| We have three covers this week, on Google, migration and left-behind Britain.
In our American edition we report on Google’s mid-life crisis . All seems well on the surface. Every day its search engine handles 6bn requests, YouTube receives 49 years’ worth of video uploads and Gmail processes about 100bn emails. Thanks to its dominance of online advertising, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made a profit of $34bn last year. Beyond its core operations, it is a world leader in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and self-driving cars. However, signs of ageing are apparent in Google’s maturing business, its changing culture and its ever-more-entwined relationship with government. This raises a problem that is as old as business itself. How do companies sustain the creativity and agility that made them great, even as they forge a culture and corporate machine that is built to last?
In our Asian and European editions we look at the plight of migrants in the age of covid-19 . Every country in the world has closed or partly closed its borders since the pandemic began. In total, they have issued more than 65,000 restrictions on mobility. There are emotive reasons why covid-19 might make countries less willing to accept foreigners even after a vaccine is discovered and the pandemic is suppressed. People are scared: not only of this pandemic but also of the next. Covid-19 has caused mass unemployment. Many voters believe that migrants take jobs from the native-born, and so would keep curbs on immigration even after other travel restrictions are loosened. Yet when the coronavirus is vanquished, migration will still be what it was before: a powerful tool that can lift up the poor, rejuvenate rich countries and spread new ideas around the world. A pandemic is no reason to abandon it.
And in Britain we ask how to bring prosperity to the country’s poorest regions . One reason Boris Johnson talks so much about “levelling up” is that, having won lots of seats in the Midlands and north of England in last year’s election, the Conservative Party needs to hold on to them. The other is that regional inequality really is a blight. Take the 10% of small regions with the highest GDP per head and the 10% with the lowest. In Britain the ratio between the two is 4.3 to 1—higher than in any other rich country. Even at the best of times, Mr Johnson struggles to give substance to a slogan and, under the shadow of covid-19, these are not the best of times. If he is to bring relief, the prime minister needs to make big cities and their hinterlands more productive by upgrading their infrastructure. More important, he must give up some of his power. |
