Good morning, Quartz readers!
We’ve been led to assume that the world of our children would be a place of fewer borders and lower barriers to the movement of goods and people. Not long ago, walls were literally brought down, with the promise that global progress and prosperity would henceforth be marked by openness.
That’s not how things are trending now, and the consequence is troubling for those of us who believe that the most powerful cure for war and economic stagnation is direct exchanges between people around trade and ideas.
The latest signal of rising barriers is the European Union considering in the coming days whether to require visas for US and Canadian tourists who currently enter without the extra hassle. It’s a discussion prompted by those countries’ own obstinance about extending the same courtesy to citizens of all EU member states.
An enthusiasm for erecting barriers is evident elsewhere, too. Among the US presidential frontrunners, Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and Hillary Clinton came out against a free-trade deal whose formulation she once supported. Government approaches to the Syrian refugee crisis have been disappointingly miserly. And the UK’s future in the EU is perhaps more in doubt now that prime minister David Cameron’s efforts to hold things intact have been undermined by his tie to secret offshore investments.
Openness can be messy. If not accompanied by lucid, compassionate policies that acknowledge its downsides, it can hurt our fellow citizens, such as those who are unable to compete with cheaper labor available elsewhere.
But the benefits of more open borders are significant when you consider the reduction of poverty in countries like Vietnam and China. If managed properly, the free movement of goods should be positive even for high-wage nations, making them more efficient and richer. And research suggests that immigrants provide net benefits to the economies of those welcoming them.
We should address any dislocations that come from the lowering of borders with honesty and generosity. If we leave our children a world that is less open than it was for us, we’ll have served them poorly.—Kevin J. Delaney
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Disrupting diamonds. Jenni Avins visits the headquarters of Diamond Foundry, a Silicon Valley startup where engineers are growing diamonds identical to their natural counterparts. Avins takes a loaner “foundry diamond” on a journey through the staggering science, marketing, economics, and romance of the $81 billion diamond industry and asks, “Would you propose with a diamond grown in a lab?”
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The finance theory of basketball. When a group of executives bought the NBA’s floundering Golden State Warriors in 2010, they reorganized it around a simple premise: A shot from 23 feet out is worth two points, but take a step back behind the three-point line, and the rate of return is much higher. Ben Cohen in the Wall Street Journal examines how the unprecedented strategy led Stephen Curry and the Warriors to a record-breaking season, and put them in the hunt to be the most successful team in NBA history.
Our emoji marketing future. Social media marketing is hard, especially when there’s no emoji to adequately illustrate your brand. That’s why Guinness hopes the Unicode Consortium will someday add an emoji for stout alongside the existing light beer emoji, and why Unilever developed a separate keyboard app for its Dove brand’s “Love Your Curls” campaign. As Advertising Age’s Jessica Wohl points out, there’s a risk of inducing emoji fatigue. But just try telling that to the people responsible for the nearly 1 million downloads of the “Love Your Curls” keyboard.
A long, wrong wait for the truth about sugar. Public health experts are coming around to the theory that sugar, not fat, is the worst dietary hazard. This could have been established 40 years ago, Ian Leslie writes in the Guardian, if only nutritionists had paid more attention to science than politics. Instead, prominent researchers misled the masses into a sugar-coated, fat-free future—which now includes a massive obesity problem.
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Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, succession plans, and fried mealworm treats to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.