AN AWARD-WINNING series, “The Marvellous Mrs Maisel”, follows the fortunes of a woman in the 1950s who undergoes an unlikely transformation from a typical housewife of the day into a talented standup comedian. It is produced by Amazon and can be viewed on Prime Video, the e-commerce giant’s on-demand service. Since its birth in 1994, Amazon has starred in several dramatic metamorphoses of its own. It has pushed beyond retailing into fields as varied as electronic books, private-label goods and cloud computing, as well as online video. Now it is intent on becoming a force in digital advertising.

Amazon has a long way to go before it catches up with the giants of the industry. It has 4% of an American market worth $111bn, compared with Google’s 37% and Facebook’s 21% (see chart). But Amazon started experimenting with ads only six years ago, and its young business is growing fast in a rapidly expanding market. By the end of the year it will overtake Microsoft, a software giant, and Verizon, a big telecoms firm, to rank third in America, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

Despite trailing far behind the leaders, Amazon’s ads are having an outsize effect on the company itself. Its revenues from ad sales worldwide in 2018 could hit $8bn, contributing perhaps $3bn in operating profit—over a quarter of the total. Michael Olson of Piper Jaffray, a brokerage, says that by 2021, it is “highly likely” that profits from Amazon’s ad business will exceed those from its lucrative cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services. Amazon loses money on its core e-commerce business, but can use the fat profits from advertising in the same way as it has used the cash from cloud computing—to push into new businesses and countries, says Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley, an investment bank.

Closing the gap between Facebook and Google will be difficult but not impossible. Like those two, Amazon has a rich pool of data about users which it can use to aim its ads, including information about past purchases, which product reviews consumers have read, where they are and their online browsing behaviour. Amazon has a unique advantage, because consumers who are using the site usually intend to buy things right away. Some 56% of Americans start the search for any product on Amazon.

That will help it to grow as brands shift marketing dollars away from physical retailers. “Trade spending”—payments to retailers by makers of soap, mouthwash, canned food and other household basics for prime shelf space and promotional offers—adds up to around $200bn in America alone. Amazon is especially attractive to makers of such consumer packaged goods. Brand loyalty is weak and buyers are more likely to be swayed by prominent ads.

Amazon’s ads will not appeal to all businesses. Firms that do not sell goods through the site, such as fashion brands, carmakers and travel companies, will not advertise there. But online video is one potential opportunity to attract more business. Amazon allows video ads on Twitch, its online-gaming site, but it could also put adverts onto Amazon Prime to win some of the advertising spending aimed at conventional television channels.

Allowing advertising on Alexa, its voice-assistant, and Echo, its smart speakers, is another possibility. In the future, when people ask questions of Alexa or order something by voice, Amazon could incorporate advertising. Earlier this year it was reported that Amazon was in discussions with Procter & Gamble and Clorox about voice ads for their wares.

As it chases growth, Amazon will face three obstacles. First, it must consider whether its advertising will put off customers. Voice ads butting in to conversations, even ones with inanimate objects such as smart speakers, are potentially irritating. And subscribers who have paid to watch online videos are unlikely to enjoy sitting through commercial breaks. Amazon must take care to avoid alienating the people it spends so much trying to please.

Second, Amazon will have to balance its relationship with vendors and address potential conflicts of interest. Advertisers can buy space at the top of product searches or pay to sponsor products. In addition, some search results are labelled “Amazon’s choice”, which could favour important vendors and advertisers, says Matti Littunen of Enders Analysis, a research firm. (Amazon does not disclose how products get this designation.) And as Amazon becomes a manufacturer and seller of more of its own private-label items, it will have to decide how much prominence to give paying advertisers and how much to its own goods.

According to research by rbc Capital, an investment bank, of 100 product searches on Amazon’s app, in only three instances was the top ranking result not a sponsored ad. Those were for three Amazon devices: two smart speakers and a Kindle e-reader. Makers of competing products will be unhappy if it appears that Amazon is favouring its own products on its site or discouraging competition by driving up the cost of ad space on products that directly challenge its private-label goods.

Amazon will also have to contend with a more active regulatory environment. In September the European Commission announced a probe into its use of data and whether it could use information about third-party retailers on its site, which are also competitors, to boost its profits. As the inquiry progresses, advertising practices could become an area of interest.

Amazon has so far avoided a privacy backlash from customers. “Facebook uses your personal life and friend graph to target ads. Amazon has a more clearly commercial relationship” with users, says Jonathan Nelson, the head of digital at Omnicom, a large advertising agency. But as its ad business grows, so will scrutiny. Amazon gives users little control over how much information they share for advertising purposes, which could violate new data-collection and privacy rules in Europe, says Mr Littunen.

As it gathers more information about people in the physical world, including their spending habits at Whole Foods, the grocer it bought last year for $13.7bn, its dossier of data on consumers will become larger and more personal. That will propel Amazon’s rise. Just as Mrs Maisel discovers she has a new talent for cracking jokes, Amazon has a chance to thrive in a new venture. Before long it could make the digital-ad duopoly a three-way affair.

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THE FIRST MBA was taught at Harvard University in 1908. More than a century later, American institutions still dominate the business-school landscape. This year they claim 16 of the top 20 places in The Economist’s ranking of full-time mba programmes, and 53 places in the top 100.

The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business regains first place from neighbouring Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. It is the sixth time in seven years that Booth has come top. The rankings weight data according to what students tell us is important. The figures are a mixture of hard numbers and subjective marks given by students and alumni in four categories: opening new career opportunities (35%), personal development and educational experience (35%), better pay (20%) and networking potential (10%).

Students rate Booth’s course the best of the 100 programmes surveyed. They also praise its world-class facilities and faculty, which includes several Nobel laureates. Job opportunities are among the best, thanks to a highly rated careers service and an alumni network of 52,500 people, one of the largest in the world. Employment outcomes are outstanding: 97% of students find a job within three months of graduation. Graduates pocket an average salary of $129,400, a 67% rise on their pre-mba pay cheques. The relationship with alumni lasts beyond graduation. The school runs refresher courses for former students on subjects such as entrepreneurship.

All this comes at a price. Fees at prestigious American schools in the top 20 now average $123,000, and have risen quickly in recent years. By contrast, European schools are cheaper because courses are generally shorter, so the return on investment is quicker. At iese, at the University of Navarra, which has the top-ranked programme outside America, students pay $96,000 for its 19-month course. The Spanish school has moved up 11 places to sixth, mainly because of a big boost in the average salary for its graduates to $123,000 and a job-placement rate of 99%. Those looking for a bargain should head to Warwick Business School in Britain. A one-year course costs just $49,400, thanks in part to the depreciation of the pound.

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DNA is the oldest information-storage system known. It predates every other, from pencil and paper to computer hard drives, by billions of years. But attempts to employ it to store data generated by people, as opposed to data needed to bring those people (and every other living thing) into being in the first place, have failed.

The reason is not so much technological difficulty as cost. Encoding a single gigabyte in dna would run up a bill of several million dollars. Doing so on a hard drive costs less than a cent. Catalog, a biotechnology firm in Boston, hopes to bring the cost of dna data-storage below $10 per gigabyte. That is still on the pricey side. But for really large storage requirements a second ratio also comes into play: gigabytes stored per cubic metre.

Hard drives take up space. Their storage ratio is about 30m gigabytes per cubic metre. Catalog’s method can store 600bn gigabytes in the same volume. For organisations such as film studios and particle-physics laboratories, which need to archive humongous amounts of information indefinitely, the ratio of the two ratios, as it were, may soon favour dna.

The obvious temptation when designing a dna-based storage system is to see the ones and zeros of binary data and the chemical base pairs (at and gc) of deoxyribose nucleic acid as equivalent, and simply to translate the one into the other, with each file to be stored corresponding to a single, large dna molecule. Unfortunately, this yields molecules that are hard for sequencing machines to read when the time comes to look at what data the dna is encoding. In particular, there are places in computer data that consist of long strings of either ones or zeros. dna sequencers have difficulty when faced with similarly monotonous strings of base pairs.

Catalog has taken a different tack. The firm’s system is based on 100 different dna molecules, each ten base pairs long. The order of these bases does not, however, encode the binary data directly. Instead, the company pastes these short dna molecules together into longer ones. Crucially, the enzyme system it uses to do this is able to assemble short molecules into long ones in whatever order is desired. The order of the short molecular units within a longer molecule encodes, according to a rule book devised by the company, the data to be stored. Starting with 100 types of short molecule means trillions of combinations are possible within a longer one. That enables the long molecules to contain huge amounts of information.

The cost savings of Catalog’s method come from the limited number of molecules it starts with. Making new dna molecules one base pair at a time is expensive, but making copies of existing ones is cheap, as is joining such molecules together. The Catalog approach also means it is harder for data to be misread. Even if a sequencing machine gets a base or two wrong, it is usually possible to guess the identity of the ten-base-pair unit in question, thus preserving the data.

Catalog’s combinatorial approach does mean that more dna is needed per byte stored than other dna-based methods require. This increases both the time and the cost of reading it to recover the stored data in electronic form for processing. Overall, though, the method promises to have significant advantages over its predecessors.

The next task is to translate that promise into reality. To this end, Catalog is working with Cambridge Consultants, a British technology-development firm, to make a prototype capable of writing about 125 gigabytes of data to dna every day. If this machine works as hoped (it is supposed to be ready next year), the company intends to produce a more powerful device, able to write 1,000 times faster, within three years. The second age of dna information storage may then, at last, begin.

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JUST a year ago the world was enjoying a synchronised economic acceleration. In 2017 growth rose in every big advanced economy except Britain, and in most emerging ones. Global trade was surging and America booming; China’s slide into deflation had been quelled; even the euro zone was thriving. In 2018 the story is very different. This week stockmarkets tumbled across the globe as investors worried, for the second time this year, about slowing growth and the effects of tighter American monetary policy. Those fears are well-founded.

The world economy’s problem in 2018 has been uneven momentum. In America President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have helped lift annualised quarterly growth above 4%. Unemployment is at its lowest since 1969. Yet the IMF thinks growth will slow this year in every other big advanced economy. And emerging markets are in trouble.

This divergence between America and the rest means divergent monetary policies, too. The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates eight times since December 2015. The European Central Bank (ECB) is still a long way from its first increase. In Japan rates are negative. China, the principal target of Mr Trump’s trade war, relaxed monetary policy this week in response to a weakening economy. When interest rates rise in America but nowhere else, the dollar strengthens. That makes it harder for emerging markets to repay their dollar debts. A rising greenback has already helped propel Argentina and Turkey into trouble; this week Pakistan asked the IMF for a bail-out.

Emerging markets account for 59% of the world’s output (measured by purchasing power), up from 43% just two decades ago, when the Asian financial crisis hit. Their problems could soon wash back onto America’s shores, just as Uncle Sam’s domestic boom starts to peter out. The rest of the world could be in a worse state by then, too, if Italy’s budget difficulties do not abate or China suffers a sharp slowdown.

Cutting-room floors

The good news is that banking systems are more resilient than a decade ago, when the crisis struck. The chance of a downturn as severe as the one that struck then is low. Emerging markets are inflicting losses on investors, but in the main their real economies seem to be holding up. The trade war has yet to cause serious harm, even in China. If America’s boom gives way to a shallow recession as fiscal stimulus diminishes and rates rise, that would not be unusual after a decade of growth.

Yet this is where the bad news comes in. As our special report this week sets out, the rich world in particular is ill-prepared to deal with even a mild recession. That is partly because the policy arsenal is still depleted from fighting the last downturn. In the past half-century, the Fed has typically cut interest rates by five or so percentage points in a downturn. Today it has less than half that room before it reaches zero; the euro zone and Japan have no room at all.

Policymakers have other options, of course. Central banks could use the now-familiar policy of quantitative easing (QE), the purchase of securities with newly created central-bank reserves. The efficacy of QE is debated, but if that does not work, they could try more radical, untested approaches, such as giving money directly to individuals. Governments can boost spending, too. Even countries with large debt burdens can benefit from fiscal stimulus during recessions.

The question is whether using these weapons is politically acceptable. Central banks will enter the next recession with balance-sheets that are already swollen by historical standards—the Fed’s is worth 20% of GDP. Opponents of QE say that it distorts markets and inflates asset bubbles, among other things. No matter that these views are largely misguided; fresh bouts of QE would attract even closer scrutiny than last time. The constraints are particularly tight in the euro zone, where the ECB is limited to buying 33% of any country’s public debt.

Spending ceilings

Fiscal stimulus would also attract political opposition, regardless of the economic arguments. The euro zone is again the most worrying case, if only because Germans and other northern Europeans fear that they will be left with unpaid debts if a country defaults. Its restrictions on borrowing are designed to restrain profligacy, but they also curb the potential for stimulus. America is more willing to spend, but it has recently increased its deficit to over 4% of GDP with the economy already running hot. If it needs to widen the deficit still further to counter a recession, expect a political fight.

Politics is an even greater obstacle to international action. Unprecedented cross-border co-operation was needed to fend off the crisis in 2008. But the rise of populists will complicate the task of working together. The Fed’s swap lines with other central banks, which let them borrow dollars from America, might be a flashpoint. And falling currencies may feed trade tensions. This week Steve Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, warned China against “competitive devaluations”. Mr Trump’s belief in the harm caused by trade deficits is mistaken when growth is strong. But when demand is short, protectionism is a more tempting way to stimulate the economy.

Timely action could avert some of these dangers. Central banks could have new targets that make it harder to oppose action during and after a crisis. If they established a commitment ahead of time to make up lost ground when inflation undershoots or growth disappoints, expectations of a catch-up boom could provide an automatic stimulus in any downturn. Alternatively, raising the inflation target today could over time push up interest rates, giving more room for rate cuts. Future fiscal stimulus could be baked in now by increasing the potency of “automatic stabilisers”—spending on unemployment insurance, say, which goes up as economies sag. The euro zone could relax its fiscal rules to allow for more stimulus.

Pre-emptive action calls for initiative from politicians, which is conspicuously absent. This week’s market volatility suggests time could be short. The world should start preparing now for the next recession, while it still can.

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OLDER people are not the only ones to try too hard to be hip and youthful. Long-established firms can, too. Just look at Procter & Gamble (P&G), one of the world’s largest consumer-goods firms, which this year applied to America’s federal patent office to trademark LOL, NBD, WTF and FML, abbreviations commonly used in text messages and social media. If it succeeds, the 181-year-old firm plans to use the phrases to market soap, cleaners and air fresheners to young buyers. Its move is the intellectual-property equivalent of Dad dancing. But it is a sign of large firms’ eagerness to woo millennial consumers.

To many firms they are a mystery. KPMG, a consultancy, reckons nearly half do not know how millennials—typically defined as those born between 1980 and 2000—differ from their older counterparts. That may be because such differences are overblown. According to Ipsos-MORI, a pollster, millennials are “the most carelessly described group we have ever looked at”. Many claims about them are simplified or wrong. It is often said, for example, that they ignore conventional ads; in fact they are heavily influenced by marketing.

Given such misconceptions, it is little wonder that firms sometimes get it wrong. In February, MillerCoors, an American brewer, released Two Hats, a light fruit-flavoured brew the beer-maker said would suit millennials’ tastes and budgets (tagline: “Good, cheap beer. Wait, what?”). Consumers just waited; the beer was pulled from shelves after six months. But some stereotypes about millennials have roots in reality. Companies are finding that three broad approaches do succeed when trying to sell to them: transparency, experiences (over things) and flexibility.

On the first of these, transparency, younger brands have led the way. In clothing, one example is Everlane, an online clothing manufacturer based in San Francisco. It discloses the conditions under which each and every garment is made and how much profit it generates as part of its philosophy of “radical transparency”.

Some large companies have made dramatic changes. ConAgra, an American food giant, has simplified its recipes and eliminated all artificial ingredients from many of its snacks and ready meals. After years of falling sales, it is growing again; millennials now account for 80% of its customer growth. “Bringing in these folks has been absolutely critical to growing the brands,” says Bob Nolan, ConAgra’s senior vice-president of insights and analytics.

Millennials’ appreciation of experiences over “stuff” is also real. Online platforms such as Airbnb have capitalised on youngsters’ taste for splurging on holidays, dinners and other Instagrammable activities, but so too have some older bricks-and-mortar firms. In 2016 JPMorgan Chase, a bank, launched Sapphire Reserve, a premium credit card that offers generous rewards for spending on travel and dining. Touted as “a card for accumulating experiences”, the $450-a-year product has been a hit with well-off millennials, who represent more than half of cardholders.

Younger consumers also have more debt, fewer assets and less job security than previous generations. In this regard, flexibility matters. Ally Bank, a subsidiary of Ally Financial, the former financial wing of General Motors, for example, does not charge its current-account customers any maintenance fees or require them to hold minimum balances. Such features have earned it the loyalty of millennials.

Business models are being revamped to serve commitment-phobic millennials. Big carmakers, including GM, Volvo and BMW, offer subscription services for their cars, offering access to new vehicles without lengthy financial obligations.

Yet many firms still have too homogeneous a view of millennials, says Laura Beaudin, a partner at Bain & Company, a consultancy. “If you want to resonate with a group that prides itself on diversity, having a one-size-fits all solution does not make sense,” she says. Some firms do embrace customers’ individuality—in May, Gucci, an Italian fashion house, introduced customised versions of a popular tote bag and pair of sneakers as part of a campaign called Gucci DIY. Gucci reportedly maintains a cadre of under-30 staffers to advise its boss. Expect more companies of a certain age to hark back to youth.

THE Archbishop of Canterbury sees it as “the reincarnation of an ancient evil”. Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, says that, for many workers, it is the “next step in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world where all the benefits are floating to the top 10%”. Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s deputy prime minister, is going after it as part of his “war on precarious work”.

For many, the “gig economy”, in which short-term jobs are assigned via online platforms, is a potent symbol of how modern capitalism has failed. Critics rail that it allows firms to rid themselves of well-paid employees, replacing them with cheap freelancers. Workers who once relied on an employer to pay into their pension, or to cover their health care when they fell ill, must instead save for the future themselves. On this reading, the gig economy turbocharges insecurity and the erosion of workers’ hard-won rights. There is a grain of truth to this. But it misses the bigger picture.

For one thing, despite city streets clogged with Uber drivers and Deliveroo cyclists, gigging is not about to take over the world. Across the OECD club of mostly rich countries, the share of workers in full-time positions, which dropped after the financial crisis of 2008-09, has been rising. In America the average job tenure has barely changed in the past 30 years. Depending on whom you ask, 1-5% of Americans gig—but many of those have salaried jobs as well.

However, the fact that it is smaller than you might think is not the gig economy’s strongest defence. That rests on how gigging brings important benefits to the economy. The advantages for consumers are clear. With a swipe or a click, almost anyone can get Rover walked in the park or a vital document copy-edited within hours.

Crucially, benefits also accrue to workers. The algorithms that underpin gig-economy platforms improve the “matching” between giggers and jobs, leading to less dead time. The evidence that gig workers face a pay penalty compared with conventional employees is patchy; many say they value the extra autonomy they enjoy compared with salaried workers. Gig platforms are a useful way of topping up income or smoothing out earnings if other sources of work dry up. They can also break open closed industries. Research shows that the arrival of Uber in American cities leads on average to a 50% surge in the number of self-employed taxi-drivers.

But the gig economy is not perfect. Platforms argue they are no more than neutral marketplaces in which workers and customers meet. By this logic, workers ought to count as self-employed. But the standards to which some platforms hold workers tell a different story. Food-delivery riders are often told to wear a uniform; drivers for ride-hailing apps need to maintain a good rating or can be kicked off the platform. Platforms have a legitimate interest in maintaining their quality of service. But it cannot be right that some firms specify how workers must submit to the duties of acting like employees even as they reject the responsibilities of acting like employers.

One proposal, being floated in America, is to create a third category of worker, sitting somewhere between self-employed and employed. Yet the boundaries between classifications will always be fuzzy. Britain already has such a third category. It is also the place where arguments about the legal status of gig workers are most vigorous.

Better to rely on two other mechanisms. The first is the market. Unemployment is low and pay is starting to rise—Amazon this week announced big bumps in the minimum wages it pays American and British workers. The platforms will need to respond. Some gig-economy firms are voluntarily offering their workers health insurance. Competition between gig firms also helps. Italian food-delivery riders boast of how they play platforms off against each other in their efforts to get better pay and benefits. Innovations such as Australia’s GigSuper, a fund which makes it easier for gig workers to save for a pension, are also welcome.

A helping hand

The other mechanism is to help workers claim their existing rights. One option is to make it simpler for disgruntled gig workers to use the judicial system. Precedent-setting rulings on the status of gig workers may be piling up, but the barriers to going to court in the first place are often too high. Another option is to help giggers organise, in order to mitigate the low bargaining power the self-employed often face compared with employees. A third option is to boost the credibility of the system for detecting and prosecuting deliberate infractions of employment law. America has just one labour inspector for every 100,000 employed people, the world’s joint-lowest ratio. Simply insisting that firms follow the rules would give workers greater protection while ensuring that the gig economy lives up to its enormous promise.

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A YEAR ago Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator. Until then his treatment of women was an open secret among some of the film industry’s publicists, lawyers and journalists. Mr Weinstein had been protected by an unspoken assumption that in some situations powerful men can set their own rules. Over the past year that assumption has unravelled with welcome speed. In every walk of life powerful men have been forced out, and not just in America. Now Brett Kavanaugh may be denied a seat on America’s highest court following a series of accusations that he committed sexual assaults decades ago as a student. What began on the casting couch has made its way to the Supreme Court bench.

That is progress. And yet the fate of the #MeToo movement still hangs in the balance in America, the country where it began and where it has had the greatest effect. To see why, only look at the case of Mr Kavanaugh—who, as we went to press, was due to give testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee along with Christine Blasey Ford, his main accuser. The good news is that the appetite for change is profound; the bad news is that men’s predation of women risks becoming yet one more battlefield in America’s all-consuming culture wars.

Anmer’s kick

Thanks to #MeToo, women’s testimony is at last being taken more seriously. For too long, when a woman spoke out against a man, the suspicion was turned back on her. In 1991 when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas, now a Supreme Court judge, of sexual harassment, his defenders smeared her as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”. The machine backing Mr Kavanaugh is equally determined. However, it has refrained from questioning either Ms Blasey Ford’s sanity or her morals. In 2018 voters would find that unacceptable.

Abuse by men is being taken more seriously, too. Mr Weinstein allegedly committed dozens of sexual assaults, including rape. The contrast between his brutality and his impunity shook the world out of its complacency. This week Bill Cosby, once America’s highest-paid actor, was jailed for being a sexually violent predator. But women in colleges and workplaces all over America are harmed by abuse that falls short of rape. Thanks to #MeToo, this is more likely to be punished. Most defences of Mr Kavanaugh have focused on his presumed innocence; 30 years ago they would have insisted that the drunken fumblings of a 17-year-old are a fuss about nothing.

These shifts reflect a broad social change. Before the elections of 2016, 920 women sought the advice of EMILY’s List, which promotes the candidacy of pro-choice Democratic women. Since Donald Trump was elected president, it has been contacted by 42,000. Outside politics, companies are keen for their staff and their customers to think that they buy in to #MeToo.

One worry is that there may be a gap between corporate rhetoric and reality. Another is uncertainty about what counts as proof. That is largely because evidence of an instance of abuse often consists of something that happened behind a closed door, sometimes long ago.

Striking a balance between accuser and accused is hard. Ms Blasey Ford has the right to be heard, yet so does Mr Kavanaugh. Mr Kavanaugh’s reputation is at stake, but so is the Supreme Court’s. In weighing these competing claims, the burden of proof must be reasonable. Mr Kavanaugh is not facing a trial that could cost him his liberty, but interviewing for a job. The standard of proof should be correspondingly lower. Neither the court nor natural justice is served by haste.

Also a problem is the grey zone inhabited by men who have not been convicted in court, but are judged guilty by parts of society. Just now, every case is freighted with precedent-setting significance, perhaps because attitudes are in flux. This month Ian Buruma was forced out as editor of the New York Review of Books after publishing an essay by an alleged abuser which failed to acknowledge the harm he had done. Mr Buruma did not deserve to go and, were values more settled, his critics might have been content with an angry letter to the editor. #MeToo needs a path towards atonement or absolution.

And #MeToo has become bound up with partisanship. According to polling earlier this year by Pew, 39% of Republican women think it is a problem that men get away with sexual harassment and assault, compared with 66% of Democratic women; 21% of Republican men think it is a problem that women are not believed, compared with 56% of Democratic men. Mr Kavanaugh, however his nomination turns out, is likely to deepen that divide—if only because Republican zeal to rush his confirmation is further evidence that the party puts power first. That was clear when it backed Mr Trump, despite his boasts of forcing himself on women and allegations of sexual misconduct by at least 19 accusers. Under Bill Clinton, who was also accused of sexual assault, the Democrats were not so very different. They now offer less protection.

If #MeToo in America becomes a Democrats-only movement, it will be set back. Some men will excuse their behaviour on the ground that it is hysteria whipped up by the left to get at Republicans. Those questions about proof, fairness and rehabilitation will become even harder to resolve.

Think ahead

It takes a decade or more for patterns of social behaviour to change. #MeToo is just one year old. It is not about sex so much as about power—how power is distributed, and how people are held accountable when power is abused. Inevitably, therefore, #MeToo will morph into discussions about the absence of senior women from companies and gaps in average earnings between male and female workers. One protection against abuse is for junior women to work in an environment that other women help create and sustain.

Conservatives often lament the role Hollywood plays in undermining morality. With #MeToo, Tinseltown has inadvertently fostered a movement for equality. It could turn out to be the most powerful force for a fairer settlement between men and women since women’s suffrage.

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THERESA MAY’S government has long insisted that free movement of people from the European Union to Britain must end after Brexit. Commentary on this week’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) report has focused on its advice that Britain should not offer EU citizens preferential terms after it leaves. Yet the report pointedly adds that “preferential access to the UK labour market would be of benefit to EU citizens”. This clearly hints that a regime favouring EU migrants could be a bargaining chip to win better access to the EU’s single market.

The principle of getting free trade in return for free movement is implicit in the single market’s rules. As a matter of economics, a single market could be built around the free movement of goods, services and capital. But the EU deliberately adds free movement of people, which most citizens outside Britain see as a benefit of the club.

Yet it also permits exceptions. Harvey Redgrave of the Tony Blair Institute, a think-tank, notes that other EU countries have long been amazed that, given Britain’s hostility to EU migration, its government has never applied the constraints allowed on free movement. It was one of only three countries not to limit the migration of nationals from central and eastern European countries for the first few years after they joined the EU in 2004. Even today it is more generous than it need be. In June Britain chose not to extend limits on free movement from Croatia, which joined the EU in 2013, for two more years.

Britain is also in a minority in having no registration system for EU migrants. Post-Brexit, it could use such a system, as Belgium does, to throw out migrants who have no job after six months. Denmark and Austria limit migrants’ ability to buy homes in some places.

Most EU countries are also tougher than Britain in insisting that welfare benefits cannot be claimed until a migrant builds up some years’ worth of contributions. Equally, the EU’s posted-workers directive is used by many to try to stop any undercutting of local labour markets. But Britain is lax in enforcing both its minimum wage and its standards for working conditions.

Non-EU countries in the European Economic Area have other options. Liechtenstein, a tiny principality, has quotas on EU migrants, despite being a full member of the single market. Article 112 of the EEA treaty allows Iceland and Norway to invoke an “emergency brake”, although they have never used it. And non-EEA Switzerland, which is in the single market for goods, not only limits property purchases but also makes most employers offer jobs to Swiss nationals first.

This particular concession was secured after the EU refused to accept a Swiss vote in 2014 to set limits on free movement. Yet a further referendum on the issue is now threatened, so Brussels may have to bend its rules yet again. All this comes as other EU countries besides Britain are looking for new ways to constrain the free movement of people.

The MAC report itself points to the irony that all this is happening as EU migration to Britain is going down fast. It notes that the country may be ending free movement just as public concern about it is falling. It is not too late for a compromise in which Britain accepts something like free movement in principle, but heavily constrains it in practice.

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THE 21st century, in one way at least, will be African. In 1990 sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 16% of the world’s births. Because African birth rates are so much higher than elsewhere, the proportion has risen to 27% and is expected to hit 37% in 2050. About a decade later, more babies will be born in sub-Saharan Africa than in the whole of Asia, including India and China. These projections by the UN, if correct, are astounding. There is good reason for the world to worry about Africa’s baby boom.

The danger is not a Malthusian crisis, in which countries run out of food or farmland at some point in the future. It is true that Africa, although vast, is already a net food importer. But that would be fine if Africans were otherwise productive.

The real problem is that too many babies sap economic development and make it harder to lift Africans out of poverty. In the world as a whole, the dependency ratio—the share of people under the age of 20 or older than 64, who are provided for by working-age people—stands at 74:100. In sub-Saharan Africa it is a staggering 129:100.

In stark contrast with most of the world, notably Asia, the number of extremely poor Africans is rising, in part because the highest birth rates are in the poorest parts of the continent. On September 19th the World Bank reported that the number of people living in extreme poverty rose in sub-Saharan Africa between 2013 and 2015, from 405m to 413m (see article). Many African countries already struggle to build enough schools and medical clinics for their existing children, let alone the masses to come.

The experience of other countries where birth rates have fallen sharply is that the number of babies is determined more by parents’ wishes than by anything else. As people move from villages to cities, children become more costly, so couples want fewer of them. As they become wealthier, they have less fear that their children will die. So, on the face of it, economic and social forces should be left to do their work. Moreover, an odd chorus of leftists (who hate racism and Western meddling) and Christian conservatives (who hate abortion and some kinds of contraception) argue that nothing should be done.

The trouble is that the reduction in fertility—the number of births per woman—is happening much more slowly in Africa than elsewhere. Half of Nigerians already live in cities, compared with one-third of Indians. Yet Nigeria’s fertility rate is more than double India’s. Overall, the fertility rate in sub-Saharan Africa is dropping about half as quickly as it did in Asia or Latin America when families were the same size.

Four mouths good, two mouths better

African countries need not, and should not, go down the coercive route to smaller families once taken by India, which carried out mass-sterilisation campaigns, or China, which long enforced a one-child policy. This led to, among other horrors, large-scale sex-selective abortions.

Instead there are good examples from within Africa of how to make things better. These involve “small is beautiful” public-information campaigns combined with a government drive to get varied birth control to poor rural areas. Many African governments already have fine-sounding policies to promote contraceptive use, yet too few act on them. Where such policies are a priority, as in Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda, fertility rates fall faster than average (though they are still high). Just as many Africans leapfrogged from no phones to mobile phones, and from no power to solar power, so they can jump to innovations like self-injected contraceptives.

High fertility can also be tackled indirectly, by concentrating on the things that are known to affect it—above all, education for girls. Granted, many African schools are awful, with ill-educated teachers who rarely turn up. One way to change that is to encourage private providers, as Liberia has done. Better schools would bring many other benefits to African children—the living as well as the yet-to-be conceived.

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THE two superpowers of artificial intelligence (AI) are America and China. Their tech giants have collected the most data, attracted the best talent and boast the biggest computing clouds—the main ingredients needed to develop AI services from facial recognition to self-driving cars. Their dominance deeply worries the European Union, the world’s second-largest economic power (see article). It is busily concocting plans to close the gap.

That Europe wants to foster its own AI industry is understandable. Artificial intelligence is much more than another Silicon Valley buzzword—more, even, than seminal products like the smartphone. It is better seen as a resource, a bit like electricity, that will touch every part of the economy and society. Plenty of people fret that, without its own cutting-edge research and AI champions, big digital platforms based abroad will siphon off profits and jobs and leave the EU a lot poorer. The technology also looms large in military planning. China’s big bet on AI is partly a bet on autonomous weapons; America is likely to follow the same path. Given the doubt over whether America will always be willing to come to Europe’s defence, some see spending on AI as a matter of national security.

Both arguments make sense. But can Europe support AI without wasting money or lapsing into protectionism? The EU has a dismal record in high-tech industrial policy. Witness Quaero, a failed attempt to build a European alternative to Google, or the Human Brain Project, which has spent over €1bn ($1.17bn) with little to show for it. Experts warn against the rise of “AI nationalism”, whereby countries increasingly try to keep their data and their algorithms to themselves.

Two aims should guide EU policy. Instead of focusing its financing on high-profile individual projects, Europe should create the environment for its AI industry to thrive. And instead of keeping foreign providers out, it should use its clout to improve their behaviour.

Creating the right environment means, above all, working to overcome the fragmentation that bedevils Europe. Big and homogeneous home markets give America and China the huge advantage of scale. According to one estimate, China will hold 30% of the world’s data by 2030; America is likely to have just as much. Europe has data, too, but needs to pool its resources. To its credit, the European Commission is arguing for a common market for data. But much more needs to be done, such as laying down rules about how data held by companies and governments can be shared.

National faultlines also cut deep in research and development. Germany has downgraded plans to co-operate with France in AI research, for example. In addition, Europe’s existing research bureaucracy is adept at sucking up funds, to the detriment of startups and outsiders. Better to encourage grass-roots initiatives such as CLAIRE and ELLIS, which seek to create Europe-wide networks of research labs. France has launched JEDI, short for Joint European Disruptive Initiative, an attempt to mimic America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which allocates money using open competitions and does not hesitate to cull programmes that fail to show promise. More opportunities of this sort, plus an accommodating immigration regime, would attract and retain AI researchers, who often decamp to America (and sometimes even to China).

European policymakers can also make better use of the one area where they are world-class—setting standards. Europe’s market of 500m relatively wealthy consumers is still enticing enough that firms will generally comply with EU rules rather than pull out. An example is a strict new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation; the principles of the GDPR are now being used as a benchmark for good data practice in markets well beyond Europe. By imposing common rules, such standards can help the EU’s indigenous AI industry flourish. But they could also have a more subtle effect—of making AI from outside the EU more benign.

By the rule book

America and China both represent flawed models of data collection and governance. China sees AI as a powerful tool to monitor, manage and control its citizens. America’s tech titans scoop up users’ data with insufficient regard for their privacy. The GDPR is just the start. Robust standards are needed to ensure that AI services are transparent and fair and that they do not discriminate against particular groups. Europe has a chance to shape the development of AI so that this vital technology takes more goals into account than simply maximising advertising income and minimising dissent. Even if it comes up with policies that help its native AI industry thrive, Europe may never match America and China. But it can nonetheless help guide AI onto a path that benefits its own citizens, and those in the rest of the world.

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