A plight in Tunisia: the president passes

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Pet ownership is on the rise around the globe and people have ever more ways to pamper their furry friends. But are all those products and services actually good for pets? And what benefits do Creature Companions really bring their owners anyway? And the science of homeopathy is clear, these diluted remedies couldn't possibly work as described. Yet in France, they've been subsidized by the state. Until recently. We look into the business of the bogus. First up though, yesterday the president of Tunisia, Beiji Kaid Sebsi, passed away. He was elected in 2014 in the wake of the Arab Spring, which started in December 2010 when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire. This single act of protest sparked a wave of revolution across the Arab world. Huge demonstrations erupted in Tunisia and spread to neighboring countries. But Tunisia was the only one to emerge from the upright with a democracy. Mr. Sebsi was key to the country's transition away from authoritarian rule. But in the end, he failed to fix some of its biggest problems. Whoever takes his place now faces huge challenges, not least a failing economy and a disenchanted public that questions what the revolution was for.

Sepsi had been ill for weeks. He was hospitalized in June, and many saw this death.

Roger McShane is our middle east editor.

A transfer of power in Tunisia was imminent anyway. A presidential election was scheduled for November. Parliamentary elections were scheduled for October. Now the presidential election will have to be moved up. It's supposed to take place within 90 days. In the interim, the speaker of Parliament will take over as president. There is one catch to all this. The whole process is meant to be overseen by by a constitutional court. That constitutional court has not actually been set up yet, so they'll have to find some way around that. But it is somewhat indicative, the fact that this court hasn't been set up yet it's sort of a product of the fighting within the Tunisian political system.

And let's go back a bit. How was it that Mr. Sebc came to power?

He was a pretty odd choice for a country that had just toppled its dictatorship. I mean, he had held positions in the previous two regimes. He had served as foreign minister, served as head of the parliament. Some saw this as something that qualified him to hold high office. Some wanted to see fresh faces. But what really sort of led him to power was his dislike for Enada, which was the Islamist party that led the first government after the revolution in Tunisia. And Anada did enough by itself to alienate the public. But Sebsi organized a party called NIDA tunes, which was a coalition of secular groups with really just one aim, which was defeating Enada. And so after a string of political assassinations, there were large protests, and Anatta was eventually forced to step down. In the elections that followed, Sebsi was elected president, and Nita Tunis won a plurality in parliament.

And what will his legacy be?

Well, he came into office promising to fix the economy, re establish security and consolidate Tunisia's democracy. If we're being honest, he largely failed at all of these tasks. I mean, the economy is still in shambles. Unemployment is very high. Corruption is rampant. Foreign investors haven't returned. Security is still an issue. Shortly before he was hospitalized last month, there was actually a terrorist attack in the capital, Tunis. And as far as consolidating Tunisia's democracy, that in some ways feels like the biggest shame, because after he was elected, Sebsi actually struck up a friendship with the leader of Anada, Rashid Ganushi and Nita. Tunis and Anatta actually formed an alliance and governed together, but they're really unable to fix the big problems that plague Tunisia. And so a lot of Tunisians were left sort of wondering what was the actual benefit of toppling the dictatorship and establishing democracy. There was this promise that prosperity would quickly follow, but it simply hasn't.

The big problems that plague Tunisia that you mention are mostly economic.

Yes, exactly. I mean, it's difficult to overstate the discontent in Tunisia over the economic situation. Things have just gotten worse and worse. The government is in debt in part because it employs an enormous civil service, but it can't afford to pay the wage bills of those who are currently on the payroll. And yet Tunisians still believe that the government ought to be the employer, not of last resort, but of first resort, really. They seek out government jobs because they are cushy, because they are well paid, and also because there are very few private sector jobs. So there is this issue in that the public still expects so much from the government, and the government simply can't afford to do much. On top of that, there is this issue of corruption and cronyism. Corruption ran rampant under the previous regimes, and if you talk to Tunisians today, they say that's still the case, only the faces have changed of the people who are actually carrying out the corruption.

So the elections that will be sort of brought forward, how do you expect that to go?

So the polling is pretty fuzzy, and it's not even clear which candidates are going to be allowed to run. What is clear is that the public is really unhappy with the politicians that are currently in place and that they're throwing their support behind populist candidates. One of them, for example, is a man named Nabil Khorraoui, who is a media magnate, but he seems to have recently been disqualified from running. His party is also atop the polls for the parliamentary election, even though it hasn't been set up yet. Now, having said that, Anada is still a force. There is still a large contingent of Tunisians who support the Islamists. You also have parties like the De Stori Party, which is nostalgic for the old dictatorship. And if you go around the countryside, you will hear that a lot about things here. Things were better under the previous regime, a lot of people say so.

That sounds like a real mess of possibilities and not all of them great. I mean, what kind of leader does Tunisia need at this stage?

Well, it needs a leader who's going to continue with the economic reforms, continue to uphold the IMF's economic program. The best candidate, I believe, is Yusuf Shahed, who's the current prime minister. And he's been trying to carry out reforms such as raising taxes, cutting subsidies, paring back the civil service. Unfortunately, this has made him rather unpopular with the public, and it seems likely they're going to go for a much more populist candidate. And that's probably not going to be great for Tunisia. These populist candidates, if they win election, there's no way they can deliver on their promises. The country is, in effect, broke. It just can't afford to do the things it used to do. Serious reforms are still needed. The IMF is still putting tremendous pressure on it to make these reforms, and only after that's done will foreign investors come back in. What you need is a reformer, but that's not the type of candidate that is likely to win favor with the public.

Roger, thanks for your time.

My pleasure.

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All dog lovers know that face. Your canine companion looks up at you with big implore eyes. Often when you're at the dinner table, you are putty in your pet's hands. And that's no accident. New research shows that unlike their wolf ancestors, dogs evolved muscles that, when activated, give them bigger looking eyes, a more expressive face. It helps them better communicate with humans and get what they want. These days, our furry friends are more mollycoddled than ever. And around the world, pet ownership is on the rise in a big way. But it may well be that one's propensity to be a pet lover is set from birth.

I find it a little hard to see how people get really extraordinarily attached to pets.

That's Joel Budd, our social policy editor.

I think, I think of pets similar to the way cats think about people, sort of they're nice to have around, they're nice to stroke. But I have to say I've never felt extraordinarily devoted to a pet. And apparently my attitude is probably encoded somewhere in my genes.

What do you mean by that? That there is a genetic component to pet loving?

Yes, it does seem that way. It's not simply that people will get a dog or get a cat because they grew up in a house with a dog or a cat. If you look at twins, you can see that there is quite a strong inherited component to it.

And so you have been looking into the behavior, I guess, of the genetic component of humanity that is given to really loving pets. What did you find?

Well, I found that keeping pets and loving pets and coddling pets and dressing pets up in crazy costumes and all the rest of it is not at all new. It's been going on for hundreds of years and possibly thousands of years. But what is new is just the sheer number of pets in the world is increasing very, very rapid. Pets are being treated much more like pets than they were in the past. So, for example, in a country like Brazil or Mexico, they've had dogs for a long time, but the dogs were kept outside and they didn't have names really. And now they're coddled and their nails are clipped and they're brushed and they're fed fancy food and all the rest of it. And you see that in lots of countries.

Go on, give me a good example. The most extreme example of pampering, I.

Think, in a way, the most extreme example is South Korea. Now, South Korea has gone very quickly from being a country where almost nobody kept dogs or cats and, in fact, not uncommonly would eat them. So dog meat was a reasonably common thing in South Korea. Some people still eat it, but it's becoming rarer. And cats were boiled up and turned into tonics, which I think the idea was they cured rheumatism. Supposedly South Korea has gone from that to a country where cat and dog ownership is rising really quickly. And cat owners in South Korea refer to themselves as, like, they're the butlers of their cats. So kind of a completely servile role.

Not owner, not mommy or daddy, no, butler, yes. So what's driving that kind of change, do you think? Why this change in, I don't know, the power structure, shall we call it?

I think it's possible that it has something to do with the way human families are changing. So obviously we have many fewer children than we used to, and people will be living without children for longer periods of their lives. And I think also it's just growing wealth. Once you take care of your basic needs, you look around for someone else or something else to take care of, and people find that in pet.

But if you can buy a beer for your bulldog in Belgium or shiatsu for your Shih Tzu in Chicago, the question is, does all this coddling benefit the animals?

There is a certain risk of people getting carried away with thinking that a dog is actually a small human being when it's not.

That's Caroline Kisko. She's the secretary of the Kennel Club, Britain's largest organization dedicated to the health and welfare of dogs. It also runs the dog show, Crofts.

Most dogs actually like being dogs and like to be treated as dogs, though while they may take advantage of the fact that you're treating them like a small human being, there is a downside to that. If they then become obese because somebody cannot stop themselves from giving them too many treats, and if they are actually made too hot by the fact that they're being pushed into wearing clothing and so on. And I think that we certainly, as a kennel club, we would caution against that. You put a raincoat on the dog if it's chucking it down in the middle of winter, but otherwise the dog has a coat of its own that will do the job very well. And certainly when it comes to painting dogs nails and all sorts of other things that you see people doing, complete no. Because what's that for? It's for you, it's not for the dog.

Extreme pampering might not benefit one's pet, but do pets benefit their owners?

I think that the evidence for that is quite weak. It's true in sort of limited circumstances. There was a nice study, for example, where people were offered the opportunity to play with a dog before they went into exam and it did seem to calm them down. But the pet lobby, if there's a pet lobby, has tried for some decades to prove that pets actually improve your health, that if you have a dog you will go to the doctor less, your blood pressure will be lower. And they've really, I think, largely failed to prove that case. And the problem is, of course, what statisticians call a selection effect. Just observing that people who have dogs are healthier is no good. Because we also know that people who have dogs are wealthier, more likely to be married, more likely to own their homes in America, more likely to be white. And all of these things are also associated with good health. So once you control for those things, it does seem that the effect of having a pet diminishes to pretty much nothing, at least in terms of health. They're just not as good for us as we seem determined to believe.

So no proven benefits to having a pet? Nothing.

If you're a young, single heterosexual man, having a dog really does seem to help you pick up women. So there was a lovely study done about 10 years ago in Paris of a man called Antoine who stood in a park, sometimes with a dog, sometimes not with a dog, and asked 240 women for their phone numbers using exactly the same chat up line. And his success rate without a dog was something like 10%. And his success rate with a dog was something like 30%. And indeed, women on dating websites will say that they are attracted to men who mention in their profiles that they have dogs. So I have a question for you. What pets do you have or what pets have you had?

I currently have a cat.

And how do you keep this cat? Does it have cat jackets, a cat bed, etc.

He is well fed with widely available and reasonably priced food. And that's kind of it.

Well, this is very retro.

I do talk to him Though, like, as if he's going to, you know, understand. Joel, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Every year, consumers spend $4 billion on homeopathy around the world. These alternative treatments are so heavily diluted that they could have no effect on the human body. Advocates say they cure disease because water retains a memory of the active ingredients. It doesn't. And plenty of scientific studies have proven it doesn't. Yet homeopathy still has its adherents.

The French are huge fans of homeopathy.

Stanley Pignoll is the Economist's European Business correspondent, based in Paris.

According to studies, more than half of all French people have ingested some homeopathy. All pharmacies dispense homeopathic products alongside real drugs. So it's kind of really part of the mainstream here in a way that is surprising to many people, especially since France is one of the cradles of modern medicine. Homeopathy is so officially sanctioned that the state reimburses patients for part of the cost. And that's something that is set to change.

Why has the government been subsidizing this quackery at all?

Well, excellent question. The French have been reimbursing homeopathy for 35 years. It's treated slightly differently to medicine. Obviously, it doesn't need to pass any tests of efficacy, because it can. But in other ways it is treated like normal medicine. So doctors prescribe it. You have real honest to God medical doctors that prescribe a homeopathy and patients buy it and then Social Security pays back for some of the cost.

But you say it's that that's changing.

Yeah. So last year, a bunch of French doctors kicked up a fuss, saying it was about time that this stopped. The amounts that get reimbursed are not huge. It's about 100 to 150 million euros a year. But health budgets are getting tighter across Europe and this has felt like it was an overdue decision. I think part of the reason it hasn't happened sooner, frankly, is France is a big producer of homeopathic medicines. But the companies that make these medicines have a formidable lobbying presence and have made that presence felt over the years.

And so the medical establishment is coming around to the idea that it's bad medicine.

Well, the medical establishment is split. There are several thousand doctors in France that call themselves homeopathic doctors. This can seem like a complete non sequitur to the rest of the world. There is, however, I think, a bigger contingent of doctors who think that this is a bit of a stain on the profession. They kind of feel that medical reimbursement should be reserved for drugs that have proof that they work.

I mean, the one end of this discussion that has ever actually carried any weight is to do with the placebo effect, that perhaps the drugs don't actually do anything, but they can have a positive effect if the person who's taking the drugs thinks they're doing something. Does that figure into this debate at all?

Yeah. So there are two arguments that are put forward. One of them is this one. So you have the placebo effect, which works when people believe that they are given effective remedies. And so even if the pills don't do anything, then people believe they're going to get better, and then they do get better. The second argument that's put forward is the French overmedicate. By and large, they go to the doctor and they expect to be given something. And what some doctors claim is, well, listen, either insofar as they're going to take something, they might as well take homeopathic pills, because the homeopathic pills won't do anything, but at least they'll prevent them from consuming other drugs which might have bad side effects. And in fact, those other drugs are more expensive and will have to be repaid by Social Security. That second argument seemed to hold sway for a while with the French authorities, but ultimately, a scientific panel made a ruling that obviously, homeopathic medicines don't work, and therefore they should just straight up be taken off the register of drugs that get reimbursed.

And so, as far as advocates of homeopathy, the homeopaths themselves, how are they taking this change in the law, the reimbursement?

Well, it threatens a pretty lucrative business model. So the biggest purveyor of homeopathic medicines is a French company called Boiron, which is based outside of Lyon in southern France. It's a company that has margins which are on par with the kind of Pfizers and Novartis of this world, which are much bigger. Much bigger companies should have better margins because they have much bigger economies of scale. But the secret sauce, if you're a homeopathic purveyor, is that you don't need to do research, obviously, because there's no science behind it. So Boiron, for example, according to its annual report, has 13 people doing research out of a workforce of nearly 4,000. So that's a tiny percentage of its workforce. If you look at a big pharma firm, it's going to be more like 1 in 6 employees. That model is enormously helped. If you have the official endorsement of the state and reimbursements to go with it. And that's the model that is being threatened today.

Well, fingers crossed. Stanley, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

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