Economist, Aug 24, 2019

choi

(1) Banyan | Fawning Frenzy; When India's government abuses power, the media don't roll over. They cheer.

Note: Rolling over means submissiveness like a dog doing the act.

(2)  Macau | Betting on Red; The former Portuguese territory shrugs off the turmoil in Hong Kong.

(3) Insurance and the poor | Under Cover. Insurance is most useful for the poor. How can they be persuaded to buy it?
("Shree Kant Kumar, of VimoSEWA, the insurance arm of SEWA, a women's union and microfinance provider. * * * Based in Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat, Mr Kant * * * says Indian small farmers cover their risks as their ancestors did -- by hoarding produce [which is a mass noun] and having more children, to look after them, they hope, when they are old. * * * This [mobile phone adoption] makes it easier to reach the unbanked, both to market insurances to them and to manage and even pay claims [to the insured]. * * * In selling insurance to the poor, tree things seem most important: trust, price and ease. The most important way of establishing trust is the demonstration effect * * * [using SEWA as an example:] to make payments public, large claims, for example, are paid at village meetings.  Correspondingly, where the claims are not paid, or met in full, insurance can soon get a bad name, often unjustifiably. * * * But it is hard for them [insurance companies willing to deal with the poor] to make large margins. * * *Many [insurance companies in this category] also find it hard to achieve the volume of business that would bring economies of scale")

(4)  Productivity | Can Get Some Satisfaction; How to keep your customers happy.
("A HAPPY CUSTOMER  is a repeat customer, or so the saying goes. But how can a business keep clients happy? The answer, according to a recent study, is to treat employees well, Glassdoor, a website which let [sic; should be lets] workers assess employers [does the study] * * * Companies with high scores for both employee and customer satisfaction include Southwest Airlines, TraderHJoe's, a grocer, and Hilton Hotel. The link is less strong among manufacturing and energy firms")

(5) Foreign investment and wages | Unequal Partnerships, who wins when multinational companies move in?
https://www.economist.com/financ ... -foreign-investment
("Bradley Setzler and Felix Tintelnot of the University of Chicago * * * find that when someone hops between two American-owned firms, their wages barely budge. But when they skip from a domestically [American-]owned one to a foreign one, their wage go up by around 7% [but foreign firms are not the same, see later]. And when they jump from a foreign-own firm to a domestic one, their wages sag.  Nessrs Setzler and Tintelnot also find that the boost to wages from working at [moving to] foreign-owned firm is skewed in favor of the highly skilled. * * * [and that] people of the bottom 10% of the skill distribution saw no pay premium at all for working at a foreign-owned company.  The researchers also ask whether a firm's country of origin might matter for the wage premium to offer. Unsurprisingly, richer home countries ten to mean fatter American pay packets. Companies from Norway and New Zealand [the paper does not specify, but Economist chart shows 15% and 13% premiums, respectively] pay best, those from Mexico and Taiwan give barely any premium. Only one country seems to offer a pay penalty (see chart) [China]")

Note: Bradley Setzler and Felix Tintelnot, The Effects of Foreign Multinationals on Workers and Firms in the United States. NBER, August 2019, at page 23 (Working Paper 26149)
https://www.nber.org/papers/w26149.pdf
("We find substantial heterogeneity across countries. The Northern European countries of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as Ireland, and New Zealand have large firm premiums, above 11 percent for the average firm. Western and Southern European countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK are joined by Australia, Israel, and Japan with firm premiums above 7 percent (approximately the overall average) but less than 11 percent. Countries with below average firm premiums, but still above 3 percent, include Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey. Small positive firm premiums are estimated for Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Taiwan,
and Venezuela, while a negative 4 percent premium is estimated for China") (emphasis original).

(6) Johnson | Everyday Superheroes; A new book spells out the magic of language.
("a new book, 'Language Unlimited' by David Adger of Queen Mary University [Queen Mary University of London (QMUL): 1785- ; named after Mary of Teck (wife of George V and mother of Edward VIII); public), the president of Linguistics Association of Great Britain. * * * The book's first, and strongest, claim is that human language is different from animal communication not just in scope, but in kind. Most important, it is hierarchical and nested in structure. A highly trained bonobo called Kanzi can obey commands such as 'Give water [to] Rose.' But Kanzi does no better than random chance when told to 'Give water and lighter to Rose.' Meanwhile, a two-year-old child tested alongside Kanzi quickly intuits that two nouns can make up a noun phrase, tucked as a direct object into a verb phrase, which in turn is part of a sentence.  This 'recursive' structure is key to syntax.  The second claim is that language is innate, not merely an extension of general human intelligence. Deaf pupils at a school in Nicaragua, having never shared a language with anyone before, created a grammatically ornate sign language on their own. A few deaf children in a mexican family [of indigenous or Mayan descent] devised a rich sign system with complex grammatical features found in spoken tongues: in their 'homesign,' nouns are preceded by a 'classifier,' a sign indicating their type, just as they sometimes are in Chinese")   (The pair of brackets containing to "to" is in the original.)

Note:
(a) recursion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion
(section 3 In language)
(b) I find the Mexican family but fail to find an example of that sign language where a classifier is used. So I do not know what classifiers are used in that system. Here is Chinese classifier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_classifier
(The modern Chinese varieties make frequent use of what are called classifiers or measure words 量词)