Новости за 17.07.2016

A bad past week for Turkish politics, but perhaps not such a bad one for the economy. In autocracies, suc­cessful coups often improve economic performance, perhaps by replacing an incompetent or male­volent leader. In a democracy, a successful coup tends to produce slower growth by reversing beneficial economic reforms, especially in the financial sector. But a failed coup in a democracy — as just happened in Turkey, more or less — has no noticeable effect on long-term economic growth

Economics has generally assumed that individuals operate autonomously, with a fixed set of tastes and preferences, uncoupled from the direct influences of others. But if the world was ever like this, it is not like this now. We are constantly reacting to the choices, decisions, behaviours and opinions of others. Individual actions merge into collective actions; norms and values emerge dynamically. Public policy needs to adjust, learning to target networked behaviour rather individual behaviour

A lawyer reviews the Chilcot Report on Britain’s war in Iraq. “The inquiry finds that the necessary infor­mation was available to the decision-makers if they had wanted to see it: on Iraq’s WMD capability, on the consequences of the war, on the mayhem that would follow. Yet the inquiry has chosen to hold back on what caused the multitude of errors: was it negligence, or recklessness, or something else? It has created a space for Blair and others to protest that they acted in good faith”

“Paradoxes have always abounded in the relationship between the Turkish military and the country’s politicians. On Friday night, the Turkish Armed Forces said, in effect, that the military was breaking the law in order to restore the rule of law. In response, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called on the Turkish people to take to the street in defense of the democracy he has done so much to undermine with attacks on the media and assaults on constitutional checks and balance”

“Next time you hear a politician boasting that unemployment has dropped by 30,000 over the previous quarter, just remember that this is an estimate based on a survey. And that estimate has a margin of error of +/- 80,000, meaning that unemployment may well have gone down, but it may have gone up – the best we can say is that it hasn’t changed very much, but that hardly makes a speech. And to be fair, the politician probably has no idea that this is an estimate and not a head count”

Not until the early 18th century did Western Europe begin to feel permanently secure against invaders from the East, after the Ottoman Empire had failed in its second attempt to conquer Vienna in 1683 and was finally in retreat. No longer at war with Islam, Western Europe had less need to define itself as Christ­endom, and could favour secular values over religious ones. We have come to believe that secular values will always prevail in modern societies: Is it time to revisit that assumption?

“These people were not from my neighborhood up the hill, but from Ankara’s poorer districts. An overwhelming majority were male, with lean faces and sunburnt skin. They spoke in Anatolian accents, and a few wore traditional Islamic garb the way Arabs do. Many used hand signs with their slogans — the takbir, an extended index finger, which suggests political Islamism, or the sign of the gray wolf, which belongs to the nationalist party. It was these people who had faced down the junta’s tanks”