provinces’ share of Chinese industry has declined from almost 48% in 2013 to only 36% last year. A third reason why China’s high-tech manufacturing push has failed to stimulate a broader recovery is fiscal. Emerging industries should deepen the tax base, helping to fill the coffers of the local governments that host them. But in China the flow of resources often runs in the opposite direction. Keen to back local champions in the industries of the future, city and provincial governments offer tax breaks and subsidies that erode their financial standing. Fiscal support prompts too many firms to enter fashionable industries, which can sap the profits of genuinely efficient rivals. Last year AlixPartners, a consultancy, calculated that only 15 of China’s 129 EV brands would be financially viable by 2030. On the face of it China’s export triumphs should help it ameliorate its domestic economic weakness. Instead the two seem mutually reinforcing. Limp spending at home results in falling prices, low interest rates and a cheap currency, all of which make Chinese goods still more competitive on world markets. Booming exports are also propping up growth, allowing China’s policymakers to delay tougher measures to restore consumer confidence, such as higher social spending or a new effort to stabilise the property market. In the face of China’s manufacturing dominance, European leaders aim to diversify their continent’s sources of supply. China’s leaders should do more to diversify their country’s sources of demand. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/06/11/for-its-own-sake-china-should-change- its-growth-model
The best way to celebrate America at 250 is to get behind the wheel Preferably with our new podcast series for company June 11th 2026 One stereotype held by foreigners about Americans is that they are irritatingly upbeat. Picture a stranger ordering you to have a nice day, or a family declaring everything to be “so great” while exploring a drizzly, midge-infested Scottish ruin—there is only one nationality they could possibly be. This cliché is misleading, though. Americans are generally cheerful. But even in the country’s brightest moments many of them have been struck by a kind of dread about it all unravelling. “Democracy never lasts long,” wrote the second president, John Adams, in 1814. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” That sentiment is widespread as the country turns 250.
America is feeling nostalgic as well as pessimistic on its semiquincentennial. In the country that has been inventing the future since 1776, nearly half of the population say they would rather live in the past. Most young Americans do not expect to be better off than their parents. Meanwhile, on many objective measures, the country is doing better than ever. After a dip caused by opioid overdoses and covid-19, life expectancy is back to the highest level in history. The economy has been growing robustly, unlike in other Western countries. Income inequality after taxes is lower than it was a decade ago. American firms are pre-eminent in artificial intelligence, biomedicine, entertainment and space technology. The Kennedy Centre is getting its name back. The distance between the data and the vibes is the central puzzle of the United States in the 2020s. Exploring that was the impulse behind the making of a new podcast we are launching this week to celebrate this spectacular country on its big birthday. The six-part series is a road trip in the company of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who loved the place and wrote a prescient book about it in the 1830s, “Democracy in America”. This road trip took The Economist from New York’s aristocracy to a maximum-security prison in the Hudson Valley; from a fight over a data centre in rural Michigan to Harvard University; and from a sheriff’s office in Ohio to Donald Trump’s court in Palm Beach, via plenty of other places. Wherever possible, we spoke with the same sorts of people Tocqueville did, to compare America then and now. As on any good road trip, unplanned encounters in diners along the way and various logistical snafus added to the texture. Long stretches behind the wheel provided time to think, listen and gaze out of the window. What did we find? One conclusion was that if all you know about America is its politics, you will draw unrealistically gloomy conclusions. More than half of Americans now think their fellow citizens are morally bad. No other country in the West comes close to that level. Henry Adams (the second president’s great- grandson) called politics “the systematic organisation of hatreds”. American ingenuity has been applied to this field, too: the hatreds seem better organised than at any time since the 1960s. But go and talk to people in
person, from purple-haired activists to rural Trump-loving sheriffs, and you will find that they agree on a surprising amount. A second conclusion is that Americans who see their homeland through their phones are looking in a mirror that is horribly distorted. In a continent-size country of 340m there is always something ugly somewhere. A few decades ago a lot of far worse things were ignored. That was not better, even if it felt better. The risk now is that people support bad policies because they have a misleading picture of what is wrong. What is the answer to this? Hit the road yourself. Or if gas prices make that tricky, listen to the podcast. Americans are thoughtful and generous. For most of them, politics is something peripheral that happens a long way away. “Never have a people been blessed with such happy, dynamic conditions of existence,” Tocqueville wrote. Bonne anniversaire. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/06/11/the-best-way-to-celebrate-america-at- 250-is-to-get-behind-the-wheel
What can you learn from the Premier League? Also this week, school meals in Indonesia, commuting, Barney Frank, MAGA tax, condoms June 11th 2026 Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.comFind out more about how we process your letter The British government could learn a thing or two from the success of football’s Premier League, you said (“How a deflated Britain can bounce back”, May 23rd). If Britain truly replicated the league it would mean that every major sovereign asset would be foreign-owned, over 75% of the top workforce would be imported and our domestic leadership class would be so thoroughly hollowed out that we have to hire overseas managers to run both our enterprise and our national teams. That is not a strategy for national renewal; it is the definition of economic dependency.
Furthermore, your dismissal of the new independent football regulator ignores the catastrophic failure of the league’s in-house self-regulation. The system is structurally broken. A lower-tier club like Southampton can be hit with a near-existential expulsion from the championship play-off final for “spying” offences, whereas an elite club like Chelsea escapes with a paltry fine for admitting to making secret payments to avoid player-transfer rules from 2011-18, before the new owners took over. Meanwhile, the entire football world holds its breath for the Manchester City financial-scandal verdict, amid predictions that, owing to the club’s geopolitical and Gulf-state connections, it will face nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Self- regulation in English football has simply resulted in one lenient rule for the global elite and a heavy hammer for the rest. Britain should look past the Premier League’s caution-to-the-wind capitalism and turn to Germany’s Bundesliga. By enforcing the 50+1 rule, which ensures that domestic fans own the clubs, and mandating strict domestic player and coaching quotas Germany has maintained full-capacity, affordable stadiums, financial sustainability and an elite conveyor belt of domestic managerial talent. The Premier League is an entertaining global circus, but Britain merely provides the tent while overseas actors take the profits and the prestige. Marcus HudsonBenwick, Cambridgeshire Openness and competition are certainly factors in Britain’s football success, but the foundation of a common standard also matters. In 1848 students arrived at Cambridge from schools with incompatible versions of football. They met on Parker’s Piece, a large park, reconciled their differences into 11 simple rules and nailed them to the trees. Those Cambridge Rules became the defining influence on the Football Association’s code in 1863, and ultimately on the game now played in every country on earth. Today’s monument on Parker’s Piece reflects this; it is engraved with the rules in various languages. The rules travelled not because they were imposed, but because they were simple, trusted and open, allowing serendipity to do the rest. Parker’s Piece was not a market. It was a protocol. Britain’s revival needs both the competition you celebrate and the institutional spaces where common standards can emerge.
David CleevelyCambridge Sweden’s parliament may use the term “Spursy” to warn “against messing up despite being well placed to succeed” (”World champions”, May 23rd). Indeed, much like the way scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, perhaps Spursy should properly refer to chronic hypertension brought on by a severe lack of trophies at Tottenham Hotspur despite endless potential. Robert ShepherdCalgary, Canada Your description of the Indonesian government’s free-school-meals scheme as a “populist” policy misses the point of this highly effective form of government intervention (“Archipelagoing fast”, May 16th). School-feeding programmes attract more children to school, reduce the prevalence of stunting and other diseases associated with malnutrition and are a strategic investment in human capital.Perhaps most important, these programmes encourage parents to send more girls to school, and girls who spend more time in study tend to marry later, have fewer children and have more career choices. School-feeding programmes are often launched by UN agencies and adopted by governments, which then carry the budgetary burden of supporting them going forward. They are an enlightened and effective example of aid in action. Greg BarrowFormerly of the UN World Food ProgrammeLondon President Prabowo Subianto’s full response to our briefing on Indonesia is at economist.com/prabowo-response