The Blob

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The rise and rise of the ‘tantric sector’

For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this in adherence to Sutherland’s Law – not the excellent 1970s BBC series featuring Iain Cuthbertson, but a rule of my own devising which states that you should always travel from the smallest airport or railway station possible.  Recently, much of the station car-park was closed so a colossal pedestrian footbridge could be constructed 50 yards away; this replaced a pedestrian level crossing at the same spot, which lay along a footpath connecting one part of Otford to another. In 25 years, I have seen pedestrians using it on three occasions. Yet the construction of the bridge must have cost well over £1 million. This seemed insane.

Friday

Leon Hadar

Why can’t we fire the Blob?

From our US edition

Let’s say that two decades ago you were wondering where to invest your savings for retirement and the money that was supposed to pay for your kids’ college years, and decided to consult with your financial adviser known to be a market wizard. Let’s call him Tom Friedman. 'Don’t pay attention to all the bullish talk about Steve Jobs and Apple', Friedman said. 'I would bet all my money on two of the market’s crown jewels, Alta Vista and Enron'. Well, to make a very long story short, you are now spending your retirement years in a trailer park in Nevada, while your son is dealing drugs and your daughter works for an escort service to pay for their college studies.

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Robert D. Kaplan

The return of the Blob

From our US edition

For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism. Not only were Democrats barred from the Trump administration, but so were the most talented of Republicans who, having assumed Trump would lose, declared themselves in opposition to him and thus disqualified themselves from work in his administration.