Civil proceedings: America's presidential debate

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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 shaping your world. South Korea's population is shrinking and government attempts to bump up the number of baby bumps haven't succeeded. So they're changing policies to get more women in work and that seems to be redressing other age old inequalities. And who's the greatest Formula one champion of all time in terms of career wins? It's now a tie between Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher. But scour through 70 years of F1 data and there's far more to consider than just checkered flags. But first, The first time it was mostly noise.

I'm not going to answer the question because. Because the question is. The question is radical left, would you.

Shoot what would have been the second time? It was split screen America. Two candidates holding two town halls on two different channels.

This president embraces all the thugs in the world. I mean, he's best friends with the leader of North Korea, sending love letters. We're building our country stronger and better.

Than it's ever been before.

And that's what's happening and everybody knows it.

And in the second actual presidential debate last night, there was some actual debate.

This was a much more normal presidential debate. The first debate was pretty appalling to watch. Donald Trump interrupted Joe Biden constantly. The whole thing was a complete mess. There was no substantive policy discussed.

John Prideaux is our increasingly sleep deprived United States editor and host of Checks and Balance, our sister show on American politics.

This second debate was much better. Both candidates more or less stuck to the time they were allotted. It was very ably moderated by Kristen Welker of NBC. She did a great job.

President Trump, I want to stay on the issue of race. We're talking about the issue. President Trump talking about race right now. And I do want to stay on the issue of race.

And some policy was discussed, which was pretty exciting for policy wonk. So all in all, a much better debate.

And so you would ascribe the relative civility to the moderator.

I think she deserves a lot of credit. There was the threat that she might use her mute button, which wasn't available in the first debate in the event she didn't really have to. But then also I think the first debate strategy from Donald Trump, which was really to talk over his opponent, bully his opponent, try and make the debate as unpleasant as possible, didn't work. So his advisors seem to have told him pretty clearly that he had to stick to the format a bit more, try and give proper answers to the questions rather than just go for the jugular the whole time. And so I think it was partly a strategic thing from both candidates. The pre debate spin from the Trump campaign had been that if President Trump just allowed Vice President Biden to speak, then viewers would see that Vice President Biden wasn't such a good candidate as he had been made to look in the first debate. In fact, Vice President Biden came across pretty well. You know, he didn't have any senior moments really. I mean, a few minor ones, but none of them I think particularly consequential. So I think both candidates actually came across pretty well in this debate.

And you said that they actually got to some policy discussion. I mean, what was the most substantive policy issue they debated?

They did get some policy discussion which was, which was good. I mean, the debate opened with a discussion about COVID 19 policy. He says that we're, you know, we're learning to live with it, people are learning to die with it. You folks home will have an empty chair with Joe Biden. Taking the side that the country needed to get the virus under control quicker, which suggested more draconian measures, lockdowns, that sort of thing. And President Trump taking the line that actually it was really important not to destroy the economy in the process of fighting. Covid19 we can't close up our nation.

Or you're not going to have a nation.

So that's a real policy debate. There were also debates on energy policy, climate. There's a pretty clear dividing line there. Joe Biden wants to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and laid out a roadmap for doing that. Would you close down the oil industry? I would transition from the oil industry, Yes.

I will transition.

It is a big statement because I would stop.

Why would you do that?

Because the oil industry pollutes. Donald Trump is much more concerned about preserving the oil industry, and though he did give a few nods to environmentalism, talking about the importance of kind of clean air, clean water, and planting trees, which I think has become the Republican Party's sort of minimalist position on environmental matters.

I do love the environment, but what.

I want is the cleanest, crystal clear water, the cleanest air. There was a bit of a debate as well about criminal justice policy and about race relations in America. So all in, it wasn't a policy fest, but it was considerably better, more substantive, than the first one. And just as a sort of anecdotal piece of data measuring that. I have a heart rate monitor on my watch, Jason, and my heart rate was considerably calmer during this debate than it was during the first one. And I suspect that's the case for a lot of Americans who were watching as well.

And what about another big issue in this campaign, that of race, given in particular that Christian Wilker, the moderator, is black.

Yeah, there was quite a bit in the debate about race relations, which seems appropriate given the discussions that have been going on in America this year and given the protests in the street, particularly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I am the least racist person in this room.

What do you say to Americans who are concerned by that rhetoric, by that?

I don't know what to say. There was some typically Trumpian hyperbole when he said that he'd done more for African Americans than anyone besides Abraham Lincoln. That's clearly nonsense, but we've heard that line from him a bunch of times before. He pours fuel on every single racist fire. What was really striking to me, though, Jason, was how the politics of criminal justice reform seem to have changed in the sense that both Candidates were kind of trying to outdo each other to say that, no, they had done more on criminal justice reform and, and were more concerned about the plight of African Americans. I think that gives you a bit of a sense about where the kind of median voter in America is in 2020.

And when we spoke after the first debate in September, you said there weren't highlights so much as lowlights. What about this time around?

I don't think there were great highlights this time around, Jason, but I think like everybody else watching the debate, I went in with such low expectations that the fact that this was a relatively normal debate between two candidates was a welcome relief. So that, I think, would be my highlight. It was interesting to see President Trump essentially trying to use his 2016 playbook again. His stock answer to pretty much any subject was, well, Vice President Biden, you were in power for eight years. You say you've got all these plans. Why didn't you do it then? You couldn't get it done. You won't be able to get it done. I'm an outsider. I'm not a politician. So that strategy worked for him in 2016. I think it's getting a little late in the day for it to work again. And of course, there's the inconvenient fact that he is, in fact, the sitting president who's been in charge of things for the past four years. And so to the extent that things aren't going well in America at the moment, it's really on him now.

And with that in mind and taking the debate as a whole, I mean, do you think it will move the needle? Do you think that this calmer debate is going to change the outcome?

I don't think it will have changed a whole load of voters minds. It's getting really late in the day. The polling has been incredibly stable all year, the most stable opinion polls on record. For this debate, to really change the dynamics in the polling, I think one of the candidates would have had to have an absolutely disastrous performance. And that didn't happen. So I expect this picture that we've seen for the past few months of stability in the polling to continue. And besides, it's important to remember that somewhere between 45 and 50 million Americans have already voted, Jason. So it's too late to change their minds.

Anyway, don't forget to vote. Thank you, everyone, and have a great night.

Thank you.

And as ever this week on your show, Checks and Balance, you're digging into the campaign. What's on the docket this week?

We're looking at what Donald Trump has really done in his first term. Jason so one of the defenses of President Trump you often hear from Republicans is, well, put aside what he says and what he tweets and look at what he's actually done. And he's done quite a lot in his first term. We focused in the episode on domestic policy and on three areas in particular immigration, trade and the response to COVID 19. That'll be out later today.

John, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

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For decades, South Koreans have been having too few children to keep their population stable. State backed initiatives to boost the numbers have been numerous and melodious, like a campaign for so called Family Love Days, an effort to encourage office workers to clock off early and go home to their partners. But none of this has worked. Last year, for the first time, the number of deaths in the country exceeded the number of births. So the authorities are focusing on a narrower problem, workforce participation, and that is leading to some slow but profound changes in Korean society.

I recently met a family in a newly built administrative city called Sejong, which is a few hours south of Seoul.

Lena Shipper is our Seoul bureau chief.

And the mother, Paki Kyung, she's called, told me how at least twice a week she was able to go to work, she runs an art school in the city and to come back. And her husband, who works for the civil service in Sejong, would have done everything. He'd have cooked the food, he'd have cleaned the house, he'd have taken care of the kid, made sure he'd done his homework. That might sound like a relatively normal setup to listeners in the west, but in South Korea it's a pretty big break from the norm because the Setup here is still very traditional. You've got the man going out to work and the woman staying home looking after the children.

So what is it that's changing?

What's become more common in the past few years is flexible working hours have been introduced, particularly in the civil service. And there's been a lot better about it than companies in the private sector and particularly small businesses. The government's made it possible for parents to share parental leave, so it's no longer just mothers who can take time off for a baby. And they've made it actually possible to take parental leave at all. It's always been theoretically possible for women to take time off to have a baby and then come back to their jobs. But what's happened in practice traditionally, is that women have been encouraged to quit because companies would not let them come back after having children. And then the other thing that's changed is infrastructure. So Sejong is quite special, I guess, in the sense it's an example of all the new approaches rolled together. It's very child friendly. The city centre is walkable, it's very green. The cafe where I met Mr. Shin and Park Ki Kyung and their son had a massive sandbox in the window. And the government spends lots of money on childcare and general child friendly infrastructure.

Which is to say that the change is clearly happening.

Change is still relatively slow, but you can observe change if you look at men taking paternity leave, for instance, which 10 years ago was basically nobody. I think it was a total of 500 men in 2009 took paternity leave and last year it was more than 20, which is an enormous increase, but still only a quarter of the number of women. So South Korean women are still very underrepresented in the workforce compared with the average in similarly rich countries. And it's still an incredibly difficult place for working women. It's got the biggest pay gap between the sexes and the OECD is almost 30%. It regularly takes last place in the Glass Ceiling Index, which ranks countries by the ease which women can get ahead in their careers, what else needs to be done. So it's partly about getting women back into the workforce or keeping them in the workforce, and partly also about making sure that they're adequately represented in the workforce and have chances to advance in their careers in the same way that men do. So a lot of these people work in the civil service, where it's easier to have flexible working hours, where it's more accepted to take leave. And in order for this to take hold what has to happen is it needs to go beyond that. It needs to go into small and medium sized companies. But that is starting to happen. We went to visit Kim Jong K, who's the CEO of a medium sized company that makes surgical robots. They have around 300 people working for them. 90% are men. And the first person to take paternity leave was only three years ago, but since then they've had seven more. And he does say that the government's more egalitarian approach has spurred his company to change things and it's become more acceptable, even if slowly, for men to take time off to look after kids.

And all told, do you think this is enough to overwhelm the broader demographic trend?

It's probably not going to turn around the broad demographic trend. Even in a place like Sejong, women have far too few babies to stop the population from shrinking. So this is not going to make much of a dent in that. But I think it could have broader cultural consequences. So toy counted.

And.

When I spoke to Mr. Shin Pak Kyung's husband, who's a civil servant in Sejong and is taking on more, you know, traditionally female coded roles himself, he said that, you know, as my son grows up, I hope he's not going to see these gender stereotypes anymore. He's not going to see a man driving a woman cooking, but he'll see the opposite. And I definitely believe that by the next generation these stereotypes and these gender roles would disappear.

Thanks very much for your time, Lene.

Thanks very much for having me, Jason.

There's a lot more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence in the print and digital editions of the Economist. To get a deal on a subscription, go to economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show notes. It's easily the world's noisiest sport. Since 1950, Formula One racing has delighted fans around the world with its fast rides and fierce rivalries. Behind every win is a sprawling team of engineers, mechanics and strategists put up on the podium amid ship showers of champagne. It's those behind the wheel who get all the glory.

Lewis Hamilton has just equaled Michael Schumacher's record of 91 career victories. And so this has raised the old age debate about who is the best driver of all time.

James Francham is a data journalist at the Economist.

In order to try and find out, we built a statistical model to try and discover who indeed is the best driver.

So how do you even go about modeling that kind of thing across seven decades of this stuff?

Comparing Athletes in any sport across eras, is always difficult, and especially in motorsports, because the cars have changed a lot and the driving styles have changed a lot, too. But we based our study on an existing paper by Andrew Bell of the University of Sheffield, and we look at the impacts that all 745 drivers that have ever taken to a circuit in F1's history, what impact they've had. The model works in two stages, effectively. So the first thing is it controls for factors that are outside of a driver's control. So that is the kind of competition on the grid, so the quality of individual drivers racing against and other factors like the number of drivers that are competing in any given race, because that's changed over time, too. And then the second element is to split out. And this is the tricky bit, the impact of the driver from that race car that that driver is racing in. How the model does this is what you have in F1, is two drivers, effectively, for each team. And so whilst we know, for example, that Michael Schumacher was very good when he raced at Ferrari, so was his teammate, Rubens Barrichello. But when Barrichello moved, for example, to a different team, he wasn't quite as good. So what the model can do is separate by looking at those two drivers side by side, how they look when they move to different teams.

So you've got all the parts out then on the shop floor. Let's go back to the original question. Is Schumacher or Hamilton the better driver in your model?

Hamilton gets for his team 1.8 points per race on average, above an average driver, whereas Schumacher will get 1.9 points on average, above an average driver. So they're pretty much neck and neck, but it does rate Schumacher just slightly above Hamilton. But our model suggests that those two drivers are not the greatest of all time. So Hamilton comes in sixth, Schumacher comes in fifth. The four drivers ahead of them are actually all drivers that effectively drove in a different era of Formula One. The top driver, Juan Manuel Fangio, is an argentine who won five F1 championships in the 1950s. Formula One cars of that era were very different to the ones that are driven now, but our model does rate him as the best of all time.

How do you account for that disparity, though, between the record for all time wins, not actually aligning with best driver of all time.

So our model doesn't actually account for the kind of absolute success of an individual racing driver. What it's looking to do is to look at the efficacy of an individual driver. So our model, in theory, could rate someone who hasn't won a single race, perhaps as a very good driver, because perhaps they were in a really bad car. So Fangio started just 51 races. He didn't actually race that much in Formula One, whereas Schumacher, on the other hand, entered 306 races. So obviously, vastly different number of races, vastly different eras. But the model does suggest that Fangio was the most skilful.

But presumably because you've separated these things, you can also say which is the best car of all time, too.

Yeah, indeed we can. So what we found was that after controlling for other factors, Ferrari, one of the original F1 manufacturers, is indeed the best F1 team over the long run. On average, it adds about 2 points per race for a driver. What we also found that over time, the impact of individual cars has actually increased. So in the 1950s, drivers contributed about 58% towards their points, and then the rest was attributed to cars and other factors. Whereas now the figure, because good teams at least, have gotten better and better, the contribution from drivers has reduced to about 19%. The question of who is the best driver is in some ways a RELIC from the 1950s and the 1960s. It really is who is the best team, because their impact is so much greater now, because the impact of drivers is far less. The accolades, really, rather than going to the drivers now should be going to all the other people that aren't behind the wheel that sit behind laptops.

So wait a minute. A guy who spends his working life behind a laptop wants to hand all the plot at end the to people who spend their lives behind the laptops?

Funny that.

James, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

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 on Monday.