by Tom Standage
Yet the world may have reached peak think-tank. The University of Pennsylvania’s researchers found that in 2014 the number of new think-tanks declined for the first time in 30 years. One reason is that donors nowadays prefer to make project-specific grants, rather than funnelling money into mere thinking. Another is increased competition. Professional consultancies such as McKinsey publish a fair bit of brainwork, and members of opinionated “advocacy organisations” can make for more compelling interviewees than balanced think-tankers. So some think-tanks are rethinking themselves. The Pew Research Centre describes itself as a “fact-tank”, focusing on information rather than policy recommendations. And the Sutton Trust calls itself a “do-tank” – not just coming up with ideas, but putting its own recommendations into practice.
How to measure the black market for cigarettes
In May 2017 Britain joined a growing number of countries in which cigarettes can only be sold in plain packs. Tobacco companies claim that the move will boost the sales of contraband cigarettes by making them trickier to spot. Working out whether that is true or not means tracking how black-market sales change. But how can such sales be measured?
There are about a dozen ways to do it, of which three are the most commonly used, says Hana Ross of the University of Cape Town. The first is a comparison of the number of cigarettes sold legally (from records on cigarette taxes paid) with the number of cigarettes consumed (which is calculated from surveys asking people how much they smoke). The gap between the two figures gives an estimate for the size of the black market. The second commonly used method is to ask smokers where they have bought cigarettes and how much they have paid; smokers may also be asked to show the most recent pack they have bought. A price lower than that of legally sold brands suggests a contraband sale; and some smokers openly admit that they have bought contraband cigarettes, or show a tell-tale pack.
The third method is to look at discarded cigarette packs and calculate what proportion of them look like black-market purchases (they may be missing their tax stickers, for example, or display a brand that is not officially registered). Discarded packs can be collected from vendors who sell cigarettes by the stick, from litter in the streets, or by rummaging through rubbish in bins or picking them up from refuse-collection trucks. (“We dress them as if they are going into space”, says Ms Ross about the recruits who rummage through the rubbish heaps, wearing protective clothing.)
Each of these methods has its weakness. Smokers may, for example, be reluctant to mention purchases of cigarettes they know to be contraband. They may also claim to smoke less than they actually do (especially if researchers come round soon after a major anti-smoking campaign). Ideally, multiple methods should be applied in parallel to get a better estimate of total black-market sales, and how they change over time. Such studies are being conducted in a growing number of countries. Just because a sale occurs in the shadows does not mean it is impossible to cast a smouldering light on it.
Mapping the rise and fall of witch-hunting
“A witch! A witch! We have found a witch, may we burn her?” asks a marauding mob during a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a 1975 comedy film. “How do you know she is a witch?”, the king’s guard inquires. “She looks like one,” comes the reply. The accused witch’s defence is met with little sympathy. “They dressed me up like this. This isn’t my nose. It is a false one,” she cries in vain. That parody is remarkably close to the truth. Between the 14th and 18th centuries about 80,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe. They were not all old, scraggly-looking women: 15% of Scottish witches were men, and their average age was 42.
Their myriad alleged crimes were often trivial. A neighbourhood disagreement might escalate into accusations of sorcery if someone suffered a misfortune, such as a premature death in the family, after a quarrel. Around half of the accused were executed, usually by hanging or by being burnt at the stake. European witch trials fell out of fashion around 1770. In recent decades, interest in them has focused mainly on re-enactments for hobbyists and tourists. But the subject has also bewitched a small group of scholars, who have combed through the surprisingly detailed data sets available on the practice and have formulated theories to explain why, when and where such trials occurred.
In 2004 Emily Oster, an economist now at Brown University, published a paper arguing that witch trials were linked to economic shocks. Accusations of witchcraft were most prevalent during the “Little Ice Age”, a period of particularly bitter winters in Europe beginning in 1590, which caused crops to fail and incomes to fall. Ms Oster speculated that medieval village-dwellers responsible for feeding poor older women in their communities may have denounced them as witches in an effort to save scarce resources. During a 164-year-long spell beginning in 1563, some 3,500 alleged witches were tried in Scotland, the second-highest rate per person in Europe. Based on Ms Oster’s theory, that period should have been characterised by poor weather and poor harvests. But a working paper by Cornelius Christian, an economics professor at Brock University in Canada, found that the Scottish climate was actually unusually balmy during that period, leading to bumper crop yields. That led him to the opposite conclusion from Ms Oster’s: people accused of witchcraft could only be persecuted with the co-operation of elites, he reasoned, who only had enough free time to get involved in witch trials when resources were plentiful.
Other researchers take a different view. A paper by Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ of George Mason University argues that religious tensions, not the weather, put witch-hunters on the prowl. They gathered statistics from 43,000 European witch trials, primarily drawn from the mountainous areas near Lyon in France, Lucerne in Switzerland and Freiburg in modern-day Germany. Of these, three-fifths occurred during the period from 1560 to 1630, known as the “Great Hunt”, which was characterised by horrifying atrocities: in Würzburg, Bavaria, for instance, 400 people were executed on a single day. The authors attribute this hysteria to the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. Witch trials were most common, they found, in areas where Catholic and Protestant churches enjoyed comparable levels of support and were locked in a struggle for converts. Conversely, such trials were much rarer where one creed or the other predominated. Mr Leeson and Mr Russ noted a striking similarity to modern American presidential elections, in which the two major parties focus on closely contested “swing states” while ignoring those where one has an insurmountable advantage.
Perhaps witch trials served a similar function during the Great Hunt to the role of political campaigns today: instead of competing to show voters they offer protection from terrorists and criminals, 16th-century religions competed to show potential converts they offered protection from witches. On this view, the witch-hunting equivalent of Florida (America’s biggest swing state) appears to have been Strasbourg, in France: 30% of all witch trials on the continent occurred within 300 miles (500 km) of the city. There is a deeper parallel. Witch trials led to the murder of tens of thousands of innocent victims. Modern politicians frequently court voters by warning of the perils posed by hidden enemies lurking in their midst. Voters might be well advised to consider whether the targets of the resulting policies are any guiltier than those accused of consorting with Satan just a few hundred years ago.
Double, double toil and trouble
European witchcraft, 1300–1850
Source: “Witch Trials”, by Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ, Economic Journal, August 2017
Globally curious: peculiar proclivities from around the world
Why spaghetti is smuggled across the Sahara
The shifting sands of the Sahara have long been crossed by trade and smuggling routes. Traffickers send people and drugs north over the desert. But they have a problem: what should they put in their empty trucks as they head back south? A popular answer, it would seem, is pasta. Some sources reckon that, apart from people, pasta is the most smuggled product (by weight) to cross the desert. Drug trafficking and gunrunning may earn fatter margins
. But many smugglers diversify their loads by pushing penne. Why?
In part, the trade is fuelled by subsidies in north African countries. Algeria, for example, spends about $28bn a year keeping down the prices of food and energy. In Libya, which also subsidises food prices (though somewhat erratically, because of the civil war), 500g of pasta can be bought for as little as $0.15. In Timbuktu, an ancient city in Mali, hundreds of miles to the south-west, the same bag of pasta might fetch 250 CFA francs (the currency used in several west African states), which is equivalent to $0.50. In Senegal or some of the posher parts of Bamako, Mali’s capital, it is worth even more: about 800 CFA francs, or $1.50.
Another incentive to smuggle is found in west Africa. Under the region’s customs union, imports of pasta face a tariff of 20% and value-added tax of 15%. So smugglers of contraband pasta can easily undercut legal suppliers. Smugglers rarely answer surveys, so the facts are hard to pin down. But a study carried out in 2015 by the Economic Research Forum, a think-tank based in Egypt, found that pasta was the main product going across the Sahara from Algeria to Mali, accounting for about one-third of the trade. The researchers reckoned that smugglers earned profits of 20–30%.
The illicit pasta trade is not just making its mark in countries south of the Sahara, but also on the desert itself. As they ply their trade, many smugglers have taken to poking sticks of spaghetti into the sand as waymarks.
Why so many places are called Guinea – and turkeys don’t come from Turkey
Guinea. Equatorial Guinea. Guinea-Bissau. Papua New Guinea. The Gulf of Guinea. Guinea, Virginia. Guinea, Nova Scotia. The world has more Guineas than a pirate’s treasure chest. What explains the prevalence of the name?
Etymologists cannot agree on the origin of the word “Guinea”. Some trace it to a word in Tuareg, a Berber language, for black people: aginaw. Others think it originally referred to Djenné, a trading city in modern-day Mali. In the 15th century, Portuguese sailors used “Guiné” to describe an area near what is today Senegal, and by the 18th century, Europeans used “Guinea” to refer to much of the west African coastline. As colonisers carved up the continent, many European nations controlled their own places called Guinea. At independence, French Guinea became Guinea, Spanish Guinea became Equatorial Guinea, and Portuguese Guinea became Guinea-Bissau. West Africa was a major source of gold, hence the name “guinea” for the British gold coin. In 1545, on the other side of the world, Yñigo Ortiz de Retez landed on an island north of Australia. Struck by the resemblance between its inhabitants and people from west Africa, the Spanish explorer named the island “New Guinea”. The word “papua” probably comes from the Malay papuwah, meaning “frizzled”, perhaps a reference to the islanders’ hair.
In addition to the various places, there are also animals: the guinea pig, most famously, and the guinea fowl. The guinea pig comes not from any of the Guineas in Africa, but from South America. Muddled Europeans may have confused Guinea with Guyana, today South America’s only English-speaking country. Guyana has nothing to do with Guinea: its name probably comes from a native word meaning “land of many waters”. Some scholars, however, propose an alternative etymology for the guinea pig: the rodents were brought to Britain on “Guinea-men”, trading ships that shuttled between Britain, South America and Guinea.
The guinea fowl, for its part, did come from west Africa. But it, too, has a complicated history. The birds were originally introduced to Britain via the Ottoman empire and so were called “turkeys”. Later, early English colonists in America confused the native birds there with the African fowl, and called them “turkeys” too. (In fact, they are a larger and entirely separate species.) All in all, it is a linguistic mess. It is unclear where the word originally came from, but it was a series of historical accidents and misunderstandings during the colonial period that led to the modern world’s proliferation of guineas.
Why New Zealand has so many gang members
For a quiet country, New Zealand has a peculiar problem with gangs. It is reckoned to have one of the highest membership rates in the world. In a population of 4.7m, police count over 5,300 mobsters or “prospects” who are angling to join. Cumulatively, that makes the groups larger than the army. Bikers like the Hells Angels and offshoots from Australian gangs are among its 25 recognised groups, but two Maori crews dominate: Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. Members signal their allegiance by sewing patches onto leather jackets or branding themselves with dense tattoos. A closed fist marks Black Power, which took its name from the American civil-rights movement, and a British bulldog signifies the Mongrels. In all, indigenous Maori people make up three-quarters of the country’s gangsters.
They have dominated the gang world since the 1970s, when many moved to the cities, where they endured discrimination and ended up in poverty because of difficulties finding work. Opportunities have improved since, but life is often harder for indigenous people than for other New Zealanders. They do worse in school, suffer poorer health and die younger. Some turn to the gangs in search of power or oblivion. Some become members in jail, forced to join a crew simply to protect themselves. Others seek something more positive: whanau, or community. Many recruits join simply because their fathers are members. The gangs, they say, are like a family. New Zealand’s high rate of gang membership is, in short, a reflection of the difficulties faced by Maori people.
Most New Zealanders never encounter this underworld, because violence generally occurs between the gangs, and their turf wars have abated in recent decades. Today much of the gangs’ criminal activities relate to drugs. Corrections officers say that foreign syndicates use the biker groups to distribute methamphetamines. Gang members account for more than 14% of the charges of conspiracy to deal methamphetamines, and of murder, laid in New Zealand. They fill about a third of prison cells. This does much to explain why more than half of all the nation’s inmates are Maori, although they make up only 15% of the population.
The popularity of methamphetamines within the gangs has also undermined them. A handful of leaders have banned the drug’s consumption after witnessing the damage it has wrought on their communities. Some have attempted to clean up their branches in other ways. The groups used to have horrific reputations for gang rape, but Black Power now prohibits it, and has also moved to reduce domestic violence more generally. Female associates of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob report that their lives are much improved. But while reform-minded members of the more established groups are maturing, a younger set of Los Angeles-style street gangs is now on the rise in New Zealand, many of them Maori and Polynesian. Their bling-obsessed teenage recruits are violent and unpredictable. New Zealand’s high rate of gang membership seems likely to endure.
Why the exorcism business is booming in France
Philippe Moscato, an exorcist, walks from room to room in a large Paris flat, sprinkling blessed water and offering incantations. “Spirits away!”, he calls out, telling otherworldly pests that their attacks will, from now on, be futile. He informs the homeowner that the air will improve after his work is done, with the entire apartment block likely to benefit. For the ritual, which lasts an hour, Mr Moscato pockets €155 ($190). He says he despooks properties in Paris a few times each week; roughly once a week, he conducts an exorcism of a person. He is not alone. Look online and a host of private exorcists, healers, mediums, kabbalists, shamans and energiticians offer similar services, for fees as high as €500 per ceremony. Some offer to help a business out of a bad patch, or to restore love to a failing relationship. Many help with supposed hauntings of properties. One self-declared exorcist near Paris says he earns as much a €12,000 a month (before tax) by working 15-hour days, including consultations by phone. Why is the exorcism business booming in France?
According to the exorcists, they thrive because customers get much-needed benefits from the rituals. Mr Moscato, for example, describes an “avalanche” of demand after the terrorist attacks in France late in 2015. He suggests that three parts of France
are particularly vulnerable to “black magic” – Paris, Lyon and the French Riviera, where local mafia are said to be active – and that this can be countered by sufficiently strong exorcists. Alessandra Nucci, a writer on Catholic matters who has attended a course run by the International Association of Exorcists (IAE) in Rome, says there are more and more private operators in Europe who charge for their services. She suggests they are filling a vacuum left by priests reluctant to do the job: the church “has, for too long, neglected exorcisms, despite strong demand from the public”, she says.
The demand is real, but reasons for it are mixed. Roughly half of the customers for one exorcist near Paris, for example, are immigrants, notably Africans ready to turn to fee-charging and charismatic exorcists rather than church-sanctioned ones. Other clients, such as the owner of the Paris flat visited by Mr Moscato, sign up after hearing of friends who did so, in part – though not only – for the entertainment of witnessing the ritual. They are not church-goers and would have been unlikely to ask a priest to bless their home. Many are encouraged by the ease of finding and booking an exorcist online. It could be that demand for private practitioners previously existed but is now more public thanks to the internet, where exorcists can easily advertise their services. Television shows, such as Fox’s The Exorcist, could also be encouraging customers to try a ritual.