Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua set to stir controversy with critique of liberal western childrearing
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
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Wednesday 12 January 2011
Thursday 26 August 2010
Reading The Bowler
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If judging the length and line early makes batting relatively more easy and effective, failure to do so puts the batsman at a disadvantage.
Batsmen also try to look at the way the bowler has gripped the ball, with regards to the position of his fingers and the orientation of the shiny surface. When bowling a slower one McGrath would hold the ball with his index and middle fingers split wide apart; Lee while doing similar would hold the ball deep in his hand. Zaheer Khan often bowls with his fingers across the seam, which tells you to be ready for a straight delivery because the ball won't swing unless the seam is upright.
One of the principles of batting is to be prompt and to be in a position to receive the ball, as against arriving at the same time as the ball, because that is invariably too late | |||
Once the line is deciphered, a batsman will mostly try to keep the front leg outside the line of the ball. For a right-hander the front leg must stay leg side of the ball. If the leg is not in the appropriate position, the bat will never come down straight, and you might end up playing across in front of your pads. Also, keeping the leg outside the line is mandatory to maintain good balance, or else you risk falling over.
Tall bowlers with high-arm actions, like McGrath, Ambrose, Kumble and so on, tend to generate more bounce than their round-arm, slingy counterparts like Malinga or Ajit Agarkar. While tall bowlers get consistent high bounce, it also often misleads the batsman into playing on the back foot, even to balls that are meant to be played on the front foot; this results in them getting trapped in front. On the other hand, bowlers like Malinga and Agarkar pose a different kind of threat - you can never trust the bounce with them. Playing horizontal bat shots and ducking - for both of which you need to be able to trust the bounce - are difficult while facing these bowlers. You have to tell yourself to be on the front foot, even if the length and pace are pushing you back, and also to play with a vertical bat as much as possible, to make up for the lack of bounce.
Monday 29 March 2010
Higher callings, base desires
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
The custodians of impossible morality turn into monstrous predators
Taher, who is 24, wants to be a writer and is starting that long journey. His first novel is going to be about just such a woman, born too lovely and seen as witchy by conservative Afghani émigrés living in small-town America. And her son, abused by the local imam. It happened to Taher when he was 10.
Taher and I have been discussing the child sexual abuse within the Catholic church worldwide and complicit priests and popes. What paedophile priests have done to children - especially young boys, most of all vulnerable young boys - is horrifying. Far worse though is the cover-up, which appears to have been organised at the Vatican, at the HQ. The top brass ensured their reputation was kept clean. Suffocating silence was thrown over the dirty quilt.
The Catholic hierarchy seeks to monitor and completely control the sexual behaviour of their flocks - banning condoms, abortion, pleasure, damning those who refuse to obey. Millions of believers ignore the injunctions, but millions do not. That power is then abused, as we have seen. More is sure to tumble out in the weeks to come.
But Taher is interested in bigger questions: "Do you not think there are some similarities between 'true' Catholics and 'true' Muslims? Both have leaders who are obsessed with how dangerous sex is and both have really sick attitudes. If they could go easy and just accept sex is part of human life it would be better for them and the rest of us."
A number of Muslim bloggers have started up similar debates since the recent Catholic scandals broke. One asks: "Could it be that Muslims are more sexually repressed than members of other faiths? I guess it is a close call between us and Catholics." Several young Muslim women and men have also contacted me alleging sexual abuse by imams and mullahs.
These two world faiths have more rules, regulations, thought and behaviour police when it comes to carnal relations than any other. Catholicism casts human sensuality as Satanic, injects an overdose of guilt to kill pleasure and within its clergy imposes celibacy, a restriction that is clearly impossible for many men of that God. The custodians of impossible morality so turn into monstrous predators.
Strict Sunni and Shia Muslims also fear sexuality and try to contain it with ever increasing fervour. Young women must cover up completely; girls too are temptresses and so are made to wear scarves, cloaks and gloves. Young men must wait until marriage with a good Muslim woman before they can have sex. All else is haram - wicked, a sin. So consumed are some Muslims with this mission to tame the sexual drive that they live in a distorted universe, a swamp of imagined wickedness and some, like the Catholic priests, end up doing terrible things.
I have interviewed too many such Muslim men who find modern relationships between the sexes only corrupt and filthy. Abdullah, a prisoner who is doing time for raping his niece, tells me that veils cannot hide a woman's breasts and buttocks. He can see right through them which is why, in his view, women should not be in the public space, ever. He can't pray, he says, because provocative females have rotted his brain and heart.
The Catholic priests who raped children from their congregations would understand Abdullah's behaviour and excuses perfectly. Those who see sex as gross and immoral, perhaps more easily use sex as an instrument of violation. Other, less dramatic effects of sexual paranoia are just as worrying. Since the spread of Saudi religious fundamentalism, devout Muslims have been brainwashed into thinking Islam is mainly concerned about the avoidance of lust and the struggle to find high decorum. Their faith has got distorted and become fearful.
From west to east, millions have sex on their minds day and night and they cannot find the tranquillity for prayer and connection with God and spirituality. Theirs is one long torturous battle against the natural self. So too, I imagine, for the vast numbers of Catholic priests whose celibacy was a sham. Did they punish their victims for their own failures to connect with the divine?
Child abusers are found among people of all religions and none. Religious and cultural communities and ordinary neighbourhoods collectively hide abuse and abusers because that is preferable to the stench of a scandal. When the Sikh British playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote a play about sexual violence in a temple, Sikh protesters stopped the performances. They didn't want to be reminded of what goes on in holy places. In my recent memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, I described how a widower in the 1960s touched up women when they bent over to find their shoes after prayers. They said the "dirty cockroach" had deflowered his own daughters. Nobody did anything. Instead, when he died they cleaned up his story and prayed for his soul. No bridegrooms were found for the "used" girls. In mosques and Islamic organisations, this still goes on and is veiled in utmost secrecy.
The abuse of young people in any religious setting is an intolerable betrayal of trust and divinity. But some religions seem more susceptible than others. Substantial numbers of Catholics and Wahabi Muslims are excessively fervent, seriously sanctimonious and phobic about the human body. Is it possible this lethal combination encourages illicit, forced sex with children? Should we be looking to save these souls before they wreck more bodies? I am only posing questions not casting aspersions. Not allowed. Blasphemy, they will cry. These enquiries will be buried under a pile of righteous outrage. Until the next time and the next.
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Thursday 4 March 2010
A lover's guide to older women
In 1965 he published an explicit book about his sexual experiences across the age divide. As the erotic classic is reprinted, Stephen Vizinczey tells John Walsh why he still believes that every man needs a Mrs Robinson
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Sunday 31 January 2010
Inequality in a meritocracy
Published: January 29 2010 20:35 | Last updated: January 29 2010 20:35
What is unclear is why the government should be alarmed about this now. It is a tautology to say that the very rich are richer than the very poor. Britain is relatively unequal for an advanced country, but it is by no means the most unequal. Italy, Poland, Portugal and the US all have larger gaps between rich and poor, and New Zealand and Ireland have comparable ones. The report asserts (and several graphs make plain) that British society grew rapidly and significantly less equal in the 1980s, and that little has changed since then. The social ground rules have been stable for at least a quarter-century.
One must read between the lines to discover the source of Ms Harman's alarm. The six "strands" of inequality that the National Equality Panel studied – gender, age, ethnicity, religion, disability and sexuality – have all been covered by civil rights legislation since Tony Blair and Labour came to power in 1997. Equality is important, Ms Harman writes in her foreword, because "the economy that will succeed in the future is one that draws on the talents of all, not one which is blinkered by prejudice and marred by discrimination". It is oppression that Ms Harman's academics are looking for.
The problem is that the report's conclusions are implicit in its definitions, which are false ones. It takes "inequality" as a synonym for "prejudice and discrimination", which it very often is not. If there is one theme that the study's authors stress with consistency, it is that inequality within groups in the UK is just as severe, or nearly as severe, as inequality between groups. The case that rising inequality is driven by sexism or racism (or some other prejudice) is weak, although the authors are indefatigable in trying to insinuate it. "Compared to a White British Christian man with the same qualifications, age and occupation," they write, "Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim men and Black African Christian men have pay 13-21 per cent lower." (The idiom of the report frequently resembles the dockside pidgin spoken in the novels of Joseph Conrad.) But not all of their evidence goes in this direction: on average, Hindu and Sikh (but not Muslim) Indians, Caribbean blacks and Chinese men have higher hourly wages than the ethnic-religious majority, and the earnings of Jewish men are about 25 per cent higher. The British-descended majority, if they really meant to exploit or exclude, would probably not relegate themselves to such a low position on the economic ladder.
Nor is the gap between men's earnings and women's an open-and-shut case of prejudice. The authors note that, while women aged under 44 have, on average, more education than their male contemporaries, they earn 21 per cent less. The problem, they opine, is the treatment of part-time work, which many women resort to when they start families. "Low pay for part-time work is a key factor in gender inequality," they write. "It reflects the low value accorded to it and failure to create opportunities for training and promotion." But the low value attached to part-time work is a function of economic common sense, not contempt. If work is part-time, then either the demand for it is less pressing or the supply of it is less reliable. A milkman who delivers milk a few days a week on a flexible schedule is less valuable per delivery than one who delivers it regularly.
Unable to show racism or sexism, the study retreats to the concept of class, noting that "economic advantage and disadvantage reinforce themselves across the life cycle, and often on to the next generation", and calling for government intervention to counteract it. But the inequalities that exist are obviously not the programme of a self-conscious class. Consider the openness of Britain's educational system. According to the report, at practically every level of scoring on the General Certificate of Secondary Education, all ethnic minority groups attend university at higher rates than white Britons. Now, ethnic prejudice is not the only form of disadvantage, but its absence – and even a powerful impulse to affirmative action – is a sign that there is no systematic attempt to seize institutions for the benefit of an in-group, as in a real class system. It is not advantage but prosperity that is self-reinforcing. The class problems that progressive governments make it their business to manage have mostly been solved.
The problems that remain are problems of meritocracy, of which inequality is a natural result. As long as economies are growing, people are content to see others get a bit more relative income. When economies stagnate, there is more political agitation for redistributing the goods that remain, and society grows less meritocratic. Ms Harman makes an unconvincing argument for more equal distribution of income and wealth among citizens. In the present climate, however, the public is unlikely to require any convincing at all.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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Friday 27 November 2009
The dark side of the internet
In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography.
- Andy Beckett
- The Guardian, Thursday 26 November 2009
Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.
"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.
His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky … they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"
Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.
Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do you need?" … "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or "MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more", "Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: "If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."
The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."
Unfathomable and mysterious
"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?
Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."
In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available."
In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything – that's not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. "It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just too much data."
But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial – "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."
The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet – all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."
Open or closed?
In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture – the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog – and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," saysDanny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.
There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.
The hollow legs of Sealand
The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.
In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay – the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise – announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.
"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.
To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet – we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."
Always recorded
According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.
Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."
As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable – suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.
Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web – the content, links, and transactions between people … A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality.
"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"
Gold Rush
It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.
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Friday 19 June 2009
Boss-class hypocrisy
Managers who have long defended their huge pay have a cheek asking staff to work for nothing
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 June 2009 23.00 BST
There's a cheery cliche popular with top entertainers and sports stars: "I love this job so much that I'd still do it if they didn't pay me." But people only say this if they know there's no risk of it happening. Those British employees now being asked to come in and work for nothing would never have thought to make the offer.
The novelty of the economic crisis has been a series of schemes encouraging staff to take unpaid leave, salary reduction or to work for a month without money as an alternative to being laid off. In the most high-profile example, British Airways has won substantial pay cuts from its pilots while encouraging other staff to work gratis for part of the year.
In some cases – principally, the highest-paid radio and TV presenters – the victims of thrift simply have to accept that their losses will be widely viewed as a necessary market correction. In the same way, the only rapid way for MPs to begin to restore public confidence would be to vote through a self-flagellating pay cut.
But the obvious objection to this popular gateau analogy is that the plates were not equally filled before the redistribution began. As BA staff have pointed out, a hairshirt month for the airline's senior management still leaves them with as much annual cash as the lowest names on the payroll would earn in a decade. At different ends of the corporate pyramid, there is a vivid difference between putting on hold plans for a second holiday house and being unable to pay the mortgage on your only home.
Even without the understandable fear that those who insist on keeping their contracted wad may later be punished with redundancy, there is something fundamentally queasy about presenting as equality a scheme in which the impact varies so widely.
The biggest obstacle to these pain-sharing schemes is the instinctive psychological and moral resistance that most people have to the idea of working for nothing. From Dr Johnson's frequently-quoted advice that only blockheads write for anything but money to the Roman Catholic catechism's warning that one of the highest sins of all is to "defraud labourers of their wages", respectable economies have been built on the concept of turning brain or muscle power into spending power.
One of the great shames of the past decade – most prevalent in the media sector – has been the practice of using young people on unpaid or barely-paid "work experience", sometimes extending for months or even years as tolerated slave labour in a post-union world. So we should flinch at the idea that such sneaky cheapskating may now become an accepted corporate tactic.
Inconveniently for the managers now promoting the benefits of allowing the bank account some downtime, the captains of industry are lengthily and noisily on record with the idea that there is a direct relationship between income and incentive.
For decades, these bosses have argued against higher taxation on the grounds that a reduction in take-home rewards would result in the drivers of society idling at their desks because there was no longer any point in making money. Yet now they have harnessed precisely the argument previously used against them – that work can have a larger purpose than personal gain – to propose what amounts to a recession tax on their employees. People who refused to earn less for the good of society now preach the beauty of taking a cut for the company.
At the risk of encouraging my employers and enraging my agent, I probably would be prepared, having had some very good and lucky years, to do much the same work next year for less than the fees paid this. But I would agree to this from the visceral, Dickensian fear of all employees that the workhouse looms as the alternative, and would nurse the angry suspicion that the superiors benefitting from our sacrifices were not suffering as much themselves. When the upturn comes, will they raise the payments or smirkingly continue with a cheaper workforce? (The BA pilots have at least been given shares as the price of their privation.)
Horrible as high unemployment is, an economy that suffers it is at least being honest about the gap between supply and demand and the failures of its systems. A state that reclassifes salary as charity is simply disguising its failures. Except for the super-rich who can do it as a populist gimmick, there is nothing to be said for working for nothing.
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Monday 27 April 2009
Brothels cut prices to beat the recession
German prostitutes are offering discounts, loyalty cards and 'extras'
It has not taken long for the global financial crisis to affect the world's oldest profession in Germany.
In one of the few countries where prostitution is legal, the industry has responded with an economic stimulus package of its own: modern marketing tools, rebates, discounts and gimmicks to boost falling demand.
Some brothels have cut prices or added free promotions, while others have introduced all-inclusive flat-rate fees. Free shuttle buses, discounts for seniors and taxi drivers, as well as "day passes" are among marketing strategies designed to keep business going.
"Times are tough for us too," said Karin Ahrens, who manages the Yes, Sir brothel in Hanover. Revenue had dropped by 30 per cent at her establishment, she said, while turnover had fallen by as much as 50 per cent at other clubs. "We're definitely feeling the crisis. Clients are being tight with their money. They're afraid. You can't charge for the extras any more and there is pressure to cut prices."
Germany has about 400,000 professional prostitutes. In 2002, legislation allowed prostitutes to advertise and enter into formal labour contracts. It opened the way for them to get health insurance, previously refused if they listed their true profession.
Annual revenues are about £12.3bn, according to an estimate by the Verdi services union. Taxes on prostitution are an important source of income for some cities. Prostitution is also legal and regulated in the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, in some parts of Australia, and the US state of Nevada.
Berlin's Pussy Club has attracted media attention with its headline-grabbing "flat rate" – a €70 admission charge for unlimited food, drink and sex between 10am and 4pm. "You've got to come up with creative solutions these days," said club manager Stefan, who requested his surname not be published. "We're feeling the economic crisis, too, even though business has, fortunately, been more or less OK for us so far." Stefan, who runs other establishments in Heidelberg and Wuppertal besides the Berlin club, said the flat rate had helped to keep the 30 women working in each location fully employed. Other novel ideas include loyalty cards, group sex parties, and rebates for golf players. Hamburg's GeizHaus is especially proud of its discount €38.50 price.
Anke Christiansen, manager of the GeizHaus, said the effects of the economic crisis were clear. "The regular customers who used to come by two or three times a week are only coming by once or twice a week now." A client, who gave his name as Pascal, said: "Naturally, we're all feeling the effects of the crisis." He added that he could no longer afford his usual two or three visits a week. Günter Krull, manager of the FKK-Villa in Hanover, agreed: "The girls are complaining, too, because business is bad and I worry that it's all going to get even worse."
Ecki Krumeich, the manager of the upmarket Artemis Club in Berlin, said he had resisted pressure to cut prices, although senior citizens and taxi drivers already get a 50 per cent discount on Sundays and Mondays. "Our philosophy is we provide an important service and even in a recession there are some things people won't do without," said Mr Krumeich. "Other downmarket places might cut prices but we decided we won't do that."
Stephanie Klee, a prostitute in Berlin and former leader of the German association of sex workers, said that even if some luxury brothels were weathering the storm, many more were struggling. "If the consumer electronics shop comes out with rebates and special promotions, why shouldn't we try the same thing?" she said. While she might have had five or six clients per day a year ago, she added, that had fallen to one or even none.
Some suggested that more women were turning to prostitution to make ends meet. "More and more women are moonlighting on the weekends," said Ms Ahrens. "They're not able to get by with their main jobs and are in pretty dire straits."
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Friday 24 April 2009
The Financial Experts: Malgudi On The Mississippi
The Financial Experts: Malgudi On The Mississippi
By Niranjan Ramakrishnan
23 April, 2009
Countercurrents.org
I was gratified the other day to discover a good collection of R. K. Narayan's novels at our local library. Among them was The Financial Expert, a story I had been meaning to re-read for some time. This novel's hero, Margayya, is often acclaimed by critics as Narayan's most memorable character, Margayya. Now the novel itself may also prove to be his most prescient -- the way it captures today's economic meltdown in the microcosm of its tragi-comic hero's rise and fall, it might have hit the shelves this month to win plaudits for its timeliness. Actually, it was published in 1952.
The book's title is in keeping with Narayan's other works - The Bachelor of Arts, The Vendor of Sweets, The Guide, The English Teacher, The Painter of Signs -- Narayan's lulling patina through which we are shown the narrow highs and lows of petty bourgeois existence in Malgudi, Narayan's imaginary South Indian small town. Save for a few passing references, Narayan stayed mostly away from the peasantry in his writings. He gave the proletariat a complete miss, as he did caste. Still, he managed to capture something essential about the Indian lower middle class. In the words of VS Naipaul, Narayan's novels comprise "small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means". Anyone familiar with India and with Narayan's works would find in that observation an adequate measure of truth.
The one character that breaks out of this mold is Margayya, "The Financial Expert". Unlike Narayan's other protagonists, all drawn from the milieu of a benign South Indian fatalism, Margayya's is the soul of the stereotypical American go-getter, bursting with energy and ambition, driven to make things happen for himself. An Indian George Jefferson in mentality, one might say, only sans race (or in Margayya's case, caste).
The novel is not a mystery and I shall be giving nothing away by sharing its storyline. It begins with Margayya as a small-time 'lobbyist' in a small town, except that he works on behalf of poor and illiterate peasants seeking loans from the Cooperative Bank, filling out their application forms, advising them on which rules to invoke to garner the largest loan. One day the bank officials throw him out of the bank compound on pain of arrest, and he finds himself out of a job. Down to his last few rupees, a chance encounter with a frustrated author leaves him with a manuscript of a book on sex education. Margayya parleys this into his first million (before discreetly divesting himself of further interest in the book so as not to be tainted by its topic -- he has bigger plans for himself). He has now morphed into a financier, offering returns on investment several times the rates provided by the local bank. Though Narayan does not term it so, any American would see his operation as a Ponzi scheme (On second thoughts, post-Madoff, perhaps not!).
Even as Margayya's stock rises in the world, with all those who insulted him in the past now standing in line to be in his good books, deterioration has set in elsewhere. His son Balu is becoming a wastrel and a vagabond, sustained in the world wholly by his father's wealth and position. Margayya knows that if the boy ever has to pass a school exam, it is essential that he (Margayya) become chairman of the school board (Narayan writes nothing of the World Bank and the IMF), a position he obtains by suitable donations. Margayya dreams that his wealth would provide Balu the opportunities he himself was denied -- a decent opportunity to study engineering and make a good life. However, with his complete preoccupation with making money, he has little time for his son. He bribes the right people, engages the schoolmaster as the boy's tutor, all to insure that the boy passes his grades. It all comes to nought, for the boy is eventually unable to get through the board exam despite several attempts. Partly out of proclivity and partly out of Margayya's pampering (he rents the boy a home in a posh neighborhood, pays for all his expenses and provides him a handsome living allowance to boot), Balu develops into and remains a full-time party animal, even after marriage and the birth of a child.
Although Margayya's rise to financial eminence is sure and swift, the reader is throughout left with a tantalizing dread that there is something unsustainable about the entire edifice -- the only question is how it all will unravel. Narayan is no Freudian in other departments, but for the constant presence of the death wish in many of his heroes. Here it finds its expression in Margayya, at the height of his powers, doing something patently suicidal. The pyramid scheme could not have continued forever in any case, but Margayya hastens its end: provoked by his son's insult, he thrashes Balu's cavorting buddy for having led his boy astray. In retaliation, that man (incidentally the author who gave him the sex therapy manuscript originally) spreads the rumor that Margayya is out of money. Fear catches, and depositors start lining up, at first in small numbers and sheepishly, to request their funds back. An instinctive psychologist, Margayya responds by tossing their money back at them, with interest and with a stiff upper lip. But when the demand for return of money gradually builds up to a crescendo there is a run on the bank, as it were, and soon Margayya is well and truly insolvent.
The beauty of Margayya's character is the utter devotion to moneymaking and its attendant mystique. But a Margayya could thrive only when others were actually producing things, using his services as an enabler from time to time. America's 2008 meltdown arose because everyone wanted to be a Margayya. If Margayya had actually been like George Jefferson and gone in to drycleaning, we (and he) would have been all right. Instead our existence became dominated by too many financial experts, as we made lots of money and quit making very much else. Like Margayya, we turned a blind eye to our own people, to their education, health or other well-being, encouraging them to leave us in peace by providing them cheap funds to... entertain themselves, shall we say. And they, like Balu, got used to living outside their means. All in all an edifice readymade to teeter. And we, in Margayya fashion, indulged our own death wish by responding to an insult by starting a foreign war or two (to his credit, at least Margayya assaulted the right guy).
In the end, all that is left is the old ancestral home, and a few pots and pans. Shortly Balu returns, kicked out of his posh house, accompanied by wife and toddling son. Margayya was paying his rent too, after all. The Financial Expert ends with the touching scene of Margayya, who had spent his life contemplating the wonders of compound interest, turning to his grandson as he finally realizes where his true wealth lay.
It is this wisdom that appears to have eluded us, even after all that has happened. From all appearances, we still remain stuck in the money-making mindset instead of realizing the meaning of real riches. We are living parodies and literal embodiments of what Naipaul wrote of Malgudi -- small men, big talk, small schemes (large scams, though).
And limited means, more limited by the day.
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Thursday 19 February 2009
Understanding the Crisis - Markets, the State and Hypocrisy
Understanding the Crisis - Markets, the State and Hypocrisy
February 18, 2009
By Noam Chomsky and Sameer Dossani
Source: Foreign Policy In Focus
February 10, 2009 -- Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. Sameer Dossani interviewed him about the global economic crisis and its roots.
SAMEER DOSSANI: In any first year economics class, we are taught that markets have their ups and downs, so the current recession is perhaps nothing out of the ordinary. But this particular downturn is interesting for two reasons: First, market deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s made the boom periods artificially high, so the bust period will be deeper than it would otherwise. Secondly, despite an economy that's boomed since 1980, the majority of working class
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well I basically agree with your picture. In my view, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s is probably the major international event since 1945, much more significant in its implications than the collapse of the
From roughly 1950 until the early 1970s there was a period of unprecedented economic growth and egalitarian economic growth. So the lowest quintile did as well — in fact they even did a little bit better — than the highest quintile. It was also a period of some limited but real form of benefits for the population. And in fact social indicators, measurements of the health of society, they very closely tracked growth. As growth went up social indicators went up, as you'd expect. Many economists called it the golden age of modern capitalism — they should call it state capitalism because government spending was a major engine of growth and development.
In the mid 1970s that changed. Bretton Woods restrictions on finance were dismantled, finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized. The power of the economy shifted to the financial institutions, away from manufacturing. And since then, the majority of the population has had a very tough time; in fact it may be a unique period in American history. There's no other period where real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — have more or less stagnated for so long for a majority of the population and where living standards have stagnated or declined. If you look at social indicators, they track growth pretty closely until 1975, and at that point they started to decline, so much so that now we're pretty much back to the level of 1960. There was growth, but it was highly inegalitarian — it went into a very small number of pockets. There have been brief periods in which this shifted, so during the tech bubble, which was a bubble in the late
Financial crises have increased during this period, as predicted by a number of international economists. Once financial markets were freed up, there was expected to be an increase in financial crises, and that's happened. This crisis happens to be exploding in the rich countries, so people are talking about it, but it's been happening regularly around the world — some of them very serious — and not only are they increasing in frequency but they're getting deeper. And it's been predicted and discussed and there are good reasons for it.
About 10 years ago there was an important book called Global Finance at Risk, by two well-known economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor. In it they refer to the well-known fact that there are basic inefficiencies intrinsic to markets. In the case of financial markets, they under-price risk. They don't count in systemic risk — general social costs. So for example if you sell me a car, you and I may make a good bargain, but we don't count in the costs to the society — pollution, congestion and so on. In financial markets, this means that risks are under-priced, so there are more risks taken than would happen in an efficient system. And that of course leads to crashes. If you had adequate regulation, you could control and prevent market inefficiencies. If you deregulate, you're going to maximize market inefficiency.
This is pretty elementary economics. They happen to discuss it in this book; others have discussed it too. And that's what's happening. Risks were under-priced, therefore more risks were taken than should have been, and sooner or later it was going to crash. Nobody predicted exactly when, and the depth of the crash is a little surprising. That's in part because of the creation of exotic financial instruments which were deregulated, meaning that nobody really knew who owed what to whom. It was all split up in crazy ways. So the depth of the crisis is pretty severe — we're not to the bottom yet — and the architects of this are the people who are now designing Obama's economic policies.
Dean Baker, one of the few economists who saw what was coming all along, pointed out that it's almost like appointing Osama bin Laden to run the so-called war on terror. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers,
None of this is really unanticipated. There were very good economists like say David Felix, an international economist who's been writing about this for years. And the reasons are known: markets are inefficient; they under-price social costs. And financial institutions underprice systemic risk. So say you're a CEO of Goldman Sachs. If you're doing your job correctly, when you make a loan you ensure that the risk to you is low. So if it collapses, you'll be able to handle it. You do care about the risk to yourself, you price that in. But you don't price in systemic risk, the risk that the whole financial system will erode. That's not part of your calculation.
Well that's intrinsic to markets — they're inefficient. Robin Hahnel had a couple of very good articles about this recently in economics journals. But this is first year economics course stuff — markets are inefficient; these are some of their inefficiencies; there are many others. They can be controlled by some degree of regulation, but that was dismantled under religious fanaticism about efficient markets, which lacked empirical support and theoretical basis; it was just based on religious fanaticism. So now it's collapsing.
People talk about a return to Keynesianism, but that's because of a systematic refusal to pay attention to the way the economy works. There's a lot of wailing now about "socializing" the economy by bailing out financial institutions. Yeah, in a way we are, but that's icing on the cake. The whole economy's been socialized since — well actually forever, but certainly since the Second World War. This mythology that the economy is based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, well ok, to an extent it is. For example at the marketing end, you can choose one electronic device and not another. But the core of the economy relies very heavily on the state sector, and transparently so. So for example to take the last economic boom which was based on information technology — where did that come from? Computers and the Internet. Computers and the Internet were almost entirely within the state system for about 30 years — research, development, procurement, other devices — before they were finally handed over to private enterprise for profit-making. It wasn't an instantaneous switch, but that's roughly the picture. And that's the picture pretty much for the core of the economy.
The state sector is innovative and dynamic. It's true across the board from electronics to pharmaceuticals to the new biology-based industries. The idea is that the public is supposed to pay the costs and take the risks, and ultimately if there is any profit, you hand it over to private tyrannies, corporations. If you had to encapsulate the economy in one sentence, that would be the main theme. When you look at the details of course it's a more complex picture, but that's the major theme. So yes, socialization of risk and cost (but not profit) is partially new for the financial institutions, but it's just added on to what's been happening all along.
Double Standard
DOSSANI: As we consider the picture of the collapse of some of these major financial institutions we would do well to remember that some of these same market fundamentalist policies have already been exported around the globe. Specifically, the International Monetary Fund has forced an export-oriented growth model onto many countries, meaning that the current slowdown in
CHOMSKY: It's rather striking to notice that the consensus on how to deal with the crisis in the rich countries is almost the opposite of the consensus on how the poor countries should deal with similar economic crises. So when so-called developing countries have a financial crisis, the IMF rules are: raise interest rates, cut down economic growth, tighten the belt, pay off your debts (to us), privatize, and so on. That's the opposite of what's prescribed here. What's prescribed here is lower interest rates, pour government money into stimulating the economy, nationalize (but don't use the word), and so on. So yes, there's one set of rules for the weak and a different set of rules for the powerful. There's nothing novel about that.
As for the IMF, it is not an independent institution. It's pretty much a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department — not officially, but that's pretty much the way it functions. The IMF was accurately described by a U.S. Executive Director as "the credit community's enforcer." If a loan or an investment from a rich country to a poor country goes bad, the IMF makes sure that the lenders will not suffer. If you had a capitalist system, which of course the wealthy and their protectors don't want, it wouldn't work like that.
For example, suppose I lend you money, and I know that you may not be able to pay it back. Therefore I impose very high interest rates, so that at least I'll get that in case you crash. Then suppose at some point you can't pay the debt. Well in a capitalist system it would be my problem. I made a risky loan, I made a lot of money from it by high interest rates and now you can't pay it back? Ok, tough for me. That's a capitalist system. But that's not the way our system works. If investors make risky loans to say Argentina and get high interest rates and then Argentina can't pay it back, well that's when the IMF steps in, the credit community's enforcer, and says that the people of Argentina, they have to pay it back. Now if you can't pay back a loan to me, I don't say that your neighbors have to pay it back. But that's what the IMF says. The IMF says the people of the country have to pay back the debt which they had nothing to do with, it was usually given to dictators, or rich elites, who sent it off to Switzerland or someplace, but you guys, the poor folks living in the country, you have to pay it back. And furthermore, if I lend money to you and you can't pay it back, in a capitalist system I can't ask my neighbors to pay me, but the IMF does, namely the
What you said about the Southern Cone is exactly right. For the last several years they've been trying to extricate themselves from this whole neoliberal disaster. One of the ways was, for example
It's also true that countries are driven to commodity export; that's the mode of development that's designed for them. Then they will be in trouble if commodity prices fall. It's not 100% the case, but in the Southern Cone, the countries that have been doing reasonably well do rely very heavily on commodity export, actually raw material export. That's even true of the most successful of them,
One major exception to this is
Government Investment
DOSSANI: Do you think the current crisis will offer other countries the opportunity to follow the example of South Korean and
CHOMSKY: Well, you could say the example of the
Let's take my own institution, MIT. I've been here since the 1950s, and you can see it first hand. In the 1950s and 1960s, MIT was largely financed by the Pentagon. There were labs that did classified war work, but the campus itself wasn't doing war work. It was developing the basis of the modern electronic economy: computers, the Internet, microelectronics, and so on. It was all developed under a Pentagon cover. IBM was here learning how to shift from punch-cards to electronic computers. It did get to a point by the 1960s that IBM was able to produce its own computers, but they were so expensive that nobody could buy them so therefore the government bought them. In fact, procurement is a major form of government intervention in the economy to develop the fundamental structure that will ultimately lead to profit. There have been good technical studies on this. From the 1970s until today, the funding of MIT has been shifting away from the Pentagon and toward the National Institute of Health and related government institutions. Why? Because the cutting edge of the economy is shifting from an electronics base to a biology base. So now the public has to pay the costs of the next phase of the economy through other state institutions. Now again, this is not the whole story, but it's a substantial part.
There will be a shift towards more regulation because of the current catastrophe, and how long they can maintain the paying off banks and financial institutions is not very clear. There will be more infrastructure spending, surely, because no matter where you are in the economic spectrum you realize that it's absolutely necessary. There will have to be some adjustment in the trade deficit, which is dramatic, meaning less consumption here, more export, and less borrowing.
And there's going to have to be some way to deal with the elephant in the closet, one of the major threats to the American economy, the increase in healthcare costs. That's often masked as "entitlements" so that they can wrap in Social Security, as part of an effort to undermine Social Security. But in fact Social Security is pretty sound; probably as sound as its ever been, and what problems there are could probably be addressed with small fixes. But Medicare is huge, and its costs are going way up, and that's primarily because of the privatized healthcare system which is highly inefficient. It's very costly and it has very poor outcomes. The
DOSSANI: Will the current crisis open up space for other countries to follow more meaningful development goals?
CHOMSKY: Well, it's been happening. One of the most exciting areas of the world is
So when the U.S. and the traditional ruling elites in Bolivia started moving towards a kind of secessionist movement to try to undermine the democratic revolution that's taken place there, and when it turned violent, as it did, there was a meeting of UNASUR last September in Santiago, where it issued a strong statement defending the elected president, Evo Morales, and condemning the violence and the efforts to undermine the democratic system. Morales responded thanking them for their support and also saying that this is the first time in 500 years that
Sameer Dossani, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the director of 50 Years is Enough and blogs at shirinandsameer.blogspot.com.
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