AI Summary
5 min readSpain's snap election, America's beef price puzzle, and edible electronics
Pedro Sánchez, Spain's prime minister, called a snap election for November 29th after his signature housing bills were defeated in parliament. The trigger was the eviction of an 87-year-old woman named María Carmen Abascal from the Madrid flat she had lived in for 70 years, after a property firm raised her rent fivefold. She was wheeled out on a hospital trolley. Protests spread across the country, and Sánchez saw an opportunity to turn public anger about housing into a renewed mandate.
The housing crisis that broke Sánchez's coalition
Housing is now the number one public concern in Spain, and the numbers explain why. According to the Bank of Spain, the country has a deficit of 750,000 housing units, and the gap widens each year because only about 80,000 units are built annually. Meanwhile, Sánchez's policy of welcoming immigrants has created 700,000 new households in the past three years alone. "You can do the maths," as Michael Reed, The Economist's Spain correspondent, put it.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:47) **Spain’s Snap Election: Sánchez Bets on Housing Anger** - Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez calls a snap election for November 29th after a housing crisis triggers public outrage.
- 2 (12:05) **America’s Beef Price Crisis: Why Meatpackers Are the Victims, Not Villains** - Despite Trump blaming meatpackers for soaring beef prices, the industry is actually suffering heavy losses due to a long-running cattle cycle.
- 3 (19:02) **Edible Electronics: A Dissolvable Battery for Inside the Body** - MIT researchers develop a biodegradable battery for ingestible medical devices, testing it successfully in pigs.
- 4 Standout Quotes
- 5 (03:53) “It was quite clearly a human tragedy, and here was this 87-year-old woman who'd lived in this flat for more than 70 years, and she was wheeled out on a hospital trolley.” — Michael Reed, on the eviction that triggered Spain’s snap election
- 6 (14:23) “The beef industry is really a boom and bust industry... There are these cycles, they usually start with a bad drought.” — Bella King, explaining the structural cause of rising beef prices
- 7 Mentioned Resources
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is gambling that anger about housing might solidify his mandate in a snap poll. Most probably it will instead add to the rightward shift in European politics. America’s beef prices have never been higher, so why is it that the meatpackers have it so tough? And the battery technology to improve medical diagnostics you can swallow.
Listen to our episode of “Babbage” on edible electronics here.
Guests and host:
- Michael Reid, Spain correspondent and writer at large
- Bella King, news editor
- David Adam, science writer
- Rosie Blau, co-host of “The Intelligence”
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- Spanish politics, housing crisis, Pedro Sánchez
- America’s meat industry, meatpackers
- medical diagnostics, edible electronics, battery technology
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