A man of the people: Pope Francis has died

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. These days, high protein is the new low calorie. Store shelves are lined with products promising this many grams or that. We look at what's behind the proteinaceous push and the market that's trying to accommodate it. And sometimes for managers, it's an absolute relief when an employee resigns. But nudging someone towards doing so? Well, there are better ways than others. But first.

One of the most dramatic moments in the life of the Catholic Church is when the great doors to the balcony of St. Peter's Swing Open and the new pope comes out.

Ann roe is the Economist's obituaries editor.

When Francis stepped out on March 13, 2013, there were a few surprises. First of all, he was Argentinian, the first pope who hadn't come from Europe for 13 centuries. And then again before he gave the great blessing, he asked the crowd to pray for him. There were more surprises to come. There wasn't going to be any papal cape or red velvet slippers. He didn't even want to wear white trousers under his white cassock. He said he didn't want to look like an ice cream seller. He refused to live in the 12 room Vatican apartment which is put aside for the Pope. And instead he lived in a very simple hostel, just two rooms, and he ate his meals in the dining room with everybody else. The motif of his papacy was that he wanted to be out among the people and he wanted to be helping those in trouble. When he was staying in the hostel, he would sneak out to go to prisons and hospitals, sometimes to the great surprise of the people who were working there, just to visit the people who were ill and in trouble. On every Holy Thursday, which was just before Easter, he would make sure he washed the feet of People who were lined up to greet him often again they were prisoners or victims of some kind of trouble. He was very conscious that he had taken the name of Francis from St. Francis of Assisi, who behaved in exactly the same way and whose idea was not to work through grand institutions, but to be out among the people helping them. In Buenos Aires, where he'd been the bishop, he'd been called the slum bishop because he insisted that his priests ought to do the same. And in fact, in Buenos Aires he had also cooked his own meals and traveled by bus. He thought that ostentatious displays of sanctity were osteoporosis of the soul. He wasn't going to have any of that. There was another extraordinary facet to his openness, and that was that he refused to defend doctrine for doctrine's sake. Of course, because he was Pope. There were some red lines which had been drawn in Catholicism for some time, and he didn't overstep those. For example, he was still firmly opposed to euthanasia, to abortion, to same sex marriage. He didn't have any sympathy with married priests and or with women deacons. All these questions came up and he didn't really engage with them very much. But on the other hand, he wanted to leave open a little space for understanding. So of homosexuals he once asked, who am I to judge? And he seemed to leave the door open to allowing people who had divorced and remarried to take communion again in church. There were no pariahs in his church, but his main enemies. There were people he called lying spellbinders, hypocrites who in fact were only posing as being pastors and were there mostly to advance their own curial careers, who did not care for the people, in other words. But of course there were many people who also opposed him. He was going very fast, much too fast for some people. In trying to reform the Church, he realized that they were trying to play a long game of prostrating him. And some of his attempts, indeed at addressing long term problems of the church, such as child abuse, didn't make much progress under him because he found that there was simply too much resistance in other quarters. On the other hand, he too could play a long game. And his chief strategy was to appoint to the cardinal aid open minded people like himself, who would carry on his work long after he had gone. Silk. Wondered what could have motivated him. He was such a gregarious, smiling, curious figure, always interested in what was going on around him. They wondered whether all this energy and tremendous speed with which he was trying to do things was an attempt to make up for something. He had been the Bishop of buenos Aires during Argentina's Dirty War in the late 1970s and 1980s. Possibly he'd made mistakes there or failed to do something that he was trying to make up for. But it seemed more likely that his motivation was simply to change the appearance of the church, To change it from this giant institution, which seemed to have made a good many missteps in recent years, to a place of mercy for everybody. This was the most important aspect. He wanted the Church to be a merciful church, and he lived every day of his life in that ambition. However, Catholics are truly worried that when he has gone, those great doors to the balcony of St. Peter's may swing slowly shut again.

Ann Ro on Pope Francis, who's died aged 88.

So I have just walked into Sainsbury's on the way to the gym looking for a snack because I haven't eaten since lunch and I don't want to capsize in this class. And in the very first aisle there are a bunch of high protein snack options. There are some handy strawberry yogurt pouches with 20 grams of protein. There's little pots of blueberry yogurt with a spoon so I can eat it on the go. Another 20 grams of protein just up from there. In the meal deal, there's chicken skewers, fridge raiders, chicken bites, tiny little bars of cheddar cheese. There used to be calories everyone is obsessed with, but more recently, it's protein.

Avantika Chilcotti is the Economist's global business correspondent.

If you go on social media, you will see lots of nutritionists and fitness influencers recommending that you eat more protein. Celebrities have made it trendy to look strong rather than skinny, and they say protein helps with that. And you can already see that's affecting how people eat. Google searches for high protein diet reached the highest point ever in January. And according to Kantar, a research firm, almost 70% of Americans say they want to increase the amount of protein they eat.

So this is not just for the bros who lift. This seems to be for many more people. I mean, what's going on here?

It's really spread beyond gym goers. So people have realized that protein can make you feel full for a longer time and it can help you build muscles. To get into the detail of this, I spoke to Jurgen Esser. He's deputy CEO of Danone, a big French dairy company.

The trends, especially on protein, was really born by the younger generation, especially the people who were very sport oriented, going to the gym, but it became a mainstream approach and now it's more in creating the awareness of the more elderly population that this is going to help.

You to stay healthy. During the COVID 19 pandemic, when everyone was stuck at home and worrying about their health, it really spurred demand for protein. And more recently, you've had a rush of interest from people who use GLP drugs. Stuff like Ozempic, which suppress appetite, help you lose weight incredibly quickly.

So why would someone who's on weight loss drugs want to turn to high protein stuff anyway?

One thing that people are noticing with people on GLP1 drugs is that when you lose weight, you lose fat, but you also lose muscle and they're trying to tone up. So it's very early days for this kinds of research. But some researchers at Cornell University did a study recently and they found that if you have a household where at least one person has started taking GLP1 drugs, their spending on groceries drops by over 5% in the first six months. But interestingly, if they're taking JLP1s to lose weight rather than, say to control diabetes, their spending on protein doesn't actually seem to drop. In America now, about 8% of adults are on JLP1 drugs. Those are becoming more and more popular elsewhere as well. So all food groups are thinking there might well be a rush of interest in protein.

And your trip to the supermarket seems to suggest that businesses have cottoned onto this and are meeting the demand.

Yes, you've got all of the big food groups producing something or the other aimed at high protein. So if you go into Marks and Spencer's near the office where we used to just have some sandwiches and packets of crisps, meal deals, there's a whole aisle of high protein salads and rice boxes with a big number on the front telling you how many grams of protein you're going to get in that box. Nestle is selling frozen pizzas and pastas under this brand. Vital Pursuit that is essentially targeting GLP1 users. It says GLP1 friendly, it says high protein. Even Mars, which you probably think of as selling calorific chocolate bars, they're also selling high protein versions of those chocolate bars. The most interesting part of the reporting for me has been speaking to food startups because they're the ones doing really innovative stuff. So I spoke to the founder of Biotiful Gut Health, which you might have seen around, they sell high protein kefir, which is a bit like a yogurt drink. And I spoke to the owners of Curators, which sells high protein chips and pork puffs and things in packets. These are things that we just didn't see before on the market.

But why reinvent the wheel? What about well known high protein things like eggs or nuts or just chicken?

Yeah, it's such a good point. So at the moment another trend is people eating fewer ultra processed foods, more natural foods. So Ocado, the food delivery service, did a survey recently and they saw people are searching more and more for things like cottage cheese or Greek yogurt, chicken breasts, which are naturally high in protein. I think the reason you're getting these startups making snacks is because the other trend in food at the moment is young people wanting food they can eat on the go. It's probably a bit more difficult to eat a chicken breast on the go than a packet of cheesies or whatever they are.

So where do you see this trend going? Will it be us walking down the street just eating chicken breasts or cheese puffs or whatever it is that keeps our protein just completely in the red?

Yeah, it's an interesting one because there are so many fads in the food space. People are trying to eat more protein. They're also trying to eat fewer ultra processed foods, like I said, but also anything that's plant based or good for your gut. So you start to wonder how much of this is just marketing. In particular, what people were saying to me is if you look at food that is marked as being high protein, it's always 20 grams or 25 grams of protein. Hitting these nice round numbers does seem a little bit like marketing, and the science behind this is uncertain. So the WHO recommends that people eat 0.83 grams of protein every day for every kilogram of body weight. And by that measure, Americans and people in Britain actually consume too much protein anyway. If consumers are confused, brands are confused as well. I spoke to, as I said, the founder of the Curators, this snack company, and he was telling me they're making a new tortilla chip and they tried lots of recipes that had 20 grams of protein per bag and 15 and they actually settled on a lower protein count because it just tasted better. And I wonder whether of all these fads, the things that really last that customers will always care about is what food actually tastes like.

Thanks very much for joining us, Avantika, and happy snacking.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

When an employee hands in their resignation, their manager could have all kinds of reactions. If the worker is great at their job, the boss might be genuinely saddened. The Manager might be irritated if it falls on them to find and train a replacement. But what if the boss was secretly hoping the employee would go? Yes, a worker choosing to leave could be the HR equivalent of removing a pebble from your shoe. And it turns out there are all sorts of methods a manager could use to encourage a resignation.

It's not new that bosses want some members of their organization to resign.

Andrew Palmer, no relation, writes Bartleby, our column on work and management.

Often they are not willing to approach this in an open way. They will do so in an underhand way by using a technique that is sometimes called quiet firing. We've heard of quiet quitting. This is quiet firing. It may be common, but it's not a very good way of approaching things.

So if underhand tactics aren't the right approach, why do so many bosses resort to them?

It's a natural thing to do because being open about getting people to leave can be conflictual. And it's certainly the kind of thing that might mean you can avoid litigation or liability if you get it wrong. But generally, it's not a great idea to do this quiet firing. It's not very nice to the person involved. So what this might mean is you'll set impossible deadlines, or you're shoved into smaller and smaller offices, or you're given menial tasks to do. You're gradually eased into irrelevance. So that's not pleasant. It leaves people on a team watching this happen, wondering a little bit like, is this fair? Why isn't the problem being dealt with? And it's very, very inefficient. It doesn't get you grasping the problem and gripping the nettle quickly.

So what's a better way?

So there are some firms which have used this idea of a pay to quit scheme. So Zappos was the first that bec really well known for doing this. That's an online retailer. And then Amazon used it as well. And the idea there is basically, they dangle money to new hires in particular and say, look, if you want to go, we'll pay you to go. And the idea is that they're trying to winkle out the people who are less committed from those who really do want to stay. And attaching money to that is a nice way of doing it makes it costly, basically, for people to pretend to be committed to an organization. One of the problems with that is that you might have this going all the time and you might actually create some weird incentives. So if people know that there's money on offer, if they join a firm and then leave soon after, you could potentially set up the problem of people joining in order to resign. So it's probably better if you're trying that to do it on a one off basis or to do it in an irregular, unpredictable way.

Okay, but even then, still hard to get the incentives lined up right. Give me more. What are the best ways to do this?

There's a really interesting new paper from academics at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago. And what they did was basically try and get workers to reflect on what it is that was meaningful to them in their lives and then in their work. So they held workshops with employees of a firm. They got them to talk through their purpose, what it is that motivated them, and then to reflect on whether their jobs matched their sense of purpose. And just that process of reflecting seemed to produce some good results for the organization in the sense that lots more people quit afterwards. The lower performers in the organization were much more likely to quit. And what's more, the overall productivity of the company rose. So it looks like if people are given a chance to reflect on am I happy in a job, does it satisfy my sense of what is meaningful that that might prompt them to leave of their own accord? Also because it seems to isolate the lower performers by which I think is a proxy for people who are kind of just less motivated. It avoids another problem with resignation offers in general, which is you might get a bunch of people who are your best performers taking the opportunity to leave if there's money on offer to do so.

You just poke workers in the feels and the wheat separates itself from the chaff. I mean, I'm half expecting after the segment goes out to receive one of these kinds of questionnaires from Men Management.

Well, that implies people are listening to this, of course, Jason, but I mean, maybe they will. It's a first paper, so it's a relatively new approach, but it's an interesting one and it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, people know if they're really happy or not, or if they feel like this is a place they want to stay. And you can probably accelerate that process. It was an interesting piece of research.

Andrew, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Sam.