Capital accounts: on the ground in Kyiv

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. From London, I'm Jason Palmer and in.

New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

When what you would call once in a century fires or floods strike three years in a row, you've got to recalibrate your statistics. We look at the shocking inundation of eastern Australia and and a pattern of freakish weather that's no longer so freakish.

And old fashioned grammar teaching has made a comeback in British classrooms. Our language columnist explains that teaching children what each bit of a sentence is called may not make them better writers.

But first.

Explosions overnight in Kiev. Several buildings, including a metro station were hit. Yesterday. Rescuers carried people out of a still smoldering tower block. The Russian bombardment of the Ukrainian capital appears to be intensifying while its people are doing their best to get on with their lives, however difficult that now is.

I came here to Kiev on 20 February, basically exactly four days before the invasion began.

Tim Judah is an economist correspondent currently based in Ukraine.

It's really a kind of eerie, strange mood, but it's something that people in Kyiv have got used to already after more than two weeks of war. There have been a few missile strikes. For example, Monday the 14th of March, I went out to a block of flats in Obolon, which has been comprehensively trashed by, it appears, a missile strike. Dozens of apartments have been destroyed there, but actually there have been very few actual strikes or missiles intercepted and crashing over the city. I think people have got quite blase about it. Much less people are actually going into shelters and basements than they did at the beginning. I met a young lady called Katya. I said, are you worried? She said, I kind of feel more secure here than in any other city. It's very hard to know how many people are actually left in the city. The city in normal times has a population of 3 million. I've seen estimates that Half the population has left, or 60% of the population has left. But I mean, since there's very few people on the streets, you can't tell where those people are. But one thing I think I can safely say is that almost anybody with children has left. Supermarkets are open and pharmacies are open, but not all of them. In the first, let's say 10 days, there were quite substantial queues to get into supermarkets and also to pharmacies. And now it's quite patchy. So for example, today I saw people queuing at some pharmacies and some supermarkets. I went to a supermarket and there was no queue at all. And I was able to get what I wanted in pharmacies. I think it's getting a little bit more difficult. So, for example, I met one man who was looking for some specific medicine. He was in the queue with me and he went in and then he told me he couldn't get it. Yes, and it's not only in this pharmacy, it's around city, the same situation. What about food? Food.

So, so it's. That's normal.

Our problem is a medicine. The fact is that it's not really a siege yet. The Russians have cut off certain routes, especially to the northeast and to the northwest. But if you're driving south, the roads are open, but if you're going west, the trains are still running. We've got electricity, we've got running water, we've got Internet. So things are still working in this city. Last week, a small, short concert was held on Maidan, or Independence Square, which is really the center of Kiev and in a way the symbolic heart of Ukraine. They played a sort of rousing rendition of the national anthem. They sort of played some polkas and waltzes, and even more symbolically, really, they played Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which is of course the European anthem. There I met a clarinetist whose name was Lev Milavsky and he was 63, musical symbol of our Kozak army, ancient Ukrainian army, you know. I asked him what he was doing, why he'd come and he said what? He'd volunteered to fight, but he was told that he was too old to fight.

I do. What can I do to help our forces?

We stay with our people, with our country, and we will stay to the end. You've got thousands, if not tens of thousands of volunteers who do all sorts of things. For example, I saw in one place a really large military style canteen. There, volunteers who had organized via Facebook. They were chopping, slicing, dicing, cooking, and then the network of Volunteers was then driving the food out, taking the food out to territorial defence checkpoints and roadblocks and wherever they needed to be fed. The territorial defence is a new force which began only a couple of weeks before the invasion began. And the aim of the territorial defence is for volunteers, civilian volunteers, to do their bit, if they want to do that. So they get a short amount of training and then they get a gun, and then they're deployed to basically second tier positions like guarding block posts or checkpoints within the city, guarding strategic buildings, building kind of now massive fortified checkpoints. And what that means is it enables the soldiers with experience and the army to actually go out and do the fighting and the serious defense of the city. But even if you're in the territorial defense kind of real life goes on. So last week I saw a couple getting married and they said that they had been meaning to get married anyway, but now they were both in territorial defense. So literary chaplain that married them and all the friends were carrying either Kalashnikovs or one or two of them were actually holding the British supplied Enlaw anti tank missiles. And so it was a kind of joyful but bizarre little scene. The situation is really quite different in some of the sort of surrounding area, especially to the northwest and to the northeast of the city. Hitherto small suburban towns. In normal times it would take you 25 minutes to drive from the center of Kiev to the center of Irpin. You drive out of the city, drive over a bridge over a little river called the River Irpin, because beyond Irpin there's a town called Bucha, which the Russians have already taken. And when I've been there, there's been the constant sound of artillery duels and Grad missiles, but so far the positions have held. I was last there on Saturday. We could hear the fighting in Bucha. And then Sunday, those positions that I visited were shelled and an American journalist was killed, shot dead. In Irpin in the days before that, there had been what they call a green corridor, so people had been allowed to escape and they'd been flowing out of Bucha in hundreds and hundreds. I saw one group arriving, there was one woman leading, she was waving a white flag and then everybody behind her, they all had white armbands tied around their arms to indicate that they were civilians and not to shoot. I mean, it was quite a harrowing scene seeing these hundreds of people absolutely shell shocked and desperate arriving and then the sort of relief on their faces when they felt they were safe behind Ukrainian lines, but not really knowing what they were going to do. In the three weeks before the war, I went around from Lviv in the West, I went to Odessa, then I went to Kharkiv, than I came here. I mention that because in that period I asked people continuously, do you think that war is coming? And 95% of them said, no, that's nonsense. Of course it's not going to be a war. So now in Kiev, people are pretty frightened, but they're defiant. But a lot of people actually don't believe that the Russians are really going to start doing to Kiev what they've done to Mariupol, what they've done to Kharkiv. Everybody says, you know, got a strong army, we've got strong air defenses, we're going to be all right. But there's always an element of denial.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show Notes.

Australia is no stranger to natural disasters. Bushfires routinely ravage the east coast. Many towns are still recovering from devastating fires. In early 2020, scores of fires are.

Burning out of control across Australia amid a heat wave which has seen temperatures.

Exceed 40 Celsius in every state.

The blazes came after years of drought that laid waste to crops.

More than half of Queensland is in its sixth year of drought. And in New South Wales the situation is even more dire, with 99% of the state affected.

And since the start of March, the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales have been hit again, this time by severe flooding.

Our state is staring down the barrel of a 1 in 1000 year flood disaster.

Floods are common in the region, but not at these levels.

It's hard to overstate just how much rain has fallen along the east coast of Australia over the past few weeks.

Eleanor Whitehead is the Economist's Australia and New Zealand correspondent.

It has come down along the east coast in just biblical quantities for days and weeks on end. And the floods that's caused have completely inundated some towns in Queensland and in New South Wales like Lismore, which is in northern New South Wales, which I visited, where people literally woke up to find that their houses were underwater.

And what specifically happened at Lismore?

So the floodwaters started rising properly in Lismore in the middle of the night. So when there was an emergency evacuation warning, a lot of locals just slept right through it. I went to see the town's mayor, Steve Krieg, and he told me about what happened next?

My phone started ringing at 3 o' clock in the morning. Get a phone call from a frantic lady that I know you need to help me. My heavily pregnant daughter is sitting on a roof in South Lismore with no way of knowing how to be rescued.

By the time people woke up, there was no way out. So you literally had a situation where residents were were scrambling into their attics because it was the last place that they could find air.

There are literally people 80 years old lying in an a frame roof truss with 20 centimeter air pocket. It's unbelievable.

There were mothers carrying children onto rooftops that were rapidly disappearing under the water and literally just screaming out for help. The emergency services around those parts were just overwhelmed. So the only help that there was was coming from locals who were launching their own boats into the water. Just hundreds of rescues to try and save people from these rooftops. And they did save most people, but still four people died in the town.

And we have heard about some serious flooding in eastern Australia in particular in recent years. How does this compare?

So Australia has always had bad floods and it's always had bad fires, but this one is catastrophic even by those standards. Politicians have called it a once in a thousand year flood. It's kind of hard to say overall is it the worst on record because it's affected such a big area and so many different places. But in towns like Lismore, it's definitely the worst that people have ever experienced. So where the floods started is in Queensland, around Brisbane, which is the capital. It received about 80% of its annual rainfall in about five days in February. 15,000 homes there were flooded. And then it kind of edged down into northern New South Wales. It was ripping up roads and on down to Sydney, where I am. A dam spilled over here, fairly close to the center of the city. There were literally bodies being pulled out of a canal in western Sydney. 50,000 people across New South Wales were forced to evacuate in the floods and more than 20 people have been killed in them. The longer term damage that they've done is really devastating.

And what does that damage look like on the ground?

So in some of these towns like Lismore, it's not like a couple of streets went underwater. It was the whole town pretty much. And when it's flooding near the river, that water's running at a furious pace. So it's ripped doors off houses, it's punched the glass fronts out of shops, it's picked up cars and dumped them upside down in ditches. There's garbage hanging from trees, it kind of looks more like a hurricane has hit it than a flood. I met one woman called Ella Buckland, and we went to see Ella's house. It's what's called a Queenslander, so it's built on stilts, the idea being that it escapes the worst of the floods. But the waters still rose well up into her house, about halfway up the walls. And in the background when we were talking, you can hear the sound of what I think's a generator that was providing some power because the. The town has been disconnected from the grid.

It's all wet. It's pretty wrecked, actually. Floors are wrecked. It's filled with water. So this is my daughter's room. So we lost all my books because they're just unsightable. It was all just littered.

And Australians are normally pretty resilient in situations like this because they have experienced, you know, fires and floods before. But Ella said she's never seen anything like this. You know, growing up here, we had floods and fires, but, like, in the.

Last five years, we've had all of them, and they've all been the worst we've ever had.

And it's, of course, tempting to blame climate change for the extremity of these floods. Right?

It is. And scientists are always wary of blaming flooding on climate change because a lot of things contribute to it. But the big picture is that whatever way you look at it here, these extreme weather events are happening more frequently and more intensely in Australia. I mean, there's been one practically everywhere every year now for the past few years. And I think that that is becoming harder and harder to ignore, even for the federal government here, which has always been a big proponent of the coal industry.

And on that note, how has the government been responding to these floods?

People feel like it's not prepared enough for big, big disasters like this. When disaster strikes, official help from state and federal governments is often slow to come. And Ella said to me that she was frustrated by what she sees as a lack of preparedness.

But given the scope of these floods that you described, what does preparedness even look like? This is fighting something very big.

Yeah. And that is, I think, now becoming a sort of existential question for some of these towns. Analysts think that these floods are going to trigger insurance claims that are in the billions of dollars. But the problem is in these areas that it's getting so hard to ins. Your property premiums are so huge that lots of locals just can't afford cover anymore. So when disaster strikes, they are literally left with nothing. So now there's a kind of debate about what should happen to these places. Should the government pay insurers to cover houses which are inevitably going to be hit by fires or hit by floods again? Should it buy back land that's in flood prone areas? Or should locals just accept that their properties are in the path of future disasters and just pick up and leave? That obviously doesn't go down well with people who've, who've been living in these places for generations. It's their home. And I think that that question of where is going to be safe from more extreme weather events is going to be one for more and more Australians.

Eleanor, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

Pleasure.

For decades in Britain, there wasn't much teaching of grammar. But then in 2014, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, reintroduced it as part of an overhaul of the national curriculum.

If you're going to write, if you're going to move, if you're going to persuade, if you're going to inspire, then you need to be able to know how the English language, which is a wonderful instrument, can be used and tuned in order to move hearts, in order to persuade people. And you cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed, what words mean.

Fans of good old fashioned grammar mechanics rejoiced. But teachers, many of whom hadn't themselves been taught grammar, panicked. Now some new research suggests that the change may have been for nothing.

Grammar at school has become a highly.

Politicized issue, Lane Greene writes Johnson, the Economist's column on language.

And now there's been a new study using a large randomized controlled trial that has added to the already extensive literature on this subject. It found that teaching kids in English schools to label the bits and pieces of a sentence does not make them better writers.

When you say label the bits and pieces, you mean knowing what a noun is, what an adverb is, that kind.

Of thing more or less. It also involves a little bit more sophisticated elements like clauses and such when you get into the older years. But this particular study tested six and seven year olds. The control group had only normal classroom teaching, and the experimental group used a digital platform called Englishus to learn their grammar lessons, which involved more than mere labeling. But the English group unfortunately did no better in this study than those who got the mere labeling instruction when they were asked to write narrative passages. But this really does raise the question again, as many studies in the past have done, about whether the national curriculum in England, which has been in effect since 2014 for grammar, has gone down a blind alley in trying to make such a big thing out of being able to identify a modal verb or underline a relative clause, for example.

Well, yeah, I would like to think I have a reasonable facility with English and I didn't know what a modal verb is.

Right. Well, most of us have a knowledge of grammar. That is, it's not innate, but it appears very early in our lives. Children are able to, for example, form subordinate clauses when they're about two and a half years old, while most adults couldn't label a subordinate clause if their life depended on it. So there's a difference between ability to use and ability to describe or label. That said, I wouldn't say we should shelve the teaching of grammar altogether. I think there are some practical benefits. One of them that many people have found is that an explicit knowledge of grammar makes it easier to learn a foreign language. And indeed, a lot of people, maybe you and certainly me, learned a lot of their first grammar in a foreign language class rather than in English class. For those grammarians who are keen on the high paying tech jobs of the future, I would also point out that there is a field of what's called natural language processing. This is things like automated translation, how digital assistants transcribe your speech and understand what you're asking them to do and give you an answer. So they're really AI jobs and they're tech jobs, but they're jobs that marry up nicely with grammar.

So how to do that then? In the school years though, if the overly prescriptive way isn't very helpful, it's still not the level of AI terminology.

Well, it's not so much a matter of prescription versus letting kids write whatever they feel like. I think everyone agrees that there is a sort of standard English that is the target for most English classrooms. And when students deviate from that, you want to steer them back. What seems to not really work is this abstract labeling of the parts underlying the modal verb and so forth. One study has shown that when these things are linked up a little more explicitly, they do help students write a bit better. So I think there are reasons to reform how grammar is taught than to scrap it entirely. Not just because it can be practical, whether helping you write or helping you get a good job, but also because the science of how words combine to make meaning is really fundamental to human nature. Only humans have human like language, even if other animals communicate. So this is really part of who we are. It's part of philosophy, it's part of cognitive science and psychology. And to me. It's both fascinating as well as fundamental.

Thanks very much for joining us. Lane.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomists.com or leave.

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Sam.