In 1988 the Economist invited the philosopher Karl Popper to write an article on democracy. It appeared in the issue of April 23rd that year and made the case for a two-party system. As America’s presidential race begins, with the Iowa caucus on February 1st, we are republishing it, below.
The first book in English by Professor Sir Karl Popper was accepted for publication in London while Hitler’s bombs were falling, and was published in 1945 under the title “The Open Society and its Enemies”. The book was well received, but in this article Sir Karl questions whether his central theory of democracy (which he does not characterise as “the rule of the people”) has been understood.
MY THEORY of democracy is very simple and easy for everybody to understand. But its fundamental problem is so different from the age-old theory of democracy which everybody takes for granted that it seems that this difference has not been grasped, just because of the simplicity of the theory. It avoids high-sounding, abstract words like “rule”, “freedom” and “reason”. I do believe in freedom and...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1m6fsJH
On January 30th 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi, by a Hindu extremist opposed to his conciliatory policy towards Muslims and his peace overtures to Pakistan. We reproduce below an article from 1948, published shortly after his death.
BRITISH regard for Gandhi is something more than the respect given to a politician sincerely devoted to his principles and prepared to die for them. It is a recognition that in Gandhi's “soul force” there was a moral and religious factor transcending the ordinary politics of nationalism or democracy. Even so, an Englishman's appreciation of his life and character must fall short of the feeling which his Indian followers have for them. In India he belongs to the lineage of ascetic saints who have never ceased in the eyes of vast numbers of Hindus to represent the highest form of human life on earth; his title of the Mahatma makes him heir to a great company of religious teachers, mystics and devotees. In the murals at India House Gandhi and the Buddha are the two most prominent figures, and there seems nothing incongruous in their juxtaposition.
The close association of...Continue reading
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HARUHIKO KURODA, the governor of the Bank of Japan, surprised his audience at the World Economic Forum’s recent gathering in Davos, Switzerland, when he called upon China to impose tighter capital controls to stabilise its currency—a breach of central-banking orthodoxy. Upon his return to Japan he swiftly unleashed yet another unorthodox measure, albeit one that has been spreading as central banks around the world battle anaemic inflation.
On January 29th the Bank of Japan (BoJ) said it would cut its benchmark interest rate below zero, to -0.1%, in an attempt to counteract the effects of falling oil prices and China’s slowdown. The BoJ is following the lead of several central banks in Europe, including the European Central Bank (ECB), which first resorted to negative rates in 2014.
The move is not quite as dramatic as it sounds: the new negative rate will apply only to new reserves that banks...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1P1TKP9
IN THE run-up to the last Republican primary debate before the start of the presidential voting contest in Iowa, Donald Trump once more dominated the news cycle. It wasn’t another of his provocative statements about Mexican rapists or banning Muslims from entering America that made headlines, but his refusal to participate in the debate moderated on January 28th by his bête noire, Megyn Kelly, and other Fox reporters. Mr Trump fell out with Ms Kelly when she challenged him during the first Republican debate about his misogynistic treatment of women (“fat pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals”), a relevant question given that the most likely presidential candidate for the Democratic Party is a woman.
Many thought that either Fox News would replace Ms Kelly as moderator at the last minute or Mr Trump would capitulate and join the other leading GOP candidates on stage at the Iowa Events Centre in Des Moines. Neither side blinked. Instead Mr Trump decided to host a fundraiser for war veterans at the nearby Drake University in Des Moines, at precisely the same time as the GOP debate. Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, two of the weaker...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1KJM8Ps
“HAMLET” without the prince—or perhaps, more aptly, a circus without its elephant, or a pantomime without its villain: without Donald Trump, the other Republican candidates essayed the odd internecine spat in their latest debate, in Des Moines, Iowa, but their hearts didn’t really seem in it. In that respect it was, as Mr Trump might have put it, a low-energy affair, the drama seeping from the marathon debate schedule (this was the seventh) even as the actual voting begins. But it did offer some potentially telling moments.
Fox News, the hosts, introduced a new tactic of confronting some of the candidates with clips of old remarks—a ruse that might have embarrassed Mr Trump had he turned up. In particular, both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz had to face down evidence that their positions on immigration had evolved, albeit in opposite directions: Mr Rubio vowing to oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants then supporting it; Mr Cruz seeming to entertain it, but subsequently insisting that he never had. “You’ve been willing to say or do anything in order to get votes,” Mr Rubio told Mr Cruz, as the Texan senator—in Mr Trump’s...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1UuToo0
EVEN without the Terai plain’s winter fogs that cling to the flat borderlands between Nepal and India, the villages on either side of the frontier look much the same: dusty lanes lined with houses made of mud, bamboo and tin. But the fog has its uses. Since protesters against a new Nepali constitution began blocking roads from India in September, enterprising villagers have risen before the rooster crows, slipped on motorbikes across to India, and returned with a jerry can of fuel or a cylinder of cooking gas before the fog disperses.
In just four months the smuggling has encroached on a state monopoly to the point of supplying half the fuel for this poor, landlocked country. It is a parable of the mess Nepal is in. Despite being members of the same lowland ethnic groups, known broadly as Madhesis—who make up about a third of the country’s population of 30m and whose leaders agitate for greater constitutional rights—the smugglers have done more than anything to weaken the Madhesis’ hand. In the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, which nestles in the uplands and whose long domination the lowlanders...Continue reading
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LOVE, as Ali MacGraw once sobbed, means never having to say you’re sorry. Working in China is the opposite: you have to say sorry quite often. A handwritten sheet of paper, ideally smudged by contrite teardrops, used to do the trick. But these days, it sometimes seems, an apology is worth anything only if it is made on national television. In recent months all sorts of people have unburdened themselves in this way: a leading financial journalist distressed at having helped create the “panic and disorder” in China’s markets; a Hong Kong publisher of muckraking books about Chinese politics, who disappeared from a beach resort in Thailand; a Swede who had for seven years run a group in Beijing offering legal help to Chinese citizens.
They and many others have confessed their “crimes” to the cameras and apologised for the trouble they have caused. Westerners, even those addicted to reality TV, find these displays on prime-time news shows appalling. America’s State Department expressed concern this month about the growing number who “appear to have been coerced to confess to alleged crimes on state media”. It does indeed look bad—an echo of...Continue reading
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ON JANUARY 19th China declared that its gross domestic product had grown by 6.9% in 2015, accounting for inflation—the slowest rate in a quarter of a century. It was neatly within the government’s target of “around 7%”, but many economists wondered whether the figure was accurate. Online chatter in China about dodgy GDP numbers was fuelled a week later by the arrest of the man who had announced the data: Wang Baoan, the head of the National Bureau of Statistics. The country’s anti-graft agency accused him of “serious disciplinary violations”, a euphemism for corruption. But beyond all the (justifiable) doubts about the figures lies another important question. That is: why does China have a GDP target at all?
It is the only large industrial country that sets one. Normally central banks declare specific goals for things like inflation or unemployment. The idea that a government should aim for a particular rate of output expansion, and steer the economy to achieve that, is unusual. In the case of China, which is trying to wean its economy off excessive reliance on GDP-boosting (but often wasteful and debt-fuelling) investment, it is risky. It is...Continue reading
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IT WORRIES the volunteer patroller at one of the entrances to Aokigahara forest that the white car with the Osaka number plates has now been there, empty, for five days. This forest of moss-clad trees covers 30 square kilometres (12 square miles) of a lava plateau near the foot of Mount Fuji. As a place to commit suicide, it is said to be second in popularity only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The car’s owner, the patroller says, is probably already dead somewhere deep inside the forest. His job is to try to spot and turn back those who may be contemplating suicide.
Folklore holds that the forest was once a site for ubasute, the (possibly apocryphal) practice of carrying the old or infirm to a remote place and leaving them to die, so that they would not be a burden to their families. A 1960 novel by Seicho Matsumoto popularised Aokigahara as a site for suicides, after the heroine took her own life there. When suicides in Japan rose steeply as the country’s financial bubble burst after 1989, several dozen people a year were killing themselves in Aokigahara, mainly by hanging. Signs stand next to the...Continue reading
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