Japan economy shrinks; India needs more than crony capitalism; US can be world's top oil producer; Omnishambles is word of 2012

1 Japan economy shrinks (The Guardian) Japan's economy shrank in the September quarter for the first time since last year, adding to signs that slowing global growth and tensions with China are nudging the world's third-largest economy into recession. The 0.9% fall in GDP was in line with expectations, although a decline in capital expenditure was much steeper than forecast. Sony and Panasonic have slashed spending plans to cope with massive losses as they struggle with competitive markets and a strong yen.

The fall in GDP translated into an annualised rate of decline of 3.5%, government data showed. While US growth showed a modest pick-up in the third quarter, Japan and the eurozone economies are shrinking. The data kept government pressure on the Bank of Japan to boost monetary stimulus even after it eased policy in October for the second straight month as a strong yen and a territorial row with China exacerbate weak demand for exports.

2 India needs more than crony capitalism (Jayati Ghosh in The Guardian) The current political churning in India reflects more than just the growing fragility of the government in power: it brings to the forefront shifting equations and changing public perceptions that are likely to define the future political economy of the country. Two recent tendencies are particularly important: the explosion of revelations about corrupt practices that point to the worst excesses of crony capitalism in a deeply divided society and increasingly unequal economy; and the associated disarray and lack of energy in the Congress party.

The past two decades have seen strongly "corporate-led" growth, with massive rises in the ratio of profits and interest to GDP. It was evident in tax breaks and other fiscal incentives to encourage higher profitability of corporate investment. It showed in the allocation of financial resources, including credit provided through public sector banks at attractive rates of interest. It manifested in the blind eye that was turned to blatant abuse of many legal provisions and laws that protect workers, local people and other stakeholders, if these were seen to interfere with the aggressive pursuit of profit.

This strategy is now proving to be unsustainable for several reasons. The social tensions that sharply increasing inequalities generate are less easy to hold in check. For a long time, national politics in India was synonymous with the Congress party, as it extracted prolonged benefits from its involvement in the freedom struggle. But from the mid-1970s, its organisational weaknesses became apparent, and the subsequent attempt to rely only on the personal charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi family has generated uneven results.

The immediate political decline of the Congress party is increasingly likely, so the question is, what will replace it? The complexity and cacophony of Indian politics suggests no simple answer. But future instability will certainly affect not just the country but the rest of the world, even as it reaffirms the vibrancy of India's democracy.

3 US can be world’s top oil producer (Fiona Harvey in The Guardian) The US can shed its longstanding dependence on Saudi Arabian oil within the next decade, redrawing the world's political systems and potentially leading to runaway global warming. In a report, the world's foremost energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA), said the US would benefit from so-called unconventional sources of oil and gas, including shale gas and shale oil, derived from fracking – blasting dense rocks apart to release the fossil fuels trapped within.

These sources could fuel the US's energy independence, and make the country the world's biggest oil producer by 2017. But, if pursued with vigour, they would also lead to huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions that would put hopes of curbing dangerous climate change beyond reach. If this happens, more than 90% of oil and gas from the Middle East could be sold to Asia, and chiefly to rapidly developing countries such as China, within the same timeframe, the IEA predicted.

4 Omnishambles is word of 2012 (San Francisco Chronicle) Britain's media are in a meltdown and its government is gaffe-prone, so Oxford Dictionaries has chosen an apt Word of the Year: "omnishambles." Oxford University Press crowned the word — defined as "a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations" — its top term of 2012.

Coined by writers of the satirical television show "The Thick of It," omnishambles has been applied to everything from government PR blunders to the crisis-ridden preparations for the London Olympics. Oxford University Press lexicographer Susie Dent said the word was chosen for its popularity as well as its "linguistic productivity." She said "a notable coinage coming from the word is Romneyshambles" — a derisive term used by the British press after US presidential candidate Mitt Romney expressed doubts about London's ability to host a successful Olympics.

Europe's financial crisis lent the shortlisted word "Eurogeddon," while technology produced "second screening" — watching TV while simultaneously using a computer, phone or tablet — and social media popularized the acronym "YOLO," you only live once.

5 Human intelligence may be moving downhill (Ian Sample in The Guardian) Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, believes that if an average Greek from 1,000 BC were transported to modern times, he or she would be one of the brightest among us. Our intellectual prowess has probably been sliding south since the invention of farming and the rise of high-density living that it allowed, he claims.

At the heart of Crabtree's thinking is a simple idea. In the past, when our ancestors faced the harsh realities of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the punishment for stupidity was more often than not death. And so, Crabtree argues, enormous evolutionary pressure bore down on early humans, selecting out the dimwits, and raising the intellect of the survivors' descendants. But not so today.

"We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago," Crabtree writes. "If selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3,000 to 6,000 years ago," he adds.

Crabtree ends on a positive note: the human race is not hurtling towards cognitive oblivion, doomed to watch reruns on televisions we can no longer build. "Remarkably it seems that although our genomes are fragile, our society is robust almost entirely by virtue of education, which allows strengths to be rapidly distributed to all members."