Joe through a rough patch:Biden’s super Tuesday

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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. Take a look at who's in the corner offices at America's biggest firms and you'll find a shortage of Asian Americans. But a new study suggests you'll find more South Asians than East Asians. We ask why that is. And Bury Football Club's stadium is shuttered, its mortgage in arrears just up the road. Manchester City's is among the glitziest in Europe. It's not just a matter of cities versus towns. The divides in English football reveal a lot about divides in society. First up though, Don't call it a comeback. He's been here for years. So I'm here to report we are very much alive.

And make no mistake about it, this.

Campaign, I will send Donald Trump packing. Yesterday, Super Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden captured a clutch of states on the way to the nomination for the Democrats presidential candidate. Voters in Texas echoed the view that Mr. Biden presents a decent, a reliable candidate.

And I've known so much about him.

For so long and he's a man.

Of honor and integrity and I think.

He will be excellent.

Senator Bernie Sanders won his home state of Vermont and looks to be ahead in California for All the talk in the party that he would be a perilous pick, plenty like his politics.

I voted for Bernie because he wants to give better rights to everyone and then free health care.

But after a surge in South Carolina and a Super Tuesday showing, the early promise of Mr. Biden's campaign seems to have returned.

And Joe has an unbelievable sense of he understands people and he's been there and I trust him and that's why.

I voted for him. Joe Biden had a very good night, certainly relative to expectations, and that's what matters most.

John Pruddeau is the Economist's US Editor.

Bernie Sanders appears to have won California, which is the most delegate rich state. But Biden did really well in other states, including Texas, which he wasn't projected to win only a few weeks ago. His campaign was being written off as being sort of dead and buried and people are encouraging him to drop out. He, he now looks certainly very competitive with Bernie Sanders and maybe even the likeliest nominee for the Democratic Party.

And how do you think it is that he managed that comeback?

I think this result is a surprise. Joe Biden did well in South Carolina, better even than people were expecting. He was top of the polls there for a while, but he really beat Bernie Sanders by a long way. And this is a terribly cliched, overused word in presidential horse race commentary, Jason, but he's carried that momentum into Super Tuesday and done really well. And it now looks like a proper two horse race between him and Bernie Sanders.

And what kind of night did Mr. Sanders have?

Well, he didn't exactly have a bad night in the sense that he won California, the most delicate rich state. He's done well in Colorado and Utah.

But tonight, I tell you with absolute confidence we are going to win the Democratic nomination.

But I think relative to expectations, having won the first few contests in the primary, it's not a very good performance for him. If you look at his delegate numbers, it looks like at the end of the night he won't be miles behind Joe Biden. But his campaign would have been hoping that Super Tuesday would have put him so far ahead that he'd be the presumptive nominee, and that hasn't happened.

What about all the other horses in the race, though?

Well, a couple of the horses dropped out before Super Tuesday. Both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, rivals for the sort of moderate slug of Democratic voters, dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden before these primaries. That appears to have helped Joe Biden a good deal.

And how do you see that narrowing going forward.

Well, the next question will be whether Mike Bloomberg stays in. He said he would. No matter how many delegates we win.

Tonight, we have done something no one.

Else thought was possible. In just three months, we've gone from.

1% of the polls to being a.

Contender for the Democratic nomination for president. But I think his performance was so poor that I'm not sure he has much of a case to state. Despite spending about half a billion dollars in advertising, he did win American Samoa. That's not a great prize in the Democratic primary. If he were to drop out, I expect that would help Biden again. And what would really help Biden is if Mike Bloomberg puts his political funding, his political machine that he's assembled very quickly behind Joe Biden both in the primary and then in the general election.

What about Elizabeth Warren, though? You haven't mentioned her.

I didn't mention her for good reason, Jason. She hasn't won a single state. That is a surprise. There are plenty of good things about her candidacy. She's rather a skillful politician. She has lots and lots of detailed policies, which is either a good thing or a handicap, depending on your point of view. And it looked for a while like she might be just left wing enough to excite the party whilst being sort of centrist enough not to scare too many people, but she really hasn't done well. She seems to have been another victim of this overcrowded primary. She's also saying that she'll stay in the race. Here's my Cast a vote that will make you proud. Cast a vote from your heart.

And.

Vote for the person you think will.

Make the best president of the United States.

But it's hard to see that there's much point in her doing so, particularly after she lost her home state in Massachusetts.

So once again in this election cycle, the talk in early stages was just how broad the field was. And now it's been narrowed down to two Washington heavyweights who have been in politics forever. How do you suppose that's happened? From all that talk of change and younger faces and diversity down to kind of a bit of the same old.

Yeah, this is a very odd feature of the Democratic primary, isn't it? I mean, if the two candidates are Biden and Sanders and one of them will face Donald Trump in November, then Donald Trump will be the youngest candidate in that race and the choice will be between three white males in their 70s. That's quite surprising given where the Democratic Party field started out. And I think the sort of main reason for that is Just there were so many candidates in the race, Jason, that quite a lot of potentially rather good candidates got knocked out early on, weren't able to pick up enough momentum, weren't able to get any purchase in early primaries. So I think that's really the reason why we've ended up with these two very familiar figures, that both of them started with a bit of an advantage in that they had, to some extent, a group of loyal voters. They're really the only candidates in the race who are in that position. And in such a crowded field, that's quite a good place to start.

And so is what we're seeing here a kind of coalescing of the fear about Bernie Sanders and the degree to which he's just kind of too far out to the left. The idea here is that Mr. Biden is the safer bet. Do you agree with that assessment?

It certainly looks that way to me. I mean, I thought that it would be certainly a risk for the Democrats to run Bernie Sanders against President Trump. If you ask Democratic voters, they say their number one thing is that they want a candidate who can beat Donald Trump. Right. But then that opens up a whole argument about, well, what kind of candidate can beat Donald Trump. And there's one theory that you need to take him on with a kind of firebrand, a fellow populist like Bernie Sanders, albeit a different kind of populist. And there's another school of thought that says actually you need to play it safe. Joe Biden is the ultimate sort of play it safe candidacy. He's not terribly exciting as a candidate, but looking at the numbers, a lot of analysts thought that he had perhaps the best chance of beating Donald Trump. So it looks like the alarm about Assander's candidacy, that it just might be taking a huge risk in what's a very consequential election, seems to have translated into poor results for him on Super Tuesday.

So, as you say, we're entering a period where it's essentially a two horse race. Do you have a sense now that things are crystallizing a bit, how it might go from here?

Well, I think one thing we can certainly say is that voters have a habit of confounding the predictions of pundits. There's still quite a long way to run in this thing and room for further slip up. So I'd be reluctant to say Candidate X will definitely be the nominee. That said, it still looks quite likely that the Democrats will end up with a contested convention in July. And I say that because if you look at the remaining states, either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden probably need to pick up maybe 60% of the remaining delegates. That's a high proportion. And if either Sanders or Biden fails to do that, the Democrats end up with a contested convention. So that still looks like it's a fairly likely outcome.

And so what are the things to watch then, as more primaries play out?

I think the things to watch are, does Michael Bloomberg stay in the race if he gets out, how does that affect him? Is Bernie Sanders, or is Joe Biden able to build up such a commanding lead that they can win this thing outright, get a majority of delegates before the convention, or whether we'll end up with a contested convention, in which case people are going to start to get very interested in the kind of intricacies and the rules of contested conventions. That's something we discussed on Checks and Balance, one of the Economist's other podcasts recently, looking back at the last contested Democratic primary, which was in 1968.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

You've probably heard of the glass ceiling, referring to the barriers to success that women face at work. But in the higher echelons of America's big firms, there are other demographic limitations. In 2005, Jane Hun described the workplace challenges that Asian Americans face, a phenomenon she called the bamboo ceiling. Some progress has been made since then, but plenty of talented workers look up and still see that ceiling.

So 15 years later, Asians are still underrepresented in corporate America. Some 11% of associates at American law firms are Asian, but only 3% of partners are in technology, where Asians make up over 30% of the workforce. Only 15% of the upper ranks are comprised of Asians.

Vijay Vaithyswaran is the Economist's US Business editor.

And at the very top of the S&P 500 firms, the 500 big industrial firms in America, only 3% are made up of Asian bosses, even though Asians make up about 6% of the American population.

So it is fair to say that there are Asians in those corner offices.

Now our listeners will be familiar with some Asian names in the headlines. If you look at IBM, Arvind Krishna is the new CEO to take over from Ginny Ramadi. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft. Alphabet, the parent company of Google is run by Sundar Pichai. Pepsi was run by Indra Nooy. So we have seen a few Asians at the top of the list, but they're relatively few. What's interesting about the list of Asians in the headlines is not only that there are relatively few of them, but also the ones you've probably seen all have Indian roots.

And so in that sense the suggestion is that the ceiling for East Asians is in fact lower than the bamboo ceiling for South Asians.

So this is an interesting question. There's no question that all Asians are underrepresented at the top in the aggregate, but there does seem to be some outperformance of South Asians versus East Asians when it comes to this bamboo ceiling. So the researchers involved in this very careful peer reviewed study tease out some of the reasons why this might be and put forward some provocative theories. For example, they do look at the question of perhaps Asian Americans lack ambition relative to the white majority. And they find that that is not the case. In fact, typically Asian Americans have a greater desire for high status, high pressure positions than do the majority of Americans. They also look at the possibility of prejudice, of racism and discrimination. Here they do find that to be a significant factor. But what they find is that in fact there is greater discrimination against South Asians than there is against East Asians. But what we see in practice is that South Asians tend to achieve the top post at a much higher rate than East Asians. That doesn't seem to be an explanation that ultimately determines success. The one that they settle on is some dimension of culture, specifically how ambitiously and how confidently different managers present themselves in management settings. How they communicate, in other words, and it turns out through their studies, which were done both amongst senior executives and thousands of business school students at top US business schools who all want to be CEO one day, they find that South Asians communicate in a manner that is more confident publicly, perhaps even bombastic. One could say that fits American notions of what a leader should do and look like and behave. Whereas they find that East Asians tend not to behave in that way when they communicate. Why might this be? They attribute this to different cultural traditions.

And do you find that a satisfying answer? I mean, there's no shortage of musing about these things and somehow the suggestion of well, it's just culture feels a little bit fuzzy.

So in my experience, on the topic of, of diversity, broadly and specifically, when one gets into parsing different ethnic groups, I find there's a lot of nonsense and stereotypes and bogus social theories that are peddled. So I was quite skeptical when I began to read this paper. But as I dug into the data and how carefully it has been done, with quite a large sample size, multiple studies across leading schools, and published in a serious peer reviewed journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences in America, the leading scientific body in the US I began to grow a little bit more convinced that they might be onto something. And in particular, it also builds on the work of a Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, who argued in the argumentative Indian how the cultural traditions of discourse of debate and engagement had given, in that example, Indians, but more broadly, South Asian culture. An external, phasing, noisy, chaotic, democratic approach to communication that anybody that's visited South Asia would know is certainly true. And those including scholars of Confucianism who've studied East Asian countries do see patterns over thousands of years of respect for hierarchy, for example, and humility, things that have been repeated over time. So there's something there to point to now. Nobody should blame the victim, for example, in the case of discrimination. Clearly, organizations need to do much more to expand diversity, to expand inclusion. But if we were to look at the different performance of South Asian groups versus East Asian groups, which is well documented in the literature in American senior corporate strata, this is an interesting hypothesis that's worth looking at.

Does that in turn lead to prescriptions? Is there a way for corporate America to level the playing field to take all this into account?

So there are two sorts of prescriptions that come forth from this, and one of them has to do with what companies can do. They can change, for example, how they choose leaders. So there's a set of things that company boards, for example, which tend to select the new CEO, or senior management, which tends to pick its next cadre of leadership, can change their attitudes from looking for a different sort of leader. They can be quietly confident leaders, not only those that are outwardly aggressive in their views or in how they communicate. So there can be a change in cultural mindset, just as those who argue for a greater representation of women at the top argue that there are multiple styles of leadership, and there's a whole academic literature about multiple intelligences, for example, and how the qualities that diverse boards or diverse companies have can improve, how companies innovate, how companies think. We don't need to have just one personality of leadership at the top of companies. There are also suggestions that if you want to get ahead in the existing world as it is, you might want to work on expressing yourself more confidently. Again, some people think that's blaming the victim. Other people say, hey, it's practical. If you want to break the bamboo ceiling, sometimes it takes a little boldness and bombast.

BJ thank you very much for joining us.

It's been great to Be with you, Jason.

They're only a couple of miles apart, but life is markedly different between Manchester, one of Britain's biggest cities, and and Barry, a market town. In Manchester, economic output is higher, people are younger and far more likely to have been born abroad. And in the 2016 Brexit referendum, more than 3/5 of people in Manchester backed remain. In Barrie, over half voted to leave. It's the kind of left behind town that's defined British politics since, along with its own left behind football club.

So if you look at Bury FC and Man City, there are quite a lot of differences between those two clubs.

James Tozer is a data journalist at the Economist.

Bury's one of the oldest clubs in the history of football. They have won the FA Cup, England's main knockout competition, twice, though not for more than 100 years. But they're in the lower divisions, or rather they were in the lower divisions of English football. At the start of the season, they were in the third division, but they were kicked out because they repeatedly failed to service their debts. Manchester City, on the other hand, are the richest team in football. In fact, Manchester City have this enormous, sparkling 55,000 seater stadium which is arguably the best in Britain. Barry FC, just down the road, their old stadium is now. The doors are locked. They can't go back in until they pay off the mortgage.

So that's not so unusual in itself. Right. One fantastically successful club might be close to one real failure of a club.

No, not at all. In fact, this is a nice sort of encapsulation of what's going on in the rest of the country, in that you have the best football teams in the Premier League tend to be concentrated in big, thriving, dynamic areas. And the clubs that are lower down the leagues tend to be in towns that are just outside. And you see this reflected in a number of different demographic indicators. One interesting one is the Brexit vote. If you look at those Premier League clubs, 70% of them, the stadiums sit in parliamentary constituencies that voted to remain in the European Union in 2016. If you look at clubs in the third and fourth division, more than 70% of those are in constituencies that voted to lead the European Union.

Isn't it just that big teams are in big cities, they bring more fans and so on?

Well, I think it's always been the case that the best teams tend to be in cities. It might partly be the case that cities, you can have more fans there, you can build bigger stadiums and you can build this groundswell of support. But one of the Things that's happened and that's exacerbated the divide between the top clubs and the bottom clubs financially is globalization. Those big cities and those clubs found it easier to attract foreign players. Work permit rules make it easier to sign international stars than say second tier players from Brazil or Nigeria or so on. So started picking up fans from around the world aggressively, sort of promoted themselves in Africa and Asia and so on, then began to attract foreign investors. In fact, Manchester City is owned by one of the Emirati royal family. In fact, Manchester City have been kicked out of the Champions League, which is the main knockout competition for European football teams, because the organization that runs it determined that Manchester City had been benefiting from inflated sponsorship deals from Emirati companies, which was used to overstate its revenue to allow it to balance its books. The club disputes that and the appeal, I think, will roll on for the next few months. So you've got enormous global pools of capital labour demand that these big city based teams have been able to tap into. The smaller ones in towns haven't been.

So it's a rich get richer scenario. The big teams only get bigger, get more funding, get more attention, are more watched on the international stage.

Well, it's always been a winner takes all sport. But another thing that plays into this is that the financial rules for clubs at the top are much more stringent. So Manchester City have been kicked out of the Champions League because they, well, allegedly they were sort of fiddling the accounts slightly and overstating their revenues. Lower down the leagues. There are still rules that try and force clubs to be profitable, but they're harder to enforce. And so you see lots of owners of smaller clubs essentially betting the ranch, saying, right, we're going to borrow money, we're going to pump in, we're going to try and get up to the Premier League. And you know, when that goes wrong, there's no one there to bail them out. And that's exactly what happened at Bury.

And so I imagine then the fans of Bury think that they've just been left behind. The rich get richer and the poor, well, essentially go out of business.

Absolutely. I went up to go and speak to some of them and there was very much this feeling that the system had let them down. There weren't the proper regulations in place to protect them from owners who didn't care about the club properly. And I think, you know, some of them sort of see this parallel between what's happening in football and what's happening in the country at large. You sort of see all these clubs in Brexit supporting places where economic output is less, less densely populated. People tend to be older, there are fewer immigrants, places that feel like they're being left behind. And the 2016 vote reflected that. And for them now to look at the football clubs that are often the pillars of these communities. Bury's been there since 1885. It's the central attraction of that town and it's gone. And I think there's a lot of anger there and it sort of reinforces that feeling that there's one set of rules and outcomes for people in big dynamic cities that have access to foreign resources and one set of rules for everyone else.

James, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

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