From the ground up: New York after 9/11

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A growing body of evidence suggests the world's most unstable and violent countries are those where women are mistreated most. From mere exclusion to out and out subjugation, we travel to places where the trend is most painfully clear. And there's something funny going on with hummingbirds. Females of the species often look like the males, but some of them change their plumage over time. We examine some new experiments aimed at explaining the fleetingly fancy feathers. But first, Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in New York City.

All of Manhattan is covered. Downtown Manhattan is covered with thick white ash and building material.

Both 110 story towers of the World Trade center had been destroyed and many of the nearly 3,000 dead hadn't yet been found. As exhausted firefighters sorted through rubble still wreathed in smoke, New York's future looked bleak. Two months later, a 16 acre pit was still burning. Even now, there is a sense of.

Awesome, gruesome Power only the hoses continue.

To try to damp the continuous fires beneath.

It took more than eight months to clean up. But the attacks spurred the transformation not just of Lower Manhattan, but all of New York City.

In some ways, the country is worse off than it was two decades ago. It sparked a 20 year war in Afghanistan and another one in Iraq. The country itself is more anxious, more polarized, less trusting.

Rosemary Ward is the Economist's New York correspondent.

But New York is better. The resurrection of Lower Manhattan acted as a catalyst for rebuilding and rethinking well beyond downtown area that was destroyed that day.

So how did the rebuilding actually carry on?

Well, for New Yorkers that were staggered by the shock of 9 11, rebuilding became a rallying cause. I remember people said, build it and build it taller. The years after 911 proved to be an era of municipal ambition, the likes of which New York hadn't seen in generations. A construction boom spread out from the immediate area that was attacked up to neighboring tribeca, up to Chelsea, and eventually across the city's five boroughs to long neglected areas like Jamaica and Flushing in queens, Staten Island, St. George, and along Brooklyn's waterfront. The subway was expanded too, for the first time in decades. And other projects such as the High Line and Hudson Yards, which is a massive redevelopment of Manhattan's west side, may not even have happened without the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.

And so in a sense, what happened in Lower Manhattan, the site of the attack, was the catalyst for change across the city.

Well, in Lower Manhattan, we saw a reimagination of the district. And one of the key factors was the decision of most businesses to stay. Something that wasn't certain in the immediate aftermath. Mike Bloomberg, who was elected mayor two months after the attacks, called for businesses to stay. To our corporate leaders, I urge you.

To strengthen your commitment to New York.

This is no time to leave the Big Apple. Your future is New York, and New.

York's is better than ever.

And it became an act of patriotism to stay put and also of self interest to operate downtown. Many companies that stayed availed themselves of new financial incentives. The federal government gave New York City $20.5 billion in aid, and of that authorized $8 billion in Liberty bonds, a sort of tax exempt financing.

And so the sense of solidarity that surrounded all of this was really what enabled it.

Almost everyone agreed that the area needed to be rebuilt, but they all had different ideas of what should be built, where, by whom, and with whose money. The disagreements among the various players, insurance companies, developers and politicians, delayed the project for years. They also had to consider the feelings of victims, families and. But in 2006, remarkably fast, the first office building 7 World Trade, was finished. The memorial opened on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. And 1 World Trade center was finished in 2014. And there's also other buildings underway.

And so if this was kind of a rethinking of Lower Manhattan, what does it feel like today?

Feels very different. Even the people who work there. It used to be dominated by finance. It's a much more diversified economy now. Just these new businesses moved in. The residential population of Lower Manhattan more than doubled between 2001 and 2020 Children, which rarely were seen before 2001 in the area, now make up 17% of the population. And new schools have to be built to accommodate the new families. And tourists came. So many tourists came. Before 2001, only six hotels served the district. 37 hotels operated in the area, at least until COVID 19 arrived.

What about the site of the World Trade center itself?

Well, it's definitely a lot different than it was two decades ago. There's new high rises, there's a performing arts centre underway, whereas before 9 11, it was actually really quiet because the people who worked in the Twin Towers tended to stay in the Twin Towers. And most of the retail was in the towers or in the basement where there was a shopping center. In the last few years, you know, you have to step onto the street sometimes because the sidewalks were so full. I'm walking around the memorial now. It's pretty quiet. The one quiet spot in the World Trade center complex which somehow drowns out, you know, the construction that's still going on. Are the fire trucks or the police or all the tourists chatting. Is the memorial that marks the footprints of the two towers at Fel. It's almost like a church. You just have to be quiet when you're there. There's trees and benches and the water that overflows in the memorial. Just. It just. It's stunning. It's really quite lovely and really quite moving.

And what do the people there make of this transformation?

One of the residents I met is a retired teacher named Rona Drossman, who's lived in the area since 1978. Interesting. One of my neighbors who still lives in the building, when you walked out the front door of my building, the World Trade center, that was your.

She called it a herbeacon.

That's how you knew what kind of.

Day the weather would be.

And it sort of greeted you because they were parallel to our front door. She kind of misses the before time. She talked about how beautiful the World Trade center was and how quiet it was on weekends with people who didn't want to come down here back then. I would say that if you've gone past the World Trade center, you've gone too far. While we were talking, we were interrupted by a tourist who wanted to know where the two towers once stood. So there are two buildings. One was here. No, they were over here. They were over here where the park is. This one building was there, one was there, and one was on the other side of that. We were literally feet away from the footprint, which is now the memorial of the World Trade Center. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome.

Roshmi. Thank you very much for joining us.

Oh, thank you, Jason.

Checks and Balance, our sister show on American politics, reflects on the 20 years since 9 11, asking if the era of American interventionism that began with the attacks is over. Our editors trace how President Joe Biden's views have changed over the years and discuss how American power might be deployed in the future. Find Checks and Balance from your preferred podcast Purveyor. In Afghanistan this week, the Taliban got down to the business of governing. They announced a cabinet with no women in it. They disbanded the Women's Affairs Ministry and reinstated their Ministry of Vice and Virtue. Women around the country have been boldly protesting, many of them begging the Taliban for representation in the interim government. At some demonstrations, women were beaten, another was dispersed by soldiers firing into the air. The Taliban is, yes, very religious, but it's also quintessentially patrilineal. It's built around men's relationships with one another. What the Taliban leaders wouldn't like to hear is that bringing women to the table in the new government and in society more broadly would help them in their bid to rule.

Societies that treat women badly are much more likely to be unstable. They're much more likely to be violent.

Robert guest is the Economist's foreign editor.

@ a time when a group of exceptionally violent misogynists have just taken over a medium sized country, Afghanistan, it's a really good time to look at how the sorts of society they represent actually work. And they're much more widespread than many people.

Realize. What do you mean when you say how they.

Work? A useful way of understanding the Taliban in Afghanistan is not to think of them as representing a religion, but to think of them as representing a tribal tradition. That society is based on male kinship groups and men who are related to each other, either closely or distantly, clubbed together as a kind of self defense unit. And Then almost everything about their society revolves around keeping that unit intact. The men being loyal to each other and very often subordinating the women. In many cultures, it is considered not merely normal, but almost obligatory for women to go and live with their husband's family and parents when they get married. For men to have loyalty to particularly their cousins and their brothers, for them to consider that a higher value than any kind of public duty to the nation or the state, and for them to have really strict rules governing the fertility of.

Women. And so this kind of pattern is quite clear outside Afghanistan, for.

Example. Yes. So, for example, recently we went to Iraq and talked to some of the Shia tribes in the southern part of the country. And they had a very clear sense of what was right and wrong. There was one sheikh of quite a large tribe we talked to who said openly, if a woman drives a car, she must be killed. Why? Well, if a woman drives a car, that means she might meet a man, and if she might meet a man, that means she might do something immoral. And so for the honour of the tribe, both she and he would have to be killed and their bodies buried in a sand dune. And the reason they have these extraordinarily unpleasant and brutal rules is because the most important thing, as far as they're concerned that a woman can do is provide a male heir. They don't believe that she should have any choice about who she marries. She's got to marry the guy her father says that if she tries to escape from that it's perfectly reasonable for her male relative to kill her and that she also has no public role. I mean, I wandered around, I didn't see a single post pubescent female. They were all hidden away inside. And the sheikh was very open. He said, in our culture, a woman does not have freedom of.

Expression. But you say that kind of kinship structure ultimately leads to violent societies, badly run countries. What evidence is there for.

That? Well, so in the first instance, obviously this kind of arrangement leads to a lot of violence towards women, but it's also bad for men. The male kinship group is a self defense structure. It was designed for a pre modern era, before modern states. Nowadays it tends to cause trouble. The overriding principle that you have to defend members of your own clan leads to unending feuds. One recent case that was described to me in Basra involved a case where a woman had sex outside marriage. And so far, seven people had been killed over this and five people injured. And if you translate that kind of mentality into the state, you have completely Dysfunctional government, because if you're from that kind of background and you get a job at, say, the Health Ministry, then you'll feel that your moral obligation is not to improve the nation's health care, but to hire your unqualified cousins and steer contracts towards your.

Kin. But those kinship structures, they're a core part of a fabric of society, by extension of a government. What is to be done about.

This? You can't change everything all at once, but there are a few levers you can pull. One is to try to end child marriage or raise the age at which females get married. That's because when you have girls getting married before they're adults, they find it impossible to stand up to their husbands. They also quite often drop out of school to do it. So they end up not being very literate and raising less literate and less healthy children. Another thing you can do is to have public pensions. The logic of having a patrilocal family, where the wife has to go and live with her husband's family, is that the husband is expected to look after his parents because they don't have any alternative. And a final thing you can do is ban polygamy in societies. And there are a lot of them, particularly in the most unstable parts of the world, where, say, for example, the guys at the top have an average of four wives each. The top 10%, that means the bottom 30% are doomed to frustrated bachelorhood for their whole lives. That's tremendously socially unstable. It gives them a huge incentive to go out and kill other men and steal their stuff, steal their cattle, in order to be able to afford to get.

Married. The prescriptions seem clear, but as you say, this is not straightforward stuff. What about how all of this plays in a geopolitical sphere? If you are a country that's looking to help another to stabilise, the.

Bulk of the work needs to be done locally. But there is a role for outsiders to play. One of the most basic things you can do is to include women in peace negotiations. There's a lot of work that shows that peace deals tend to last longer if there are women at the table. That may be because if there are no women at the table, that's a sign that the interests of non combatants are being completely ignored. The techniques that work in one country for teaching young men not to hit women or persuading people to get married later can be copied in other countries. And there's a whole global network of think tanks and NGOs who try to spread good ideas around the world. The main takeaway for foreign policy people is that if they want to understand how the world really works and they're not paying attention to what's going on with half the population, they're not going to do a very good job of it. Ten years ago, Hillary Clinton said that the subordination of women was a threat to the security of the.

World. Give women equal rights and entire nations are more stable and secure. Deny women equal rights and the instability of nations is almost.

Certain. She got a lot of flack for it at the time, but I think she was onto.

Something. Robert, thank you very much for joining.

Us. Well, thank you.

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Only. Male birds are often more more colorful, more ornate than females of the same species. Think peacocks, as opposed to peahens. Those embellishments serve an evolutionary purpose. Flashy feathers signal good health, females see a good potential mate, and males see a rival. Not to be trifled with, but for ornithologists, there's still something of a mystery in why some females also have vivid.

Plumage. Many species of bird have females that have evolved plumage to look like.

Males. Sona Poppet writes about science for the.

Economist. The traditional explanation for this is that if the sexes cooperate to raise their young, which birds often do, males as well as females must be choosy about their mates. They want their mates to be as fit as possible so that their offspring will have good genes and a better chance at survival. Usually birds can show that they're that fit based on their plumage. But there's one species of bird that calls this explanation into question.

Hummingbirds. In what way? Why don't hummingbirds fit into that.

Picture? Well, male hummingbirds actually don't help to raise the young. So the explanation doesn't work. They don't need to be as choosy about their mates. So we're back to that question of what advantage does the male like plumage actually give? This is called female limited polymorphism and it's especially common in hummingbirds. It's found in nearly a quarter of hummingbird species and it's evolved independently in all nine major groups of hummingbirds. So it can't just be a coincidence that it's there. Dr. Jay Falk of the University of Washington spent four years in Panama studying a species of hummingbird called the white Necked Jacobin to try and figure this puzzle.

Out. What was he doing for four years in.

Panama? Well, first he wanted to find out how common that polymorphism was in the species. So he captured and recorded the details of the birds, including their age, sex and coloration. And of the over 400 Jacobins he captured, nearly 30% of the females had a male like coloration. But the real clue into why this polymorphism exists came when he discovered that all of the young Jacobins, regardless of their sex, have a male like plumage. Only later in life do some of the females develop that distinctive muted coloration. And some of the female Jacobins, which were captured in one year, released and then recaptured a year or two later, had actually changed colours in that period. They went from a male like plumage as a juvenile to a female like plumage as an.

Adult. So why would that be? That some females start out looking like males and then losing that later in.

Life? Well, this is the reverse of normal for sexual selection. There's no point in an immature individual pretending they are mature because they won't be able to have offspring. So it doesn't really make sense that it is sexual selection. Instead, Dr. Falk thought maybe it's social behaviours that have to be involved. So first he used stuffed mounts to see how the plumage affected the behaviour of other hummingbirds that interacted with. He set them up at feeders in pairs, so, for example, a female with female plumage and a female with male like plumage to see which one received more attention or harassment. And a clear pattern emerged. The stuffed females in female plumage received a lot of sexual attention from males, whilst those in the male plumage were spared. And more surprisingly, they were also on the receiving end of more aggression. And that same pattern was seen in interactions between live Jacobins.

Too. So it is in fact something that's evolved because of this kind of behavior. Because females that look like females basically get more grief when they're.

Feeding. Yes, it looked like that. And to prove that it was about feeding rather than just general harassment. He looked at the actual benefit that females got depending on their plumage type. So he varied the amount of sugar water in some of the feeders. So the food was good quality in some areas and lower quality in other areas. And across the board, he found that female birds with the male like plumage were able to feed more frequently and for longer than those with the muted female colours. And being able to access nutrients is especially important for hummingbirds. In fact, they have the highest metabolic demands per gram of body weight of all.

Vertebrates. But that still doesn't explain why some start out looking like males but don't end up looking like.

Males. Yeah, that's the rest of the mystery. Perhaps the muted female colours make them less conspicuous to predators so they have a better chance of survival later on in life. Another possibility is that if all of the females had male like plumage, the social advantage would very quickly be lost because the males would catch on that all of the females with male like plumage are indeed females. Another question is whether there's a genetic basis behind the feather colors. So tackling the other questions might require another trip to Panama for Dr. Falk.

Sana. Thank you very much for joining.

Us. Thank you for having.

Me. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editor this week is Chris Impey and our sound engineer, Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Hannah Mourinho, Duncan Barber and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren and assistant producers Jason Hoskin and Abesoye Ocean Dairo. With extra production help this week from Pete Naughton and John Jo Devlin. We'll all see you back here on the.