The Economist Magazine Cover For 09/07/2024

The Economist Read in browser September 7th 2024 How we chose this week’s image SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image Insert a clear and simple description of the image Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief We have two covers this week. In most of our editions we warn how the Communist Party’s instinct to restrict data threatens China’s economy. In America we focus on our own research showing that ever-heavier SUVs and pickups are killing people. The gloom about China’s economy reflects real problems, from half-built tower blocks to bad debts. But it also reflects growing mistrust of the information the Chinese government is willing to release. On August 19th stock exchanges stopped publishing daily numbers on dwindling foreign-investment inflows. Balance-of-payments statistics have become so murky that even America’s Treasury is baffled. Figures for youth unemployment, which is a huge problem, have been “improved and optimised” and—who would have guessed?—they have come out lower. Here are two versions of this distortion. In one the party is suppressing technical data that it finds awkward or embarrassing. In the other, it is dressing up the numbers. Last year many of China’s biggest retailers reported disappointing sales. Yet the National Bureau of Statistics declared that nominal household consumption rose by a robust 9.5%. Neither version quite gets the story right—partly because neither captures its magnitude. The information void feeds on itself: the more fragile the economy is, the more knowledge is suppressed and the more nerves fray. By backtracking on a decades-long policy of partially liberalising the flow of information, China will find it harder to achieve its ambition of restructuring the economy around new industries. Like the Soviet Union—and indeed communist China before its reforms—it risks instead becoming an example of how autocratic rule is not just illiberal but also inefficient. We liked the panda working its way through a pile of embarrassing statistics. But it is too cuddly. Amid a widening culture of fear and a determination to put national security before the economy, the Communist Party has proved unable or unwilling to limit the scope of its interference in information flows. It also misses half the story. For decades, China’s leaders have run a system known as neican, or internal reference, in which journalists and officials compile private reports. However, it is a good bet that this source of information may be failing, too. No one wants to sign a memo that says one of Mr Xi’s signature policies is failing. If the public square is locked and barred, where can contrarians make themselves heard? These flags are more like it. We imagined a headline about darkening: as the facts are obscured, so are China’s prospects. To Chinese eyes, however, when a newspaper uses black, it is marking an important death. It would be as if The Economist were wishing a catastrophe on China. Patches of light wash away the offence, but turn a powerful image into a so-so one. We settled on a version of this photograph of the forbidden city—as in the tales of Alice, we have the real world and its imaginary twin which works by its own peculiar logic. This cover needs work. The red filter makes the image hard to read. The top half will collide with our logo and the flashes that we use to highlight articles. And we realised that we should make the two images different, to reflect different versions of reality. Amid the horrors of the mid-20th century, liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek grasped that free-flowing information improves decision-making, reduces the odds of grave mistakes and makes it easier for societies to evolve. But when information is suppressed, it turns into a source of power and corruption. Over time, the distortions and inefficiencies mount. China is turning its back on this lesson and the consequences could be grave. Our cover in America is about how heavy SUVs and pickups kill people—not their drivers, but everyone else on the road. Heavy vehicles protect their occupants, but for each life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen are lost in smaller vehicles. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, The Economist has found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest pickups and SUVs kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Battery-power will add to the problem. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs around 40% more than its petrol-engine cousin. We wanted our cover to put the monster into monster truck. One idea was to shrink the people. Another was to have a truck parked on the page with the title in the collision zone. Heavy cars pose a giant collective-action problem. In America it is hard enough to persuade gun owners to embrace sensible gun laws, because of a mistaken belief that guns protect their owners. Convincing big-car drivers to trade down would be even harder, because they and their passengers really are safer. But only up to a point. We estimate that if the heaviest 10% of vehicles in America’s fleet shrank by roughly 1,000lb, road fatalities in multi-car crashes would fall by 12%, or 2,300 a year, without impairing the safety of the heavier cars. What to do? A large part of the answer is to make accidents rarer and less deadly. Stop signs are an abundant feature of America’s road network. Replacing them with roundabouts would save thousands of lives a year. Because the energy—and hence destructive power—of a moving vehicle rises with the square of its velocity, finding ways to limit speed has an outsize effect. A good start would be simply to enforce existing laws on speed limits. Instead, plenty of American states ban speed cameras. For our cover we jettisoned the stop sign and focused instead on the front end of a massive truck—carefully designed not to represent the product of any of the large carmakers. Inevitably, we vacillated over whether to use the word truck or car. Alliteration and Englishness won the day. Cover image • View large image (“China’s looking-glass economy”) • View large image (“America’s killer cars”) Backing stories → The real problem with China’s economy (Leader) → The Chinese authorities are concealing the state of the economy (Briefing) → What to do about America’s killer cars (Leader) → Americans love affair with big cars is killing them (United States) Also from The Economist Our daily news app Espresso is now free for students worldwide The Economist’s concise daily briefing on the most important stories in business, politics and culture is now available to high school and university students aged 16 and older. Subscribe We’d like to hear from you Share your feedback or send us an email below to get in touch. → Email newsletters@economist.com Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. This email has been sent to: ohomen171@gmail.com. If you'd like to update your details please click here. Replies to this email will not reach us. 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