A game of rounders
The S&P 500 index chalked up 3,453 days without entering bearterritory,definedasa drop of at least 20%. Many declared it a record for a stock- market bull run. Others ques- tioned that, maintaining that the market stayed just out of bear territory in 1990—and that the 4,494 days from December 1987 to March 2000 constitute the true record-holder.
Italy’s hardline interior min- ister, Matteo Salvini, refused to allow 177 refugees off an Italian ship that had rescued them at sea. In his short time in office Mr Salvini has built a rep- utation for being tough on migrants. He said he would give permission for the refu- gees to disembark once he received assurances that they would be distributed among all European Union countries.
A hat with no rabbit
With somebody else in charge, Venezuela might still have a chance. A competent president would keep parts of Mr Madu- ro’s therapy, such as the devaluation, and add new remedies. Business would be freed from price controls and given legal se- curity. The bolívar would be issued by a truly independent central bank, or perhaps replaced by the dollar. Venezuela would gain external credibility and financial support by nego- tiating an adjustment agreement with the IMF. It would start serious negotiations to restructure its foreign debt.
Mr Cohen’s plea has made the president of the United States an unindicted co-conspirator in a pair of federal crimes. That makes this a sad week for America. But it is a shameful one for the Republican Party, whose members remain more dedicated to minimising Mr Trump’s malfeasance than to the ideal that nobody, not even the president, is above the law.
The walls of nations
International law categorises migrants either as refugees, who are entitled to sanctuary, or as economic migrants, who have no right to go anywhere that does not want them. Yet the dis- tinctions are blurry. Poor countries next to war zones receive huge influxes, while rich countries try to shirk their obliga- tions. And since rich countries admit virtually no economic migrants from poor countries unless they have exceptional skills or family ties, many of them try their luck by posing as ref- ugees. It does not help that states have different rules on who is a refugee. Or that they struggle to send home those who are de- nied asylum, not least because many of their countries refuse to take them back.
This mess feeds disaffection in the West, and it is a waste. The act of moving from a poor country to a rich one makes workers dramatically more productive (see Briefing). A world with more migration would be substantially richer. The snag is that the biggest benefits of moving accrue to the migrants themselves, while the power to admit them rests with voters in rich countries. Fair enough: democratic accountability is vested largely in national governments. Yet most Western countries, struggling with ageing populations and shrinking workforces, need more migrants. So they have to find ways to make migration policy work for everyone.
Wouldn’t it be nice
The biggest worry about immigration is that it might undermine the very thing that makes it attractive. Poor countries tend to have bad institutions. Rich countries have good ones—that is why they are rich. Poor people move to rich countries to enjoy the benefits of good institutions. But what if so many of them move that they swamp those institutions, replacing the norms of Switzerland, say, with those of Nigeria?
Another way of putting this is: how many newcomers can rich countries ab- sorb? American history suggests: a huge amount, over time. Its population has swollen from some 5m (including 900,000 black slaves) in 1800 to 320m of many col- ours today. Mr Clemens and Lant Pritchett of Harvard devised a model to see how much immigration would be necessary to make rich-country institutions start to be- come more like those in poor countries, ex- trapolating from what can be observed to- day. Their answer was: far more migration than is currently plausible. The cultures of rich countries are both strong and attrac- tive. Migrants typically move to the West because they like it. By and large, they obey its laws and adopt many of its customs, and its institutions remain strong.
A lack of staff and surplus of prisoners are to blame for this dramatic deterio- ration. Between 2010 and 2015 the prison service’s budget was cut by a quarter. It shed 27% of its staff during that period. But the prison population, now about 83,000, remained stable. After realising how badly the staff cuts had affected order in prisons, the government launched a recruitment ef- fort, and has since rehired about half the number of staff originally laid off. A leaked government report into the causes of a riot in Birmingham prison in December 2016 found that officers were “worn down by the chronic staffing shortages.”
Despite G4S’s failure in Birmingham, there is little evidence that the 13 other pri- vately run prisons in England and Wales perform worse than the government-run ones. Judging by the Ministry of Justice’s annual performance ratings, they do pretty well. Most meet the majority of their targets. Two, Ashfield and Dovegate, are “exceptional performers”. Of the gov- ernment-run prisons, fewer than half meet their targets, and a smaller proportion are judged exceptional.
However, most of these privately run prisons have been built since the early 1990s, making them easier to manage than the ancient jails left to the public sector. Bir- mingham was one of the few older prisons in private hands. G4S was chosen to run it because it had made a decent job of man- aging its other jails; in its first three years in charge it seemed to be doing a good job. In the end, though, it proved incapable.
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