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Family planning in ChinaTwo little, too lateChina has replaced its “one-child policy” with a two-child one. It should stop dictating family size altogetherFOR more than 35 years, the Chinese Communist Party has governed the world’s most-populous nation by means of a thinly disguised threat: the country could become rich only if most couples limited themselves to having no more than one child. If they disobeyed, women were forced to undergo abortions; parents were subject to fines equivalent to several years’ income and sometimes dismissed from their jobs; in the countryside, the homes of poor peasants who could not afford the penalties were occasionally stripped of anything of value and then knocked down. The “one-child policy”, as the benighted approach to the country’s development was known, became synonymous with some of the most brutal aspects of the party’s rule. The bitter irony is that China’s problem today is too few babies, not too many.On October 29th the party belatedly decided to switch to a two-child policy. It had already been allowing this for some couples—for example, if one of the parents was an only child. Easing up a bit more, it reasoned, would help slow the country’s rapid ageing. More children would (eventually) mean more people to look after the elderly—a looming problem in a country with only a rudimentary welfare system. Once again,however, the party has miscalculated. In 1979, when it introduced the one-child policy, it believed that coercion was the only way to ensure that population growth did not become unsustainable. The party has since claimed that the policy has helped prevent 400m births.In fact, there is little evidence to ba ck this claim. China’s birth rate had been falling rapidly since the early 1970s with the help of little more than education campaigns. The birth rate continued to fall under the new policy, but other countries have seen similar declines without resorting to cruelty and oppression. Their experience suggests that the more important factors behind China’s lower birth rate were rising female participation in the workforce, improvements in education, later marriages and the rapidly increasing cost of education and housing. The main effect of the one-child policy was to foster egregious human-rights abuses against the minority who ignored it.By that measure, the new policy is also misguided. Some couples may feel encouraged to have two children, but it is unlikely that the overall birth rate—now well below the level needed to keep the population from falling—will climb by much. This is clear from the lukewarm response to previous changes allowing couples to have two children in certain circumstances. A generation has grown up indoctrinated in the belief that China has “too many people”. Except for the very rich, most prefer to use their family’s resources (increasingly stretched by the demands of theelderly) to give one child the best opportunities.A bitter pillBizarrely, the party still believes that coercion remains necessary. Those who have had two children in violation of the previous policy will still have to pay off their fines. It is likely that those who have three children will be punished. There is no evidence that lifting these controls would result in a crippling population surge. So the party’s insistence on maintaining them appears mostly a way of demonstrating power and saving face—as well as the jobs of the 1m-strong army of family-planning officials, who thrive on issuing fines.The party would struggle to admit that the world’s biggest attempt at demographic engineering has failed. But that is what it must do by lifting the remaining restrictions. Not for the sake of boosting the birth rate—it may well be too late for that. Rather because, after forcing so many Chinese to suffer to such little effect, a disastrous policy deserves to be abolished.Last Act in the MideastPatrick BazDespite the Libyan intervention, the era of Western meddling in theregion is coming to an end.Ever since Britain and France set out to dismember the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, the West has been engaged in an incoherent, haphazard, episodic, but more or less relentless effort to impose its will on the Middle East. Methods have varied. Sometimes the “infidels” have employed overt force. At other times they have relied on covert means, worked through proxies, or recruited local puppets.The purposes offered to justify Western exertions have likewise varied. With empire falling into disfavor, the pursuit of imperial aims has required conceptual creativity. Since 1945 resistance to communist subversion, a professed antipathy for brutal dictators, support for international law, and an enthusiasm for spreading freedom have all been pressed into service (albeit selectively) to legitimize outside intervention. Today’s “responsibility to protect” extends this tradition, offering the latest high-minded raison d’être for encroaching on the sovereignty of Middle Eastern states whenever the locals behave in ways that raise Western ire.Underlying this great variety of methods and professed motivation, two things have remained constant across the decades. The first is an assumption: that Arabs, Persians, Afghans, and the like are incapable of managing their own affairs, leaving the West with no choice but to act in loco parentis, setting rules and enforcing discipline. The second is aconviction: that somehow, some way, the deft application of Western power will eventually fix whatever ails the region.At first Britain served as principal enforcer. Roughly since the Suez crisis of 1956, the lead role has fallen to the United States. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, Americans hesitated to become too deeply involved in places that seemingly offered little but grief. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s—not so incidentally, decades when the U.S. became highly dependent on imported oil—that ambivalence diminished. With the promulgation of the Carter doctrine in 1980, it disappeared altogether and the American instinct for activism kicked into high gear.The results? As with the British, so with the Americans: an endless series of plots, alarms, excursions, and interventions ensued. Indeed, to combine first British and then American efforts to pacify the Middle East into a single seamless narrative is to describe an epic march to folly. Despite stupendous Western expenditures—the United States spent trillions trying to decide the fate of Iraq alone—the region as a whole has remained unpacified, untamed, unstable, and unpredictable. And now the ongoing Arab uprising has demonstrated that the people of the Middle East have an organic capacity to engineer change themselves,demolishing the patronizing notion that they (and by extension their neighbors) need outside oversight, guidance, or protection.Yet thanks to Muammar Gaddafi’s heavy-handed attempt to crush those seeking his ouster, the United States and its allies are now elbowing their way back onstage. To supplement the Carter doctrine (and smooth off the Bush doctrine’s rough edges), we now have the Obama doctrine, elaborated by the president in last week’s speech to the nation, which treats the plight of civilians caught in the path of war as a renewed argument for lobbing Western bombs and missiles, if not launching full-fledged invasions.Will our bombs be enough to topple Gaddafi? Are recent defections of high-level Libyan officials a sign of the government’s imminent collapse? Or will the U.S. and its allies eventually have to send in ground troops to amplify the work of the covert operatives who have already been providing support to the rebels for weeks? As important as these questions seem to us now, the answers will not change the underlying dynamic of the situation. Gaddafi’s fall (assuming it occurs) will close a chapter in Libyan history but won’t open a new chapter in the history of the Middle East. Libya is an outl ier. It won’t be and can’t be a bellwether. Apart from enabling policymakers in Washington, London, and Paris to reclaim a sense of self-importance, Western intervention in Libya willhave little effect on the drama now unfolding in the Middle East. Pundits can talk of the United States shaping history. The truth is that history is shaping itself, while we are left to bear witness.The result is that for the moment serious policy—as opposed to gestures—has become an impossibility. That leaves Americans in a thoroughly un-American position: they must be patient, waiting on events to ripen. In due course the dust will settle.At that time, prudence will dictate that the West make what it can of the outcome, offering support and assistance to Arab governments that share our interests and values and withholding them from those that do not. The big story is this: the century-long battle to control the Middle East is ending. We lost. They won. No amount of high-tech ordnance can alter the outcome.U.S. presidential candidates shouldn’t put globalization inretreatBy Robert J. SamuelsonJeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric (2015 revenue: $117 billion), gave an interesting speech the other day that illuminates some pressing questions about the future of globalization. This involves politics as much as economics. It should be no surprise that the three remaining major presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump) are no fans of globalization.Most people consider globalization an economic phenomenon, signifying the spread of technology, the growth of trade, and the threats to U.S. workers and firms from many sources — low wages, manipulated exchange rates, government subsidies and pure competitive advantage. It is all of these things but also much more. If there was an organizing principle to U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War, it was globalization.The general idea was that, as countries traded with each other, their populations would become richer —in poor countries, middle classes would emerge —and nations’ interests would become intertwined. The threat of major wars would recede, because middle-class societies prefer commerce to conflict. The new world order would have tensions and feuds, but they would be manageable precisely because they occurred in a context of shared interests.With hindsight, we know that this vision was simplistic and flawed. Expectations were unrealistic. Three defects stand out.First, globalization overestimated its capacity to suppress ethnic, religious and nationalistic strife. For proof, see the Middle East ablaze.Second, it optimistically presumed strong and steady economic growth. Markets were assumed to be self-correcting, so slumps and stock declines — while inevitable — would be short and mild. The devastating 2008-2009 financial crisis and Great Recession punctured this premise.Finally, the economic benefits of more trade and open financial markets were considered so obvious that globalization would enjoy strong political support. Not so. It represents a loss of national sovereignty. Countries accept this when the rewards —prosperity and rising living standards —seem high. When gains fade, the bargain becomes less tenable.Enter GE’s Immelt. “Globalization is being attacked as never before,” he told MBA graduates of New York University’s Stern School of Business. “This is not just true for the U.S., but everywhere.” At another point, he said: “We are having a raucous [U.S.] presidential election, one where every candidate is protectionist.”So GE must defend its interests. “Wi th globalization, it is time for a bold pivot,” Immelt said. “We will localize production.” To the extent possible, production will occur where the company makes sales. With 420 factories worldwide, he said, GE has “tremendous flexibility” in locating prod uction. For the United States: “We will produce for the U.S. in the U.S., but our exports may decline.”Superficially, this seems reasonable. We produce where we consume; so do other countries. In fact, it’s a formula for U.S. economic stagnation, because most of GE’s growth is happening in foreign markets. When Immelt joined GE in 1982, 80 percent of the company’s sales occurred in the United States. Now, 70 percent originate elsewhere. If othermultinationals copy GE (which seems plausible), there will be a slow-motion shrinkage of their U.S. operations.Similarly, policies backed by the presidential candidates, including opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, may backfire. The candidates falsely promise to strengthen the economy by “de-globalizing.”In practice, just the opposite may be true. Consider Trump’s proposed45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. No one should think this would stimulate much added production to the United States.“U.S. companies would not start producing more apparel and footwear in the United States, nor would they start assembling consumer electronics domestically,” writes economist Douglas Irwin of D artmouth College in a forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. “Instead, production would shift from China to other low-wage developing countries in Asia, such as Vietnam.” Meanwhile, China would almost certainly retaliate against U.S. exports. The big loser would be the United States.There would also be broader political repercussions. “Trump’s ‘America First’ policies would reinforce the drift away from U.S. global leadership—in ways that would benefit China,” my Post colleague David Ignatius recently wrote. Clinton’s and Sanders’s trade policies merit a similar verdict.Just because globalization is flawed doesn’t mean that its nationalist substitute is superior. Creeping protectionism reduces the efficienciescreated by large international markets. This would limit the possibility of lowering prices of traded goods and services. It would also foster more trade conflicts as countries aided local firms with more subsidies and protectionism.For all its shortcomings, globalization has contributed to a huge reduction in worldwide poverty over the past quarter-century. We ought to be more realistic about its limits and should police its vulnerabilities—particularly the danger of financial breakdowns. But as an organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy, we shouldn’t abandon it until we have something better. We don’t.What does post-truth mean for a philosopher?Sean Coughlan"Post-truth" has come to describe a type of campaigning that has turned the political world upside down.Fuelled by emotive arguments rather than fact-checks, it was a phrase that tried to capture the gut-instinct, anti-establishment politics that swept Donald Trump and Brexit supporters to victory.Oxford Dictionaries made it the word of the year, defining it as where "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".But what does this new world mean for academics and scientists whosewhole purpose is trying to establish objective facts?AC Grayling, public thinker, master of the New College of the Humanities, and Remain campaigner, views the post-truth world with undisguised horror.The philosopher, awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours, warns of the "corruption of intellectual integrity" and damage to "the whole fabric of democracy".But where does he think the post-truth world has come from?"The world changed after 2008," says Prof Grayling - politics since the financial crash has been shaped by a "toxic" growth in income inequality. As well as the gap between rich and poor, he says a deep sense of grievance has grown among middle-income families, who have faced a long stagnation in earnings.With a groundswell of economic resentment, he says, it is not difficult to "inflame" emotions over issues such as immigration and to cast doubt on mainstream politicians.Another key ingredient in the post-truth culture, says Prof Grayling, has been the rise of social media.It's not the soundbite any more, but the "i-bite", he says, where strong opinion can shout down evidence."The whole post-truth phenomenon is about, 'My opinion is worth more than the facts.' It's about how I feel about things."It's terribly narcissistic. It's been empowered by the fact that you can publish your opinion. You used to need a pot of paint and a balaclava to publish your opinion, if you couldn't get a publisher."But all you need now is an iPhone. Everyone can publish their opinion - and if you disagree with me, it's an attack on me and not my ideas. "The fact that you can muscle your way on to the front row and be noticed becomes a kind of celebrity.""Fake news" on social media became part of the post-election debate in the US - and Prof Grayling warns of an online culture that can't distinguish between fact and fiction."Put the words 'did the' into Google and one of the first things you see is, 'Did the Holocaust happen?' and the links will take you to claims that it didn't," he says.This process is "corrosive of our public conversation and our democracy" and he warns of a culture where a few claims on Twitter can have the same credibility as a library full of research.Appropriately for a philosopher, he identifies post-modernism and relativism as the intellectual roots "lurking in the background" of post-truth."Everything is relative. Stories are being made up all the time - there is no such thing as the truth. You can see how that has filtered its way indirectly into post-truth."He says this has unintentionally "opened the door" to a type of politics untroubled by evidence.But hasn't this always been part of the battle of ideas?Prof Grayling tells the story of Adlai Stevenson, the unsuccessful liberal contender in the 1952 US presidential election, who was told: "Mr Stevenson, every thinking person in America is going to vote for you. And he said: 'Great, but I need a majority.'"But the philosopher argues that there has been a significant shift beyond the boundaries of election spinning and into something fundamentally different.He places his argument into a historical perspective, saying the international landscape is more like the volatile, intolerant era before World War Two."There are some really uncomfortable parallels with the 1930s," he says. "These guys have realised you don't need facts, you just lie."。