You imply that residents who increase their earnings while remaining in social-housing represent a flaw in the system. We see something different. We see people who have been given a stable foundation from which to build their lives. That is something housing policy should aspire to for people from a range of incomes and jobs living in the same communities. We support informed debate about making better use of social homes, improving mobility and ensuring that public investment delivers the greatest possible benefit. But that debate should begin with evidence and respect. Social-housing residents deserve to be recognised not for the discount attached to their rent, but for the contribution they make to Britain’s economy, public services and communities. Similarly, public spending on building social housing should be treated as an investment in essential infrastructure for the long-term prosperity of the country. It’s an asset not a cost and we hope to see a more balanced discussion of this in The Economist in future. Ian McDermottChair of G15Daisy ArmstrongOn behalf of the G15 Residents’ GroupLondon You argue that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, should not spend “vast sums on building new council homes”. Perhaps. But thankfully the housing-association sector is spending vast sums on building new homes through a mixture of government grant, borrowing and cross-subsidy from profit on sales. This makes sense as a counter-cyclical investment given that construction in Britain is notoriously volatile. Social landlords are less exposed to the absorption rate (the rate at which private builders construct homes to align with sales) so can build more consistently, and can use more innovative methods because their commercial model is different. Social landlords consistently build about 20% of all new builds every year. This sounds about right in a mixed market. Maybe local councils shouldn’t play in this space, maybe they should. When they have done it well they have built some of the best quality, most innovative, award-winning developments in the country. Their role in the newbuild market and as place-based leaders creating solutions for the communities they serve deserves more consideration.
Tom JarmanHousing consultantWhitley Bay, Tyne and Wear It’s an interesting theory that trust in weather forecasters has increased in Britain because of fading memories of the “great storm” of October 1987, when Michael Fish, a national broadcaster, said that the powerful cyclone would not hit the country (“A hot topic”, July 11th). He was wrong. In 1987 Mr Fish had only one forecast on which to base his conclusions. But today, weather centres routinely produce dozens of forecasts for tomorrow’s weather. These forecasts differ from each other in their initial conditions and in aspects of the predictive model. Taken together, they describe possible parallel universes with varying weather conditions, helping forecasters assess not only what is most likely to happen, but also how confident they should be. The Met Office communicates this uncertainty through the familiar “30% chance of rain” shown on its app. Naming storms also helps communicate this uncertainty, for example, as a storm’s track becomes clearer. Communicating uncertainty has also increased public trust. It demonstrates honesty about the limits of forecasting a chaotic atmosphere. As in many areas of life, it is better to be honestly uncertain than confidently wrong. Hannah ChristensenAssociate professor of physical climateUniversity of Oxford “Even lawyers have been caught out”, you say, by the rise of vibe lawyering, where potential legal clients are turning to AI to help with their cases (“Trial and error”, July 4th). Indeed. A database maintained by Damien Charlotin, a research fellow at HEC Paris, tracks the use of AI in over 1,800 cases that lead to a legal decision. He finds that roughly 40% of the cases with AI hallucinations come from lawyers. Additionally, in a paper recently presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law titled “PermitBot”, we found that when people with no legal training are guided on how to prompt a chatbot to provide relevant legal information, the quality of answers also improves.
There is therefore ground to believe that specially designed legal AI bots could do a better job than the current general-purpose models. Clement GuittonZofingen, Switzerland Ashoka wrote about falling objects in India (July 18th) because of the lax enforcement of safety regulations. The list of things that have fallen on people’s heads include trees, slabs of concrete and iron rods. The column struck a chord. Fifty years ago, as the administrative partner of an accounting firm in Kolkata, I received an application for long leave from my clerk with a truly spectacular excuse: on his commute to work a cow had fallen on him. As it turned out he had been walking past three men carrying a sick calf in a large basket. When a passing tram loudly clanged its bell, the startled animal jumped, landing directly on my unfortunate colleague and rupturing a heart valve. He survived the surgery and recovered well, but he walked away with the ultimate story for his grandchildren. NAWSHIR MIRZAMumbai Advancing technology repeatedly parallels the inventions of nature. I was fascinated to read how zebra-striped vehicles are being used to avoid drone
strikes in Ukraine (“Hiding in plain site”, July 11th). In the early 1980s, I set out with colleagues in southern Africa to reduce the impact of tsetse flies and sleeping sickness on humans and animals. Noticing how horses suffered from tsetse whereas zebras are rarely bitten we hypothesised that the visual system of flies, generally designed to orient towards the edge of solidly coloured objects, would fail to identify zebras as a host. Dragging variously patterned electrified zebra models through the Zimbabwean bush revealed just such an effect. The pattern-matching training for machine vision in drones seems to have resembled the evolutionary process by which tsetse has come to find its animal hosts, most of which are big and brown. Like zebras, striped military lorries appear to have beaten the system. Unfortunately for the lorries, AI-assisted drone technology is evolving far more rapidly than flies and their hosts. Professor Jeff WaageLondon School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Regarding Bartleby’s observation that “people who ask more questions tend to be better liked” (July 11th). As a child I was known as “20 questions”. I was an irritant to adults. I became a journalist. Robin KnightLondon This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/letters/2026/07/30/does-britains-social-housing- subsidise-the-wrong-people
Don’t blame global imbalances on the undervalued yuan Demanding that China revalue the yuan gets both the diagnosis and the cure wrong, write Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Hélène Rey Jul 30th 2026 THERE IS A comfortable ritual in international economic diplomacy. Whenever global imbalances emerge as a source of anxiety—as they have again today—the conversation gravitates towards the exchange rate. China runs large and growing external surpluses. America runs large and growing external deficits. Both are assessed as excessive by the IMF. If only policymakers could meet in some fancy hotel, agree to strengthen the yuan and weaken the dollar, the argument runs, then China would import more and export less, America would do the opposite and the world’s lopsided
pattern of surpluses and deficits would gently correct itself. Of late, this view has gathered supporters in the West. To be clear, the Chinese yuan is no doubt undervalued. But the emphasis on the exchange rate as the lever of adjustment is misplaced. In a G7 expert report and an IMF policy paper on global imbalances, both published this year (with input from the authors of this article), the exchange rate is treated not as a culprit, but as an outcome—an undesirable but predictable consequence of a particular configuration of domestic policies. A country that suppresses household consumption while simultaneously facing a collapse of property investment will run persistent current-account surpluses and will, other things equal, have a weak currency. A country with insufficient private savings and unsustainably large fiscal deficits will run persistent current-account deficits and will, other things equal, have a strong real exchange rate against other other currencies. The currency is misaligned because the underlying policy mix produces too much or too little saving. The exchange rate is a symptom, not the disease. Some argue that China’s exchange rate reflects currency-intervention policies to keep the yuan weak. Indeed, the yuan does not float freely, and it is possible to engineer both a persistent current account surplus and a weak real exchange rate through a combination of capital controls, consumption suppression and foreign-exchange interventions. But China’s currency interventions in recent years have often been to prevent the currency from weakening, and the yuan, if anything, has been stable. The recent depreciation of China’s real exchange rate has followed mainly from weaker inflation in China relative to its trading partners. The knee-jerk emphasis on the currency has two serious drawbacks, and they compound each other. The first is economic. Suppose China did revalue tomorrow, sharply and by fiat, with no accompanying change in its underlying macroeconomic policies. Would the required global adjustment follow? In all likelihood, it would not. In the short run, the nominal appreciation would have limited effect on China’s exports as the majority of its export prices are set in dollars and adjust slowly.