Seriously Curious
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TOM STANDAGE is deputy editor of The Economist and the author of six books, including A History of the World in 6 Glasses. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and Wired. Seriously Curious is the sequel to Go Figure, which he also edited.
Published in 2018 under exclusive licence from The Economist by
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The greatest care has been taken in compiling this book. However, no responsibility can be accepted by the publishers or compilers for the accuracy of the information presented.
Where opinion is expressed it is that of the author and does not necessarily coincide with the editorial views of The Economist Newspaper.
While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of material produced or cited in this book, in the case of those it has not been possible to contact successfully, the author and publishers will be glad to make amendments in further editions.
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ISBN 9781788161367
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Contents
Introduction: the case for being seriously curious
Seriously curious: unexpected explanations to stretch your mind
Why polygamy makes civil wars more likely
Why there is a shortage of sand
How shoelaces untie themselves
Why the sea is salty
Why diamond production may be about to peak
Why Boko Haram prefers female suicide bombers
Move over, oil. Which countries have the most lithium?
Why the global arms trade is booming
What do think-tanks do?
How to measure the black market for cigarettes
Mapping the rise and fall of witch-hunting
Globally curious: peculiar proclivities from around the world
Why spaghetti is smuggled across the Sahara
Why so many places are called Guinea – and turkeys don’t come from Turkey
Why New Zealand has so many gang members
Why the exorcism business is booming in France
Why China has the world’s worst flight delays
Why Somaliland is east Africa’s strongest democracy
Why yurts are going out of style in Mongolia
Which cities have the highest murder rates?
Why young Britons are committing fewer crimes
How car colours reflect Britain’s national mood
Why Swedes overpay their taxes
Mapping the world’s mega-rich
Why nobody knows how many Nigerians there are
Why Chinese children born in the year of the dragon are more successful
Sexual selection: love, sex and marriage
Why the sperm-bank business is booming
How porn consumption changed during Hawaii’s false alarm
Why transgender people are being sterilised in some European countries
How opinions on acceptable male behaviour vary by age, sex and nationality
What porn and listings sites reveal about Britain’s gay population
Attitudes to same-sex relationships around the world
Why couples do more housework than single people
What men and women think about their partners’ careers and housework
How fracking boosts birth rates
What explains Europe’s low birth rates?
Why America still allows child marriage
Also on the menu: oddities of food and drink
The surprising link between avocados and crime
Why China’s dog-meat market has expanded
Why obesity is a growing problem in poor countries
The Argentine–American lemon war of 2001–2018
Which European country has the most craft breweries per person?
Why some American cities don’t like food trucks
How wine glasses have got bigger over the years
Why food packaging is good for the environment
Peak booze? Alcohol consumption is falling around the world
Why wheat has a more complex genome than humans
Asian countries are eating more wheat
By the numbers: economical, with the truth
The easiest way to get rich in America
Why women still earn much less than men
Why China is rebuilding the old Silk Road
Why “death taxes” have fallen out of favour
Wealth inequality has been increasing since the stone age
What makes something a commodity?
Does longevity always increase with national wealth?
Why do companies exist?
Millennial Americans are just as loyal to their employers as previous generations
Why old-fashioned manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back
Why India scrapped its two biggest bank notes
The roots of the gender pay gap lie in childhood
Department of white coats: science, health and the environment
Can young blood really rejuvenate the old?
What people want at the end of life
How China reduced its air pollution
Why forests are spreading in the rich world
The Arctic could be ice-free by 2040, 30 years sooner than expected
Why there’s something in the water in New Zealand
Measures to discourage smoking are spreading around the world
Why “gene drives” have yet to be deployed in the wild
Why it is so hard to fix India’s sanitation problems
Why some deadly diseases are hard to eradicate
Why China is sick of foreign waste
Why are wolves coming back in France?
Why biggest isn’t fastest in the animal kingdom
Geek speak: getting technical
What is a brain-computer interface?
The link between video games and unemployment
What do robots do all day?
Why 5G might be both faster and slower than previous wireless technologies
Mobile phones are more common than electricity in much of sub-Saharan Africa
Why self-driving cars will mostly be shared, not owned
How ride-hailing apps reduce drink-driving
What is augmented reality?
Why we’re still waiting for the space elevator
How astronomers spotted the first interstellar asteroid
Why drones could pose a greater risk to aircraft than birds
What is the point of spam e-mail?
Why the police should wear body cameras
Why tech giants are laying their own undersea cables
Game theory: sport and leisure
Why tennis players grunt
Why board games are so popular in Nigeria
How drones can keep beaches safe from sharks
How football transfers work
How St Louis became America’s chess capital
What does “digitally remastering” a film really mean?
How bookmakers deal with winning customers
The world’s highest-e
arning football clubs
Speaking my language: words and wisdom
Why emoji have beneficial linguistic side-effects
How the letters of the alphabet got their names
Why Papua New Guinea has so many languages
Is Serbo-Croatian one language or four?
How language is bound up with national identity
How machines learned to process human language
Why the World Bank needs to cut down on the word “and”
The French argument over a new punctuation mark
Seasonal selection: festivals and holidays demystified
Where new year’s resolutions come from
How St Patrick’s Day celebrations went global
Why Easter moves around so much
Why Europeans slack off in August
How Thanksgiving became a secular holiday
How weather, religion and daylight hours affect Christmas music consumption
How Christmas, once a raucous carnival, was domesticated
Contributors
Index
Introduction: the case for being seriously curious
WHAT LINKS DETECTIVES, scientists, economists, journalists – and cats? The answer, of course, is curiosity. They all want to discover more about the world. But their curiosity is driven by more than just a desire to understand the way things are. They also want to understand the underlying mechanisms that explain how things got to be that way, so that they can anticipate, predict or explain future events. Detectives want to uncover people’s motivations and solve crimes. Scientists want to devise new theories that will deepen their grasp of reality. Economists want to improve their understanding of the transactions that underpin human societies. Journalists want to create narratives that help people make sense of current affairs. Cats want to maximise their chances of getting their paws on more roast chicken.
All of them are constantly gathering evidence, devising theories and testing new avenues in pursuit of their goals. In all these fields, curiosity is not merely useful – it is vital. It is a willingness, or in fact a hunger, to discover new, previously unknown things. No wonder Thomas Hobbes called it “the lust of the mind”. Curiosity provides the spur to gather more raw material for analysis, by probing the limits of what is known.
Alas, the information-driven, evidence-based way of looking at the world has lately fallen out of favour. In a “post-truth” world, knowledge is scorned, facts are optional (or can be challenged by “alternative facts”) and reality can be distorted or ignored. But the seriously curious know that in the long run, reality will always prevail. Curiosity leads people towards a more accurate understanding of the world; only the terminally incurious can maintain a distorted or inaccurate worldview for long, and only then by walling themselves off from evidence that challenges their outlook. Curiosity is the royal road to truth.
So this book takes a stand, in its own small way, for the forces of curiosity, evidence and reason. It brings together unexpected explanations and fascinating facts from The Economist’s output of explainers and daily charts. Its mission is to show, through a series of entertaining examples, how logic and data can illuminate the hidden mechanisms that make the world work the way it does. Why do tennis players grunt? Why does polygamy make civil wars more likely? What is the link between avocados and crime? Why is there a shortage of sand? How does fracking boost birth rates?
Each of these questions is a miniature mystery story. Each one challenges you to imagine your own explanation, like a detective arriving at the scene of a crime. (You are probably wondering about those criminal avocados right now.) After a paragraph or two of context comes the explanation, and enlightenment dawns – or, just as satisfyingly, you discover that your theory was indeed the correct answer. Moreover, you now understand an aspect of how the world works better than you did before.
We hope this collection will stimulate and satisfy your curiosity. The very fact that you are reading this book at all, and have bothered to read to the end of this introduction, grants you admission, along with the detectives, scientists and cats, to the ranks of the seriously curious. Welcome to the club.
Tom Standage
Deputy Editor, The Economist
July 2018
Seriously curious: unexpected explanations to stretch your mind
Why polygamy makes civil wars more likely
Wherever polygamy is widely practised, turmoil tends to follow. The 20 most fragile states in the world are all somewhat or very polygamous. Polygamous nations are more likely to invade their neighbours. The polygamous regions of Haiti and Indonesia are the most turbulent; in South Sudan, racked by civil war, perhaps 40% of marriages involve multiple wives. One study, by the London School of Economics, found a strong link between plural marriage and civil war. How come?
Polygamy nearly always involves rich men taking multiple wives. And if the top 10% of men marry four women each, then the bottom 30% cannot marry at all. This often leaves them not only sexually frustrated but also socially marginalised. In many traditional societies, a man is not considered an adult until he has found a wife and sired children. To get a wife, he must typically pay a “bride price” to her father. When polygamy creates a shortage of brides, it massively inflates this bride price. In South Sudan, it can be anything from 30 to 300 cattle – far more wealth than an ill-educated young man can plausibly accumulate by legal means.
In desperation, many single men resort to extreme measures to secure a mate. In South Sudan, they pick up guns and steal cattle from the tribe next door. Many people are killed in such raids; many bloody feuds spring from them. Young bachelors who cannot afford to marry also make easy recruits for rebel armies. If they fight, they can loot, and with loot, they can wed. In a paper published in 2017, Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University and Hilary Matfess of Yale found that a high bride price is a “critical” factor “predisposing young men to become involved in organised group violence for political purposes”. Jihadist groups exploit this, too. One member of Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the attack on Mumbai in 2008 that killed 166 people, said he joined the organisation because it promised to pay for his siblings to get married. Radical Islamist groups in Egypt have also organised (and helped to pay for) marriages for members. In northern Nigeria, where polygamy is rife, Boko Haram still arranges cheap marriages for its recruits.
Globally, polygamy is in retreat, but in some pockets support for it is rising. After America’s Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage in 2015, some people argued that plural unions should be next. According to Gallup, a pollster, the proportion of Americans who consider polygamy to be morally acceptable rose from 5% in 2006 to 17% last year, among the most dramatic jumps in the subjects it tracks. Campaigners in Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and other central Asian states are seeking to re-establish men’s right to take multiple wives. In Kazakhstan, a bill failed in 2008 after a female MP included an amendment stipulating that polyandry (women taking multiple husbands) also be allowed. Advocates claim that polygamy promotes social harmony by giving lusty husbands a legitimate alternative to infidelity. But the mayhem in places like South Sudan, Afghanistan and northern Nigeria suggests otherwise.
Why there is a shortage of sand
Sand is in high demand. In some parts of the world, people are going to increasing lengths to get their hands on the golden grains. A “sand mafia” in India intimidates locals in order to extract and transport the material. In Morocco and the Caribbean, thieves are stripping beaches bare. Even though fully accounting for illegally mined sand is not possible, sand is easily the most mined material in the world. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), sand and gravel account for up to 85% of everything mined globally each year.
Modern cities are built with, and often on, sand. Most of it is used in the construction industry to make concrete and asphalt. No surprise, then, that Asia is the biggest consumer of sand. China alone accounts for half of the world’s dem
and. That reflects the country’s breakneck pace of construction: according to the United States Geological Survey, China used more concrete from 2011 to 2013 (6.6 gigatons) than America did in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons). Sand also has industrial uses: it is used to make glass, electronics, and to help extract oil in the fracking industry. Vast quantities of sand are dumped into the sea to reclaim land. Singapore, for example, has expanded its land area by more than 20% since the 1960s in this way. The Maldives and Kiribati have used sand to shore up their islands against rising sea levels. The UN forecasts that, by 2030, there will be over 40 “megacities” home to more than 10m inhabitants (up from 31 in 2016), which means more housing and infrastructure will need to be built. And sea levels will continue to rise. All of this means that sand will only become more sought after.
So why is there a shortage, when sand seems so abundant? The trouble is that desert sand is too smooth, and cannot be used for most commercial purposes. Australian sand was transported to a faraway desert to build Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower. Most countries also have rules in place about where, and how much, sand can be mined. But voracious demand has sparked a lucrative illegal trade in many rapidly developing countries. The result is that existing deposits are being mined more quickly than they can be naturally replenished, which is damaging the environment. Dredging causes pollution and harms local biodiversity, while thinning coastlines affect beaches’ capacity to absorb stormy weather.
Fortunately, there are substitutes for sand: asphalt and concrete can be recycled, houses can be built with straw and wood, and mud can be used for reclamation. In rich countries, government policy will encourage a shift towards such substitutes. According to Britain’s Mineral Products Association, for example, nearly a third of all housing material used in Britain in 2014 was recycled. Singapore is planning to rely on Dutch expertise for its next reclamation project, which involves a system of dykes and is less dependent on sand. In poorer countries, too, builders are likely to shift away from sand as its price rises. But unless law enforcement improves, that will be a very slow process, and the shortage of sand will persist.