Britain’s bosses fat and lazy? For once, Liam Fox has a point

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Liam Fox ranks among the chief fantasists behind Brexit, deplores gay marriage as “social engineering”, and thinks nothing of claiming 3p from taxpayers for a car journey of less than 100m. But even a snake-oil salesman sometimes speaks the truth and in criticising British business as “too lazy and too fat on our successes”, he has a point.

I know, I know. Why defend a Tory headbanger who otherwise thirsts for cuts to the NHS budget and the slashing of taxes upon the rich? Why entertain lectures from someone whose only attempt at job creation was the boondoggle he shamelessly awarded his former best man?

Yet when the international trade secretary says, “If you want to share in the prosperity of our country, you have a duty to contribute to the prosperity of our country”, I fail to muster up the outrage. I share neither Fox’s views on the causes nor his suggestions on the solution. But he is on to something.

For the past six years, the Tory party has barely paused from laying into British workers. From Iain Duncan Smith to George Osborne, senior ministers wrote off a sizeable chunk of this country as “skivers”. The screws were twisted so hard that jobseekers who decline zero-hours contracts are now penalised with benefit sanctions.

And the Tories did all this with the simpering connivance of Nick Clegg’s LibDems. If you think that era ended with David Cameron, remember that Theresa May’s cabinet boasts luminaries who wrote a report stating: “Too many people in Britain … prefer a lie-in to hard work. Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.”

Ever since 2010, the Tories have tried to pin the blame for economic sluggishness on the shirking Brits. At the same time, their ministers have boasted, with all the regularity of a cuckoo clock, about how the number of British people in work is now at a record high. As a matter of logic, both things cannot be true. The British cannot be both workshy and working more than ever before. The Tories have been fibbing – and at last one of their number has come out and said as much.

The real problem in Britain isn’t its workers: it’s the bosses. By this, I’m not getting at the poor old line managers. I mean those right at the top of big business who have got away with paying themselves too much and investing too little in their workers, their businesses and their society.

Consider pay. While the average British worker is barely better off than in 2008, wages for those at the top of British business have just kept soaring. Researchers at the High Pay Centre recently went through the accounts of the FTSE 100 largest companies. They found that chief executives raked in an average of £5.5m in 2015, up 10% from the year before.

Bung in the lavish pension arrangements and generous bonuses and the average chief executive now earns the same as 129 of their employees. There is no justification for such a wide disparity: no one is as productive as 129 other people. We have gone beyond “Because I’m Worth It” to “Because I Said So” (and my mates on the remuneration committee backed me up). Even when shareholders revolt, as happened at BP over the £14m handed out to its chief executive despite huge losses, they are roundly ignored.

The TUC has just crunched the numbers on how much investment the private sector makes in this country. Of the 29 leading industrialised countries, the UK comes in at 27. Businesses in Estonia, the Czech Republic, Poland: all invest more in plants, equipment and the rest. The only countries that do worse are Greece and Iceland.

We have the same calamitous showing in spending on research and development. A few years ago, the Sheffield University physicist Prof Richard Jones went through the figures. He wrote: “In 1979 the UK was one of the most research-intensive economies in the world. Now, among advanced industrial economies, it is one of the least.” All of our competitors – the US, Japan, France and Germany – have maintained or increased their spending on research. South Korea and China are breathing down our necks. But the British capitalist class prefers the safe bets, the quick bucks – and the mega handouts to the senior executives and the shareholders.

Vice chairman of Stronger In campaign calls off Liam Fox after saying is Britain ‘fat and lazy’
Friday afternoons on the golf course? Fox may have watched one too many episodes of Terry and June. But what’s clear is that Britain’s bosses pay themselves far more than is justified either by comparison with their workers or on their performance. They have spent years relying on taxpayers to top up poverty pay and on the regulators to allow pensions holidays – just so they could hand out more money to shareholders.

They take what academic Kevin Farnsworth estimates at £93bn a year in corporate welfare – cash handouts and subsidies. But they react with horror to the notion of decent wages or chipping in for apprenticeships, rather than treating them as the normal overheads of doing business in a developed country. If that’s not fat and lazy, I don’t know what is.

Of course there are good and non-greedy bosses. But I have spent six years hearing the view that the British are lazy spongers with barely a demurral from most of the media or the political classes. It is high time to push the pendulum back a little.

Fox sees the answer to all this as more slash and burn: of taxes, of red tape, of public spending. That is delusional. Britain has spent 40 years making the burden on business easier, and the results have been to create a capitalist class so sluggish and short-term that it now threatens the continuation of capitalism.

Better, by far, to have a more honest capitalism: in which the responsibilities of business – on taxes, on pay and on investment – are laid out alongside their rights.

Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

By Ben Carter BBC News

A much-touted theory suggests that practising any skill for 10,000 hours is sufficient to make you an expert. No innate talent? Not a problem. You just practice. But is it true?

One man who decided to test it is Dan McLaughlin, 34, a former commercial photographer from Portland, Oregon.

"The idea came in 2009. I was visiting my brother and we decided to play a par three, nine-hole course," he says. "I had never really been on a golf course and went out and shot a 57, which is horrible. It's 30 over par on an easy nine-hole course."

Far from being discouraged by his apparent lack of any natural talent for golf, Dan and his brother started talking about what it would take to become a professional golfer. Dan soon decided he wanted to try.

"When I announced I was going to quit my job, my co-workers started bringing books in and I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle," he says. "These books all had this idea of 10,000 hours in them."

The 10,000-hours concept can be traced back to a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, called The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.

It highlighted the work of a group of psychologists in Berlin, who had studied the practice habits of violin students in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

All had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only done 4,000 hours of practice.

The psychologists didn't see any naturally gifted performers emerge and this surprised them. If natural talent had played a role it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect gifted performers to emerge after, say, 5,000 hours.

Anders Ericsson concluded that "many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years".

It is Malcolm Gladwell's hugely popular book, Outliers, that is largely responsible for introducing "the 10,000-hour rule" to a mass audience - it's the name of one of the chapters.

But Ericsson was not pleased. He wrote a rebuttal paper in 2012, called The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists.

"The 10,000-hour rule was invented by Malcolm Gladwell who stated that, 'Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.' Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalisation to a magical number," Ericsson writes.

Ericsson then pointed out that 10,000 was an average, and that many of the best musicians in his study had accumulated "substantially fewer" hours of practice. He underlined, also, that the quality of the practice was important.

"In contrast, Gladwell does not even mention the concept of deliberate practice," Ericsson writes.

Gladwell counters that Ericsson doesn't really think that talent exists.

"When he disagrees with the way I interpreted his work, it's because I disagree with him," he says.

"I think that being very, very good at something requires a big healthy dose of natural talent. And when I talk about the Beatles - they had masses of natural talent. They were born geniuses. Ericsson wouldn't say that.

"Ericsson, if you read some of his writings, is... saying the right kind of practice is sufficient."

Gladwell places himself roughly in the middle of a sliding scale with Ericsson at one end, placing little emphasis on the role of natural talent, and at the other end a writer such as David Epstein, author of the The Sports Gene. Epstein is "a bit more of a talent person than me" Gladwell suggests.

One of the difficulties with assessing whether expert-level performance can be obtained just through practice is that most studies are done after the subjects have reached that level.

It would be better to follow the progress of someone with no innate talent in a particular discipline who chooses to complete 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in it.

And we can, thanks to our wannabe professional golfer, Dan McLaughlin.

"I began the plan in April 2010 and I basically putted from one foot and slowly worked away from the hole," he says.

"Eighteen months into it I hit my first driver and now it's approaching four years and I'm about half way. So I'm 5,000 hours into the project. My current handicap is right at a 4.1 and the goal is to get down to a plus handicap [below zero] where I have the skill set to compete in a legitimate PGA tour event."

David Epstein hopes that McLaughlin can reach his goal, but he has some doubts. In the sporting world innate ability is mandatory, he believes.

A recent study of baseball players, Epstein points out, found that the average player had 20/13 vision as opposed to normal 20/20 vision. What this means is that they can see at 20 feet what a normal person would need to be at 13 feet to see clearly. That gives a hitter an enormous advantage when it comes to striking a ball being thrown towards them at 95mph from 60 feet (or 153km/h from 18m).

Using an analogy from computing, Epstein says the hardware is someone's visual acuity - or the physiology of their eye that they cannot change - while the software is the set of skills they learn by many, many hours of practice.

"No matter how good their vision is, it's like a laptop with only the hardware - with no programmes on it, it's useless. But once they've downloaded that software, once they have learned those sports-specific skills, the better the hardware is the better the total machine is going to be."

But is there a simpler way to think about all this? Maybe talented people just practise more and try harder at the thing they're already good at - because they enjoy it?

"Imagine being in calculus class on your first day and the teacher being at the board writing an equation, and you look at it and think 'Wow, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,' which some people do," says Gladwell.

"For those people to go home and do two hours of calculus homework is thrilling, whereas for the rest of us it's beyond a chore and more like a nightmare.

"Those that have done the two hours' practice come in the following day and everything is easier than it is for those who didn't enjoy it in the first place and didn't do the two hours' homework."

What Dan McLaughlin is hoping is that what he lacks in innate talent he more than makes up for with his 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

If Dan's plan goes well he could be mixing it with the likes of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in 2018. If not, he will just be a very good golfer.