Can the cricket coach be king?

The role is still evolving, but it's hard to see it become the centrepiece of the narrative like in football

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

March 3, 2014

 

	Micky Stewart (sitting, extreme right) was one of cricket's first coaches, but his role was more to support the captain than to be the man in charge © PA Photos  Enlarge

Where is cricket's Jose Mourinho, its Pep Guardiola, its Sir Alex Ferguson?

I intend no disrespect to cricket coaches. But the question is unavoidable. The football manager has evolved not only as the boss - the "gaffer" - but also the central and controlling mind. He is the team's selector, its tactician and its figurehead. Compare cricket's separation of powers, a three-way division of responsibility. The selectors determine which players get onto the field; the captain sets the field, declares and changes the bowling; while the coach - well, hang on a minute, what does the coach do? This second question partly answers my first one: the role of the coach leads us to the absence of Jose Mourinho.

The original football manager was Herbert Chapman, whose first job was at Northampton Town in 1907. He pioneered a new style of play, rebranded his teams (it was Chapman who termed Arsenal "the Gunners"), and signed players at lower prices by plying rival directors with alcohol while he sipped ginger ale from a whisky glass. No wonder his nickname was "Football's Napoleon". That tradition of managerial control continues to this day. Arsenal's club captain is Thomas Vermaelen. You may not have noticed because he very rarely makes the team. The manager, Arsene Wenger, in contrast, is ever-present.

With occasional exceptions - meddling owners, egotistical chairmen, exceptional captains - there is no doubt who runs a football team: the manager. This has long made them the envy of the coaching fraternity. When the Welsh rugby visionary Carwyn James, who coached the British Lions, was asked if he had any regrets, he replied that he would have liked to be a football manager instead: they didn't have to put up with the interference of selectors.

Cricket didn't even have coaches when James was shaping his teams in the 1970s, let alone Chapman his in the 1910s. English cricket's first full-time professional coach was Micky Stewart, who took over as team manager for the 1986-87 tour of Australia. But Stewart and his generation of coaches were managers in name, not reality. They were more organisers than bosses. David Lloyd, who succeeded Stewart in the England job, put it like this: "The captain ruled the roost, he was the boss really, and you were there to support him. So I wouldn't cross either of the captains I worked with, Atherton or Stewart."

So history, clearly, is part of the explanation. The cricket coach is relatively new. There has not yet been much time for cricket's pioneering coaches to expand and enhance the role. One perfectly plausible projection is that cricket will become more like other sports and a single manager will assume control of the central decisions. Michael Vaughan believes that selectors are now superfluous and their role should been ceded to the coach. Sir Clive Woodward, who coached England to the rugby World Cup, recently accused cricket of being "stuck in the dark ages", with an over-mighty captain and a weak manager. Woodward was baffled that English cricket could sack Kevin Pietersen before the appointment of a new coach. Surely, Woodward argued, that decision was for the coach, not the captain and administrators? This line of argument holds that the cricket coach is still taking infant steps towards its logical evolution and that - in a decade or two - the coach will be king.

	A football coach can alter the effect of individual players by tinkering with the structure in which they operate. Cricket, in contrast, is the accumulation of what statisticians call "discrete" events, actions that occur in a comparative vacuum

There is a counter argument. Ian Chappell and Shane Warne, among others, believe that the cricket coach should be held in check rather than allowed to launch a power grab. At international level, in Warne's words, "the coach shouldn't be coaching." The coach can certainly help create the right environment. But the Warne-Chappell approach remains suspicious of interventionist technical coaching once players have reached Test level. They believe it must be the captain, not the coach, who runs the team on the field.

This is the nub of the issue. Is there something about cricket, almost unique among sports, that makes it harder (perhaps impossible) for a coach to shape what happens during the match? We know it is the baseball manager who pulls off the pitcher and replaces him with a fresher arm. We know it is the football manager who devises the playing system and structure for each match. Why not cricket?

We now run into a parallel question: how central is captaincy? For if the coach wishes to become the defining figure, he can assume selection control from the selectors, but tactics he must wrestle from the captain. As a teenager, I was 12th man for Kent in a one-day match. I organised the drinks bottles while sitting next to the coach. When Kent took a wicket and I prepared to run onto the pitch, the coach pulled me to one side. "Tell the captain to change the bowling at the far end and move mid-off deeper. And tell him that has come from me!" I relayed the message. "Tell the coach to f*** off and let me captain the team," the captain replied, "and tell him that's from me." It was an early lesson in a familiar confusion about roles and responsibilities.

The structure of cricket may work against an off-field mastermind, certainly in the longer formats of the game. In a five-day match, the coach can only directly speak to his players at lunch, tea or the close of play. During each session, the captain must make his own decisions - as Bob Woolmer discovered when his coach-to-captain walkie-talkie system was outlawed in 1999. It is possible to imagine a T20 match mapped out in advance because there are only a small number of bowling changes to make. But a Test match is so fluid and unpredictable, with so many moving parts interacting and influencing each other, that a "planned" Test is a contradiction in terms.

In other respects cricket is anything but fluid. The ball is "live" in cricket for a very small percentage of the match. And for the vast majority of that time, only two or three players are involved: the bowler, the batsmen and sometimes a fielder. Crucially, their individual actions take place in perfect isolation. No one else can help you hit a cover drive or bowl a yorker. This truth is captured by the old cliché that cricket is a team game played by individuals.

That makes it very different from football. When an attacking player tracks back, the job of being a defender becomes fundamentally easier. When a coach devises a different midfield formation, the experience of being out on the pitch materially changes. The spaces are in different places, so it becomes a changed match. Not so in cricket. A coach (or captain) can change his batting order. But no coach can soften or alter the isolated examination that awaits all the batsmen when they eventually face Mitchell Johnson's thunderbolts. You can shuffle the pack, but the cards must be played individually.

This is the greatest challenge facing a cricket coach. A football coach can alter the effect of individual players by tinkering with the structure in which they operate. The presence of a good defensive midfielder frees up the playmaker to push up-field and express himself. Just ask the playmaker. When Real Madrid sold the defensive midfielder Claude Makelele and bought David Beckham instead, Zinedine Zidane felt the pinch. "Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley," asked Zidane, "when you are losing the entire engine?" These are managerial judgements, decisions about structure and strategy that affect almost every moment of a football match. Cricket, in contrast, is the accumulation of what statisticians call "discrete" events, actions that occur in a comparative vacuum.

Paradoxically, this makes it harder for cricket coaches to influence the shape of the match. They come up against an impenetrable wall: every player, with bat or ball, is on his own when it really matters. This, I suspect, is why cricket coaches, during periods of desperate failure, are so often reduced to the worst of all managerial failings: telling their players how to bat and bowl. It almost never works, but you can see how they end up there.

By my own logic, cricket coaching could evolve in either of two opposite directions. Given the technical and individual nature of the game, the trend may be towards individual coaches who work for the player, rather than vice versa - exactly as already happens in golf and tennis. Alternatively, cricket may eventually accept a version of the football model, despite its structural differences. One thing is certain. Unless that happens - and I'm not sure it should - I can't see a cricketing Jose Mourinho putting up with the constraints of the job. After all, pity the poor chief selector who relays the following message, "Jose, here's the team we've picked for you to play against Manchester City."

In today's corporations the buck never stops. Welcome to the age of irresponsibility

Our largest companies have become so complex that no one's expected to fully know what's going on. Yet the rewards are bigger than ever

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 9 July 2013 21.30 BST

Hon Ha's Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, in 2010. That year there were 12 suicides in the 300,000-strong workforce. 'The top managers of Apple escaped blame because these deaths happened in ­factories in another country (China) owned by a company from yet another country (Hon Hai, the Taiwanese ­multinational).' Photograph: Qilai Shen

George Osborne confirmed on Monday that he would accept the recommendation of Britain's parliamentary commission on banking standards and add to his banking reform bill a new offence of "reckless misconduct in the management of a bank".

That is a bit of a setback for the managerial class, but it still does not sufficiently change the overall picture that it is a great time to be a top manager in the corporate world, especially in the US and Britain.

Not only do they give you a good salary and handsome bonus, but they are really understanding when you fail to live up to expectations. If they want to show you the door in the middle of your term, they will give you millions of dollars, even tens of millions, in "termination payment". Even if you have totally screwed up, the worst that can happen is that they take away your knighthood or make you give up, say, a third of your multimillion-pound pension pot.

Even better, the buck never stops at your desk. It usually stops at the lowest guy in the food chain – a rogue trader or some owner of a two-bit factory in Bangladesh. Occasionally you may have to blame your main supplier, but rarely your own company, and never yourself.

Welcome to the age of irresponsibility.

The largest companies today are so complex that top managers are not even expected to know fully what is really going on in them. These companies have also increasingly outsourced activities to multiple layers of subcontractors in supply chains crisscrossing the globe.

Increasing complexity not only lowers the quality of decisions, as it creates an information overload, but makes it more difficult to pin down responsibilities. A number of recent scandals have brought home this reality.

The multiple suicides of workers in Foxconn factories in China have revealed Victorian labour conditions down the supply chains for the most futuristic Apple products. But the top managers of Apple escaped blame because these deaths happened in factories in another country (China) owned by a company from yet another country (Hon Hai, the Taiwanese multinational).

No one at the top of the big supermarkets took serious responsibility in the horsemeat scandal because, it was accepted, they could not be expected to police supply chains running from Romania through the Netherlands, Cyprus and Luxembourg to France (and that is only one of several chains involved).

The problem is even more serious in the financial sector, which these days deals in assets that involve households (in the case of mortgages), companies and governments all over the world. On top of that these financial assets are combined, sliced and diced many times over, to produce highly complicated "derivative" products. The result is an exponential increase in complexity.

Andy Haldane, executive director of financial stability at the Bank of England, once pointed out that in order to fully understand a CDO2 – one of the more complicated financial derivatives (but not the most complicated) – a prospective investor needs to absorb more than a billion pages of information. I have come across bankers who confessed that they had derivative contracts running to a few hundred pages, which they naturally didn't have time to read.

Given this level of complexity, financial companies have come to rely heavily on countless others – stock analysts, financial journalists, credit-rating agencies, you name it – for information and, more importantly, making judgments. This means that when something goes wrong, they can always blame others: poor people in Florida who bought houses they cannot afford; "irresponsible" foreign governments; misleading foreign stock analysts; and, yes, incompetent credit-rating agencies.

The result is an economic system in which no one in "responsible" positions takes any serious responsibility. Unless radical action is taken, we will see many more financial crises and corporate scandals in the years to come.

The first thing we need is to modernise our sense of crime and punishment. Most of us still instinctively subscribe to the primeval notion of crime as a direct physical act – killing someone, stealing silver. But in the modern economy, with a complex division of labour, indirect non-physical acts can also seriously harm people. If misbehaving financiers and incompetent regulators cause an economic crisis, they can indirectly kill people by subjecting them to unemployment-related stress and by reducing public health expenditure, as shown by books like The Body Politic. We need to accept the seriousness of these "long-distance crimes" and strengthen punishments for them.

More importantly, we need to simplify our economic system so that responsibilities are easier to determine. This is not to say we have to go back to the days of small workshops owned by a single capitalist: increased complexity is inevitable if we are to increase productivity. However, much of the recent rise in complexity has been designed to make money for certain people, at the cost of social productivity. Such socially unproductive complexity needs to be reduced.

Financial derivatives are the most obvious examples. Given their potential to exponentially increase the complexity of the financial system – and thus the degree of irresponsibility within it – we should only allow such products when their creators can prove their productivity and safety, similar to how the drug approval process works.

The negative potential of outsourcing in non-financial industries may not be as great as that of financial derivatives, but the buying companies should be made far more accountable for making their subcontractors comply with rules regarding product safety, working conditions and environmental standards.

Without measures to simplify the system and recalibrate our sense of crime and punishment, the age of irresponsibility will destroy us all.

An Article against MBAs

Bloodless bean-counters rule over us – where are the leaders?

The inexorable march of the managerialists is creating resentment and social division. 

Charles Moore in The Telegraph

Recently, a man got in touch with me who works for the defence services contractor QinetiQ. He wanted to complain about the way it was run. The company, in his view, suffers from “managerialism”.

Managerialists, he says, are “a group who consider themselves separate from the organisations they join”. They are not interested in the content of the work their organisation performs. They are a caste of people who think they know how to manage. They have studied “The 24-hour MBA”. There is a clear benefit from their management, for them: they arrange their own very high salaries and bonuses. Then they can leave quickly with something that looks good on the CV. The benefit to the company is less clear.

I also spoke to a former senior employee of QinetiQ. He corroborated my informant’s points with gusto. He said managerialists were particularly unsuited to industries such as QinetiQ’s, where scientific knowledge is all. He put it simply: “People who are making bits of technology, or servicing them, should know about technology.”

Skills are not infinitely transferable. “You used to be the editor of a broadsheet newspaper,” he said to me. “How do you think a former chief executive of Ford would perform if he suddenly came and edited a national title?” (or, he politely didn’t say, if the reverse were to happen).

The lack of knowledge at the top of a firm obviously creates a practical problem – “You don’t have people to get under the bonnet. They can only kick the tyres and change the oil.” They don’t understand the needs of the core customer. It also, in his view, creates a moral problem. The workers cannot respect their bosses. Management becomes “not symbiotic, but parasitic”.

I do not know whether these men are right about QinetiQ. I have no experience of the company and no technical expertise. One must also allow for the fact that, in any organisation, there are people with axes to grind. But I did find the way they talked striking. It seemed to accord with so many things I hear about life in so many organisations.

It is a big complaint, for example, about the modern National Health Service. Nowadays, on the dubious principle that all businesses and services are essentially the same, managers are a non-medical breed. The effect can be laughable. I heard of a case in which the managers told the doctors in a big hospital to save money by sending all their instruments away to a centralised off-site sterilising unit. Fine, said one mischievous consultant, but in that case may I have a second set of instruments so that I can work on my patients in emergencies? The managers, having no idea about his instruments, thought he probably could. “That’ll be £2 million then,” he said.

Comparable problems afflict the Armed Forces. They have fought several wars in the past 15 years, dealing with a Ministry of Defence staffed by people who know nothing about war. More generally in the Civil Service, it has become common to reduce specialist skills – language training in the Foreign Office, for example – and to move able people around from department to department. The present permanent secretary of the Home Office had never worked there before she took her present post at the beginning of last year. Since it is a department of fantastic complexity, it is perhaps not surprising that it has recently taken a series of tumbles on such issues as deportations and borders.

You find this hollowing-out everywhere. In schools, the head who does not teach is now a familiar, indeed dominant figure. University vice-chancellors, instead of being dons who move from their subject into administration for a period of their lives, are now virtually lifelong managers, with hugely increased salaries to match. It is even commonplace for charities to be run by people with no commitment to the charity’s specific purpose, but proud possession of what they call the necessary “skill-sets”, such as corporate governance.

With the rise of the managerialist comes a special language – a weird combination of semi-spiritual banality (“unlocking energies”), euphemism, and legalese. If you want to see the difference between people steeped in their trade and people steeped in managerialism, compare the testimony, at the Leveson Inquiry, of the Murdochs, father and son. The wicked old man spoke in the language, simultaneously sharp and blunt, of people who know and run their business. The evasive son adopted the locutions taught in business-school courses, honed by big law firms, footnoted by anxious compliance officers.

My friend at QinetiQ draws my attention to some of the usages which predominate where managerialism rules. The system of internal communications becomes a platform not for sharing knowledge but for propaganda. Human Resources invent things like the Personal Improvement Programme, which is really a means of punishing staff. “Consultation”, he says, is a word meaning that managerialists “tell you what they are going to do, 30 days before they do it”.

These habits are now pervasive across industry and the public services. “Diversity” is always “celebrated”, but it never means diversity of thought. The people who tell you they are “passionate about” X or Y are usually the most bloodless ones in the outfit.

In such cultures, just as the experts, the professionals and the technicians bitterly resent the managerialists for neither understanding nor caring, so the managerialists secretly detest the professionals who, they believe, get in the way of their rationalisations. They are desperate to “let go” of such people. Very unhappy organisations result.

A few weeks ago, after Dr Rowan Williams had given notice of his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury, there was a story about his potential successor, Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York. Dr Sentamu’s critics, apparently, had been saying that he was too much like an African tribal chief. Friends of Dr Sentamu were angry at what they saw as a racial slur.

But it struck me that the qualities of a tribal chief are now shockingly rare in big modern organisations. They might be just the job, and not only for the poor old C of E. The point about a tribe is that it unites its members by ties that are very hard to break. Tribalism, for sure, can be a bad thing, but a tribe understands matters of life and death. It recognises the importance of yesterday and tomorrow as much as today. It maintains the interest of the whole over that of a particular part. The chief of the tribe is not a manager: he is a leader.

No one sensible thinks that a large organisation can exist without being managed. Old stagers in companies, regiments, professions and, in my own experience, newspapers, easily over-romanticise their achievements and are unfair about the poor “bean-counters” who make the sums add up. But management should not dominate. As Lord Slim, who brilliantly led the British Army through the Burma campaign, put it: “Managers are necessary; leaders are essential.” We now have unprecedented numbers of the former, not so many of the latter.

Because, since the credit crunch, Everything Is Different Now, this problem is causing real social division. It explains much of the rage about executive pay. It is not so much the numerical difference between the top and the bottom which causes the anger, as the sense about why that difference exists. It has been arranged by the managerialists. It may even be the chief purpose of the managerialists’ working lives, as they edge towards the exit with the largest portable share of the takings available.

It's time to start talking to the City

A radical reform of the financial sector can only be achieved if we know what kind of capitalism we want

• Ha-Joon Chang
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 February 2012

Last week I delivered a lecture on my latest book to about 150 people from the financial industry at the London Stock Exchange. The event was not organised or endorsed by the LSE itself, but the venue was quite poignant for me, given that a few months ago I did the same thing on the other side of the barricade, so to speak, at the Occupy London Stock Exchange movement.

At the exchange I made two proposals I knew may not be popular with the audience. My first was that we need to completely change the way we run our corporations, especially in the UK and the US. I started from the observation that financial deregulation since the 1980s has greatly increased the power of shareholders by expanding the options open to them, both geographically and in terms of product choice. Such deregulation was particularly advanced in Britain and America, making them the homes of "shareholder capitalism".

With greater abilities to move around, shareholders have begun to adopt increasingly short time horizons. As Prem Sikka wrote in the Guardian in December 2011, the average shareholding period in UK firms fell from about five years in the mid-1960s to 7.5 months in 2007. The figure for UK banks had fallen to three months by 2008 (although it is up to about two years now).
In order to satisfy impatient shareholders, managers have maximised short-term profits by squeezing other "stakeholders", such as workers and suppliers, and by minimising investments, whose costs are immediate but whose returns are remote. Such strategy does long-term damages by demoralising workers, lowering supplier qualities, and making equipment outmoded. But the managers do not care because their pay is linked to short-term equity prices, whose maximisation is what short term-oriented shareholders want.

That is not all. An increasing proportion of profits are distributed to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks (firms buying their own shares to prop up their prices). According to William Lazonick – a leading authority on this issue – between 2001 and 2010, top UK firms (86 companies that are included in the S&P Europe 350 index) distributed 88% of their profits to shareholders in dividends (62%) and share buybacks (26%).

During the same period, top US companies (459 of those in the S&P 500) paid out an even greater proportion to shareholders: 94% (40% in dividends and 54% in buybacks). The figure used to be just over 50% in the early 80s (about 50% in dividends and less than 5% in buybacks).

The resulting depletion in retained profit, traditionally the biggest source of corporate investments, has dramatically undermined these corporations' abilities to invest, further weakening their long-term competitiveness. Therefore, I concluded, unless we significantly restrict the freedom of movement for shareholders, through financial reregulation, and reward managers according to more long term-oriented performance measures than share prices, companies will continue to be managed in a way that undermines their own viability and weakens the national economy in the long run.

My second proposal was that, in order to improve the stability of our financial system, we need to radically simplify it. I argued that financial deregulation in the last 30 years led to the proliferation of complex financial derivatives. This has created a financial system whose complexity has far outstripped our ability to control it, as dramatically demonstrated by the 2008 financial crisis.
Drawing on the works of Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel economics laureate and a founding father of the study of artificial intelligence, I pointed out that often the crucial constraint on good decision-making is not the lack of information but our limited mental capability, or what Simon called "bounded rationality". Given our bounded rationality, I asserted, the only way to increase the stability of our financial system is to make it simpler. And the most important action to take is to restrict, or even ban, complex and risky financial instruments through the financial world equivalent of the drugs approval procedure.

The reactions of my audience were rather surprising. Not only did nobody challenge my proposals, but many agreed with me. Yes, they said, "quarterly capitalism" has been destructive. True, they related, we've seen too many derivative products that few people understood. And, yes, many of those products have been socially harmful.

It seems that, as it is wrong to label the Occupy movement as anti-capitalist, it is misleading to characterise the financial industry as being in denial about the need for reform. I am not naive enough to think that the people who came to my lecture are typical of the financial industry. However, a surprisingly large number of them acknowledged the problems of short-termism and excessive complexity that their industry has generated to the detriment of the rest of the economy – and ultimately to its own detriment, as the financial industry cannot thrive alone.

The rest of us need to have a closer dialogue with reform-minded people in the financial industry. They are the ones who can generate greater political acceptance of reforms among their colleagues and who can also help us devise technically competent reform proposals. After all, without a degree of "changes from within", no reform can be truly durable.

In the UK 2,800 bankers earn over £1m. The claim that rare skills command a premium does not apply to them

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, 23/11/2011

Here's a game you can play at home. Ask your friends how much they reckon the head of human resources at Cadbury, the chocolate company, pocketed for the last year for which we have figures. In my experience, the guessing will open at around the £100,000 or £150,000 mark. Then, realising that the answer must be stunning or else you wouldn't be asking the question, people go higher, suggesting £300,000 or even £500,000.

Those who place their bet at that very top end tend to smile at the absurdity of it, acknowledging in advance the madness of such a high salary. So far, in two years of playing this game, I have never seen anyone get the right answer. Which is that in 2008 Bob Stack, then head of HR for Cadbury, was rewarded with a package totalling £3.8m, including £2m in exercised share options. The aptly named Stack retired with all that and an £8m pension pot, paying him £700,000 this year and every year.

It's a choice example, even if Cadbury, gobbled up by Kraft, is, like Stack, no longer part of the British corporate scene. No matter how inured you think you are to runaway executive salaries, laid bare by this week's report of the High Pay Commission, that one makes the jaw drop. For Stack was not some master of the universe CEO, heading up a global financial behemoth. He ran the personnel department at a chocolate company. That's not a trivial job. But a basic package of nearly £2m a year? It makes no sense.
Ask people to pinpoint the problem and they might struggle to be specific. They just find it appalling that, as the commission found, today's CEO is often paid 70, 80 or over 100 times the salary of their average worker, when three decades ago the ratio usually stood at 13 to 1. A gap has turned into a vast, ever widening chasm.

Why does this matter exactly? You can't simply whine that it's unfair, insisted the executive recruiter Heather McGregor on the Today programme. "Anyone over the age of seven who complains that things are not fair needs a reality check," she said.

Deborah Hargreaves, the High Pay Commission chair, is ready with grown-up, hard-headed arguments for why runaway pay is bad for business. When those at the top are getting so much more than their subordinates, workers get demoralised, Hargreaves told me; absenteeism increases, and staff refuse to engage with management or support the corporate mission. When the average salary has increased just threefold over the last 30 years, it makes workers sullen and resentful to note that, say, the head of Barclays has seen his pay rise by nearly 5,000% over the same period.

Free-wheeling capitalists should be particularly alarmed, says the commission. Gargantuan executive pay is sapping enterprise: people who might have been risk-taking entrepreneurs have no reason to start their own businesses when they are so comfortably looked after at corporate HQ. And of course such winner-takes-all rewards warp the wider economy. Housing in London is just one example. The bonus boys have driven up prices at the top end, pulling the whole housing market out of reach of would-be first-time buyers at the other end. It's trickle-down economics at its worst: the wealth of the rich doesn't cascade downwards, but its corrosive consequences do.

Defenders of the wealthy brush aside such talk, certain their critics' real beef resides elsewhere, in envy or a retro-communist desire for uniformity. "Move to Cuba" was McGregor's most succinct soundbite.
In one way she's right: concerns over worker demoralisation and reduced entrepreneurial spirit do not lie at the heart of the matter. Our objection to telephone-number salaries goes deeper. What it comes down to is desert – a notion so deeply ingrained that, yes, even a seven-year-old can grasp it: the belief that people should deserve the rewards they get.

That's why the "move to Cuba" remark was so off beam. Most people have long accepted that there will be a differential in pay that, in the hoary example, the brain surgeon will earn more than the dustman. People understand that some skills are rare and therefore command a greater premium. They even accept that this can result in extreme outcomes, with the likes of Wayne Rooney trousering £250,000 a week. But none of that logic applies to the current state of corporate pay.

Rooney is truly a one in a hundred million talent; there might be just two dozen people in the world who could match his skills. But with all due respect to Bob Stack, that is not true of him. Nor can it possibly be true of the 2,800 staff in 27 UK-based banks who, according to the Financial Services Authority, received more than £1m each in 2009. Whatever these people are able to do, it's clearly not rare.

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian 23/11/2011

Ah, comes the reply, but these are the cream of the international crop, among the very best bankers in the world. The commission report blows a hole in that tired argument, revealing there's hardly any cross-border poaching of corporate talent. Not many of our monolingual high earners could work abroad and even fewer would want to. They like it here and do not have to be paid lottery jackpot money to stay.

So rarity and competition can't justify these rates, and nor can any old-fashioned notion of desert: there is no society-wide consensus that says these people do such valuable, critical work they deserve their riches. On the contrary, we lament that the City lures maths and science graduates who might otherwise have become great engineers or scientists, paying them instead to move digits on a screen producing nothing of any discernible value whatsoever.

When reward slips its moorings from merit, this surely poses a danger that goes beyond our economic prospects. What message are we sending the next generation of Britons? Why should they aspire to become a surgeon or a headteacher or a judge, when those once top-paid jobs now earn a tiny fraction of the salary attached to a relatively cushy, low-risk seat in the boardroom or on the trading floor?

Strikingly, the commission found that even the mega-earners do not kid themselves they deserve their pay. They admitted that they had got lucky, that they worked no harder and risked no more than those earning much less. But they did think they were "entitled" to what they got. Hargreaves draws no parallel with the August rioters, except that they "showed that same sense of entitlement, that they could take trainers or a TV, as those bankers who thought they could take a bonus, even if they had brought a bank to its knees".
The commission has plenty of bright ideas for change. Ignore the City bleats that meaningful action has to be international, which sadly is impossible: action has only been impossible up till now because the UK, batting for the City, has blocked any EU attempt to tackle high pay. But the larger change will be cultural. We need to revive the lost notion of merit and desert, to make those bagging huge, undeserved salaries feel a sense of shame or at least loss of reputation at such unwarranted rewards. We have the Fairtrade scheme, so why not a Fair Pay kitemark granted only to products made by companies who pay defensible rates? Such a seal of approval should be given only sparingly – only to those who have really earned it.