The five biggest market surprises of 2023 - The Economist | China is stoking a controversy in order to influence Taiwan’s election - The Economist | America’s new policing tech isn’t cutting crime - The Economist | The working-from-home illusion fades

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The five biggest market surprises of 2023 - The Economist

Financial markets will always produce surprises. After all, by the time a consensus has formed, people will have bought or sold accordingly. The move has already happened; the future has something else in store.

Even accounting for this, investors have had an unusually difficult time in 2023. The year started with broad agreement that 2022’s soaring interest rates would cause recessions in much of the world. Not only was this baked into asset prices—it also turned out to be wrong.

Yet it was not just economic assumptions that were overturned. Here are the other big market surprises of 2023.

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China is stoking a controversy in order to influence Taiwan’s election - The Economist

ALICE OU DOES not mince words when criticising education officials in Taiwan. She has accused them of turning young people into “moral dwarves and historical idiots”. She says the government’s actions amount to “self-castration”. Ms Ou, a Chinese-literature teacher at the prestigious Taipei First Girls’ High School, is angry that the state has reduced the number of recommended classical Chinese texts in the high-school curriculum. She believes this is an effort to “de-sinicise” students.

Ms Ou’s opinion, first aired at a press conference in early December, went viral. It quickly became part of a narrative promoted by the Chinese government and Taiwan’s opposition parties. Both accuse Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which takes a defiant stance towards China, of trying to stamp out Chinese culture. The messaging comes as Taiwan prepares for a presidential election on January 13th. The outcome could lead to a big change in Taiwan’s posture towards China, which sees the island as part of its territory.

In the two weeks after Ms Ou’s moment in the spotlight, China’s state-affiliated media and social-media accounts published more than 200 articles about her comments, according to the Taiwan Information Environment Research Centre. “Hear the cry of sorrow and anger from Taiwan’s education sector,” said Xinhua, China’s state news agency, in an indicative piece. Ma Ying-jeou, a former Taiwanese president and elder statesman in the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party, praised Ms Ou’s “moral courage”.

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America’s new policing tech isn’t cutting crime - The Economist

ON MAY 31ST 2020 the life of Michael Williams, a 66-year-old from the south side of Chicago, fell apart. That evening Mr Williams picked up a young hitchhiker in his neighbourhood. A few blocks later, the young man was shot, apparently through the passenger window of the car. Mr Williams rushed him to hospital; two days later the man died, and a few weeks after that Mr Williams was arrested. He spent the next 11 months in the Cook County jail, accused of murder. But before the case could come to trial, it was thrown out, when the public prosecutor in the Chicago area decided to withdraw its main evidence. Since last year Mr Williams has been suing the City of Chicago, alleging that the city’s police department deliberately relied on a case it knew was flimsy.

That evidence was from Shotspotter, an “acoustic gunfire-detection” system supplied by SoundThinking, a firm based in California. Shotspotter automatically recognises and analyses the sound of gunshots from a network of microphones spread across cities—Chicago has by far the largest network in America. By triangulating the recordings it can, in theory, pinpoint where a gun has been fired. The idea is that this will help police officers respond more quickly to shootings, and find out about shootings that go unreported.

Chicago spends over $10m a year for the service. But it is controversial. Cases like that of Mr Williams are partly why. Before his election in May, Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s left-wing mayor, promised to end the city’s contract (as mayor he has extended it, seemingly by accident).

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The working-from-home illusion fades - The Economist

A gradual reverse migration is under way, from Zoom to the conference room. Wall Street firms have been among the most forceful in summoning workers to their offices, but in recent months even many tech titans—Apple, Google, Meta and more—have demanded staff show up to the office at least three days a week. For work-from-home believers, it looks like the revenge of corporate curmudgeons. Didn’t a spate of studies during the covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?

Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received much attention when it was published in 2020 by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, then both doctoral students at Harvard University. They found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline.

The researchers had not made a mistake. Rather, they received more precise data, including detailed work schedules. Not only did employees answer fewer calls when remote, the quality of their interactions suffered. They put customers on hold for longer. More also phoned back, an indication of unresolved problems.

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