The Economist explains

To mark the publication of “Go Figure”, a collection of The Economist’s explainers and daily charts, the editors of this blog solicited ideas on Facebook and Twitter. This week we publish five explainers suggested by our readers, who will each receive a copy of the book.   

THE first artists emerged in the Ice Age, when humans moved out of the eastern Mediterranean and into the rich central European plain with its plentiful supply of food. Initially they painted what they saw around them—people, animals, hunting—as scenes depicted in ochre and mud on the walls of caves.

To mark the publication of "Go Figure", a collection of The Economist’s explainers and daily charts, the editors of this blog solicited ideas on Facebook and Twitter. This week we publish five explainers suggested by our readers, who will each receive a copy of the book.   

ACCORDING to internet folklore, the very first spam e-mail was sent in 1978, to around 400 recipients. The sender was given a ticking-off, and told not to do it again. Alas for that golden age. These days, a torrent of poorly spelled e-mails promising to cure wrinkles, enlarge penises, banish fat or wire millions in unclaimed offshore wealth is the fate of almost everyone with an e-mail address.

To mark the publication of “Go Figure”, a collection of The Economist’s explainers and daily charts, the editors of this blog solicited ideas on Facebook and Twitter. This week we publish five explainers suggested by our readers, who will each receive a copy of the book.

ASKED why the Federal Reserve had failed to anticipate the lax bank lending that ultimately led to the global financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, the Fed’s former chairman, said he had the wrong model. He had assumed that bankers, acting in their self-interest, could not blow up their own banks. He was wrong, and the regulation of banks has since become far stricter.

SUPERMARKETS encourage shoppers to buy products through clever layouts and cunning promotions. Packaging presents items in an alluring way. It also keeps them clean and safe to eat. Green types balk at plastic-encased bananas. But some forms of packaging, especially for meat, can be an environmental boon. A third of food never makes it to the plate according to the UN, costing billions of dollars every year. Taken together, greenhouse-gas emissions from food waste are higher than those of India, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, because chucking out items means the water, fuel, fertilizer and other inputs that went into them are wasted too.

DONALD TRUMP, the populist American president-elect, wants to deport undocumented immigrants. Podemos, the populist Spanish party, wants to give immigrants voting rights. Geert Wilders, the populist Dutch politician, wants to eliminate hate-speech laws. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the populist Polish politician, pushed for a law making it illegal to use the phrase “Polish death camps”. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s populist president, has expanded indigenous farmers’ rights to grow coca. Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ populist president, has ordered his police to execute suspected drug dealers.

“FIFTEEN years ago, I swore an oath to defend my country and Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On December 19th, I will do it again.” Thus ended an op-ed in the New York Times at the beginning of December by Christopher Suprun, a Republican paramedic from Texas, who is one of the 538 members of the electoral college that will do its work on December 19th. Mr Suprun says he has the legal right and the constitutional duty to vote following his conscience. This is why he decided to become a “faithless elector”, as some have called him, by refusing to cast his electoral college vote in accordance with the results in his state.

JUMP onto the back of a motorcycle taxi almost anywhere between Nigeria and Kenya and the odds are that your driver will be wearing a high-visibility vest carrying the logo of a mobile telephone company. The phones themselves are even more ubiquitous. By the end of this year there will probably be close to 1bn active subscriptions for mobile phones across the continent, almost one for each of 1.2bn people living in Africa.