The Economist - Special reports

CHARLES DARWIN MARRIED his cousin, and may have regretted it. The great scientist’s experiments on plants later convinced him of the “evil effects” of persistent inbreeding. In 1870 he wrote to an MP, suggesting that the upcoming national census ask parents whether they were blood relatives. For, as he noted, consanguineous marriages were commonly said to produce children who suffered from “deafness and dumbness, blindness &c”.

Darwin’s request was turned down. Britain did not start keeping records of marriages between first cousins, nor did it ban the practice, as some American states were doing at the time. Instead, British society gradually changed so that marriage between cousins became undesirable, verging on unthinkable. The same is now happening across the world.

Data are patchy, but the trend is clear. In Jordan, 57% of marriages in 1990 were consanguineous, but by 2012 the figure had dropped to 35%. Surveys of Israeli Arabs suggest that 20% of marriages before 2000 were between first cousins, compared with 12...

CHARLES DARWIN MARRIED his cousin, and may have regretted it. The great scientist’s experiments on plants later convinced him of the “evil effects” of persistent inbreeding. In 1870 he wrote to an MP, suggesting that the upcoming national census ask parents whether they were blood relatives. For, as he noted, consanguineous marriages were commonly said to produce children who suffered from “deafness and dumbness, blindness &c”.

Darwin’s request was turned down. Britain did not start keeping records of marriages between first cousins, nor did it ban the practice, as some American states were doing at the time. Instead, British society gradually changed so that marriage between cousins became undesirable, verging on unthinkable. The same is now happening across the world.

Data are patchy, but the trend is clear. In Jordan, 57% of marriages in 1990 were consanguineous, but by 2012 the figure had dropped to 35%. Surveys of Israeli Arabs suggest that 20% of marriages before 2000 were between first cousins, compared with 12% in 2005-09. Consanguineous marriage has also declined in Pakistan, Turkey and south India. It seems to be growing nowhere except Qatar.

Health workers take credit for the decline. They have argued for years that consanguineous marriage increases the risk of genetic disease, on good evidence. One of the best studies is of...

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...

Appier experience

IN HOTEL BARS in many parts of Africa, foreign businessmen like to regale each other with tales about the difficulty of arranging even simple things like accommodation or a safe ride from the airport. The head of a big American investment bank recalls how he bagged the last available room in a swanky Lagos hotel, only for the door to fall off as he entered. When he complained, the receptionist said, “No problem” and sent up two burly guards to stand in the doorway all night. Your correspondent’s contribution to this fund of stories is about the disturbed night he spent in a brothel after unwittingly booking into a hotel with a reassuringly international franchise in its name.

Nowadays such mishaps are becoming rarer, thanks largely to the sharing economy. A business traveller can hail a car from the airport using a smartphone app and travel directly to an apartment in Lagos or Accra rented through Airbnb, at a fraction of the cost of the offerings...

TO FLY NORTH from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), is to look down on a country that has become hell. The dark shadow cast by the UN helicopter passes over mile after empty mile of green, fertile land. The few signs of former habitation—a homestead on top of a hill, the remains of a once-ploughed field—have been burned to the ground or overrun by bush. After an endless succession of conflicts, almost all the people have fled to refugee camps guarded by the UN.

There are many reasons why the CAR is in such a wretched state, but high among them is that it is Africa’s most remote country, with almost no connections to the outside world. Even ideas struggle to cross its borders. Fast internet and mobile-phone reception is available only in and around Bangui. Its people are largely illiterate. It is, in short, a country that technology has skipped over.

Yet the CAR is an exception. Across the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, countries are on the cusp of a tech-...

WITH ITS SNAZZY technology hubs and army of bright young programmers, Kenya can rightly claim to be east Africa’s tech startup nation. It was here that mobile money first took off, and it is here that off-grid solar power is making its biggest impact. Even the election in August was meant to be a showpiece of tech wizardry, with voting stations automatically beaming the results via mobile internet to a computer in the capital, Nairobi, to prevent tampering. But it turned out that about a quarter of the country’s 41,000 polling stations did not have mobile-phone reception and sent in incomplete results, leading to allegations of vote-rigging. That helped persuade the courts to order a re-run.

Most other countries are far worse placed. On average, not even one in two people in Africa has a mobile phone, and many have to walk for miles to get a signal. The economic costs of this low penetration are enormous: every 10% increase in mobile-phone penetration in poor countries speeds up GDP growth per person by 0.8-1.2 percentage points a year. And when people get mobile internet, the rate of growth bumps up again.

Apart from being useful in their own right, mobile phones enable a range of other innovations such as mobile money that improve lives and speed economic growth. A study in Kenya by Tavneet Suri of MIT and Billy Jack of Georgetown University found...

ALONG A WINDING road down the edge of an airport near Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, is an aeronautical version of a Mad Max world. An old UN cargo plane rusts in a field. Jammed up against fences are aeroplanes of various vintages and states of disassembly. “Airheads” (aviation enthusiasts) scrounge for parts to get their machines aloft again.

Just around the corner is one of the most modern aircraft assembly plants anywhere in the world. In it stand two brand new prototypes of the Advanced High Performance Reconnaissance Light Aircraft, or AHRLAC, designed to fill a gap in the market for a rugged aeroplane jam-packed with sensors that can patrol borders, look for poachers and drop guided weapons on insurgents.

This is not the first military aircraft designed in South Africa. During apartheid the country circumvented an arms embargo by building its own attack helicopters. But these planes are a private venture aimed at a niche in the export market. The firm that makes them...

Improving on peanuts

AT LUNCHTIME IN Mombasa, Kenya’s humid port city, groups of men gather in the shade for the day’s bunge la mwananchi (people’s parliament), where they debate the latest news and politics. Everyone takes his turn to discuss whether the local governor is any good, or whether a group of men arrested on charges of drug-smuggling should be extradited to America. Then the debate turns to economics. “Why should we export all of our tea to Britain?” asks one man. “It is because of the law of comparative advantage,” retorts another. “How will Kenya ever be able to catch up with the rich countries in Europe and America?” To this, nobody has an answer.

That tech and innovation can play a big role in making some countries richer than others is not in question. About half the differences in GDP per person between countries are due to differences in productivity. Countries that encourage their firms to innovate, and that invest in...

WHEN SATELLITES TRAIN their cameras onto Africa at night, it is almost as if they are peering back to an age before electricity. The rich world is awash with great glowing orbs for the main population centres and orange tentacles for the roads that link them. But apart from speckles of light around the biggest cities, much of Africa is dark.

Of all the measures of the continent’s poverty, few are starker than that about two-thirds of its people have no access to reliable electricity. The Africa Progress Panel (APP), a group of experts led by Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, puts the number of Africans without any power at 620m, most of them in villages and on farms. The panel found that in nine African countries fewer than one in five primary schools had lights. A study by the World Health Organisation found that about a quarter of clinics and hospitals in 11 African countries have no power of any kind, and many of the rest get it from generators that often break down or run out of...

WITH EMERALD-GREEN tea plantations stretching out as far as the eye can see, the town of Nandi Hills has its fortunes planted firmly in the rich, red soil of Kenya’s highlands. In the cool of a dark market, women traders surrounded by beans, mangos and bananas wait for custom. Bananas seem an uncomplicated crop, but Pauline, a middle-aged tea farmer who also grows fruit and vegetables, says she used to find it hard to know when to harvest and send them to market. They stay fresh on the tree for weeks, but ripen quickly once harvested. If she and several other farmers tried to sell them on the same day, there would be a glut and she would not even recover the cost of taking them on the half-hour journey. “Sometimes I would just bring them back to the farm and feed them to the animals,” she says. Yet on other days there might be no bananas available to buy at all.

This market failure, leaving both farmers and customers unhappy, is caused almost entirely by poor communications. It is also easily solved. 2KUZE, a simple e-commerce system devised by MasterCard with funding from the Gates Foundation, is now linking up thousands of farmers and traders in a virtual marketplace, using text messages on basic mobile phones. A trader might type in a request for honey that goes out to all the beekeepers in the area. Those with honey to sell will respond. A middleman who...

AT THE END of a long row of benches where young mothers wearily try to soothe their squirming babies is a clue to both the enormous challenge involved in reducing infant mortality in Africa and the huge potential for doing so. Perched on the edge of an examination table in the only clinic offering care in a community north of Nairobi is a small silver-coloured horn that looks a bit like a trumpet. Known as a Pinard horn, it is used to check the heartbeat of a baby in the womb. In the rich world the device, invented in 1895, was long ago replaced by doppler ultrasound machines, which do a much better job. Yet in many parts of Africa it remains in widespread use because it is cheap and does not need electrical power.

It is partly for want of better equipment that some of the world’s highest rates of infant mortality are found in African countries. The continent accounts for about two-thirds of all deaths relating to pregnancy and childbirth around the globe, even though it makes up only one-sixth...

Collared

FOR EACH OF the past three years South Africa has lost more than 1,000 rhinos to poachers, despite intensive efforts to protect them using armed rangers, drones and specially trained tracker dogs. Guarding rhinos is particularly difficult because they roam across vast areas of veld where poachers can hide easily. But two novel approaches using artificial intelligence may help rangers catch their hunters. The first was developed by a group of computer scientists who had previously used artificial intelligence to detect roadside bombers in Iraq and insurgents in Afghanistan. In South Africa they used machine learning to predict where rhinos were most likely to be feeding the following day. The computers also crunched historical data on poaching incidents to identify areas where they were likely to happen. Rangers and drones could then be sent to patrol in areas most likely to have both poachers and rhinos, says V.S. Subrahmanian, who worked on the project at the...

That’s going straight in my basket

NO COMPANY WANTS to replicate what happened to Hachette in 2014, when the publisher balked at Amazon’s terms. Suddenly its book shipments seemed to be delayed and Amazon was recommending titles from other publishers. The dispute ended with Hachette getting more control over pricing. But the deal showed the risks for producers of all kinds as online platforms gain strength.

The old system suited many businesses. Clothing manufacturers followed a predictable calendar for when goods would be produced and distributed. Giant makers of household products and food had to deal with stingy retailers such as Walmart, but they could also swat away smaller competitors with spending on expensive television ads.

E-commerce is changing all this. Companies that sell dresses and shoes to conventional retailers like Macy’s find them in turmoil, threatened both by online sellers and by nimbler bricks-and-mortar ones such as Zara. For...

ON AN AVERAGE morning a young urban professional anywhere in the world might wake up, check her social-media feed and order a cab on her mobile. While sitting in traffic, she might use her phone to purchase groceries and watch a video, and later to pay the driver and buy a coffee. Once at work, she might make an online payment to reimburse a friend for a concert ticket. So far, so normal. But if that young urbanite were living in China, every one of these activities could have been powered either by Alibaba or a company in which it has a stake.

E-commerce in China is sweeping the board. Last year online sales in China hit $366bn, almost as much as in America and Britain combined. Growth has slowed from its eye-popping pace of a few years ago, but Euromonitor predicts that online shopping’s share of total retail will rise to 24% by 2020; Goldman Sachs, whose forecast includes sales from one consumer to another, puts the figure at 31%. That will mean selling more to existing shoppers and gaining new ones in smaller cities and towns. About 80% of adults in China’s biggest cities already shop online.

Alibaba, the company leading this transition, makes most of its money from advertising. But it has permeated consumers’ lives in ways not yet seen in America or Europe. Westerners should picture a combination of Amazon, Twitter, eBay and PayPal, but broader....

WHEN AMERICA’S RETAIL bosses gathered in New York earlier this year for the annual shindig of their trade association, the National Retail Federation, there was much talk about new technology to improve the industry’s prospects, from sensors that read consumers’ facial expressions to machine-learning software that can optimise prices. The ghost at the banquet was the company that gave no presentations but made its presence felt everywhere: Amazon.

Traditional retailing has had a tough time lately. Traffic in shopping centres in Europe’s biggest markets has been declining. In America, which has about five times as much space in shopping centres per person as Britain, the pain is acute. Chains that were faltering even before Amazon’s ascent are now in even deeper trouble. Macy’s, a department store, last year said it would close 100 of its 728 shops. Fung Global Retail & Technology, a consultancy, expects nearly 10,000 stores in America to close this year, about 50% more than at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. And there will be more to come.

Shops used to compete by offering a combination of selection, price, service and convenience. E-commerce’s most obvious edge is in selection and convenience. Even the biggest store cannot hold as many items as Amazon can offer. Walmart conquered America by saving consumers money; Amazon is doing the...