"Export dependency is another correlate with English. Countries that export more are better at English (though it’s not clear which factor causes which). Malaysia, the best English-performer in Asia, is also the sixth-most export-dependent country in the world. (Singapore was too small to make the list, or it probably would have ranked similarly.) This is perhaps surprising, given a recent trend towards anti-colonial and anti-Western sentiment in Malaysia’s politics. The study’s authors surmise that English has become seen as a mere tool, divorced in many minds from its associations with Britain and America."
I guess I’ll have to drink them myself. Oktoberfest turns to Oktobergloom as German Braumeisters wake up to an extraordinary hangover - their country’s shrinking appetite for beer.
Economists have come to learn that politics matters. But survival matters the most to those involved in politics. We provide a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders, fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic.
The light perceived by the human eye is measured in units called lumen-hours. This is about the amount produced by burning a candle for an hour. In 1700 a typical Briton consumed 580 lumen-hours in the course of a year, from candles, wood and oil. Today, burning electric lights, he uses about 46 megalumen-hours—almost 100,000 times as much.
"In China, “Free Willy” is known as “A very powerful whale runs to heaven”. “Boogie Nights” wonderfully, is “His great device makes him famous”."
— Why are titles so hard to translate? Our correspondent in Mexico goes looking for a Spanish copy of “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” - and is surprised by what he finds. (via theeconomist)
each American soldier costs $1m a year to sustain in Afghanistan.
High-speed traders are setting their sights on Asia and Latin America
via theeconomist
Here’s another way to explain why the concept of cheap wages can so quickly become misleading. If you’re looking to buy a Mercedes-Benz, for instance, German labour is the cheapest in the world for that goal.
"Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, generate 40 terabytes every second—orders of magnitude more than can be stored or analysed."
"In a poor country, a man proves to his wife that he loves her by giving her a rose, but in a rich country, he must give a dozen roses."
— Economist Richard Layard
