The third element, tolerance for failure, is more cultural than regulatory. Although policy can encourage entrepreneurship, attitudes towards risk are slower to change. Yet here too there are signs of evolution, as younger generations of European founders and investors become more comfortable with experimentation and iteration. Europe has not failed for lack of ideas or capability. It has been constrained by scale, fragmentation and, at times, its own caution. The challenge now is not to imitate Silicon Valley, but to remove the barriers that prevent European innovation from reaching global scale. Pablo ZalbaVice-chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee in the European Parliament, 2009-16Pamplona, Spain Your March 28th issue carried articles about Theodore Roosevelt (America at 250, Chapter 3) and the Marquis de Morès, a French proto-fascist (“Fascism’s forgotten first act”). Edmund Morris’s biography of Roosevelt, published in 1979, recounts a handful of encounters the future president had with Morès. These included an attempt by Morès to get Roosevelt to join a band of vigilantes who wanted to lynch horse thieves, correspondence between the two when Morès was charged with a murder in the Badlands, and a narrowly averted duel between the two. Alex DewSalt Lake City Michael O’Flaherty argued that the judiciary should be an independent arbiter and not an instrument of policy when it comes to the European Convention on Human Rights (Letters, April 18th). Yet the role of judges is to apply and interpret laws that have been established by the political process. The concerns regarding the ECHR are indeed that judges have become too independent of the political will, and by ignoring that political will they do not respond to changes in policy that have been debated by politicians representing their electorates. The notion that human rights are inherent and not subject to politics is not borne out by history or geography. In different epochs and in different places today, there have been and are views of morality very different from those established by the ECHR. Situations change, the political process adjusts
laws in response, and the judges must consider those wishes without recourse to some higher authority. William PedderLondon I enjoyed your article on the growing use of AI in pure maths (“One step at a time”, April 11th). Missing from your article was a discussion of the Birch test, proposed by Bryan Birch of Oxford University and others as a benchmark for whether AI has crossed the threshold of theoretical discovery in maths. It is composed of three parts. The first is that the discovery must be made entirely by AI without human direction. The second is that it must be sufficiently concrete to be interpretable (in practice this rules out discoveries made by applications of deep learning to mathematical datasets where the underlying mechanism of, say, prediction is opaque). The third is that the proven result must be sufficiently non-trivial so as to prompt future work on the topic.For now these criteria remain unsurmountable. The work of Donald Knuth that you mentioned, and other key papers in the field, would fail the first, but I am not certain that will always be so. If we continue to produce work only that can pass the second two hurdles, AI in maths will remain a valuable tool, much as computers have been for many years now, enhancing the work of mathematicians and aligning with the vision of Demis Hassabis. Indeed, Thomas Hales’s original proof of the Kepler conjecture also used computers, namely to verify a large number of inequalities.A recent blog post for Anthropic by Matthew Schwartz, a physicist at Harvard, describes his experience writing a “technically rigorous, impactful high-energy theoretical physics paper” entirely by prompting Claude, in what seems to be the closest we have got to passing the Birch test so far. The end result was entirely generated by AI, but Mr Schwartz went through multiple rounds of providing text prompts. He summed up the scientific difficulty of the problem: “it’s a highly technical calculation that I was confident I could do myself. The physics is understood in principle; what’s missing is a careful, complete treatment.”Finally, we should remember when hearing discussions about proving mathematics in natural language versus in a symbolic description, that this process is not new. The equals sign was not introduced until the 16th century.
Dr Linden Disney-HoggSchool of MathematicsUniversity of Leeds The Telegram (April 11th) wrote about mass migration from authoritarian states. The forces that drive migration from non-democratic countries can also occur wherever a single party faces little opposition. The persistence of one-party dominance in states like California gives rise to a sense that power is uncontested, that institutions serve insiders, and that rules are written for those who write them. Democrats hold every statewide office, command supermajorities in the legislature, shape the judiciary, the regulatory apparatus and the administrative state, with little political opposition. After nearly three decades of one-party rule California has experienced an unprecedented number of people leaving the state. Surveys show the reasons for leaving include the cost of living, quality of schools, taxes, public safety, and a sense that the state is unresponsive to voters’ concerns. A functioning democracy requires competitive pressures. If that is absent, it can also send people packing. Dr Francois MeleseEmeritus professor of economicsNaval Postgraduate School Monterey, California
Your review of Mary Beard’s new book, “Talking Classics”, mentioned recent scholarship on the significance of classical Rome to Victorian imperialists (“Acropolis now”, April 18th). However, this has been long established, in fact since the 19th century itself, when the Victorians were actively modelling the British empire on the Roman empire. Questions of politics, governance and imperial legitimacy were debated with frequent reference to Roman history. The Victorians were also very much aware of the Romans’ decline into decadence. Hence the mixed reaction to Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “Roses of Heliogabalus”, which depicts revellers at a Roman banquet strewn with rose petals, when it was exhibited in the late 1880s, and what this work intimated about the classics the Victorians themselves so revered. They feared this downfall for themselves; perhaps they were right to do so. MARTE STINISArt historianThe Hague As a young fund manager in 1981 I visited Taiwan with Mark Mobius (Obituary, April 25th), when he worked for Vickers da Costa, a stockbroker. We went together to the Taipei Stock Exchange when it was no bigger than a large room. Prices were written in chalk on a wall. It was a mêlée of gesticulation and a din of open outcry. But as we walked onto the exchange floor the traders fell silent, then broke out into wild applause. Later I asked what that was all about. Mobius was a “completely bald man, very lucky!“, they said. Stephen BarberLondon I applaud your crackdown on egg puns. The recent article on egg imports to Britain (“Cluck for victory”, April 25th) contained a restrained one pun for every 155 words, compared with an article on free-range eggs from 2016 that squeezed in one pun for every 35 words (The Economist eggsplains, December 8th 2016). The correct ratio probably eludes mankind’s grasp, but may be best described as too much and never un oeuf. Paddy FletcherEdinburgh This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//letters/2026/05/07/why-does-britain-consistently-fail- to-capture-economic-returns-from-innovation
Vladimir Putin is losing his grip on Russia The pact that could help America and China repair relations
Vladimir Putin is losing his grip on Russia His every move to preserve power accelerates decay, writes a former senior official in the Russian government May 7th 2026 IT ARRIVED NOT as an event but as a sensation, felt everywhere at once: Vladimir Putin has led Russia into a dead-end and nobody has a map for what comes next. The first manifestation is a shift in the language used by senior officials, regional governors and businessmen: they have stopped using the first-person plural when talking about the actions of authorities in the country. As recently as last spring, everything was “we” and “ours”. Mr Putin’s war on Ukraine may be reckless and failing, but it was shared. “We” were inside it, and it would be better for all of “us” if it ended sooner. Now they describe
what is happening as “his” story, not “ours”. Not our project, not our agenda, not our war. His decisions are described as “strange”. Even stranger is the fact that he decides anything at all. It is not only about falling approval ratings. The future is no longer discussed in terms of what Mr Putin will decide, but as something that will unfold independently of him—and possibly already without him. This shift in language does not signal a rebellion. The authoritarian system can survive for a long time on fear, inertia and repression. It still has a monopoly on violence, but has lost its monopoly on shaping the future. In the past, the regime, for all its lies, had some project it could tout: “restoring statehood”, reasserting itself as an “energy superpower”. There was even “modernisation” before the U-turn to ultra-conservatism and war. The irony is that Mr Putin started the war to preserve power and the system he has created. Now, for the first time since the conflict began, Russians are starting to imagine a future without him. This is down to a confluence of four factors. First is the growing cost of fighting. The war in Ukraine was meant to be a special military operation conducted by selected groups who received financial incentives for their trouble, while the rest of society carried on as normal. This model crumbled as the war grew in length and scale. It has led to higher inflation and taxes, neglected infrastructure, increased censorship, endless prohibitions. It is not a national war, but it is paid for nationally— and society is not being offered any purpose in return. Second is a growing demand for rules among elites who have been forced back into Russia, along with their capital. Previously their property rights were outsourced to the West. They used London courts, offshore structures and international arbitration to resolve conflicts or seek protection. Now conflicts must be resolved domestically, without functioning institutions. Demand for rules grows more urgent as redistribution of assets gathers pace. In the past three years assets worth around 5trn roubles ($60bn) have been seized from private businessmen and either nationalised or handed to