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And Eve and Genevieve

THE SCRIPT IS familiar by now. Supporters talk about freedom and equality, and point out that many other countries allow it. Opponents pose as plucky defenders of traditional norms, and warn that schools will push homosexuality and gender confusion on children. Then gay marriage becomes the law of the land. Australia is the latest country to go through these motions: on November 15th a majority of voters supported gay marriage in a non-binding plebiscite. The excitement will be quickly forgotten.

Few things have gone from unthinkable to normal with such speed. “I can’t go that far—that’s the year 2000,” said President Richard Nixon in 1970 about a lawyer who appeared to favour same-sex marriage. But the US Supreme Court upheld gay marriage in 2015, and a poll earlier this year found that 64% of Americans now approve of it.

One possible explanation for the nonchalance is that the number of gay marriages has been fairly small....

Joining the uxariat

IN A CLASSROOM in southern England, a group of 17-year-old girls has just learned something extraordinary. The pupils are interviewing a couple, Jane and Graham Marshall, who have been sent to their school by the Students Exploring Marriage Trust, a charity that tries to promote wedlock by providing teenagers with real-life examples. Mr Marshall has mentioned that he has been married to Mrs Marshall for 48 years. “Aww,” say the girls. Then they stop to think, because Jane and Graham do not look terribly old. Hold on, asks one pupil after a few seconds—how old were you when you got married? Nineteen, says Mr Marshall. The pupils gasp. “Whoa!” says one.

It is a long cultural journey from half a century ago to the present. Out of every 1,000 unmarried adult women living in England and Wales in 1970, whether single, divorced or widowed, 60 got hitched. Women married for the first time at a median age of 21, to men who were two years older. One-third...

IN PI VILLAGE, on the outskirts of Beijing, a man in his late 50s who gives his name as Ren is mixing cement for a new apartment building. As he shovels, he gives an account of bride-price inflation. When he married, his parents gave his wife 800 yuan, which seemed like a lot. Twelve years ago one of Mr Ren’s sons married. His bride got 8,000 yuan. Recently another son married, and Mr Ren had to stump up 100,000 yuan ($15,000). He is likely to be mixing cement well into his 60s.

Like India, most of China is patrilocal: in theory, at least, a married woman moves into her husband’s home and looks after his parents. Also like India, China has a deep cultural preference for boys. But whereas India has dowries, China has bride prices. The groom’s parents, not the bride’s, are expected to pay for the wedding and give money and property to the couple. These bride prices have shot up, bending the country’s society and economy out of shape.

The cause, as Mr Ren explains, is a shortage...

INTO A CRAMPED, stuffy room on the outskirts of Delhi shuffles a middle-aged woman in a yellow sari. Giving her name as Nirmala, she launches into an account of a marriage gone horribly wrong. Her husband has become a drunkard, she says. He often comes in late and is sick on the floor. When drunk, he can be violent: recently he tried to strangle Nirmala, injuring her neck. Nirmala’s father- and mother-in-law, with whom she and her husband share a home, are bullies who accuse her of lying in bed all day. So she has moved out to live with her parents.

Nirmala’s husband, Chiranjit, has also turned up at the hearing, which is a mahila panchayat—a sort of informal marriage court run by women. He disputes little of what his wife has said. He points out, however, that he has defended Nirmala against his brother, who has tried to beat her. He also says that she has attacked him on occasion.

The marriage would appear to be over. But that is not the conclusion...

“THIS IS SO exciting!” trills a young woman, squeezing her friend’s arm. Laid out before her, in the Olympia exhibition centre in west London, is the National Wedding Show. Some 300 merchants have turned up to sell everything that is needed to throw a wedding, and a great many things besides. There are florists, harpists, teeth-whiteners, tiara-sellers, a fireworks firm and more than a dozen photographers. A new company, Hitch and Pooch, arranges for people’s dogs to play a role in their weddings—as ring-bearers, say. Every two hours a blast of music announces a catwalk show consisting entirely of wedding dresses and grooms’ suits.

Marriage is often said to be ailing. It is “fashionably dismissed” and “taken for granted”, sniffed Iain Duncan Smith a few years ago when he was Britain’s secretary of state for work and pensions. Social conservatives argue that a once-great institution has been undermined by ever more blasé attitudes to premarital sex, cohabitation and divorce—and, in the past...

IF YOU TAKE a long, wide view, marriage and personal relationships are in fine shape. Parental coercion is weakening; marriages are becoming more egalitarian; enormities such as child marriage are fading. Even in countries where divorce is common, most marriages last. A couple who tied the knot in England or Wales in 2012 can be expected to stay together for 32 years, according to the Office for National Statistics. By contrast, the average pre-industrial English marriage endured for just 15-20 years before one partner perished. The vows in the Anglican wedding service, in which couples promise to love and cherish each other “till death do us part”, used to be laden with doom.

Nor, if only the couples are considered, is the spread of cohabitation anything to worry about. Fewer people have jobs for life these days, or even careers for life, so it seems odd to expect them to leap into lifelong romantic commitments. Demographers used to argue that living together before marriage raised the risk of early divorce. But couples who move from...

Elvira’s mad again

WHEN Elvira Nabiullina took over the governorship of the Russian Central Bank (CBR) in 2013, she faced a bloated and leaky finance sector with over 900 banks. Since then, more than 340 have lost their licences. Another 35 have been rescued, including, in recent months, Otkritie, once the country’s biggest private lender by assets, and B&N Bank, its 12th largest. The costs have been steep. According to Fitch, a ratings agency, over 2.7trn roubles ($46bn, some 3.2% of GDP in 2016) have been spent on loans to rescued banks and payments to insured depositors. Fitch reckons another few hundred banks could go before the clean-up concludes. More large private banks are whispered to be among them.

The CBR has rightly been praised for preventing a wider crisis and undertaking a clean-up during a punishing recession. Non-performing loans are at a manageable level, of around 10%. Bringing Otkritie and B&N under CBR stewardship calmed panicked markets. Yet nationalisation also raises...

ITALY seems an unlikely place to be enjoying a boom in new listings on the stockmarket. It is full of family-run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that mostly rely for their finance on banks; and Italy’s banks are notorious for the bad debts still lingering on their balance-sheets. But Borsa Italiana, Milan’s stock exchange, has already seen 33 share issues so far this year, of which 24 have been full-fledged initial public offerings (IPOs). The number of listings so far already equals that seen in previous boom years in 2007 or 2015. With more expected before January, the exchange is likely to achieve the highest number of listings since the height of the dotcom bubble in 2000 (see chart).

A big reason for the surge is the Italian government’s roll-out in February of new individual savings accounts, known as PIRs, which offer favourable tax treatment. These have done better than expected. Asset managers have amassed €7.5bn ($8.3bn) in new PIR funds in the first three quarters of...

JAPAN is prone to fads—usually in fancy desserts or fashion ripe for Instagram. A less photogenic one has hit finance: investing in assets screened for ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors. In 2014-16 funds invested in ESG assets grew faster in Japan than anywhere else (and not just because of better reporting and a low base).

Today Japan’s sustainable-investment balance is $474bn, or some 3.4% of the country’s total managed assets—low compared with Europe or America, but high for Asia. The shift is driven from the top down, rather than, as elsewhere, by ethically minded individual investors.

When he returned to power in 2012 with a plan to revitalise the economy Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, wanted to reform Japan’s conservative business culture. A code for institutional investors was introduced in 2014, followed by one on corporate governance a year later. The government’s aim is not only to get firms to distribute some of their vast piles of...

The revolutionary vanguard

VANGUARD, an American fund-management giant, promises “the highest standards of ethical behaviour”. Its low fees, helpful call centres and lack of scandal give the claim credence. It is by far the largest mutual-fund group, with $4.8trn under management. It receives more than half of all the new money going into American mutual funds. Most ends up in its passively managed offerings that track indices.

So you might think its shareholder meetings would be pious celebrations. Instead, Vanguard tries to avoid them. On November 15th it held its first since 2009, to satisfy a legal requirement that two-thirds of fund directors are elected rather than appointed. It held the meeting near its Arizona satellite office, far from its Philadelphia-area headquarters. Only 200 of its 20m clients showed up, trudging through metal detectors and tight security.

Vanguard may have been pleased by the small turnout. Among those dogged 200 who attended were representatives of an...

RANDY KULL, a businessman based in Illinois, sells traffic signs. His products have international appeal, with signs for anglophones (STOP), Spanish-speakers (ALTO) and horses (WHOA). But for some customers, he must stay local. When America’s Department of Transportation is involved, he must use American-made sign-mounting brackets, and fill in a form confirming their source. Mr Kull’s supplier in Arkansas is happy, but he himself is dubious. “We live in a global economy,” he scoffs. The weight of the evidence backs his instinctive scepticism.

To many, buying local seems sensible—wholesome, even. Keeping money close to home is supposed to foster thriving communities and generate jobs. To the administration of President Donald Trump, it is a source of national strength. Around the world, such sentiments are gaining ground. Global Trade Alert, a watchdog, has picked up 343 examples of new local-content requirements imposed since November 2008. In America, it estimates that the share...

SEEN from the continent, it just isn’t right. LCH, a firm mostly owned by the London Stock Exchange (LSE), dominates the clearing of interest-rate derivatives. Each day it clears $3.4trn-worth, counting both sides of a trade. (The simplest variety is a swap of fixed and floating rates, allowing counterparties to reduce or increase their exposure to changes in rates.) In euro-denominated derivatives, the biggest category after dollars, LCH’s market share comfortably exceeds 90%, according to Clarus Financial Technology, a research firm.

Eurex, the derivatives arm of Deutsche Börse, owner of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, wants to change that. So do European Union politicians and regulators, once Britain quits the EU. On November 20th Eurex’s clearing division said that so far around 20 banks, including lots of heavyweights, had joined a “partnership programme” to boost its interest-rate business. (The most notable absentees are Goldman Sachs and two big French banks, BNP Paribas and Société Générale.)

Though...

ECONOMISTS think of the opportunity cost of money as one reason to hold a bank deposit: rather than skulk under a mattress, cash could earn interest. In volatile, war-torn Afghanistan, neither option appeals. Money has to be kept secure somehow, but a bad bank might make off with its depositors’ money. In 2010 Kabul Bank collapsed after a spree of insider loans to shareholders, including a brother of the then president. A central-bank bail-out cost nearly 7% of GDP. Much of the nearly $1bn stolen has not been recovered.

A bank that customers trust, though, is in a strong position. So Afghanistan International Bank (AIB) does not pay any interest on its deposits, says Anthony Barned, its British chief executive. AIB was set up by the Asian Development Bank and private investors in 2004, and is the largest private bank in Afghanistan, holding $790m in deposits, around one-fifth of the country’s deposit base. It is also the most profitable.

As the only private institution with a dollar-clearing facility with big...

IN 2008, when she was in her mid-20s and sitting on a $500m inheritance, Liesel Pritzker Simmons asked her bankers about “impact investing”. They fobbed her off. “They didn’t understand what I meant and offered to screen out tobacco,” recalls the Hyatt Hotels descendant, philanthropist and former child film star. So she fired her bankers and advisers and set up her own family office, Blue Haven Initiative. It seeks investments that both offer market-rate returns and have a positive impact on society and the environment. “Financially it’s sensible risk mitigation,” she says. “Our philanthropy becomes far more efficient if we don’t need to undo damage done in our investment management.”

Such ideas are gaining ground, particularly among the young. Fans of “socially responsible investment” (SRI) hope that millennials, the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, will drag these concepts into the investment mainstream. SRI is a broad-brush term, that can be used to cover everything from...

Your extensible friend

IN 1997, two months after Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty, it acquired a cutting-edge payment technology. People could rush through turnstiles with a wave of their colourful Octopus cards—stored-value cards pre-loaded with cash. Its latest advance, however, is risibly low-tech. On October 30th Octopus launched an extensible pole with a plastic hand to help drivers pay at toll booths. Critics of Hong Kong’s cautious approach to fintech snorted in derision. Meanwhile, a government official was quoted as blaming Octopus for stifling the city’s shift to cashlessness. Both criticisms are unfair. Hong Kongers enthusiastically embrace electronic payments and do well from the fierce competition between different platforms.

The Octopus card, designed for journeys on Hong Kong’s trains, buses, trams and ferries, soon stretched its tentacles into shops. In 2016 the company generated revenues of HK$956m ($122m) for its owners (mostly...

THE one-percenters are now gobbling up more of the pie in America—that much is well known. This trend, though disconcerting, is not unique to the modern era. A new study, by Timothy Kohler of Washington State University and 17 others, finds that inequality may well have been rising for several thousand years, at least in some parts of the world. The scholars examined 63 archaeological sites and estimated the levels of wealth inequality in the societies whose remains were dug up, by studying the distributions of house sizes.

As a measure they used the Gini coefficient (a perfectly equal society would have a Gini coefficient of zero). It rose from about 0.2 around 8000BC in Jerf el-Ahmar, on the Euphrates in modern-day Syria, to 0.5 in around 79AD in Pompeii. Data on burial goods, though sparse, point to similar trends.

The researchers suggest agriculture is to blame. The nomadic lifestyle is not conducive to wealth accumulation. Only when humans switched to farming did...

Doug Jones has had crucial roles in many of the director’s projects; this is the first time he’s been the star — and a romantic hero at that.

Trevor Schoonmaker turns the Big Easy into a giant gallery, with Rashid Johnson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mark Dion and more across 17 venues.

With armored vehicles on streets, civilians fled a showdown between rival Moscow-backed political leaders in the breakaway Luhansk region.

An announcement by Myanmar and Bangladesh brings a vague commitment to return migrants who fled death and destruction in a military crackdown.