Coming write-up: Chile votes to overhaul its constitution

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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. People are living longer and longer and that has demographic effects in every corner of society. We look into the many challenges that growing elderly populations present for the prison system, which was never designed to deal with them. And there's an intriguing theory that may help explain rising political instability that seems to have taken hold all over. Maybe these aren't battles that start from the bottom of unequal societies. Maybe it's too much jostling at the top. But first, The votes are in. Yesterday, Chileans decided by an overwhelming majority to scrap and replace their dictatorship. Era Constit. President Sebastian Pineda said it was the beginning of a new path for the country. Chile's constitution was introduced under Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled by terror for nearly two decades. He lost power after a plebiscite in 1988.

All of them united in opposition to the regime of General Pinochet. It was the biggest political rally yet.

Seen in the capital, but the constitution remained. Later, governments amended it dozens of times. But for many Chileans, the constitution's most fundamental provisions are to blame for the inequality and poor public services that plague one of Latin America's wealthiest countries. A year ago, mass protests erupted. At least 30 people died and thousands were injured. There were yet more demonstrations in the run up to yesterday's vote. Now the country will get a chance to recast its national charter, quietening some concerns, but perhaps raising new ones.

Chileans blame the Constitution of 1980 for a lot that's wrong with the country.

Brooke Unger is our America's editor.

In many ways, looking from the outside, there's not a lot wrong with Chile. It's got one of the highest per capita incomes in the region. It's reduced poverty very dramatically. It's had political stability for the past 30 years. But there are also big problems, and people have been growing increasingly unhappy with those problems over the past decade, decade and a half.

So what were the issues with it if the outcome has seemed so stable in the meantime?

Several things. Inequality remained relatively high. And I think most important really was a feeling that largely because of the Constitution, the way the public services were delivered resulted in low quality and great unfairness. The constitution kind of privileges the private sector in Chile. And the reason for that is that Pinochet had kind of an intellectual alliance with the so called University of Chicago economists who were very pro free market. And they wrote into the Constitution lots of guarantees to protect the private sector and to give the private sector a pretty substantial role in providing public services like health care, pensions and education. And people have looked at that and become increasingly unhappy with the results that that system has brought.

So how do you think it is that a rewriting of the Constitution will address all of these concerns?

I think that the new constitution will probably end up making Chile more social democratic than it is. For example, the Constitution now says that people have a right to contribute either to a privately run or a publicly run health care system, which has resulted in a kind of a two tier system where the rich are in the private system and most people are in the public system. And the bulk of people feel that they're not very well served by that kind of two tier system. So I would expect some language that would allow the state to play a greater role in the health system and that would allow taxation to play a greater role in funding a public health system. And one of the things that reformers want to do is to insert this idea of equality of opportunity into the Constitution, which doesn't really have the American meaning. It basically means that they want the state to be in a position to ensure that all Chileans are treated equally. And so that will, I think, lessen the role of the private sector in the provision of public services.

And that's the real crux of it. What voters most want changed, other things.

That probably will change. Some people say that the Chilean system is sort of hyper presidential. The President has a lot of power in Chile. Only the President can initiate tax and spending bills, for example. Congress can't do that. The President can determine which issues Congress prioritizes. The regions in Chile don't have their own tax raising powers. So all of these things tend to concentrate power in the capitol and in the hands of the presidency. And I would expect to see that being changed. It'll be interesting to see whether the constitution's ban on abortion is, is upheld. I imagine that will be a very controversial issue. So, you know, Chile is at a point where it could change in lots of pretty profound ways.

But I mean, how even to go about that, to start from scratch on a kind of working document of a whole country?

One of the choices that voters made yesterday was on how to rewrite the new constitution. And what they decided was that there would be a newly elected assembly consisting entirely of new representatives, which under the law will be half female. And an election to that new body will be held in April. And that body will then, I believe, have a year to write a new constitution. So it really will, in theory, start with a blank piece of paper. One of the complicating issues will be that as this assembly is sitting and arguing and drafting, Chile will be moving into a political season. There are presidential elections, national elections, to be held in November of next year. So it's pretty foreseeable that, you know, the politics of the presidential election will feed into the thinking of the drafters and vice versa. It's going to be a very fraught, I suspect, and controversial process.

So the potential gains seem fairly clear here. But is there some risk when starting from scratch like this?

I think there is a risk. Chile has in many ways been a pretty successful country. And you can imagine that, you know, taken to extremes, Chile ends up moving not so much in the direction of social democracy, but in the direction of populism. I mean, one of the things that probably will happen is that you'll have new rights inserted into the constitution, like a right to housing, for example. Now that doesn't sound like a bad thing, but the question will be, is the government then on the hook for kind of bottomless spending on all these new rights, spending that will either result in enormous deficits or crushing taxation. I think the danger of that is limited to some extent by the fact that each clause of the new constitution will have to be approved by a two thirds majority of this assembly. So I think the risks are limited to some extent. It was interesting to see that only the very richest districts voted against the idea of a new constitution. And after the results of the vote were clear, you know, we had celebrations in the middle of Santiago. So instead of protest, there was a great sense of celebration. So I think there's a sense of national consensus that this process needs to happen. And it'll be very interesting to see if that national consensus holds up as the process actually gets underway.

Brooke, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

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My name's Mickey. Come from south London. Was a naughty boy when I was youngster.

As a young man, Mickey d' Hara got to know London's prisons well. By his early 40s, he'd served what he thought was his last sentence. But as he turned 60, he found himself back inside.

I think it was a bit different for me. I'm quite a fit man and I don't really care, I would have thought with anyone even at my age.

Now, as someone with experience of prison, Mickey was asked by the officers to support some of the older inmates.

I remember one old fella, he could hardly walk. I mean, I said go down and help him get his food and whatever. Especially old prisons. You're talking about Wandsworth, Pentonville, Brixton, they've got no ground floor cells. They might have only a very few. You know, older people wind up getting up, put upstairs and they've got to try and get down and themselves are lethal. There was one guy who weren't completely blind, he wouldn't be able to get down the stairs. So they said to me, will you go and get him? So every morning I used to go the same as the old boy downstairs. So I'll take him downstairs, help him out, put him back up and then go and sort the old boy out. Noise is mad. They'll be shouting to each other, something smashing on the door. The young people don't. They don't care about it. They love a bit of noise. Some of them play their music so loud that you really get annoyed that you want to go around and smash their radio up. See, like the older man, all he wants to do is get his head down and go to sleep and read a book. It's a crazy, crazy time for an old person.

Globally, the number of elderly people in prison is on the rise. And that's presented particular challenges for those running the institutions.

In Britain, for example, the number of people aged over 60 behind bars has jumped by 243% since 2002. By March this year, there were 5,176 of them. And that's now 6% of the total British prison population.

Sarah Burke is an international correspondent for the Economist.

In Japan, which has an aging population anyway, 20% of inmates are 60 or older, which is double what it was in 2002. And in America, which obviously has extremely high incarceration rates, generally by 2030, it's reckoned that one third of all inmates will be older than 55.

And what's causing that increase in the numbers?

I mean, it varies. So one thing is tougher policies. So in America and Britain, that's definitely true. Since the 1970s, there's been this sort of push for harsh punishments and that's led to longer sentences. So people are inside for longer and get older inside. In Britain, a sort of big factor is that some older people are being convicted of offences that they actually committed several years ago. So male sexual offenders actually make up the largest proportion of pension age prisoners in the uk. And then in Japan, it's slightly different. I mean, older people themselves are actually committing more crime in their later years. I mean, often they're minor offenses such as shoplifting, but they say that they can't afford to live on their pensions. And some people in Japan actually say that they want to go to prison where they'll get fed, you know, they might not have children or people they know outside prison. At least inside prison, they have a structure and sort of services provided to them.

And so what are the challenges in particular in dealing with a prison population that is growing older, I mean, to.

Start with, it's about suitable accommodation for them. I mean, prisons, when they were built, were designed for fit and healthy young men, and it was usually young men because they make up the vast number of. Of prisoners. So they don't have things like handrails in the shower or bed hoists. There might be lots of stairs. It might be a long walk between the canteen and your cell. So, you know, just this basic prison design is not suitable for older people. And then older people, obviously, by dint of their age, have more health problems. They're often chronic things. So it might be dementia or it might be inability to walk because they need a hip replacement, or cancers are obviously more likely as you grow older. So all these things need money to help them and better services. And so it's the combination of all of those that make it hard to house these people. And obviously prison guards are saying, well, we are here to do discipline. We are not trained in how to nurse people or take them to the toilet or change their incontinence pad. So this is causing a lot of problems and it's obviously raising the costs, which are already high, of keeping someone in prison, because you need to provide a lot more help.

And so are prisons adapting to this shifting demographic in any particular way?

I mean, they are, and again, it depends on the country, but it's a sort of piecemeal approach. It seems that countries have recognised this as a problem. So Britain and America have both put out numerous documents from the government and think tanks saying the number of older prisoners is growing. But there's no national strategy in either of those countries, and that's leaving individual prisons to sort of have to do the best they can with little funds and with no sort of guidance from above. So you've got certain prisons that have done that particularly well. HMP Wotton in Britain, for example, built 48 cells designed for older prisoners. They even can care now for palliative patients in one or two of their cells. There's another prison in upstate New York called Fish Kill, and that actually started a unit for those with dementia like conditions. But then you've got lots of other prisons who just can't afford or don't have the leadership to actually do these things. And where old people are sort of not getting anything that they actually need.

Is releasing people towards the end of these sentences as they get into the sunset years an option?

I mean, this is where coronavirus has focused some minds. Obviously, old prisoners are high risk Insofar as they're old, which is a risk factor for a fatal dose of coronavirus, and they're put together very close in a facility. So that's led some countries to think about releasing some prisoners. Now very little has been done. Lobby groups like Human Rights Watch are very critical of how few have been let out. But it is something that Covid has helped to focus minds on. You already have some initiatives, so some states in America, such as Alabama, California, and I think Georgia too, have geriatric release laws where once you get to a certain age you can apply for release. Other countries that don't have things specifically directed at older people, you can use compassionate release, such as Britain. So there are ways of releasing them, but it's not something that's used very widely.

And is that in part because it runs counter to the idea that prisons are for punishment?

I mean, yeah, it is. But you know, prison isn't just to punish people. It's also to rehabilitate them and to protect the public. And here, you know, there are grounds for releasing older people. The research shows that older people, some obviously remain a danger to society whatever their age, and have to stay locked up. No one's saying we should release all older prisoners. I mean, what people say is anyway, there needs to be a push to reduce the rates of imprisonment of all age groups and not to be so tough and to look at more at rehabilitation than just punishment. So, you know, you could stop, help solve this problem, stop there being so many old people in prison by not putting them behind bars for so long in the first place. And then there are sort of more radical solutions. So you could look at the prisoner's age when you're sentencing them. So a 10 year sentence means something very different for a 20 year old who might come out age 30 and still have their life ahead of them and a 70 year old who is very likely to therefore die in prison. Very few people are actually suggesting that might become reality, but that's one of the ideas out there.

Sarah, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

University graduation is usually a time of celebration and promise as newly minted grads head out to conquer the world or at least get an entry level job. But what if too many brainy people entering the workforce is actually a dangerous thing?

In 2010, a professor of biology published a short piece of in Nature, which is a very well established scientific journal, which talked about political instability and basically pretty clearly predicted a rise in political instability in the 2010s and up until 2020. And beyond.

Callum Williams is a senior economics writer at the Economist.

It was based on a range of different things, but the one that you have the most emphasis on is this idea of overproduction of elites.

What does he mean by that?

Essentially what he's talking about is this idea that at different points, going back a really long time, you've had a situation where there's a limited number of genuinely elite positions, whether that's economic or political superiority, and there's been too many people who aspire to those positions. And what he thinks is, broadly speaking, the west has reached a similar point where we have too many people who have the qualifications and the educational attainment that are necessary to be a member of the elites, broadly defined, but there are just too few spots for them. And so what his theory is is that when we have a situation like that, these would be elites, these also ran elites. Rather than playing by the rules of the system, they seek to disrupt them and they create movements that seek to overturn the status quo. And that's the mechanism by which he thinks that societies move from periods of stability to instability.

So it's not the uprising of the proletariat then, But I mean, in history is this backed up by evidence?

So you're right that it's not the uprising of the proletariat. It is true that sort of like Marx, he puts a lot of weight on the idea of class struggle, but he's just talking about a different class in terms of history. If you look at what happened in the French Revolution, there is a good historical argument that the French Revolution was not only or even primarily because of immiseration and poverty, but instead was a kind of battle between an up and coming bourgeois elite and a more decaying aristocratic class.

And so the idea is that the instability we see now is because we've got too many elites now in the West.

He cites some data that shows that each year America produces too many lawyers, about 25,000, according to his estimate, for the number of lawyer positions that become available. I think it is also definitely the case that if you look at the number of PhD students that the west produces, relative to the number of stable, well paid academic jobs, there's way more of the former than of the latter. I think also when you consider the housing market, this is a really important piece of the puzzle for young people in most parts of the west today. It is very, very difficult to enter the elite broadly defined because house prices are so high. The only way in which you can be guaranteed to be part of a kind of property owning class is by inheriting. And so there are various bits of the puzzle, but it all kind of makes sense, this idea that there are people who feel that they've done what they need to do to enter the ranks of the elite, but their ambitions are frustrated. And if you look at support for radicalism, both in Europe and in the us, you find that, particularly in terms of the radical left, you see pretty strong support from young university educated people. So I think there's something to be said for his theory.

But what does the theory say about how the system resets itself, how the instability passes?

So there are different ways it can happen. He looks, for instance, at what happened in the early 20th century in the US where you had a recognition from a lot of elites that there were a number of extraordinarily powerful companies that were taking consumers for a ride. You also had the emergence of a kind of hereditary aristocracy where people were inheriting vast amounts of money and sustaining themselves that way. So you get a big amount of trust busting to break up these big companies. And you also get raising of inheritance taxes to prevent the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next. So his message really is to the elites today, watch out for this, because if you don't do something now, you'll find that before long you won't be elite any longer.

Thanks very much for joining us, Callum.

Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.

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