Why we should bulldoze the business school

There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years. By Martin Parker in The Guardian

Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.) Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash.

Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.
These are not complaints from professors of sociology, state policymakers or even outraged anti-capitalist activists. These are views in books written by insiders, by employees of business schools who themselves feel some sense of disquiet or even disgust at what they are getting up to. Of course, these dissenting views are still those of a minority. Most work within business schools is blithely unconcerned with any expression of doubt, participants being too busy oiling the wheels to worry about where the engine is going. Still, this internal criticism is loud and significant.
The problem is that these insiders’ dissent has become so thoroughly institutionalised within the well-carpeted corridors that it now passes unremarked, just an everyday counterpoint to business as usual. Careers are made by wailing loudly in books and papers about the problems with business schools. The business school has been described by two insiders as “a cancerous machine spewing out sick and irrelevant detritus”. Even titles such as Against Management, Fucking Management and The Greedy Bastard’s Guide to Business appear not to cause any particular difficulties for their authors. I know this, because I wrote the first two. Frankly, the idea that I was permitted to get away with this speaks volumes about the extent to which this sort of criticism means anything very much at all. In fact, it is rewarded, because the fact that I publish is more important than what I publish.

Most solutions to the problem of the B-school shy away from radical restructuring, and instead tend to suggest a return to supposedly more traditional business practices, or a form of moral rearmament decorated with terms such as “responsibility” and “ethics”. All of these suggestions leave the basic problem untouched, that the business school only teaches one form of organising – market managerialism.

That’s why I think that we should call in the bulldozers and demand an entirely new way of thinking about management, business and markets. If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing. In every case, the business school acts as an apologist, selling ideology as if it were science.

Universities have been around for a millenium, but the vast majority of business schools only came into existence in the last century. Despite loud and continual claims that they were a US invention, the first was probably the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, founded in 1819 as a privately funded attempt to produce a grande école for business. A century later, hundreds of business schools had popped up across Europe and the US, and from the 1950s onwards, they began to grow rapidly in other parts of the world.

In 2011, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business estimated that there were then nearly 13,000 business schools in the world. India alone is estimated to have 3,000 private schools of business. Pause for a moment, and consider that figure. Think about the huge numbers of people employed by those institutions, about the armies of graduates marching out with business degrees, about the gigantic sums of money circulating in the name of business education. (In 2013, the top 20 US MBA programmes already charged at least $100,000 (£72,000). At the time of writing, London Business School is advertising a tuition fee of £84,500 for its MBA.) No wonder that the bandwagon keeps rolling.

For the most part, business schools all assume a similar form. The architecture is generic modern – glass, panel, brick. Outside, there’s some expensive signage offering an inoffensive logo, probably in blue, probably with a square on it. The door opens, automatically. Inside, there’s a female receptionist dressed office-smart. Some abstract art hangs on the walls, and perhaps a banner or two with some hopeful assertions: “We mean business.” “Teaching and Research for Impact.” A big screen will hang somewhere over the lobby, running a Bloomberg news ticker and advertising visiting speakers and talks about preparing your CV. Shiny marketing leaflets sit in dispensing racks, with images of a diverse tableau of open-faced students on the cover. On the leaflets, you can find an alphabet of mastery: MBA, MSc Management, MSc Accounting, MSc Management and Accounting, MSc Marketing, MSc International Business, MSc Operations Management.

There will be plush lecture theatres with thick carpet, perhaps named after companies or personal donors. The lectern bears the logo of the business school. In fact, pretty much everything bears the weight of the logo, like someone who worries their possessions might get stolen and so marks them with their name. Unlike some of the shabby buildings in other parts of the university, the business school tries hard to project efficiency and confidence. The business school knows what it is doing and has its well-scrubbed face aimed firmly at the busy future. It cares about what people think of it.

Even if the reality isn’t always as shiny – if the roof leaks a little and the toilet is blocked – that is what the business-school dean would like to think that their school was like, or what they would want their school to be. A clean machine for turning income from students into profits.

What do business schools actually teach? This is a more complicated question than it first appears. Much writing on education has explored the ways in which a “hidden curriculum” supplies lessons to students without doing so explicitly. From the 1970s onwards, researchers explored how social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on were being implicitly taught in the classroom. This might involve segregating students into separate classes – the girls doing domestic science and the boys doing metalwork, say – which, in turn, implies what is natural or appropriate for different groups of people. The hidden curriculum can be taught in other ways too, by the ways in which teaching and assessment are practised, or through what is or isn’t included in the curriculum. The hidden curriculum tells us what matters and who matters, which places are most important and what topics can be ignored.

 

Illustration: Michael Kirkham

In many countries, a lot of work has been done on trying to deal with these issues. Materials on black history, women in science or pop songs as poetry are now fairly routine. That doesn’t mean that the hidden curriculum is no longer a problem, but at least in many of the more enlightened educational systems, it is not now routinely assumed that there is one history, one set of actors, one way of telling the story.

But in the business school, both the explicit and hidden curriculums sing the same song. The things taught and the way that they are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world.

If we educate our graduates in the inevitability of tooth-and-claw capitalism, it is hardly surprising that we end up with justifications for massive salary payments to people who take huge risks with other people’s money. If we teach that there is nothing else below the bottom line, then ideas about sustainability, diversity, responsibility and so on become mere decoration. The message that management research and teaching often provides is that capitalism is inevitable, and that the financial and legal techniques for running capitalism are a form of science. This combination of ideology and technocracy is what has made the business school into such an effective, and dangerous, institution.

We can see how this works if we look a bit more closely at the business-school curriculum and how it is taught. Take finance, for instance. This is a field concerned with understanding how people with money invest it. It assumes that there are people with money or capital that can be used as security for money, and hence it also assumes substantial inequalities of income and wealth. The greater the inequalities within any given society, the greater the interest in finance, as well as the market in luxury yachts. Finance academics almost always assume that earning rent on capital (however it was acquired) is a legitimate and perhaps even praiseworthy activity, with skilful investors being lionised for their technical skills and success. The purpose of this form of knowledge is to maximise the rent from wealth, often by developing mathematical or legal mechanisms that can multiply it. Successful financial strategies are those that produce the maximum return in the shortest period, and hence that further exacerbate the social inequalities that made them possible in the first place.

Or consider human resource management. This field applies theories of rational egoism – roughly the idea that people act according to rational calculations about what will maximise their own interest – to the management of human beings in organisations. The name of the field is telling, since it implies that human beings are akin to technological or financial resources insofar as they are an element to be used by management in order to produce a successful organisation. Despite its use of the word, human resource management is not particularly interested in what it is like to be a human being. Its object of interest are categories – women, ethnic minorities, the underperforming employee – and their relationship to the functioning of the organisation. It is also the part of the business school most likely to be dealing with the problem of organised resistance to management strategies, usually in the form of trade unions. And in case it needs saying, human resource management is not on the side of the trade union. That would be partisan. It is a function which, in its most ambitious manifestation, seeks to become “strategic”, to assist senior management in the formulation of their plans to open a factory here, or close a branch office there.

A similar kind of lens could be applied to other modules found in most business schools – accounting, marketing, international business, innovation, logistics – but I’ll conclude with business ethics and corporate social responsibility – pretty much the only areas within the business school that have developed a sustained critique of the consequences of management education and practice. These are domains that pride themselves on being gadflies to the business school, insisting that its dominant forms of education, teaching and research require reform. The complaints that propel writing and teaching in these areas are predictable but important – sustainability, inequality, the production of graduates who are taught that greed is good.

The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. They almost never systematically address the simple idea that since current social and economic relations produce the problems that ethics and corporate social responsibility courses treat as subjects to be studied, it is those social and economic relations that need to be changed.

You might well think that each of these areas of research and teaching are innocuous enough in themselves, and collectively they just appear to cover all the different dimensions of business activity – money, people, technology, transport, selling and so on. But it is worth spelling out the shared assumptions of every subject studied at business school.

The first thing that all these areas share is a powerful sense that market managerial forms of social order are desirable. The acceleration of global trade, the use of market mechanisms and managerial techniques, the extension of technologies such as accounting, finance and operations are not routinely questioned. This is a progressive account of the modern world, one that relies on the promise of technology, choice, plenty and wealth. Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology.
The second is the assumption that human behaviour – of employees, customers, managers and so on – is best understood as if we are all rational egoists. This provides a set of background assumptions that allow for the development of models of how human beings might be managed in the interests of the business organisation. Motivating employees, correcting market failures, designing lean management systems or persuading consumers to spend money are all instances of the same sort of problem. The foregrounded interest here is that of the person who wants control, and the people who are the objects of that interest can then be treated as people who can be manipulated.

The final similarity I want to point to concerns the nature of the knowledge being produced and disseminated by the business school itself. Because it borrows the gown and mortarboard of the university, and cloaks its knowledge in the apparatus of science – journals, professors, big words – it is relatively easy to imagine that the knowledge the business school sells and the way that it sells it somehow less vulgar and stupid than it really is.

The easiest summary of all of the above, and one that would inform most people’s understandings of what goes on in the B-school, is that they are places that teach people how to get money out of the pockets of ordinary people and keep it for themselves. In some senses, that’s a description of capitalism, but there is also a sense here that business schools actually teach that “greed is good”. As Joel M Podolny, the former dean of Yale School of Management, once opined: “The way business schools today compete leads students to ask, ‘What can I do to make the most money?’ and the manner in which faculty members teach allows students to regard the moral consequences of their actions as mere afterthoughts.”

 

Illustration: Michael Kirkham

This picture is, to some extent, backed up by research, although some of this is of dubious quality. There are various surveys of business-school students that suggest that they have an instrumental approach to education; that is to say, they want what marketing and branding tells them that they want. In terms of the classroom, they expect the teaching of uncomplicated and practical concepts and tools that they deem will be helpful to them in their future careers. Philosophy is for the birds.

As someone who has taught in business schools for decades, this sort of finding doesn’t surprise me, though others suggest rather more incendiary findings. One US survey compared MBA students to people who were imprisoned in low-security prisons and found that the latter were more ethical. Another suggested that the likelihood of committing some form of corporate crime increased if the individual concerned had experience of graduate business education, or military service. (Both careers presumably involve absolving responsibility to an organisation.) Other surveys suggest that students come in believing in employee wellbeing and customer satisfaction and leave thinking that shareholder value is the most important issue, and that business-school students are more likely to cheat than students in other subjects.

Whether the causes and effects (or indeed the findings) are as neat as surveys like this might suggest is something that I doubt, but it would be equally daft to suggest that the business school has no effect on its graduates. Having an MBA might not make a student greedy, impatient or unethical, but both the B-school’s explicit and hidden curriculums do teach lessons. Not that these lessons are acknowledged when something goes wrong, because then the business school usually denies all responsibility. That’s a tricky position, though, because, as a 2009 Economist editorial put it, “You cannot claim that your mission is to ‘educate the leaders who make a difference to the world’ and then wash your hands of your alumni when the difference they make is malign”.

After the 2007 crash, there was a game of pass-the-blame-parcel going on, so it’s not surprising that most business-school deans were also trying to blame consumers for borrowing too much, the bankers for behaving so riskily, rotten apples for being so bad and the system for being, well, the system. Who, after all, would want to claim that they merely taught greed?

The sorts of doors to knowledge we find in universities are based on exclusions. A subject is made up by teaching this and not that, about space (geography) and not time (history), about collectives of people (sociology) and not about individuals (psychology), and so on. Of course, there are leakages and these are often where the most interesting thinking happens, but this partitioning of the world is constitutive of any university discipline. We cannot study everything, all the time, which is why there are names of departments over the doors to buildings and corridors.

However, the B-school is an even more extreme case. It is constituted through separating commercial life from the rest of life, but then undergoes a further specialisation. The business school assumes capitalism, corporations and managers as the default form of organisation, and everything else as history, anomaly, exception, alternative. In terms of curriculum and research, everything else is peripheral.

Most business schools exist as parts of universities, and universities are generally understood as institutions with responsibilities to the societies they serve. Why then do we assume that degree courses in business should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in which human life could be arranged?

The sort of world that is being produced by the market managerialism that the business school sells is not a pleasant one. It’s a sort of utopia for the wealthy and powerful, a group that the students are encouraged to imagine themselves joining, but such privilege is bought at a very high cost, resulting in environmental catastrophe, resource wars and forced migration, inequality within and between countries, the encouragement of hyper-consumption as well as persistently anti-democratic practices at work.

Selling the business school works by ignoring these problems, or by mentioning them as challenges and then ignoring them in the practices of teaching and research. If we want to be able to respond to the challenges that face human life on this planet, then we need to research and teach about as many different forms of organising as we are able to collectively imagine. For us to assume that global capitalism can continue as it is means to assume a path to destruction. So if we are going to move away from business as usual, then we also need to radically reimagine the business school as usual. And this means more than pious murmurings about corporate social responsibility. It means doing away with what we have, and starting again.

Broadcaster Bias and Ball Tampering

Sidharth Monga in Cricinfo


There is a cricket match on. Not high-profile but still an international. Like all internationals, it is being televised. The broadcast director spots a player from Team A tampering with the ball. He shares the footage with the match referee, who brushes the matter under the carpet and hands out a slap on the wrist. The director has done his job; it is up to the match referee to determine the degree of offence.

It is not the end of the story, though. The manager of Team A, the away team in this case, confronts the channel. "You are only after our guys," he says. The footage is not aired on TV but a token punishment has been handed out. A commentator on the broadcast, a former player from Team B, the host team in this case, gets wind of it, and puts pressure on the broadcaster, through his board, for the footage to be aired, because the punishments handed out tend to be more severe when the evidence is made public, once the righteousness kicks in. The TV channel doesn't know what to do. It can't really afford to antagonise either board because it is in business with both. So to get the local board off his back, the director tells the home board that if he airs the footage he is being urged to, he will have to be equally vigilant with the home team and air any footage that the cameramen come up with. The threat works.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a short story about ball-tampering, but it tells you more than any other yarn can.

On paper the umpires run the game, but they can only act if they have video evidence, because the ICC's code-of-conduct charges must be able to stick in a court of law. And remember what happened the last time an umpire acted without video evidence, at The Oval in 2006?

Which brings us to commentators. Many of them - not all - still consider themselves part of the teams they once represented. They fight their team's PR battles in the commentary box, and some often go beyond, in trying to make sure "their boys" are on the right side of calls of ball-tampering and player behaviour.

There are exceptions - like the one who asked the broadcast director in a match to keep an eye on the team that commentator once played for because he could sense something dodgy happening. It resulted in the discovery of a new tampering technique and a hefty fine. Needless to say, the "boys" don't like the commentator now, but they haven't yet got to the level of entitlement where it drives them enough to get him fired.

The way teams react makes it clear how commonplace tampering is. The manager of the guilty team says his side is being targeted; he knows other teams are guilty just as often. The other board has no reason to back off, other than, well, its team also does it. And whenever anything happens, the ICC, the commentators, the teams and their boards, all run to the broadcasters.

Since that Oval match, all the ball-tampering incidents that have officially been termed as such have relied on broadcasters. On all occasions, it is away players who have been caught tampering: Faf du Plessis in the UAE and in Australia, Vernon Philander in Sri Lanka, Shahid Afridi in Australia, and Dasun Shanaka in India. Aspersions were cast against Stuart Broad and James Anderson in South Africa, where too now the Cape Town three have been caught.

Neutral broadcasts - during ICC events - have not caught a single player tampering with the ball (though there was a match in the 2013 Champions Trophy where the umpires quietly changed the ball without imposing penalty runs, to avoid the morality furore that accompanies the laying of a ball-tampering charge, and also because the broadcast didn't have footage to back them).


"Would there have been footage against a home player? Would the broadcaster have even gone looking? More importantly, should cricket be comfortable with broadcasters wielding so much influence practically unwatched and unchecked?"


The Cape Town scandal is a perfect example of the role the broadcaster needs to play for a ball-tampering offence to not just come to light but for the charge to stick. Various broadcast directors have told ESPNcricinfo they don't usually follow the ball as closely as was done here. For example, in the normal course, they follow the ball into the keeper's gloves, through to slip, and then cut away to some other action. One of them says it is mostly so they can turn a blind eye to some of the tampering, without which, he believes reverse swing is not possible. He means that the use of lozenge-laden spit, and fake shining - when the thumb hidden between the ball and the thigh goes to work - is actually often overlooked. Call it the thieves' code but this much has been acceptable and well known.

Also, broadcasters don't usually want to play dirty and expose only the visiting side, given both teams might equally be doing things that are considered, among cricketers, as Derek Pringle once wrote, "little more than mischief". No director wants to live with that guilt until he is asked to look for something - in which case, the moral responsibility lies with someone else.

In Cape Town last month, though, the broadcasters were on Australia all along. David Warner's heavily taped hand came under the scanner first. Warner knew it too. When visuals first emerged, the tape on his hand was unmarked. The next day he had his wife's name written on it - a possible wink to the broadcasters that he knew what they were up to. Was the focus on Warner a possible reason for ball-handling duties being transferred to Cameron Bancroft?

The actual footage that led to the nabbing of Bancroft had a shot from the midwicket camera between overs. Not only is it rare for cameras to be following the ball between overs, but also for between-overs footage to be recorded on the EVS platform. EVS is a Belgian company that manufactures live outdoor broadcast digital production systems. For something to be replayed, the EVS system has to record it first. Between-overs footage from midwicket cameras is not often recorded. When Bancroft shoved the sandpaper into his pants, however, he was at short extra cover, which happened to be the perfect position for the Ultra Motion camera - usually placed at reverse slip - to catch him in the act. That said, once the broadcast wants to go after you, there is no fielding position that is safer than others.

Fanie de Villiers, the former South Africa cricketer, now a commentator, has since said to RSN Breakfast, a radio show, that they, the commentators, had asked the cameramen to look for tampering. The version coming from the Australian media is that the South Africa players had made a request through the commentators. Alvin Naicker, head of production at Supersport, was soon quoted by Supersport as saying they spotted something first and then went looking closely, not the other way around.

"If we go looking for it," says another director familiar with at least two ball-tampering incidents in the past, "over a three- or four-Test series, we can catch any team. Everybody does it. Every time there is some reverse, there is something behind it." Unless, of course, it is one of those replaced balls that begin to "go" immediately, like for Dale Steyn in Nagpur in 2010, or for Mitchell Starc in Durban in this series.

South Africa are no saints when it comes to ball-tampering, as their record will show, but they have never been caught at home. The last time they were caught, in Australia, they were incensed. Not because they didn't do it - it was on tape - but presumably because it was such a minor and acceptable act that they must have felt the thieves' code had been broken. Footage that was either not seen during the broadcast or was too insignificant to have been noticed, had conveniently made its way to - surprise, surprise - a news channel. The ICC's hands were now tied. It had to act. It did. Faf du Plessis and South Africa were furious.

There has been an unspoken rule among broadcast directors to not have cameras follow the ball when it is not in play, so a blind eye can be turned to "routine" tampering, without which reverse swing is not possible 

Naicker obviously rubbished any suggestions his channel might have acted on instructions or as a response to what happened in Australia. "We don't want it to seem like we are going after the Australian team," he was quoted as saying by Supersport's website. "If that was a South African, we would have broadcast the footage for sure. We have a responsibility to entertain, but just like journalists, we have a moral obligation to provide unbiased editorial."

The question, though, is: would there have been footage against a home player in the first place? Would they have even gone looking? More importantly, should cricket be comfortable with broadcasters wielding so much influence practically unwatched and unchecked?

As cricket continues to embrace technology, host broadcasters have assumed huge significance. ESPNcricinfo knows of a case where a broadcast didn't air footage of, or alert match officials to, a home player tampering with the ball; and it is a fact that they hardly ever go looking for tampering with home players. There have been various other instances where the umpires have seen something but can't find footage to back their claims.

The ICC has practically outsourced decision-making to the broadcasters, and it is not restricted to ball-tampering. ESPNcricinfo has learnt that on day four of the Bangalore Test between India and Australia last year, India's coaching staff asked a commentator to ask the broadcaster to keep an eye on Australia because they had suspected dressing-room assistance on DRS. It just so happened that that was the day Steve Smith was caughtsoliciting such assistance , but what resort do India have if they suspect something similar on an away tour? Malcolm Conn, a former cricket writer with News Corporation, and now Cricket Australia communications manager, might well have been referring to these cases when he pointed to the "hypocrisy of home advantage" in lashing out at yet another tweet by British media enjoying the Australians' suffering. Home advantage is not restricted to pitches and conditions anymore. If it wants to be, the broadcaster can well and truly be the 12th man for the home team, and the ICC can do nothing about it.

The ICC, in fact, trusts broadcasters more than it does its own umpires, who are not allowed to stand in matches in which their country is playing. The broadcaster, on the other hand pays for, controls, and mans the technology required for all the decision- making. Projected paths used for DRS lbw calls are off limits for any independent scrutiny because the technology is "proprietary". And yet, even if the broadcasters don't like it, they are forced to pay for Hawk-Eye because the ICC has made it mandatory for the DRS.

Broadcasters, like everyone else, are open to biases. Biases of nationality, biases of what is best for business (home teams losing or their players getting caught cheating certainly aren't). The biases weren't born with the DRS either. If you remember Jonty Rhodes' low catch to dismiss Sachin Tendulkar in the washed-out 1996-97 tri-series final in Durban, you will remember Rahul Dravid fell to a similar low catch but replays of that were not shown. When Kapil Dev mankaded Peter Kirsten, Kepler Wessels hit Kapil on the shin with his bat - visuals we have never seen. Google "Matthew Wade Virat Kohli sendoff", and you will find many videos of Wade arguing with Kohli for sneaking in a bye when Wade was hit by the ball - incidentally the very kind of moralising that resulted in such schadenfreude at Australia's recent fall - but you will not be able to find footage of the sendoff that Kohli gave later in the same match.

Yet it remains next to impossible for a broadcaster to cheat - be it "losing" a key visual, providing a wrong replay to determine a no-ball, or playing around with other evidence - because it is just impossible for something dodgy to have happened and for it to stay in the production control room. These things travel, unless the manipulation is systemic or institutionalised. There is no evidence of this having happened yet, but like with other conflicts of interest, it is the possibility of it that should make people uncomfortable.


"Broadcasters, it needs to be stressed, don't like to be in a position to influence results, no matter what they do to influence public opinion with their commentary and other output"


Broadcasters, it needs to be stressed, don't like to be in a position to influence results, no matter what they do to influence public opinion with their commentary and other output. What are they to say to the home captain if he wants extra scrutiny on the opposition? They are in the entertainment business, and they would rather they didn't have to carry the additional burden of decision-making in these contexts. In fact, they hate it when they are told to turn down the volume of the stump mics because the players are abusive. They don't pay astronomical sums to be told what they can or cannot show. They want the ICC to control the players instead of controlling the broadcast, which is enhanced by the observations and quips of a wicketkeeper such as MS Dhoni. They want the ICC to take control of decision-making technology so that they, the broadcasters, are not seen as all too powerful.

They are not happy that the third umpire doesn't sit with them and take charge of what he wants, but for that the ICC has a valid explanation. The third umpire sits alone because any conversation he has with others is liable to directly or indirectly influence his decision-making.

While the ICC has made strides towards training its third umpires in the use of technology, there remain inconsistencies. "One match referee tells me I must give the third umpire only what he asks for," a director says, "while another says I must give him everything that can help him arrive at the correct decision. As an organisation, ICC seems happy with not taking absolute control and the accountability that comes with it."

Recently in a PSL match, Karachi Kings' celebrations were halted when it was discovered the last ball of the match was a no-ball. No umpire had suspected one in this case but the broadcasters alerted them. This no-ball resulted in a Super Over, which Karachi lost. What are the odds of this happening to the home team in a bitterly fought contest between Australia and South Africa?

It is not that the ICC is not aware or not uncomfortable. It has been discussed in the ICC that only away players get caught tampering with the ball. Like with most things ICC, the governing body can't do much more. It cannot take any action without video evidence, nor can it look away when a broadcaster puts evidence out there. When umpires come back to the ICC with suspicions of ball-tampering, they review the available footage and find nothing. Even at The Oval in 2006, Pakistan accepted the decision at first, and hit back at the umpires when they were sure there was no footage to implicate them, an ICC source has revealed. It is not practical for the ICC to ask the broadcaster for additional footage that might help implicate a home player, because of the blowback that will immediately ensue. And yet when footage appears of du Plessis going to his lozenge to shine the ball, the ICC has to act, even though a blind eye is turned to this kind of thing most times.

The ICC is also aware its trust in broadcasters for the DRS and third umpires is blind. The only direct solution is to pay for all the technology and also have a few cameras at every international match to monitor ball-tampering. This is not cost-effective, and it has not gone beyond ICC board meetings. Ultimately if the ICC does pay for all the technology, the money has to come from the member boards - and, like in the matter of the Associates, we all know what the decision has been there, and is likely to be in future. The other solution to this was to accept ball-tampering as an offence of the nature of over-appealing or showing dissent, but that ship sailed long ago, as was obvious in this most recent episode from the sadistic sanctimony of various former captains.

So as usual, the ICC is likely to look only for indirect solutions when it undertakes a review of its code of conduct, and ball-tampering in particular. If the indications are anything to go by, ball-tampering will become a more grave, more clearly defined offence. The "spirit of cricket" will be defined more clearly. It will be made clearer that the onus is on captains, and possibly boards, to play in the spirit. This is going to increase the pressure on visiting captains even more. This review will be considered successful only if the ICC can somehow find a way to break the home advantage that comes with broadcasters.

The myth of the benefits cheat is a sign of unkind times

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

Some things are easier to see from far away, and a collective slide away from empathy and common sense, towards pearl-clutching judgmentalism, is one of them. At the start of August the co-leader of New Zealand’s Green party, Metiria Turei, was forced to resign, following an outpouring of opprobrium that threatened to poleaxe her party’s prospects in September’s elections.

The crime for which this tide of hate would have been proportionate is hard to imagine: in fact, it was spurred by her admission that she committed benefit fraud in the early 90s, a confession she made freely to highlight how hard it was then, and is now, to raise a child as a single parent under New Zealand’s notoriously punitive welfare system.

More than half of all that country’s benefit claimants owe money to their work and income department, in what appears to be a version of Gordon Brown’s working family tax credit overpayments, where you identify the country’s poorest families, pay them slightly more than you intended by a metric you haven’t really explained, then saddle them with a debt they have no hope of repaying. When you get to the point that these debts affect 60% of claimants, this is no longer a glitch in the system: this is the system.


Families on benefits are now 40% short of what a citizens’ jury thinks they need to live a decent life

As the journalist Giovanni Tiso described in a moving essay, “once the blood was in the water, the sharks had to do as nature commanded them” – her admission of guilt was deemed not quite penitent enough. The media set out to “investigate” the extent of her fraud, and found that she had also had support from family members when she was young, so couldn’t possibly have been as destitute as she claims.

The prevailing view landed on the fact that she was a thief: she had stolen from the great, honest taxpayer, that creature of myth who needs nothing, takes nothing, works only to support others lazier than himself. Turei had to go. The fact that she created something miraculous – a stable home for her daughter, a law degree, a performance art troupe, a political career – from a standing start of grinding poverty and no qualifications was overlooked.

An incalculably valuable thing – a person in politics who knows what it is like to rely on the systems politicians create – has been righteously thrown away like contaminated sharps.

And for what? The maintenance of the narrative: benefits claimants are inherently suspect, because if they were better people they wouldn’t be on benefits. You have to watch them like hawks, and if you spend more money on surveillance than you could ever save from the detection of the fiddles you lie awake imagining, so be it – our own Department for Work and Pensions sanctions system is fantastically expensive, a fact of which the government seems perversely proud.

The idea that need should come with a badge of shame is not new: the 1697 Poor Act laid down in law that those in receipt of parish aid should wear some blue or red cloth.

Yet it is relatively recent that a competing theory has been overturned. Even in the darkest days of me-first Thatcherism, the social security conversation hinged on whether or not the dole was enough to provide a decent life. State benefits were compared to the median income, and to similar systems in Europe: the question of fraud rarely came up, because the conditions of the 97% not committing it, living honestly on money to which they were entitled, were thought more important.

Simply by changing the frame, pointing attention towards the dishonest, the government managed to render whole swaths of normal social inquiry – what is life like for those at the bottom? – irrelevant. Ask not what life is like for those at the bottom; ask whether they really are at the bottom, or have a cash-in-hand window-cleaning job that puts them nearer the middle. Ask what mountain of fecklessness prevents their escape from the bottom.

Yet when people engage seriously with the concept of social security, different attitudes emerge. The minimum income standard is a research method where small groups, drawn from every social class, calculate what a person needs to live on: they consider the impact of not being able to afford Christmas presents, as well as council tax. They ponder how often one might need a new toaster. They come up with a ballpark figure that, currently, according to a report released by the Child Poverty Action Group, a huge number of people fall short of.

A household of two adults working full time for the minimum wage is 13% shy of it; a single parent on the same wage, 18%. Families relying on benefits, through a combination of inflation and the benefits freeze, are now 40% short of what a citizens’ jury thinks they need to live a decent life.

When you consider these figures as a lived experience, the picture is bleak: yet there is a thread of optimism in the minimum income standard itself. The ostentatious parsimony of the state has not cut through. People still have a conception of decency that goes well beyond mere sustenance, and wish it for one another. All that remains is that we remember how to fight for it.

A Free Market in Tax

Nick Cohen in The Guardian

Donald Trump’s tax affairs are as nothing compared to those of the great global corporations


 

Keeping it offshore: Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven for the world’s rich. Photograph: Alamy


Donald Trump is offering himself as president of a country whose federal income taxes he gives every appearance of dodging. He says he is fit to be commander in chief, after avoiding giving a cent more than he could towards the wages of the troops who must fight for him. He laments an America where “our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in third world condition and 43 million Americans are on food stamps”, while striving tirelessly to avoid paying for one pothole to be mended or mouth to be filled.

Men’s lies reveal more about them than their truths. For years, Trump promoted the bald, racist lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and, as an unAmerican, was disqualified from holding the presidency. We should have guessed then. We should have known that Trump’s subconscious was trying to hide the fact that he was barely an American citizen at all.

He would not contribute to his country or play his part in its collective endeavours. Like a guest in a hotel who runs off leaving the bill, Trump wanted to enjoy the room service without paying for the room. You should never lose your capacity to be shocked, especially in 2016 when the shocking has become commonplace. The New York Times published a joint piece last week by former White House ethics advisers – one to George W Bush and one to Barack Obama, so no one could accuse the paper of bias. They were stunned.

No president would have nominated Trump for public office, they said. If one had, “explaining to the senate and to the American people how a billionaire could have a $916m ‘loss carry-forward’ that potentially allowed him to not pay taxes for perhaps as long as 18 years would have been far too difficult for the White House when many hard-working Americans turn a third or more of their earnings over to the government”.

Trump’s bragging about the humiliations he inflicts on women is shocking. Trump’s oxymoronic excuses about his “fiduciary duty” to his businesses to pay as little personal tax as he could are shocking. (No businessman has a corporate “fiduciary duty” to enrich himself rather than his company.) Never let familiarity dilute your contempt.

And yet looked at from another angle, Trump is not so shocking. You may be reading this piece online after clicking on a Facebook link. If you are in Britain, the profits from the adverts Facebook hits you with will be logged in Ireland, which required Facebook to pay a mere €3.4m in corporate taxes last year on revenues of €4.83bn . If you are reading on an Apple device, Apple has booked $214.9bn offshore to avoid $65.4bn in US taxes. They are hardly alone. One recent American study found that 367 of the Fortune 500 operate one or more subsidiaries in tax havens.

Trump may seem a grotesque and alien figure, but his values are all around you. The Pepsi in your hand, the iPhone in your pocket, the Google search engine you load and the Nike trainers you put on your feet come from a tax-exempt economy, which expects you to pick up the bills.

The short answer to Conservatives who say “their behaviour is legal” is that it is a scandal that it is legal. The long answer is to invite them to look at the state of societies where Trumpian economics have taken hold. If they live in Britain or America, they should not have to look far.

The story liberal capitalism tells itself is heroic. Bloated incumbent businesses are overthrown by daring entrepreneurs. They outwit the complacent and blundering old firms and throw them from their pinnacles. They let creative destruction rip through the economy and bring new products and jobs with it.

If that justification for free-market capitalism was ever true, it is not true now. The free market in tax, it turns out, allows firms to move offshore and leave stagnant economies behind. Giant companies are no longer threatened by buccaneering entrepreneurs and innovative small businesses. Indeed, they don’t appear to be threatened by anyone.

The share of nominal GDP generated by the Fortune 100 biggest American companies rose from 33% of GDP in 1994 to 46% in 2013, the Economist reported. Despite all the fuss about tech entrepreneurship, the number of startups is lower than at any time since the late 1970s. More US companies now die than are born.

For how can small firms, which have to pay tax, challenge established giants that move their money offshore? They don’t have lobbyists. They can’t use a small part of their untaxed profits to make the campaign donations Google and the other monopolistic firms give to keep the politicians onside.

John Lewis has asked our government repeatedly how it can be fair to charge the partnership tax while allowing its rival Amazon to run its business through Luxembourg. A more pertinent question is why any government desperate for revenue would want a system that gave tax dodgers a competitive advantage.

What applies to businesses applies to individuals. The tax take depends as much on national culture as the threat of punishment, on what economists call “tax morale”.

No one likes paying taxes, but in northern European and North American countries most thought that they should pay them. Maybe I have lived a sheltered life, but I have no more heard friends discuss how they cheat the taxman than I have heard them discuss how they masturbate. If they cheat, they keep their dirty secrets to themselves. Let tax morale collapse, let belief in the integrity of the system waver, however, and states become like Greece, where everyone who can evade tax does.

The surest way to destroy morale is to make the people who pay taxes believe that the government is taking them for fools by penalising them while sparing the wealthy.

Theresa May promised at the Conservative party conference that “however rich or powerful – you have a duty to pay your tax”.

I would have been more inclined to believe her if she had promised, at this moment of asserting sovereignty, to close the British sovereign tax havens of the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Bermuda and the British Virgin and Cayman Islands.

But let us give the new PM time to prove herself. If she falters, she should consider this. Revenue & Customs can only check 4% of self-assessment tax returns. If the remaining 96% decide that if Trump and his kind can cheat, they can cheat too, she would not be able to stop them.

My difficult relationship with Wasim Akram

Dennis Freedman in The Dawn

Young Michael Slater is fidgeting at the crease.

Scratch. Shake. Rub. Repeat.

His career is off to a flyer. The New South Welshman averages nearly 50. In 1995, openers don’t average anything near that much. For context, Mike Atherton only averages 38.

The Hobart pitch looks clean. Wasim has the ball. The recipe is complete.

New wicket, master tradesman and some chilly dense Hobart weather.

The cable knit sweaters are on. Even those with extra natural padding are wearing them.

Old timers predict that there will be some cut and swing. In their minds, it’s as certain as death and taxes. But it is likely to only last a few overs until the shine is gone from the ball. If Slater can connect with a cut shot or two, the danger will quickly subside.

Wasim has a lazy 12 step run up. Perhaps it is only 10? The left arm swings around like an angry propeller on a Spitfire. The ball pitches on a length, cuts in hard and strikes the pad.

Slater had no chance. His fidgeting hasn’t been demonstrative enough to wake up his feet. They didn’t move.

An appeal. A really good appeal. Not Out.

Hitting outside the line? Too high?

The replay indicates that many an umpire would have raised the finger.

The Pakistanis share a knowing wink. Darrell Hair looks concerned. He has just realised that this will be a tough morning for him.

Slater shakes it off. We expected this, right? It is not as though Wasim wastes too many new balls in these conditions.

Ball 2.

Same shape. Slightly quicker. Slightly shorter.

The 25-year-old Slater gets in behind it and scrubs a defensive prod to short cover.

It looked awkward.

Where feet were expected to move, they didn’t. Michael Slater often looked awkward.

Back in 1995, openers were expected to look in control. Stylish. Dapper. Like Fred Astaire dancing in the rain. Slater could be that guy, but it wasn’t his natural happy place. He was more Vanilla Ice. In your face. New, exciting and baggy clothes.

He just wanted to make runs. Quickly.

Ball 3.

The sucker ball.

Pushed across the right hander and holding its line. The keeper takes it in front of first slip. A nervous Slater doesn’t bite. He wanted to. It was his ball. That mad cut shot wanted to come out of its cage. It didn’t.

Maybe if it were Steve Harmison bowling and not Wasim Akram? Surely he would have pounced at it then?

Slater continues to fidget at the crease. Perhaps this is where Steve Smith learnt it from?

Ball 4.

A half volley outside off stump. Not super quick, but still sharp. The batsman strides out to meet it. Almost overstretching.

Then he defends.

Wasim has got inside his head. Why didn’t that ball swing? Why didn’t I give it hell? It was there to hit. I’ll get him next time.

Mark Taylor is at the other end. He is practising the flick off his pads. It would be a dangerous shot against Wasim. Across the line. An invitation to produce a leading edge.

Ball 5

It is a repeat of ball 2. This time Slater jumps a little as he plays it. But to be fair, he is well behind it. Surely he feels more comfortable now? Apart from the first ball, the others have offered little danger to a set batsman. Like jelly in a blast chiller, Slater sets at a rapid speed. But he is not set yet. However, he is close.

Ball 6

Like Slater, Wasim also sets quickly. This is his effort ball. A full in-swinging yorker. We’ve seen it before. Close your eyes and you can picture it. Mitchell Starc took this dream and copied it.

Slater gets hit on the toe. His bat is still on its journey towards the ball. His bat is too slow. Wasim is too fast.

Umpire Hair fires him.

Peak Wasim. Classic Wasim. Just Wasim.

A tease of what he could do. A sense of what he would do. Then he did it.

He is like a gift from the gods. What is not to love?

What is not to respect?

Fast forward five years.

The dark clouds of match fixing would soon fall over Pakistani cricket.

They were always threatening to come in from the north, as they circled above the Kyber Pass. Now they had arrived.

These clouds set a waypoint for Wasim Akram. They threatened to unleash a thunderstorm from hell.

Winds. Hail. Lightning.

Instead, when one looks up at them, they are full of potential menace, yet never quite create more than a minor inconvenience.

These clouds are known as the Qayyum Report.

The typed pages of investigation that are contained within it are Pakistan’s attempt to look into corruption within the national team.

It opens up like a well laid out crime novel. A slow and steady start. A scene being set. Some explosive twists. Inconclusive conclusions and a reader left wanting for more.

Justice Qayyum, the author, is also fallible as we discover later. A cricket lover. A man working essentially with many contradicting first hand accounts and hearsay. His heroes are under attack.

But one in particular gives him the most troublesome time.

Wasim.

The Qayyum Report is clear in its condemnation of Pakistan’s greatest ever swing bowler.

Ata-ur-Rehman swore on oath that he was offered 200,000 rupees by skipper Akram to perform poorly in an ODI against New Zealand in Christchurch in 93/94.

Aamir Sohail had, on oath, also spoken ill of Akram.

Akram then, using his own personal credit card, paid for Ata-ur-Rehman to fly to London. Here, Rehman visited Akram’s lawyer and signed an affidavit supporting Wasim against the existing one penned by Sohail.

Essentially, Akram paid for Rehman’s travel so that he could perjure himself.

Akram does not dispute that he paid for Rehman’s ticket.

Rehman originally alleged that Akram threatened to have him “fixed” if he didn’t follow orders. Rehman then retracted his story after Akram paid for that flight to London to visit his lawyer. Rehman decided that, in fact, Sohail had coerced him to speak against Akram.

Perjury. A broken witness.

However, the great Imran Khan also testified that Rehman had told him of Akram’s approaches.

It is recorded for all eternity in the Qayyum Report.

Imran doesn’t lie, does he? (Politicians don’t lie?)

Other allegations are made against Wasim Akram in the Qayyum report. However, they are the classic ‘he says / she says’-type argument. They focus on Akram feigning injury, bowling badly and manipulating batting orders so as to lose matches.

They are difficult to prove either way. There is little corroboration.

Justice Qayyum dismisses them.

However, back on the match fixing charge where there are elements of corroboration, Quyyam states the following:

“As regards to allegation one on its own, this commission is left with no option but to hold Wasim Akram not guilty of the charge of match-fixing. This the Commission does so only by giving Wasim Akram the benefit of the doubt.”

In isolation, natural justice clears Akram.

Not guilty.

We can all move on with our lives. Akram is still a national hero.

Or is he?

Qayyum goes on to say:

“However, once this commission looks at the allegations in their totality, this commission feels that all is not well here and that Wasim Akram is not above board. He has not co-operated with this Commission. It is only by giving Wasim Akram the benefit of the doubt after Ata-ur-Rehman changed his testimony in suspicious circumstances that he has not been found guilty of match-fixing. He cannot be said to be above suspicion.” [Emphasis added.]

So Akram is found not guilty because he helped finance a witness to change his story under oath?

What nonsense is this?

Think about it for just a second. Pause and reflect.

If this were a criminal trial, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that Akram tampered with a witness.

Unbelievable.

“It is, therefore, recommended that he be censured and be kept under strict vigilance and further probe be made either by the Government of Pakistan or by the Cricket Board into his assets acquired during his cricketing tenure and a comparison be made with his income. Furthermore, he should be fined Rs300,000.”

The classic Clayton’s verdict. You aren’t guilty, but please pay a fine for the little bit of guilt that you do harbour.

“More importantly, it is further recommended that Wasim Akram be removed from captaincy of the national team. The captain of the national team should have a spotless character and be above suspicion. Wasim Akram seems to be too sullied to hold that office.” [Emphasis added.]

Stained. But not guilty.

It is important to note that the Qayyum report was not a criminal trial. This impacts the burden of proof.

“.....it must be stated that the burden of proof is somewhere in between the criminal and normal civil standard.”

Akram argued that the burden of proof should be high. But of course, he would. The higher the burden of proof, the harder it is to convict him.

“It is not as high as the counsel for Wasim Akram recommended, that the case needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

This is a commission of inquiry and not a criminal court of trial so that standard need not be high.”

Its outputs are recommendations. Typically, outputs from these inquiries are followed by prosecutors and governments. As they should.

Pakistan moved on after this event. They purged themselves. Apparently, they chose to reject corruption in cricket.

Then Butt, Asif and Amir.
Then Amir back in the Pakistan national side after those with memories, including Misbah and Hafeez, initially protested.

Corruption - 1

Sanctity - 0

But the story takes another turn.

While all this is happening, Wasim Akram remained a powerful man. He took more power. His voice is now the most powerful in Pakistani cricket.

He becomes a commentator. He models. He tries coaching in the IPL and being an ambassador in the PSL.

He is Pakistan’s Mr Everywhere.

But if you don’t clean up filth properly, it festers and mould grows and eventually it rears its head once again.

Justice Qayyum later recalls that he had a “soft corner” for Wasim.

“He was a very great player, a very great bowler and I was his fan, and therefore that thing did weigh with me.”

Qayyum admits he was lenient to “one or two of them” based on reputation and skill.

Qayyum, like all men, is guilty of being fallible. But what a time to lose control to your weakness.

Can we deduce from this that without personal bias, Qayyum may have found Wasim guilty of match fixing?

For a swing bowler, Akram knew how to live right on the slippery edge of right and wrong.

He was almost a match fixer, but paid a fine for being one.

He coerced a witness to change his sworn testimony against him by using his own funds.

He was stripped of the captaincy.

All facts. Indisputable.

Yet, you all still adore him like a god.

You place his playing deeds ahead of the damage he did to the game.

Does being good at something absolve one from society’s judgement about what is right and wrong?

Should we allow that Akram is afforded a voice on our television screens, our newspapers, mingles with players and coaches professional teams?

Would you allow Chris Cairns to do it? He was found not guilty by a UK court of lying about match fixing.
Why is Wasim any different? Is it because Wasim was a better player than Cairns?

Then how about those actually found guilty of crimes against the sport of cricket?

Shane Warne is a convicted drug cheat and took money from bookies. Why do you cower to him?

Mark Waugh is an Australian selector. An official position. He also took money from bookies. Having said that, Cricket Australia has official bookmaker partners, so they aren’t even pretending to take this seriously.
I am not talking about those who get a speeding fine here.

I am talking about individuals who cheated the game. Put their selfishness ahead of the greater good. Frauds.

Why does the game owe these people anything?

Cricket is not society. It does not automatically have to bestow a second chance on anyone. Instead, it is the duty of everyone associated with the game to protect it.

Yet when it comes to our heroes, those who swung a ball in mysterious ways or batted like silk, we turn a blind eye.

Wasim is Wasim. He has made his choices. He has vandalised the sport. As has Warne. As has Mark Waugh.

Rod Marsh once placed a bet against a team he was playing in. Australia lost. Rod Marsh won big.

Rod Marsh is now the Chairman of Selectors for Cricket Australia.

If I were caught breaking serious rules at work, I would get fired. There is no way in hell that my employer would ever have me back.

In some industries, if I break the rules, I can never work in them again.

The legal profession. Working with children. Policing.

No second chances. Respect the fortunate position you have obtained or leave forever.

If cricket really wants to see corruption as a significant foe, why does it not take the same stance?

So next time you share a view with me about what Wasim has said, or what Warne did on the pitch, forgive me if I don’t partake in your idolisation.

For Wasim is not my idol and it is him who is to blame.

You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

IMF economists have published a remarkable paper admitting that the ideology was oversold

‘You hear it when the Bank of England’s Mark Carney sounds the alarm about ‘a low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest-rate equilibrium’. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/AFP/Getty Images



What does it look like when an ideology dies? As with most things, fiction can be the best guide. In Red Plenty, his magnificent novel-cum-history of the Soviet Union, Francis Spufford charts how the communist dream of building a better, fairer society fell apart. 

Even while they censored their citizens’ very thoughts, the communists dreamed big. Spufford’s hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet ever to win a Nobel prize for economics. Rattling along on the Moscow metro, he fantasises about what plenty will bring to his impoverished fellow commuters: “The women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity.”

But reality makes swift work of such sandcastles. The numbers are increasingly disobedient. The beautiful plans can only be realised through cheating, and the draughtsmen know it better than any dissidents. This is one of Spufford’s crucial insights: that long before any public protests, the insiders led the way in murmuring their disquiet. Whisper by whisper, memo by memo, the regime is steadily undermined from within. Its final toppling lies decades beyond the novel’s close, yet can already be spotted.

When Red Plenty was published in 2010, it was clear the ideology underpinning contemporary capitalism was failing, but not that it was dying. Yet a similar process as that described in the novel appears to be happening now, in our crisis-hit capitalism. And it is the very technocrats in charge of the system who are slowly, reluctantly admitting that it is bust.

You hear it when the Bank of England’s Mark Carney sounds the alarm about “a low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest-rate equilibrium”. Or when the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank’s central bank, warns that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”. And you saw it most clearly last Thursday from the IMF.

What makes the fund’s intervention so remarkable is not what is being said – but who is saying it and just how bluntly. In the IMF’s flagship publication, three of its top economists have written an essay titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

The very headline delivers a jolt. For so long mainstream economists and policymakers have denied the very existence of such a thing as neoliberalism, dismissing it as an insult invented by gap-toothed malcontents who understand neither economics nor capitalism. Now here comes the IMF, describing how a “neoliberal agenda” has spread across the globe in the past 30 years. What they mean is that more and more states have remade their social and political institutions into pale copies of the market. Two British examples, suggests Will Davies – author of the Limits of Neoliberalism – would be the NHS and universities “where classrooms are being transformed into supermarkets”. In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition.

The results, the IMF researchers concede, have been terrible. Neoliberalism hasn’t delivered economic growth – it has only made a few people a lot better off. It causes epic crashes that leave behind human wreckage and cost billions to clean up, a finding with which most residents of food bank Britain would agree. And while George Osborne might justify austerity as “fixing the roof while the sun is shining”, the fund team defines it as “curbing the size of the state … another aspect of the neoliberal agenda”. And, they say, its costs “could be large – much larger than the benefit”.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde with George Osborne. ‘Since 2008, a big gap has opened up between what the IMF thinks and what it does.’ Photograph: Kimimasa Mayama/EPA

Two things need to be borne in mind here. First, this study comes from the IMF’s research division – not from those staffers who fly into bankrupt countries, haggle over loan terms with cash-strapped governments and administer the fiscal waterboarding. Since 2008, a big gap has opened up between what the IMF thinks and what it does. Second, while the researchers go much further than fund watchers might have believed, they leave in some all-important get-out clauses. The authors even defend privatisation as leading to “more efficient provision of services” and less government spending – to which the only response must be to offer them a train ride across to Hinkley Point C.

Even so, this is a remarkable breach of the neoliberal consensus by the IMF. Inequality and the uselessness of much modern finance: such topics have become regular chew toys for economists and politicians, who prefer to treat them as aberrations from the norm. At last a major institution is going after not only the symptoms but the cause – and it is naming that cause as political. No wonder the study’s lead author says that this research wouldn’t even have been published by the fund five years ago.

From the 1980s the policymaking elite has waved away the notion that they were acting ideologically – merely doing “what works”. But you can only get away with that claim if what you’re doing is actually working. Since the crash, central bankers, politicians and TV correspondents have tried to reassure the public that this wheeze or those billions would do the trick and put the economy right again. They have riffled through every page in the textbook and beyond – bank bailouts, spending cuts, wage freezes, pumping billions into financial markets – and still growth remains anaemic.

And the longer the slump goes on, the more the public tumbles to the fact that not only has growth been feebler, but ordinary workers have enjoyed much less of its benefits. Last year the rich countries’ thinktank, the OECD, made a remarkable concession. It acknowledged that the share of UK economic growth enjoyed by workers is now at its lowest since the second world war. Even more remarkably, it said the same or worse applied to workers across the capitalist west.

Red Plenty ends with Nikita Khrushchev pacing outside his dacha, to where he has been forcibly retired. “Paradise,” he exclaims, “is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social order? What kind of paradise?”

Economists don’t talk like novelists, more’s the pity, but what you’re witnessing amid all the graphs and technical language is the start of the long death of an ideology.

The Observer view on corporate cheats

“If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen” ran the slogan of one of VW’s most iconic ad campaigns. Last week’s revelations that VW deliberately and illegally cheated emissions tests will rightly do irreparable damage to a global brand that has traded off its reputation for quality and reliability.

The way this has played out on both sides of the Atlantic raises two critical and related questions about corporate accountability. First, VW is only the latest in a series of global corporates to be caught breaking the law, a sure sign that, even where regulations exist, they are often not fit for purpose. Second, VW’s law-breaking has highlighted the extent to which powerful industry lobbying has watered down European testing to the extent it can be manipulated without illegal action, and at terrible cost. Air pollution accounts for some 50,000 premature deaths a year in the UK – three times as many as liver disease. But in the face of corporate lobbying, EU and government efforts to address it have been utterly inadequate.

“It was not an accident… a lot of work has gone into this,” was the verdict of John German of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the NGO that uncovered VW’s use of sophisticated software to flout US emissions tests. It’s a textbook case of predatory capitalism: a global business deliberately flouting regulations to harm the environment and cause unnecessary deaths in the name of profit.

The business community reacted with outrage when former Labour leader Ed Miliband condemned predatory businesses, accusing him of unfairly tarring the whole private sector with this brush. But each new corporate scandal makes this response more untenable. Scandals in banking, energy and food show that a serious misdemeanour at one global firm is often indicative of poor practice across a whole industry. Other car firms have already been found guilty of illegally manipulating tests, albeit not on the scale of VW.

The common lesson from these scandals is that capitalism is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. But unless they are rooted out, poor cultures that permit bad individual behaviour can and will develop in businesses. Companies such as VW employ the equivalent of a small city’s worth of people: in a company that size, there may well be employees with criminal tendencies. What’s critical is whether company cultures root out these bad apples, or whether they allow them to set in train a corporate race to the bottom. This is not an insight limited to business: the MP expenses scandal and widespread doping in athletics show what happens when people feel able to police themselves.

The financial crisis should have served as a warning of how imperfect our regulatory systems are at rooting out criminal practices within business. But the debate about reforms to corporate accountability has not been commensurate with the scale of the challenge. This is partly because there are no easy solutions. There is a consensus that regulators need to focus more on firm cultures, but little understanding about what an effective approach might look like. Greater personal liability undoubtedly has a role to play, but is no magic fix, as poor organisational cultures can encourage people to take risks regardless of the consequences.

The German system of corporate governance – often held up as an exemplar for its employee representation – has failed to prevent scandals afflicting big German companies such as Siemens, Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Telecom: a system designed to work for modestly sized, community-rooted businesses has not worked in holding global giants to account. But corporate governance is an imperfect lever through which to try to change corporate culture.

The VW case shows how a relatively small NGO running independent tests was eventually able to get US – if not European – regulators to take action. It demonstrates how independent civil society organisations can play an important role in holding corporates to account: but to do so, they need to be properly resourced.

This is particularly true given the way in which global companies have wielded their huge power to get regulations watered down, perhaps the most shocking aspect of how this has played out in Europe.

Air quality is a serious killer. But addressing it is easier than other public health challenges because it relies more heavily on changing corporate than individual behaviour. It is much more localised than climate change policy: unlike with carbon emissions, action to improve air quality in the UK overwhelmingly benefits the UK. Yet the immense lobbying power of the German car industry has knocked air quality down the agenda both in Brussels and Westminster. As a result, EU emissions tests are far laxer than in the US. There are even legal loopholes that allow car manufacturers to use the type of software that VW was found to be using in the US.

The European Commission and the government have both been warned about the implications: some diesel cars that have passed European laboratory tests have been found to be producing seven times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide emissions. But as reported by this paper today, the government has been seeking to block EU legislation to toughen up emissions tests. And it has ignored European legal limits for nitrogen dioxide levels altogether. It has taken a legal case by the NGO Client Earth to force Defra even to consult on proposals to reduce air pollution, proposals that experts believe fall far short of what’s needed. The scale of government inaction in the face of heavy industry lobbying is staggering even in relation to other public health challenges such as obesity and smoking.

As well as tougher European vehicle testing and a properly resourced plan from government to improve air quality, there needs to be a more holistic approach to environmental policy. Diesel has been promoted as a greener alternative to petrol as a result of its lower carbon emissions, but it performs much worse on air quality. There are similar issues with biomass. Yet climate change policy sits with the department of energy and climate change, while air quality is the responsibility of Defra.

VW’s behaviour has had terrible consequences for global human health. It is only the latest warning that business regulation remains unfit for purpose, and a powerful reminder that corporate lobbying has too often stopped governments taking action to prevent avoidable human suffering. It must not take another corporate scandal on this scale to get governments to act.

Why happy couples cheat?

Why happy couples cheat? Esther Perel

Why we love, why we cheat? Helen Fisher

Your students’ A-level results could easily be wrong

 

Students may not be getting the exam grades they deserve due to the inconsistent marking. Photograph: Alamy


Anonymous in The Guardian

Thursday 13 August 2015 07.00 BST 

Congratulations. Your students have got their grades, university beckons and you can bask in the warm glow of a job well done. Parents, colleagues and students salute you. But are the results accurate? As a senior examiner with more than 20 years’ experience, let me share my doubts.

Perhaps you picture genteel examiners sitting in Oxbridge common rooms, languidly resting on armchairs as they earnestly discuss whether Chloe’s essay merits an A* or merely an A. Maybe you imagine seasoned professionals kindly donating their holidays to mark in the garden over Earl Grey tea and lemon drizzle cake? Wise up. Examining is a ruthless multi-million pound business. There are two types of examiners: the quick and the dead. The faster we mark, the more we get paid. If we’re slow, we fall foul of exam cheat No 1: the exam board.

Take it from an examiner, your students’ A-level results could easily be wrong



It doesn’t matter whether you teach economics with ABC board or further maths with XYZ, they are as rotten as each other. My board ask for two qualifications from their examiners: they are alive and they need the cash.

Mr Simpson turns up year after year marking different papers in my subject because the exam board doesn’t cross reference sackings with recruitment. Think of him as a zombie – we declare them dead, but they reappear. Simpson is “aberrant”, in examiner parlance. This means that when we look at his marking, some scores are too generous, some are too mean and there is no pattern. Fancy having him mark your students’ papers? Ms Griffin, however, is merely a “lingering doubt”. These markers make big mistakes, but there is a consistent generosity or meanness that we can correct.

Speaking of consistency, here’s exam cheat No 2: Ofqual. The quango is charged with ensuring compatibility between the exam boards but its heavy-handed, ruthlessly statistical approach makes everything much worse. Unless exam boards give 80% of their marks to Ofqual by early July, they face severe sanctions, including public naming and shaming. Senior examiners therefore have to apply the thumbscrews to their juniors, with predictable consequences for accuracy.

In a recent report exam boards confessed to “guesstimating” grades. The only shock for me was that they admitted it. I’ve seen a chief examiner (top of the tree in exam terms) take a set of papers from an aberrant marker and come back minutes later with new grades. Usain Bolt couldn’t have moved at that speed. The examiner had clearly just looked up the school’s predicted grades and scribbled them on top of the papers. The moral of the story is to check the grades your centre sends to the board. They are used more than you think.

If in doubt about a result, always go for a re-mark – the numbers of requests are booming. It’s hardly a surprise; some examiners are not even standardised. In standardisation, they are given a sample of pre-marked papers and tested on how well they can match the agreed marks. If they cannot, they are not allowed to continue marking. But there are thousands of orphan scripts left unmarked every summer and my board was so desperate that it summoned the zombies, the lingering doubters and other barrel scrapings to a special centre to mark against the clock. Several of these worthy souls had failed standardisation but were allowed to carry on (paid at several times the normal rate).

It gets worse; there are gangsters out there. I’ve seen papers given the green light despite major reservations about how it’s been graded because an examiner needed to move on to their next marking gig. Exam cheat No 3: examiners.

Secret Teacher: marking exam papers exposes the flaws in teaching



I get paid £4 per script. There’s an adage about peanuts and primates. We genuinely don’t do it for the money, but no one likes to be exploited. Meanwhile, remarks cost £40, so someone is making a lot of money. Markers are poorly motivated and often poorly qualified. My examiners once needed several years of teaching experience, now I’ll take a PGCE student. What unites us is a genuine love of the subject we are marking and respect for the students who are producing the answers. For me, reading a good script is an emotional and resonant experience. Students deserve nothing less than my best, and I try to give it. I cannot say the same for the examining process. Your students’ marks may be right, wrong or anywhere in between.

Unexpected exam hero No 1: former education secretary Michael Gove. He was unpopular, but he had some good ideas, one of which was to reduce the exam boards to one. A single board with consistent standards, fair rules and fair results. One exam envelope. And no more zombies. Full marks, I say.

The real benefit cheats are the employers who are milking the system

In the last year, Tesco has cost the Treasury £364m in pay-rate supplements. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty


Deborah Orr in The Guardian


I really don’t know why the government is making such heavy weather of cutting £12bn off the benefits bill. That sum, and much more, could be cut at the stroke of a pen – though it would mean that the government would have to put its money where its mouth is and make it a legal requirement for employers to pay the living wage. If a company really can’t afford to, then it’s the company that should be applying for supplements, not the people who work for it.

Cameron wants to curb in-work benefits. No wonder: just £8bn on benefits goes to the unemployed, while an estimated £76bn, according to James Ferguson of Money Week, goes to people who are working. The government says this shouldn’t be happening. Cameron insists employers should be paying wages people can live on – which, funnily enough, is the sort of thing unions say, although they no longer have any power to make it happen.

It’s what Labour says, too, now the party is out of power. When it was in power, it avoided confrontation with employers offering poverty wages, and with the unions, by kindly offering to make up the difference between the minimum wage and a living wage via the benefits system.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. The Tories excoriate Labour because Labour accepted the Conservative idea that employers should be freed from the burden of social responsibility. Labour spent a lot of money on protecting employers from such irksome duties. The Conservatives still don’t want to impose such irksome duties, but don’t want to stump up for the hefty bill that ensues from failing to do so either.

Just one of the woeful consequences of Labour’s drive to support employers by supplementing employees is that it makes the figures look like the Department of Work and Pensions is showering taxpayers’ money on the feckless, when it is actually showering taxpayers’ money on businesses. Employing someone has come to be seen as such a noble pursuit that businesses are paid to do it. Businesses don’t, of course, complain that this interferes with the free market. Money spent supplementing wages should be coming from the Business and Enterprise budget, with companies vetted to assess whether they are justified in offering pay below the living wage. Those who are can be offered loans to cover the difference, repayable in much the same manner as student tuition fees. They are hiring staff to grow their own businesses, after all. Such entrepreneurial risk-taking is seen as admirable. But when the taxpayer is taking on so much of the cost, and the benefit-receiving employee is getting so much of the blame, there’s really only sheer nerve and hypocrisy left to be admired.

Businesses, of course, would hate having to admit that they expect the state to prop up their poverty wages. They despise “red tape”, after all. Although that doesn’t stop them employing individuals who must submit themselves and their families to miles of red tape and minute government scrutiny because their wages aren’t enough to live on.

Work in the retail sector is notoriously badly paid, so it should be no surprise that around £11bn in in-work benefit is paid each year to people working in retail. Employees at Next receive more money in pay-rate supplements than the company pays in tax (about £2,087 per low-paid worker). In the last year, Tesco has cost the Treasury £364m in pay-rate supplements. Cameron talks about dysfunctional merry-go-rounds of tax and spend. But the culprits aren’t ordinary people scraping by. The culprits are employers milking the system.

The in-work benefits system also encourages businesses to employ lots of people part-time, rather than fewer people full-time. A couple has to work 24 hours a week to qualify for in-work benefits, and a single person 16 hours. The more part-time people you employ, the more the government is supplementing your payroll, and the easier it is to get competent staff on the cheap.

Much of the reduction in unemployment seen over the last couple of years is because people are taking part-time work when they would prefer full-time work. The government may trumpet the decline in unemployment. But its complaints about the cost of in-work benefits are an acknowledgement that the Department of Work and Pensions is paying out a lot of cash to make that happen.

A system that minimises costs while maximising profits is bound to result in a mismatch between what people earn and what it costs them to live. This tendency can be seen most clearly in the housing market. In 2009-10,according to House of Commons figures, 478,000 people with jobs claimed housing benefit, at a cost of £2.2bn. By 2014-15, it was 962,000 and £4.6bn, and it’s set to continue rising if things don’t change. What things?

It’s endlessly said by everybody that the social housing supply has to increase. But no one seems willing to take their valuable piece of land and render it much less valuable by building social housing on it, when they could keep it as an asset or sell it to private developers instead. Private landlords are the obvious beneficiaries.

But again it’s the person claiming the housing benefit that is seen as the problem, not the person who wants the “market rate” when the market isn’t paying it. Again, the person making the profit gets the benefit, rather than the person who doesn’t have enough income to put a roof over his head. Just as it’s time to restrict state benefits paid to employers via employees, it’s time to restrict benefits paid to landlords via tenants.

The Conservatives, I’m afraid, seem to do nothing at all in government except complain that Labour spent too much money on mitigating the effects of the previous Conservative government’s policies. Employers are allowed to set wages and landlords allowed to set rents without regard to the amount of money people have to live on. The least the state can do is be honest about the amount of state money that is spent on defending the right to make profits, instead of blaming the hapless citizens from whom the profit is wrung.