Elizabeth Spiers

My most recent Fortune article on Zimbabwe has been on the newsstands for a couple of weeks, but it’s not online yet. The short version: if Robert Mugabe stays in power and continues to thoroughly ruin the economy, he’ll eventually run out of money to pay his security forces (the only thing standing between Zimbabwe and official failed state status) and may find himself in a position familiar to the people he has oppressed–cowering in terror at the barrel of a gun, being issued demands he cannot possibly meet.
An excerpt:
A passage from The State of Africa by Martin Meredith, recalls the explanation offered to citizens for cutting off their food supplies [during the Matabeleland conflict]: “First you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children, and finally you will eat the dissidents.” But most of the dissidents left the country before anyone could stick a fork in them… That Mugabe has any resources left to plunder at all is a function of what is increasingly a remittance economy.
“The World’s Worst Inflation” [Fortune]
UPDATE: It’s online now. You can read it here.
See also Peter Godwin’s excellent piece in Vanity Fair this month.

Belatedly: my last Fortune column has been up for a while. It’s about nuclear energy, which has never been popular, but which I think no intellectually serious environmentalist can credibly dismiss as an alternative to fossil fuel burning technologies. Nuclear energy is cleaner, and empirically speaking, much, much safer. But we’ve all seen The China Syndrome and Chernobyl documentaries, which tend to take up more emotional space in the public psyche than things like actual evidence and hard numbers. (Never underestimate the power of Jane Fonda.)
The case for nukes [Fortune]

My last Fast Company column is up now. (As explained previously, my Fortune contract is exclusive for business writing, so I can’t write for Fast Company anymore.) I expect that this will get me more than the usual allotment of hate mail, but you can only walk into so many Brooklyn boutiques with piles of artisanally crafted chocolate, sweaters knittedly lovingly by resident hipsters and all-caps exhortations to “BUY LOCAL” before the implied self-righteousness starts to make you twitch. (Me, anyway.) There are good reasons to buy local, but they’re usually not the reasons why people actually do. From the column:

The same people who are horrified by the xenophobic implications of “buy American” campaigns also engage in a different sort of provincialism when it comes to their own consumption choices. Why? Let’s face it, much of the buy-local movement has nothing to do with geography. The emotional tenor, at least, is much more about shunning corporate behemoths. If the farmer next door happens to be Monsanto, you rethink buying local. What buying local really means is buying boutique-branded artisanal products that are crafted with tender loving care by actual human beings.
Or that merely appear to be.

Neighborhoodlums: Benefits of Buying Local? [Fast Company]

“As far as I can tell, there are only three constituencies outside the mining or commodities-trading industries who have historically demonstrated consistent enthusiasm for acquiring gold: street pavers in heaven, leprechauns, and survivalists.” Thus begins my most recent Fortune column.
We did a series about where to put your money in a recession and I took the a look one of the more popular options for the truly paranoid: gold investments. Something must be in the air because I pitched it several weeks ago with the notion that I wanted to talk a bit about survivalists and why they love gold, and the next weekend I amused to see a piece in the New York Times about the popularity of survivalism–in the Styles section, no less. It’s an interesting piece written by my talented former colleague, Alex Williams, and you can read it here.
Alex’s piece notes that interest in survivalism is the highest it’s been since the late 1970s. As it happens, gold is also the highest it’s been (price-wise) since the late 1970s. From my column:

…for those who remember the late 1970s, survivalism wasn’t the only thing going up at the time. If you have any interest in precious metals, you may recall that period as the last time gold went up precipitously, setting a record high of $850 an ounce in January 1980. The intersection of the two is not a coincidence.
Both were in part triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and concerns about the economy. In 1979 inflation was high, energy prices were high, unemployment was high, and global political instability was an ongoing source of anxiety.
Now it’s 2008. Inflation is on the rise (unless you’re averting your eyes and focusing only on “core inflation,” as the Fed would have you do), energy prices are high, unemployment is going up, and political instability is an ongoing source of anxiety. Concurrently, survivalism is enjoying a revival, and after a horrendous performance during most of the ’80s and ’90s (dropping to around $264 an ounce in 2000), gold has once again shot up, reaching a record high of $1,030.80 on March 17.

You can read the full article here.
Should You Rush to Gold? [Fortune]

I have a doom-and-gloom inflation column is this week’s issue of Fortune. Summary: We’re All Screwed!

So how do we account for the discrepancy between the Federal Reserve’s recent assurances that inflation is under control and the 91% of the population that’s worried it isn’t? There are several possibilities: The first is that we’re all paranoid. We simply need reassurance from the authorities: Inflation rates are fine, nothing to see here, move along quietly. The second is that the Fed’s insistence on focusing on “core” inflation – a measure that strips energy and food from the consumer price index (CPI) because they’re theoretically subject to short-term volatility – makes inflation seem smaller than it is, or than we feel it to be when our gallon of milk that was 12% cheaper last year gets swiped across the grocery store scanner, beeping ominously like a tiny alarm bell. (While core inflation was just 2.3% in February, the CPI was 4%.) The third and most disconcerting possibility is that the CPI systemically understates inflation, in which case we’re paying for it taxwise, and the government is underpaying Social Security recipients. In the words of many a UFO spotter, it isn’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

The Great Inflation Cover-up

My April Fast Company column is up now. It’s about the self-help-ification of the business book genre and, well, its general cliches:

…There are the tortured metaphors (usually involving cute animals with simple, vaguely ambulatory problems — mice chasing moving cheese, penguins realizing their iceberg is melting and having nowhere to go) and the slightly less persecuted similes (business is like The Art of War, business is like Winnie the Pooh, business is like having your pinkie finger pulled backward until the pain is intolerable). There is the gratuitous manufacture of new jargon that sounds like English but is in fact spoken only in hotel conference rooms near the airport…

Library of the Living Dead [Fast Company]

I wrote a short piece for Slate yesterday on why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns. It’s a bit simplified if you’ve been digesting every piece of news that comes down the pipe about the story, but if not, and you want to know why your taxpayer money should be going to Bear (or JPMorgan, as it were), take a look for a quick explanation. (The short answer: when choosing between catastrophe and apocalypse, one generally picks catastrophe.)
Bear Run [Slate]

My Fast Company column for February is up now. You can read it here. It’s about the health-ification of junk food brands. In the interest of research, various “healthy” junk foods were consumed in the making of said column:

I bought something at Whole Foods last week called Laura’s Wholesome Junk Food Chocolate X-Treme Fudge Bite-lettes. I was willing to forgive the spelling of “extreme” here as if it preceded a dirt-bike competition, but the “bite-lettes” tasted so bad that I had to chase them with a Dove Organic chocolate bar, the medicinal aftertaste of which only disappeared after the consumption of a handful of Ferrara Pan Red Hots, which are, according to the packaging, a “fat-free food.” … Certainly, it’s possible to find and highlight the healthy aspects of nearly anything (arsenic: cholesterol and fat free!).

Devil’s Food [Fast Company]

PC Mag, which celebrates its 25th Anniversary this month, asked me to write a short essay on the future of media and how current trends will shape what happens in the next few years. It’s hard to write short on that one, but I gave it a shot. The six-word summary: continued fragmentation and more consumer choice.
Also included in the issue are essays from Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Vint Cerf, John McCain and Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling. (See here.)
The Media Company of the Future [PC Mag]

My Fast Company column for October is out now. The subject: Apple and Steve Jobs–the latter of whom just got subpeonaed yesterday, but I didn’t talk about backdating because I think Jobs is pretty much in the clear on that one. Instead I talked about why I keep buying Apple products even though they consistently fall apart on me well before their ostensible expiration dates:

And yet I keep buying Apple products. I could blame myself for continuing this sort of irrational behavior, which is particularly irresponsible when you consider that a computer is a professional necessity. I need it to do important things such as adding an aquarium with little pixelated fish to my Facebook profile and sending fake David Hasselhoff sightings to Gawker.com. But I don’t blame myself, because that would be unpleasant. So I blame Steve Jobs, who has seduced me into buying his sleek machines, even if their delicate organs seem to fail with alarming regularity, like the beautiful consumptive heroines in Victorian novels. Steve…is the human incarnation of the average Apple product: He’s good-looking, he overpromises, and he’s notoriously temperamental.

The Tao of Steve [Fast Company]