The Economist on Birds and Bees

Sex hormones

For the birds

What regulates the lengths of human fingers?

Jun 10th 2010

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours

FROM financial traders’ propensity to make risky decisions to badly behaved schoolboys’ claims to be suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, testosterone makes a perfect scapegoat. In both of these cases, and others, many researchers reckon that the underlying cause is exposure to too much of that male hormone in the womb. Positive effects are claimed, too. Top-flight female football players and successful male musicians may also have fetal testosterone exposure to thank for their lot in life.

Yet the evidence that it is exposure in utero to testosterone that causes all these things relies on a shaky chain of causation. What these people actually share is a tendency for their ring fingers to be longer than their index fingers. This peculiarity of anatomy is often ascribed to fetal testosterone exposure because it is common in men and much rarer in women, and because there seems to be a correlation between the point in gestation when it appears and surges of testosterone in the womb. But the link has never been proved decisively. It has, rather, just become accepted wisdom.

Research carried out on birds now suggests that the accepted wisdom could be wrong. In their study of the feet of zebra finches published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Wolfgang Forstmeier and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, conclude that oestrogen—the hormone of femininity—rather than testosterone, may be to blame.

Although it is well over 300m years since people and finches had a common ancestor, the basic vertebrate body plan is the same in both. So, a few years ago Dr Forstmeier, an expert on finch behaviour, wondered if the link between digit ratio and behaviour might show up in his animals, too.

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It did. The ratio between a zebra finch’s second and fourth digits (which are not fingers but toes in birds) is associated with more courtship songs by males and fewer flirtatious hops by females—in other words with more masculine behaviour, regardless of the sex of the individual.

Dr Forstmeier probed the matter further. He has been investigating the birds’ oestrogen and androgen receptors—molecules that respond to female and male hormones, respectively.

Zebra crossing

The receptors in question orchestrate both behavioural and physical development, including some types of bone growth, in many vertebrate species. Different versions of a receptor (encoded by genes that have slightly different DNA sequences) can be more or less sensitive to the appropriate hormone. That led Dr Forstmeier to ask whether the type of hormone receptor a bird has influences its digit ratio, its sexual behaviour or both.

To find out, he looked for correlations between genes, ratios and behaviour in more than 1,100 zebra finches. Surprisingly, in view of the working assumption about humans, the type of testosterone receptor that a bird had proved to be irrelevant. Its oestrogen-receptor variant, however, had a significant impact on both digit ratio and courtship behaviour. This suggests that the sorts of predispositions that in people are blamed on fetal testosterone are caused in birds by fetal oestrogen (or, rather, the response to it).

That does not, of course, mean the same thing is true in people: 300m years is quite a long time for differences to emerge. It is also true that the digit-ratio that predicts male-like behaviour in birds is the opposite of the one found in humans (ie, the second digit, rather than the fourth, is the longer of the two). But it does suggest that it would be worth double-checking. Though science likes to think of itself as rational, it is just as prone to fads and assumptions as any other human activity. That, plus the fact that most scientists are men, may have led to some lazy thinking about which hormone is more likely to control gender-related behaviour. Just possibly, the trader’s finger should be pointing at oestrogen, not testosterone.

Science and Technology

The Economist on Papua

Papua

Indonesia's last frontier

Indonesia is a democracy. But many Papuans do not want to be part of it

Jun 3rd 2010 | TIMIKA

THE hotel provides free mosquito repellent and closes its pool bar before dusk to prevent guests from contracting malaria. The former Sheraton still offers the best accommodation in Indonesia’s little-visited province of Papua, catering mainly to employees of its owner, Freeport-McMoRan, an American mining giant. Freeport protects its staff from more than malaria. Since July 2009 a spate of mysterious shootings along the road linking the hotel in Timika to the huge Grasberg mine up in the mountains has killed one employee, a security guard and a policeman and wounded scores of others. Workers are now shuttled from Timika to the mine by helicopter.

Before the pool bar closes, a jolly crowd of Freeport employees have their beers stored in a cool box. They take it to one of the—mostly dry—seafood restaurants in town. As in the rest of Papua, all formal businesses are run by Indonesian migrants who are predominantly Muslim. The mainly Christian Papuans sit on the pavements outside selling betel nuts and fruit.

“We are not given licences to run a business,” says a young Papuan independence activist who does not want to be named. He sits in a car with two bearded guerrilla fighters of the West Papua Revolutionary Army, the militant wing of the Free Papua Movement (OPM). For more than 40 years the OPM has fought a low-intensity war to break away from Indonesia. Partly because of restrictions on reporting it, this is one of the world’s least-known conflicts. It is getting harder to keep secret.

Unlike its independent neighbour, Papua New Guinea, which occupies the eastern half of the vast island, the western part used to be a Dutch colony. During the cold war the United Nations said there should be a plebiscite to let Papuans decide their future. But Indonesians, the Papuans say, forced roughly 1,000 Papuan leaders at gunpoint to vote unanimously for integration into their country. This “act of free will” has been contested ever since.

The two bearded rebels drive around town to evade security forces. “Indonesia might be a democracy, but not for us Papuans,” says one. “They gave us autonomy which is a joke. We are different from those Indonesians. Just look at our skin, our hair, our language, our culture. We have nothing in common with them. We beg President Obama to visit Hollandia when he comes to Indonesia in June to witness the oppression with his own eyes,” says the other, using the colonial name for Papua’s capital, Jayapura. (America’s president is due to visit the country on June 14th.) In the 1960s indigenous Papuans made up almost the whole population of Indonesia’s largest province; since then immigration from the rest of the country has reduced their share to about half.

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The two rebels do not want to take responsibility for the shootings along the road to the Grasberg mine, but leave no doubt either about their sympathies or their intentions. “The Indonesian shopkeepers, the soldiers and the staff of Freeport are all our enemies. We want to kill them and the mine should be shut,” they say. “Grasberg makes lots of money but we Papuans get nothing. When we achieve independence, we shall kick out the immigrants and Freeport and merge our country with Papua New Guinea.”

The car draws up in front of the seafood restaurant where the Freeport staff are becoming ever more cheerful, unaware that rebels are watching them. Freeport is the biggest publicly traded copper company in the world, and the Grasberg mine remains its main asset. The complex, the world’s largest combined copper and gold mine, is enormously profitable. It provided $4 billion of Freeport’s operating profit of $6.5 billion in 2009. The mining facilities are protected by around 3,000 soldiers and police which were supported by Freeport with $10m last year, according to the company. In December 2009 the police shot dead Kelly Kwalik, one of the OPM’s senior commanders, whom the police blamed for a series of attacks on Freeport’s operations, a charge he repeatedly denied.

Foreign journalists are restricted in their travel to Papua. Your correspondent was lucky enough to slip through the net. In the towns, it is clear that the guerrillas generally keep a low profile. But in the central highlands they are free to operate more openly. This is their heartland. Anti-Indonesian feelings run high because of the sometimes brutal suppression of the OPM by the army.

A well-hidden rebel camp in the Baliem valley—home to a Stone Age tribe discovered and disturbed by outsiders only in the 1930s—lies a few kilometres from a small army base. The guerrillas conduct military training with villagers who use spears, bows and arrows, all without metal heads. Students with mobile phones and video cameras teach the farmers revolutionary rhetoric. They have lost faith in peaceful means of protest and hope to provoke a bloody confrontation that will push Papua on to the international agenda. So far the government has refused to talk to the fractious OPM. Unless it changes its mind, it risks being unable to prevent the young radicals from kicking off a revolution.

Asia

The Economist on Anti-Gay Laws

Very interesting how easily women get off (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)...

The Economist on Genital Cutting

The Economist on Cats and Mice

Toxoplasmosis and psychology

A game of cat and mouse

There is tantalising evidence that a common parasite may affect human behaviour

Jun 3rd 2010

IF AN alien bug invaded the brains of half the population, hijacked their neurochemistry, altered the way they acted and drove some of them crazy, then you might expect a few excitable headlines to appear in the press. Yet something disturbingly like this may actually be happening without the world noticing.

Toxoplasma gondii is not an alien; it is a relative of that down-to-earth pathogen Plasmodium, the beast that causes malaria. It is common: in some parts of the world as much as 60% of the population is infected with it. And it can harm fetuses and people with AIDS, because in each case their immune systems cannot cope with it. For other people, though, the symptoms are usually no worse than a mild dose of flu. Not much for them to worry about, then. Except that there is a growing body of evidence that some of those people have their behaviour permanently changed.

One reason to suspect this is that a country’s level of Toxoplasma infection seems to be related to the level of neuroticism displayed by its population. Another is that those infected seem to have poor reaction times and are more likely to be involved in road accidents. A third is that they have short attention spans and little interest in seeking out novelty. A fourth, possibly the most worrying, is that those who suffer from schizophrenia are more likely than those who do not to have been exposed to Toxoplasma.

Nor is any of this truly surprising. For, besides humans, Toxoplasma has two normal hosts: rodents and cats. And what it does to rodents is very odd indeed.

Fatal feline attraction

Joanne Webster of Imperial College, London, has been studying Toxoplasma for years. Like Plasmodium, which cycles between mosquitoes and man, Toxoplasma cycles between its rodent and feline hosts, living out different phases of its existence in each. In cats, it resides in the wall of the small intestine and passes out of the host in its faeces. These are then picked up by rats and mice (and also by other mammal species, including humans), where they form cysts in brain, liver and muscle tissue. Eventually, if the parasites are lucky, their rodent host is eaten by a cat and the whole cycle starts again.

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Unlike Plasmodium, however, which can rely on the natural behaviour of mosquitoes to spread it around, Toxoplasma’s rodent hosts have a strong aversion to helping it into its next home. Which is where, in Dr Webster’s elegant phrase, fatal feline attraction comes in. Rats and mice infected with Toxoplasma start wandering around and drawing attention to themselves—in other words, behaving in ways that will bring them to the attention of cats. They are even, Dr Webster’s work suggests, attracted to the smell of cats.

How these behavioural changes come about was, until recently, obscure. But in 2009 Glenn McConkey of the University of Leeds, in England, analysed Toxoplasma’s DNA. When he compared the results with those of other species, he discovered that two of the bug’s genes encode enzymes involved in the production of a molecule called dopamine. This molecule acts, in animals that have nervous systems, as a chemical messenger between nerve cells. It does not, however, have any known function in single-celled critters. Moreover, dopamine is particularly implicated in schizophrenia. Haloperidol, an antipsychotic drug, works by blocking dopamine receptors.

Intriguingly, Dr Webster has found that haloperidol serves to reverse fatal feline attraction in rats. This suggests the parasite is indeed interfering with the brain’s dopamine system—and thus that it might be doing the same thing in people. Dr McConkey is now making a version of Toxoplasma with the dopamine genes excised, to see if rats infected with this modified bug are protected from the fatal attraction.

Culture club

The evidence that human toxoplasmosis does more than appears at first sight is, it must be said, quite scattered. But it is intriguing and probably worth following up.

The connection with schizophrenia was originally suggested in the 1950s, but only really took off in 2003, when it was revived by Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, near Washington, DC. In collaboration with Bob Yolken of Johns Hopkins University, Dr Fuller discovered that people who suffer from schizophrenia are almost three times more likely than the general population to have antibodies to Toxoplasma.

That does not, of course, prove Toxoplasma causes schizophrenia. As every science student is taught from the beginning, correlation is not causation. It could be that schizophrenics are more susceptible to the infection, or some third, as yet unidentified variable may be involved.

Another interesting correlation has, though, been discovered by Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague. Dr Flegr has studied several aspects of the Toxoplasma question. In one case he looked at the infection rate of people involved in road accidents. Both drivers and pedestrians who had been in accidents were almost three times more likely to be infected than comparable individuals who had not been. Similar results have been found in Turkey, by Kor Yereli of Celal Bayar University, in Manisa. And Dr Flegr has found other abnormalities in infected people. These included reduced reaction times and shorter attention spans—both of which might help to explain the accident statistics—and a reduction in “novelty-seeking”.

This latter is curious. The sort of behaviour shown by rodents is, if anything, an increase in novelty-seeking. But the point is that novelty-seeking is controlled by nerve cells that respond to dopamine. Humans are dead-end hosts as far as Toxoplasma is concerned, so the exact effect will not have been honed by natural selection and may therefore be different from the one in animals that are actually useful to the parasite.

All of these suggested effects are obviously bad for the individuals involved, but some researchers go further and propose that entire societies are being altered by Toxoplasma. In 2006 Kevin Lafferty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a paper noting a correlation between levels of neuroticism established by national surveys in various countries and the level of Toxoplasma infection recorded in pregnant women (a group who are tested routinely). The places he looked at ranged from phlegmatic Britain, with a neuroticism score of -0.8 and a Toxoplasma infection rate of 6.6%, to hot-blooded France, which scored 1.8 and had an infection rate of 45%. Cross-Channel prejudices, then, may have an unexpected origin.

To repeat, correlation is not causation, and a lot more work would need to be done to prove the point. But it is just possible that a parasite’s desire to get eaten by a cat is shaping the cultures of the world.

Science and Technology

The Economist on DHA

Diet and the evolution of the brain
Fish and no chips
The wonders of docosahexaenoic acid
May 27th 2010

TO PIN one big evolutionary shift on a particular molecule is ambitious. To pin two on it is truly audacious. Yet doing so was just one of the ideas floating around at “A Celebration of DHA” in London this week. The celebration in question was a scientific meeting, rather than a festival. It was definitely, however, a love-in. It was held on May 26th and 27th at the Royal Society of Medicine to discuss the many virtues of docosahexaenoic acid, the most important of that fashionable class of dietary chemicals, the omega-3 fatty acids.
DHA is a component of brains, particularly the synaptic junctions between nerve cells, and its displacement from modern diets by the omega-6 acids in cooking oils such as soya, maize and rape is a cause of worry. Many researchers think this shift—and the change in brain chemistry that it causes—explains the growth in recent times of depression, manic-depression, memory loss, schizophrenia and attention-deficit disorder. It may also be responsible for rising levels of obesity and thus the heart disease which often accompanies being overweight.
Michael Crawford, a researcher at the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition in London, believes, however, that DHA is even more important than that. He suggests that it was responsible for the existence of nervous systems in the first place, and that access to large quantities of the stuff was what permitted the evolution of big brains in mankind’s more recent ancestors.


Fish-eye lenses
According to Dr Crawford, DHA’s first job was to convert light into electricity in single-celled organisms. This gave them a crude form of vision, allowing them to move in response to light and shade, but also brought into biology a way of controlling electrical potential. If organisms are to be multicellular, cells must be able to talk to each other. Electrical potentials, the basis of every nervous system, are one way of doing this. And DHA was the enabler.
The molecule is certainly ubiquitous. Some 600m years after animals became multicellular, more than half of the fatty-acid molecules in the light-sensitive cells of the human eye are still DHA, and the proportion of DHA in the synapses of the brain is not far short of that, despite the fact that similar molecules are far more readily available. Indeed, Dr Crawford thinks that a shortage of DHA is a long-term evolutionary theme. The molecule is most famously found in fatty fish. He suggests this might explain why, for example, dolphins have brains that weigh 1.8kg whereas zebra brains weigh only 350g, even though the two species have similar body sizes. Furthermore, he argues that the dramatic increase of the size of the brains of humanity’s ancestors that happened about 6m years ago was not because apes came out of the trees to hunt on the savannahs, but because they arrived at the coast and found a ready supply of DHA in fish.
Not everyone, it must be said, agrees with this interpretation of history. For one thing, humanity’s ancestors do not seem to have been exclusively coastal. What they do agree about, though, is that substituting DHA with other, superficially similar molecules is a bad idea.

Accept no substitute
Joseph Hibbeln, a researcher at America’s National Institutes of Health, has been looking at the supply to babies of DHA from breast milk and at genetic variation in the ability to produce this molecule from other omega-3s. A study that began in the early 1990s has shown that children who are breastfed have the same range of IQs, regardless of whether they have the ability to make their own DHA. In the case of those fed on formula milk low in DHA, though, children without the DHA-making ability had an average IQ 7.8 points lower than those with it.
Nor is intelligence the only thing affected by a lack of DHA. There is also a body of data linking omega-3 deficiencies to violent behaviour. Countries whose citizens eat more fish (which is rich in DHA) are less prone to depression, suicide and murder. And new research by Dr Hibbeln shows that low levels of DHA are a risk factor for suicide among American servicemen and women. Actual suicides had significantly lower levels of DHA in the most recent routine blood sample taken before they killed themselves than did comparable personnel who remained alive. More worryingly, 95% of American troops have DHA levels that these results suggest put them at risk of suicide.
America’s department of defence has taken note. It will soon unveil a programme to supplement the diets of soldiers with omega-3s. The country’s Food and Drug Administration may change one of its policies, too. Thomas Brenna, a professor of nutrition at Cornell University, has written a letter (co-signed by many of the scientists at the meeting) urging the agency to revise its advice to pregnant and fertile women that they limit their consumption of fish. This advice, promulgated in 2004, was intended to protect fetuses from the malign effects of methyl mercury, which accumulates in fish such as tuna. The signatories argue that this effect is greatly outweighed by the DHA-related benefits of eating fatty fish.
They may, however, be swimming against the tide. The popularity of omega-6-rich foods based on cheap vegetable oils will be difficult to reverse. Indeed, if another of Dr Hibbeln’s studies proves true of people as well as rodents, it may be self-fulfilling.
In this experiment he fed rats diets that were identical except that in one case 8% of the calories came from linoleic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid) while in the other that value was 1%. These percentages reflect the shift in the proportion of omega-6s in the American diet between 1909 and the early 21st century.
In the 8% diet, levels of rat obesity doubled. It turns out that in rats (and also in humans) linoleic acid is converted into molecules called endocannabinoids that trigger appetite. Those who eat omega-6s, in other words, want to eat more food. And since, in the human case, omega-6-rich food is much cheaper than omega-3-rich food, that is what they are likely to consume.
The way out of this vicious circle is not obvious. Eating fish is all very well, but the oceans are under enough pressure as it is. Biotechnology might be brought to bear—creating genetically modified crops such as soyabeans with higher levels of DHA. Until that day, though, the best advice is probably that which was posted over the oracle at Delphi: “Nothing in excess”.

Economist on Moslems vs Facebook

First Facebook, then the world
An annoying web page prompts a worrisome precedent

NOT for the first time, feelings in Pakistan have been hurt and censorship provoked by an overseas campaign to blaspheme the Prophet Muhammad. On May 19th the Lahore High Court suspended access to Facebook, a popular social-networking site. Facebook has been “responsible for immense hurt and discomfort”, the court found. It ordered that the site be blocked, subject to a review on May 31st. For Pakistan’s 22m internet-users, havoc has ensued.

The offence was an American cartoonist’s idea for a “Draw Muhammad Day”. Enthusiasts proceeded to draw thousands of images, many of them offensive. Facebook’s policy of prohibiting hate speech was apparently in abeyance: drawings of pigs urinating on the Koran—and worse—were posted.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) argued against the ban on the grounds that it would hurt the country’s economy, but was overzealous in enforcing it: first Facebook, then YouTube, also for “sacrilegious” content, then another 450 sites. Parts of Wikipedia, BBC News, Twitter and Webster’s online dictionary have been blocked, though sometimes only briefly. Proxy servers, which might have been used to circumvent the prohibitions, were also blocked. Even Blackberry services were hit (to gasps of horror from the business elite).
A group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement argued in favour of the ban, taking the view that any economic sacrifice is justified to defend the Prophet’s honour. Demonstrations on the street, though relatively small, suggest that the ban has some grassroots support. Many online commentators support it too.
Fasi Zaka, a newspaper columnist, worries that the precedent could be used by governments to stifle criticism. “The one thing that Pakistan had going for it was relative freedom of expression. That’s in danger right now.” Further censorship might appeal to some in power. Facebook plays host to a page that mocks President Asif Zardari, whose 133,000 fans have together posted almost 1,700 derogatory images of the man.
The three main secular parties in the ruling coalition have kept quiet. Sherry Rehman of the Pakistan People’s Party has no qualms about censoring “those who cause wilful offence”. But she too worries, lest the incident “become a curtain-raiser for other curtailments.”

The Economist on Corn Fructose

High-fructose corn syrup

Sickly sweetener
Americans are losing their taste for a sugar substitute made from maize
May 27th 2010 | New York

IN A sun-dappled yard, above the cheerful whoops of healthy children, one mother assures another that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sweetener made from maize (corn), is, like sugar, “fine in moderation”. Yet fewer and fewer Americans, it seems, are convinced of the claim, made in a series of advertisements by the Corn Refiners’ Association, an industry group. Demand for HFCS declined by 8% between 2007 and 2009. Several fast-food chains and consumer-goods firms have ostentatiously dropped it from their recipes. Michelle Obama, the first lady, has expressed concern. Some Americans feel so strongly that they have posted spoof advertisements online, explaining that lead poisoning, Nazism and genital mutilation are also “fine in moderation”.
HFCS, which became a common ingredient in processed foods in the 1980s thanks in part to an abundance of subsidised maize, is cheaper than sugar. A rise in the price of sugar in recent years has increased the difference, yet big firms such as Pepsi and Kraft have substituted sugar for HFCS in many of their products. ConAgra, another big foodmaker, announced earlier this month that it had removed HFCS from its Hunt’s ketchup brand, and slapped a prominent label to that effect on the bottles. The move, the firm says, reflects consumer demand.
The most common complaint about HFCS is that it has helped to make Americans fat. But that idea is hotly disputed. The American Medical Association and the American Dietetic Association argue that there is no direct link between obesity and consumption of HFCS in America, although both have surged in the past 30 years. Other studies have fingered HFCS, including one released in March by scientists at Princeton, which found that rats gained more weight eating it than table sugar. HFCS’s defenders blame perfidious sugar refiners for their bad press.
Another complaint centres on subsidies for maize, which, the theory runs, have warped America’s entire food chain. Yet high tariffs on imported sugar, to the benefit of America’s beet and cane farmers, have also helped to promote HFCS. Mike McConnell of the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimates that HFCS and sugar would be roughly comparable in price in a free market. In that respect, at least, the two products are as bad as each other.

The Economist on Selflessness

Selflessness of strangers

The search for an evolutionary theory

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. By Oren Harman. W.W. Norton; 464 pages; $27.95. The Bodley Head; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: dishevelled, smelly and cold. Alongside them were Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, both distinguished British evolutionary biologists. All seven men had come to mourn an American scientist who helped to unpick the riddle of why people should ever be kind to one another, who had chosen to give away his clothes, his possessions and his home, and who, when his generosity was exhausted, slashed his own throat with a pair of scissors, aged 52.

Ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have pondered whether it can explain the existence of altruism: behaviour that decreases an individual’s fitness but which increases the average fitness of the group to which he belongs. Such benevolence is not unique to humans but exists also in complex insect societies. Bees, for example, live in colonies headed by a queen and populated by sterile workers. One reading of Darwin’s theory says that, because the workers do not breed, evolution should result in their elimination. Yet this is not what happens in nature.

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In the 1960s, Hamilton proposed that evolution acts on characteristics that favour the survival of close relatives of a certain individual. The bee colonies that survive are those in which sterile workers (which are daughters of the queen) provide the “fittest” service to their mother. Each worker thus strives to favour the reproductive success of the queen, even at the price of her own reproductive failure.

Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic predisposition to altruism could evolve. He devised a formula, now called the Price equation, that describes how characteristics that can, in some cases, prove disadvantageous, nevertheless persist in the population. By tinkering with the variables, he was able to describe populations in which kindness was widespread, everyone benefited and altruism was passed down the generations, and other, more brutal worlds, where charity was abused and kindness died out.

Ultimately, Price ended up in such a place. Oren Harman’s account of his life traces his early years, including a stint at the University of Chicago, where he worked on detecting radiation as his colleagues toiled to produce the first atomic pile. It bounces between his many interests: Price trained as a chemist but worked on electronic transistors at Bell Labs before going into computer-aided design. Then a generous payment from his health insurance for a thyroid tumour enabled him to abandon his wife and two young daughters and move to London in 1967.

There he hooked up with Hamilton and derived the equation for which he is famed. At the same time, his interest in altruism blossomed into something less kin-based and more practical: he began to seek out needy strangers. At one stage, he had four homeless men staying in his flat, while he slept in his office. As he became increasingly unwell, both physically and mentally, he redoubled his efforts to help the poor, moving into a dirty squat where, one freezing night, he committed suicide. As Mr Harman so vividly describes, Price ultimately became one of the vagabonds he had set out to save.

The Economist on Work

Schumpeter

Overstretched

Many people who kept their jobs are working too hard. What can companies do about it?

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN GEORGE ORWELL’S “Animal Farm” the mighty cart-horse, Boxer, inspires the other animals with his heroic cry of “I will work harder”. He gets up at the crack of dawn to do a couple of hours’ extra ploughing. He even refuses to take a day off when he splits his hoof. And his reward for all this effort? As soon as he collapses on the job he is carted off to the knacker’s yard to be turned into glue and bonemeal.

“Animal Farm” looks ever more like a parable about capitalism as well as socialism. Everybody knows about the scourge of unemployment. But unemployment is bringing another scourge in its wake—overwork. The Corporate Leadership Council, an American consultancy which surveys 1,100 companies every quarter, reports that the average “job footprint” (what a worker is expected to do) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession. The Hay Group, a British consultancy which recently surveyed 1,000 people, says that two-thirds of workers report they are putting in unpaid overtime. The reward for all this effort is frozen pay and shrinking perks. The only difference between these overstretched workers and Boxer is that they can see the knacker’s van coming.

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So far workers have borne all this with remarkable stoicism—partly because they feel lucky to keep their jobs and partly because they want to save their firms from going under. But the Dunkirk spirit is beginning to fade. The Hay survey notes that 63% of workers say that their employers do not appreciate their extra effort. And 57% feel that employees are treated like dispensable commodities. Half report that their current level of work is unsustainable. People are wearying of frantic reorganisation as well as the added toil—floods of memos and meetings, endless reshuffles, the exhortations to do more with less.

For their part, companies are beginning to notice the downside of all this overstretching. Absenteeism is on the rise. Low-level corporate crime is growing. Corporate loyalty is on the wane. The Corporate Leadership Council reports that the proportion of workers who are willing to put in “discretionary effort” has dropped by almost half since 2007, while the share of respondents who claim that they are “disengaged” from their jobs has risen from a tenth to a fifth. But “discretionary effort” and “engagement” are vital sources of the innovation and creativity that companies claim to value so highly.

The biggest danger for companies is if workers head for the door as the economy picks up. The Hay Group reports that 59% of its sample are either considering leaving or actively looking for a new job—and more than 85% of those who are not in the job market are staying only because that market is so dismal.

Most problematic of all is when star employees decide to look for work elsewhere. These “high-potentials” (HiPos) are doubly frustrated: they have been asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the growing burden of work and they have seen senior jobs dry up as older managers try to cling to their positions.

A few signs suggest that overstretched companies are beginning to hire again. America added 290,000 new workers in the past quarter. But the growth in employment is likely to be much slower and patchier than it has been after previous recessions. Bosses report that they expect a prolonged period of slow growth in the rich world. And the recession that has battered the private sector will soon reach the long-protected public sector as governments desperately try to bring their deficits under control.

What can organisations do to cope with this new era of overwork? Most obviously they can redouble efforts to make staff feel valued. Cash-strapped companies are making more use of symbolic rewards. Cap Gemini, an IT consultancy, has a “gold awards programme” complete with a public ceremony every six months. This might sound suspiciously like the parades that the pig-dictator in “Animal Farm” organises to reconcile his fellow animals to their desperate lot. But, given people’s worries about their job security, it seems to work like a treat.

A second strategy is to make more use of that old favourite, “empowerment”. This means trying harder to explain why companies are acting as they are. At Dollar General, a retail chain, managers brief selected front-line workers on corporate strategy and then ask them to explain what is going on to their workmates. It also means giving workers some more control over their lives. Best Buy, a seller of electronics, measures staff by their results rather than their hours. Bombardier, an aircraft-maker, encourages managers from different divisions to act as consultants to each other. Cap Gemini gives as many people as possible 3G devices so that they can do their administration while travelling. More companies are allowing staff flexible working hours as a way of reconciling them to added burdens—if they can’t have more pay, workers can at least have more control over how and when they work.

Power to the HiPos

A third strategy is to pay particular attention to high performers. A striking number of companies have introduced “HiPo schemes” to identify and nurture potential stars. Procter & Gamble, which sells consumer goods, encourages rising stars to tackle difficult problems (“crucible roles”). Hewlett-Packard, an IT firm, lets its stars attend high-level strategy meetings and suggest solutions. The companies are combining these schemes with judicious pruning of less productive workers.

This approach is less divisive than it sounds. Most workers are surprisingly keen on rewarding superstars (who hold the future of the organisation in their hands) and on dumping freeloaders. And sensible bosses are well aware that their competitors are already compiling hit lists of high-flyers who are dissatisfied with their lot. All animals are equal, remember. But some animals are more equal than others.

The Economist on Freedom of...

Liberty, privacy and some bottles of beer

Want to talk politics with your neighbour? Better ask permission

May 20th 2010 | SEATTLE | From The Economist print edition

PAT MURAKAMI runs a small computer repair shop and does a little political agitating on the side. She worries about her neighbourhood, a vibrant area full of Vietnamese shops and veiled women waiting at bus stops. The city of Seattle tried to declare parts of it “blighted”, which would have enabled it to seize people’s homes and hand the land to private developers.

Mrs Murakami started a group called “Many Cultures, One Message”, to rally her neighbours in protest. She prevailed. Or at least, the plan to knock down chunks of her neighbourhood was shelved in 2007. But she worries that the politicians and their developer chums may try again, so she wants to reform Washington state’s rules on “eminent domain”, which give local government extraordinary powers to condemn private property.

She ran into a second little-known state law. If she prints some flyers, calls some meetings and urges her neighbours to write to their state representative demanding change, she has to register as a “grassroots lobbyist”. This rule applies to any group that spends more than $500 in any given month trying to influence the legislature. That sum includes not only cash but also anything else of value.

To comply with the law, Mrs Murakami must provide details such as the name, address and occupation of everyone who helps organise her campaign or who contributes more than $25 in cash or kind to it. All this information is then made public on the internet. She must also provide monthly reports on all the group’s activities and expenditures. Failure to follow the rules can result in ruinous fines; $10,000 per violation, which could mean every time she sends out a mailshot.

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Mrs Murakami is suing to have this law overturned. If the first amendment means anything, she reckons, it surely protects the right of Americans to talk politics with their neighbours. Many of Mrs Murakami’s supporters are recent refugees from autocratic regimes. If getting involved means having their personal details published, they would rather not.

The same worry afflicts supporters of unpopular causes. Alfred Petermann, who runs a discussion group called “Conservative Enthusiasts”, says it is “unbelievable” that he has to publish the name, address and occupation of anyone who brings $25-worth of beer to a meeting. “Conservative” is a dirty word in Seattle, he says. Some in his group fear repercussions at work if they are outed.

All states regulate professional lobbyists: ie, paid agents who communicate directly with politicians in the hope of swaying them. Fair enough. But a new report from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group, reveals that 36 states also impose restrictions on “grassroots lobbying”, meaning people like Mrs Murakami. The rules are often complex and unclear. The first sentence of the Massachusetts guidelines for grassroots lobbyists is but a whisker shorter than the Gettysburg address and comprehensible only to a lawyer. Small groups cannot afford lawyers. Yet a few states even threaten criminal penalties for breaking the rules. In Alabama, the maximum sentence is 20 years in jail.

The most severe punishments are seldom, if ever, applied. But they still have a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech. The constitution says people have a right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”. Politicians hate that.

The Economist on New Life

And man made life

Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived

TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor (see article). Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth. Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops (see article), greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

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On the face of it, then, artificial life looks like a wonderful thing. Yet that is not how many will view the announcement. For them, a better word than “creation” is “tampering”. Have scientists got too big for their boots? Will their hubris bring Nemesis in due course? What horrors will come creeping out of the flask on the laboratory bench?

Such questions are not misplaced—and should give pause even to those, including this newspaper, who normally embrace advances in science with enthusiasm. The new biological science does have the potential to do great harm, as well as good. “Predator” and “disease” are just as much part of the biological vocabulary as “nurturing” and “growth”. But for good or ill it is here. Creating life is no longer the prerogative of gods.

Children of a lesser god

It will be a while, yet, before lifeforms are routinely designed on a laptop. But this will come. The past decade, since the completion of the Human Genome Project, has seen two related developments that make it almost inevitable. One is an extraordinary rise in the speed, and fall in the cost, of analysing the DNA sequences that encode the natural “software” of life. What once took years and cost millions now takes days and costs thousands. Databases are filling up with the genomes of everything from the tiniest virus to the tallest tree.

These genomes are the raw material for synthetic biology. First, they will provide an understanding of how biology works right down to the atomic level. That can then be modelled in human-designed software so that synthetic biologists will be able to assemble new constellations of genes with a reasonable presumption that they will work in a predictable way. Second, the genome databases are a warehouse that can be raided for whatever part a synthetic biologist requires.

The other development is faster and cheaper DNA synthesis. This has lagged a few years behind DNA analysis, but seems to be heading in the same direction. That means it will soon be possible for almost anybody to make DNA to order, and dabble in synthetic biology.

That is good, up to a point. Innovation works best when it is a game that anyone can play. The more ideas there are, the better the chance some will prosper. Unfortunately and inevitably, some of those ideas will be malicious. And the problem with malicious biological inventions—unlike, say, guns and explosives—is that once released, they can breed by themselves.

Biology really is different

The Home Brew computing club launched Steve Jobs and Apple, but similar ventures produced a thousand computer viruses. What if a home-brew synthetic-biology club were accidentally to launch a real virus or bacterium? What if a terrorist were to do the same deliberately?

The risk of accidentally creating something bad is probably low. Most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead. It doesn’t fight back. Living hosts do. Creating something bad deliberately, whether the creator is a teenage hacker, a terrorist or a rogue state, is a different matter. No one now knows how easy it would be to turbo-charge an existing human pathogen, or take one that infects another type of animal and assist its passage over the species barrier. We will soon find out, though.

It is hard to know how to address this threat. The reflex, to restrict and ban, has worked (albeit far from perfectly) for more traditional sorts of biological weapons. Those, though, have been in the hands of states. The ubiquity of computer viruses shows what can happen when technology gets distributed.

Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach: openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to oppose the villains is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly. If pathogens can be designed by laptop, vaccines can be, too. And, just as “open source” software lets white-hat computer nerds work against the black-hats, so open-source biology would encourage white-hat geneticists.

Regulation—and, especially, vigilance—will still be needed. Keeping an eye out for novel diseases is sensible even when such diseases are natural. Monitoring needs to be redoubled and co-ordinated. Then, whether natural or artificial, the full weight of synthetic biology can be brought to bear on the problem. Encourage the good to outwit the bad and, with luck, you keep Nemesis at bay.

Lena Horne: Obituary

TO THOSE few Americans in the 1950s who did not care about race—who did not quibble about one-thirty-seconds or one-sixty-fourths, and who were happy to share washroom or soda fountain with people of another shade—Lena Horne was simply one of the most beautiful women in the world. There was something of Audrey Hepburn in her large brown eyes, and of Hedy Lamarr in her tall forehead; her nose was bobbed and cute. But to everyone else Ms Horne, before her beauty was even considered, was black.

There were ways of saying this gently, of course. She was not coal or piccaninny black; she was “dusky”, “sepia”, “milk-chocolate”, café au lait. At Harlem’s Cotton Club, where she started her career at 16 as a dancer, she was “tan and terrific”, like the others. The MGM Studios in Hollywood, where she went at 24 in 1941, tried to pass her off as a Latina on her contract. A special make-up, called Light Egyptian, would be rubbed on her skin to make her look more coloured: a better match for the ink-black mammies and funny-men around her.

Her race-blind fans would have been prepared to see her star in any show, as elegant, satin-clad and triumphant as she eventually appeared in 1981 in “The Lady and her Music” in New York. But to casting directors during segregation she could only be a lady’s maid or a jungle girl. At best she could star in all-black comedies, as a devil-sent temptress in “Cabin in the Sky” (1943), or as the lead in the Broadway musical “Jamaica” (1957). She belonged in the piny woods or under the palms.

Because she was lovely, and could sing bewitchingly, she was also allowed a few solo scenes in “white” films. There, like “a butterfly pinned to a column”, she would deliver a number which could be seamlessly cut when the picture was shown in southern cinemas. Her greatest hope was to be allowed to play Julie, a mulatto, in “Show Boat”. But Julie had to fall in love with a white man; so Ava Gardner played her, initially lip-synching to Miss Horne’s recordings and even made browner with her Light Egyptian. Lena and Ava were friends. But it hurt to the end of her days.

It hurt all the more because the young Lena did not think of herself as black particularly. Her blood was mixed up on both sides with white European and native American, so that in her black school she was “yellow” to her playmates, and was whispered to have a white Daddy. Both blacks and whites felt she was not one of them. Her family’s social models were the white bourgeoisie; her father, resplendent in a suit with a diamond stick-pin, had told Louis B. Mayer to his face that he didn’t want his daughter playing maids in Hollywood, because she could have maids of her own. Not that it did any good. At one of her lowest points Miss Horne went to tea with Hattie McDaniel, who had played Mammy in “Gone with the Wind”. They ate tiny sandwiches and cakes in her grand drawing room, while Hattie explained that a maid’s role was her only realistic future on the screen. Pretty soon afterwards, she threw in the acting life.

A tiger inside

Singing, though she made her career in it, proved no simpler. She toured with Charlie Barnet’s all-white band in 1940, sleeping in the band bus when hotels would not take her in, but counted in her repertoire songs like “Sleepy Time Down South”, which blacks were expected to sing. She felt forced into jazz, and not much good at it. Although she covered songs by Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters, her neat enunciation, expressiveness and clarity made her sound more like Judy Garland. Waters’s “Stormy Weather” became her theme, but when she sang it—especially in the film of 1943, against rain-soaked city streets—she looked, and sounded, somewhere over the rainbow, and closer to Kansas.

The insults she suffered, therefore—debarred from lodging houses, spat at in the street, forbidden from mixing with white customers—were all the worse because she did not feel she represented a race, only herself. And conversely, the barriers she broke—first black star on a long-term contract with a studio, first black on the cover of Motion Picture magazine, first star whose picture could be pinned up by black GIs in their lockers—gave her neither pride nor joy, because she thought only of the label that had been stuck on her. She was not a symbol, not a credit, not a first this and that, as she cried bitterly in her old age. “I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

In the 1950s she was blacklisted for her friendship with Paul Robeson, a communist sympathiser; it hampered her career in her best years, though the voice soared on. In the 1960s she campaigned for civil rights, drawn as much to the militancy of Malcolm X as to Martin Luther King’s non-violence. When a man called her “nigger” in a Beverly Hills restaurant she hurled an ashtray, a lamp and several glasses at him, until he bled. She used her white husband, Lennie Hayton, as a whipping boy for her frustration. “Never hope too hard,” she said. “Never pans out.”

Miss Horne’s producers once complained that she opened her mouth too wide to sing. They meant it was a Negro thing. Certainly Miss Horne had a wide, extravagant smile, a real show-stopper. But it was on the face of a tiger. It hid a lifetime of ferocious resentment and regret.

The Economist on TV

The great survivor
TV has coped well with technological change. Other media can learn from it

Apr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

NEWSPAPERS are dying; the music industry is still yelping about iTunes; book publishers think they are next. Yet one bit of old media seems to be doing rather well. In the final quarter of 2009 the average American spent almost 37 hours a week watching television. Earlier this year 116m of them saw the Super Bowl—a record for a single programme. Far from being cowed by new media, TV is colonising it. Shows like “American Idol” and “Britain’s Got Talent” draw huge audiences partly because people are constantly messaging and tweeting about them, and discussing them on Facebook.
Advertising wobbled during the recession, shaking the free-to-air broadcasters that depend on it. But cable and satellite TV breezed through. Pay-television subscriptions grew by more than 2m in America last year. The explosive growth of cable and satellite TV in India explains how that country has gone from two channels in the early 1990s to more than 600 today. Pay-TV bosses scarcely acknowledge the existence of viewers who do not subscribe to multichannel TV, talking only of people who have “yet to choose” a provider. This is not merely bluster. As our special report this week explains, once people start paying for greater television choice, they rarely stop.
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The advantages of indolence
It helps that TV is an inherently lazy form of entertainment. The much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV subscriptions and piece together an evening’s worth of entertainment from free broadcasts and the internet “assumes that people are willing to work three times harder to get the same thing”, observes Mike Fries of Liberty Global, a cable giant. Laziness also mitigates the threat from piracy. Although many programmes are no more than three or four mouse clicks away, that still sounds too much like work for most of us. And television-watching is a more sociable activity than it may appear. People like to watch programmes when everybody else is watching them. Give them devices that allow them to record and play back programmes easily, and they will still watch live TV at least four-fifths of the time.
Yet these natural advantages alone are not enough to ensure television’s survival. The internet threatens TV just as much as it does other media businesses, and for similar reasons. It competes for advertising, offering firms a more measurable and precise way of reaching consumers. Technology also threatens to fracture television into individual programmes, just as it has ruinously broken music albums into individual tracks. TV has endured because it has responded better to such threats than other media businesses.
One of the lessons from TV is to accept change and get ahead of it. Broadcasters’ initial response to the appearance of programmes online was similar to the music industry’s reaction to file-sharing: call in the lawyers. But television firms soon banded together to develop alternatives to piracy. Websites like Hulu, a joint venture of the American broadcasters ABC, Fox and NBC, have drawn eyeballs away from illicit sources. Gradually it has become clear that these websites pose a threat to the TV business in themselves, and that they are not bringing in as much advertising money as might be expected (which is similar to the problem faced by the newspaper business). So television is changing tack again.
With impressive speed, TV firms are now building online subscription-video services. The trendiest model is authentication: prove that you subscribe to pay-television and you can watch all the channels that you have paid for on any device. Such “TV Everywhere” services are beginning to appear in America and Canada. It is likely that Hulu will become a “freemium” service—mostly free, but with some shows hidden behind a paywall. The move from an ad-supported model to a mixture of subscriptions and advertising is tricky, but logical. It shows that it is not enough to embrace technological change. Businesses must also work out how to build digital offerings that do not cause their analogue ones to collapse.
Television has domesticated other disruptive technologies. Ten years ago digital video recorders like TiVo promised to transform the way people watched TV. The devices made it easy to record programmes and play them back, zooming through ads. The TV networks responded by running advertisements that work at high speed. Cable and satellite companies built cheap digital video recorders into set-top boxes and charged viewers extra for them. In effect, money flowed back to the television business. In Britain those boxes will soon be deployed to deliver targeted advertising, enabling the living-room television to compete with the internet.
Other outfits are learning from TV. Record labels sound terribly innovative when they talk about bundling music together with broadband subscriptions. Yet this model comes from television. For the past few years ESPN, a sports giant, has been showing games on its website. The cost is buried in monthly broadband bills. Hulu-style joint ventures are all the rage in media, too. Magazine publishers have set up Next Issue Media, which is trying to shape the evolution of digital devices to suit their needs. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem aims to do the same for films.
That box might appear to be sitting in the corner of the living room, not doing much. In fact, it is constantly evolving. If there is one media business with a chance of completing the perilous journey to the digital future looking as healthy as it did when it set off, it is television.

The Economist: Hunters and Shoppers

Hunters and shoppers
Men and women navigate differently

Apr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

MEN are generally better than women on tests of spatial ability, such as mentally rotating an object through three dimensions or finding their way around in a new environment. But a new study suggests that under some circumstances a woman’s way of navigating is probably more efficient.
Luis Pacheco-Cobos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his colleagues discovered this by following mushroom gatherers from a village in the state of Tlaxcala for two rainy seasons. Two researchers, each fitted with GPS navigation devices and heart-rate monitors, followed different gatherers on different days. They recorded the weight of the mushrooms each gatherer collected and where they visited. The GPS data allowed a map to be made of the routes taken and the heart-rate measurements provided an estimate of the amount of energy expended during their travels.
The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that the men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms. But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy—70% more than the women. The men did not move any faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms. The women made many more stops, apparently satisfied with, or perhaps better at finding, patches of fewer mushrooms.
Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labour, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing.
The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants.
The research suggests that in certain circumstances women are better at navigating than men. Which might lend some comfort to a man desperately searching for an item in a supermarket while his exasperated wife methodically moves around the aisles filling the shopping trolley. He is simply not cut out for the job, evolutionarily speaking.

The Economist: Kill Me Quick

Kill me quick
Kenya’s lethal brew deserves its name

Apr 29th 2010 | NAIROBI | From The Economist print edition

THE Korogocho slum is one of the poorest in Nairobi, Kenya’s teeming capital. Its 120,000 residents occupy a stinking square kilometre by the city rubbish dump. Nearly three-quarters are under 30 years old. Many are alcoholics.
The equivalent of $1 is enough to buy four glasses of illegally brewed chang’aa—and oblivion. Some drink the local special, jet-five, so called because the fermentation of maize and sorghum is sped up with pilfered jet fuel. It can damage the brain. Elsewhere in Nairobi, chang’aa is spiked with embalming fluid from mortuaries.
The name, meaning literally “kill me quick”, is well chosen. This and other methanol-based kickers are sometimes fatal: 10ml of methanol can burn the optic nerve; 30ml can kill. Even without the kicker the brew is impure. The water is filthy with fecal matter. When police recently made some raids, decomposing rats and women’s underwear were found in servings of chang’aa. But the price and the potency are more tempting than the heavily taxed bottles of beer that are the staple of richer Kenyans.
Kenya is not alone. The UN’s World Health Organisation reckons that half of all alcohol drunk in Africa is illegal. Neighbouring Uganda may consume more alcohol per person than any country in the world. Much of this is waragi, a banana gin. Some 100 Ugandans died from toxic waragi in April alone. Botswana, arguably sub-Saharan Africa’s most successful country, serves up laela mmago, meaning “goodbye mum”.
East African Breweries is one of Kenya’s biggest companies and taxpayers. It wants to see illicit chang’aa replaced with a safer commercial version. Yet bringing the price of alcohol down to that of water risks increasing alcoholism and forcing the very poorest into even dodgier booze dens. In any case, it could add other costs: crime, violence to women and children, unsafe sex and bad health. Catholic priests in Korogocho host an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, state help for recovering alcoholics is rare.
What is clear is that urbanisation is changing the way alcohol is drunk. Illicit brews smooth dealmaking and reconciliation in the countryside. But in the sprawling city slums, where most of Nairobi’s people live, they are more often a cheap way of blotting out a sense of abandonment.