Bibi steps: Israel’s long-awaited government

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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. For many, life has slowed down recently. Not for scientists. Thousands of studies have already been published on the coronavirus and its effects. Some of the old ways of disseminating research are being completely upended. And that is a good thing. And in many American states, it's become illegal for potential employers to ask about past salaries. That simple change helps bring the chronically underpaid up to a fairer wage and not coincidentally, goes a long way to closing the gender pay gap. First up, though, For more than a year, Israel seemed to be stuck in a loop, election after election after election, as both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then head of the Opposition Benny Gantz repeatedly failed to form a coalition. But the political deadlock is over. Tonight, the pair will inaugurate a new unity government. Mr. Netanyahu will be prime minister for 18 months before handing over to Mr. Gantz. The swearing in was delayed by a day after America's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo broke a travel hiatus to fly to Jerusalem and meet with both leaders. There he discussed joint efforts to counter Iran's influence in the region.

A campaign that we have been part of to reduce the resources that the ayatollah has to inflict harm here in Israel and all across the world has borne fruit. It has been successful and we're going to stay at it. There's still work to do.

What wasn't publicly addressed were Israel's plans for the West Bank. Mr. Netanyahu campaigned on promises to annex parts of the occupied territories. That's just one point of contention between his likud party and Mr. Gantz's Blue and White coalition. As the long awaited government gets down.

To work, two political rivals who have been swearing in their campaigns not to trust each other, not to allow each other to be Prime Minister, are now basically going to guarantee each other as Prime Minister over the next three or four years.

Anshel Pfeffer is our Israel correspondent reporting from Jerusalem.

Benny Gantz and the parties which supported him and are entering this government will receive an equal number of ministers in cabinet to the ministers of Likud and the other parties which supported Netanyahu. So they're supposed to have equal footing in cabinet and that both the Prime Minister and the alternate prime minister, Netanyahu and Gantz, who will have those titles and swap those titles in 18 months, both of them have the power of veto over the government's agenda. So that's the basic framework of how this is supposed to work. But obviously, almost any kind of government decision or policy could lead to a crisis.

One of the things that's lingered over this question for 16 months is this corruption trial Mr. Netanyahu faces. How will that work under this unity government?

So 10 days from the swearing in of this new government, Netanyahu is scheduled to face the Jerusalem District Court and three charges of fraud, one charge of bribery. And Netanyahu, of course, is denying all these charges. Doesn't seem that he can evade his day in court. And to make sure that the court system does hold Netanyahu to account, the Justice Ministry has been handed to one of Benny Gantz's allies. So they're saying he's going to ensure that the case goes ahead. But we can expect Netanyahu to try and find various ways to erode and undermine the case against him. We're already seeing from various Netanyahu proxies in the media a very vicious smear campaign against Attorney General who decided on the charges against him. And this will continue to be the undercurrent to the new government's first few months.

So assuming that this unity government can get past the corruption trial and get back to governing, how much faith do you have in them being able to stick together, given how much mistrust there is between these guys.

Well, the distrust within this new government is endemic, there's no question about it. And Gantz and Netanyahu spent the last 16 months slagging each other off. So suddenly beginning to work together may be a bit of a daunting prospect. But you have to remember that Gantz has in the past been the commander of the Israeli army under Netanyahu. So he does have a history of working well together with Netanyahu. And each of the new ministers in this government will be eager to get down to work, and they're really sick and tired of campaigning. For the last 16 months, Israeli politics has been in limbo. So I think that despite the distrust that there is amongst them, that they will get down to governing at least over the next few months and try to overcome whatever obstacles and dislikes they have for each other.

And another big question in Israel recently is the plan for annexation, which seems to be going ahead well.

The coalition agreement between Likud and Gantz's Blue and White Party does include the clause that the issue of annexation, as it appears in the peace plan proposed by Donald Trump back in January, will be brought to Cabinet and to the Parliament from the beginning of July. So that issue is there. And we know that Gantz and some of his partners are not very enthusiastic about going ahead with annexing large parts of the occupied West Bank. And that certainly is a potential minefield for this new government. But the real question is, is Benjamin himself really eager to go ahead with annexation? He's used this over the last year or so as an issue to rally his right wing base over the election campaigns. Benhya is a very risk averse leader, despite his gung ho image. He doesn't really like to to endanger the status quo. So why go ahead and jeopardize that by pushing on annexation? I think we'll hear Netanyahu continuing to promise annexation to his supporters, but finding reasons to delay. And then a lot will depend on the outcome of the US Presidential election in November. If Donald Trump loses and the next administration is much less supportive of annexation, then it may well not happen.

And is it that annexation push the sort of tacit approval of the Trump administration? The reason why America's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Israel yesterday, his first trip abroad in nearly two months.

So according to sources in Pompeo's entourage, that's not the reason he flew halfway around the world on his first international trip since the beginning of the Pandemic According to both Pompeo's remarks and what we've been hearing from people both on the Israeli and the American sides who were in the meetings, the main issue was actually Iran and various concerns that Israel and the United States have about escalations of tensions with Iran in the region. And the other issue that Pompeo brought up quite pointedly was China and America's concerns over China's lack of cooperation regarding COVID 19 and America's reservations with various projects that Israel is cooperating with the Chinese big infrastructure programs and so on that the administration wants Israel to freeze the Chinese out of.

So putting all that together, how likely do you think it is that this government will serve out its term as written?

So I think for the next year or so there's a good chance of the government staying together because nobody really wants to go back to election campaign mode again. People are really exhausted of elections. At the same time, Israel's just beginning to emerge from coronavirus shutdown. So I think at least for the 12 month period now, the government will somehow stick together. The real question mark on this government's future arises towards the end of 2021, when Netanyahu and Gantz have to sort of swap places and Gantz becomes the Prime Minister while Netanyahu will only be the alternate prime minister. I think then we'll see whether Netanyahu can actually contemplate relinquishing power. But probably for the next year, year and a half, Israeli politics will be relatively stable.

Angel, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Jason.

For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to the economist. To get 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds, just go to economist.com radiooffer One of the unexpected side effects of the pandemic has been the speeding up of Science. Before COVID 19, many disease scientists would submit their research to academic journals awaiting a careful process of vetting that takes months or more. Now, as they work at breakneck speed to understand the virus, some long established norms of science publishing are being tossed aside, possibly for good.

So normally scientists might spend years collecting data and then six months or even a year getting it published in peer reviewed scientific journals. There's a very careful process of checking and it's all very slow.

Alec Jha is the Economist's science correspondent.

With the pandemic, in the last three months alone, something like 8,000 or 9,000 research papers have been published, which is astonishingly large number so quickly. And that's a combination of several things. Journals themselves are speeding up peer review, so doing it in days rather than months. But also what's happening is that researchers are much happier to share preliminary findings. So findings that they've checked themselves and they've written up as manuscripts, but which have not gone through the sort of normal peer review process. And this has really accelerated the amount of information about the virus, about the disease that's available to other scientists.

And what kind of particularly helpful things have come out at this accelerated speed.

So the genome of the virus was published early January, which allowed people all around the world to develop tests to detect it, which was incredibly useful. The other important things that happened quickly, the early case reports of the disease caused by the virus being more fatal than flu, they were really important because they were shared as case studies and by medical reports that weren't necessarily peer reviewed. But what these did was to allow governments around the world to take the thing more seriously and institute the kind of policies that we've seen now, which involved severe lockdowns and economic disruption. If they didn't know so quickly that it was as dangerous as it was, then maybe they wouldn't have done that. And other things, for example, the idea that the virus can be spread by people without showing any symptoms, this wasn't obvious by any means. And if it had gone through the normal peer review process to be published these case studies and so on, then it might have taken months. But those findings were shared very early on and it allowed the world to respond appropriately.

And so what exactly has changed then? Why have things sped up so much?

Scientists themselves are now much, much happier to share preliminary UN peer reviewed findings on servers, on websites and servers called preprint servers. Now the idea here is that they've done the work, they've checked it as much as they can, they probably have shared it with some of their colleagues already, but that before they go through the peer review, formal peer review process of a journal, they upload it for anyone to have a look at and share. They're not a new idea at all. They've been used in the physical sciences and mathematics for almost three decades. And in those areas, actually preprints are the main way that scientists communicate in the medical sciences and health sciences. Scientists have resisted preprints because they rightly argue that a lot of their work has impacts on public health or human health directly. So they don't want shoddy or incomplete work sort of easily available.

Well, exactly. Aren't there risks in moving to a.

Model where you publish first and ask questions later?

Remember, scientists around the world don't just sit idly and take information from others without checking it themselves. If you're an epidemiologist in one part of the world and you see a study from somewhere else, you won't just believe the results. You might check yourself and rerun the models. And so there is a lot of peer review going on. It's just happening after publication when it comes to preprints rather than before. But the advantage of the preprint process is that information has been out there and can be used quickly, quicker than if it was just published in a paper in, let's say, six months time.

But I mean, an uncharitable view of preprint servers is it's a website and anybody can put anything they like up on a website. Do we have a sense at all of how accurate the stuff that's put on preprint servers ends up being in the longer run?

We haven't got a huge amount of research on that. There's some early bits of work that show that something like 70% of the preprints posted onto Biorxiv, which is the main biological sciences preprint server and where a lot of coronavirus research is being posted. About 70% of that work ends up being published in peer reviewed journals eventually. And when scientists looked at the amount of value, scientific value in a preprint compared to the scientific value of a published paper, they found that there's not very much difference. Now it's still early days and preprints are still a niche thing. Most research is not published on preprint servers. So we need much, much more to understand how good the quality is, what.

Safeguards are there to make sure that the quality is high, as high as you'd expect from peer reviewed studies.

Scientists work on prestige. They don't want to be pushing out information that then gets corrected and is shown to be wrong. So the thing that they would put on a preprint service in general at least a reputable scientist would be as good as they can manage. The analysis would be as good as they can manage. The experiments would be described in as good ways they can. So they don't want to be publishing even onto pre servers things that are not going to be shown to be correct.

But from the vantage of right now, do you think this sort of speeding up is a good thing to go from months and years to a matter of weeks? Is it the sort of the four minute mile that we should now just.

Stay under for the pandemic? It feels like the speed outweighs the risks. Basically every scientist in the world who is reputable and has interest in coronavirus needs information about it from all over the world as quickly as possible. And preprints and speeded up peer review have done that. And it outweighs the, I think the problems of shoddy work. There has been shoddy work published on preprint servers and also in peer review journals, but it's been quickly shown, even in the last few months, I think it's been quickly shown to be wrong. So the peer review process is working in the long term. There is some value in speeding up the work because most scientists would argue that the publication process is far, far too long. So there is some value in speeding things up. But I would say that for most work that isn't related to a public health emergency, it doesn't need to be as fast as this, but that more communication faster is better than the processes we've had so far in science.

Alok, thank you very much for joining us.

You're very welcome, Jason.

While all of this epidemiology and virology is speeding up on Earth, there are lots of advances in the study of worlds beyond it. This week on our sister podcast Babbage, a special episode on seti, the hunt for intelligent life out there.

Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, There.

Are plenty of cringe worthy questions you might expect at a job interview. What's your biggest weakness? How would your friends describe you? But in many American states, one of the most prickly ones, how much do you earn? Is now illegal.

Massachusetts was the first state to pass such a law, and that was back in 2016.

Erin Braun is an economist journalist based in New York.

Since then, at least 17 states and 21 municipalities, so that might be a county or a city, have passed a similar law.

And what's the stated purpose of these laws?

So advocates say that asking somebody about their salary history can be discriminatory. It might harm, for example, people who have been out of the labor force for a while. Say you're coming back to a job after five years. Your previous salary would have been much lower than it would have been if you're moving right from another job. As we know, that can sort of last with you throughout your entire career. So it really mitigates that problem. Every time somebody starts a new job is sort of a fresh slate, if you will.

And those gaps, they're not uniformly distributed, are they?

So the biases that these bans are trying to mitigate disproportionately seem to affect women, especially because we know that women are more likely to take time off to take care of kids and things like that. So really, the purpose of these bans is to try to narrow the gender pay gap.

And does it work? I mean, is there evidence to indicate that it does narrow that gap or stop perpetuating those biases?

It does seem to work, yeah. There's a new paper from researchers out of the University of Oregon and University of California, San Diego, and they take a look at census data for the last 13 or 14 years, and they calculated sort of a synthetic California. So they took all of the characteristics that make up California's labor force, like the racial makeup, the ratio of men to women, and the types of industries, to forecast what the pay gap would look like had the ban not gone into place, and then compare that to the actual data that they had from the census.

And how did that turn out?

What did they find?

So they found that the ban did seem to narrow the gap. After California introduced its ban in 2018, the gender pay gap for women over 35 narrowed by 2.3 percentage points. So it's a pretty big chunk. And the effect was even more stark for married women with children over the age of five. For that group, the pay gap shrank by 4.7 percentage points. And when you think about that, it sort of makes sense. 5 is about the age where kids can go to school full time. So if you did have a mother, for instance, who took time off work to care for their kids when they were little, when they go to school for the first time, that mother might go back to work as well. And so then she wouldn't have been hurt as much by a pay penalty once the ban had gone into place.

But what about beyond California?

So the researchers repeated the experiment across all states and municipalities that had enacted a ban and found the exact same effect. And they saw that the gap narrowed the most among older workers. So that group over 35. And for women in male dominated industries, which just means women working in fields that are majority male.

So is the suggestion here that this is a kind of law that should be enacted everywhere just to address that gap that does exist everywhere?

I think that it is more prudent to think of it as sort of a tool in a toolbox. There's not one magic policy that's going to erase the gender pay gap. There are other policies that have a similar effect. A study in Canada last year found that when provinces enacted pay transparency laws so companies have to share how much each of their employees are making for instance, they saw a similar narrowing of the gap. I found it quite interesting that full pay, transparency, and in effect, the opposite, not knowing what anybody is making can have this same effect. And the researchers argue that any way that you can reduce asymmetry or the information gap between employers and employees, it helps job applicants. So if you have no data, or if you have all of it and your employer has the same, then it's much harder to discriminate against women.

Erin, thanks very much for your time.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.