2021年1月23日发(作者：草履虫)
Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(6-7)
Hard to digest

A wealth of genetic information is to be found in the human gut
BACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range
of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions,
however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven
Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this week's
Science
, suggests
that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.

Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA
from the faeces of two volunteers.
Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria, just the
individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers.

What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identify
—
the bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. So the researchers
guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered with published databases of genes whose functions are
already known.

This comparison helped Dr Gill identify for the first time the probable enzymatic processes by which bacteria help humans to
digest the complex carbohydrates in plants. The bacteria also contain a plentiful supply of genes involved in the synthesis of
chemicals essential to human life
—
including two B vitamins and certain essential amino acids
—
although the team merely showed
that these metabolic pathways exist rather than proving that they are used. Nevertheless, the pathways they found leave humans
looking more like ruminants: animals such as goats and sheep that use bacteria to break down otherwise indigestible matter in the
plants they eat.

The broader conclusion Dr Gill draws is that people are superorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of
human and microbial attributes. The notion of a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in other fields have come to
view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. This, suggest some, will be crucial to the success of personalised medicine, as
different people will have different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial flora. Accordingly, the next step, says
Dr Gill,
is to see how microbial populations vary between people of different ages, backgrounds and diets.

Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their
gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the
most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one.

Zapping the blues

The rebirth of electric-shock treatment

ELECTRICITY
has long been used to treat medical disorders. As early as the second century AD, Galen, a Greek physician,
recommended the use of electric eels for treating headaches and facial pain. In the 1930s Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, two Italian
psychiatrists, used electroconvulsive therapy to treat schizophrenia. These days, such rigorous techniques are practised less widely.
But researchers are still investigating how a gentler electric therapy appears to treat depression.

V
agus- nerve stimulation, to give it its proper name, was originally developed to treat severe epilepsy. It requires a
pacemaker-like device to be implanted in a patient's chest and wires from it threaded up to the vagus nerve on the left side of his
neck. In the normal course of events, this provides an electrical pulse to the vagus nerve for 30 seconds every five minutes.

This treatment does not always work, but in some cases where it failed (the number of epileptic seizures experienced by a
patient remaining the same), that patient nevertheless reported feeling much better after receiving the implant. This secondary effect
led to trials for treating depression and, in 2005, America's Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy for depression that
fails to respond to all conventional treatments, including drugs and psychotherapy.

Not only does the treatment work, but its effects appear to be long lasting. A
study led by Charles Conway of Saint Louis
University in Missouri, and presented to a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, has found that 70% of patients
who are better after one year stay better after two years as well.
The technique builds on a procedure called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted deep into the white
matter of patients' brains and used to “reboot” faulty neural circ
uitry. Such an operation is a big undertaking, requiring a full day of
surgery and carrying a risk of the patient suffering a stroke. Only a small number of people have been treated this way. In c
ontrast,
the device that stimulates the vagus nerve can be implanted in 45 minutes without a stay in hospital.

The trouble is that vagus-nerve stimulation can take a long time to produce its full beneficial effect. According to Dr Conway,
scans taken using a technique called positron-emission tomography show significant changes in brain activity starting three months
after treatment begins. The changes are similar to the improvements seen in patients who undergo other forms of antidepression
treatment. The brain continues to change over the following 21 months. Dr Conway says that patients should be told that the
antidepressant effects could be slow in coming.

However, Richard Selway of King's College Hospital, London, found that his patients' moods improved just weeks after the
implant. Although brain scans are useful in determining the longevity of the treatment, Mr Selway notes that visible changes in the
brain do not necessarily correlate perfectly with changes in mood.

Nobody knows why stimulating the vagus nerve improves the mood of depressed patients, but Mr Selway has a theory
. He
believes that the electrical stimulation causes a region in the brain stem called the
locus caeruleus
(Latin, ironically, for “blue
place”) to flood the brain with norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter implicated in alertness, concent
ration and motivation
—
that is, the
mood states missing in depressed patients. Whatever the mechanism, for the depressed a therapy that is relatively safe and long
lasting is rare cause for cheer.

The shape of things to come

How tomorrow's nuclear power stations will differ from today's
THE agency in charge of promoting nuclear power in America describes a new generation of reactors that will be “highly
economical” with “enhanced safety”, that “minimise wastes” and will prove “proliferation resistant”. No d
oubt they will bake a
mean apple pie, too.

Unfortunately, in the world of nuclear energy, fine words are not enough. America got away lightly with its nuclear accident.

When the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania overheated in 1979 very little radiation leaked, and there were no injuries.
Europe was not so lucky
. The accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 killed dozens immediately and has affected (sometimes
fatally) the health of tens of thousands at the least. Even discounting the association of nuclear power with nuclear weaponry,
people have good reason to be suspicious of claims that reactors are safe.

Y
et political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy
security. Already, some 441 commercial reactors operate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet's electricity, according to
America's Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to
extend
their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations
belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are
considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?

Clearly, modern designs need to be less accident prone. The most important feature of a safe design is that it “fails safe”.
For a
reactor, this means that if its control systems stop working it shuts down automatically, safely dissipates the heat produced by the
reactions in its core, and stops both the fuel and the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactions from escaping by keeping them
within s
ome sort of containment vessel. Reactors that follow such rules are called “passive”. Most modern designs are passive to
some extent and some newer ones are truly so. However, some of the genuinely passive reactors are also likely to be more
expensive to run.
Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A
large atom (usually uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones,
releasing energy and neutrons. The neutrons then trigger further break-
ups. And so on. If this “chain reaction” can be controlled, t
he
energy released can be used to boil water, produce steam and drive a turbine that generates electricity. If it runs away
, the result is a
meltdown and an accident (or, in extreme circumstances, a nuclear explosion
—
though circumstances are never that extreme in a
reactor because the fuel is less fissile than the material in a bomb). In many new designs the neutrons, and thus the chain r
eaction,
are kept under control by passing them through water to slow them down. (Slow neutrons trigger more break ups than fast ones.)
This water is exposed to a pressure of about 150 atmospheres
—
a pressure that means it remains liquid even at high temperatures.
When nuclear reactions warm the water, its density drops, and the neutrons passing through it are no longer slowed enough to
trigger further reactions. That negative feedback stabilises the reaction rate.





Can business be cool?
Why a growing number of firms are taking global warming seriously

RUPERT MURDOCH is no green activist. But in Pebble Beach later this summer, the annual gathering of executives of Mr
Murdoch's News Corporation
—
which last year led to a dramatic shift in the media conglomerate's attitude to the internet
—
will be
addressed by several leading environmentalists, including a vice-president turned climatechange movie star. Last month BSkyB, a
British satellite-television company chaired by Mr Murdoch and run by his
son, James, declared itself “carbon
-
neutral”, having
taken various steps to cut or offset its discharges of carbon into the atmosphere.
The army of corporate greens is growing fast. Late last year HSBC became the first big bank to announce that it was
carbon-neutral, joining other financial institutions, including Swiss Re, a reinsurer, and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, in
waging war on climate-warming gases (of which carbon dioxide is the main culprit). Last year General Electric (GE), an industrial
powerhouse, launched its “Ecomagination” strategy, aiming to cut its output of
greenhouse gases and to invest heavily in clean (ie,
carbon-free) technologies. In October Wal-Mart announced a series of environmental schemes, including doubling the
fuel- efficiency of its fleet of vehicles within a decade. Tesco and Sainsbury, two of Britain's biggest retailers, are competing
fiercely to be the greenest. And on June 7
some leading British bosses lobbied Tony Blair for a more ambitious policy on climate
change, even if that involves harsher regulation.
The greening of business is by no means universal, however. Money from Exxon Mobil, Ford and General Motors helped pay
for television advertisements aired recently in America by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with the
daft slogan “Carbon
dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life”. Besides, environmentalist critics say, some firms
are engaged in superficial
“greenwash” to boost the image of essentially climate
-hurting businesses. Take BP, the most prominent corporate advocate of
action on climate change, with its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign, highprofile
investments in green energy,
and even a “carbon
calculator” on its website that helps consumers measure

their personal “carbon footprint”, or overall emissions of carbon. Yet,
critics complain, BP's recent record profits are largely thanks to sales of huge amounts of carbon-packed oil and gas.
On the other hand, some free-market thinkers see the support of firms for regulation of carbon as the latest attempt at
“regulatory capture”, by those who stand to profit from new rules. Max Schulz of the Manhattan
Institute, a conservative think tank,
notes darkly that “Enron was into pushing the idea of climate change, because

it was good for its business”.

Others argue that climate change has no more place in corporate boardrooms than do discussions of other partisan politic
al
issues, such as Darfur or gay marriage. That criticism, at least, is surely wrong. Most of the corporate converts say they are acting
not out of some vague sense of social responsibility, or even personal angst, but because climate change creates real business risks
and opportunities
—
from regulatory compliance to insuring clients on flood plains. And although these concerns vary hugely from
one company to the next, few firms can be sure of remaining unaffected.

Testing times
Researchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws may
increase the number of experiments needed
IN AN ideal world, people would not perform experiments on animals. For the people, they are expensive. For the animals,
they are stressful and often painful.

That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection from the toxicity
of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission is forging ahead with proposals
that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the European Union, by requiring toxicity tests on every
chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25 years.
Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of these to be
examined right away, and plans to spend between
?
4 billion-8 billion ($$5 billion-10 billion) doing so. The number of animals used
for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m a year to about 5m, unless they are saved by
some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment, roughly 10% of European animal tests are for general
toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs and vaccines, and the remaining 10% a variety of uses such as diagnosing diseases.
Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and last weekend
the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to review progress.
A good place to start finding alternatives for toxicity tests is the liver
—
the organ responsible for breaking toxic chemicals
down into safer molecules that can then be excreted. Two firms, one large and one small, told the meeting how they were using
human liver cells removed incidentally during surgery to test various substances for long-term toxic effects.
th
PrimeCyte, the small firm, grows its cells in cultures over a few weeks and doses them regularly with the substance under
investigation. The characteristics of the cells are carefully monitored, to look for changes in their , the big firm,
also doses its cultures regularly, but rather than studying individual cells in detail, it counts cell numbers. If the number of cells in a
culture changes after a sample is added, that suggests the chemical in question is bad for the liver.
In principle, these techniques could be applied to any chemical. In practice, drugs (and, in the case of PrimeCyte,
food
supplements) are top of the list. But that might change if the commission has its way: those 140,000 screenings look like a lucrative
market, although nobody knows whether the new tests will be ready for use by 2009, when the commission proposes that testing
should start.
Other tissues, too, can be tested independently of animals. Epithelix, a small firm in Geneva, has developed an artificial
version of the lining of the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix's researchers, the firm's cultured cells have similar
microanatomy to those found in natural lung linings, and respond in the same way to various chemical messengers. Dr Huang says
that they could be used in long-term toxicity tests of airborne chemicals and could also help identify treatments for lung diseases.
The immune system can be mimicked and tested, too. ProBioGen, a company based in Berlin, is developing an artific
ial
human lymph node which, it reckons, could have prevented the near-disastrous consequences of a drug trial held in Britain three
months ago, in which (despite the drug having passed animal tests) six men suffered multiple organ failure and nearly died. The
drug the men were given made their immune systems hyperactive. Such a response would, the firm's scientists reckon, have been
identified by their lymph node, which is made from cells that provoke the immune system into a response. ProBioGen's lymph node
could thus work better than animal testing.
Another way of cutting the number of animal experiments would be to change the way that vaccines are tested, according to
Coenraad Hendriksen of the Netherlands Vaccine Institute. At the moment, all batches of vaccine are subject to the same battery of
tests. Dr Hendriksen argues that this is over- rigorous. When new vaccine cultures are made, belt-and-braces tests obviously need to
be applied. But if a batch of vaccine is derived from an existing culture, he suggests that it need be tested only to make sure it is
identical to the batch from which it is derived. That would require fewer test animals. All this suggests that though there is still
some way to go before drugs, vaccines and other substances can be tested routinely on cells rather than live animals, useful progress
is being made. What is harder to see is how the use of animals might be banished from fundamental research.

Anger management

To one emotion, men are more sensitive than women
MEN are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by a thousand
women's magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, confirms that men are, indeed,
less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important and suggestive exception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other
men.
Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study has just been published in
Current Biology
, looked at the way a person's
sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agree on what six basic
expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness or surprise seems to
be recognised universally
—
which suggests that the expressions involved are innate, rather than learned.

Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants in their study photographs of these emotional expressions in mixed
sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, and measured the amount of time
it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies, that both men and women identified angry
expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was more quickly identified on a male face than a female one.
Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eight photographs as
when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts of expression,
which took more time to find
when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in the brain is attuned to picking out angry
expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, this highly tuned ability seems more important to males than
females, since the two researchers found that men picked out the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women
were usually quicker than men to recognize every other sort of facial expression.
Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly has a survival
advantage
—
and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the ability to spot angry males
quickly is particularly valuable.
As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to get killed by it.
Most murders involve men killing other men
—
even today the context of homicide is usually a spontaneous dispute over status or
sex.
The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allow the
sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, this study also confirms a
lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you want attention, get angry.

The shareholders' revolt
A turning point in relations between company owners and bosses?
SOMETHING strange has been happening this year at company annual meetings in America: shareholders have been voting
decisively against the recommendations of managers. Until now, most shareholders have, like so many sheep, routinely voted in
accordance with the advice of the people they employ to run the company. This year managers have already been defeated at some
32 companies, including household names such as Boeing, ExxonMobil and General Motors.
This shareholders' revolt has focused entirely on one issue: the method by which members of the board of directors are elected.
Shareholder resolutions on other subjects have mostly been defeated, as usual. The successful resolutions called for directors to be
elected by majority voting, instead of by the
traditional method of “plurality”—
which in practice meant that only votes cast in
favour were counted, and that a single vote for a candidate would be enough to get him elected.
Several companies, led by Pfizer, a drug giant, saw defeat looming and pre-emptively adopted a formal majority-voting policy
that was weaker than in the shareholder resolution. This required any director who failed to secure a majority of votes to tender his
resignation to the board, which would then be free to decide whether or not to accept it. Under the shareholder resolution, any
candidate failing to secure a majority of the votes cast simply would not be elected. Intriguingly, the shareholder resolution was
defeated at four-fifths of the firms that adopted a Pfizer-style majority voting rule, whereas it succeeded nearly nine times out of ten
at firms retaining the plurality rule.

Unfortunately for shareholders, their victories may prove illusory, as the successful resolutions were all
“precatory”—
meaning
that they merely advised management on the course of action preferred by shareholders, but did not force managers to do anything.
Several resolutions that tried to impose majority voting on firms by changing their bylaws failed this year.
Even so, wise managers should voluntarily adopt majority voting, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a Wall Street
law firm that has generally helped managers resist increases in shareholder power but now expects majority voting eventually to
“become universal”. It advises that, at the very least,
managers should adopt the Pfizer model, if only to avoid becoming the subject
of even greater scrutiny from corporate-governance activists. Some firms might choose to go further, as Dell and Intel have done
this year, and adopt bylaws requiring majority voting.
Shareholders may have been radicalised by the success last year of a lobbying effort by managers against a proposal from
regulators to make it easier for shareholders to put up candidates in board elections. It remains to be seen if they will be back for
more in 2007. Certainly, some of the activist shareholders behind this year's resolutions have big plans. Where new voting rules are
in place, they plan campaigns to vote out the chairman of the compensation committee at any firm that they think overpays
the boss.
If the 2006 annual meeting was unpleasant for managers, next year's could be far worse.

Intangible opportunities

Companies are borrowing against their copyrights, trademarks and patents
NOT long ago, the value of companies resided mostly in things you could see and touch. Today it lies increasingly in
intangible assets such as the McDonald's name, the patent for Viagra and the rights to Spiderman. Baruch Lev, a finance professor
at New York University's Stern School of Business, puts the implied value of intangibles on American companies' balance sheets at
about $$6 trillion, or two-thirds of the total. Much of this consists of intellectual property, the collective name for copyrights,
trademarks and patents. Increasingly, companies and their clever bankers are using these assets to raise cash.
The method of choice is securitisation, the issuing of bonds based on the various revenues thrown off by intellectual property.
Late last month Dunkin' Brands, owner of Dunkin' Donuts, a snack-bar chain, raised $$1.7 billion by selling bonds backed by,
among other things, the royalties it will receive from its franchisees. The three private-equity firms that acquired Dunkin' Brands a
few months ago have used the cash to repay the money they borrowed to buy the chain. This is the biggest intellectual-property
securitisation by far, says Jordan Yarett of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a law firm that has worked on many such
deals.
Securitisations of intellectual property can be based on revenues from copyrights, trademarks (such as logos) or patents. The
best-known copyright deal was the issue in 1997 of $$55m-
worth of “Bowie Bonds”
supported by the future sales of music by David
Bowie, a British rock star. Bonds based on the films of DreamWorks, Marvel comic books and the stories of John Steinbeck have
also been sold. As well as Dunkin' Brands, several restaurant chains and fashion firms have issued bonds backed by logos and
brands.
Intellectual-property deals belong to a class known as operating-asset securitisations. These differ from standard securitisations
of future revenues, such as bonds backed by the payments on a 30-year mortgage or a car loan, in that the borrower has to make his
asset work. If investors are to recoup their
money, the assets being securitised must be “actively exploited”, says Mr Yarett:
DreamWorks must continue to churn out box-office hits.
The market for such securitisations is still small. Jay Eisbruck, of Moody's, a rating agency, reckons that around $$10
billion-
worth of bonds are outstanding. But there is “big potential,” he says, pointing out that
licensing patented technology
generates $$100 billion a year and involves thousands of companies.
Raising money this way can make sense not only for clever private-equity firms, but also for companies with low (or no) credit
ratings that cannot easily tap the capital markets or with few tangible assets as collateral for bank loans. Some universities have
joined in, too. Yale built a new medical complex with some of the roughly $$100m it raised securitising patent royalties from Zerit,
an anti-HIV drug.

It may be harder for investors to decide whether such deals are worth their while. They are, after all, highly complex and
riskier than standard securitisations. The most obvious risk is that the investors cannot be sure that the assets will yield what
borrowers promise: technology moves on, fashions change and the demand for sugary snacks may collapse. Valuing intellectual
property
—
an exercise based on forecasting the timing and amount of future cashflows
—
is more art than science.
So far, says Mr Eisbruck, these bonds have generally matched investors' hopes. But regulators say that only institutional
investors, such as pension funds and hedge funds, can buy them. Fans seeking a slice of the profits from the next instalment of
“X
-
Men” must wait.


Nef off

The reason HIV is so virulent may have been found

THE human immunodeficiency virus, HIV-1, the cause of the global AIDS epidemic, is the most intensively studied pathogen
in history. For all that, it still has secrets to reveal. One is why it is so deadly. Many of man's primate relatives in Africa harbour
similar viruses. Yet as far as can be seen, these so-called simian immunodefic
iency viruses (SIVs) have little impact on their hosts'
health.
Frank Kirchhoff and Michael Schindler, of the University of Ulm, in Germany, and their colleagues have been looking into
why that is. Their investigation, just published in
Cell
, suggests it is the result of a change in the role of a single viral gene, called
nef
.

They came to this conclusion by looking at those simian equivalents. In most SIVs, they found, one role of
nef
is to remove a
protein called TCR- CD3 from the surfaces of the cells that host the virus. The host cells in question are immune- system cells called
T-
cells. Specifically, they are “helper” T
-cells, which orchestrate the immune system's response to pathogens such as viruses.
The way the body recognises an infection is by examining molecules from the infectious agent. These molecules, known as
antigens, are picked up by so-called antigen- presenting cells that display them on their surfaces and show them to the helper cells.
The job of TCR-CD3 is to assist in the recognition of these antigens. If a helper cell recognises an antigen, it becomes activated.
This means that it starts secreting chemicals that stimulate the growth and multiplication of other T-cells, including the killer Tcells
that destroy infected cells. Then, its job done, it dies.
Usually, this response clears the infection. In the case of AIDS, though, it does not. That means the immune system continues
to be stimulated, and this prolonged stimulation results in high death rates among T-cells. Eventually, that exhausts the immune
system's capacity to regenerate itself. The result is a collapse in the number of T-cells, and the accompanying symptoms of AIDS.
In most simian infections, this does not happen because
nef
keeps the TCR-CD3 level too low for this exaggerated response to
occur. That is also true in a rarer form of human AIDS caused by a virus called HIV-2. This form of AIDS is found in West Africa,
but has not spread much beyond that part of the world. Indeed, of the 16 immunodeficiency viruses the researchers looked at, all but
five had
nef
genes that removed TCR-CD3 from the cell surface. Three of those five were closely related monkey viruses. The
fourth was HIV-1.
The fifth was the chimpanzee virus that is the direct ancestor of HIV-1. Mankind, it seems, was just unlucky that this virus
made the leap across the species barrier. If the only barrier-leaper had been HIV- 2 (which is the descendent of a
TCR- CD3-controlling monkey virus), AIDS might be a localized phenomenon in a few West African countries, rather than one of
the biggest problems faced by humanity.


Life beyond pay

Are you a “binge worker” ? Do you “chunk” your career? Companies are having to find new

ways to attract and retain skilled workers
A NEW magazine was published in America this month.
Success
is the resurrection of a title first published in 1897 by Orison
Swett Marden, an entrepreneur and author of a series of self-help books,
including “Getting the Most Out of Life”.
The magazine's
publisher, Joseph Guerriero, wants today's
Success
to reflect the contemporary workplace, where, he says, success is measured less
by money and
titles, and more by what is sweepingly referred to as “work
-
life balance”. The first issue conta
ins an article about
men leaving work to become full-time fathers.
Improving the balance between the working part of the day and the rest of it is a goal of a growing number of workers in rich
Western countries. Some are turning away from the ideals of their parents, for whom work always came first; others with scarce
skills are demanding more because they know they can get it. Employers, caught between a falling population of workers and tight
controls on immigration, are eager to identify extra perks that
will lure more “talent” their way. Just now they are focusing on
benefits (especially flexible working) that offer employees more than just pay.
Some companies saw the change of mood some time ago. IBM has more than 50 different programmes promoting work-life
balance and Bank of America over 30. But plenty of other firms remain unconvinced and many lack the capacity to cater to such
ideas even if they wanted to. Helen Murlis, with Hay Group, a human-resources consultancy, sees a widening gap between firms
“at the creative end of employment”
and those that are not.
The chief component of almost all schemes to promote work-life balance is flexible working. This allows people to escape
rigid nine-to-five schedules and work away from a formal office. IBM says that 40% of its employees today work off the company
premises. For many businesses, flexible working is a necessity. Globalisation has spread the hours in which workers need to
communicate with each other and

increased the call for flexible shifts.
Businesses have other good reasons for improving employees' work-life balance. Wegmans Food Markets, a grocery chain
based in Rochester, New York, frequently appears near the top of lists of the best employers in America. It has a broad range of
flexible-work programmes, which gives it one of the lowest rates of employment turnover in its industry
—
8% a year for full-time
workers, compared with 19% across the industry.
The spread of flexible work has come about at least partly as a result of initiatives to keep women workers. Companies have
had to offer extended periods of leave for them to look after dependants (young and old), and flexible working in between. At BAH,
women partners take an average of eight-anda-half extended breaks during their careers. Men take an average of one- and-a-half.
Ernst & Young, keen to show that part-time workers can also become partners, recently made the first such appointment in Houston,
Texas.
To some extent, the proliferation of work-life-balance schemes is a function of today's labour market. Companies in
knowledge-based industries worry about the shortage of skills and how they are going to persuade talented people to work for them.
Although white-collar workers are more likely to be laid off nowadays, they are also likely to get rehired. Unemployment among
college graduates in America is just over 2%. The same competition for scarce talent is evident in Britain.
Just after the dotcom boom ended in 2000, labour-market conditions were very different. Attrition rates shrank then because
staff were afraid to leave. Many were offered unpaid sabbaticals for the sake of the firm's health rather than that of the individual.
Such conditions may yet recur.

Travelling more lightly

As companies send more employees abroad, they are offering fewer perks and finding more
recruits in developing countries
FEW stereotypes are more enduring than the pampered expatriate, leading a life of luxury to compensate for the hardships of
slaving away in foreign climes. Although the end of foreign postings has long been predicted, many companies are sending more
people abroad than ever before. But they are trying to keep down the costs of doing so. The traditional business- class expat, usually
male and Western, is steadily being replaced by an economy version who may well come from a developing country.
According to a recent study of international assignments by Mercer, a consultancy, 38% of companies surveyed have increased