A level Economics: How Chicago school economists reshaped American justice

From The Economist

In recent years the antitrust division of America’s Department of Justice has gone on a crusade against corporate mergers, filing a record number of complaints in an attempt to stop the biggest businesses from getting even bigger. With few exceptions, these efforts have been thwarted by the courts. That it is so hard to get a judge to intervene in business reflects the work of an institution known more for its free-market influence on economics than the law: the University of Chicago.

Fifty years ago this autumn Richard Posner, a federal judge and Chicago scholar, published his “Economic Analysis of Law”. Now in its 9th edition, the book set off an avalanche of ideas from Chicago school economists, including Gary Becker, Ronald Coase and Milton Friedman, which passed into the folios of America’s judges and lawyers. The “law-and-economics” movement made the courts more reasoned and rigorous. It also changed the verdicts judges handed out. Research has found that those exposed to its ideas are more opposed to regulators and less likely to enforce antitrust laws, and tend to impose prison terms more often and for longer.

Links between economics and the law have long been studied. In “Leviathan”, published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote that secure property rights, which are needed for a system of economic exchange, are a legal fiction that emerged only with the modern state. By the late 19th century, legal fields that overlapped with economics, such as matters of taxation, were being analysed by economists.

With the arrival of the law-and-economics movement, every legal question was suddenly addressed in the context of the incentives of actors and the changes these produced. In “Crime and punishment: an economic approach” (1968), Becker argued that, rather than being a balancing-act between punishment and the opportunity for reform, sentences act mainly as a deterrent: the literal “price of crime”. Harsh sentences, he argued, reduce criminal activity in much the same way as high prices cut demand. With the caveat that a greater chance of arrest is a better deterrent than longer prison sentences, Becker’s theorising has since been borne out by decades of empirical evidence.

Too steep?

In the movement’s early days, “the legal academy paid little attention to our work”, recalls Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School and another of the field’s founding fathers. Two things changed this. The first was Mr Posner’s bestselling textbook, in which he wrote that “it may be possible to deduce the basic formal characteristics of law itself from economic theory.” Mr Posner was a jurist, who wrote in a language familiar to other jurists. Yet he was also steeped in the economic insights of the Chicago school. His book successfully thrust the law-and-economics movement into the legal mainstream.

The second factor was a two-week programme called the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges, which ran from 1976 until 1998. This was funded by businesses and conservative foundations, and involved an all-expenses-paid stay at a beachside hotel in Miami. It was no holiday, however, even if those who went nicknamed the conference “Pareto in the Palms”. The curriculum was extremely demanding, taught by economists including Friedman and Paul Samuelson, both of whom had won Nobel prizes.

image: the economist

By the early 1990s nearly half the federal judiciary had spent a few weeks in Miami. Those who attended included two future justices on the Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas (an arch conservative) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (his liberal counterpart). Ginsburg would later surprise colleagues by voting with the conservative majority on antitrust cases, applying the so-called “consumer welfare standard” championed by the Manne programme. This states that a corporate merger is anticompetitive only if it raises the price or reduces the quality of goods or services. Ginsburg wrote that the instruction she received in Miami “was far more intense than the Florida sun”.

In a paper under review by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Elliot Ash of eth Zurich, Daniel Chen of Princeton University and Suresh Naidu of Columbia University treat the Manne programme as a natural experiment, comparing the decisions of every alumnus before and after their attendance at the conference. They then use an artificial-intelligence approach called “word embedding” to assess the language in judges’ opinions in more than a million circuit- and district- court cases.

The researchers find that federal judges were more likely to use terms such as “efficiency” and “market”, and less likely to use those such as “discharged” and “revoke”, after time spent in Miami. Manne alumni took what the authors characterised as the “conservative” stance on antitrust and other economic cases 30% more often in the years after attending. They also imposed prison sentences 5% more frequently and of 25% greater length. The effect became stronger still after 2005, when a Supreme Court decision gave federal judges greater discretion over sentencing.

That researchers are turning the unforgiving lens of economic analysis on law and economics itself is a promising trend. The dismal science has come a long way since the heyday of the Chicago school. Thanks in large part to the empiricism of behavioural economics, it is less wedded to abstractions like the perfectly rational actor. This has softened some of the Chicago school’s harsher edges. But it will nevertheless take time for judges to modify their approach. As Mr Ash notes: “The Chicago school economists may all be retired or dead, but Manne alumni continue to be active members of the judiciary.” In courtrooms across America, Mr Posner’s influence will live on for decades to come.

Economics Essay 64: Market Concentration

Markets dominated by large firms, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon can deliver huge benefits to consumers. To what extent should economists be concerned by highly concentrated markets such as these?

Market concentration refers to the degree of dominance or control exerted by a few large firms within a specific industry or market. It is typically measured by indicators such as market share, concentration ratios, or the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). When a market is highly concentrated, a small number of firms have significant market power and can influence prices, output levels, and competition within the market.

The extent to which economists should be concerned about highly concentrated markets, such as those dominated by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (referred to as GAFA), is a matter of debate. Here are some key considerations:

Benefits of Highly Concentrated Markets:

1. Efficiency and Innovation: Large firms often have the resources and capabilities to invest heavily in research and development, technological advancements, and innovation. This can lead to the development of new products, services, and technologies that benefit consumers. For example, Google and Apple have introduced groundbreaking technologies that have transformed the way people access information and communicate.

2. Economies of Scale: Dominant firms can achieve economies of scale due to their size, which can lead to cost efficiencies. This, in turn, can result in lower prices for consumers, as the cost savings can be passed on to them. Amazon's scale allows for competitive pricing and efficient logistics, resulting in cost savings and convenience for customers.

Concerns about Highly Concentrated Markets:

1. Reduced Competition: Highly concentrated markets can limit competition, leading to reduced consumer choice and potentially higher prices. When a small number of firms dominate a market, they can engage in anti-competitive practices such as predatory pricing, collusion, or exclusionary tactics that hinder the entry of new competitors.

2. Market Power and Exploitation: Large firms with significant market power may exploit their dominant position to extract higher profits at the expense of consumers. They may engage in practices such as price discrimination, monopolistic behavior, or leveraging their dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another.

3. Barriers to Entry: Concentrated markets can have high barriers to entry, making it difficult for new firms to compete. This can stifle innovation, limit entrepreneurial opportunities, and hinder market dynamics. Incumbent firms may use their market power to discourage or impede the entry of potential competitors.

4. Data Privacy and Consumer Protection: Highly concentrated markets often involve the collection and use of vast amounts of consumer data. This raises concerns about data privacy, security, and potential abuses of personal information. Additionally, concentrated markets may limit consumer choices and make it challenging for regulators to enforce consumer protection measures effectively.

In evaluating the impact of highly concentrated markets, economists consider the balance between the benefits of efficiency, innovation, and economies of scale against the potential drawbacks of reduced competition, market power, and barriers to entry. The concern lies in ensuring that market concentration does not harm consumer welfare, impede competition, or stifle innovation. Regulatory measures, antitrust policies, and enforcement mechanisms can play a crucial role in promoting competition, protecting consumers, and addressing any potential negative consequences associated with market concentration.

Fallacies of Capitalism 8: The Efficient Markets Hypothesis

The Efficient Markets Fallacy 

Markets are considered efficient in certain aspects because they have the potential to allocate resources efficiently, respond to changes in supply and demand, and facilitate mutually beneficial transactions between buyers and sellers. This efficiency arises from the following factors:

1. Price mechanism: Markets utilize the price mechanism, where prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand. This mechanism helps in efficiently allocating resources as prices adjust based on changes in supply and demand conditions. For example, when the demand for a particular product increases, its price rises, signaling producers to increase production to meet the demand. This responsiveness allows resources to be directed to where they are most valued, leading to efficiency.

2. Competition: In competitive markets, multiple buyers and sellers compete with each other, leading to increased efficiency. Competition incentivizes businesses to improve their products, reduce costs, and innovate, ultimately benefiting consumers. For example, when multiple companies produce similar goods, they are motivated to offer better quality or lower prices to attract customers. This competition can drive efficiency improvements over time.

3. Profit motive: In a capitalist system, the profit motive serves as an incentive for individuals and businesses to make efficient decisions. When individuals seek to maximize their profits, they are driven to allocate resources in the most productive and efficient ways. For instance, if a business realizes that a particular product line is not generating sufficient profits, it may reallocate resources to more profitable areas, contributing to overall efficiency.

4. Flexibility and adaptability: Markets are often more flexible and adaptable compared to centralized planning systems. They can quickly respond to changes in supply, demand, and consumer preferences. This adaptability allows resources to be reallocated efficiently, ensuring that goods and services align with consumer needs. For example, if a new technology emerges, markets can swiftly adjust by reallocating resources to support its development and meet the changing demand.

However, while markets can be efficient in certain respects, it is important to recognize their limitations and the factors that can hinder their efficiency. Let's understand this concept with simple examples:

1. Market concentration: In some industries, a few large companies can dominate the market, resulting in market concentration. These companies may have significant market power, enabling them to set prices, limit competition, and control supply. For example, imagine a telecommunications industry where only a handful of companies operate. This concentration can lead to reduced choices for consumers and hinder new entrants from competing. The efficient markets fallacy does not account for the potential negative effects of market concentration on competition and consumer welfare.

2. Monopolies: A monopoly occurs when a single company has exclusive control over a particular market. This lack of competition can result in inefficiency and reduced innovation. For instance, imagine a pharmaceutical company that holds a patent for a life-saving drug without any competing alternatives. This monopoly power allows the company to set high prices, limiting access to the medication. The efficient markets fallacy does not address the potential harm caused by monopolistic behavior and the need for regulations to promote competition.

3. Inequitable distribution of resources: The efficient markets fallacy assumes that resources are distributed fairly and efficiently in a capitalist economy. However, in reality, the distribution of resources can be highly unequal. For example, wealth and income disparities can arise, with a small portion of the population holding a significant share of resources while others struggle to meet their basic needs. This inequitable distribution can lead to social unrest and hinder overall economic growth. The efficient markets fallacy does not adequately consider the need for interventions and policies to address the inequitable distribution of resources.

4. Externalities and public goods: Efficient markets do not always account for externalities, which are the costs or benefits that affect third parties not involved in market transactions. For instance, pollution from factories imposes costs on the environment and public health. Without government intervention, the market may not internalize these costs, leading to inefficient outcomes. Additionally, markets may underprovide public goods like education or healthcare, which have broader societal benefits. The efficient markets fallacy fails to address the need for government intervention to address externalities and ensure the provision of public goods.

In summary, the "efficient markets" fallacy fails to address the issues of market concentration, monopolies, inequitable distribution of resources, and the provision of public goods. Recognizing these limitations is crucial for understanding the need for regulations, competition policies, and interventions to promote fair competition, address market failures, and ensure a more equitable distribution of resources in a capitalist economy.

Why does the Muslim Ummah and Islamic states stay silent over China’s abuse of the Uighurs? They blame India in the same breath.?

Nations that claim to be defenders of the faith offer no protest to the concentration camps writes Nick Cohen in The Guardian 

 

One of China’s ‘re-education’ centres in Dabancheng, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters


When China imposed trade sanctions on Norway in 2010 for honouring the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo with the Nobel peace prize, it spat out a word we weren’t used to hearing from propagandists for an atheist communist regime, but should get used to today. “It’s a blasphemy,” a party mouthpiece said.

Once, blasphemy was damning the faithful’s gods and sacred books. Now, criticism of the world’s largest dictatorship has become sacrilegious. You shouldn’t be surprised. As some of us tried to say in the 1990s and 2000s, the gap between the sacred and the profane was never as wide as religious sentimentalists and liberal multiculturalists believed.

They went along with the argument that it was bad taste at best and racism at worst to offend believers. You were “punching down” at largely poor and largely Muslim communities. We thought they were being wilfully blind. They did not understand how men with real power and malice were manipulating religious outrage to consolidate their rule over their wretched population. Iran issued a death sentence on Salman Rushdie in 1989 for satirising Islam’s foundation myths in The Satanic Verses. Its theocratic dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini, was augmenting his powers by claiming to speak for the Muslim world, as well as taking aim at novelists. When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published largely innocuous cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, to assert the right to mock religion, the Egyptian and Syrian dictators, Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, turned a local argument into a global campaign against Denmark. The cries of rage usefully distracted from their corruption and misrule. I could add further examples but they tell the same story. Authoritarian politics and authoritarian religion are just two sides of the same debased coin.

China has stripped away the religious justifications to reveal what was once half-hidden: unadorned and unstoppable power. In many countries, criticising China is the new blasphemy. Nowhere can you see the power more nakedly displayed than in Muslim-majority regimes. Once, they tried to murder blasphemous novelists and screamed about their desire to defend the prophet from the smallest insult. Today, they bend their knees and bite their tongues as China engages in unspeakable atrocities against the largely Muslim Uighur population of western China.

One of the great crimes of the 21st century is being committed in front of our eyes. We see it, yet we don’t register it. The Chinese Communist party is reverting to type, and reviving the totalitarian fear of the Mao era. To bring down numbers of the largely Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang, the China scholar Adrian Zenz reports, the Communists are forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive devices. If they resist, the state sends them to join the one million Uighur people and other Muslim minorities detained in what the state defines as “re-education” camps. A BBC investigation found that China was separating children from their families so they grew up without understanding Islam.


Countries that could not tolerate Rushdie's magical realist novel can live with the mass sterilisation of Muslim women

It may be a cheap point but it remains true that if a western country were to display one-tenth, one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the brutality that China is inflicting on Muslims, the global left would be burning with outrage. (Editor's note - See the oppobrium heaped on Modi and the BJP in India)

If you want to be charitable, its silence can in part be explained by logistical difficulties. Reporters are free to cover China’s suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, for the time being at any rate, but cannot get near Xinjiang without taking extraordinary risks. With no footage of their suffering, millions can suffer unnoticed in the dark.

But the main reasons why Muslims suffer in silence is that the Muslim-majority countries that raged against Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo have decided to stay silent. They use the idea of Muslim solidarity only when it suits them.

In July 2019, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and other Muslim-majority states that pose as defenders of the faith helped to block a western motion at the United Nations calling for China to allow “independent international observers” into the Xinjiang region. Iran issues occasional criticisms but wants Chinese support in its struggle against the Trump administration and so keeps its complaints coded. Their hypocrisy is almost funny, if you take your humour black. Iran, Egypt, Syria and dozens of other countries that could not tolerate a magical realist novel can live with the mass sterilisation of Muslim women. They will give concentration camps a conniving wink of approval, but draw the line at cartoons in a Danish newspaper.

China sterilising ethnic minority women in Xinjiang, report says

Many have been bought off. China is now a more active and influential voice at the United Nations because so many countries are benefiting from billions of dollars in Chinese investments through its “Belt and Road” infrastructure programme. As Norway found in 2010, and Australia found this year when it asked for an international inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, those who blaspheme against China face cyber-attacks and sanctions. Better to take the rewards and avoid the punishments.

Following the money, however, can lead you into a dead end. In a survey of China’s growing power, the Economist noted it was making the world safe for autocracy. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for example, keeps his conservative base happy in Turkey by posing as an ostentatiously Islamic strongman. But he is not likely to condemn the abuse of Muslims by China when he is just as keen on abusing the rights of his domestic opponents. The Chinese world order appeals to the freemasonry of publicity-shy sadists. You say nothing about what we do to our subject people and we will say nothing about what you do to yours.

“The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes,” said Salman Rushdie when he was in fear of his life in 1990. He was talking about conservative Islam. China is now turning criticism of its disastrous record on incubating the Covid-19 virus and its atrocities against its Muslim minorities into crimes, and the people who should be shouting the loudest are bowing their heads in reverential silence.

The George Soros philosophy – and its fatal flaw

Daniel Bessner in The Guardian


In late May, the same day she got fired by the US TV network ABC for her racist tweet about Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, Roseanne Barr accused Chelsea Clinton of being married to George Soros’s nephew. “Chelsea Soros Clinton,” Barr tweeted, knowing that the combination of names was enough to provoke a reaction. In the desultory exchange that followed, the youngest Clinton responded to Roseanne by praising Soros’s philanthropic work with his Open Society Foundations. To which Barr responded in the most depressing way possible, repeating false claims earlier proferred by rightwing media personalities: “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth – were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?”

Barr’s tweet was quickly retweeted by conservatives, including Donald Trump Jr. This shouldn’t have surprised anyone. On the radical right, Soros is as hated as the Clintons. He is a verbal tic, a key that fits every hole. Soros’s name evokes “an emotional outcry from the red-meat crowds”, one former Republican congressman recently told the Washington Post. They view him as a “sort of sinister [person who] plays in the shadows”. This antisemitic caricature of Soros has dogged the philanthropist for decades. But in recent years the caricature has evolved into something that more closely resembles a James Bond villain. Even to conservatives who reject the darkest fringes of the far right, Breitbart’s description of Soros as a “globalist billionaire” dedicated to making America a liberal wasteland is uncontroversial common sense.

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In spite of the obsession with Soros, there has been surprisingly little interest in what he actually thinks. Yet unlike most of the members of the billionaire class, who speak in platitudes and remain withdrawn from serious engagement with civic life, Soros is an intellectual. And the person who emerges from his books and many articles is not an out-of-touch plutocrat, but a provocative and consistent thinker committed to pushing the world in a cosmopolitan direction in which racism, income inequality, American empire, and the alienations of contemporary capitalism would be things of the past. He is extremely perceptive about the limits of markets and US power in both domestic and international contexts. He is, in short, among the best the meritocracy has produced.

It is for this reason that Soros’s failures are so telling; they are the failures not merely of one man, but of an entire class – and an entire way of understanding the world. From his earliest days as a banker in postwar London, Soros believed in a necessary connection between capitalism and cosmopolitanism. For him, as for most of the members of his cohort and the majority of the Democratic party’s leadership, a free society depends on free (albeit regulated) markets. But this assumed connection has proven to be a false one. The decades since the end of the cold war have demonstrated that, without a perceived existential enemy, capitalism tends to undermine the very culture of trust, compassion and empathy upon which Soros’s “open society” depends, by concentrating wealth in the hands of the very few.

Instead of the global capitalist utopia predicted in the halcyon 1990s by those who proclaimed an end to history, the US is presently ruled by an oafish heir who enriches his family as he dismantles the “liberal international order” that was supposed to govern a peaceful, prosperous and united world. While Soros recognised earlier than most the limits of hypercapitalism, his class position made him unable to advocate the root-and-branch reforms necessary to bring about the world he desires. The system that allows George Soros to accrue the wealth that he has done has proven to be one in which cosmopolitanism will never find a stable home.

The highlights of Soros’s biography are well known. Born to middle-class Jewish parents in Budapest in 1930 as György Schwartz, Soros – his father changed the family name in 1936 to avoid antisemitic discrimination – had a tranquil childhood until the second world war, when after the Nazi invasion of Hungary he and his family were forced to assume Christian identities and live under false names. Miraculously, Soros and his family survived the war, escaping the fate suffered by more than two-thirds of Hungary’s Jews. Feeling stifled in newly communist Hungary, in 1947 Soros immigrated to the UK, where he studied at the London School of Economics and got to know the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper, who became his greatest interlocutor and central intellectual influence.

In 1956, Soros moved to New York to pursue a career in finance. After spending over a decade working in various Wall Street positions, in the late 1960s he founded the Quantum Fund, which became one of the most successful hedge funds of all time. As his fund amassed staggering profits, Soros personally emerged as a legendary trader; most famously, in November 1992 he earned more than $1bn and “broke the Bank of England” by betting that the pound was priced too highly against the Deutschmark.

Karl Popper, whose writings were a key influence on Soros’s thinking about the ‘open society’. Photograph: Popperfoto

Today, Soros is one of the richest men in the world and, along with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, one of the US’s most politically influential philanthropists. But unlike Gates and Zuckerberg, Soros has long pointed to academic philosophy as his source of inspiration. Soros’s thought and philanthropic career are organised around the idea of the “open society,” a term developed and popularised by Popper in his classic work The Open Society and Its Enemies. According to Popper, open societies guarantee and protect rational exchange, while closed societies force people to submit to authority, whether that authority is religious, political or economic.

Since 1987, Soros has published 14 books and a number of pieces in the New York Review of Books, New York Times and elsewhere. These texts make it clear that, like many on the centre-left who rose to prominence in the 1990s, Soros’s defining intellectual principle is his internationalism. For Soros, the goal of contemporary human existence is to establish a world defined not by sovereign states, but by a global community whose constituents understand that everyone shares an interest in freedom, equality and prosperity. In his opinion, the creation of such a global open society is the only way to ensure that humanity overcomes the existential challenges of climate change and nuclear proliferation.
Unlike Gates, whose philanthropy focuses mostly on ameliorative projects such as eradicating malaria, Soros truly wants to transform national and international politics and society. Whether or not his vision can survive the wave of antisemitic, Islamophobic and xenophobic rightwing nationalism ascendant in the US and Europe remains to be seen. What is certain is that Soros will spend the remainder of his life attempting to make sure it does.

Soros began his philanthropic activities in 1979, when he “determined after some reflection that I had enough money” and could therefore devote himself to making the world a better place. To do so, he established the Open Society Fund, which quickly became a transnational network of foundations. Though he made some effort at funding academic scholarships for black students in apartheid South Africa, Soros’s primary concern was the communist bloc in eastern Europe; by the end of the 80s, he had opened foundation offices in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union itself. Like Popper before him, Soros considered the countries of communist eastern Europe to be the ultimate models of closed societies. If he were able to open these regimes, he could demonstrate to the world that money could – in some instances, at least – peacefully overcome oppression without necessitating military intervention or political subversion, the favoured tools of cold war leaders.

Soros set up his first foreign foundation in Hungary in 1984, and his efforts there serve as a model of his activities during this period. Over the course of the decade, he awarded scholarships to Hungarian intellectuals to bring them to the US; provided Xerox machines to libraries and universities; and offered grants to theatres, libraries, intellectuals, artists and experimental schools. In his 1990 book Opening the Soviet System, Soros wrote that he believed his foundation had helped “demolish the monopoly of dogma [in Hungary] by making an alternate source of financing available for cultural and social activities”, which, in his estimation, played a crucial role in producing the internal collapse of communism.

Soros’s use of the word dogma points to two critical elements of his thought: his fierce belief that ideas, more than economics, shape life, and his confidence in humanity’s capacity for progress. According to Soros, the dogmatic mode of thinking that characterised closed societies made it impossible for them to accommodate to the changing vicissitudes of history. Instead, “as actual conditions change”, people in closed societies were forced to abide by an atavistic ideology that was increasingly unpersuasive. When this dogma finally became too obviously disconnected from reality, Soros claimed, a revolution that overturned the closed society usually occurred. By contrast, open societies were dynamic and able to correct course whenever their dogmas strayed too far from reality.

As he witnessed the Soviet empire’s downfall between 1989 and 1991, Soros needed to answer a crucial strategic question: now that the closed societies of eastern Europe were opening, what was his foundation to do? On the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Soros published an updated version of Opening the Soviet System, titled Underwriting Democracy, which revealed his new strategy: he would dedicate himself to building permanent institutions that would sustain the ideas that motivated anticommunist revolutions, while modelling the practices of open society for the liberated peoples of eastern Europe. The most important of these was Central European University (CEU), which opened in Budapest in 1991. Funded by Soros, CEU was intended to serve as the wellspring for a new, transnational, European world – and the training ground for a new, transnational, European elite.

 

An activist removing an anti-Soros poster in Budapest, Hungary. Photograph: Bernadett Szabo/Reuters

How could Soros ensure that newly opened societies would remain free? Soros had come of age in the era of the Marshall Plan, and experienced American largesse firsthand in postwar London. To him, this experience showed that weakened and exhausted societies could not be rehabilitated without a substantial investment of foreign aid, which would alleviate extreme conditions and provide the minimum material base that would enable the right ideas about democracy and capitalism to flourish.

For this reason, in the late 80s and early 90s Soros repeatedly argued that “only the deus ex machina of western assistance” could make the eastern bloc permanently democratic. “People who have been living in a totalitarian system all their lives,” he claimed, “need outside assistance to turn their aspirations into reality.” Soros insisted that the US and western Europe give the countries of eastern Europe a substantial amount of pecuniary aid, provide them with access to the European Common Market, and promote cultural and educational ties between the west and the east “that befit a pluralistic society”. Once accomplished, Soros avowed, western Europe must welcome eastern Europe into the European community, which would prevent the continent’s future repartitioning.

Soros’s prescient pleas went unheeded. From the 1990s on, he has attributed the emergence of kleptocracy and hypernationalism in the former eastern bloc to the west’s lack of vision and political will during this crucial moment. “Democracies,” he lamented in 1995, seem to “suffer from a deficiency of values … [and] are notoriously unwilling to take any pain when their vital self-interests are not directly threatened.” For Soros, the west had failed in an epochal task, and in so doing had revealed its shortsightedness and fecklessness.

But it was more than a lack of political will that constrained the west during this moment. In the era of “shock therapy”, western capital did flock to eastern Europe – but this capital was invested mostly in private industry, as opposed to democratic institutions or grassroots community-building, which helped the kleptocrats and anti-democrats seize and maintain power. Soros had identified a key problem but was unable to appreciate how the very logic of capitalism, which stressed profit above all, would necessarily undermine his democratic project. He remained too wedded to the system he had conquered.

In the wake of the cold war, Soros dedicated himself to exploring the international problems that prevented the realisation of a global open society. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, in which a currency collapse in south-east Asia engendered a world economic downturn, Soros wrote books addressing the two major threats he believed beset open society: hyperglobalisation and market fundamentalism, both of which had become hegemonic after communism’s collapse.

Soros argued that the history of the post-cold war world, as well as his personal experiences as one of international finance’s most successful traders, demonstrated that unregulated global capitalism undermined open society in three distinct ways. First, because capital could move anywhere to avoid taxation, western nations were deprived of the finances they needed to provide citizens with public goods. Second, because international lenders were not subject to much regulation, they often engaged in “unsound lending practices” that threatened financial stability. Finally, because these realities increased domestic and international inequality, Soros feared they would encourage people to commit unspecified “acts of desperation” that could damage the global system’s viability.

Soros saw, far earlier than most of his fellow centre-leftists, the problems at the heart of the financialised and deregulated “new economy” of the 1990s and 2000s. More than any of his liberal peers, he recognised that embracing the most extreme forms of its capitalist ideology might lead the US to promote policies and practices that undermined its democracy and threatened stability both at home and abroad.

In Soros’s opinion, the only way to save capitalism from itself was to establish a “global system of political decision-making” that heavily regulated international finance. Yet as early as 1998, Soros acknowledged that the US was the primary opponent of global institutions; by this point in time, Americans had refused to join the International Court of Justice; had declined to sign the Ottawa treaty on banning landmines; and had unilaterally imposed economic sanctions when and where they saw fit. Still, Soros hoped that, somehow, American policymakers would accept that, for their own best interests, they needed to lead a coalition of democracies dedicated to “promoting the development of open societies [and] strengthening international law and the institutions needed for a global open society”.

But Soros had no programme for how to modify American elites’ increasing hostility to forms of internationalism that did not serve their own military might or provide them with direct and visible economic benefits. This was a significant gap in Soros’s thought, especially given his insistence on the primacy of ideas in engendering historical change. Instead of thinking through this problem, however, he simply declared that “change would have to begin with a change of attitudes, which would be gradually translated into a change of policies”. Soros’s status as a member of the hyper-elite and his belief that, for all its hiccups, history was headed in the right direction made him unable to consider fully the ideological obstacles that stood in the way of his internationalism.

The George W Bush administration’s militarist response to the attacks of September 11 compelled Soros to shift his attention from economics to politics. Everything about the Bush administration’s ideology was anathema to Soros. As Soros declared in his 2004 The Bubble of American Supremacy, Bush and his coterie embraced “a crude form of social Darwinism” that assumed that “life is a struggle for survival, and we must rely mainly on the use of force to survive”. Whereas before September 11, “the excesses of [this] false ideology were kept within bounds by the normal functioning of our democracy”, after it Bush “deliberately fostered the fear that has gripped the country” to silence opposition and win support for a counterproductive policy of militaristic unilateralism. To Soros, assertions such as “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” eerily echoed the rhetoric of the Nazis and Soviets, which he hoped to have left behind in Europe. Soros worried, wisely, that Bush would lead the nation into “a permanent state of war” characterised by foreign intervention and domestic oppression. The president was thus not only a threat to world peace, but also to the very idea of open society.

Nevertheless, Soros was confident that Bush’s “extremist ideology” did not correspond “to the beliefs and values of the majority of Americans”, and he expected that John Kerry would win the 2004 presidential election. Kerry’s victory, Soros anticipated, would spur “a profound reconsideration of America’s role in the world” that would lead citizens to reject unilateralism and embrace international cooperation.

But Kerry did not win, which forced the philanthropist to question, for the first time, ordinary Americans’ political acumen. After the 2004 election, Soros underwent something like a crisis of faith. In his 2006 book The Age of Fallibility, Soros attributed Bush’s re-election to the fact that the US was “a ‘feel-good’ society unwilling to face unpleasant reality”. Americans, Soros avowed, would rather be “grievously misled by the Bush administration” than confront the failures of Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror head-on. Because they were influenced by market fundamentalism and its obsession with “success”, Soros continued, Americans were eager to accept politicians’ claims that the nation could win something as absurd as a war on terror.

Bush’s victory convinced Soros that the US would survive as an open society only if Americans began to acknowledge “that the truth matters”; otherwise, they would continue to support the war on terror and its concomitant horrors. How Soros could change American minds, though, remained unclear.

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 encouraged Soros to refocus on economics. The collapse did not surprise him; he considered it the predictable consequence of market fundamentalism. Rather, it convinced him that the world was about to witness, as he declared in his 2008 book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, “the end of a long period of relative stability based on the US as the dominant power and the dollar as the main international reserve currency”.

Anticipating American decline, Soros started to place his hopes for a global open society on the European Union, despite his earlier anger at the union’s members for failing to fully welcome eastern Europe in the 90s. Though he admitted that the EU had serious problems, it was nevertheless an organisation in which nations voluntarily “agreed to a limited delegation of sovereignty” for the common European good. It thus provided a regional model for a world order based on the principles of open society.

Soros’s hopes in the EU, however, were quickly dashed by three crises that undercut the union’s stability: the ever-deepening international recession, the refugee crisis, and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist assault on norms and international law. While Soros believed western nations could theoretically mitigate these crises, he concluded that, in a repetition of the failures of the post-Soviet period, they were unlikely to band together to do so. In the last 10 years, Soros has been disappointed by the facts that the west refused to forgive Greece’s debt; failed to develop a common refugee policy; and would not consider augmenting sanctions on Russia with the material and financial support Ukraine required to defend itself after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. He was further disturbed that many nations in the EU, from the UK to Poland, witnessed the re-emergence of a rightwing ethnonationalism thought lost to history. Once Britain voted to leave the union in 2016, he became convinced that “the disintegration of the EU [was] practically irreversible”. The EU did not serve as the model Soros hoped it would.

 

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban in parliament for a vote on the ‘Stop Soros’ anti-immigration laws that he introduced. Photograph: Tamas Kaszas/Reuters

Soros experienced firsthand the racialised authoritarianism that in the last decade has threatened not only the EU, but democracy in Europe generally. Since 2010, the philanthropist has repeatedly sparred with Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian, anti-immigrant prime minister of Hungary. Recently, Soros accused Orbán of “trying to re-establish the kind of sham democracy that prevailed [in Hungary] in the period between the first and second world wars”. In his successful re-election campaign earlier this year, Orbán spent much of his time on the campaign trail demonising Soros, playing on antisemitic tropes and claiming that Soros was secretly plotting to send millions of immigrants to Hungary. Orbán has also threatened the Central European University – which his government derisively refers to as “the Soros university” – with closure, and last month parliament passed new anti-immigration legislation known as the “Stop Soros” laws.

But while Orbán threatens Hungary’s open society, it is Donald Trump who threatens the open society writ large. Soros has attributed Trump’s victory to the deleterious effects market fundamentalism and the Great Recession had on American society. In a December 2016 op-ed, Soros argued that Americans voted for Trump, “a con artist and would-be dictator”, because “elected leaders failed to meet voters’ legitimate expectations and aspirations [and] this failure led electorates to become disenchanted with the prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism”.

Instead of fairly distributing the wealth created by globalisation, Soros argued, capitalism’s “winners” failed to “compensate the losers”, which led to a drastic increase in domestic inequality – and anger. Though Soros believed that the US’s “Constitution and institutions … are strong enough to resist the excesses of the executive branch”, he worried that Trump would form alliances with Putin, Orbán and other authoritarians, which would make it near-impossible to build a global open society. In Hungary, the US and many of the parts of the world that have attracted Soros’s attention and investment, it is clear that his project has stalled.

Soros’s path ahead is unclear. On one hand, some of Soros’s latest actions suggest he has moved in a left-wing direction, particularly in the areas of criminal justice reform and refugee aid. He recently created a fund to assist the campaign of Larry Krasner, the radical Philadelphia district attorney, and backed three California district-attorney candidates similarly devoted to prosecutorial reform. He has also invested $500m to alleviate the global refugee crisis.

On the other hand, some of his behaviour indicates that Soros remains committed to a traditional Democratic party ill-equipped to address the problems that define our moment of crisis. During the 2016 Democratic primary race, he was an avowed supporter of Hillary Clinton. And recently, he lambasted potential Democratic presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand for urging Al Franken to resign due to his sexual harassment of the radio host Leeann Tweeden. If Soros continues to fund truly progressive projects, he will make a substantial contribution to the open society; but if he decides to defend banal Democrats, he will contribute to the ongoing degradation of American public life.

Throughout his career, Soros has made a number of wise and exciting interventions. From a democratic perspective, though, this single wealthy person’s ability to shape public affairs is catastrophic. Soros himself has recognised that “the connection between capitalism and democracy is tenuous at best”. The problem for billionaires like him is what they do with this information. The open society envisions a world in which everyone recognises each other’s humanity and engages each other as equals. If most people are scraping for the last pieces of an ever-shrinking pie, however, it is difficult to imagine how we can build the world in which Soros – and, indeed, many of us – would wish to live. Presently, Soros’s cosmopolitan dreams remain exactly that. The question is why, and the answer might very well be that the open society is only possible in a world where no one – whether Soros, or Gates, or DeVos, or Zuckerberg, or Buffett, or Musk, or Bezos – is allowed to become as rich as he has.

Auditors and Directors failed Carillion

Nils Pratley in The Guardian

Apart from the junior director who tried to speak against the delusion in Carillion’s boardroom, nobody emerges with credit from the two select committees’ post-mortem on the contracting firm. The other directors, led by chairman Philip Green, chief executive Richard Howson and finance director Richard Adam, were directly responsible for the failure because they were either “negligently ignorant of the rotten culture” or complicit in it. But the entire system of checks and balances failed.

The auditors, KPMG, were useless, as was the audit industry’s passive regulator. The government, in the form of the Crown Representative, was asleep. The Pensions Regulator was feeble. City advisers to Carillion were paid to be supine. Big shareholders were not inquisitive. None of those judgments will surprise those who followed the evidence sessions, but the MPs’ report will count for little unless it forces action from government. Three areas are priorities.

First, reform the auditing industry. The public lost faith in auditors when HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed without a squeak of warning from the people signing off the accounts. Now there’s Carillion, where the report accuses KMPG, which had the auditing gig for 19 years, of failing to exercise professional scepticism – the basic requirement of the job.

The MPs’ prescription is not original, but is correct. Get the Competition and Markets Authority to look at two specific proposals: a breakup of the big four auditors or a separation of the auditing arms from their consultancy operations.

Concentration in this market has now reached absurd levels – the big four are auditors to 97% of FTSE 350 companies. Carillion perfectly illustrated the closed shop in action. KMPG approved the accounts, Deloitte advised the board on risk management, and EY was consulted on turnaround plans. That left the field clear for PwC to name its price as adviser to the Official Receiver.Quick guide
All you need to know about CarillionShow

A proper shakeup of the industry would probably mean an increase in the cost of audits, but that will be money well spent if it means more competition and higher standards. “KPMG’s long and complacent tenure auditing Carillion was not an isolated failure,” says the report. “It was symptomatic of a market which works for members of the oligopoly but fails the wider economy.” Spot on.

Second, ministers need to understand the risks they take when they outsource work to companies of Carillion’s size. The failed firm had 450 government contracts and the Crown Representative, looking out for taxpayers’ interests, had no insight into how badly things were going wrong. The huge profit warning in July 2017, which marked the beginning of the end, was a complete shock in Whitehall.

The report is short on specific proposals, other than telling ministers to appreciate that “the cheapest bid is not always the best”. But there are good ideas around, and some have even come from the contractors’ side of fence.

Rupert Soames, the chief executive who led the rescue of Serco to prevent an earlier Carillion-style calamity, has suggested a few: open-book accounting so that the Cabinet Office and National Audit Office have the numbers; bank-style “living wills” so that contracts can be handed back to government without huge costs to the public purse; and a code of conduct that, on the supplier’s side, would involve conservative financing, timely payment of subcontractors, and adequately funded pension schemes.

The government is free to demand all that and more. It just requires the penny to drop that, when you’re buying £200bn of goods and services from the private sector each year, you can change the way business is conducted.

The third priority is pensions, since Carillion dumped an £800m liability on the industry lifeboat. The Pensions Regulator’s threats were hollow and its bluff was called, the report says. The directors were allowed to keep paying a dividend to shareholders that was plainly unaffordable.

It’s now too late for excuses or pleas about insufficient powers. The MPs’ hard judgment is that “a tentative and apologetic approach is ingrained” at the regulator and “the current leadership” may not be equipped for cultural change. That sounds like a call for Lesley Titcomb, the chief executive, to go. It would be personally tough on her, since she arrived in 2015, by which time the worst mistakes on Carillion had been made, but she should take the hint. A pensions regulator needs to be feared.

The overall report is impressive – it drips with anger and is strong on detail. It would be disgrace if it fell between the cracks of Brexit. It is essential that the government makes a point-by-point response – starting with the auditors, who escaped from the scene of the banking catastrophe but whose moment in the spotlight is now.

How do batsmen cope with the intensity of their lonely skill?

Digging the pitch, repetitive body movements, talking to themselves, superstitious behaviour, visualisation - different ways that batsmen deal with the pressure of their profession


Michael Bond in Cricinfo


All sportspeople like to imagine that their discipline is the most mentally challenging, that winning or losing comes from within. But batsmen have a stronger claim than most. What other sport demands such intense concentration, affords participants so little control over their situation and penalises mistakes so cruelly and with such dramatic ritual?

Batting is a game of life and death like no other. Success - a century, a match-saving last stand - can live with you forever. But getting out feels like the end of everything: you are dismissed not just from the field of play, but from your own dreams of hopefulness and redemption.

---Also read

THE MASKS WE WEAR

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Dismissed batsmen are like mourners at their own funerals. The dressing room falls silent as they return, "in respect for the dead", as Mike Brearley puts it in The Art of Captaincy (1985).

"There aren't many situations in sport where you have this challenge of one tiny mistake and that's it, finished, the rest of the day you're watching from the sidelines," says sports psychologist Steve Bull, who worked with the England cricket team for 17 years. "It creates a particular type of pressure which I don't think other athletes experience."

Given the intensity of the mental drama, it is little wonder that a batsman's struggles are with himself as much as with the bowler he faces, and that a lack of confidence can invite negative thinking and a fear of failure. For top-level batsmen with near-perfect technical skills, protecting themselves from such tendencies is critical. The methods they use to reduce anxiety, stay positive and maintain focus are idiosyncratic, often eccentric and tell us as much about the quirks of the human mind as the nuances of cricket.

If you watched England's three-match Test series against Sri Lanka this summer, you will have spotted a graphic example of one of these methods. Before each ball, the Sri Lankan opener Kaushal Silva performs what psychologists call a "pre-performance routine". He adjusts the velcro on his gloves, moves his bat from his left to his right hand and holds it up in front of him, moves his left elbow back and forth eight times (fewer if he's facing a spinner) as if pulling on an imaginary rope, then, gripping his bat with both hands, arches his back before settling into his crease.

The repetition looks neurotic, but Silva has developed it to help him feel settled. "I don't really count the exact number of times I do it, it just comes from my body," he says. "I do it until I have calmed my nerves and I feel OK and I'm really focused. These small things help me to be myself and to just concentrate on the next ball."

It seems to be working. Sri Lanka lost 0-2, but Silva won his team's Player-of-the-Series award for his 193 runs.

Most batsmen have pre-performance routines, though few as elaborate as Silva's. They might wander a few steps towards square leg, tap the bat on the ground a particular way or pull at their shirt. What psychological purpose does this serve? Brearley thinks it's "a way of clearing the mind of the last ball, getting on with the next one, making clear to oneself that a line needs to be drawn under the last one".

In Jonathan Trott's case this is literally true. He marks his guard with a shallow trench, which he reinforces before each delivery, as if to bury everything that's gone before, a habit he repeats whether he's batting in the nets or in a county or international game.

Such repetition is critical to why routines work, says Bull. "It has to be 100% consistent, every ball always the same. You need to get your routines habitualised to the point where you don't think about them, to practise them so that when you're in the middle you go into automatic pilot."

In other words, batsmen should tune their mental routines alongside their physical ones so that the two coalesce. Consider Kevin Pietersen's advice to a 12-year-old budding cricketer who asked him on Twitter how to stop "second-guessing" himself when playing a shot, a common mental error among cricketers still developing their technique. "Practise, practise, practise, and trust your practise," Pietersen replied. "Hardest thing to do but when you do it changes your game."

Perhaps the most tangible function of routines is that they give the batsman a sense of control over a situation which, for the most part, is out of their hands. The state of the wicket, the weather, the path of the ball through the air and off the pitch are beyond his reckoning; his pre-ball ritual is all his own. This need for control amid so much uncertainty may explain why batsmen are particularly prone to superstitions. Unlike a pre-performance routine, a superstition - essentially an irrational belief in implausible causality - is unlikely to improve performance. Yet cricket is full of them.

The Glamorgan opener Steve James avoided eating duck meat until he retired, and he wouldn't allow his daughter to have plastic ducks in her bath. Mike Atherton had to be first on to the field at the start of an innings, even if it meant barging past his opening partner on the way down the pavilion steps. The South African batsman Neil McKenzie used to tape his bat to the dressing-room ceiling because his team-mates had once done this as a practical joke prior to him scoring a century. Steve Waugh batted with a red rag in his pocket for similar reasons.

Derek Randall, like many batsmen, hated being on 13. "I couldn't wait to get off it," he says. "Sometimes I'd get out because I was trying too hard to get off the blooming thing."

Ed Smith, one of the most notoriously superstitious cricketers, had a habit of asking the umpire, mid-over, how many balls were left. For the first part of his career he did this always after the fourth ball, then switched to asking after the third ball. Since he batted for around 15,000 overs in his career, he must have asked this question of the umpire around 15,000 times.

"It was silly and I knew it," he writes in Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune (2012). "It was unintelligent and I knew it. It was a source of mirth and I knew it. But I did it anyway. Superstition was a dependency I found hard to give up."

Many batsmens' superstitions revolve around an obsession with their kit. Trott is scrupulous about how he arranges his bats. Atherton always followed the same padding-up routine: box, chest guard, inside thigh-pad, outside thigh-pad, left pad, right pad, arm guard, gloves, helmet. This kind of fastidiousness is not too surprising since batting is much about organisation, repetition and structure.

Yet rigorously adhering to a ritual is unlikely to put you in the runs and could make things worse. "If the superstition is something you might not have control over, like wearing your lucky socks, what happens when you lose your lucky socks or they fall apart," says sports psychologist Stewart Cotterill. "It will have the opposite effect: you'll feel you're not ready."

Once all the fussing and the rituals and the routines are done and the batsman is settled at the crease, he can then focus on the bowling. This is where the real test begins. Unless you are an expert meditator, paying close sustained attention to something for long periods can be mentally draining. To deal with this, coaches encourage batsmen to "dial up" their focus when the bowler is running in and "dial down" between balls.

Atherton says switching on and off like this is "absolutely vital" and came easily to him, a naturally relaxed character. "All studies show you can't concentrate for lengthy periods without a break. The ball is 'live' for maybe six to ten seconds, so that is all you have to concentrate for."

Silva pares down the window of concentration even further, to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. He calculates that this way, if he sets out to score a century in, say, 180 to 200 balls, he will have to concentrate deeply for just ten to 15 minutes. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier. You don't worry about the long term, you just focus on the particular ball."

"Mental skills are like physical skills. You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives"

STEVE BULL, SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST

The thought of surviving hours at the crease can seem overwhelming if you don't break it down.

Tammy Beaumont, who this summer became the first woman to hit back-to-back ODI centuriesfor England, during the series against Pakistan, worries only about the next five runs. "I'll tell myself: get to five, once I get to five get to ten, keep it like that, keep it all about the next ball."

Another approach is to segment time. Brearley and Randall did this during the Centenary Testbetween England and Australia in Melbourne in 1977. Needing 463 to win with a wicket down, they decided to take it in 15-minute sections. "Stick at it, Skip. In ten minutes there'll only be 15 minutes to tea," Brearley recalls Randall saying, in The Art of Captaincy. They lost by 45 runs; Randall scored 174.

You don't have to be an international or even a professional cricketer to benefit from these mental heuristics. Bull says the key difference between elite and "Sunday afternoon batsmen" is that "Sunday afternoon batsmen tend to overcomplicate things. They're standing there tapping the ground as the bowler runs in, thinking about where the fields are, thinking about their left-hand grip, where their shoulders are. The best players in the world are just standing there saying: watch the ball."

Mental routines are a way to simplify things, to shut out technical thoughts, memories of mistimed shots and other internal distractions, and to help the batsman settle into a state of readiness that Bull calls "relaxed alertness". But routines alone may not be enough, especially in international games where the pressures can be immense. To settle nerves and maintain confidence through an innings, many batsmen engage in what used to be considered a symptom of mental illness but is now recognised as fully functional: talking to yourself.

In a 2013 study at an English first-class cricket club, psychologists at Cardiff Metropolitan University found that batsmen used self-talk regularly, either to motivate themselves in challenging situations - when walking out to bat, for example, or after a poor shot - or to deliver instructional cues that focus attention, such as "Watch the ball!"

In fact, "Watch the ball" seems to be the default cue for most batsmen. Ricky Ponting used it. You can sometimes see Eoin Morgan mouthing it before a ball. Beaumont, after watching one of Ponting's masterclasses, adopted it then adapted it - her current cue is "Time the ball, play straight". Easy if you know how.

One of the most notorious self-talkers in cricket history is Randall. He did it constantly and out loud. "It was spontaneous, it was a natural thing to do. When I'm nervous I start talking. It would help me concentrate. It annoyed everybody, including the people who played with me."

During the fourth Test of the 1978-79 Ashes, when Randall scored 150 during the second innings and turned the series in England's favour, his monologue continued throughout the nine hours and 42 minutes he spent at the crease. Here's a snatch of it, as related to Sunday Times journalist Dudley Doust by his opponents and team-mates: "Come on, Rags," he says. "Get stuck in. Don't take any chances. Get forward, get forward. Get behind the ball. Take your time, slow and easy. You idiot, Rags. Come on, come. Come on, England."

Younis Khan, who averages 53.72 in Test cricket and is Pakistan's highest-ever run scorer, also talks to himself all the time when he's at the wicket. But he has a slightly different approach to most, conducting his conversations with an alter ego that he conjures up as he goes out to bat.

"I imagine there is a guy standing in front of me and he is Younis Khan, and just talk with him. It's like there are two Younis Khans standing face to face like a boxer, and they are talking and looking each other in the eyes. Come on, Younis Khan, you can do this, you can do that."

Self-talk can keep you focused, and it can also help maintain confidence, without which batting can feel like Russian roulette. Mark Ramprakash, the England men's batting coach, says confidence and self-belief are "absolutely paramount. They can work wonders: they can make up for a less-than-perfect technique. The thing with cricket is that you have a lot of bad days. You make one wrong decision, or someone takes a great catch. The best players, like Alastair Cook, are incredibly resilient to those bad days. They maintain a belief in their own ability."

Ramprakash himself suffered a crisis of belief early on in his England career when he failed to make a big score and began to question whether he belonged at Test level. Then in 1998 he started working with Bull, brought in by England as team psychologist.

"He gave me a very simple framework of coping with all the scrambled thoughts that were going on in my head," says Ramprakash.

Silva pares down the window of concentration to three or four seconds, switching on only when the bowler is halfway through his run-up. "So it's 15 minutes to get 100 runs. If you cut it down like this then it will be easier"

It proved pivotal. Soon after meeting Bull he scored 154 against West Indies in Barbados - his first Test century - and then topped the averages the following winter in Australia. His team-mate Atherton, writing in his autobiography, said he sensed at the time that Ramprakash was "a totally different person, and consequently, player".

Today the mental side of batting and the pressures that come with playing at international level are taken very seriously by England's management, due in no small part to Ramprakash's influence. Yet confidence is a fickle trait. Sometimes it's necessary to fake it to make it, so to speak. Psychologists have known for decades that feelings and emotions stem from changes in the body, rather than the other way round - a phenomenon known as embodied cognition - which means it's possible to generate confidence simply by acting it out.

"Shadow batting" - practising sublime strokes between balls - or walking out to bat with head held high, can have a positive effect on the way you play. The sports psychologist Jamie Barker, who works with Nottinghamshire Cricket Club and the ECB's performance programme, makes a point of getting players to focus on their body language as they leave the pavilion, to appear confident even if they don't feel it: "If you're assertive, your brain will pick up on that."

Another way of "faking" confidence is to visualise the way you want to play in your mind's eye before the game begins. In 1974, early in his career, Randall suffered four first-class innings in a row without scoring a run. "It was a nightmare," he says. "The pressure just builds on you." So on the morning of his fifth innings he got up early and arrived at the ground while it was still deserted, strapped on his pads, walked out to the middle, played a cover drive and took a run, "just to remember what it was like". He scored 93 that day.

Ramprakash encourages England's batsmen to use this kind of visualisation, which serves as a cognitive rehearsal for the main event. There is much evidence that it works. One problem with all these approaches is that worrying too much about your own performance can easily make things worse. Steven Sylvester, Middlesex's psychologist and author of the recent book Detox Your Ego(2016), thinks that for players at the top of their game what really matters is "where your heart is, why am I here?"

The important thing, he says, is to believe at an emotional level that you are playing not for yourself but for your team or your country, or some other ideal that transcends you. "When players start to think about their performance as serving the group it increases their self-esteem, their belief goes up and they become a bit freer in their skills. It gives them a little bit extra."

In 2013, Sylvester helped Australia and Middlesex batsman Chris Rogers after he was called up to the Ashes squad more than five years after his previous Test. "It became blindingly obvious that his fear of representing his country in the Ashes as an opening batsman was stopping him from moving forward," he says. "Through a deep discussion of how to serve his country he came up with a more compelling reason to doing well than if it was just about him."

Sylvester coached Moeen Ali through a similar process, helping him put his cricket in the context of his faith and his desire to be a role model. The Pakistan batsman Asad Shafiq, who has scored eight Test centuries at No. 6 - a world record - gives an equally compelling reason for his own success: "To bat at No. 6 you have to be patient, as most of the time the tailenders are with you. You have to give them confidence and support."

Shafiq is batting not just for himself, but for Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 as well. He epitomises CLR James' portrait in his classic Beyond a Boundary (1963) of the batsman as the ultimate team player. When facing the ball, writes James, he "does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side."

Without doubt, all batsmen can improve their confidence, resilience and other mental attributes if they're willing to practise. "Mental skills are like physical skills," says Bull. "You have to work at them relentlessly. You have to challenge your brain to get better at blocking out the negatives and replacing them with positives."

Yet it also seems clear that some people are inherently better at this than others. In 2005, Bull carried out a psychological analysis of 12 English cricketers from the previous two decades whom county coaches had identified as the toughest mentally in the country. Among them were Atherton, Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart. Bull found them all to be highly competitive and motivated, full of self-confidence and with a never-say-die attitude, some of which derived from their upbringing, some from the teams they had played with and some from their personality.

For the rest of us, it is comforting to know that we can learn such skills - and that even the greats can struggle at times. Even Don Bradman called batting "a nerve-racking business". In The Art of Cricket (1958), he implores us to give a thought to the batsman's travails as he wends his way to the wicket: "He is human like you, and desperately anxious to do well."