Hey Friends,
Welcome back to Field Research, the weekly dark humor and satire publication written and produced by me,
.I read the summer double-issue of The Economist, cover to cover, and in today’s post I’m telling you everything you need to know to become an informed global citizen.
Enjoy!
LEADERS
The Economist smugly calls its opinion pieces Leaders. Here are this week’s hot takes:
The overstretched CEO: Government meddling, geopolitical tensions, and woke capitalism — oh my! The world’s most depraved psychopaths and soulless sycophants will have to earn their exorbitant salaries. Sad.
Make Ukraine’s grain Russia’s loss: War criminal Vladimir Putin shocked world leaders (again) by scuppering a deal to safely export Ukrainian grain. War criminals only respond to force. Use force.
A sad day for Israel: Thanks to Bibi, the Knesset’s not into the whole checks and balances thing. If you lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Do better.
A spell of sunshine: The rich world killed the planet with egregious consumerism and excessive fossil fuel consumption. Using AI to give the poor world a heads up whenever a climate-induced natural disaster’s about to destroy their livelihoods is a fair and equitable tradeoff.
Britain’s aid policy: Britain merged its two largest aid organizations and, as expected, it’s a clusterfuck. British colonialism impoverished much of the world. The state has a moral duty to return a fraction of that stolen wealth to the globe’s poor. #payitforward
UNITED STATES
Sticker shocker: Net tuition isn’t as expensive as it seems because colleges and universities have perfected the dark art of price opacity.
Legacy problems: Want to go to a fancy university? Come from a rich family. Quote:
Students whose parents earn more than 95% of Americans are no more likely than the average student with the same test scores to attend a [fancy] college. In contrast, those at the 99th percentile of family income are nearly twice as likely to go to one, and those in the top 0.1% three times as likely.
Want to know why this country’s in the toilet? Because the people running the show are legacy duncecaps who nepo-babied their way into fancy universities. Quote:
In other words, these universities are channeling comparatively underqualified legacies, athletes and private-school graduates into positions of unusual influence. A greater emphasis on academic merit would yield not only a fairer society, but also a brighter elite.
Kidfluencers: The fascists at the FTC might make monetizing your children a lot less lucrative.
Opioid crisis: In a win for DEI advocates, fentanyl’s coming for the inner cities.
THE AMERICAS
NATO laggard: Canada shirks on defense spending — because they’re too busy investing in woke nonsense like public education, accessible healthcare, and a social safety net — and should be ashamed of themselves.
Q-pop: Indigenous Peruvian influencer Lenin Tamayo Pinares is revolutionizing Q-pop, which is Quechua-inspired music influenced by K-pop, which is Korean pop music influenced by American hip hop, which makes Q-pop the second derivative of cultural appropriation.
ASIA
The Koreas: North Korea and South Korea remain bitter, estranged roommates.
Singapore: The faux utopia, lionized by faux intellectuals as a hybrid market-based, pseudo-democratic city-state, is corrupt AF. Its MPs are also super horny.
CHINA
WWIII index: Want to know when China’s about to invade Taiwan? When Pooh Bear starts stockpiling oil, natural gas, wheat, corn, soyabeans, beryllium, niobium, platinum, and palladium, and begins converting dollar and euro-denominated foreign-exchange reserves into yuan or gold, head to your local bunker.
Qin Gang gone: The Party disappeared its foreign minister and forgot which gulag they put him in.
Central planning: Good news for Western foreign policy hawks: Xi Jinping learned nothing from Mao Zedong’s reign of terror. Quote:
“The country asks us to grow rice, so we grow rice,” [a farmer] says.
MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA
Friends like these: When invited by Putin to attend a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, two-thirds of African oligarchs were like, “Nah.”
Might makes right: Niger’s military saw Mali’s coup, then Burkina Faso’s double-turn, and said, “Hold our democracy.”
EUROPE
Fickle French: France is richer, healthier, has a higher quality of life, and longer life expectancy than its closest Western peers, features world-class multinational corporations and an innovative tech sector, and has access to superior infrastructure and abundant energy. And yet the French are still miserable. Hence the word malaise.
Ukraine’s missile cemetery: Performing autopsies on Russian missiles reveals crucial battlefield intel: Russia’s missile supply is dwindling, they’re relying on obsolete Soviet-era technology, and they’re as effective as Prigozhin’s coup.
Schwimmbad: German savages can’t stop brawling at public pools. AfD blames immigrants.
BRITAIN
Cancel culture: Nigel Farage, right-wing shitheel and Brexit Bro, claimed Coutts, a fancy bank owned by NatWest, canceled him. NatWest’s CEO then got canceled. Nigel Farage continued to wreak havoc on Britain. Dumb enough for you?
BoE knows fuck all: The Bank of England is relying on ultra shitty economic models to forecast inflation and determine interest rates, and has no idea what it’s doing. Quote:
Part of the problem, as the bank’s chief economist, Huw Pill, has noted, is that no one truly knows how the economy works.
That’s not a typo or a riff. That’s a direct quote from the article. From now on, whenever you read financial and business news, your first thought should be: nobody knows how the economy works.
The tragedy of Rishi Sunak: In RRR, Raju, the revolutionary, fulfills his father’s promise to deliver weapons to his village, and reunites with his true love, Sita. Bheem, the shepherd, saves the kidnapped Malli and returns her to their village. Together, they take down the evil Governor Scott, and spark a revolution that culminates with the Indian Independence Act of 1947 (this may not be 100% historically accurate).
Seventy-five years later, in a too delicious act of karma, a brown bugger named Rishi Sunak became the Prime Minister of the once proud and now disgraced British Empire.
But the Gods are capricious.
Rishi Sunak is just another right-wing wanker who drank too much Iron Lady Kool-Aid as a kid. He rebuffs asylum seekers, “Knows what a woman is,” doesn’t care about the environment, and legitimately thinks Brexit is a dope idea.
Naatu Naatu was for naught.
INTERNATIONAL
Ukraine’s counter-offensive: Top Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhny pushes the 10th Corps all-in and doubles down on the counter offensive. Will the gamble pay off?
1843 MAGAZINE SUMMER SPECIALS
The demonisation of BlackRock’s Larry Fink: Writers are supposed to show, not tell. This wonderful profile shows you that Larry Fink is a confounding, conflicting, complicated man. I’ll just tell you Larry Fink’s a cynical asshole.
The Baghdad job: who was behind history’s biggest bank heist?: The crooked Iraqi government conspired to steal $2.5 billion from its own state-run bank. Every time I fear my novel is too unrealistic, I read the news. This is by far the most gripping story in the issue.
How Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank Russia’s flagship: Russian avarice, Ukrainian pluck, and two Neptune subsonic anti-ship cruise missiles collide in this hilarious and heartwarming underdog story.
BUSINESS
Back to reality: Stingy VCs make for broke start-ups. No more free donuts while democracy burns.
Bad bosses: People are monkeys, and monkeys like power structures. But, if you find yourself in a position of power, that doesn’t mean you should behave like a psychopath. Power can be wielded for good, too. Seems like this should’ve been fairly obvious.
AT&T and Verizon: These shitty, poorly run, miserable companies are dying the slow, miserable deaths they deserve.
Pick your poison: Good news: Amazon’s struggling grocery business is a joke. Bad news: Walmart’s the beneficiary.
FINANCE & ECONOMICS
Systemic risk: Credit Suisse didn’t diversify its bonds, ergo Swiss officials fed its corpse to UBS. The combined entity has $5 trillion of invested assets and “a balance-sheet twice the size of the Swiss economy.” Can’t imagine that’ll come back to haunt them.
U.S. inflation: Nobody at the Federal Reserve understands inflation. See: Britain section.
Summer of discontent: Scorching temperatures make people crazy. Everyone from Florida and Arizona knows this. Soaring food prices make people angry. Everyone who’s ever lived knows this. Scorching temperatures and soaring food prices make people crazy and angry. Economics ≠ rocket science.
Irrational exuberance: A gold rush in AI stocks helped “sophisticated” investors forget about World War III and death by greenhouse gas.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Weather forecasting: AI programs will model erratic weather with increased certainty. Unless the erratic weather kills us first.
CULTURE
Pillow fights: Doxing, pile-ons, staff cuts, funding shortages, and an overabundance of shitty books have made literary critics nicer. That doesn’t serve readers, and it’s certainly less fun.
For example, in the good old days, when men were men, the knives came out. Quote:
…one of the most famous poems of the Roman writer Catullus is a riposte to critics who accused him of being effeminate. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” he wrote, which means (broadly speaking): “I will sodomise and face-fuck you.”
THE ECONOMIST EXPLAINS
India’s rice ban: Rice for me, but not for thee. Billions will go hungry.
Do Beyoncé and Taylor Swift concerts cause inflation?: No.
OBITUARY
Andre Watts: One of America’s first Black stars of classical piano, and a master of Liszt and Schubert, died on July 12, aged 77. Economist obituaries are gorgeous pieces of writing. No shade here.