Never Meet Your Hero

The saying "Never meet your hero" is a cautionary advice that suggests it's best to avoid meeting or getting too close to someone you greatly admire or look up to. The underlying idea is that meeting them in person may shatter the idealized image you have of them, leading to disappointment, disillusionment, or a loss of respect.

Here are a few reasons why this saying holds some truth:

1. Idealization: When we admire someone from a distance, we tend to create an idealized version of them in our minds. We focus on their achievements, talents, and positive qualities. However, meeting them in person may reveal their flaws, shortcomings, or simply the fact that they are human like everyone else. This contrast between the idealized image and reality can be disheartening.

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3. Unmet Expectations: Meeting your hero can come with high expectations. You might anticipate an extraordinary experience or hope for a deep personal connection. However, in reality, the interaction may not live up to your expectations. They may not meet your assumptions or be as interested in engaging with you as you had hoped. This discrepancy can be disappointing and lead to a sense of letdown.

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5. Human Imperfection: Heroes, like all humans, have their flaws and make mistakes. By meeting them, you become more aware of their imperfections, which can tarnish the pedestal on which you had placed them. You might discover they hold different beliefs, behave in ways that clash with your values, or have made questionable decisions. This revelation can be disillusioning and alter your perception of them.

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7. Loss of Mystery: Part of the allure of heroes lies in the mystery and intrigue surrounding them. When you meet them and learn more about their personal lives, their struggles, and their everyday routines, the enigma may dissipate. This loss of mystery can diminish the charm and fascination you had felt toward them.

It's important to note that while this saying holds some truth, it doesn't mean that meeting your hero will always result in disappointment. Some people have positive experiences and develop deeper admiration and respect for their heroes after meeting them. However, the saying serves as a reminder to be prepared for the possibility that reality may not match your expectations, and it encourages appreciating and respecting people for their accomplishments while acknowledging their humanity.

Niall Ferguson | Ukraine, Zelensky, Putin & China

 

Indian Matchmaking Only Scratches the Surface of a Big Problem - A Critique

Sonia Saraiya in Vanity Fair

Every reality show has at least one villain. In Indian Matchmaking, that villain is 34-year-old Aparna Shewakramani, a prospective bride who’s critical of every man she meets and vocal about disliking things like the beach, relaxing, and podcasts. Early on, she tells the camera she hasn’t regretted a decision she’s made since the age of three. In her finest moment, presented with a suitor with a sense of humor, she sighs: “You know how I hate comedy.”

In reality, Aparna’s probably not as insufferable as she seems. But her apparent unsuitability for the dating world makes her a perfect subject for Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai–based matchmaker Sima Taparia as she tries to get every single and reasonably well-to-do Indian in her path married to a heterosexual partner of her, and their parents’, choosing.

Okay, I’m being a little flippant. As Sima and the show itself frequently remind us, arranged marriage is not quite the form of social control it used to be; everyone here emphasizes that they have the right to choose or refuse the matches presented to them. But as becomes especially clear when Sima works in India, that choice is frequently and rather roughly pressured by an anvil of social expectations and family duty.

In the most extreme case, a 25-year-old prospective groom named Akshay Jakhete is practically bullied by his mother, Preeti, into choosing a bride. Somehow, she claims, Akshay’s failure to choose a bride by the ripe old age of 25 is a disappointment to his parents, an obstacle to the conception of his older brother’s as yet nonexistent firstborn baby, even a drag on Preeti’s own physical health. She breaks out her home blood pressure monitor, telling him that her high numbers are a direct result of the stress he’s causing her. I’ve always thought of my mom as a champion of desi guilt, but Preeti really puts her to shame. (It should be said that despite all of this, Akshay says on the show that his ideal bride is “someone just like my mother.”)

Indian Matchmaking smartly reclaims and updates the arranged marriage myth for the 21st century, demystifying the process and revealing how much romance and heartache is baked into the process even when older adults are meddling every step of the way. But for me, at least, the show’s value is as a vibrant validation of how brutal the gauntlet of Indian matchmaking can be—a practice that begins with your parents’ friends and relatives gossiping about you as a teenager and only intensifies as you get older. Though these families use a matchmaker, the matching process is one the entire community and culture is invested in. In this context, romance is not a private matter; your love life is everyone’s business.

Let’s start by clearing up some terminology. Netflix’s unscripted show is called Indian Matchmaking, but it takes place both in India and America, with matchmaker Sima, based in Mumbai, flying back and forth as well as handling clients via FaceTime. The Indians and immigrants represented aren’t really a cross section of the country’s vast diversity: The show focuses almost entirely on upper-caste, well-to-do, North Indian Hindu families. (That’s also my background, so Indian Matchmaking is playing tennis in my backyard.) A few families show off a level of wealth that borders on obscene: At one point, Preeti pulls out a king’s ransom of precious jewelry, emeralds and diamonds and gold, and proudly brags that the display is just “20%” of what her future daughter-in-law will inherit on her wedding day.   

Altogether, it’s a little alarming that Indian Matchmaking features not a single Muslim match, just one or two individuals with heritage from South India, and only one whom we could call low-caste, though the show takes pains to not present it so bluntly.

Director Smriti Mundhra told Jezebel that she pitched the show around Sima, who works with an exclusive set of clients. Perhaps that narrow focus expresses more about the stratification of Indian culture than it does about the producers’ biases—but Indian Matchmaking touches lightly on the culture that creates these biases. The most explicit it gets is with the story of event planner Nadia Jagessar, who tells the camera she’s struggled to find a match in the past because she’s Guyanese Indian. This is code for a number of conditions: Nadia’s family, originally Indian, immigrated to Guyana in the 1800s, along with a vast influx of indentured Indian labor shipped around the world after the British outlawed slavery. Many consider them low-caste, or not “really” Indian; there is a suspicion of their heritage being mixed, carrying with it the stigma of being tainted. Yet the show merely explains that for many Indian men, bright, bubbly, beautiful Nadia is not a suitable match.

The parents task Sima with following multiple stringent expectations. Some are understandably cultural, perhaps: A preference for a certain language or religion, or for astrological compatibility, which remains significant for many Hindus. Other preferences, though, are little more than discrimination. They demand that prospective brides be “slim,” “fair,” and “tall,” a ruthless standard for female beauty that’s also racialized—and while the demands are most exacting in India, they are not exclusive to the subcontinent. Houston–based Aparna, for example, euphemistically states her preference for a “North Indian”—which might sound innocent enough to the average listener, but to me sounded like just another way of saying light-skinned. In the final episode, a new participant, Richa, makes it explicit: “not too dark, you know, like fair-skinned.” As Mallika Rao writes at Vulture, it’s not exactly surprising, but whew.

Divorced clients are also subjected to particularly harsh judgment. Sima bluntly tells one fetching single mom, Rupam, that she would typically never take on a client like her. The options she finds for Rupam are pointedly, pathetically slim pickings; Rupam ends up leaving the matchmaking process after meeting a prospective match on Bumble instead.

In Delhi, Ankita Bansal’s story takes on multiple dimensions of exclusion and judgment. She’s both a career woman and one who doesn’t adhere to the Indian beauty standard; previous efforts to find a match have returned the feedback that she’s too independent or not attractive enough. Which is mind-boggling, because Ankita is gorgeous. But she’s also darker, curvier, and shorter than is ideal, and the fact that she started and runs her own company is a threat to men who are looking for a wife to run their household.

To Ankita’s credit, she rejects suggestions that she needs to change herself; she’s become a sort of heroine for Indian Matchmaking viewers, who cheer her for speaking out against this process’s constrictive standards while trying to find love. During her first date on the show, though, Ankita hits it off with a suitor only to have a meltdown, a few scenes later, upon learning that he’s divorced. Granted, some of the anxiety seems to stem from the matchmakers not informing her before their date that he had previously been married. But the failure of what was otherwise a charming first date goes toward illustrating how harsh the stigma can be in Indian matchmaking—and how discrimination cuts both ways. 

What I want from Indian Matchmaking is probably impossible: Not just an exploration of arranged marriage, but a true reckoning with its limitations. Mundhra, the director, addressed some of these limitations in her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl. But Indian Matchmaking turns the tradition’s hypocrisies and frailties into a carnivalesque background for individual stories to take place in front of. To a degree, that’s how it works for those of us who are in the culture; whether or not you participate, the expectations and biases of arranged marriage are always just an arm’s length away. But it’s charitable—outright propaganda, arguably—to frame it merely as a fun, silly circus of chattering parents and matchmakers with spreadsheets.

The proponents of arranged marriage are quick to point to India’s low divorce rate and various success stories—and undoubtedly, in the past and today, there are countless happy couples who were set up through some version of traditional matchmaking. But that doesn’t change the fact that arranged marriage is a family-sanctioned form of social control—a way for a community’s elders to enforce certain norms onto their children. Quite literally, it regulates reproduction by determining the bounds of their descendants’ gene pool. It diminishes the individual’s personal choice in favor of the collective’s stability.

To many young men and women looking to get married, that’s precisely the appeal: They love their families, and want to match with someone who will mesh with the religion, traditions, and values that they practice. As Sima says frequently in Indian Matchmaking, a wedding unites two families, so it’s only natural that the two families would have a say in what happens to their child. Yet this sunny view of arranged marriage glosses over a lot of potential complications, ranging from individual heartache and loss to the wholesale porting of familial dysfunction and despair from one generation to the next. The stigma around divorce is so high—the show does not dance around that, at least—that the choice of partner is typically permanent, regardless of how unsuitable a pair might be for each other. The combination of tradition and unhappiness can be extremely dangerous: In 2005, India’s large-scale National Family Health Survey found that over 37% of women in India had experienced some kind of physical or sexual spousal abuse. Beyond violence, women in India are often cut off from access to household funds, and are not permitted to make decisions up to and including family planning.

It is the great irony of a country that churns out love songs in its melodramatic Bollywood musicals, that turns weddings into three-, five-, or seven-day affairs: Indian marriage is frequently unhappy and unequal—less romantic, more another building block in a patriarchal society. Yet the passion for traditional arranged marriage is so intense that when couples marry outside the strictures of their familial norms, they may be disowned or ostracized. And as the show never even acknowledges, there is no place in arranged marriages—or much of traditional Indian society—for any sort of queer partnership.

This last detail might be why Pradhyuman Maloo, a self-described “rich pretty boy,” is both one of the show’s more loathsome characters and possibly one of its heroes. His well-connected family is eager for him to get married; a bevy of dark-skinned service staff hover out of frame in every scene. He’s a professional jewelry designer and enthusiastic amateur chef, with impeccable hair in every scene. Pradhyuman has reportedly been offered more than 150 proposals from eligible girls, and has turned every single one down. On one hand, he seems like a self-centered asshole—at one point, he tells his sister he feels deep love only for himself. On the other hand, you wish someone on the show would simply ask him if he’s even interested in women.

Irony isn’t dead: None of the participants in Indian Matchmaking found a spouse on the show. The eight-episode first season doesn’t end so much as run out of time—but there’s plenty of room for a season two, if Netflix wants one.

In the meantime, I’m left with my own thoughts. My parents had an arranged marriage, and it has been an unhappy one. I decided at a young age I wouldn’t go through the same process, with all the confidence and American privilege only a five year old can have. Neither my refusal nor their own unhappiness stopped my parents from trying to set me up—more and more feverishly as I passed 30 and still hadn’t “settled down,” as they put it.

It wasn’t just them—it was everyone. I wore high heels and a sari to a pre-event for a cousin’s wedding in India and got a marriage proposal by the end of the day, from another guest who had a relative in America. My cousin told me I should have expected it because I wore clothes that looked so adult. I was barely 22. An American college student has no context for marriage proposals from complete strangers; I didn’t even know how to talk about this phenomenon with friends. I just did my best to ignore it.

At a low point for all of us, my mom made a profile for me on shaadi.com, a popular matchmaking site for Indians abroad. I was a little astounded to find not only was she messaging potential suitors—“everyone does it for their kids,” she informed me—but that she’d also radically altered my physical type for the website; I had grown a couple of inches taller and lost 30 pounds. Weight came up again and again in this world. I grudgingly went on a date organized by my mom’s cousin, only to discover after we decidedly had no sparks that the guy I met had to be talked into meeting someone who weighed more than 125 pounds.

I did get married; my matchmaker was Tinder, and to my delight, my husband satisfies none of the search criteria my mother put into the shaadi.com search engine. I’m lucky that my parents came around to having a white son-in-law, and I know that if he were Black, Muslim, or low-caste, it would have been a much harder path to acceptance. He and I watched Indian Matchmaking together, and though the show has its limitations, I am grateful that it offered him a window into the pressures I grew up with. (He says while he would like to end up with me in “all possible timelines,” he would also pay good money to see me on the show.)

My parents have split up now, which is still incredibly uncommon, even in the Indian diaspora. But it interested me that in Indian Matchmaking, two different participants have parents who divorced: Aparna’s one, and a charming, nerdy guy named Vyasar Ganesan is the other. Even where the arranged marriage model hasn’t worked, the appetite for it is outsized.

Indian culture makes marriage so central to society—and so vital to an individual’s path—that it tends to ignore the potential downsides. The people who don’t fit into tradition’s methodology get sifted out, left not just without a picture-perfect marriage but without the acceptance and cultural identity that accompany it. I know that by opting out of the arranged marriage pathway, I have made it much harder for my future child to speak the language or practice the religious traditions of my ancestors; he’ll have to navigate the annoying cultural straddling of being from many places at once. It was the right choice for me, but it’s a hard thing to live with. The price of belonging to an Indian culture is to leave some of your individuality behind—and for me, at least, it was a price I was not willing to pay.

By the end, Aparna became a tragic figure for me. When we see her at home—dressed in outfits that seem identical to her mother’s, pushing her two tiny dogs in a stroller—she looks like an oversize little girl. There’s something so sad about her narrow ideas of what her future partner should be like; it reflects how little latitude she allows herself in her own life. Her mother, Jotika, is another meme-able figure: The production cuts together a proclamation that all she wants for her daughter is happiness and a serious monologue, directed at the camera, about how “all” she asked of her daughters is to never make her look bad and to get not just one or two degrees, but “nothing less than three.” A few episodes later, Aparna tells a suitor that she hates being a lawyer, and has been trying to do something else for years.

The tradition in India and the Indian diaspora seems to be less about marriage and more about this intense, all-consuming pressure to mold your children. Nothing seems to fuel the marriage complex more than the fear of social stigma, of being somehow outside, somehow othered. In this context, it’s no wonder that matchmaking brings out the worst colorism, casteism, and classism that Indians have to offer. I wish Indian Matchmaking said anything about that. But at least it gives the world a view into the false promise of arranged marriage, even if, by the end, the series is still starry-eyed, committed to a fantasy. Aparna, my parents, all of the frantic parents who catch Sima’s wrist at a party and whisper biodata into her ear; they just want what was promised. They just want to belong.

A Sick Society That Manufactures Failures – the True Face of Education in India

Avjit Pathak in The Wire.IN


To gain awareness of the presence of things other than “me and what is mine”, in other words to develop sympathy for the outside world is a way to liberate oneself from egocentricity. To have such a character is the sign of good education. – Devi Prasad, Art: The Basis of Education

Board exams… Entrance tests for medical/engineering colleges… College admissions: where are the youngsters moving? What does growing up mean with the euphoria of success and the stigma of failure? What is the experience of walking through a path defined by others – regimented schools and market-driven forces?

Let me begin with the story of a young boy I have been interacting with for quite some time. Yes, he is in the ‘science’ stream; what is popularly known as PCM (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) is his religion and possibly a road to what the aspirational middle class society regards as ‘success’ – or the moment of being ‘settled’.

With a series of private tutors, coaching centres and exam after exam for getting entry into any of the engineering/medical colleges, there is no breathing space in the life of this 17-year old boy. He is anxious; his parents are worried. Sometimes I feel like talking to him about poetry and cinema, literature and travelogue; he thinks it is useless and his parents too are not very interested in these ‘softer’ dimensions of life. Every moment, they are compelled to think, has to be utilised for achieving ‘success’.

With my sociological sensibilities, I know that he is not alone – he symbolises a social fact, he is the product of an oppressive reality characterised by a faulty pattern of education, parental ambitions and the aggression of hyper-competitiveness resulting from the increasing gap between the number of aspirants and availability of opportunities in an over-populated and uneven society like ours.

Let us try to understand the resultant malady destroying the possibilities innate in the young mind.

‘Success’ has failed them

What is the nature of the mythical ‘success’ they are striving for?

First, in the age of trade and economic utility, it is based on the hierarchy of disciplines. Science/commerce is seen to be superior, practical and lucrative, but a negative orientation is attached to arts/humanities – these ‘soft’/’feminine’ disciplines, it is thought, have no ‘future’, and ‘intelligent’ students are not supposed to opt for these branches of knowledge.

Anyone familiar with school education in India knows how parents and teachers pressurise children to opt for science/commerce even if they are not inclined to it. In fact, many of them are never given the space to look at themselves, and understand their unique traits and aptitudes. This is the beginning of alienation in the child’s life. This alienation is further intensified when the societal pressure restricts their imagination, and forces them to believe that life is necessarily dark and bleak without medical science/engineering/management.

In this reckless preparation for ‘success’ their alienated selves find no joy, no ecstasy; coaching centres have no humour, guide books are devoid of creative imagination, ‘success mantras’ require war strategies, not the spirit of wonder, and the joy of learning is replaced by the neurotic urge to be a ‘topper’.

Second, this ‘success’ is centred on the hierarchy of professions. Money, technocratic sleekness and state power – these three factors play a key role in the making of this hierarchy. In fact, if one is courageous enough to decipher the folk tale of the ‘IIT-IIM syndrome’, one would realise that a mix of money and technological sleekness transforms their ‘products’ into corporate professionals with a good pay package.

In fact, ‘placement’ (your destiny is to find yourself as a well-fed/well-paid employee of the gigantic corporation) is the success index in a society that sanctifies technocratic capitalism; everything revolves around it. No wonder, in popular imagination a youngster – hardly 23-years-old – working as an IT professional in a multinational company and living in a gated community in Bengaluru is considered to be more ‘successful’ than, say, a 50-year old college teacher living in the suburb of Mumbai, and writing a scholarly book on medieval Indian history.

Furthermore, state power still has its aura. In our society, it reinforces the legacy of feudal aristocracy. No wonder, as the UPSC phenomenon suggests, the job of a district collector or a superintendent of police or an income tax officer (imagine their bungalows, office vehicles with red lights, and the brigade of police constables saluting them) continues to fascinate the young mind, particularly from the small towns.

No wonder, like the IIT/IIM entrance test, the UPSC civil service examination seems to have become one of the major national events – the most dominant evaluator for certifying one’s ‘success’ in life.

However, this ‘success’, as I wish to argue, has its own discontents. The reason is that, for most of them, it is an immensely alienating experience. It kills one’s creativity; it makes one one-dimensional; it robs one of the spirit of positive life-energy. Writing all sorts of mock tests conducted by the coaching centres endlessly, or transforming everything – be it the Olympics or the installation of a nuclear reactor or an international conference on climate change – into a typical ‘general studies’ stuff of the UPSC type is by no means a life-affirming experience.

See the march of the other-directed crowd at Kota in Rajasthan – a notorious site of inflated expectations and broken dreams. Or, for that matter, visit the tiny rooms in the narrow lanes of Mukherjee Nagar and Katwaria Sarai in Delhi, and meet the tired/exhausted youngsters from Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh trying to grapple with the Rao’s IAS notes. You realise that to achieve this sort of ‘success’, one fails as a creative being.

Students attend class at a coaching institute in Kota, Rajasthan. Credit: Reuters/Ahmad Masood

No wonder, corruption is rooted in this ‘success manufacturing machine’. The heavy cost of coaching centres, the exorbitant tuition fees in many of these medical/engineering/management colleges, and above all, the burden of donations and capitation fee: from where do you compensate the money you have spent? Is it the inflated dowry rate in a society that has not yet eradicated its patriarchal ethos? Or is it the normalisation of bribery and other malpractices in workplaces—from hospitals to construction sites, from block development offices to police stations?

Likewise, the very nature of this race is that your ‘success’ is assured at the cost of someone else’s failure. The fact is that most of the applicants would fail in this race. Imagine every year the number of ‘failures’ we create. They acquire a sense of stigmatised identity; this affects severely their life-trajectories filled with psychic wound and a sense of loss.

Finally, in this system, there is actually no winner; everyone is a loser. It redefines failure; everyone suffers from a sense of lagging behind. Hence, these days if you get 90% in the board exam, you are sad and depressed because your friends have got more than 95%. Likewise, if instead of pursuing economics at Shri Ram College of Commerce, you do Physics at Hindu College, you are a failure. Or for that matter, despite being in IIT, if you could not make it to the United states, you have failed in life.

In a way, ‘success’ has failed them.

Redefining the calling of life

It is not easy to come out of this trap. As the spectre of unemployment or the notion of a superficial notion of ‘social prestige’ haunts the young mind and their over-protective parents, it becomes exceedingly difficult to strive for meaningful education. Yet, I would insist that no social transformation is possible without the creative spark of human agency; and even in difficult times, we need to try our best to give the young a different vision of life.

It is in this context that I wish to make three points. First, as teachers/educationists/adults we all need to tell them that nothing matters more in life than inner fulfilment. There is no external marker of success – to be truly successful in life is to find joy and meaning in whatever one does, be it farming, nursing and teaching. One need not become like somebody else, one need not be ‘big’ and ‘gorgeous’. One has to be oneself – simple, authentic and confident of one’s own path.

Second, it is important to appreciate the plurality of skills/intelligence/sensitivity needed in diverse modes of occupational and vocational engagement. There is no reason why everyone has to think of joining the IIT; there is no reason why every science student should think of becoming an IT professional. A mature society is one that needs a spectrum of possibilities – engineers as well as filmmakers, doctors, historians, economists and art critics. The task of teachers is to make the child aware of his/her potential.

Third, fear has to be overcome. Youngsters ought to be encouraged to think differently, to take ‘risks’, and experiment with life. Nothing meaningful in life is possible if one is continually pressurised to remain ‘normal’, and opt for a ‘safe/tasted/secure/non-risky’ path. Living meaningfully is to understand the call of the puzzling curves and turning points in life. Karl Marx did not live as a ‘respectable’ employee in a company; Mahatma Gandhi did not end his life as a lawyer; G.M. Muktibodh, despite economic hardships, did not give up poetry; and Medha Patkar did not become a professor of social work in a university.

As adults, we would betray our children if we do not offer anything positive to them, if we metamorphose them into, as Franz Kafka indicated in one of his heart-breaking short stories, ‘insects’ roaming around the four walls of an office cubicle.

How tricksters make you see what they want you to see

By David Robson in the BBC

 Could you be fooled into “seeing” something that doesn’t exist?

Matthew Tompkins, a magician-turned-psychologist at the University of Oxford, has been investigating the ways that tricksters implant thoughts in people’s minds. With a masterful sleight of hand, he can make a poker chip disappear right in front of your eyes, or conjure a crayon out of thin air.

And finally, let’s watch the “phantom vanish trick”, which was the focus of his latest experiment:

What did he tuck into his fist? A red ball? A handkerchief?

Although interesting in themselves, the first three videos are really a warm-up for this more ambitious illusion, in which Tompkins tries to plant an image in the participant’s minds using the power of suggestion alone.

Around a third of his participants believed they had seen Tompkins take an object from the pot and tuck it into his hand – only to make it disappear later on. In fact, his fingers were always empty, but his clever pantomiming created an illusion of a real, visible object.

How is that possible? Psychologists have long known that the brain acts like an expert art restorer, touching up the rough images hitting our retina according to context and expectation. This “top-down processing” allows us to build a clear picture from the barest of details (such as this famous picture of the “Dalmatian in the snow”). It’s the reason we can make out a face in the dark, for instance. But occasionally, the brain may fill in too many of the gaps, allowing expectation to warp a picture so that it no longer reflects reality. In some ways, we really do see what we want to see.
This “top-down processing” is reflected in measures of brain activity, and it could easily explain the phantom vanish trick. The warm-up videos, the direction of his gaze, and his deft hand gestures all primed the participants’ brains to see the object between his fingers, and for some participants, this expectation overrode the reality in front of their eyes.

The secret of a happy marriage? Low expectations

Daisy Buchanan in The Guardian

Since I got married last October, I’ve been thinking a lot about divorce. Not in a “serving papers” way, but in the sense that nothing is impossible and it’s good to be prepared. Divorce is something that could never have happened to me before the wedding – but now there’s a chance that it’s in my future. Just as some people believe there’s no better way of appreciating life than by contemplating the inevitability of death (“You might get knocked down by a bus tomorrow!” Not if I stick to heavily pedestrianised areas!), I think that the best way of appreciating the best bits of my relationship is to remind myself that we’re both free to leave at any time.

Reader, I married him hoping that it will last for ever, but knowing that it’s going to be hard, because life is hard. The variables are infinite – loved ones might get seriously ill, we might get ill, one of us could do something thoughtless and hurtful and stupid that changes the nature of the relationship, we might end up growing apart instead of growing together. Surely any idiot knows that the romantic bits – wearing your best underwear, snogging your way through plane safety demonstrations on your endless minibreaks and holding in your farts – happen in the six months after you meet. Marriage is all “Can you get a birthday present for my mum? By the way, the toilet’s broken and we’ve just had a council tax bill for 800 quid.”

So I’m not surprised by the results of a recent study which show that the higher a couple’s expectations of marriage, the more likely the union was doomed to failure. When couples had low expectations that were easily reached, they were happier than the couples who had higher expectations, despite having the same needs met.

The study surmised: “Among spouses who either reported less severe problems or were in marriages observed to be characterised by lower levels of destructive behaviour, standards were positively associated with satisfaction over time,” but that bringing impossibly high expectations to marriage was as damaging as undermining each other, or communicating badly.

Dr James McNulty, the psychologist in charge of the research, advises newlyweds to “realise their strengths and weaknesses and calibrate their standards accordingly”, explaining that the problems occur when couples experience “a mismatch between what they demand and what they can actually attain”.

The lesson is obvious. Love the one you’re wedded to, not the tidier, healthier, cleverer, more committed person you hope marriage might make them. If they’re always hitting on your friends and being sick in taxis, they won’t be cured of it just because all of your relatives have bought you flatware from a John Lewis list .

I know I’m incredibly lucky to have met my husband in the UK, in 2015. In other countries and other eras, marriage hasn’t been a choice for women but an inevitability. Many hoped that courtship, and the chance to live away from home, would lead to slightly more independence and fun. In some households, you’re still better off as a matriarch than as an adult female child. But that only reinforces my point.

If you’re marrying in the belief that it will make your life significantly better, then things probably aren’t great to begin with.

Literature is littered with characters who have entered disastrous marriages in the failed pursuit of wealth and adventure. Your Becky Sharps and Emma Bovarys start unions in the hope that they will allow them to realise personal ambitions, and it never ends well.

I’m optimistic for my own marriage because I have no hopes for social betterment, grand balls, or private jets. I married my husband knowing that we have the same idea of what constitutes a good time. We believe there is no greater state of wedded bliss than lying on a sofa with your head on your spouse’s bottom, and six hours of QI repeats scheduled. If I were to dare to dream and get ideas above my station, I might hope that one day we could replace our customary bag of own-brand crisps with a big sack of Kettle Chips.

Ultimately, a marriage can only ever be as good as the people in it. You can’t make coq au vin with a can of Red Stripe and a £1.99 six-piece selection from Chicken Cottage, but you’ll have a nicer dinner if you appreciate the tasty charm of your raw ingredients instead of moaning about their lack of nutritional value. My greatest ambition for my marriage is that we keep treating each other with as much tenderness and respect as we did when we first met, and that we love each other enough to admit it’s time to call it a day if we ever can no longer do this. I hope it will never happen, but at least when it comes to love, a pessimist is never disappointed.

What really makes a good teacher?

Barnaby Lenon in the Telegraph

A NASUWT poll last week found that the majority of parents wanted ‘qualified teachers’ to teach their children. Unsurprising really, until you consider what that word ‘qualified’ really means.

In independent schools, recognised as being among the best in the world, we are free to choose our own teachers. In 2013, pupils in independent schools achieved 32 per cent of all A* grades at A-level.

Our success lies in the quality and expertise of our teachers, yet some may not have a teaching qualification. So what makes a good teacher?

They have four characteristics.

First, they love their subject and have excellent subject knowledge (the two go together). Last year Professor Rob Coe and the Sutton Trust published research into the qualities of the best teachers and this came top of the list.  

It is the reason that some schools are happy to appoint an excellent graduate in a subject like physics even if they don’t have a teaching qualification. They are classified as ‘unqualified’, even though they possess the most important quality of all.

Good subject knowledge matters not only because at the top of the ability range you need to be able to stretch pupils but also because teachers with good knowledge tend to make lessons for younger children more interesting. They have more substance to be interesting about.

Secondly, they need to have the right personality. Teaching is partly acting, and acting ability helps greatly. Above all you need to be able to control a class, because without good discipline nothing worthwhile can be achieved.

So that means good teachers are those whom pupils will respect - and slightly fear if necessary. They are completely in control of what’s going on around them.

Pupils know the teacher will notice if they are misbehaving or if their work is incomplete or copied from another child and will take action - punish the child, perhaps, or require the work to be redone.

But the best teachers are not disciplinarians. They are a velvet hand in an iron glove. Pupils come to know, over time, that they are warm and generous. But they are not to be messed with. Discipline has to come first.

There are other personality traits that matter too. Good teachers are very hard working, putting a huge effort into preparing lessons, marking work and giving extra time to children who need it.

They are able to manage stress. They are passionate about their school and their pupils, keen for all to do well. They are highly organised, because switching in a few seconds from one class to another, keeping track of individuals, remembering which extra duties they are down for, managing record-keeping and databases - all this requires good organisation.

Thirdly, they need to have certain classroom skills. This is why all ‘unqualified’ teachers need some training, both before they start and throughout their first year of teaching.

They need to be shown how to deliver a lesson with pace and interest, how to use digital resources effectively, how to mark work and record those marks, how to write reports, how best to teach tricky concepts, how to ask questions of pupils in the most effective way.

Finally, they need to have high expectations of their pupils. This is a characteristic of all the best teachers. They are determined that every pupil will master their subject. This attitude sets the scene for everything which follows.

Pupils who produce unsatisfactory work must be made to redo it until they achieve a good level. Pupils will be regularly tested to see whether they have understood and learnt the work; those who do badly will be retested.

Excellent teachers believe that it is pupil effort and teaching quality which determine how well a child does, not the ability of the child. The less able children will get there in the end.

So these are characteristics of the best teachers. In terms of weighting, perhaps 30 per cent is subject knowledge, 30 per cent is personality, 30 per cent is level of expectations, 10 per cent classroom skills. Of these, only the last need be the subject of teacher training.

George Osborne's description of the economy is near-Orwellian

The fact that even Labour accepts the UK is 'on the mend' shows how low our expectations of economic performance are

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 July 2013 20.01 BST

George Osborne this week. 'The UK's economic performance since the start of the coalition government … has been so poor that Thursday's announcement of 0.6% growth … was greeted with a collective sigh of relief.' Photograph: Christopher Thomond

If all else fails, they say, you can always lower your standards. This is what we have become used to doing in relation to the UK economy. The UK's economic performance since the start of the coalition government in May 2010 has been so poor that Thursday's announcement of 0.6% growth in the second quarter of 2013 was greeted with a collective sigh of relief.

Having declared the UK economy to be "on the mend" on the strength of this growth figure, George Osborne is said to have regained his swagger. Even the opposition grudgingly acknowledged that the latest figures were good enough news, although it was quick to add that the benefits of the recovery have been almost exclusively concentrated at the top.

But even the opposition's interpretation may be too charitable. Including the last quarter, the UK economy has grown by just 2.1% during the 12 quarters since the current government came to power. This compares very poorly with the 2% growth that the economy had managed in just four quarters between the third quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010. The coalition blames this poor performance on the eurozone crisis. But this argument is not very persuasive when output has more than recovered to pre-crisis level in many eurozone countries, including France and Germany, while UK output is still 3.3% less than what it was at the beginning of 2008.

It gets worse. During the past five years, the UK's population has grown by 3%. This means that, on a per capita basis, the country's income is 6.3%, not just 3.3%, less today than it was five years go. This performance is far worse than what Japan managed during its infamous "lost decade" of the 90s. At the end of that period, Japan had a per capita income 10% higher than at the start.

If the UK is to match this performance during what looks certain to be its own "lost decade", it will have to grow at the rate of 3.9% every year for the next five years (or 3.3% in per capita terms, assuming that the past five years' population growth rate of 0.6% per year continues). Even the most optimistic cheerleaders for the coalition government are not talking such numbers.

Thus seen, describing the UK economy as being "on the mend" is a near-Orwellian redefinition of economic recovery. The fact that most people accept that description, even if with reservations about the uneven distribution of its benefits, shows how low the standard of performance we expect of the UK economy has become.

But even applying this low standard, it is not clear whether we can expect a sustained recovery in the coming years. There are at least two factors that can derail the recovery process, especially given that it is so feeble. The first is the likely evolution of the global economy. The eurozone may be dragging itself out of a recession, but things can turn for the worse at any moment. Especially given the severity of austerity in countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, the policy's continuation may result in another bout of political unrest, negatively affecting the economy.

Thanks to its avoidance of the worst form of austerity policy, the US economy has recovered from the 2008 crisis more strongly than the European countries. But with another federal debt ceiling negotiation looming later in the year, it is possible that the US recovery will be set back by another round of budget cuts. The Chinese economy has visibly slowed down. And the Chinese government seems determined to keep it that way for a while. Concerned with financial stability, it has clamped down on credit expansion. Worried about seething public anger against government corruption and extravagance, it has imposed a ban on "wasteful" government spending (lavish buildings, banquets, and foreign trips). These are all good policies in the long run, but they will dampen Chinese demand in the immediate future.

The other two biggest "emerging" economies, Brazil (second largest) and India (third), have both seriously slowed down in the last couple of years. India's growth rate fell from 10.5% in 2010 to 6.3% in 2011, and then to 3.2% in 2012. The equivalent figures for Brazil were 7.5%, 2.7%, and 0.9%. Both these economies suffer from high inequality and social tensions, as shown by the recent protests in Brazil and the resurgence of Maoist guerillas called the Naxalites in the eastern part of India. Therefore there is always a possibility that political unrest may dampen these economies even further.

These global factors are, of course, beyond the UK's control, but there is another factor at least partially within its control that may derail the recovery. It is the asset bubbles that have developed in the stock market and the property market, fuelled by cheap credit (sounds familiar?).

Share prices have reached levels that simply cannot be justified by the state of the economy. In May 2013, the FTSE 100 share price index surpassed the pre-crisis peak of June 2007, although it has come down a bit since then. Given that the pre-crisis peak was supported by a buoyant (albeit unsustainable) economy, current share prices, which have no such support, can only be described as an even bigger asset bubble.

Although the rest of the country is still experiencing a stagnant housing market, property markets in London and the south-east are beginning to look inflated, given the state of the economy. And the government is stoking this property bubble with the Help to Buy scheme.

These asset bubbles have provided important sources of demand in the UK economy in the past few years. But the trouble is that they are quite shaky even for asset bubbles, for they are only sustained by historically low interest rates and the massive indirect subsidies given to banks through the so-called quantitative easing scheme.

The fragile nature of these bubbles is revealed by the nervousness with which financial market participants react to pronouncements by central bankers. They know that the current price levels are viable only with QE, so they are readying themselves to jump as soon as there is a sign that it may come to an end. When the asset bubbles deflate, there is likely to be a serious fall in demand that will derail the recovery.

In the past few years the UK should have found a way to stage a recovery without having to rely on state-sponsored asset bubbles. As it hasn't even tried, it is facing the prospect of having a "lost decade" that is even more "lost" than the original one in Japan. 

Mickey's problem - The sacking of Australian cricket coach Mickey Arthur

Australia's recently replaced coach came up against an Australian cricketing culture struggling to come to terms with a new reality

Ed Smith

June 26, 2013

A

	Arthur's track record of success with South Africa does not "prove" he is a brilliant coach any more than his track record of relative failure with Australia proves he is a bad one © AFP  Enlarge
Related Links Daniel Brettig : Arthur let down by coach-killers News : Lehmann's cultural remedy for Australia Players/Officials: Mickey Arthur | Darren Lehmann Series/Tournaments: Australia tour of England and Scotland Teams: Australia

One of the questions asked of Australian cricketers during the Mickey Arthur era was, "How did you rate your sleep?" The idea was to encourage a holistic approach to match preparation, in which mind and body worked together in blissful harmony.

From today, if a player complains about a poor night's sleep under the new coaching regime of Darren Lehmann, he should expect the burly left-hander to reply: "Should have had an extra couple of beers last night then, mate." As for hydration, Rod Marsh used to say that if you had to take a toilet break during the hours of play then you obviously hadn't drunk enough the night before. Being a bit thirsty in the morning has its benefits.

In turning to Lehmann, there is a sense of Australian cricket coming home. He is naturally chatty and quick-witted, with a keen cricket brain and an earthy manner. When he was Yorkshire's overseas player, I remember a close four-day match between Yorkshire and Kent at Canterbury. Before the start of the final day's play, it was agreed that both teams would enjoy a few drinks in the home dressing room after the match. Lehmann was free and unguarded with his perceptions and insights, almost as though it was a responsibility of senior players to talk about the game. You could also tell he was absolutely in his element in a dressing-room environment.

Context is everything, as Mickey Arthur has found out. As coach of South Africa, Arthur enjoyed an established side, a resolute captain and an experienced group of senior players. That played to his strengths. An affable and undemonstrative man, Arthur could operate under the radar. Graeme Smith, one of the strongest captains in world cricket, already commanded plenty of authority and a clear sense of direction.

It has become fashionable in modern sport to waste a great deal of energy fretting about "job descriptions" and "lines of accountability". In real life, however, wherever the arrows may point on the flow charts, power finds itself in the hands of dominant personalities. The real determining factor in the distribution of power between a captain and a coach is their personal chemistry. A shrewd coach will empower a captain and the senior player as far as possible. And when Arthur was coach of South Africa, there was no shortage of alpha males out on the pitch.

Now transfer Arthur into a very different setting. Where South Africa had a settled side that was enjoying sustained success, Australia are adjusting - or failing to adjust - to leaner years, having gorged themselves on two decades of feasting on perpetual success. Where most of the South African team selected itself, Australia have had great difficulty identifying their best XI. That is not a criticism. You try selecting the same team during a sequence of defeats and listen in vain for the pundits shouting, "Well done on retaining consistency of selection." No, losing teams search for a new combination that will bring better results. The much-worshipped god "consistency of selection" is partly a privilege that follows from success as well as a cause of it. There is certainly a strong correlation between a settled side and a winning team, but as mathematicians learn in their first statistics class, correlation does not always imply straightforward causality.

Arthur faced another problem not of his own making: the expectations of the Australian cricketing culture. This has been an unpleasant hangover after a hell of a party. For 20 years Australian cricket celebrated a golden age that would have made Jay Gatsby blush. In terms of cricketing talent, the taps overflowed with vintage champagne. To understand how good Australia were, simply remember that Lehmann himself only played 27 Tests.

	We used to hear how Australian cricket was best because they were mates who played for each other; Australian cricket was best because they were tougher and "mentally stronger"; Australian cricket was best because they had fewer first-class teams; Australian cricket was best because it didn't have to endure the "mediocrity of county cricket"

As any economist will tell you, the most dangerous aspect of any boom is the absurd way it is "explained" as a new and permanent paradigm shift (remember the view, just before the financial crisis, that modern banks had mastered "risk-free" methods?) We used to hear how Australian cricket was best because they were mates who played for each other; Australian cricket was best because they were tougher and "mentally stronger"; Australian cricket was best because they had fewer first-class teams; Australian cricket was best because it didn't have to endure the "mediocrity of county cricket"; Australian cricket was best because they knew how to enjoy a win and let their hair down; Australian cricket was best because they were "more professional". I heard all those theories put forward with huge confidence, often in tandem, even when the theories contradicted each other.

The difficulty, of course, came when results deteriorated, as they eventually had to. In a boom, you can have any explanation for why Australia were so good and still be proved "right". As a result, Australian cricket finds itself awash with voodoo doctors - convinced of their own prescience - rushing to pronounce the cure for a new and frightening malady called "average results". My own opinion is that the rise and fall of cricketing nations is harder to explain, let alone reverse, than most people seem to think.

Arthur's frustrating time with Australia reveals a broader problem. The whole notion of "a track record" is questionable, especially when the track record under discussion consists of a smallish sample size. Arthur's track record of success with South Africa does not "prove" he is a brilliant coach any more than his track record of relative failure with Australia proves he is a bad one.

Each phase of every management career is unique. The way any team functions can never be reduced to scientific analysis. As a result, credit and blame can never be exactly apportioned. We know for sure that some leaders experience success and failure. But exactly why, or to what extent they were responsible, will always remain partly a mystery. Coaches do not operate in a vacuum. What they inherit - the personnel, appetite for change, and attitude of the wider culture - matters at least as much as their methods.

Arthur encountered an Australian cricketing culture struggling to come to terms with a new reality. Quite simply, they aren't that good anymore. They may well get better under Darren Lehmann. But anxiously searching for miracles has a nasty habit of making them harder to find.

Inequality for All – another Inconvenient Truth?

The powerful documentary Inequality for All was an unexpected hit at the recent Sundance film festival, arguing that US capitalism has fatally abandoned the middle classes while making the super-rich richer. Can its star, economist Robert Reich, do for economics what Al Gore did for the environment?

• 
• • Carole Cadwalladr
  • The Observer, Saturday 2 February 2013 21.00 GMT

Former US labour secretary Robert Reich at an Occupy Los Angeles rally in 2011. Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images

In one sense, Inequality for All is absolutely the film of the moment. We are living through tumultuous times. The economy has tanked. Austerity has cut a swath through the country. We're on the verge of a triple-dip recession. And, in another, parallel universe, a small cohort of alien beings – or as we know them, bankers – are currently engaged in trying to figure out what to spend their multimillion-pound bonuses on. Who wouldn't want to know what's going on? Or how it happened? Or why? Or if it is really true that the next generation down is well and truly shafted?

And yet… what sucker would try to make a film about it? It's not exactly Skyfall. Where would you even start? Because there are some films that practically beg to be made. And then there's Inequality for All; the kind of film that you can't quite believe that anybody, ever, considered a good idea, let alone had the passion and commitment to give it two years of their life.

How did you even come up with the idea of making a film about economics? I ask the director Jacob Kornbluth. "I know! People would roll their eyes when I told them. They'd say it's a terrible idea for a film." On paper it is, indeed, a terrible idea. A 90-minutedocumentary on income inequality: or why the rich have got richer and the rest of us haven't (I say "us" because although it's focused on America, we're snapping at their heels) and which traces a line back to the 1970s, when things stopped getting better for the vast majority of ordinary working people and started getting worse.

"It always sounded so dry," says Kornbluth. "But then I'd tell people it's An Inconvenient Truth for the economy and they'd go, Ah!"

In fact, Inequality for All, which premiered at the Sundance film festival a fortnight ago, is anything but dry. It won not just rave reviews but also the special jury prize and a major cinema distribution deal, and while it owes an obvious debt to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it is, in many ways, a much better, more human and surprising film. Not least because, incredibly enough, it's actually pretty funny. And, in large part, this is down to its star, Robert Reich.

Reich is not a star in any obvious sense of the word. He's a 66-year-old academic. And he's been banging on about inequality for more than three decades. At one point in the film he looks quite downcast and says: "Sometimes I just feel like my life has been a total failure." An archive clip of him on CNN from 1991 looking fresh-faced and bushy-haired shows that he has literally been saying the same thing for decades upon decades. And yet, as he tells me cheerfully on the phone from his home in California, "It just keeps getting worse!"

These days he's a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and while he's not a figure we're familiar with in the UK, he's been part of American public life for years. At the start of the film, he introduces himself to a lecture hall full of students, telling them how he was secretary of labour under Bill Clinton. "And before that I was at Harvard. And before that I was a member of the Carter administration. You don't remember the Carter administration, do you?" The students remain silent. "And before that," says Reich with impeccable comic timing, "I was a special agent for Abraham Lincoln." He shakes his head. "Those were tough times."

Reich's books and ideas have been at the forefront of Democratic party thinking for a generation. He is an intellectual heavyweight, a veteran policymaker, a seasoned political hand, and yet he also has the delivery of a standup comedian. His ideas were the basis for Bill Clinton's 1992 election campaign slogan, "Putting People First" (they were both Rhodes scholars and he met Clinton on board the boat to England; he once dated Hillary too, though he only realised this when a New York Times journalist rang him up and reminded him). And they were still there at the heart of President Obama's inaugural address last month. America could not succeed, said Obama, "when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it". What Reich, basically, has been saying since the year dot.

What's extraordinary is how, somehow, these ideas have been translated into a narrative that shows every sign of being this year's hit documentary film. It certainly shocked Reich. He says he was amazed when Kornbluth first pitched the idea of a film. "He came and said that he'd read my book, Aftershock, and that he loved it and wanted to do a movie about it. And I honestly didn't know what he meant. How could you make a movie out of it?"

But Kornbluth has made a movie out of it. A really astonishingly good movie that takes some big economic ideas and how these relate to the quality of everyday life as lived by most ordinary people. The love and care and artistic flair that Kornbluth brought to it is evident in every frame. It was really really hard work, he tells me, to make something look that simple. But then "I grew up poor. So I've always been very aware of who has what in society." His father had a stroke when Kornbluth was five and died six years later. And his mother, who didn't work because she was raising three children, died when he was 18.

Any synopsis of the film runs the risk of making it seem dry again, but essentially it describes how the middle classes have come to have a smaller and smaller portion of the economic pie. And how, since 70% of the economy is based on the middle classes buying stuff, if they don't have any money to buy this stuff, it cannot grow. Meanwhile, the government has allowed the super-rich, the "one per cent", to take more of the nation's wealth. Half of the US's total assets are now owned by just 400 people – 400! – and, Reich contests that this is not just a threat to the economy, but also to democracy.

Kornbluth tells me that he initially had the idea of casting Reich in a feature film. "I'd seen him on TV and I just thought he'd make a great tax inspector in this film I was making. Although, actually, it turned out he was a terrible actor. But we hit it off. And I discovered that he and I share a sense of humour. I'm not a documentarian. My background is comedy. Yet I just thought that this could be an amazingly riveting film. To me it's the most important story of our time. And nobody was telling it. I kept on reading the papers and watching the news and I really wanted a story. I craved it. I just knew that to do it, we would have to make it as funny and human as possible."

And it's this, the gentle humour at the heart of the film, and the lightness of its direction, that are its winning ingredients, disguising what is, in fact, incredibly powerful. Because at heart Inequality for All is a revolutionary film. Or, at least, its dearest desire is to precipitate a revolution in the way that we think about economic matters. As Reich tells me, "the economy is not like the weather". It's not inevitable. It's not determined. "An economy does not exist in nature. We don't have to settle." And, crucially, it can be changed.

But the film's main stroke of brilliance is to put Reich, the unlikely hero, at the centre. "I had never done anything political before," says Kornbluth. "I didn't consider myself political. But seeing his example, the way that he has fought this fight for so many years has been an absolute inspiration to me. I see it in his students, they really do walk out of his lectures and want to change the world."

As in An Inconvenient Truth – or "the most lucrative PowerPoint presentation in history", as one critic called it – the film is structured around a lecture, or rather series of lectures: Reich's incredibly popular wealth and poverty class at Berkeley. But it is only loosely used as a vehicle. There are also news clips and interviews and stylised graphics and archive footage.

And what the film tries to do is thread together evidence that many people know about – the increasing struggle of the middle classes to just get by, the way that the top 1% of society has unshackled itself from the rest of us and has seen its income increase exponentially, and the ever-increasing cost of the traditional avenues of improvement, such as higher education – and weave it into a cohesive and convincing narrative. It is, in some respects, a theory of everything. Reich charts the three decades of increasing median income after the second world war, a period he calls "the great prosperity" and then examines what happened in the late 1970s to put an end to it. The economy didn't falter. It kept on growing. But wages didn't.

The figures that Reich supplies are simply gobsmacking. In 1978, the typical male US worker was making $48,000 a year (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile the average person in the top 1% was making $390, 000. By 2010, the median wage had plummeted to $33,000, but at the top it had nearly trebled, to $1,100,000.

"Something happened in the late 1970s," we hear him tell his Berkeley class. And much of the rest of the film is working out what happened.

Some inequality is inevitable, he says. Even desirable. It's what makes capitalism tick. But at what point does it become a problem? When the middle classes (in its American sense of the 25% above and below the median wage) have so little of the economic pie that it affects not just their lives but the economy as a whole.

Reich's thesis is that since the 1970s a combination of anti-union legislation and deregulation of the markets contrived to create a situation in which the economy boomed but less of the wealth trickled down. Though for a while, nobody noticed. There were "coping mechanisms". More women entered the workforce, creating dual-income families. Working hours rose. And increasing house prices enabled people to borrow.

And then, in 2007, this all came crashing to a halt. "We have exhausted all the options," he says. There's nowhere else left to go. It's crunch time.

It's crunch time that so many working families understand too well. They may not be familiar with the theory of income inequality but they haven't been able to avoid noticing that they've got less money in their pockets. "I've always thought that kitchen-table economics is the most important topic to most people," says Reich. "Their wages, their jobs, getting by. I've always tried to relate economics to where people live. That's why I was so excited about the film."

The human stories of working American families struggling to cope are at the emotional centre of the film. At a Q&A after the Sundance screening, a third of the audience admitted that they'd cried during the film at some point.

There's Erika and Robert Vaclav, for example, who pay $400 a week to keep their daughter in after-school care so that Erika can work on the checkout at Costco. "And I'm trying to work out if I should get her a phone so that she can walk home from school alone, and I know she's OK, or if I should continue paying the money." They lost their house when Robert was made redundant from his job as a manager at the now defunct electrical retailer Circuit City. And, it gradually transpires, that he's a student in Reich's wealth and poverty class at Berkeley.

"How much money do you have in your checking account?" Kornbluth asks Erika from off camera as she drives her daughter to school. "$25," she says and her voice starts to crack and waver.

One of Reich's greatest sources of humour is himself. In the opening shots of the film, the camera follows him walking to his car, a Mini Cooper. "I sort of identify with it," he says. "It's pretty little. I feel we are in proportion. Me and my car. We are together facing the rest of the world."

Later he takes a box out of the back of his car. "I always travel with my box," he says and explains that he suffers from a rare genetic condition – Fairbanks disease – that led to him only growing to 4ft 10in in height. The box is what he always takes to public-speaking events so that he can reach the podium.

He was bullied as a child "because that's just what happens when you're small" and repeatedly beaten up. His grandmother consoled him by telling him that when he was 10, 11 or 12 he'd shoot up. He never did. "It's never been a conscious thing on my part but that feeling of being bullied, and feeling vulnerable, has stayed with me. And maybe it's because of that that I can empathise with poor people. Because they are the most vulnerable. There is no one to protect them."

In the film, he tells how he made strategic alliances with older boys who could protect him. And years later, he discovered that one of them had travelled down to Mississippi to register voters and had been tortured and then murdered. "That changed my life," he says.

"He has never cashed in," says Kornbluth. "He's an incredibly smart guy and he could have found a way to correlate that into money as so many people do. But he never has. He has absolute integrity. It's almost shocking now for someone not to do that. I mean one of the film-makers I admire is Mike Leigh. And he does McDonald's commercials and I was like 'Whoa!' when I found out but I can't hold it against him. You can't hold it against anybody who's trying to make a living. But it makes Rob all the more amazing. He doesn't sit on boards. Or on thinktanks. He draws a modest salary. He has this absolute moral compass. And he's still trying to change the world."

In the 60s and 70s, this wasn't such a surprising thing. Reich recounts how he grew up "in a time of giants". His first job was working for Bobby Kennedy. Changing the world was what everyone wanted to do.

The world has changed. Just not in the way many thought it would. We fell victim to what Reich calls "the huge lie". That the free market is good. And government is bad. Government makes the rules, Reich keeps on reminding us, over and over. And it decides who benefits from those rules, and who is harmed. And increasingly, that boils down to the rich and the poor.

Perhaps the most surprising voice in the film is Nick Hanauer's. He's just your ordinary, everyday billionaire. One of the 1%. Except that he believes – like Warren Buffett – that he doesn't pay enough tax. And that hammering the middle class, the ones who buy actual stuff, who create demand, which in turn creates jobs and more taxes, is simply bad for the economy. "I mean, I drive the fanciest Audi around, but it's still only one of them… Three pairs of jeans a year, that will just about do me."

The system simply isn't working, he says. It's put the millionaires and the billionaires, the Nick Hanauers and the Mitt Romneys – the people that Republican rhetoric describes as job creators – at the centre of the economic universe, rather than what Hanauer calls the true job creators – the middle classes.

The problem is, he says, is that they've been attacked from every side. He was one of the initial investors in Amazon, a business of which he's "incredibly proud", but he points out that on revenues in the last three months of 2012 of $21bn (£13bn), Amazon employs just 65,600 people. "If it was a mom and pop retailer, it would be 600,000 people, or 800,000 or a million."

Globalisation and technology have played their role. But so has the government. For decades, under both Republicans and Democrats the highest rate of tax didn't dip below 70%. Now, Hanauer says he pays 11% on a six-figure income. Hanauer believes that if he was taxed more, he would be better off, because his company – he's a venture capitalist and his family own a pillow factory – would sell more products, and he would, therefore, make more money.

This is inequality imposed from the top. Reich's charts show that for years, chief executives' earnings kept in step with other employees. And then in 2000-03 "It went kerbluey", by which he means off the charts.

Which is where it still is. In the UK, Royal Bank of Scotland, having covered itself in glory in the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal, is currently contemplating bonuses for its investment banking division of £250m, according to reports last week. This, to put it another way, is the annual wage bill for at least 12,500 of its call-centre workers. Because this isn't just an American problem. It's a British one too.

"If there was upward mobility it would be OK," says Reich in the film. "But 42% of children born in poverty in the USA will stay there. In Denmark it's 24%. Even in Great Britain, where they still have an aristocracy, it's 30%."

It's probably a shocking statistic for Americans to hear. The problem is that by every index you can measure, inequality is worsening in Britain. There are fewer opportunities to overcome the barriers of your birth in the UK than in any other country in Europe. One of the most chilling moments in Inequality for All for a British audience is that how, faced with the same choices that America had in the 70s, we have, in the last year or so, taken the same path.

One of the key moments for Reich was the underinvestment in education, particularly higher education in the 70s. This was when America introduced tuition fees and its workforce started to fall behind the rest of the world's. When opportunities for those from low- and middle-income backgrounds began shrinking: precisely where the UK is today.

It's not just that wages have remained flat in America – as they have in the UK – it's that the expenses of everyday life have soared, in particular education and healthcare.

Last October, an independent commission in the UK led by the Resolution Foundationpredicted that in 2020 wages for low- to middle-income families would be the same as they were in 2000. And yet everything else will have gone up. We too are facing the crunch.

In December, the Office for National Statistics found that richest 10% of people in Britain own 40% of the national wealth. In London and the south-east, one in eight households has almost £1m of assets. The bottom half of the country has no net property wealth and only £4,000 in pensions savings. For them, there is just rising prices. And the ever diminishing possibility of things ever being different for them or their children.

"Where America leads, sadly the rest of the world follows. This same thing is affecting people all over the world," says Reich. "If nothing is done to reverse this trend, Britain will find itself in exactly the same place as America in just a few years' time."

Earlier in the week, I notice that he'd tweeted: "Britain's austerity economics is complete disaster. Its economy shrinking." And pasted a link to the Wall Street Journal in which the head of the IMF took George Osborne to task. When I ask him about it, he calls our austerity economics "a cruel hoax". Cruel because "it hurts people who have been hurt enough". And a hoax because, "It simply doesn't work. Look at the figures."

It should be our crunch time too. We have more people living in poverty who have jobs than those who don't, according to Oxfam. The average British citizen – the average – is three pay cheques away from destitution. And with the entire country poised on the brink of a triple-dip recession.

Perhaps the unlikeliest thing about Robert Reich is how very chipper he is. Even though, by every measure, inequality has got worse in the United States since he started preaching his doctrine. He doesn't seem to let it get to him.

There are clips of him from the 90s when he used to be a regular pundit on Fox News, but as American politics has moved to the right, he has found himself cast as a dangerous leftie. "Robert Reich?" says a pundit on one news clip. "He's a communist. A socialist." It's not a coincidence that he makes a point of saying in the film that he is not, and never has been, a member of the Communist party. And he and Kornbluth go to extraordinary lengths not to mention the word "Sweden" or "Japan" and barely even "Germany".

No good will come of telling the American people what funny foreigners get up to. It is, instead, rather gently subversive, the aesthetic opposite of any film by Michael Moore. It tries to politely prod its viewers into looking at the world differently rather than beating them around the head with a heavy wooden bat marked "polemic".

But American politics has become so polarised, so ideologically vicious, that it's only a matter of time before it's attacked by the right as Stalinist propaganda. "But I'm used to that," he says. "I've been attacked at a personal level for the last 30 years. I'm just excited that this might trigger a debate. Though I'm trying not to get my hopes up."

Crunch time in the US is looking ugly. Reich believes that both the Tea Party and Occupy movements spring from the same sense of anger and frustration that people fear. That politics will become more polarised, more extreme, more hate-filled.

One of the key pieces of research that Reich cites is a study of tax data by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty which shows that the years of peak income inequality in America were in 1928 and 2007. Right before both crashes. "The parallels are striking," he says. It's also striking what happened in the years after 1928. How in Germany, to take a random example, worldwide depression also led to a vicious polarisation of right and left. And certain other outcomes.

Could that happen in America? "Oh good heavens, I hope not!" he says. "Though when you go into periods of economic insecurity with widening inequality which puts the middle class under stress, you create fertile ground for demagogues from left or right. The politics of hate. The politics of fear. We're already seeing that."

And yet, despite, it all, he remains hopeful. "Change has always been difficult," he says. It's why he teaches. If he can't change the world, maybe his students will. Or people who watch the film? I ask and get a classic, understated, deadpan but not entirely unoptimistic Reichian reply. "I'm trying to keep my expectations in check."