Bidin’: will Joe go or no?

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Just off the Colombian coast lies what might be the world's most valuable shipwreck. It's been found intact after 300 years and a project is underway to pick through its treasures. Whom those treasures belong to, well, that's the tricky bit.

And mention international students and countries such as America, Britain and Canada come to mind. Now Finland is trying to get in on the act. Can its primary schools attract foreign pupils?

First up, though, In this year full of elections, America's is clearly a biggie. And by now you might hope to be hearing stuff of substance about it. The would be president's policies, plans and promises. Instead, one question has absolutely consumed the agenda, particularly for Democrats.

Can President Biden remain his party's nominee for president?

Opinions are hardening in many quarters. That action has to be taken. And that action is a different nominee.

That's the question. After an extraordinary week of turmoil inside.

The Democratic Party, plenty of party members and Lawmakers have suggested Mr. Biden should give way. Some even had the gumption to say so publicly. And at every stage, Mr. Biden has pushed back. This week it was an open letter insisting he's going nowhere. I'm firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump, he wrote. And yet where this race ends for him remains unclear.

Joe Biden has been a pretty good president.

John Britto is the Economist's US Editor.

But after the debate performance he gave, it's just very hard for him to convince Americans that he should serve another four years. Once you've seen those moments, you can't exactly unsee them. And even the parts of the debate that weren't disastrous weren't exactly great either.

On the matter of the what now.

Question, it's been largely about people within Mr. Biden's party. How significant has the movement there been?

So seven House Democrats have publicly called for him to stand aside now, as has one Democratic senator. That's not nothing, given that the Democratic Party typically is quite well behaved and orderly. And then the below the surface part, there are a lot of people who haven't spoken out publicly who have concerns, particularly those running in competitive congressional or Senate races and are worried about Biden dragging them down. You also see some senior party figures, party elders like Nancy Pelosi, who seems to be asking Biden to go without actually, it's up to the president to.

Decide if he is going to run. We're all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short, the, I think overwhelming support of the caucus. It's not for me to say I'm not the head of the caucus anymore, but he's beloved, he is respected and people want him to make that decision, not me.

He has said he has made the decision. He has said firmly this week he.

Is going to run.

Do you want him to run?

I want him to do whatever he decides to do.

And earlier this week, Adam Smith, who's the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called for Biden to step down on cnn.

Well, look, I think he should step aside. There was concerns leading up to it in the terms of the president's ability to deliver a message, and it hasn't gotten better since the debates. And look, a lot of Democrats are saying, well, let's move on, let's stop talking about it. We're not the ones who are bringing it up. Our constituents are bringing it up. The country is bringing it up. And the White House, sorry, campaign strategy of be quiet and fall in line and let's ignore it simply isn't working right now.

So what do you make of that point Mr. Smith is making about? Ultimately, this is about what the voters.

Want at the moment Joe Biden's polling deficit compared with Donald Trump has increased by 1.7 points since the debate. So that doesn't sound huge. Right, but that means that Donald Trump has the biggest lead in national polls he's had in any of his three presidential campaigns. I mean, you have to remember that Joe Biden was already behind in national polls and in swing state polls before this debate. The Economist's election forecast model gives Donald TRUMP A 3 in 4 chance of victory at the moment. If that's accurate, then Joe Biden is in a deep hole, and having members of his party, frankly, not wanting him to run again won't help his chances.

Is there any reason to believe, if he did step down, that whoever replaced him would have better odds, would have a better chance of beating Mr. Trump?

There's not a lot of evidence in polling. So the latest polling shows that Kamala Harris might do slightly better, but that's really because essentially no Democrat has the name recognition that Joe Biden has. And so when pollsters ask, would you vote for Donald Trump or would you vote for Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg or Roy Cooper or somebody else? So many voters haven't heard of those people that actually their numbers don't look that great against Trump. And so Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, look like the best bets on raw polling numbers. However, that's just not great evidence. I think better evidence is if you talk to political observers or frankly, talk to elected Democrats, who are the best judges at who's really good at winning elections. And in private, the names that they will mention are governors of swing states like Whitmer in Michigan, like Andy Bashir in Kentucky, people like Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary. They're people who, it's pretty obvious, have real political talent, A and B, are a lot younger than Joe Biden is.

I mean, it might be a moot point in that Mr. Biden may, in fact, stick to his guns. Unless there is some way to force.

His hand, it might be moot. Jason, all the signs at the moment, as you know, are that Joe Biden is sticking to his guns. He said in a recent interview he wouldn't step aside unless it was the Lord Almighty coming down and asking him to do so. That's a pretty high bar. But I also have to say, if you're Joe Biden, you can't show any sign of weakness, really, until the moment that you do actually decide to stand aside. Now, every signal he's giving is that he's not going to stand aside. But I just still think the Democratic Party is going to be in so much trouble if it goes through to the election in November with him at the top of the ticket. I think privately most of them know that the reason this story is quite so hard to report is that the decision rests in the hands of one man, Joe Biden. And so everybody is trying to get into his head. And yes, he is old and stubborn and doesn't like to be pushed around, but he could change his mind and then everything changes.

But I'm really curious as to why Mr. Biden doesn't see this. A man who's dedicated his entire life to public service, he must be politically savvy enough to know that this is really troubled.

Jason, I agree with you on the face of it. What's been really troubling, I think, is the way that over the past week or so he's just been denying all the evidence that should be staring him in the face. He started talking about how he doesn't believe polls, which is always a bad look for a candidate and also sounds a bit trumpy. He's been talking about how everybody wants him to stay in the race, which is not true. He's been talking about how he's the victim of a plot by party elites, as if the guy who was first elected to the Senate in the early 70s was somehow an outsider. So all of that points in the other direction. I would agree with you that the Biden of four years ago really had his finger on the pulse of where the Democratic Party was and also where it needed to be. Perhaps the fact that you have this large staff telling you day after day that you're great. Biden has this stubborn streak. He feels that he was passed over for the nomination in 2016 and told to step aside, and that was a mistake. If you go back even further, Biden first ran for the presidency in the 1988 election. He's wanted it since then. Having won the office, it's a hard thing for him to give up.

I mean, when you put it like.

That, going for office first in the 70s, going for the presidency first in the 80s is just a stark reminder of essentially how old both these candidates really are.

That's right. And it's something that's been on my mind a lot this year. It's very strange. America looks very unlike other Western democracies in this, as you say, you have these two candidates born in the 1940s. About half the country has lived most of their lives under a white male who was born in the 1940s in the White House. So if you're also interested in why it is that those American men have had such a lock on power for such a long time, then do go and listen to Boom. The Generation that Blew Up American Politics. Our new podcast series which I host, the first episode came out last week. The second episode, which focuses on 1978, is out today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, I.

Am curious about that and I have been listening and I know a good friend of mine from Florida is listening. Very complimentary about that first episode.

Well, that's great to hear. And as all Americans know, folks in Florida have the best taste of any Americans.

John, thanks for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

I recently traveled to Cartagena, which is a stunning town on Colombia's northern Caribbean coast.

Claire McHugh writes about Colombia for the Economist.

It's full of tourists and they all go there to wander along the walls because it's surrounded by these enormous military walls that the Spanish built to fend off pirates. And you basically just spend the day wandering around the streets looking at the very brightly coloured houses and eating ceviche. And there's street performers and sloths in the park and it's so atmospheric and beautiful. But I wasn't there for the ceviche and the beaches. I was there because just beyond the walls, 600 metres below the waves, lies what might be the world's most valuable shipwreck. And at the end of May, Columbia got one step closer to revealing the ship's secrets.

Wow. Tell me about the world's most valuable shipwreck and its buried treasure.

It's a ship called the San Jose. It's a Spanish galleon. It sank off the coast of Cartagena in 1708 after a skirmish with a squadron of British warships. And it was a huge boat with about 600 sailors on board. And it was moving back towards Europe carrying all these treasures that were intended to fund the Spanish War of succession. So there were emeralds, because Colombia has a ton of emerald mines, and then gold and silver from the mines in what today is Bolivia. And it was also carrying treasures from the Far east, including Qing Dynasty porcelain. And all of this is probably worth billions of dollars in today's money.

Buried treasure from 300 years ago. What's happened to the San Jose since then?

So it's pretty much lain at the bottom of the seabed. And then in 2015, the Colombian Navy found it with the help of a couple of private firms. And then there's Been another gap in the San Jose's history. Because Colombia only began its archaeological project to explore the San Jose at the end of May. The director of Colombia's Institute of Anthropology and History, a woman called Elena Caicedo, recently announced the launch of this project. On a very rainy day in Cartagena. From deck of a naval vessel, The government run project sent down a remotely operated robot to photograph, scan and study the site. They found that the wreck had not been looted. They found three more anchors. So for Colombia, this is fantastic news. This is the first very successful step of a government run mission that they say could last for years. But on the other hand, the shipwreck is at the heart of a tangle of problems.

What are those problems?

The most important one is who does the ship belong to? Colombia claims it because the San Jose sunk in their territorial waters. But Spain also claims it because the San Jose was sailing under the Spanish flag. Various indigenous groups also claim the ship's contents. And then there's an American salvage company that says they found the ship first. Back in 1982, they've actually opened a court case against Colombia in The Hague for $10 billion. And I spoke to Samuel Flores, who is the legal representative of the Caracara, that's one of the Bolivian indigenous groups involved in claiming the ship's cargo. They say that the treasures were taken from their lands in Bolivia 300 years ago by the Spanish. And he believes that the San Jose is a chance for his people to reclaim their history and their respect.

Okay, so lots of competing claims. Who's winning? What's going to happen?

The project has become an important part of Colombia's president's cultural strategy. So Gustavo Petro, like many other left wing leaders in the region, has made decolonizing heritage a really important part of his government's mission. And as a result of that, they are very clear that Colombia is not going for gold, they do not want to excavate the treasure, that all of this is a scientific exploration that is for the benefit of Colombian knowledge, including indigenous people and including Afro Colombian communities. Their hope is that Columbia could become a power in marine archaeology and that they could unlock this kind of golden age of exploration in the Caribbean.

I'm amazed to hear you say that going for gold is not the main aim. Surely the goal must be to get some of these riches off the ocean floor.

They're very ambiguous about whether or not they want to take the treasures. The second step would be to lift a representative number of samples, say like four or five objects from the sea floor. And then those would be sent to laboratories in Cartagena that the Navy are adapting. But the long term plan is for a museum to be constructed in Cartagena where they can tell the story of the San Jose. People can come and visit. And the indigenous and Afro Colombian communities would get a cut of the proceeds. But this is not straightforward. Excavating a ship that's so old and that's 600 meters below the waves is technically a challenging project. Parts of the wreck might crumble when it comes up to the surface on contact with oxygen. And so Colombia really needs expertise and technology. And most importantly, it needs money to carry out this mission.

And is Colombia up to that challenge? Does it have that expertise?

I spoke to a couple of archaeologists about this. One of their concerns is that Colombia is putting history at risk by rushing ahead to carry out the initial exploration of the San Jose within Gustavo Petro's presidency. That there isn't a long term strategy and there isn't a guaranteed budget. There aren't any archaeologists on the project with deep sea experience. Colombia has put $4.5 million into the San Jose, but these excavations can run into the tens of millions. The stakes are really high to get this right. If the Archaeolog cannot carry out the excavation within the timeframe required, then treasure hunters might come back to finish off the job quickly. And that would be a worst case scenario because these treasure hunting firms are considered the pirates of the archaeological world. They just plunge in to these shipwrecks with profits in mind. And as they do so, they destroy all of this invaluable history in the process.

Claire, thank you so much. Really interesting.

Thanks. Rosie.

You probably haven't heard of Raltavara. It's a small town in a largely rural area in the center of Finland. Around 1500 people live there, but the community is shrinking. The local school has more desks than students to fill them. Now the town thinks it's found an answer to its dwindling population.

So the school in the town of Routeavara has room to take about 20 pupils a year. But local families are only going to supply about a dozen this coming autumn.

Mark Johnson is the Economist's education correspondent.

So it plans to make up the difference by importing students from developing countries. They're going to receive a Finnish at Finnish taxpayers expense.

Finland's not the first place you'd think of for people to move abroad. Why has this become necessary?

So school age populations are shrinking in lots of European countries and they're shrinking in Finland faster than most. So by 2030, the country could have maybe 10% fewer children aged 4 to 18 than it does at the moment, according to the EU's best guesses. So that's a problem for some schools, especially schools in the countryside, which suffer both from having few births and from migration to the cities. Hundreds of schools in Finland have shut their doors in the last couple of decades. Some schools now offer local youngsters incentives, like free driving lessons. They give them small cash scholarships in the hope that they'll stay around.

So who's actually pushing this idea of trying to get foreign students to come and study in Finnish schools?

Well, it isn't a government initiative, so it's being led by a Finnish startup called Finest Future. That company is co founded by an entrepreneur who previously helped build the Angry Birds brand for Rovio, a famous Finnish company. And this new company sells Finnish language lessons to kids in Asian, African, Latin American countries. So these are pupils from places such as Myanmar, from Vietnam, from Tanzania. And if they pass the necessary tests, if they achieve good proficiency, they get referred to Finnish schools. Now, the schools like this because they get per pupil funding from the central government for every student they take, just as if they were Finnish. As for the pupils, this is a cheaper option than going to, say, a British boarding school, if they have their hearts set on studying abroad. And it also comes with a prospect of a free place at a Finnish university at some point down the line.

And is it expected that these students will stay? Is it expected to help deal with the skills gap in Finland?

So that's the argument from the people that are organising this scheme. Yes. So Finland's not a big country, has a total population of 5.5 million, and that's going to start declining within the next decade. The country doesn't always do that well at attracting high skilled foreign workers. It's actually got a very low rate of foreign born inhabitants compared to the rest of Europe. And so there is this argument that drawing in foreigners when they're teenagers, doing it in a way that requires them to learn the language and providing them with a Finnish education is going to be a better way of attracting new talent than skilled worker programs for adults that haven't always been working all that well. And so the idea is that in the long run, this brings much more cash into Finland, much more growth than has to be spent on the education that attracts them.

Be interesting to see what effect this has on the learning of the Finnish language, which is famously very difficult. I'm interested in whether the government supports this strategy and also Finnish taxpayers who are essentially now funding places for foreign students.

Yeah, the Education Ministry in Helsinki has made it fairly clear that it doesn't much like funding places for kids from other countries. Sort of complicated series of laws that require it at the moment to pay for this when a Finnish speaker wishes to attend a Finnish school. Other factions in government I think are keener on this, more interested in the idea that it's a good way of attracting new young talent. There is a debate about whether focusing spending on fewer bigger schools might serve Finnish children much better than continuing to prop up small ones. Even if closing these schools is often a big wrench for country dwellers and can have big impacts on the future of these small towns. Whatever happens next, I think this experiment is going to supply other shrinking school systems across Europe with valuable lessons.

Mark, thank you so much.

Thank you.

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