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A Guardian book review, considering whether we need to reassess the concept of money, and its role in society.

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A Guardian book review, considering whether we need to reassess the concept of money, and its role in society.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does removing the term ‘money’ from our personal lexicon help us to understand the way the economy works more effectively?

KEY TERMS Widespread idea, Valid explanation, Counterintuitively, Evidence-based conversation

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In the classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, depositors demand their money from a small-town building society. Its manager, George Bailey (in an unforgettable performance by James Stewart), explains that the money is not in the building society's vault; it has been lent to other people in the town. "The money's not there," Bailey pleads. "Your money's in Joe's house ... And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs Macklin's house, and a hundred others."

Bailey's explanation reflects a widespread idea of how banks work.

According to this idea, banks gather funds, such as through retail deposits and wholesale borrowing, then lend out those funds - or a proportion of them. This picture of banking permeates popular culture and popular notions of finance.

In 2008, during the crisis that rocked the foundations of western capitalism, the author and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson published The Ascent of Money. His goal was to explain the underpinnings of the global financial crisis and put it in its historical context.

Ferguson's book repeated uncritically the It's a Wonderful Life explanation of how banking works. Seventeenth-century banks, he explained, had pioneered what would become the foundation of modern finance: "fractional reserve banking". That mode of banking exploited the fact that "money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. Since depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money, only a fraction of their money needed to be kept in the [bank's] reserve at any given time."

The George Bailey-Niall Ferguson explanation of banking is widely held, and, long ago, it was a valid explanation of how banks worked.

Just as banks lend money into existence in the form of IOUs, governments spend it into existence

But as a descriptor of banking today, it is incorrect. Banks don't lend out money from reserves or deposits or other sources of pre-existing funds. Counterintuitively, the loans come first.

When you borrow money and your bank credits your loan account, the account balance is created anew, "from thin air", not from or in relation to existing deposits or other existing money. And as you repay the loan principal, the money created at the time of the loan gradually disappears, reverting to its previous form of airy nothingness.

The Bailey-Ferguson picture of bank lending is back to front, and the nature of bank deposits is also widely misunderstood. The unnerving reality: a positive balance in your bank account does not correspond to a stock of "money" held somewhere for you, over and above the account balance. The account balance is all there is. It is the record of a promise from the bank, effectively an IOU.

Your deposit account is a liability for your bank and, as a depositor, you are no more than one among many of the bank's unsecured creditors.

In normal times a promise from a private bank is nearly as good as a promise from a government or a central bank. But in a crisis the promise is worth much less, and can be worth as little as nothing at all.

These differences in understanding are the tip of an iceberg of confusion that also extends to public finance and fiscal policy.

According to the standard picture of public expenditure and revenue raising, governments can only spend if they first gather money through taxes or asset sales or borrowing. The reality, however, is again the reverse. Just as banks lend money into existence in the form of IOUs, governments spend it into existence.

(From time to time, governments and central banks also make loans, such as for monetary policy and economic development purposes. In those instances, governments and central banks lend money into existence just as private banks do.)

As with money created through bank lending, money created through government spending does not persist and circulate indefinitely through the economy. The slightly shocking and dispiriting reality is that, when you pay your taxes, the money doesn't go into an account or a vault. It is vaporised. The tax payments cancel out the money that was created at the time of the original government spending.

These differences in understanding are not peripheral or inconsequential. Their implications extend far beyond the practical administration of banks and governments.

The standard view dominates the politics of taxation and fiscal responsibility. It also prevails in sections of the academy, where some economists are wedded to the idea of money continually circulating through the economy as a persistent element in a closed system. In reality, money is regularly being created and destroyed, and economic models that don't reflect that fact are not even slightly useful.

(The New Zealand economist Alban William Housego "Bill" Phillips became famous for the Phillips curve, postulating a relationship between rising inflation and unemployment. In 1949 he invented the monetary national income analogue computer, or Moniac. Also known as the financephalograph, this heroically clunky contraption used real liquid, hydraulics and pipes to illustrate how Phillips thought a sealed, circular, money-fuelled economy worked.)

Misunderstandings about money and banking affect the incentives and tactics of the largest private banks, and how well citizens and taxpayers hold governments and financial regulators to account. They prevent us all from having an adult, evidence-based conversation about debt, taxes and monetary policy. Without such a conversation (knowledgeably adjudicated by finance writers and journalists) citizens will forever be bit-part players in capitalism - the irresistible targets of participants with better information.

Protecting customers, taxpayers and the community as a whole from the excesses of modern banking requires a new understanding of the roles of banks and governments in finance; a new understanding of loans, deposits and derivatives as one family of financial contracts; and a new awareness of the privileged position of private corporations in the global financial system.

Crucially, society as a whole needs to think differently about the nature of money -possibly by first discarding the term itself. "Money" encompasses a range of phenomena that have intrinsically different purposes and risks. Commercial bank deposits are materially different to banknotes, for example, which are different to reserve funds. Money as a concept is increasingly outdated and misleading.

A better understanding of money would open up the possibility of important innovations such as lending-only and deposit-only institutions; new mechanisms of financial prudence and oversight; and an integrated monetary and fiscal policy that uses monetary and fiscal levers in concert.

A new financial conversation would make the causes of inter-generational inequities more explicit, and it would allow the community to rethink allowing "too big to fail" banks to earn, year in year out, enormous risk-free profits.

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'Outdated and misleading': is it time to reassess the very concept of money?

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It's regularly being created and destroyed - and economic models that don't reflect that fact are not even slightly useful

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An Economist article, arguing that globalization may not be responsible for income inequality. 

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An Economist article, arguing that globalization may not be responsible for income inequality. 

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W orking out who earns what is surprisingly tricky. Both the very rich, who sometimes try to keep their wealth from the taxman, and the very poor, who are sometimes mistrustful of clipboard-wielding officials, are especially hard to pin down. Nevertheless, before the covid-19 pandemic, household surveys consistently found a fall in the number of people living in poverty. The World Bank counted 659m living on less than $2.15 a day in 2019, down from around 2bn in 1990.

Yet this progress came at a cost: a global "precariat" emerged, members of which were barely out of poverty and perilously exposed to shocks, while the top 1% got rich faster. That, at least, is the received wisdom. The World Inequality Database, a project associated with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, two economists, combines tax data with other sources of information to estimate the incomes of the uber-rich. They have found that although inequality between countries has fallen, as the rest has caught up with the West, within countries it may have risen. Chinese and Indian elites have done the best relative to their countrymen. American and European plutocrats, who are busy stashing wealth in tax havens, have done well, too.

A new paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Kasey Chatterji-Len and William Nober, economists at Columbia University and the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, challenges this picture. The researchers look at how likely people in different parts of the income distribution are to understate their income. They find that as the poor become richer, they become more likely to do so. Once adjustments are made for this, poverty has fallen faster than previously thought, and inequality within countries has not risen. It may even have fallen slightly.

To reach this conclusion, the authors look at the difference between estimates of income from regional household surveys and gross domestic product in the same area. When surveys imply that a region has less overall income than official figures, it suggests more income is going unreported. The researchers find that the richer an area, the larger the gap tends to be. This makes sense, notes Mr Sala-i-Martin. As a subsistence farmer becomes a small business owner or market trader, he develops more complex income streams and has more incentive to mislead the taxman.

If the finding holds, it changes the history of globalisation. Rather than a precariat, the researchers conclude that a "true global middle class" has emerged. Its members will not be plunged back into poverty by a financial crisis or a pandemic.

Yet the study will not be the final word. Economists have been arguing about trends in global inequality-and the quality of the data that lie beneath them-for decades. When it comes to the world's richest people, the new research has more to say about the top 10% than the top 1%, who are widely believed to have done so much better than the rest. Like most papers, this one relies on assumptions that could be challenged by other researchers. Working out the global income distribution is one thing; convincing others you have the right answer is quite another. ■
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Globalisation may not have increased income inequality, after all

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A new study questions the received wisdom on trends within countries | Finance & economics

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A Guardian article, arguing that globalization is contributing to greater inequality around the world.

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A Guardian article, arguing that globalization is contributing to greater inequality around the world.

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The gulf between rich and poor countries continues to grow, according to the UN, furthering the reversal of a 20-year trend where the gap steadily shrank until 2020.

The latest human development report found that although each of the 38 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries has recovered from the Covid pandemic, only half of the least-developed countries have done so.

"If you take [the index] as an average of all countries you see a story of recovery," said Achim Steiner, the administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP). "But when you look more closely it is a recovery particular to high-income countries. It is not yet a recovery for the low-income and least-developed countries."

The report points to rising populism, "mismanaged globalisation", and militarisation as the key challenges facing today's global development.

Steiner said: "We are seeing that defence budgets are increased year on year, while development budgets, the very currency of being able to help poorer countries to invest in cooperation, are being slashed. This is a recipe for a much darker future."

The human development index is a tool used by the UN since the 1990s. It takes into account life expectancy, education and per capita income. Switzerland, which topped this year's chart, gained a score 0.967, an increase from its 2021 score of 0.962. However, South Sudan, which was bottom in 2021-22 with a score of 0.385, had an even lower score of 0.381 this year.

The Covid pandemic had been a "multiplier" of pre-existing structural problems such as poverty, Steiner said.

"The pandemic weakened countries' resilience and ability to withstand shock. So the subsequent shocks of conflict, which have affected many countries, and the high-inflation environment have cumulated to disproportionately affect those countries that were already the most weakened by the pandemic," he said.

Somalia, which is included in the report for the first time, came last on the list.

The UNDP's Somalia resident representative Lionel Laurens said the fact that enough meaningful data has been gathered by a "fruitful collaboration" between UN bodies and the Somali National Bureau of Statistics "shows how much progress has been achieved in recent years". But he acknowledged that "much work remains to guarantee healthcare, education and prosperity for all Somalis in a context that remains fragile, particularly [given its] exposure to climate vulnerabilities".

The Somali government has been approached for comment.

Steiner pointed to vaccine inequality as an example of "mismanaged globalisation" described in the report.

"Covid taught us in a very brutal way the price of inequality," Steiner said. "It showed how quickly a clinically triggered phenomenon can turn into a social and economic set of ripple effects. The polarisation, the deep debates about confidence or lack thereof in our state institutions, the economic impacts - these factors amplified feelings of abandonment for many people. Consequently many turned to more radicalised political discourse and more populist narratives took centre stage."
Additional reporting by Hinda Abdi Mohamoud

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Growing gulf between rich and poor countries 'recipe for much darker future', says UN

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Human development report finds the pandemic, conflict, globalisation and populism have combined to disproportionately affect lower-income countries

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A Big Think article, considering whether we should redraw the world map, to better reflect power and influence in the 21st century. 

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A Big Think article, considering whether we should redraw the world map, to better reflect power and influence in the 21st century. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How familiar is this map to them - and why might it seem rather strange (or, depending on their cultural background, familiar!)? What has driven the ‘cartographic rectification’ of this map? Why does the article say that “no world map is totally right”, and that the center of any map is “a matter of purely subjective choice”? Which version of the world is more valid - and why? Overall, are all map projections equally valid (and equally flawed) when it comes to accurately representing the world?

KEY TERMS Normal, Vertical representation, Cartographic rectifications, Perspective, True center of the world

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This article was first published on Big Think in August 2019. It was updated in December 2022.

The world, but not as we know it

Europe is tucked away in a corner, an appendage of Asia dwarfed by neighboring Africa. North America is stood on its head, facing the rest of the world from the top of the map - cut off from South America, which cuts a solitary figure at the bottom. Africa is justifiably huge, but equally eccentric.

The eye scouts elsewhere for a place to land: not the Indian Ocean, which dominates the middle of the map, but some terra firma. Antarctica and Australia are too small, mere stepping stones for the land mass of Asia. Ultimately our gaze is drawn toward China, the lynchpin of this unfamiliar world.

Managing to leave both poles intact, this "vertical" world map is about as far away as you can get from the classic Mercator projection, which slices up both, giving center stage to a puffed-up Europe. Perhaps this new map will become more familiar soon: It may do more justice to the world of the near future, dominated by China and determined by shipping routes across the iceless Arctic.

China's 'ten-dash line'

While there's no indication that this map represents the Chinese government's "official" worldview, it is no secret that China has a thing with maps - and more specifically, the country's representation on them.

In China, the country's current economic success is seen as a redress of the unequal treatment meted out by western superpowers in the 19th century. China's world dominance is a return to a more natural state of world affairs, many feel. Cartographic rectifications are a symbolically significant corollary of that sentiment.

Fines are regularly imposed on companies - domestic and foreign - that fail to represent China to the fullest extent of its external borders, disputed though they may be by others (e.g. India, Taiwan and any of the countries with claims overlapping China's in the South China Sea). But the People's Republic's cartographic obsession doesn't end at China's territory itself. It also includes the country's position on the world map.

The Kingdom at the Middle of the World

China's name for itself is Zhōngguó, which means 'Central State' or 'Middle Kingdom', reflecting its ancient self-image as the civilized center ( Huá) of the world, with wild tribes ( Yí) at the edge. That view is not unique to China. Vietnam, for example, at certain times also styled itself as the "central state" ( Trung Quóc) - considering the Chinese in turn as the uncouth outsiders.

It may be surprising to recall, but Europeans themselves once considered their own continent a relative backwater, viewing Jerusalem as the true center of the world. That changed with the Age of Discovery, which placed Europe at the center of an ever-expanding world. Maps reflected that worldview, and largely continue to do so. That's why today's standard world map still has Europe at its center - with China off toward the periphery on the map's right-hand side.

The most notable feature of the very first major modern world map produced in China, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (1602), is that it places China firmly at the center of the world. Produced for the Chinese emperor by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, it was the first map ever to combine that perspective with modern western knowledge: it was the first Chinese map to show the Americas, for instance.

That representation may not have taken off elsewhere, but it will be instantly recognizable to Chinese students, as it's the standard format for world maps in China's schools today.

America on its head

For those used to "classic" Eurocentric world maps, Europe's marginalization may come across as a bit of an upset. America's new position on the horizontal Chinese world map is less jarring: It merely moves from the left- to the right-hand side of the picture. But then there's this vertical world map, which deals a similar blow to the American land mass: divided in two and pushed to the upper and lower edges of the map.

Unfamiliar? Sure. Shocking? Perhaps. Wrong? Not really. First off, no world map is totally right, since it's mathematically impossible to transfer the surface of a three-dimensional object onto a flat surface without some distortion. And since the world is a globe, where you center that map is a matter of purely subjective choice.

Those choices have historical reasons. Mercator's map was not specifically designed to put an inflated Europe at the center of the world. That was just a side effect; its main purpose was to aid shipping: Straight lines on the map correspond to straight lines sailed on the seas.

The vertical world map, showing the relative proximity of China (and the rest of Asia) to Europe and (even the East Coast of) North America, has a similarly maritime raison d'être, or it will have by mid-century. Experts project that by 2050 (if not sooner), the Arctic will be sufficiently ice-free to enable the so-called Transpolar Passage, i.e. shipping straight across the North Pole.

That would shave more than three weeks off a traditional sea voyage between Europe and Asia, via the Suez Canal - and even be significantly faster than other northern alternatives like the Northwest Passage (via Canada) or the Northern Sea Route (hugging the Siberian coast). Since ships would not need to go through locks or pass over shallow waters, it would also remove current restrictions on tonnage per ship.

The only country seriously preparing for such a future: China. None of the other Arctic powers is giving the Transpolar route any strategic thought. On the other hand, China's Arctic Policy document, released in January 2018, already matter-of-factly refers to the Transpolar route as the 'Central Passage' - one of several 'Polar Silk Roads' that China seems to want to develop. And they already have the world map to go with it.
Strange Maps #984 Got a strange map? Let me know at [email protected] .

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The world map of the future might be vertical

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This article was first published on Big Think in August 2019. It was updated in December 2022. Europe is tucked away in a corner, an appendage of Asia dwarfed by neighboring Africa. North America is stood on its head, facing the rest of the world from the top of the map - cut off from South America, which cuts a solitary figure at the bottom.

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A Guardian article, considering whether it's more correct to now refer to 'globalisation' as 'glocalisation.'

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A Guardian article, considering whether it's more correct to now refer to 'globalisation' as 'glocalisation.'

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Not bad. But not great either. That summed up the mood as the World Economic Forum ended in Davos last Friday with a panel on the state of the global economy. Not bad because most countries outperformed expectations of a year ago. Not bad because sharply rising interest rates didn't plunge the US, the eurozone and the UK into recession. Not bad because the war between Israel and Hamas has failed to send oil prices shooting above $100 a barrel.

Not great because central banks face a balancing act between cutting interest rates too quickly and reigniting inflation, and keeping them too high and plunging their economies into recession. Not great, because the early weeks of 2024 have led to a wider Middle East conflict, with implications for one of the world's main trade routes. And not great because - as Davos showed - the global economy is deeply fractured.

Inevitably, there is a risk that things will turn out badly in 2024. One leading global policymaker, speaking privately, said that repeated blows since 2020 mean it would be wise to be braced for the next surprise shock. Only the most incurable Davos optimist would quibble with that.

Washington and Beijing are in a grim struggle for economic supremacy. The gap between north and south is widening, and liberal democracy is being challenged by a new breed of autocrats. The planet continues to heat up. In a week that marks the 100th anniversary of Lenin's death, there are once again competing visions of what constitutes progress and success.

Even so, the death of globalisation has been much exaggerated. The reach of the multinational companies and the banks that continue to flock to the World Economic Forum were evidence of that. As is the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), part of a tech revolution that cuts across borders and which is leaving national regulators floundering in its wake. A year ago, ChatGPT was in its infancy. This year, AI was central to the Davos debate, with those hailing its potential to help solve pressing problems - such as the climate crisis - ranged against those warning of its risks.

So globalisation is not dead, nor even on its last legs. The same goes for the demise of western liberal democracy. To be sure, productivity has been weak and living standards have been squeezed in recent years. Germany's finance minister, Christian Lindner, raised eyebrows when he said his country was the tired man of Europe. But there are good reasons why there are no TV pictures of migrants or asylum seekers trying to get into Russia or China.

What is true is that having been pushed on to the defensive, global capitalism is morphing into something different. Peak globalisation - along with peak Davos - happened a while ago, around the time of the global financial crisis of 2008, but it has been the repeated shocks since 2020 that have changed the dynamic.

Everything that has happened since the arrival of the Covid pandemic has pointed to a new paradigm: some call it de-globalisation, others call it - perhaps more accurately - " glocalisation ".

An ugly term, glocalisation is not the global free market, and it is not autarky (a nation that operates in a state of self-reliance), but something in between. It involves shorter supply chains, an emphasis on building back domestic manufacturing capacity, and a more strategic role for government. As with any form of mixed economy, the degree of glocalisation varies from country to country.

Where once Davos lionised frictionless supply chains stretching from China to the developed countries of Europe and North America, now there is a recognition that low cost is not everything and that there is value in governments knowing that they will not run short of vaccines, protective equipment, computer chips and energy. The attacks on cargo vessels in the Red Sea, necessitating much longer journeys around the Cape of Good Hope is the latest example of how vulnerable long supply chains have become. As Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, said at the final Davos session: "We were relying on efficiency over security a little too much." Lagarde noted, correctly, that a bit of rebalancing was no bad thing.

The long-term causes of glocalisation lie in the increasingly fractious relationship between the US and China - a relationship that has been deteriorating since Washington woke up to the threat posed by China's rapid growth and its clearly signalled plan to use its economic power to challenge America's global hegemony. The US Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are both examples of American determination to rebuild its industrial base through active government intervention.

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But while the shift towards on-shoring previously outsourced production would have happened anyway, it has certainly been accelerated by the events of the past four years: a pandemic, then supply chain bottlenecks, a surge in inflation, and the war in Ukraine.

The upshot is that industrial policy is no longer a dirty word, even in Davos. Indeed, there was plenty of interest at the WEF in what Labour's plans to boost the supply side of the UK amounted to.

Nick Stern, author of the seminal report on the economics of climate change, thinks there is a potential sweet spot where the demands for stronger growth and the fight against global heating intersect. AI, he says, can act as an accelerator to help developing countries both with climate change mitigation and adaptation. He is not blind to the pushback by the fossil fuel industry against steps to combat global heating, but thinks the positives outweigh the negatives.

Stern insists investing for good green projects would be good for growth and fiscally responsible. A green light for Labour's green growth plan, in other words. And glocalisation in action.

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Globalisation, though not dead, is fading: 'glocalisation' is becoming the new mantra | Larry Elliott

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Industrial policy such as a green growth plan is no longer a dirty word as nations realise shorter supply chains and a strategic state role are necessary

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A Conversation article, looking at the Red Sea Crisis, and how it creates a crisis for global commodities. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the Red Sea Crisis, and how it creates a crisis for global commodities. 

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British people are known around the world for their love of tea. This is borne out by the statistics: a staggering 50 billion cups of tea are consumed on average in the UK every year.

Most of this tea is made using black tea leaves, most of which are not produced in the UK. Thus, shipping disruption caused by attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea, through which an estimated 12% of global trade passes each year, has sparked fears of a national tea shortage.

The attacks, which are being carried out by the Yemeni Houthi rebel militant group in support of Hamas, have forced shipping companies to redirect around the southern tip of Africa - a journey that can take up to three weeks longer.

Two of the UK's biggest suppliers of tea, Tetley and Yorkshire Tea, have announced that they are monitoring their supply chains closely for any potential disruptions. And customers have reported reduced stocks of tea in supermarkets across the UK.

It is no surprise that tea is vulnerable to supply chain disruption. The tea supply chain is a complex global network, involving producers, processors, auctions and wholesalers, packers, distributors and retailers.

The UK imports primarily unprocessed tea from countries in south Asia and east Africa. This tea is then packaged and blended within the UK for both domestic and export markets. Only around 10% of the packaged tea sold in the UK is supplied by companies from overseas.

But tea is one of many items to be caught up in the supply chain crisis. The disruption is affecting supplies across various other sectors too, including electric cars and liquified natural gas - and it could prove costly.

The UK is particularly reliant on natural gas for the production of carbon dioxide, a gas that is essential for everything from NHS operations to keeping food fresh while it is transported.

Not so unpredictable

The disruption caused by the Red Sea attacks is considered by some to have been an entirely unpredictable occurrence of what is known as a "black swan" event. But this crisis is the latest in a long line of shocks to global supply networks that have occurred over the past decade.

Whether it was the 2011 tsunami off the coast of Japan, Brexit, COVID, US trade sanctions on China, or the war in Ukraine, the fact of the matter is that supply chains are now experiencing disruption more often than they used to.

There are two reasons for this. First, organisations have become increasingly reliant on distant countries for the manufacturing and supply of routine and critical components.

Sometimes this decision is made because of the natural advantage these countries hold. For example, China currently accounts for 93% of the global production of so-called rare earth elements, which are used in the components of many of the devices we use every day. But most of the time these decisions are driven by an organisation's pursuit of lowering its cost of operation.

Second, a focus on just-in-time production, where businesses focus on producing precisely the amount they need and delivering it as close as possible to the time their customers need it, has reduced the buffer against supply chain shocks.

Building resilient supply networks

Organisations need to diversify their supply chains by developing alternate sources of supply. Many businesses already spread their source of materials over multiple suppliers across different regions to ensure quality, the continuity of supply, and to minimise costs.

For less complex components, such as packaging (cardboard, plastic bags and bubble wrap) or raw materials (metals and plastic), multiple sourcing is often practised through competitive tendering and reverse auctions; where the sellers bid for the prices at which they are willing to sell their goods and services.

However, for more complex products, the development of alternate sources of supply needs to be done strategically. One of the most important steps to improve supply chain resilience is to reduce reliance on global suppliers through processes called "onshoring", "nearshoring" and "friendshoring".

Onshoring is where components are sourced from suppliers located within domestic national borders. Nearshoring is a similar strategy where a company moves its supply to neighbouring countries. And friendshoring is where organisations transfer their production away from geopolitical rivals to friendlier countries.

The US, for example, has traditionally relied on Taiwan and South Korea for its supply of semiconductors (computer chips). But geopolitical tensions with China, coupled with a global shortage of semiconductors, have forced the US to look for suppliers in countries closer to home, while also exploring the potential of moving chip manufacturing to the US.

Geographical and climate factors restrict the onshoring of tea cultivation to the UK. But these supply strategies could help businesses manage the risk of supply chain disruption to other, potentially more critical, commodities.

Making supply chains more agile

The frequency with which global supply chains are now becoming disrupted means that organisations must rethink their supply chain strategies, evolving from being efficient and lean to flexible and agile.

An agile supply chain strategy will require businesses to maintain adequate inventory levels to guard against a situation where stock runs out. These inventory levels must be informed by real-time - or as close to real-time as possible - data on customer demand.

The disruption to the UK's tea supply highlights the vulnerability of supplies of everyday essentials to unexpected events. But businesses can make sure they are better prepared for the occurrence of an unexpected event by enhancing the resilience of their supply chain through diversification and agility.

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Red Sea crisis: with fears of a UK tea shortage, worries are brewing over other crucial commodities

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Tea supplies are under threat as a shipping crisis continues in the Red Sea.

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A Big Think 'strange maps' article, looking at a scheme to create five global superstates in the 1920s. 

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A Big Think 'strange maps' article, looking at a scheme to create five global superstates in the 1920s. 

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Geopolitical dreams

If the geopolitical dreams of a 20th-century Austro-Japanese aristocrat had come true, this is what the map of the world would have looked like: dominated by no more than five super-states.

Now mostly obscure, count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) is remembered mainly as the hero and villain (respectively) of the two fringes of the never-ending debate about European integration.

And that's a shame, because Coudenhove-Kalergi cuts quite an intriguing figure. Not only is he the one who proposed Beethoven's Ode to Joy as Europe's anthem, he also served as inspiration for Victor Laszlo, the fictional resistance hero in Casablanca.

On his father's side, Richard was the scion of an Austrian noble family with roots in Flanders and Greece and branches all over the rest of Europe. His mother, Mitsuko Aoyama, came from a wealthy Japanese family of merchants and landowners.

Pan-European Union

In 1922, Coudenhove-Kalergi co-founded the Pan-European Union, together with Austrian Archduke Otto von Habsburg. A year later, he published the manifesto Pan-Europa, and in 1924 he founded an eponymous journal, which ran until 1938. In 1926, the first Congress of the Pan-European Union elected Coudenhove-Kalergi as its president, which he would remain until his death.

The motivation for the count's Pan-Europeanism was the threat of "world hegemony by Russia". The only way to prevent that was to supersede Europe's various nationalisms. The Pan-European superstate as envisioned by Coudenhove-Kalergi was a curious mix of social democracy and Christian conservatism - a "social aristocracy of the spirit". In response, Leon Trotsky, then Soviet commissar, in 1923 called for a "Soviet United States of Europe".

Five superstates

The original framework for Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europeanism was a global polity of no more than five superstates, as shown on this map taken from one of his early works:

Pan-Europe: uniting all European countries, minus the Russian and British empires. Pan-Europe also includes the French, Italian, Portuguese, Belgian, and Dutch colonial possessions, with a foothold in the Americas, half of Africa, and substantial parts of South East Asia.

Pan-America: all of the Americas, with one major exception: Canada - controlled by the Brits. Minor exceptions include all the other bits controlled by the British and European empires. Pan-America also includes the Philippines, U.S.-administered at the time of publication.

The British Commonwealth: basically, the British Empire at its height. Great Britain and Ireland, Canada and British Guyana, Africa from Cape to Cairo (and Nigeria, plus other territories in West Africa), the Arabian peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand.

The Russian Empire: almost at its greatest extent. Ukraine is under the sway of Moscow, as are the Caucasian and Central Asian areas that are currently independent. But the Baltics are part of Pan-Europe.

The smallest, but probably most populous of the five empires is East-Asia: uniting Japan, Korea and China, and also including Nepal.

The big idea behind the map is clear: There is strength in numbers, and efficiency in scale. The world is gravitating toward large zones of cooperation, and these are five geopolitical concepts that seemed like viable options to Coudenhove-Kalergi. Do note, however, that there are some countries that do not fit into the count's world vision: Question marks cover Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The map is also a bit scary: A globe dominated by an 'oligopoly' of just five states suggests governments that are far removed from their citizens.

It's a small leap from this world map to the one that informs 1984. In fact, George Orwell may have been inspired for his dystopian geography by the count's utopian vision: One of the three superstates on Orwell's imaginary map is in fact called 'Eastasia'. Another one, 'Eurasia', could be identified with another iteration of Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, without the colonial empires but including Russia.

In his later work, Coudenhove-Kalergi seems to have abandoned the global dimension of his agglomerative vision, concentrating more on unity within Europe.

His Pan-Europeanism may have been directed against the threat of the extreme left, that didn't make it popular with the extreme right. Hitler denounced the count (and his ideas) as those of a "rootless, cosmopolitan and elitist half-breed." The Nazis considered Pan-Europeanism a Masonic plot.

Fleeing into American exile after Austria's Anschluss (1938), Coudenhove-Kalergi spent the war continuing to make the case for European unity. At one point, however, he also proposed to form and head an Austrian government in exile - a suggestion that was ignored by Roosevelt and Churchill.

Eurasian Union

After the war, it was others who led Europe towards greater integration, although Churchill lauded the count's Pan-European Union for its work in a speech in 1946 in Zürich. Coudenhove-Kalergi was instrumental in founding the European Parliamentary Union in 1947 and in 1950 was the very first recipient of the annual Charlemagne Prize, awarded by the city of Aachen for work in the service of European unification.

Coudenhove-Kalergi's grave, near Gstaad, carries the epitaph: Pionnier des États-Unis d'Europe. For all its simplicity, that sounds a bit grandiose - he was not directly involved in founding the EU or any of its precursors - not to say premature: today's European Union is not (yet) the dreaded monolithic superstate evoked by the epithet 'United States of Europe'.

Nonetheless, proponents of (further) European integration happily praise the count's life-long devotion to the cause. Streets and squares throughout Europe - although admittedly never the longest or largest ones - carry his name.
On the other hand, opponents of European integration from the nationalist and identitarian camp denounce the so-called Kalergi Plan, a plot to use immigration to dilute Europe's 'whiteness', supposedly penned by the "cosmopolitan" count. It's a hoax on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, unfortunately also by token of its continued currency among those fringe groups.
Strange Maps #1002
Got a strange map? Let me know at [email protected] .

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The utopian 1920s scheme for five global superstates

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Geopolitical dreams If the geopolitical dreams of a 20th-century Austro-Japanese aristocrat had come true, this is what the map of the world would have looked like: dominated by no more than five super-states. Now mostly obscure, count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) is remembered mainly as the hero and villain (respectively) of the two fringes of the never-ending debate about European integration.

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A Guardian article, looking at how garment workers in Bangladesh face violent reprises when they ask for fairer pay and conditions.

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A Guardian article, looking at how garment workers in Bangladesh face violent reprises when they ask for fairer pay and conditions.

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When Masuma Akhtar arrived at the garment factory where she works on the outskirts of Dhaka on 31 October, she was expecting a normal shift. Instead, she was met with brute violence. "The moment I walked through the factory gates, a group of armed men began beating me with wooden sticks," says Akhtar. "I fell down on to the ground. Even then they wouldn't stop beating me."

Akhtar, 22, is a seamstress at Dekko Knitwears in Mirpur, where she spends long days churning out clothes for western fashion brands, including Marks & Spencer and C&A.

Bangladesh is one of the world's biggest producers of fast fashion, pumping out millions of tonnes of clothing every year to meet the demands of the world's most popular clothing brands, which are drawn to this small South Asian country where orders - and the labour needed to fulfil them - come cheap.

Although most fast fashion brands that source from Bangladesh claim to support a living wage, they are only required to pay the workers who make their clothes the legal monthly minimum wage, which is one of the lowest in the world and has remained set at 8,000 taka (£58) since 2018.

Negotiations over a new minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh have sparked mass demonstrations on streets across the capital. The protests have escalated since the government announced a minimum wage increase for the workers, from 1 December, to 12,500 taka (£90), far below the 23,000 taka a month workers say they need to keep their families from starvation.

Factory owners and police have responded to workers' protests with threats and violence. The beatings she received by armed men at Dekko Knitwears left Akhtar with a broken arm. "They hit my back, my thighs and my arms repeatedly," she says. Now, without use of one of her arms, she is unable to work. "I don't know how I will survive the rest of the month," she adds.

Masuma Akhtar's arm was broken when she was beaten by armed man at Dekko Knitwears in Mirpur. Photograph: Sazzad Hossain

Other workers at Dekko Knitwears say that the men beating them concentrated on their hands and arms. "They started hitting us mercilessly," says Bushra Begum, 25, another worker. "My livelihood depends on my hands, and they targeted them viciously."

Her colleague Rita Anwar, 26, tried to run away but was chased down the road by three men. "I am covered in blood clots," she says, pulling up her sleeve to reveal her injuries. "My back is black with bruises. The pain is so much that I can barely walk."

Before they left, the men issued a warning: the workers were not to take part in any more protests - or they would face consequences.

They can threaten and beat us but if we accept their ridiculous wage proposal, we will starve to death anyway

Naima Islam

As protests in Dhaka turned increasingly violent, three garment workers have been killed, allegedly after being shot by police in the first wave of protests. And last Wednesday, another woman died after being shot in the head.

Factory owners also threatened to shut down production and withhold wages by applying a "no work, no pay" rule. Over the weekend, more than 150 factories closed "indefinitely", as police issued blanket charges for 18,000 workers in connection with the demonstrations.

Workers were warned of dismissal if they continued to protest and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, a trade body, called for all factory recruitment to be paused, making it difficult for protesters to find work elsewhere.

But despite the violent crackdown on workers, those who have spoken to the Guardian are determined to see the fight through to the end.

"They are trying to silence us but we won't back down," says Naima Islam, a machine operator at Columbia Garments. "They can threaten and beat us but what they don't understand is, we have nothing to lose. If we accept their ridiculous wage proposal, we will starve to death anyway."

Islam, 28, is one of thousands of protesters who have had police reports filed against them, which trade unionists fear may soon lead to mass arrests. Many believe it is an attempt to forcefully suppress the wage increase movement.

But that hasn't deterred Islam and her co-workers. "We are not asking for much. This entire industry is built off our backs - the least we deserve is the bare minimum to survive," she says.

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Nazma Akter, president of local trade union Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation, condemns the violence against protesting workers. "The Bangladesh government must ensure workers are able to exercise their rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining without fear of violence, reprisal, or intimidation," she says.

Garment workers block a key intersection during a protest in Dhaka on 12 November. Photograph: Abdul Goni/AFP/Getty Images

In a statement, Marks & Spencer said: "These are very serious allegations and we are urgently investigating them. We would never tolerate violence or intimidation of workers and set out very clearly in our global sourcing principles that workers must be guaranteed freedom of association and a safe workplace, as well as fair and transparent wages. As a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative, we have supported the tripartite minimum wage negotiations between the unions, Government Wages Board and the Employers' Association - and we continue to support cross-sector calls for an increase that provides a decent standard of living for workers."

A spokesperson for C&A said: "We are aware of the incident that took place in Bangladesh, and we are in close contact with the supplier to investigate. We condemn all types of violence, and we have a longstanding commitment to ensure the safety and health of all workers in our supply chain."

PVH did not respond to a request for comment.

Dekko Knitwears and Columbia Garments were approached for comment but did not respond.

Fashion brands sourcing from Bangladesh have said they support workers' calls for a higher minimum wage. In a joint letter in September, brands including Asos, Primark and H&M, wrote that they recognised their role in "supporting wage developments". But rights groups argue that this means little if brands don't agree to pay their suppliers more.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch and Clean Clothes Campaign called on brands to take responsibility for their workers' wages and pay their suppliers more. Aruna Kashyap, associate director for corporate accountability at Human Rights Watch says: "Wage increases have consequences for suppliers' costs and eat into their profit margins."

"Brands themselves are driving low wages with their unfair pricing and purchasing practices," she adds. "To preserve their own profits, brands are putting themselves first."

Names have been changed to protect identities

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Bangladesh garment workers fighting for pay face brutal violence and threats

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Workers describe hands and arms being targeted in 'merciless' beatings as protests over low wages turn increasingly violent in Dhaka

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A Big Think article, in which Michael O'Sullivan argues that globalization is doomed.

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A Big Think article, in which Michael O'Sullivan argues that globalization is doomed.

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Is globalization doomed? Economist Michael O’Sullivan believes so.

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Why one expert believes it is knocking on death’s door.

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A Conversation article, investigating how human labour is powering the rise in AI.

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A Conversation article, investigating how human labour is powering the rise in AI.

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The Finnish tech firm Metroc recently began using prison labour to train a large language model to improve artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For 1.54 euros an hour prisoners answer simple questions about snippets of text in a process known as data labelling.

Data labelling is often outsourced to labour markets in the Global South where companies can find workers who are fluent in English and willing to work for low wages.

Due to the lack of Finnish speakers in these countries, however, Metroc has tapped into a local source of cheap labour. Were it not for the prison labour program, Metroc would likely be hard-pressed to find Finns willing to take data-labelling jobs that pay a fraction of the average salary in Finland.

These cost-cutting strategies not only highlight the significant amount of human labour still required to fine tune AI, but they also raise important questions about the long-term sustainability of such business models and practices.

AI's labour problem

The ethical ambiguity of prison labour-sourced AI is part of a larger story about the human cost behind AI's significant growth in recent years. One issue that has become more evident over the past year revolves around the question of labour.

Leading AI firms are not denying their use of outsourced and low-wage labour to do work like data labelling. However, the hype around tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT has drawn attention away from this aspect of the technology's development.

As researchers, including myself, are trying to understand the perceptions and use of AI in higher education, the ethical problems associated with current AI models continue to pile up. These include the biases that AI is prone to reproducing, the environmental impact of AI data centres, and privacy and security concerns.

Current practices of outsourcing data labelling work expose an uneven global distribution of AI's costs and benefits, with few proposed solutions.

The implications of this situation are twofold.

First, the massive amount of human labour that is still required to shape the "intelligence" of AI tools should give users pause when evaluating the outputs of these tools.

Second, until AI firms take serious steps to address their exploitative labour practices, users and institutions may want to reconsider the so-called values or benefits of AI tools.

What is data labelling?

The "intelligence" component of AI still requires significant human input to develop its data processing capabilities. Popular chatbots like ChatGPT are pre-trained (hence, the PT in GPT). A critical phase in the pre-training process consists of supervised learning.

During supervised learning, AI models learn how to generate outputs from data sets that are labelled by humans. Data labellers, like the Finnish prisoners, perform different tasks. For example, labellers might need to confirm whether an image contains a certain feature or to flag offensive language.

In addition to improving accuracy, data labelling is necessary to improve the "safety" of AI systems. Safety is defined according to the goals and principles of each AI firm. A "safe" model for one company might mean avoiding the risk of copyright infringement. For another, it might entail minimizing false information or biased content and stereotypes.

For most popular models, safety means that the model should not generate content based on prejudiced ideologies. This is partly achieved through a properly labelled training data set.

Who are data labellers?

The job of combing through thousands of potentially graphic images and snippets of text has fallen on data labellers largely concentrated in the Global South.

In early 2023, TIME magazine reported on OpenAI's contract with Sama, a data labelling firm based in San Francisco. The report revealed that employees at a Kenyan satellite office were paid as little as US$1.32 per hour to read text that "appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet."

WIRED also investigated the global economic realities of data labellers in South America and East Asia, some of whom worked more than 18 hours per day to earn less than their country's minimum wage.

The Washington Post has taken a close look at ScaleAI which employs at least 10,000 workers in the Philippines. The newspaper revealed the San Francisco-based company "paid workers at extremely low rates, routinely delayed or withheld payments and provided few channels for workers to seek recourse."

The data labelling industry and its required workforce is set to expand drastically in the coming years. Consumers who increasingly use AI systems need to know how they are built as well as the harm and inequities being perpetuated.

Transparency needed

From prisoners to gig workers, the potential for exploitation is real for all entwined in big AI's thirst for data to fuel bigger (and possibly more unpredictable) models.

As institutions and individuals are swept up by the momentum of AI and all of its promises, the public tends to pay less attention to ethical aspects of the technology's development.

Researchers at Stanford University recently launched a website showcasing their Foundation Model Transparency Index. The index provides metrics on measures of transparency for the most widely used AI models. These metrics range from how transparent companies are about where they source their data to how clear they are on the potential risks of their models.

Ten AI models were examined based on criteria of how transparent the company that operates them is about its labour practices. The index shows that tech companies have much work to do to improve transparency.

AI is becoming a growing part of our increasingly digital lives. That is why we must remain critical of a set of technologies that, unchecked and unexamined, may cause more problems than they solve and deepen divides in the world rather than eliminate them.

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Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AI's development

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Tech firms are relying on low-wage workers to power their AI models. That raises serious ethical questions about how the technology is being developed.

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A Guardian article, looking at how Egypt's nomad visas are luring foreign workers, but creating inequality. 

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A Guardian article, looking at how Egypt's nomad visas are luring foreign workers, but creating inequality. 

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Egypt’s economic woes lure digital nomads – but cast others out to sea

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While the Red Sea resort of Dahab draws those who earn dollars and can work anywhere, a third of Egyptians live in poverty and see a perilous voyage to Europe as their only hope

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A Guardian article by Gordon Brown, in which he highlights the dangers of a nationalistic outlook for global policy-makers.

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A Guardian article by Gordon Brown, in which he highlights the dangers of a nationalistic outlook for global policy-makers.

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"There is no longer such thing as the international community," a prominent African leader recently complained to me, lamenting that this week's G20 would, like September's UN general assembly, October's IMF-World Bank meetings and this month's Cop27, fail to combat the world's food, energy, debt, inflation, currency, pollution and poverty crises.

At the very moment the world needs to work together to address global problems that cannot be resolved without global solutions, it is being pulled apart not just by conflicts but also by a rising protectionism. And while it is not difficult to blame poor leadership, an outdated geopolitics is threatening a decade of perma-crises.

Pillars of the post-cold war world order are tumbling down as we leave behind the unipolar, hyper-globalised, neoliberal era. Those who try to build the present in the image of the past are finding themselves wholly ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the future. As Mohamed El- Erian and Michael Spence have written, we need new models for growth, national economic management and global cooperation.

No one can deny the significance of the emergence of new power centres around the world, the growing importance of services and the digital economy at the expense of manufacturing; the education-rich and education-poor divide that is replacing the old manual/non-manual divide, and the serious, existential threats to our planet. No growth model can meet the needs of the 21st century without incorporating rising concerns about environmental and economic equity and re-evaluating the role of finance. And the manufacturing-led, export-driven, low-wage models of development that until recently served every industrialising country are being overtaken not just by demographic shifts but by technological advances that mean more goods can be manufactured by a markedly smaller workforce.

All this is determining the seismic shifts in our geopolitics. First, as we move from a unipolar to a multipolar world, no single country - no matter the size of its military or economy - has the power to command and control us, only the power to propose and persuade. Second, there is now no consensus that open markets benefit all. The hyper-globalisation of the last 30 years is not giving way to de-globalisation or even slowbalisation, but lowbalisation: a globalisation-lite defined by near-shoring, friend-shoring and shortening supply chains. Policies promoting privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation, which became popularly known as the Washington consensus, now have few supporters - even in Washington.

Most important of all, nationalism has replaced neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of the age. If, for the past 30 years, economics drove political decision-making, now politics is determining economic decisions, with country after country weaponising their trade, technology, industry and competition policies. The win-win economics of mutually beneficial commerce is being replaced by the zero-sum rivalries of "I win, you lose", as movements such as "America first", "China first", "India first" and "Russia first", "my tribe first", threaten to descend into an us versus them geopolitics of "my country first and only". And with national security establishments now freezing the central bank reserves of hostile regimes and limiting access to global payments systems, trade, technology, and capital wars are set to intensify.

The one hopeful sign of cooperation is Nato unity over Ukraine. But this should not blind us to the scale of global disunity, with almost all of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East standing aloof from sanctions against Russia and even condemnation of its war crimes.

Very few can ever benefit from this fragmentation, and almost everywhere inequality is on the rise. Warehouses in Asia, America and Europe have sufficient grain reserves to feed the world, and yet there is no global distribution plan and the World Food Programme struggles with only half the finance it needs to prevent famines. Energy producers are making unprecedented profits while consumers struggle with unpayable bills. Yet there is no plan before the G20 to address this, or the halving of global growth, inflation, currency imbalances and debt, or to undo some of the damage done by resistance at Cop27 to even honouring the promise of $100bn a year for the developing world. There are rising dangers from this unilateralism: the risk of monetary and fiscal overkill - and a global recession - if one country after another pursues its own monetary and fiscal tightening, with little thought given to the spillover effects on each other. Lost jobs and lost prosperity - and more poverty - are the prices we will pay if the very countries that created the international institutions to deliver cooperation behave uncooperatively.

In 2009, when recession threatened to become depression, a G20 leaders group was formed and backstopped the world economy with $1tn. During the 1970s oil crisis, a G7 comprising the west and Japan was established, with a plan to redirect oil surpluses and stabilise currencies. And in 1945, to rebuild a crisis-torn world and root out poverty and hunger, the Marshall plan and a new array of institutions from the UN to the IMF and World Bank were born.

But even if, in 2022, there is no modern Marshall, and no plan to deal with a similarly perilous world, we are not powerless. The US holds the key. Having generally acted multilaterally in a unipolar era, it must resist the temptation to act unilaterally in a multipolar era. President Biden and G20 leaders should direct the IMF to make operational the 2009 " multilateral action process" to coordinate a global push for non-inflationary growth. A strengthened early warning system should be forged to head off the threat of the kind of global shadow banking crisis feared by the Bank of International Settlements. Reintegrating global supply chains can happen if we empower the World Trade Organization to stand up to protectionism.

Debt relief is essential to prevent a breakdown in the internal social and political fabric of more than half the world's developing countries. The IMF has the capacity to more than double its outlays and to lend into arrears and corral absent partners - China and the private sector - into orderly debt restructuring. Developing countries, who are not to blame for the interlocking global crises destroying their prosperity, should be subject to less conditionality and have longer repayment periods. The G20's review of the World Bank should recommend the use of guarantees and the more efficient use of its capital, and offer not billions but trillions in the long-term finance needed for climate health and education. And leaders should examine how other struggling international institutions can be updated; seek wider agreement on capping energy prices to tame inflation; release food reserves to avert a famine while helping Africa become more self-sufficient; and stand ready to deal with currency volatility. Past mistakes have put us on this bumpy journey. But if global leadership and cooperation finally rise to the occasion, we can guide our world to a better destination.

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Nationalism is the ideology of our age. No wonder the world is in crisis | Gordon Brown

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Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden should be pushing for greater cooperation at the G20, says former UK prime minister Gordon Brown

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A Slate article, considering how the most significant modern borders are the ones that demarcate different brands of mobile phone. 

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A Slate article, considering how the most significant modern borders are the ones that demarcate different brands of mobile phone. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What determines borders, and do they matter?

KEY TERMS Borders, Globaloney, Transcend

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Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday
When Tim Cook was recently asked by a reporter whose mom uses an Android phone whether he was doing anything to improve texting with non-iPhone users, Cook responded: " Buy your mom an iPhone."

When I first read this, my mind turned to a subject that has been on my mind a lot: borders. Specifically, the ways in which they still matter.

The realms of Android and iMessage aren't separate territories on a map in a literal sense, but borders pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, even in the world of technology, where engineers fetishize the concept of interoperability. Closer to home, where I work for a university that prides itself on being innovative and transdisciplinary, borders between academic units and disciplines retain a stubborn resilience.

The fact that actual borders between actual American states are becoming more rather than less meaningful feels like a reversal of time's normal progression. The Supreme Court's unprincipled stab in the back to our most intimate rights, and to the concept of the Union as their primary guarantor, now means we are all at the mercy of our individual states. Hop on to one of our wondrous interstate highways-monuments to that fading yearning to transcend borders-and the extent to which you can assert some fundamental human rights will vary depending on the most recent dopey "Welcome to the XX State" sign you drove by.

I have been feasting over the past year on Rick Perlstein's engaging histories of the tumultuous voyage from the Goldwater movement to the Reagan revolution-the saga encompassed in his four masterpieces Before the Storm, , The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland-which are a reminder that anxieties about borders are a constant in our history. Within the more isolationist and populist base, the term globaloney was often used to describe the party's elites' internationalism. But what constitutes "globaloney" can shift over time: At one point in The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein recounts how as a candidate leading up to the 1980 Republican primaries, Reagan asked his advisers to prepare an "open border" proposal to allow Mexican workers to come and go freely.

In The Lawless Roads, a book about his travels through Mexico in the 1930s, the English novelist Graham Greene wrote: "The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped."

That 2,000-mile-long border to the south remains a particularly nettlesome riddle. I can't turn on the television in Arizona without seeing campaign commercials featuring a candidate standing by the border, promising to finish the wall, mobilize the military, dig ditches, unspool barbed wire, or do whatever else is necessary to "secure" the porous line in the sand and protect us from its unspeakable dangers and from their opponents espousing a Reaganesque "open border." In the real world, meanwhile, beyond elections, Mexico and the United States are so intertwined that the recent legislation passed in Congress providing subsidies for electrical vehicles produced domestically counts Mexico and Canada as being on this side of the customs house, the passport officer, and the man with the gun.

And yet, Greene wasn't wrong, things are different down there, once your passport has been stamped. On the day my colleague Mia Armstrong published this piece on the persistence of mask-wearing in Mexico, I was flying down to Mexico City from Houston. Our flight attendant announced before takeoff in Houston that while we no longer needed to wear masks during the flight, we'd all better have one as we would need to put it on upon landing in Mexico, or we wouldn't be able to go through the airport, which still has a mask mandate in place. Groans ensued. Borders still matter.

Mia got married last weekend, by the way, to a Mexican she first met while spending a college semester on an exchange program in Mexico City. The wedding was a moving tribute to globaloney's highest ideals, the fusion of two cultures and nations, at the familial level. Mia and Ricardo proved love can transcend distance and borders, and that made their celebration all the more meaningful.

I also discovered they have transcended the border between iPhone and Android, because she has an iPhone and Ricardo has an Android. What about texting interoperability, I ask.

"Well, we only use Whatsapp!" Mia answers, "because Mexico."

But it has been difficult between him and her family, Mia conceded.

"We had to get my parents on WhatsApp."

Take that, Tim Cook.

Here are some stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

Wish We'd Published This

" Amazon Wanted a Lord of the Rings Show. It Turned to Frodo and Sam," by Ben Cohen, the Wall Street Journal

What Next: TBD

On Friday's episode of Slate's technology podcast, host Lizzie O'Leary talks to Protocol's Issie Lapowsky and organizer Wanda Manning about the fight for broadband in Louisiana-and in rural communities across the U.S. Last week, Lizzie dug in to YouTube with writer and former Google employee Claire Stapleton and Mark Bergen, author of Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. She also chatted with the Washington Post's Drew Harwell on how A.I. is changing art. Tomorrow, Lizzie will talk to ProPublica's Cezary Podkul about how human traffickers are forcing their victims into cybercrime.

Upcoming Events

1. Someone Disrupted the Trash Can. It ... Doesn't Suck?

2. Wikipedia's Supreme Court Is About to Take on One of the Site's Most Controversial Subjects

3. Elon Musk Went to Mexico and Was Surprised They Have Bed Bath & Beyond

4. Indoor Cannabis Farms Are Booming, but There's a Dark Side

On Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 12 p.m. ET, join Annual Reviews, Knowable Magazine, and Future Tense for a conversation about the challenges that the climate crisis poses for insurance-and why some experts think that new forms of insurance, built on technological advances in data collection and machine learning, could be one of the most effective ways to make communities more resilient. RSVP now for a conversation between Alice Hill, senior fellow for climate change policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Then, on Thursday, Oct. 13 at 1 p.m., join the New America Fellows program for a conversation with Rachel Aviv about Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. In the deeply reported book, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are, and explores how the stories we tell about mental illness shape its course in our lives.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Apple, Android, and 21st-Century Borders

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Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday When Tim Cook was recently asked by a reporter whose mom uses an Android phone whether he was doing anything to improve texting with non-iPhone users, Cook responded: " Buy your mom an iPhone."

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A Guardian photo-essay by Lucien Migné, looking at the work of marginalised groups around the world whose livelihoods have remained largely untouched by the modernisation of work

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A Guardian photo-essay by Lucien Migné, looking at the work of marginalised groups around the world whose livelihoods have remained largely untouched by the modernisation of work

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For a moment, the workers disappear in the clouds of dust that billow across the white limestone plains as the old circular saws they handle cut through rock in a deafening noise.

Every day thousands of men and boys, some as young as 12, travel in the back of pickup trucks to the limestones quarries of Al-Minya, about 300km (186 miles) south of Cairo in Egypt. They slice the limestone into bricks by pushing the machines with saws across the lunar landscape.

The old equipment is unsafe and the work is extremely dangerous. Wearing scarves and sunglasses to protect themselves from the dust, many workers have respiratory diseases and complain of severe eye pain. In the summer, the temperature in the quarries can reach 50C.

"There are regular accidents. Some men have lost arms, legs and their lives," says the French photographer Lucien Migné, who travelled to the quarries in 2022. The workers "are aware of the risks, but they feel they don't have a choice". The limestone quarries are the main source of employment in the region. Workers can earn up to 120 Egyptian pounds (£3) a day, but risk paying the price with their lives.

From Egypt and Ethiopia to Bangladesh, Migné's work tells the stories of forgotten and marginalised people, whose livelihoods have remained unchanged by the rapid computerisation of society.

Migné focuses on what he describes as "feudal" power dynamics between the world's rich and poor, which come to the fore in how people work. "It's about shedding light on these working conditions with the idea that the photos can perhaps empower someone to act."

Throughout his reportage, Migné says he has been "astonished" by stories of human resilience in the face of strenuous, insecure and low-paid work.

In the Manshiet Nasser district of Cairo, a Coptic Christian community has been collecting, sorting and recycling the city's waste for nearly a century. Known as Zabbaleen, which means literally "garbage people" in Egyptian Arabic, the group are stigmatised for their religion and their work, and many live in extreme poverty.

And yet, the Zabbaleen have created one of the most efficient waste recycling systems in the world - providing one of Africa's most populous cities with a critical service. Women sort the waste while men recycle materials in informal, family-run workshops. The city produces waste faster than the Zabbaleen can process it and the work continues through the night. Many have respiratory diseases, probably caused by the toxic fumes given off when plastic is melted into small pellets that can be reused.

"It's gruelling and backbreaking work. But people aren't complaining. Like in every job, people talk and laugh," says Migné. "I found that people lived in great dignity. They consider what they do a job like any other. As long as there's a job to do, then it's good to take."

In Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, Migné met people struggling to survive after two years of war and a year of fragile peace.

More than 1 million people remain displaced by the conflict. Smallholder farmers have lost their crops, livestock and sources of income because of the war. "I have seen people dying of hunger," he says. "People here want the world to notice them."

In the Gheralta mountains, Leter Kidam sows teff seeds. She doesn't have enough money to buy fertilisers and expects a poor yield. Her daughters have to help her work the land if they are going to have anything to eat. "Here, if you do nothing, you will have nothing," says Migné.

In the south of the country, the semi-nomadic Borana people, who traditionally live from their livestock, have lost nearly all their cows and goats for a different reason: five consecutive years of drought. To survive, many have decided to leave their rural land and live in refugee camps in cities.

Didwardy, 16, Elguda Guyo, 56, and Tume Belisso, 30, live in a camp in the town of Dubuluk. They now earn a salary from a wealthier farmer managing hay reserves in preparation for the next dry spell.

"Many of the Borana people I met were suffering the loss of their traditional way of life and culture. Their independence in work was directly tied to this way of life," Migné says.

Migné wants his work to bear witness to disappearing trades, jobs and cultures. "The world is changing faster than ever before. Photography enables [us] to leave a trace of what has been."

This has been a pressing task in Bangladesh, where Migné documented the lives of people working at the Lion Circus - the largest circus still travelling the country. Once very popular, circuses now attract dwindling numbers of spectators and the tradition could soon disappear.

The Lion Circus's tight-knit troupe comprises several families, who live on the fringes of Bangladeshi society. With up to three shows a day, the work is physically demanding. The troupe lives in shacks made of corrugated iron at the back of the circus tent. The children don't go to school but are brought up collectively by the troupe and learn the circus acts from a young age. Here, work, family and culture are colourfully and joyfully intertwined.

"I love to show that beyond the daily hardship, there are family lives and strong social ties," says Migné. "In the west, as people increasingly work online, these strong bonds which for centuries have underpinned people's working lives are being eroded."

The photos, he hopes, can be a reminder of what wealthier societies are losing.

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Danger and dignity in some of the world's vanishing trades - a photo essay

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From Egypt to Bangladesh, photographer Lucien Migné has documented the work of marginalised groups whose livelihoods have remained largely untouched by the modernisation of work* All photographs by Lucien Migné

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An Aeon animation, portraying US immigration as rings on a developing tree.

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An Aeon animation, portraying US immigration as rings on a developing tree.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a rather beautiful way of portraying immigration numbers, showing them as the thickening rings of a growing tree. Is this a helpful way of communicating the reality of this political issue? What insight (if any) do we gain from this that we don’t from looking at straight statistics? Why do you think the creators of this animation chose to represent immigration in the form of a tree – and how does that influence the way we process the data?

KEY TERMS Political data-visualisation

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With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country's population growth through immigration. Cruz depicts these accumulating figures as an ageing tree trunk, with each new ring accounting for a decade of population growth, and each coloured cell representing 100 immigrants from a cultural-geographical region. According to Cruz, the tree metaphor 'carries the idea that these marks in the past are immutable' and it 'embodies the concept that all cells contributed to the organism's growth'. As with so many renderings of US history, indigenous populations are conspicuously absent from the tableau. Still, Cruz's skilfully deployed data doubles as a resonant work of cultural commentary, offering a rich and often surprising look at the ever-evolving makeup of the country.

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For a radical new perspective on immigration, picture the US as an ancient tree | Aeon Videos

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With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country's population growth through immigration.

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An Aeon essay, looking at six different narratives of the nature and effect of globalization. 

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An Aeon essay, looking at six different narratives of the nature and effect of globalization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, what are students’ thoughts on the effects of globalization? Which of the six narratives does this most closely align to? Do they agree with the author that these are each “narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth”? How does applying a ‘fox-like approach’ help us to ‘embrace multiple perspectives’? Should we become ‘foxes’ in all areas of knowledge?

Key terms Fox vs. hedgehog, Perspectives, Polarization, Truth

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Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog - 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' - to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world. Foxes, on the other hand, embrace many values and approaches rather than trying to fit everything into an all-encompassing singular vision.

Debates about economic globalisation are often dominated by hedgehogs - actors who interpret and evaluate the dynamics and consequences of globalisation through a single lens. Take the narrative that dominated the debate about globalisation in the West from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the global financial crisis in 2008. On this view, economic liberalisation promised to grow the pie so that everyone - developed and developing countries, rich and poor - would be better off. This confident perspective touted free trade as a win-win outcome that would create peace and prosperity for all.

In recent years, this view has been challenged by a variety of narratives that stress that economic globalisation produces many losers. Right-wing populists lament the decay of America's rust belt, warning of the need to protect the native working class against the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and the onshoring of immigrants. Left-wing populists and critics of corporate power protest that globalisation's advantages often accrue mainly to rich people and powerful multinationals, hollowing out the middle class. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have heightened anxiety about the resilience and sustainability of our economies.

We are at a critical juncture: a relatively long period of stability in mainstream thinking about economic globalisation has given way to a situation of dramatic flux. During such periods, narratives assume particular relevance because they offer new ways for actors to understand what the problem is and what should be done about it.

The interplay of different narratives could be the starting point of a nuanced appraisal of the complexities, uncertainties and ambiguities of economic globalisation. More often, however, debates about economic globalisation devolve into stand-offs among hedgehogs who emphasise the validity of their perspective while seeking to expose their opponents as economically illiterate, politically dangerous or morally bankrupt.

A prime example of such a standoff was the reaction by establishment figures to the critiques of free trade and immigration that animated Donald Trump's presidential campaign in the United States and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. Many curled up into a ball of spikes, disparaging opponents for their stupidity and self-interest. But proponents of the insurgent narratives have been no less at fault: they have drawn much of their energy from their ability to present a radically different perspective, often at the cost of nuance and a willingness to compromise.

None of this is to say that the perspectives brought to light by the hedgehogs are not valid and valuable. Some of them harness the empirical and theoretical tools of particular academic disciplines to build our knowledge of the global economy, polity and environment. Others articulate a particular value system and spell out its ethical ramifications for organising the global flow of goods, people, capital, data and ideas. Each of these perspectives expresses a different viewpoint and sheds light on a piece of the puzzle.

Yet debates dominated by hedgehogs hinder us from moving forward. These debates tend to oscillate between two extremes. On some issues, proponents of different narratives seem to inhabit different worlds, with little or no interaction (silos). Some know a lot about inequality, for instance, but little about great-power competition or how the two might relate. At other times, the advocates of rival approaches clash forcefully, but the sides are so deeply entrenched in their own worldviews that genuine dialogue seems impossible (polarisation).

In order to grapple with complex issues such as economic globalisation, we need to develop more fox-like approaches that seek to overcome the silos and polarisation that are the hallmark of contemporary debates. The fact that hedgehogs have been dominating public debates about economic globalisation not only impedes our understanding of complex phenomena but makes it difficult for us to appreciate and accommodate the different values at stake. It is time for a more foxy approach.

The first step to developing such an approach is to understand what the hedgehogs have been saying about economic globalisation. In our book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters (2021), we identify six main narratives driving debates in the West about the virtues and vices of economic globalisation. These narratives provide the storylines through which people perceive reality and communicate their understandings and values. They fall into three broad categories: win-win, win-lose and lose-lose narratives.

The establishment narrative has been the dominant frame for understanding economic globalisation in the West over the past three decades. It sees globalisation as an unstoppable but overwhelmingly beneficial force. It focuses on rising productivity and declining poverty rates, emphasising economic efficiency and the virtues of countries and companies playing to their comparative advantage. This 'everybody wins' view has been espoused by many institutions that serve as the guardians of the international economic order, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

The establishment narrative has now been dislodged from its dominant position. In the decade following the global financial crisis, previously marginalised narratives have made their way to the centre of political debate. While the establishment narrative assumes that everyone wins, four other hedgehog narratives argue that economic globalisation produces both winners and losers. Where they differ is in who wins and who loses, what causes these distributive outcomes, and why they are problematic.

On the Left of the political spectrum, we see two narratives that emphasise how gains from economic globalisation have flowed upward to rich individuals and multinational corporations. On the Right of the political spectrum, we find two narratives that see the gains from globalisation flowing sideways to foreigners and foreign countries.

The Left-wing populist narrative focuses on the ways in which national economies are rigged to channel the gains from globalisation to the privileged few. Even as countries have seen their economies grow, many have also experienced a sharp increase in inequality, with a growing divide between rich and poor and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Whereas some proponents point the finger at chief executive officers, bankers and billionaires (the top 1 per cent of the global population), others take aim at the educated professional class and the upper middle class more broadly (the top 20 per cent). Either way, the poor and working class have lost out.

Proponents of the related corporate power narrative argue that the real winners from economic globalisation are multinational corporations, which can take advantage of a global marketplace to produce cheaply, sell everywhere, and pay as little in taxes as possible. These companies use their power to shape international rules in areas that advantage them, such as trade and investment, while lobbying against effective international cooperation on subjects that might disadvantage them, such as taxation. According to this narrative, economic globalisation produces many losers - workers, communities, citizens, governments - but only one winner: corporations.

The sixth hedgehog narrative argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation

The Right-wing populist narrative shares with the Left-wing version a deep distrust of elites, but the two narratives part company on what they blame the elite for: whereas Left-wing populists fault the elite for enriching themselves, Right-wing populists deride the elite for failing to protect the hardworking native population from threats posed by an external 'other'. The Right-wing populist narrative thus has a strong horizontal us-versus-them quality, whether expressed through concern about protecting workers from the offshoring of jobs or guarding them against an inflow of immigrants who might compete for those jobs, live off the welfare system, or threaten the native community's sense of identity.

The geoeconomic narrative focuses on a different kind of external threat: the economic and technological competition between the US and China as great-power rivals. Although both countries have gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, in relative terms China has closed the gap on the US. The US increasingly perceives China as both an economic competitor and a security threat, lending the geoeconomic narrative an urgency that it did not have during the Cold War. Instead of applauding international trade and investment as enhancing economic welfare and increasing prospects for peace, the geoeconomic narrative emphasises the security vulnerabilities created by economic interdependence and digital connectivity with a strategic rival.

Sometimes these different narratives overlap. For instance, many members of the Trump administration embraced both the Right-wing populist narrative and the geoeconomic one, while presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren embodied both the Left-wing populist critique and the corporate power one. At other times they diverge. For instance, the protests against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in Europe were much more strongly motivated by the corporate power narrative than the Left-wing populist one. Different narratives focus on different concerns. While the Right-wing populist narrative laments the loss of the manufacturing jobs of the past, the geoeconomic one focuses on winning the race in the technologies of the future, such as fifth-generation (5G) networks and artificial intelligence.

These win-win and win-lose narratives differ from the sixth hedgehog narrative, which argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation in its current form. This lose-lose narrative portrays economic globalisation as a source and accelerator of global threats such as pandemics and the climate crisis. Some versions focus on how global connectivity increases the risk of contagion of both viruses and supply chain shocks. Others warn that the skyrocketing carbon emissions associated with the global diffusion of Western patterns of production and consumption are endangering both people and the planet.

This global threats narrative emphasises our shared humanity; its proponents call for global solidarity and international cooperation in the face of common challenges. They argue that we need to redefine the goals of our economies to enable individuals and societies to survive and thrive within the limits of our planet. This can mean emphasising resilience over efficiency in our supply chains and sustainability over profit-seeking in our economies. Without change, they warn, we run the risk that everybody loses - though some people and countries are likely to lose first and worst.

Trained in a world that values hedgehogs, the most common question we encountered in our research was 'So, which narrative is correct?' We also found that proponents of the individual narratives were quick to point out the ways in which their narrative was right and others wrong - a classic hedgehog move. Both approaches missed a deeper point.

As with any partial representation of a more complex reality, each narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth. Each narrative highlights important aspects of the process of economic globalisation and expresses values that are deeply held by significant numbers of people. Each narrative reveals and obscures. Rather than defending one narrative as the correct one, we need to adopt more fox-like approaches that embrace multiple perspectives, holding them in tension and combining their insights.

At the analytical level, adopting a more fox-like approach helps in developing better understandings of complex issues. As the political scientist Philip E Tetlock explains in his book Expert Political Judgment (2005), what experts think matters far less than how they think. Tetlock finds that hedgehog-like thinkers who know one big thing are often overly confident and inclined to (over)extend the explanatory reach of their expertise into new domains. Yet they are often far less accurate in their predictions than fox-like thinkers who stitch together diverse sources of information to produce more provisional conclusions.

Take the backlash against the French president Emmanuel Macron's diesel tax as an example. From the perspective of the establishment and global threats narratives, the tax made perfect sense: making fossil fuels more expensive is a market-based way of reducing carbon emissions. The policy failed, however, because Macron did not consider how the tax would appear from the populist perspectives that fuelled the 'yellow vest' protests. Right-wing populists saw the tax as an affront to rural ways of life by city-dwelling elites, while Left-wing populists noted how it burdened poorer populations without equally targeting the habits of the rich, such as flying.

If the art of advocacy lies in convincing others to view the world through the lens of your preferred narrative, the art of policymaking requires examining issues through diverse lenses. The question of whether a country should use the telecommunications company Huawei for its 5G networks is not just about whether Huawei's products are cheap, reliable and economically efficient; it is also about whether a country is comfortable entrusting its critical infrastructure to a company that is subject to the Chinese government in an era of increased security concerns and geopolitical rivalry. Similarly, understanding the spread and impact of the virus SARS-CoV-2 requires an appreciation of the systemic risks arising from global connectivity as well as the variability resulting from domestic inequalities.

The synthesising mind takes in information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole

A fox-like approach can also help overcome some of the mutual incomprehension that plagues economic debates. A fox-like approach encourages us to step into the shoes of the proponents of narratives with which we disagree. It does not require us to adopt their narrative - we may still contest some of the narrative's empirical claims, value judgments and policy prescriptions. But if we attempt to see economic globalisation through the lens of another narrative in a charitable and empathetic way, we will gain a better understanding of that narrative's internal logic, appeal and prescriptions, and a clearer vision of the blind spots and biases of our own preferred narratives and policy options.

To develop more fox-like approaches, we need to get better at integrative thinking. This is difficult in today's environment. Universities typically organise their research and teaching along disciplinary lines and thereby encourage depth, specialisation and mastery over breadth, connectivity and creativity. Policymakers often work in a relatively siloed fashion as different departments take charge of a problem and keep a tight hold of the drafting pen. Yet complex phenomena such as economic globalisation involve a multitude of interconnected issues that do not fall neatly within the disciplinary and subject-matter lines along which much of our knowledge production is organised.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was of the view that: 'In the 21st century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesising mind.' The synthesising mind takes in and evaluates information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole. The ability to hold (at least) two diametrically opposed ideas or narratives in one's head and, instead of simply picking one, produce a synthesis that is superior to either has been found to be a common quality among exceptional business leaders. Increasingly, we are seeing trade policies in Washington, DC, Brussels and beyond that seek to integrate insights from different perspectives instead of simply championing the establishment narrative or replacing it wholesale with another narrative.

Although Trump's defeat revived optimism among some commentators about a reset on economic globalisation, the new US president Joe Biden's approach integrates insights from multiple narratives. Biden's trade agenda embraces the establishment narrative's enthusiasm for trade's potential to generate prosperity while tempering it with a commitment to prioritising the welfare of US workers (a concern of both Right-wing and Left-wing populists), an awareness of the need for greater regulation of corporate power (including in the areas of taxation and antitrust), and a determination to compete aggressively with China economically and technologically while attempting to cooperate on global threats such as the climate crisis and pandemics. The Biden administration has continued many of Trump's protectionist and geoeconomic trade policies, while also seeking to work with allies and reaching out to China on issues of common interest, such as the climate crisis.

Similar movements are evident in Brussels. Long a staunch proponent of the establishment narrative, the European Union has been updating its trade policy to achieve greater resilience with respect to critical goods, spearhead its own semiconductor manufacturing to protect its industrial position, and impose a carbon border adjustment mechanism to pursue greater sustainability within a global trading system. Europe is also seeking to incorporate insights from different narratives in its approach to China, with the European Commission declaring that:

China is, simultaneously, in different policy areas, a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.

If we move past either/or arguments about which narrative is right, where might more integrative thinking about economic globalisation lead us? Although we do not have a definite answer, our survey of competing hedgehog narratives suggests that the debate's centre of gravity is shifting away from the old establishment consensus in at least two respects: questions of distribution, both within and between countries, are increasingly central; and noneconomic values, whether environmental, social or security-related, are increasingly qualifying or outweighing a primary focus on efficiency and growth.

When it comes to distributive questions, advocates of the establishment narrative traditionally endorsed a two-step approach. The first imperative was to maximise the size of the pie by opening markets to international trade and investment. Distributional questions about how the pie was divided were left to the domestic level. Economic thinking in this mould focused on increasing efficiency so as to promote economic growth for the country as a whole. A growing economy meant that the winners could compensate the losers and still be better off. Whether the winners actually did compensate the losers was a matter for messy politics rather than elegant models.

A common theme that emerges from the other narratives is that distribution is highly significant. It is not enough to increase the size of the pie; the way the pie is sliced is just as important, and sometimes more so. Left-wing populists zero in on the distribution of wealth and opportunity among socioeconomic classes within a particular country. For them, growth is pointless if it is not broadly shared. The Right-wing populist narrative argues that distribution also matters horizontally in geographic space. It contrasts dynamic cities that move ahead with rural communities that decay when factories close.

Relative gains may also be important at the international level. The geoeconomic narrative notes that, although China and the US both gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, China's relative success in closing the gap has sharpened strategic competition between the two. Instead of producing a win-win situation that increased peace and prosperity for all, the changing global balance of power now threatens peace and prosperity. Distributional questions, both within and among countries, are becoming central to policymaking.

We need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies

Another common theme in the narratives pushing back against the free-trade orthodoxy is the focus on values other than economic efficiency, whether they be human wellbeing, environmental protection, community cohesion or national security. The establishment narrative tends to either ignore nonmonetary values or treat them as reducible to economic measures. The challenger narratives argue that overall 'welfare' cannot be represented solely in economic metrics; sometimes other values are more important than wealth and might not be commensurable with money. Even if disability payments, welfare handouts and cheaper products mean that laid-off manufacturing workers are materially better off than their parents, what they have lost in pride and status will likely outweigh any material gains.

The idea that values other than wealth maximisation matter is an essential element of the global threats discourse. Environmentalists and their allies ask us to recast economic growth as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. They remind us that not all economic growth contributes to human wellbeing, especially when it is pursued without respect for planetary boundaries. 'Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive,' notes the economist Kate Raworth; 'what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.'

Noneconomic values also animate the other challenger narratives. The Right-wing populist narrative prizes the ties that bind families, communities and nations, and it values tradition, stability, loyalty and hierarchy. Its advocates see work as important not just for providing an income but also for conferring a sense of identity, self-worth and dignity, which in turn helps in building stable families and communities. Even if trade encourages greater efficiency and cheaper production, it can damage the social fabric, particularly when change is rapid and highly concentrated in specific geographic regions or industrial sectors.

Sometimes economic growth is helpful in achieving these noneconomic goals; sometimes it stands in tension with achieving them. Proponents of these nonestablishment narratives concur that we cannot focus solely on growing the size of the pie or even on dividing it fairly - we must also acknowledge that the things that we value might not form part of a single pie. This conclusion means that we need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies. As the philosopher Michael Sandel explains:

Liberal neutrality flattens questions of meaning, identity, and purpose into questions of fairness. It therefore misses the anger and resentment that animate the populist revolt; it lacks the moral and rhetorical and sympathetic resources to understand the cultural estrangement, even humiliation, that many working-class and middle-class voters feel; and it ignores the meritocratic hubris of elites.

There is no one view that accurately captures the virtues and vices of globalisation. Instead of buying into the worldview of a single hedgehog narrative, we need to develop more fox-like ways of thinking about complex issues. This approach requires an ability to appreciate the insights of and values held by proponents of different narratives, as well as a culture of respectful debate where different tradeoffs are openly assessed. How should we weigh tradition against economic progress, the wealth of the nation against the wellbeing of particular regions or groups, and the importance of nationality against the value of global and cosmopolitan identities, for instance?

Debates about economic globalisation need to move past either/or battles about which narrative is right. The ability to integrate insights from different narratives and a willingness to explore synergies and navigate tradeoffs will become hallmarks of successful policymaking. Efficient supply chains are no longer good enough; we need them to be secure and resilient as well. Climate policy must not only be economically and technologically feasible; it must also be equitable and inclusive. The choice is not US-China cooperation, competition or confrontation, but how to navigate all three in different domains and at different times.

Looking at an issue through many narrative lenses requires a lot from us, both cognitively and normatively. But it is also the best chance we have of devising approaches that respond to the kaleidoscopic complexity of today's challenges.

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There are six main narratives of globalisation, all flawed | Aeon Essays

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Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog - 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' - to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world.

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A Guardian article, investigating how garment workers in places such as El Salvador have lost out on $4bn of severance pay.

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A Guardian article, investigating how garment workers in places such as El Salvador have lost out on $4bn of severance pay.

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Garment workers have lost out on $4bn of severance pay, says rights group

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The employees, who made clothes for western clothing brands, were legally entitled to the money after losing their jobs

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does Gaha Vince refer to political borders as ‘inventions’? How is the climate crisis putting pressure on the world’s current borders? What are the arguments for viewing the world as a ‘global commonwealth of humanity’ - and is this a viable mindshift for people to make? How and why does Vince suggest we rethink our ‘national pride’? Overall, ask students if they agree with the following statement: In order to create a more harmonious and fully functioning world, we need to “clear from our mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual.”

KEY TERMS Borders, Cleanly defined, Invention, Livability limits, Meaningless, Controlling vs. managing, Reinvent, Power, Divisive tribalism

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by the effects of global warming by the end of the century, should it lead to a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?
I've had an obsession with maps ever since I first sought my bearings in Winnie the Pooh's "Hundred Aker Wood", trying to discover where was "nice for piknicks", and the locations of the characters' houses. My childhood was spent studying and drawing treasure maps, charting imaginary lands and plotting routes to faraway places I longed to visit.

Today, my home is plastered with the maps I've collected or been given - reminders of places that are special to me. By my desk, I have a large world map, the continents distinguished from the oceans by their mosaic of colours. Each coloured patch is a country, separated from its neighbour by a neat line drawn onto this two-dimensional representation of our world.

The borders are cleanly defined, ink separating nationalities destined for different fates. For me, these lines mark exciting possibilities, with the potential for exploration and adventure, to visit foreign cultures with different foods and languages. For others, they are prison walls that limit all possibilities.

Borders define our fate, our life expectancy, our identity, and so much more. Yet they are an invention just like the maps I used to draw. Our borders don't exist as immutable facets of the landscape, they are not natural parts of our planet, and were invented relatively recently.

It can be argued, however, that most of these imaginary lines are not fit for the world of the 21st Century with its soaring population, dramatic climate change and resource scarcity. Indeed, the idea of keeping foreign people out using borders is relatively recent. States used to be far more concerned about stopping people from leaving than preventing their arrival. They needed their labour and taxes, and emigration still poses a headache for many states.

There are, however, true human borders set not by politics or hereditary sovereigns, but by the physical properties of our planet. These planetary borders for our mammal species are defined by geography and climate. Humans cannot live in large numbers in Antarctica or in the Sahara Desert, for instance. As global temperatures increase, causing climate change, sea level rise and extreme weather over the coming decades, large parts of the world that are home to some of the biggest populations will become increasingly hard to live in. Coastlines, island states and major cities in the tropics will be among the hardest hit, according to predictions by climate scientists.

Unable to adapt to increasingly extreme conditions, millions - or even billions - of people will need to move.

Borders are often now a barrier to movement, but might that have to change in the future? (Credit: Nicolas Economou/Getty Images)

The most densely populated areas of the planet are clustered around the 25-26th north parallels which has traditionally been the latitude of most comfortable climate and fertile land. An estimated 279 million people are packed into this thin band of land, which cuts through countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, the United States and Mexico.

But the conditions here are changing. On average, climate niches - the range of conditions at which species can normally exist - around the world are moving polewards at a pace of 1.15m (3.8ft) per day, although it's far faster in some places. Adapting to the changing climate will mean chasing our own shifting niche - which for much of human history has been within the temperature range -11C to 15C (12F to 59F) - as it migrates north from the equator. True livability limits are the borders we must worry about as the world warms over this century, bringing unbearable heat, drought, floods, fires, storms, and coastal erosion that make agriculture impossible and displace people.

Already record numbers of people are being forced to flee their homes with each passing year. In 2021, there were 89.3 million people, double the number forcibly displayed a decade ago, and in 2022 that number reached 100 million, with climate disasters displacing many more people than conflicts. Floods displaced 33 million people in Pakistan this year, while millions more in Africa have been affected by drought and the threat of famine, from the Horn of Africa to the continent's west coast.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appealed to global leaders at the COP27 climate change conference to take bold action to tackle the humanitarian consequences of global warming. That change needs to be "transformational" according to the UNHRC. "We cannot leave millions of displaced people and their hosts to face the consequences of a changing climate alone," says Grandi.

Migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn)

Without action, hundreds of millions people will have to leave their homes by 2050, according some estimates. One study from 2020 predicts that by 2070, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, " one to three billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years".

With so many people on the move, will this mean that invented political borders, ostensibly imposed for national security, become increasingly meaningless? The threat posed by climate change and its social repercussions dwarf those surrounding national security. Heatwaves already kill more people than those who die as a direct result of violence in wars.

Compounding this, the global population is still growing, particularly in some of the regions worst hit by climate change and poverty. Populations in Africa are set to almost triple by 2100, even as those elsewhere slow in growth. This means there will be a greater number of people in the very areas that are likely to be worst affected by extreme heat, drought and catastrophic storms. A greater number of people will also need food, water, power, housing and resources, just as these become ever harder to supply.

Meanwhile, most countries in the Global North are facing a demographic crisis in which people are not having enough babies to support an ageing population. Managed mass migration could thus help with many of the world's biggest problems, reducing the number of people living in poverty and climate devastation, and helping northern economies build their workforce.

But the main barrier is our system of borders - movement restrictions either imposed by someone's own state or by the states they wish to enter. Today just over 3% of the global population are international migrants. However, migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn) - some $3tn (£2.6tn) more than they would have produced in their origin countries. Some economists, such as Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development in the US, calculate that enabling free movement could double global GDP. In addition, we would see an increase in cultural diversity, which studies show improves innovation. At a time when we have to solve unprecedented environmental and social challenges, it could be just what is needed.

After WW2, Britain encouraged migration from Commonwealth countries to help make up for labour shortages (Credit: Haywood Magee/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Removing borders or making them far more flexible, especially to labour flows, has the potential to improve humanity's resilience to the stresses and shocks of global climate change. Managed well, migration could benefit everyone.

What if we thought of the planet as a global commonwealth of humanity, in which people were free to move wherever they wanted? We'd need a new mechanism to manage global labour mobility far more effectively and efficiently - it is our biggest economic resource, after all. There are already wide-ranging global trade deals for the movement of other resources and products, but few that deal with labour movement.

Some 60% of the world's population is under the age of 40, half of these (and growing) under 20, and they will form most of the world's people for the rest of this century. Many of these young, energetic jobseekers are likely to be among those moving as the climate changes - will they add to economic growth to build sustainable societies, or will their talents be wasted?

The conversation about migration has become stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur. I believe nations need to move on from the idea of controlling migration to managing migration. At the very least, we need new mechanisms for lawful economic labour migration and mobility, and far better protection for those fleeing danger. Everyone could be offered an official form of United Nations citizenship in addition to their birth citizenship. For some people, such as those born in refugee camps, lacking papers, or citizens of small island states that will cease to exist later this century, UN citizenship may well be their only access to international recognition and assistance, even though citizenship is a human right. Passports could be issued on the back of this.

The political theorist David Held argued that we have outgrown our national boundaries through increasing globalisation, and now live in "overlapping communities of fate" from where we should form a cosmopolitan democracy at a global level. Today, we are experiencing a planetary crisis and I believe it is time to see ourselves as members of one globally dispersed species that must cooperate to survive. The scale of the climate crisis requires new global cooperation and, I believe, new international citizenship with global bodies for migration and for the biosphere - new authorities that are paid for by our taxes and to which nation states are accountable.

Currently, the United Nations has no executive powers over nation states, but that may well need to change if we are to bring down global temperatures, reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and restore the world's biodiversity. Global governance could also be useful in coordinating the vast new mobile workforce, perhaps using an international quota system to help allocate people to positions during the mass climate migrations of this century. But it would also face challenges created by bureaucracy, corruption and lobbying by powerful corporations.

Nations are communities that do things together - David Miller

Underpinning global governance, however, there also needs to be strong states. The tension between the desires and needs of the individual and society are very real for us all, and hard enough to reconcile when our society is a small, closely knit group, let alone the population of the whole planet. It's hard to care, for example, about a nameless, faceless stranger in a country you've never visited when making choices about your own life in a city thousands of miles from them. Most people find hard to balance the needs of a stranger one street away. Successful nation states help to manage this with structures and institutions that ensure a useful level of cooperation between strangers that nurtures a strong society in which we all can succeed. We willingly make small, daily sacrifices of time, energy and resources as individuals - paying taxes, for instance - to ensure our societies operate. Most of us do this because it's our society, our social family, our nation state.

The invention of the nation state has been a very powerful tool in enabling us to cooperate so well. As the political theorist David Miller put it: "Nations are communities that do things together."

It would seem unwise, then, to try to completely dismantle or abandon our existing geopolitical system in the brief time we have to prepare for the massive disruption that is expected to occur over the course of this century.

Only strong nation states will be capable of setting up the systems of governance that will help our species survive climate change. Only strong nation states will be able to manage a massive movement of migrants from different geographies and cultures to the native population.

It may instead require a blend between internationalism and nationalism.

In recent decades, the growth of globalisation has led to greater internationalism - a citizen of London may often feel more commonality with a citizen of Amsterdam or Taiwan than with someone from a small country town in Britain. This may not matter for many successful urbanites, but natives of more rural areas can feel left behind by their own country as once dominant industries decline, and social spaces and cultural traditions dwindle away. This creates resentment and fear of the kind that can lead to prejudice against immigrants, as was seen in parts of the UK during the Brexit debate.

Flooding in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have displaced millions of people in 2022 (Credit: Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

Open borders do not have to mean no borders or the abolition of nation states, though. It may be necessary to explore different types of nation states, with different governance options. Will states that are most affected by climate change buy or rent territory in safer places? Or will we see charter cities that operate under different jurisdictions and rules to the territory surrounding them, or floating states that build new territory on the waves?

It will take work to reinvent the concept of the nation state so it becomes more inclusive so that it strengthens local connections while forging greater and more equitable global networks. There are multiple benefits in encouraging commonality, a kinship with our fellows, based on our shared societal project, language and cultural works. These traits matter to people enough to make patriotism a powerful source of identity.

So why not also engender patriotic feeling about our nations' air, land and water, to encourage people to look after them.? One approach, since we all face environmental threats, might be to enlist military and other security institutions in the struggle against climate change. National service for younger citizens and immigrants to help with disaster relief, nature restoration, agricultural and social efforts could be another solidarity-creating step. And we may need to restore or invent new national traditions that are environmentally or socially beneficial, and for which citizens can feel pride and respect. These could include social groups and clubs that sing, create, play sport or perform together, and to which members can belong for life. These traditions can help maintain dignity in hard times and provide patriotic meaning for immigrants to assimilate to.

The new patriotic narrative could be about civic nationalism, based on the common good, with rights and duties, and a passionate cultural attachment to nature, and to protecting and conserving places of national (or international) importance.

Costa Rica, for instance, embraced the term pura vida, broadly meaning "good life", as a national ethos, mantra and identity. Its use became widespread from the 1970s, when refugees from the violent conflicts in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador relocated to the country in large numbers. Costa Rica, a small Central American country that has no standing army and instead invests heavily in nature protection and restoration alongside social services such as health and education, used this outlook on life to help define its character and integrate new immigrants.

"A person choosing to use this phrase thus is not only alluding to this shared ideology and identity, he/she is at the same time constructing that identity by means of expressing it," says Anna Marie Trester of New York University. "Language is a very important tool of self-construction."

See these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers

This offers us a new way of looking at national pride. It doesn't have to mean seeing "your people" as better than other nations', nor does it mean a centralisation of meaning and power. Instead, it can involve the devolution of traditions and an appreciation of regionality and of the enormous cultural value of new citizens. The European Union is an example of supranational identity that allows citizens to feel they are European and identify with the values of the EU, but without having to give up their national identity.

A similar idea can apply within nations as well as between them. In the UK, for instance, London's Chinatown is rightly a much-visited tourist destination, as is Little India - they are part of the nation's identity, even though Chinese Brits and British Indians often face prejudice and socioeconomic disadvantage.

To earn national pride rather than suffer divisive tribalism, a nation needs to reduce inequality. The state must invest in the people for the people to feel invested in the state. That means putting social and environmental issues first in ways that are for the benefit of all, rather than a small tribe of global aristocrats. The Green New Deals proposed in the European Union and the US are examples of policies aimed at restoring economies, providing jobs and boosting dignity while helping unite people in a bigger social project of environmental transformation.

Try, if you will, to clear from your mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual. As if nationality were anything more than an arbitrary line drawn on a map. See instead these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers across the possibilities that Earth's lands offer us all.

* Gaia Vince is the author of Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval and a freelance science journalist and broadcaster.

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Is the world ready for mass migration due to climate change?

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by climate change by 2100, does there need to be a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?

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A New Statesman article, which looks at how and why the real time statistics site ‘Worldometer’ became such a popular site, and the reliability of the data it provides.  

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A New Statesman article, which looks at how and why the real time statistics site ‘Worldometer’ became such a popular site, and the reliability of the data it provides.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This short video gives a great overview about how graphs are being used and misused to represent the pandemic, and specific elements that we need to be aware of when we use them to understand what’s going on. Overall, how can data visualizations be manipulated in order to spin the knowledge they communicate? How can we guard against being misled?

KEY TERMS Visual data, Y and X axes, Scales

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In 2004, before he reached the age of 20, Andrey Alimetov created what has become one of the most viewed websites of the coronavirus pandemic, Worldometer. The site has shot into the top 100 Alexa rankings. Coronavirus data collated by Worldometer has gone on to be cited by the Government, politicians, media outlets, and commentators - Peter Hitchens has taken to tweeting out a "Daily Worldometer check" comparing the UK and Sweden's statistics. Wikipedia editors have debated whether or not it should be used as a source. Conspiracy theorists and a right-wing American think tank have speculated that a Chinese company is behind Worldometer. So, can the site be trusted, and who's behind it?

Even from its foundation, Worldometer has been about people dying. Its original page, archived online, contained estimates for figures on Earth's population, deaths this year, death today, deaths by communicable diseases this year, and a raft of other categories such as numbers of newspapers circulated in that year, cars produced, and coal consumption. The site used Javascript and your computer's clock to calculate the live count, meaning the archived version still works for 2020, albeit using data that even then was only "somewhat correct for 2003-2004 years". As Alimetov explains, "I just started playing with JavaScript at the time and after reading one of those 'there are currently X amount of people dying every second' so I figured it might be a cool idea to put that into a more easily-readable format. Whole thing took only about two to three days to make."

The site then blew up after being featured on Digg ("Yes, I'm that old", Alimetov says). So a few months later, he sold it on eBay through an auction for $2000. "At the time, it was a lot of money, and I wasn't even 20 back then so it was a no-brainer. The immediate cash-out was worth a lot more in my opinion at the time than long-term returns. Also at the time there was no easy way to 'cash out' a high-traffic website. The money at the time really helped with my living situation."

But the purchaser didn't seem to have big plans for the site at the start either. In 2013, after seeing the site on the front page of Reddit, Alimetov wrote to Worldometer to send his best regards. The owner, Dario, replied, explaining he had bought the website mainly "for its PR6" or PageRank 6, a discontinued algorithmic system used by Google for ranking the popularity of a site and the popularity of sites linked from other pages. He wanted to link to other sites from it to boost their traffic. Then, as this side of his business started to decline, "I decided to invest in Worldometer, bringing in resources and people until eventually it took a course of its own."

In 2005, the site began to offer manually updated numbers, showing American military casualties in Iraq since the day the war began, since "Mission Accomplished", since the "Capture of Saddam" and since the handover of Saddam. From 2007, it was led by "Chief project coordinator" Sir Thomasson, and by 2009 it was part of the " Real Time Statistics Project". The Real Time Statistics Project, however, seemed to consist of Worldometer and spin-off sites created by its unknown team of "developers, researchers and volunteers." Worldometer counters have apparently been "licensed and showed on electronic displays and motorway signs in Colombia and England."

Today, references to either Thomasson or sometime managing director Peter Collins are no longer on Worldometer's site, which notes it is owned by Dadax. Conspiracy theorists were quick to jump on the fact that at least two companies go by the name Dadax, one of which is based in Shanghai, bombarding the Chinese company with queries about the data. But it wasn't behind Worldometer, which is owned by American-based Dadax LLC. Company filings reveal its sometime president to be a Dario Pasqualino. Multiple unsuccessful attempts were made to try and contact Worldometer and speak to any of the figures involved for comment.

The curiosity about the possible Chinese ownership of Worldometer is not just a consequence of suspicion as to the veracity of Chinese coronavirus data, but also of problems with Worldometer's process of data collation. There were perhaps inevitable incidents of hacking in March which suggested the Vatican City had had 892,045 deaths. A remarkable figure, let alone that those deaths were from 568,000 cases in a country with a population of around 800. But the site has other problems apart from hackers.

Max Roser, a researcher at Oxford University and founder of Our World In Data, has expressed frustration at the site. He tweeted: "I'm annoyed by Worldometer because it wastes so much of my and my team's time. For weeks we get messages of people asking why do we not show this or that - 'Worldometer has the data'. And too often when you look into it, they provide no source or it is wrong." He says the site has made mistakes in reporting test numbers, in its labelling of metrics, and confusion of case fatality rate with infection fatality rate.

Unlike Wikipedia, Worldometer's team are totally anonymous. There's no edit history, talk page, or audit log, apart from bullet pointed country-by-country daily updates, some of which are provided with a link to the original source while others aren't. The missing sources and occasional mismatch between the data in the source and the update were enough for Wikipedia editors to decide not to permit any use of Worldometer as a source in any coronavirus related pages.

Despite Worldometer not being a good enough source for Wikipedia editors, it was for the UK government. From 30 March to 14 April, Worldometer figures were cited in the slide showing global comparison of deaths at the daily press conference. But perhaps because Worldometer didn't explicitly note the difference in forms of reporting processes between countries and was bundling the death figure together even if it excluded care home deaths at the time, as Health Service Journal pointed out on 14 April, the comparison was flawed. The next day, the source was changed to Johns Hopkins University (JHU). When asked if Worldometer's data had been verified and why it was used in the first place, a Cabinet Office spokesperson said: "Both Worldometers and John Hopkins provided comprehensive and well respected data. As the situation developed, we transferred from Worldometers to John Hopkins as John Hopkins relies more on official sources - in the USA, for example, John Hopkins collates state-level information."

Inevitably, the data from JHU is not without its critics either. One thread on the GitHub project where JHU is publishing its data calls for them to "please stop misinforming people by feeding fake data" and to let "trustworthy providers like [Worldometer] do the job." Despite its flaws, Worldometer continues to attract significant traffic, both towards its coronavirus coverage and apparent real time updates on world statistics. In 2010, a Toronto librarian wrote in a review of the site: "The first time I visited Worldometers I had the feeling that I was suddenly put into orbit and looking down on the collective activity of all earth's human inhabitants". Worldometer's clean crisp presentation of the data makes coronavirus and the scale of human (in)activity seem comprehensible, nothing more than a set of increasing numbers.

As for Alimetov, he now works as a systems manager for a company that publishes trade magazines for healthcare professionals and scientists. He admits he "probably would have never taken it to where it is now." Does selling it now seem a bit like the case of Laszlo Hanyecz, who spent 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas in 2010? "Yeah that's exactly how it looks like, but I don't regret it at all, actually kinda proud my idea started something as grand as this."
[See also: The UK is the only G7 economy not to have recovered from the Covid crash]

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The story of Worldometer, the quick project that became one of the most popular sites on the internet

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A simple page of statistics, compiled in a couple of days, has become one of the most widely cited sources of information in the world, with even the UK government quoting its figures. But who is behind the site, and is its data accurate?