Arabs got the blues

The Arabs | Between fitna, fawda and the deep blue sea | Economist.com

This is a pretty interesting review of the various reasons the Arab nations are all pretty depressed at the moment.

Here are a few points from the article that I don't think are so widely known:

* In Egypt, fewer than one in ten voters bothered to turn out for recent polls.

* Sex out of wedlock remains taboo, yet the cost of lavish weddings, hefty dowry payments and the bridal requirement of a furnished, paid-for home have pushed the average age of marriage in many Arab countries into the 30s.

* Religious texts still out-sell every other form of literature in most Arab countries.

* An oft-quoted statistic from the reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.

UPDATE: this is a fascinating article on how Egypt tries to iron out inequality by massive government subsidies for bread (amongst other things,) and how it goes wildly wrong. Here's the key paragraph, but go read the whole thing:

So the bread subsidy continues, costing Cairo about $3.5 billion a year. Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education. But it is not just the cost that plagues the government. The bread subsidy fuels the kind of rampant corruption that undermines faith in government, discourages investment and reinforces the country's every-man-for-himself ethos, say government officials and political experts, not to speak of bakers and their customers.