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At OnPost we believe in giving you more power over how you bank.

That's why AIB and Bank of Ireland customers can now lodge and withdraw money at any of our 900 post offices across Ireland, 6 days a week.

That's right, Your bank is in your post office.

Meaning you can bank wherever you live or work.

Visit your local post office or onpost.com slash everyday banking.

Allied Irish Banks PLC and Bank of Ireland are regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

I'm Kenneth Kukie, The Economist's Deputy Executive Editor.

And welcome to Editor's Picks, where you can hear 3 highlights from the latest edition of The Economist, read aloud.

In most of the world, our cover highlights a special report on the future of war.

The war in Ukraine is a high-intensity conflict that combines cutting-edge technology with industrial-scale killing.

Our cover story explains that it will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come.

In Asia, our cover story is about families, fertility, and freedom.

Households' commitment to conservative family life is collapsing in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

There millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier and less male-dominated arrangements.

We argue that in a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the social, economic, and demographic consequences will be vast and potentially destabilizing.

And finally, we turn to America, where there is a lack of lab monkeys.

We explain that the shortage is bad for biomedical research, and it encourages smuggling.

The stories you're about to hear are just a small sample of what's on offer in this week's issue of The Economist.

If you subscribe, you can read or listen to all of what we do, in print, on our app, or online.

And you can get your first month of a subscription for free by heading to economist.com slash podcast offer.

First up, a new era of high-tech war has begun.

Big wars are tragedies for the people and countries that fight them.

They also transform how the world prepares for conflict, with momentous consequences for global security.

Britain, France and Germany sent observers to the American Civil War to study battles like Gettysburg.

accelerated the shift of America's army from the force that lost in Vietnam to the 1 that thumped Iraq in

That campaign in turn led China's leaders to rebuild the People's Liberation Army into the formidable force it is today.

The war in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since

It will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come.

It has shattered any illusions that modern conflict might be limited to counter-insurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace.

Instead, it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge tech with industrial-scale killing and munitions consumption, even as it draws in civilians, allies and private firms.

You can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to get an edge in any coming conflict.

Rather than recoiling from the death and destruction, liberal societies must recognise that wars between industrialised economies are an all-too-real prospect, and start to prepare.

As our special report explains, Ukraine's killing fields hold 3 big lessons.

The first is that the battlefield is becoming transparent.

Think of all-seeing sensors on satellites and fleets of drones.

Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by ever-improving algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks.

The mobile signal of a Russian general, say, or the outline of a camouflaged tank.

This information can then be relayed by satellites to the lowliest soldier at the front, or used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision and range.

This quality of hyper-transparency means that future wars will hinge on reconnaissance.

The priorities will be to detect the enemy first before they spot you, to blind their sensors – whether drones or satellites – and to disrupt their means of sending data across the battlefield, whether through cyber attacks, electronic warfare or old-fashioned explosives.

Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal, concealment and deception.

Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies or to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do.

Even in the age of artificial intelligence, the second lesson is that war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans and millions of machines and munitions.

The ability to see targets and hit them precisely sends the body count soaring.

To adapt, troops have shifted mountains of mud to dig trenches worthy of Verdun or Passchendaele.

The consumption of munitions and equipment is staggering.

Russia has fired 10 million shells in a year.

It is asking its allies for old-school cluster munitions to help its counter-offensive.

Eventually, technology may change how this requirement for physical mass is met and maintained.

On June 30th, General Mark Milley, America's most senior soldier, predicted that a third of advanced armed forces would be robotic in 10 to 15 years' time.

Think of pilotless air forces and crewless tanks.

Yet armies need to be able to fight in this decade as well as the next 1.

That means replenishing stockpiles to prepare for high attrition rates, creating the industrial capacity to manufacture hardware at far greater scale, and ensuring that armies have reserves of manpower.

A NATO summit on July 11 and 12 will be a test of whether Western countries can continue to reinvigorate their alliance to these ends.

The third lesson, 1 that also applied for much of the 20th century, is that the boundary of a big war is wide and indistinct.

The West's conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by small professional armies and imposed a light burden on civilians at home, but often lots of misery on local people.

In Ukraine, civilians have been sucked into the war as victims.

A provincial grandmother can help guide artillery fire through a smartphone app.

And beyond the old defence industrial complex, a new cohort of private firms has proved crucial.

Ukraine's Battlefield software is hosted on Big Tech's cloud servers abroad.

Finnish firms provide targeting data and American ones satellite comms.

A network of allies with different levels of commitment has helped supply Ukraine and enforce sanctions and an embargo on Russian trade.

The growing participation of civilians raises legal and ethical questions.

Private companies located outside the physical conflict zone may be subject to virtual or armed attack.

As new firms become involved, governments need to ensure that no company is a single point of failure.

A fight between India and China may take place on the rooftop of the world.

A Sino-American clash over Taiwan would feature more air and naval power, long-range missiles and disruptions to trade.

The mutual threat of nuclear use has probably acted to limit escalation in Ukraine.

NATO has not directly engaged a nuclear-armed enemy, and Russia's threats have been bluster so far.

But in a fight over Taiwan, America and China would be tempted to attack each other in space, which could lead to nuclear escalation, especially if early warning and command and control satellites were disabled.

For liberal societies, the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine and from the vast cost and effort of modernizing their armed forces.

Yet they cannot assume that such a conflict between large industrialized economies will be a one-off event.

An autocratic and unstable Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come.

China's rising military clout is a destabilizing factor in Asia, and a global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely.

Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do.

For more on the future of war, read our detailed seven-section special report in this week's edition of The Economist, in print, online or on our app.

We'll be back with 2 more articles in a moment.

At Unpost, we believe in giving you more power over how you bank.

That's right, your bank is in your post office, for personal and business banking alike.

Allied Irish Banks, PLC and Bank of Ireland are regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

This is Editor's Picks from The Economist.

Next, we take a look at the new Asian family.

East Asian governments need to manage momentous social change they cannot prevent.

The concept of Asian values, once championed by leaders across the region, went out of vogue after the Asian financial crisis of

The idea that East and Southeast Asia's disciplined governments had a unique economic edge over the decadent West suddenly seemed less compelling.

Today, in prosperous East Asia, a different facet of those ballyhooed values is looking even more parlous.

In China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Asians' supposed commitment to conservative family life is collapsing.

As we report in our Asia and China sections this week, millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier, and in the East Asian context, less male-dominated arrangements.

In a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the socio-economic and demographic consequences will be vast, potentially destabilizing, and will shape millions of lives.

In Japan, where the shift first became evident, married couples with at least 1 child accounted for 42% of households in 1980 and single people 20%.

In 2020, couples with children accounted for 25% of households and singletons

Last year, 17 percent of Japanese men and 15 percent of women aged 18 to 34 said they would not marry, up from 2 percent and 4 percent in the early 1980s, and China recorded its lowest ever number of marriages, half as many as a decade ago.

In some ways, young Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Koreans are following a path charted in rich countries elsewhere.

Europe's marriage rate fell by half, for many of the reasons that are now driving down East Asian rates.

To many people, marriage seems increasingly anachronistic and unaffordable.

Across East Asia, it is still widely understood, in Confucian terms, as the union of a dominant man and submissive woman.

In South Korea, a married woman is referred to as jip-saram, or home person, and her husband as bak-at-yangban, or man outside.

High property prices are an added disincentive to setting up a marital home.

Alternative domestic arrangements are becoming more accepted.

Besides singledom, they include intergenerational flat-sharing and, less often, cohabiting and gay partnerships.

And growing numbers of middle-class women are putting off marriage to concentrate on their careers.

Traditional values are hard on women at work, too.

East Asia has some of the world's best-educated women, yet its overall record on female empowerment is poor and in some ways worsening.

On the World Economic Forum's gender equality ranking of 153 countries, China, where women are said to hold up half the sky, slipped from 63rd in 2006 to 102nd in

South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the OECD.

If most of this sounds familiar, 2 things make East Asia's great social change distinct and hugely troublesome.

First, the taboo against having children outside marriage remains as rigid as ever.

Across the OECD, 40% of births are outside wedlock.

In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, less than 5% are.

The figure in China is unavailable, revealingly, but not thought to be higher.

The result is a plummeting fertility rate.

South Korea's, at 0.78, is the lowest recorded anywhere, and Taiwan's only slightly higher.

Japan's and China's are just above half the replacement rate.

China's cruel one-child policy, now replaced by panicked officials with calls to have 3, exacerbated its demographic squeeze.

But as the regional picture shows, it would have happened anyway.

The total population of the 4 East Asian countries is predicted to shrink by 28% between 2020 and

The second problem is that the region's governments are making the situation worse.

None seriously broaches the only policy guaranteed to revive East Asia's flagging demography, mass immigration.

Their main response is to try to resuscitate marriage with economic perks, including tax breaks and subsidised weddings, with little success.

South Korea's president, Yoon Suk-yol, admits that his country has in essence squandered 280 trillion won, that's 215 billion dollars, on such policies.

Worse, he and his counterparts in China and Japan are doubling down on the conservative approach that their citizens increasingly object to.

South Korea's previous administration sought to extend benefits to single parents and unmarried couples.

Yun, who blames the low fertility rate on feminism, has put a stop to that.

Under Xi Jinping, China promises its citizens a Confucian revival and arrests gay rights activists.

Japan's ever-ruling Liberal Democratic Party is also against reforming marriage, including by refusing to make it available to gay couples, although most voters want to see that change.

There are pockets of progress, notably in Taiwan, which recently took a more liberal course.

It has legalised same-sex marriage and in May permitted gay couples to adopt children, though it is too soon to know whether these changes will show up in the statistics.

But the region as a whole is stuck between modernity and tradition, suffering some of the worst effects of both.

East Asians are free to disdain traditional family roles, but not to redefine them.

That is why millions resort to childlessness and solitude.

Governments should try to complete this lopsided revolution.

Even if social change is not entirely within their grasp and does not happen overnight, they can at least stop resisting it.

To make family life more attractive, they need to deal with its gender imbalances as well as its costs by, for example, making paternity leave routine.

They should look beyond heterosexual marriage, as their citizens have, and extend legal recognition to cohabiting, gay, and other non-traditional arrangements, and afford them the support married couples now enjoy, especially over child-rearing.

It is self-defeating and outrageous that China prevents single women from freezing their eggs, or that Japan makes it nearly impossible for gay couples to foster children.

Such policies would not fix the region's demography, but they would have a more positive effect on it than the current ones.

More important, they would leave millions freer to lead the lives they choose, especially women and gay people.

East Asian governments have overseen the greatest ever economic boom.

Now they must attend to their citizens' happiness and liberty."

And finally, the consequences of America's lab monkey shortage.

American authorities arrested Maspal Kree, an official in Cambodia's Forestry Administration last November, when he was heading to an international meeting about trade regulations for endangered species in Panama.

Prosecutors accused him of conspiring with a smuggling ring.

Monkeys, specifically long-tailed macaques.

His gang allegedly grabbed wild macaques in Cambodia's national parks and bribed officials to label them as captive bred.

Fake papers allowed Vanny Bio-Research, a Cambodian pharma company, to ship these unfortunate primates to America for use in research.

Kree is facing trial in Florida's Southern District Court.

The federal government funds 7 National Primate Research Centers, or MPRCs, which house in total around 20, 000 primates, macaques, but also baboons and marmosets.

These centres then award primates to labs across America.

MPRCs have fulfilled only a third of requests for untested-on macaques in 2021 and prices have soared.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a rhesus macaque cost $8, 000.

Another species, long-tail macaques, is probably per pound, currently the most expensive traded wildlife, says Lisa Jones Engel, a science advisor at PETA, an animal rights group.

Getting lab monkeys from abroad became harder during the pandemic.

Chinese authorities banned the export of all primates in early 2020.

The Chinese government wanted to suppress the country's wildlife trade, which is thought to encourage the transmission of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 from animals to humans.

Chinese labs also need monkeys to achieve the Communist Party's goal of China becoming a world leader in neuroscience by

That forced American companies to rely on less scrupulous Southeast Asian suppliers.

Many scientists believe poaching is endemic across Cambodia.

In February, the Department of Justice subpoenaed Charles River over 1, 000 juvenile macaques the pharmaceutical company had bought from Cambodia.

The DOJ suspected they were caught in the wild, then exported.

These primates are now in Texas and Maryland, but also in limbo.

They cannot be tested on, nor can they be flown back to Cambodia.

Thank you for listening to Editor's Picks.

For more from us, subscribe at economist.com slash podcast offer.

I'm Kenneth Kukie and in London, this is The Economist.

Add-on Post, we believe in giving you more power over how you bank.


Speaker 0: At OnPost we believe in giving you more power over how you bank. That's why AIB and Bank of Ireland customers can now lodge and withdraw money at any of our 900 post offices across Ireland, 6 days a week. That's right, Your bank is in your post office. For personal and business banking alike. Meaning you can bank wherever you live or work.

Visit your local post office or onpost.com slash everyday banking. OnPost. Your money for your world. Allied Irish Banks PLC and Bank of Ireland are regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Speaker 1: It's Monday, the 10th of July, 2023. I'm Kenneth Kukie, The Economist's Deputy Executive Editor. And welcome to Editor's Picks, where you can hear 3 highlights from the latest edition of The Economist, read aloud. We have 2 cover stories this week. In most of the world, our cover highlights a special report on the future of war.

Speaker 2: The war in Ukraine is a high-intensity conflict that combines cutting-edge technology with industrial-scale killing. Our cover story explains that it will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come. In Asia, our cover story is about families, fertility, and freedom. Households' commitment to conservative family life is collapsing in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. There millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier and less male-dominated arrangements.

We argue that in a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the social, economic, and demographic consequences will be vast and potentially destabilizing. And finally, we turn to America, where there is a lack of lab monkeys. We explain that the shortage is bad for biomedical research, and it encourages smuggling. The stories you're about to hear are just a small sample of what's on offer in this week's issue of The Economist. If you subscribe, you can read or listen to all of what we do, in print, on our app, or online.

And you can get your first month of a subscription for free by heading to economist.com slash podcast offer. The link is in the show notes.

Speaker 3: First up, a new era of high-tech war has begun. Big wars are tragedies for the people and countries that fight them. They also transform how the world prepares for conflict, with momentous consequences for global security. Britain, France and Germany sent observers to the American Civil War to study battles like Gettysburg. The tank duels of the Yom Kippur War in

Speaker 0: 1973

Speaker 3: accelerated the shift of America's army from the force that lost in Vietnam to the 1 that thumped Iraq in

Speaker 0: 1991.

Speaker 3: That campaign in turn led China's leaders to rebuild the People's Liberation Army into the formidable force it is today. The war in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since

Speaker 0: 1945.

Speaker 3: It will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come. It has shattered any illusions that modern conflict might be limited to counter-insurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace. Instead, it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge tech with industrial-scale killing and munitions consumption, even as it draws in civilians, allies and private firms. You can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to get an edge in any coming conflict. Rather than recoiling from the death and destruction, liberal societies must recognise that wars between industrialised economies are an all-too-real prospect, and start to prepare.

As our special report explains, Ukraine's killing fields hold 3 big lessons. The first is that the battlefield is becoming transparent. Forget binoculars or maps. Think of all-seeing sensors on satellites and fleets of drones. Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by ever-improving algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks.

The mobile signal of a Russian general, say, or the outline of a camouflaged tank. This information can then be relayed by satellites to the lowliest soldier at the front, or used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision and range. This quality of hyper-transparency means that future wars will hinge on reconnaissance. The priorities will be to detect the enemy first before they spot you, to blind their sensors – whether drones or satellites – and to disrupt their means of sending data across the battlefield, whether through cyber attacks, electronic warfare or old-fashioned explosives. Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal, concealment and deception.

Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies or to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do. Even in the age of artificial intelligence, the second lesson is that war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans and millions of machines and munitions. Casualties in Ukraine have been severe. The ability to see targets and hit them precisely sends the body count soaring. To adapt, troops have shifted mountains of mud to dig trenches worthy of Verdun or Passchendaele.

The consumption of munitions and equipment is staggering. Russia has fired 10 million shells in a year. Ukraine loses 10, 000 drones per month. It is asking its allies for old-school cluster munitions to help its counter-offensive. Eventually, technology may change how this requirement for physical mass is met and maintained.

On June 30th, General Mark Milley, America's most senior soldier, predicted that a third of advanced armed forces would be robotic in 10 to 15 years' time. Think of pilotless air forces and crewless tanks. Yet armies need to be able to fight in this decade as well as the next 1. That means replenishing stockpiles to prepare for high attrition rates, creating the industrial capacity to manufacture hardware at far greater scale, and ensuring that armies have reserves of manpower. A NATO summit on July 11 and 12 will be a test of whether Western countries can continue to reinvigorate their alliance to these ends.

The third lesson, 1 that also applied for much of the 20th century, is that the boundary of a big war is wide and indistinct. The West's conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by small professional armies and imposed a light burden on civilians at home, but often lots of misery on local people. In Ukraine, civilians have been sucked into the war as victims. Over

Speaker 0: 9, 000

Speaker 3: have died, but also participants. A provincial grandmother can help guide artillery fire through a smartphone app. And beyond the old defence industrial complex, a new cohort of private firms has proved crucial. Ukraine's Battlefield software is hosted on Big Tech's cloud servers abroad. Finnish firms provide targeting data and American ones satellite comms.

A network of allies with different levels of commitment has helped supply Ukraine and enforce sanctions and an embargo on Russian trade. New boundaries create fresh problems. The growing participation of civilians raises legal and ethical questions. Private companies located outside the physical conflict zone may be subject to virtual or armed attack. As new firms become involved, governments need to ensure that no company is a single point of failure.

No 2 wars are the same. A fight between India and China may take place on the rooftop of the world. A Sino-American clash over Taiwan would feature more air and naval power, long-range missiles and disruptions to trade. The mutual threat of nuclear use has probably acted to limit escalation in Ukraine. NATO has not directly engaged a nuclear-armed enemy, and Russia's threats have been bluster so far.

But in a fight over Taiwan, America and China would be tempted to attack each other in space, which could lead to nuclear escalation, especially if early warning and command and control satellites were disabled. For liberal societies, the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine and from the vast cost and effort of modernizing their armed forces. Yet they cannot assume that such a conflict between large industrialized economies will be a one-off event. An autocratic and unstable Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come. China's rising military clout is a destabilizing factor in Asia, and a global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely.

Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do.

Speaker 2: For more on the future of war, read our detailed seven-section special report in this week's edition of The Economist, in print, online or on our app. We'll be back with 2 more articles in a moment.

Speaker 0: At Unpost, we believe in giving you more power over how you bank. That's why AIB and Bank of Ireland customers can now lodge and withdraw money at any of our 900 post offices across Ireland, 6 days a week. That's right, your bank is in your post office, for personal and business banking alike. Meaning you can bank wherever you live or work. Visit your local post office or onpost.com slash everyday banking.

OnPost, your money for your world. Allied Irish Banks, PLC and Bank of Ireland are regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Speaker 2: This is Editor's Picks from The Economist. Next, we take a look at the new Asian family. East Asian governments need to manage momentous social change they cannot prevent.

Speaker 4: The concept of Asian values, once championed by leaders across the region, went out of vogue after the Asian financial crisis of

Speaker 0: 1997.

Speaker 4: The idea that East and Southeast Asia's disciplined governments had a unique economic edge over the decadent West suddenly seemed less compelling. Today, in prosperous East Asia, a different facet of those ballyhooed values is looking even more parlous. In China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Asians' supposed commitment to conservative family life is collapsing. As we report in our Asia and China sections this week, millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier, and in the East Asian context, less male-dominated arrangements. In a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the socio-economic and demographic consequences will be vast, potentially destabilizing, and will shape millions of lives.

In Japan, where the shift first became evident, married couples with at least 1 child accounted for 42% of households in 1980 and single people 20%. That has flipped. In 2020, couples with children accounted for 25% of households and singletons

Speaker 0: 38%.

Speaker 4: And the decline is continuing. Last year, 17 percent of Japanese men and 15 percent of women aged 18 to 34 said they would not marry, up from 2 percent and 4 percent in the early 1980s, and China recorded its lowest ever number of marriages, half as many as a decade ago. In some ways, young Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Koreans are following a path charted in rich countries elsewhere. Between 1960 and

Speaker 0: 2010,

Speaker 4: Europe's marriage rate fell by half, for many of the reasons that are now driving down East Asian rates. To many people, marriage seems increasingly anachronistic and unaffordable. Across East Asia, it is still widely understood, in Confucian terms, as the union of a dominant man and submissive woman. In South Korea, a married woman is referred to as jip-saram, or home person, and her husband as bak-at-yangban, or man outside. High property prices are an added disincentive to setting up a marital home.

Alternative domestic arrangements are becoming more accepted. Besides singledom, they include intergenerational flat-sharing and, less often, cohabiting and gay partnerships. And growing numbers of middle-class women are putting off marriage to concentrate on their careers. Traditional values are hard on women at work, too. East Asia has some of the world's best-educated women, yet its overall record on female empowerment is poor and in some ways worsening.

On the World Economic Forum's gender equality ranking of 153 countries, China, where women are said to hold up half the sky, slipped from 63rd in 2006 to 102nd in

Speaker 0: 2022.

Speaker 4: South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the OECD. If most of this sounds familiar, 2 things make East Asia's great social change distinct and hugely troublesome. First, the taboo against having children outside marriage remains as rigid as ever. Across the OECD, 40% of births are outside wedlock. In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, less than 5% are.

The figure in China is unavailable, revealingly, but not thought to be higher. The result is a plummeting fertility rate. South Korea's, at 0.78, is the lowest recorded anywhere, and Taiwan's only slightly higher. Japan's and China's are just above half the replacement rate. China's cruel one-child policy, now replaced by panicked officials with calls to have 3, exacerbated its demographic squeeze.

But as the regional picture shows, it would have happened anyway. The total population of the 4 East Asian countries is predicted to shrink by 28% between 2020 and

Speaker 0: 2075.

Speaker 4: The second problem is that the region's governments are making the situation worse. None seriously broaches the only policy guaranteed to revive East Asia's flagging demography, mass immigration. Their main response is to try to resuscitate marriage with economic perks, including tax breaks and subsidised weddings, with little success. South Korea's president, Yoon Suk-yol, admits that his country has in essence squandered 280 trillion won, that's 215 billion dollars, on such policies. Worse, he and his counterparts in China and Japan are doubling down on the conservative approach that their citizens increasingly object to.

South Korea's previous administration sought to extend benefits to single parents and unmarried couples. Mr. Yun, who blames the low fertility rate on feminism, has put a stop to that. Under Xi Jinping, China promises its citizens a Confucian revival and arrests gay rights activists. Japan's ever-ruling Liberal Democratic Party is also against reforming marriage, including by refusing to make it available to gay couples, although most voters want to see that change.

There are pockets of progress, notably in Taiwan, which recently took a more liberal course. It has legalised same-sex marriage and in May permitted gay couples to adopt children, though it is too soon to know whether these changes will show up in the statistics. But the region as a whole is stuck between modernity and tradition, suffering some of the worst effects of both. East Asians are free to disdain traditional family roles, but not to redefine them. That is why millions resort to childlessness and solitude.

Governments should try to complete this lopsided revolution. Even if social change is not entirely within their grasp and does not happen overnight, they can at least stop resisting it. To make family life more attractive, they need to deal with its gender imbalances as well as its costs by, for example, making paternity leave routine. They should look beyond heterosexual marriage, as their citizens have, and extend legal recognition to cohabiting, gay, and other non-traditional arrangements, and afford them the support married couples now enjoy, especially over child-rearing. It is self-defeating and outrageous that China prevents single women from freezing their eggs, or that Japan makes it nearly impossible for gay couples to foster children.

Such policies would not fix the region's demography, but they would have a more positive effect on it than the current ones. More important, they would leave millions freer to lead the lives they choose, especially women and gay people. East Asian governments have overseen the greatest ever economic boom. Now they must attend to their citizens' happiness and liberty."

Speaker 2: And finally, the consequences of America's lab monkey shortage.

Speaker 5: American authorities arrested Maspal Kree, an official in Cambodia's Forestry Administration last November, when he was heading to an international meeting about trade regulations for endangered species in Panama. Prosecutors accused him of conspiring with a smuggling ring. The contraband? Monkeys, specifically long-tailed macaques. His gang allegedly grabbed wild macaques in Cambodia's national parks and bribed officials to label them as captive bred.

Fake papers allowed Vanny Bio-Research, a Cambodian pharma company, to ship these unfortunate primates to America for use in research. Mr. Kree is facing trial in Florida's Southern District Court. The federal government funds 7 National Primate Research Centers, or MPRCs, which house in total around 20, 000 primates, macaques, but also baboons and marmosets. These centres then award primates to labs across America.

MPRCs have fulfilled only a third of requests for untested-on macaques in 2021 and prices have soared. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a rhesus macaque cost $8, 000. By 2022, they had hit

Speaker 0: $24, 000.

Speaker 5: Another species, long-tail macaques, is probably per pound, currently the most expensive traded wildlife, says Lisa Jones Engel, a science advisor at PETA, an animal rights group. Getting lab monkeys from abroad became harder during the pandemic. Chinese authorities banned the export of all primates in early 2020. The Chinese government wanted to suppress the country's wildlife trade, which is thought to encourage the transmission of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 from animals to humans. Chinese labs also need monkeys to achieve the Communist Party's goal of China becoming a world leader in neuroscience by

Speaker 0: 2025.

Speaker 5: That forced American companies to rely on less scrupulous Southeast Asian suppliers. Many scientists believe poaching is endemic across Cambodia. In February, the Department of Justice subpoenaed Charles River over 1, 000 juvenile macaques the pharmaceutical company had bought from Cambodia. The DOJ suspected they were caught in the wild, then exported. These primates are now in Texas and Maryland, but also in limbo.

They cannot be tested on, nor can they be flown back to Cambodia.

Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Editor's Picks. For more from us, subscribe at economist.com slash podcast offer. I'm Kenneth Kukie and in London, this is The Economist.

Speaker 0: Add-on Post, we believe in giving you more power over how you bank. That's why AIB and Bank of Ireland customers can now lodge and withdraw money at any of our 900 post offices across Ireland, 6 days a week. That's right, your bank is in your post office, for personal and business banking alike. Meaning you can bank wherever you live or work. Visit your local post office or onpost.com slash everyday banking.

OnPost, your money for your world. Allied Irish Banks, PLC and Bank of Ireland are regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

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