I’ve recently spent ten days on the lovely Adriatic coast on Croatia. It is the second time I have holidayed in the country, and I wasn’t disappointed. Its inviting coastline—especially between Split and Dubrovnik—is as good a retreat for sun and relaxation as anywhere in southern Europe’s other more well-known holiday spots. Holiday tends to mean audiobook binging, and on this occasion I listened to John Banville’s Snow, narrated by Stanley Townsend in the Audible version. This was a bit of a risk. My wife recently bought Banville’s The Singularities, and struggled to get traction with it. I then had a go, and while I found the prose mysteriously hypnotic, I struggled to follow the plot, and eventually put it down, having reached only a bit further than my wife. I later realised that this was partly because The Singularities presumes knowledge of Banville’s earlier works.
Read MoreThe political flurry in the US over the virtues of parenthood and a high birth rate is part of a much larger cultural moment in which the debate on the significance of falling global fertility is pitting two increasingly militant and unyielding sides against each other. We have trade wars, culture wars, even actual wars; we can now add fertility wars to the list. When Elon Musk, a US entrepreneur and businessman, calls Ms. Harris an “extinctionist”, because she has linked the reluctance of young people to have children to “climate anxiety”, he means it, just as he means it when he concludes that “the natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!”
How to get handle on this? With difficulty, but in the end, hopefully with precision and clarity. First, I will briefly show that the fertility wars have been fought for a long time. I will then draw the contours of three separate positions in the fertility wars today—on the Conservative right, on the left, and a feminist perspective—before offering a suggestion on where this discourse goes next, and where it ultimately ends up, if we are sufficiently unlucky or un-attentive.
Read MoreLast week was a good day for my boss Ian Shepherdson who has been sticking his neck out since the beginning of the year with a call that the Fed would cut rates this year by more than the consensus believes. It was a bad day for a lot of other forecasters and investors. I recently joked with him that we were just one bad payroll report away from markets freaking out. That report landed on Friday, pushing already nervy markets into near meltdown. We know the drill; bonds soared, equities crashed, and “US recession risks” hit a headline near you. Of course, the Fed hasn’t cut rates yet, but even before Friday’s data, everyone expected the first cut in September. Expectations are now shifting towards a 50bp reduction, and further cuts in quick succession after that. The decision to hold rates in July is now freely being seen as a mistake.
Read MoreThere’s been a lot of talk about the political center* in Europe in the past few weeks, in the wake of the French parliamentary elections and the landslide victory for Labour in the UK. Is it reinvigorated, complacent, or perhaps just lucky? I offer two thoughts on this.
Firstly, sometimes a long-in-the-tooth incumbent is sacrificed on the altar of change no matter how reasonable or uncontroversial he or she is. In the context the most recent elections in Europe, this applies mostly to France, where the people has a tendency to throw their leaders under the bus, for no other reason that they’ve been in power for a bit too long. But I think it applies to England too, to an extent. Rishi Sunak and his cabinet weren’t that bad, or more specifically, the Sunak government was a lot of less controversial and risk-seeking than its Tory predecessors. But in the end, the weight of dissatisfaction and disillusion with previous iterations of Conservative cabinets were too much to bear. The Tories received the drubbing they deserved, having put their faith in a toxic mix of volatility and incompetence under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The doomed political and economic project of Brexit looms large in this story too. Whatever Labour decides to do with this smelling carcass of a political legacy, it brought the destruction of the Conservative party, and the right in UK politics, as we know it. Perhaps for that reason, Starmer will be inclined to leave it smelling for a bit longer, to remind people of what they’ll get should they consider jumping back into the Tory fold.
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