How to get rich in the 21st century - The Economist | Xi Jinping and China face another tough year - The Economist | Israel’s Supreme Court strikes back - The Economist | A clash over Trump’s disqualification tests the Supreme Court

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How to get rich in the 21st century - The Economist

By 2050 there will be a new crop of economic powers—if things go to plan. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, wants his country’s GDP per person to surpass the World Bank’s high-income threshold three years before then. Indonesia’s leaders reckon that they have until the mid-century mark (when an ageing population will start to drag on growth) to catch up with rich countries. 2050 is also the scheduled finale for Muhammad Bin Salman’s reforms. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince wants to transform his country from an oil producer into a diversified economy. Other smaller countries, including Chile, Ethiopia and Malaysia, have schemes of their own.

These vary widely, but all have something in common: breathtaking ambition. India’s officials think that GDP growth of 8% a year will be required to meet Mr Modi’s goal—1.5 percentage points more than the country has managed on average over the past three decades. Indonesia will need growth of 7% a year, up from an average of 4.6% over the same period. Saudi Arabia’s non-oil economy will have to grow by 9% a year, up from an average of 2.8%. Although 2023 was a good year for all three, none experienced growth at this sort of pace. Very few countries have maintained such growth for five years, let alone for thirty.

Nor is there an obvious recipe for runaway growth. To boost prosperity, economists typically prescribe liberalising reforms of the sort that have been advanced by the IMF and the World Bank since the 1980s under the label of the “Washington Consensus”. Among the most widely adopted are sober fiscal policies and steady exchange rates. Today technocrats urge looser competition rules and the privatisation of state-owned firms. Yet these proposals are ultimately concerned with removing barriers to growth, rather than supercharging it. Indeed, William Easterly of New York University has calculated that, even among the 52 countries which had policies most consistent with the Washington Consensus, GDP growth only averaged 2% a year from 1980 to 1998. Mr Modi and Prince Muhammad are unwilling to wait—they want to develop, fast.

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Xi Jinping and China face another tough year - The Economist

EVERY YEAR on December 31st a glimpse is revealed of an impenetrable world. On Chinese state television, Xi Jinping delivers his new-year address to the nation. China’s netizens pore over the footage: on no other occasion do they get to see their leader sitting at what purports to be his desk. They swap analysis of Mr Xi’s collection of photographs, displayed on bookshelves behind him. And they parse his ponderously delivered words. “Along the way, we are bound to encounter headwinds,” he said this year. Many will see that as an understatement of China’s current woes.

Just over a year ago, Mr Xi abandoned his strict “zero-covid” measures, which had been in force for nearly three years and had led to ever more frequent, brutally enforced lockdowns. But the country did not experience what Mr Xi described in his speech as a “smooth transition” out of that period. China’s under-vaccinated population was ill-prepared: according to some estimates, well over 1m people died of the disease as the country staggered back to normality (officials admitted to only a fraction of that number). The economy failed to gather momentum. Youth unemployment soared and the property market continued to slump. Foreign investors in China grew more nervous. The headwinds were fierce. The coming year looks hardly less troubled.

Mr Xi will try to put on a brave face. In mid-January he will send an unusually large delegation to schmooze with plutocrats at the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of businesspeople, politicians and celebrities in Davos, Switzerland. Reuters, a news agency, says the team will be led by China’s prime minister, Li Qiang—the highest-ranking Chinese official to attend in person since Mr Xi himself showed up in 2017. Mr Li is a protégé of Mr Xi who got the job in March 2023 after serving as party leader in Shanghai. He impressed foreigners there with his business-friendly ways.

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Israel’s Supreme Court strikes back - The Economist

AT ANY OTHER time it would have provoked a constitutional crisis. For much of 2023 Israelis had taken to the streets to protest against the government’s efforts to weaken the power of judges to overrule the government, a step many saw as an attack on Israel’s democracy. Yet when on January 1st Israel’s highest court struck down the judicial reform law passed just six months earlier, most Israelis shrugged. Since Hamas attacked in October, killing or kidnapping some 1,400 people and sparking an ongoing war in Gaza, Israelis have had bigger issues to worry about. Even so, the ruling is a significant blow to the right-wing government led by Binyamin Netanyahu, and its ramifications will be felt once the fighting in Gaza has ended.

The court’s former president, Esther Hayut, in one of the last rulings of her tenure which ended in October, argued that this was one of the “rare cases where the beating heart of a constitution…is harmed”. She was referring to an amendment passed in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, last July, which all but eliminated the court’s ability to overturn government decisions that judges deemed were unreasonable.

While only a bare majority, eight of the court’s fifteen judges, ruled to nullify the legislation itself, there was an additional ruling of even greater significance. Twelve of the judges agreed that, in principle, the Supreme Court has the power to strike down changes to Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, in “rare and extreme cases [where] the Knesset has overstepped its constitutional powers”.

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A clash over Trump’s disqualification tests the Supreme Court - The Economist

THE 14th AMENDMENT is no stranger to America’s Supreme Court. Many of the most controversial questions to reach the justices—from abortion rights to affirmative action—turn on interpretations of “due process” or the promise of “equal protection” found in the Reconstruction-era text. But 156 years after the amendment was ratified, the court now has its first occasion to grapple with a clause that some believe disqualifies Donald Trump from becoming president again.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars those who have sworn an oath to uphold the constitution from holding federal or state office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the constitution or “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”. This rule was designed to keep former Confederate rebels from the levers of power after the Civil War. Few dispute that it applies with equal force to insurrectionists today. The open question is whether Mr Trump’s attempts to secure himself a second term despite losing the 2020 election—culminating in the riot at the Capitol three years ago—count as an insurrection and so disqualify him from trying to recapture the White House the old-fashioned way.

A flurry of conflicting answers to this question has emerged in recent weeks. On December 19th the Colorado Supreme Court released a ruling that removes Mr Trump from the ballot for the state’s Republican primary on March 5th. Nine days later, Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, announced that Mr Trump’s role in the January 6th attack made him ineligible to be listed on her state’s primary ballot. (Both decisions are on hold, for now, as appeals proceed.) Ms Bellows’s ruling followed an administrative proceeding in which several residents of the state challenged Mr Trump’s inclusion. She wrote that, although no one in her position “has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access” stemming from a claim under Section 3, “no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection”. She has a duty, she wrote, to ensure that all candidates appearing on the ballot “are qualified for the office they seek”.

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