Fabulous opinion piece by Stephen Greenblatt about Shakespeare’s Richard III, a character marked by “a weird, obsessive determination to reach a goal that looked impossibly far off, a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude”.

“Richard III,” which proved to be one of Shakespeare’s first great hits, explores how this loathsome, perverse monster actually attained the English throne. As the play conceives it, Richard’s villainy was readily apparent to everyone. There was no secret about his fathomless cynicism, cruelty and treacherousness, no glimpse of anything redeemable in him and no reason to believe that he could govern the country effectively.

His success in obtaining the crown depended on a fatal conjunction of diverse but equally self-destructive responses from those around him. The play locates these responses in particular characters — Lady Anne, Lord Hastings, the Earl of Buckingham and so forth — but it also manages to suggest that these characters sketch a whole country’s collective failure. Taken together, they itemize a nation of enablers.

Remind you of anyone?

Good evaluation by the Economist of the second presidential debate:

SO THIS is how it was to end: a septuagenarian con-man flanked by four victims of sexual assault, real or alleged, trying to intimidate his opponent by dredging up old accusations against her husband, Bill Clinton. That pre-debate Facebook Live broadcast by Donald Trump, which combined farce, dystopia and reality-TV in three tawdry minutes, presaged the tone of the encounter that followed. As it turned out, his second confrontation with Hillary Clinton, at a town-hall style event in St Louis, did not signal the end of Mr Trump’s presidential bid. It may not lead to the headlong disintegration of the Republican Party, another outcome predicted in advance. Instead a hairline crack may have opened in the American republic itself.

Great piece, worth reading in full. It concludes that the debate wasn’t the cataclysmic event for the Trump campaign — but only because he was playing to his core supporters, who would probably vote for him even if he’d shot Clinton live on stage. But it shows the kind of damage that the last 30 years have inflicted on the American polity. And it’s more than a ‘hairline crack’.

ALSO. Great column by George F. Will. Ends thus:

Today, however, Trump should stay atop the ticket, for four reasons. First, he will give the nation the pleasure of seeing him join the one cohort, of the many cohorts he disdains, that he most despises — “losers.” Second, by continuing to campaign in the spirit of St. Louis, he can remind the nation of the useful axiom that there is no such thing as rock bottom. Third, by persevering through Nov. 8 he can simplify the GOP’s quadrennial exercise of writing its post-campaign autopsy, which this year can be published Nov. 9 in one sentence: “Perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan.” Fourth, Trump is the GOP’s chemotherapy, a nauseating but, if carried through to completion, perhaps a curative experience.

This is lovely.

Note the $2.85B given to charity.

Writing in today’s FT (paywall), Larry Summers reports on last week’s IMF summit in Washington. It’s a sombre column.

“The pervasive concern”, he writes,

was that traditional ideas and leaders were losing their grip and the global economy was entering into unexplored and dangerous territory.

IMF growth forecasts issued before the meeting were “again revised downwards”. (Note the ‘again’.).

“While recession does not impending in any large region”, he continues,

growth is expected at rates dangerously close to stall speed. Worse is the realisation that the central banks have little fuel left in their tanks.

Why?

Containing [recessions] generally requires 5 percentage points of rate cutting. Nowhere in the industrial world do central banks have anything like this kind of room even making allowance for the effects of unconventional policies like quantitative easing. Market expectations suggest that it is unlikely they will gain room for years to come.

The problem is that:

After seven years of economic over-optimism there is a growing awareness that challenges are not so much a legacy of the financial crisis as of deep structural changes in the global economy.

Which of course is one of the factors which led to the Brexit vote and the rise of Trump. Interesting therefore to hear a leader of the global elite coming round to the same conclusion.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Tim Montgomerie, writing in today’s Times (behind a paywall) says that

many people have learnt it can be dangerous to laugh at the party that won four million votes at the last general election. Jean-Claude Juncker, for example. The European Union he leads would be managing one less existential crisis if Mr Farage’s popularity hadn’t frightened David Cameron into holding the Brexit referendum. And Mr Cameron would still be in No 10 if the people he once dismissed as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” hadn’t overturned British politics.

Which is true. But he fails to mention the underlying problem, namely the first-past-the-post electoral system which meant that four million voters get precisely one MP in Parliament. So the people who were enraged by a political system that seemed impervious to their concerns couldn’t register their disaffection through the normal electoral system. But they could in a referendum — and they did.

In the end, the only way to make the UK a modern functioning democracy is to change the voting system so that the distribution of MPs matches the distribution of votes. Theresa May has no plans to do that. Nor, it seems, has the Labour Party, such as it is.