IMF marks Brics down, UK up; China's push from farm to city; Who ruined the humanities?

1 IMF marks Brics down and UK up (Stephanie Flanders on BBC) It's worth savouring the novelty. The IMF has raised its UK growth forecast for this year, and cut it for most emerging market economies, including China. I can't remember the last time we saw those two things together in an IMF report, but it's safe to say it's been a pretty long time. In fact, the only part of the update which sticks to the previous script is the forecast for the eurozone, which has been cut for the umpteenth time.

I'll say more about the emerging market forecasts in a second: they're the most significant feature of this latest report. But first, a few words about the UK.  Treasury folks will be smiling at the increase in the Fund's 2013 forecast, only a few weeks after the IMF suggested he should ease up on austerity this year to protect the recovery. The Fund quietly repeats that advice, in this report, with a reference to "more gradual near-term fiscal adjustment" in key advanced economies.

Back now to the global picture - and those emerging market economies that have been breathing a different kind of economic air to the likes of us for so much of this post-crisis period. The IMF's message is that there has been a change in the economic weather for them too. Needless to say, the new forecasts will be wrong. they nearly always are. The precise numbers don't matter - but the size of the downward revisions are significant - and so is the underlying cause.

The Fund still thinks the likes of China and Brazil will grow more than twice as fast as the advanced economies over the next year or two, with growth of around 5%. But with so much room for "catch-up", it would be a surprise if they were not growing a lot faster than the "old" world.

2 China’s push from farm to city (Ian Johnson in The New York Times) China is implementing one of the largest peacetime population transfers in history: the removal of 2.4 million farmers from mountain areas in the central Chinese province of Shaanxi to low-lying towns, many built from scratch on other farmers’ land. The total cost is estimated at $200 billion over 10 years.

It is one of the most drastic displays of a concerted government effort to end the dominance of rural life, which for millenniums has been the keystone of Chinese society and politics. While farmers have been moving to cities for decades, the government now says the rate is too slow. An urbanization blueprint that is due to be unveiled this year would have 21 million people a year move into cities. But as is often the case in China, formal plans only codify what is already happening. Besides the southern Shaanxi project, removals are being carried out in other areas, too: in Ningxia, 350,000 villagers are to be moved, while as many as two million transfers are expected in Guizhou Province by 2020.

All told, 250 million more Chinese may live in cities in the next dozen years. The rush to urbanize comes despite concerns that many rural residents cannot find jobs in the new urban areas or are simply unwilling to leave behind a way of life that many cherish. The campaign to depopulate the countryside is seen as the best way to maintain China’s spectacular run of fast economic growth, with new city dwellers driving demand for decades to come.

3 Who ruined the humanities? (Lee Seigel in The Wall Street Journal) The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline. But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).

The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair.

In the current alarming view, large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall. The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to grave reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

The college teaching of literature is a relatively recent phenomenon. Literature did not even become part of the university curriculum until the end of the 19th century. The teaching of literature came into its own early in the 20th century.

In "Moby-Dick," Melville's narrator, Ishmael, declares that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Soon, if all goes well and literature at last disappears from the undergraduate curriculum—my fingers are crossed—increasing numbers of people will be able to say that reading the literary masterworks of the past outside the college classroom, simply in the course of living, was, in fact, their college classroom.