Airbnb, Uber, eBay: in this intangible world workers must adapt to survive

John Harris in The Guardian







As descriptions of capitalism go, it’s surely one of the best ever written: poetic, urgent, and as much to do with metaphysics as economics. According to the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” And then the kicker: “All that is solid melts into air.”

Whatever their shortcomings as revolutionaries and futurologists, Marx and Engels’ vision of ceaselessly changing economies and societies seems just as pertinent now as it did 169 years ago, with one particularly surreal caveat.

Most traditional conceptions of capitalism have been founded in some notion of material stuff: physical property, premises, machinery, goods. But the companies at the forefront of the 21st-century economy have a very different way of operating, as evidenced by one of the year’s most talked-about books. It has a title that, somewhere in the socialist hereafter, must have been greeted with mirth by the ghosts of Karl and Fred. Written by the economist Jonathan Haskel and the innovation researcher Stian Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital may sound like a riddle but actually makes perfect sense.

Airbnb has revolutionised the market in accommodation but owns no property. Chinese online giant Alibaba is reckoned to be the world’s biggest retailer but holds no stock. Neither does that byword for modern shopping, eBay. Meanwhile, Uber has arrived to upturn personal transport but owns no cars.

Such are the strange ways of what is becoming known as platform capitalism: a model which took a shift that had been under way since the 1970s to its logical conclusion. Cutting-edge capitalism is increasingly weightless. What makes the difference between winners and losers is not physical things, but such quicksilver commodities as ideas, knowledge, research, software, brands, networks and relationships.

Haskel and Westlake centre their story on a shift in investment, away from “tangible” assets to these “intangible” items. In the United States, the share of GDP devoted to the latter is reckoned to have overtaken the former in the mid-1990s; in the UK, the watershed was reached towards the end of that decade. In other countries – Italy and Spain, for instance – investing in old-fashioned kit and plant still takes precedence. But in all the statistics there is a clear implication: that as we head into the future, intangibles will rule.

This cuts across many of the usual laws and expectations of economics. Physical assets, in any crude understanding, can be bought and sold. But intangibles are much more difficult entities. As the authors say: “Toyota invests millions in its lean production systems, but it would be impossible to separate these investments from their factories and somehow sell them off.”

Intangible assets are open to “spillovers”: the tendency of ideas and innovations to spread, often way beyond the intentions of their inventors. As part of the same process, they tend to have synergies with each other, often unexpectedly: “The MP3 protocol, combined with the miniaturised hard disk and Apple’s design skills, created the iPod, a very valuable innovation.”

And, liberated from any dependence on a fixed stock of machinery, the creations of these intangible assets can spread at speed, and quickly dominate their field – which is why Uber has become inescapable in less than a decade and 13 years after Facebook’s launch, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is central to the lives of a quarter of humanity.

The world, then, changes quickly. The physical production that companies still need is increasingly both outsourced to distant, low-wage countries and automated. Even employment in what we think of as “services” is looking alarmingly vulnerable to robotics and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, intangibles dominate not just the business world but our everyday lives. From music through books to cars, the centrality of physical stuff is dwindling away.

So an inevitable question arises: in economies and societies in which the intangible is king, and having a specific skill tied to a particular activity seems much less valuable than a generalised set of attributes, who will prosper? And who is in danger of sinking?

As Haskel and Westlake see it, the future belongs to people who can thrive in an ethereal, unpredictable world, and endlessly adapt – “product managers, lawyers, business development people, design engineers, marketers, head-hunters, and so forth”. Or, put another way, “people who combine decent data-analytical skills with the soft skills needed to broker relationships inside and outside their own company”.

These people cluster in cities – where, as evidenced by the increasingly costly London, New York and San Francisco, their ever-increasing presence is pushing up property prices. The fact that their mixture of aptitudes can easily seem rare often fosters a “cult of talent” that pushes their pay into the stratosphere. They move to urban areas, partly in pursuit of the kind of “synergies” and “spillovers” mentioned above, and network their heads off.


Extend the notion of intangibles into questions of culture, and you have a key to what is unsettling western societies

The old world is a factory canteen in a company town, full of harried workers keeping their heads down before they graft on a production line; the new reality is symbolised by a street-corner coffee shop full of people answerable to a mixture of employers, who may be either working or socialising, or both.

I know this tribe of people increasingly well. Around a month ago, I spent an afternoon at the tech division of the insurance giant Aviva, housed in what it calls a “digital garage”. The first person I met was the twentysomething who had recently designed all the visual aspects of its websites and apps, and came not from the world of financial services, but the games company Activision.

A few yards away, some of his colleagues were working on a classic example of spillover and synergy, perfecting software that will allow people to access spoken financial advice via the Amazon Echo. That week, they were working in insurance. The next, they might be bringing their talents to a completely different part of the economy.

Obviously, not everybody is like that. And as consistent work involving physical stuff increasingly falls away, it seems the clash between two very different kinds of people will characterise the painful birth pangs of a new reality.

In a frustratingly brief section of the book, Haskel and Westlake tentatively put Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in this context, which seems absolutely right. Indeed, extend the notion of intangibles beyond assets and into questions of culture, and you have a key to what is so unsettling many western societies: on one side sit social forces loyal to such ideas as place, vocation and family; on the other is a cluster of people happy to accede to the modern economy’s demands and reinvent themselves whenever required, and be free of such quaint baggage.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” says the Communist Manifesto. The future will be too, with the kind of ironic twist that those two 19th-century Germans would have found delicious: that taking capital out of capitalism will probably spread uncertainty and agitation as never before.

A tax haven blacklist without the UK is a whitewash

Prem Sikka in The Guardian







At the heart of the intensifying debate about fairness and inequality is tax. Who can think without shuddering of the opportunity costs incurred by needy economies robbed of the tax to which they are entitled? In that context, and against the backdrop of exposure exercises such as the Paradise Papers, there was understandable enthusiasm for the European Union’s latest list of uncooperative tax havens. It arrived this week, amid much ballyhoo and talk of toughness. What a disappointment.

The EU put 17 extra-EU jurisdictions on a blacklist: American Samoa, Bahrain, Barbados, Grenada, Guam, South Korea, Macau, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Namibia, Palau, Panama, St Lucia, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. They could lose access to EU funds and incur sanctions soon to be announced. But contrast the list with what we know was revealed about international tax avoidance by both the Paradise and Panama Papers.

The EU seems to have targeted countries with little economic, military or diplomatic weight. The list includes Panama, which was central to the Panama Papers, but not Bermuda, which was central to the Paradise Papers. In imperialist mode, the EU paints a picture that broadly says that “those over there” in low-income countries, at the periphery of the global economy, are a source of the world’s economic problems and should face sanctions. The blacklist does not include any western country, even though accountants, lawyers, banks and much of the infrastructure that lubricates global tax avoidance are located in the west. Also excluded are UK crown dependencies and overseas territories, which have undermined the tax base of other countries for decades.

Another 47 jurisdictions are included in a “greylist”: these are not compliant with the standards demanded by the EU, but have given commitments to change their rules. This list includes Andorra, Belize, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Switzerland. But even that is deficient. And Luxembourg is missing altogether.

Where is the UK on either list? It offers special tax arrangements to non-domiciled billionaires that are not available to British citizens. We are deeply complicit. The UK has long enabled large companies and accountancy firms to write favourable tax laws, and has entered into sweetheart deals with major corporations.


The UK has long enabled accountancy firms to write favourable tax laws, and entered into sweetheart deals

The issue of tax avoidance is not going away. Corporations and wealthy elites are addicted to it. And many of the tax havens, as comparatively small countries, are not readily going to dilute their practices, as a decent standard of living cannot easily be provided by seasonal tourism, agriculture and fishing.

But the EU blacklist is a wasted opportunity because there are things the international community can do. Tax havens should, for example, be offered favourable financial grants by the EU and other countries to rebuild their economies and become hubs for new industries, and research and development. Grants should be conditional on step-by-step progress towards meeting specified benchmarks on transparency, accountability and cooperation, including a publicly available register of beneficial ownership of all companies and trusts, and a list of the assets held by wealthy individuals. Havens would need to commit to automatic exchange of information with other countries on any matter relating to tax or illicit financial flows.

The accounts of corporations and limited liability partnerships holed up in tax havens should also be made public. At the very least, the EU and the UK should insist that the public accountability mechanisms in tax havens match those on mainland Europe.

As for jurisdictions that reject reform, they should face sanctions. The imposition of a withholding tax, of say 20%, on all interest and dividend payments to individuals and companies would reduce their attractiveness. Labour’s 2017 manifesto contained that idea.

The EU, the UK and other countries could also ensure that no individual or company under their jurisdiction would be able to import or export any goods or services from designated tax havens. The UK is being asked to pay a fee to secure access to EU markets after Brexit; by the same logic, a fee should be demanded from tax havens in the shape of better transparency and accountability. Persistently aggressive jurisdictions might suffer travel and visa restrictions, or be denied the use of international satellites that tax havens rely on for communications and financial transactions.

These ideas, and there are others, may not curb the predatory practices of tax havens overnight, but any or all would give the sponsors and users of these territories considerable food for thought. Action is often promised, but how many weak governments have sought refuge behind the claim that global tax avoidance requires international solutions, while at the same time undermining possibilities of international solutions? Too many.

We cannot afford to go on like this. Be brave and follow the money.

The uncomfortable truth behind the mask

Suresh Menon in The Hindu

What do they know of air pollution who only air pollution know? Kipling didn’t say that, neither did C.L.R. James, nor let’s face it, did former England captain Ted Dexter. But Dexter was the first to connect air pollution in India and international cricket.

After England lost the first Test of the 1992-93 series in Kolkata, Dexter, then chairman of selectors announced grandly that he had “commissioned a report into the impact of air pollution in Indian cities.”

England lost all the Tests of that series, and the excuses varied from pollution to the players’ facial hair to prawn curry in a Chennai restaurant. But Dexter’s attempt at studying pollution is the best remembered a quarter century later.

In The Guardian, David Hopps wrote then: “Dexter will deservedly face accusations today that he is hiding behind a smogscreen, that the only air about last night was hot air, and that anybody seen choking was most likely choking with laughter.”

What innocent days those were!


No laughing matter

Pollution is no longer a laughing matter. It is real, measurable, and, in the case of Delhi, 12 to 15 times beyond safety limits.

To say that Indians handle pollution better than Sri Lankans is a foolish boast, and quite meaningless. To attach nationalism and patriotism to the manner in which Indian players don’t cough or vomit while their opponents do is ridiculous in the extreme.

The fact of the matter is, Sri Lankan players suffered, they deserve our sympathy and even an apology. Two First Class matches were called off in Delhi last year owing to the pollution; there is good reason for the Board of Control for Cricket in India to drop Delhi from its schedule during winter, especially when the pollution levels go from the merely dangerous to the hazardous.

The BCCI has been quoted as saying that next time they will check the pollution levels before giving Delhi a match. We’ll see.

Players selected for a Delhi Test in future might have to acclimatise themselves by revving a car engine in a locked garage. This is a terrible thing to say, but Delhi has been an embarrassment. Images of fielders in masks must rate as the most mortifying to emerge from an Indian sports field.

Such high levels of air pollution are dangerous; players and spectators who already have respiratory problems are badly hit. R. Ashwin, for example, suffered from asthma as a child. Bowling and fielding in these conditions could not have been ideal for him.

Yet, he carried on heroically. No Indian was likely to wear a mask on the field — they wore one off it, though — since that would have sent out a message no Indian wanted to hear. Patriotism before health is the safer option.

If Sri Lanka wore masks, that was a health statement; if the Indians had worn them, it would have been a political statement. That is not a burden cricket needs to carry.

Sri Lanka had every right to complain. The umpires and the match referee had to deal with a unique situation. The guiding principle in all such cases is simple: the health and safety of the players is paramount. Yet there were political considerations here too. Relationship between the countries, future tours, the financial implications of rubbing India the wrong way.

The BCCI president’s aggressive response was disingenuous — but then the governing body has not been known to use tact when belligerence is an alternative.


Not unintelligent

Players are grown men who are not unintelligent. Sri Lanka could not have been unaware of the strategic advantages of disrupting a game where they were being so thoroughly dominated. But we cannot assume that was their primary motivation. If Kohli missed a triple century, blame the politicians of Delhi or the farmers of Punjab. Further proof that no sport exists in isolation.

It has been argued that India play in extreme conditions in Dunedin or Manchester, so why can’t visiting teams play in polluted Delhi?

But climate is a natural phenomenon, pollution is manmade. Playing in England or New Zealand is not injurious to health.

It is true that international sportsmen must be prepared to play in all conditions — weather, pitch, outfield, audience — but you do not travel equipped to deal with pollution.

Pollution affects the Indian team too, brave front or not. If a players’ association existed (as mandated by the Supreme Court), here’s another area it might have made a difference. By definition, such an association would be focused on the players’ welfare (players, history has shown us, are not the top priority of the BCCI).

Perhaps the players and administrators lack specific knowledge of the long-term damage that air pollution can cause. That gap can be filled by a players’ association which focuses on educating the stakeholders in the game.

Sri Lankans will return to their country, the cricketing caravan will move on.

But what of those who continue to live in Delhi? Not for the first time, cricket has shone a light on man’s inhumanity to man.

A civilised society supports people in need, but our brutal system shatters lives

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian



Simon’s death certificate tidies away his life in a few terse official phrases. Date of death: 12 November 2017. Causes: “a) Fatty liver” and “b) Alcohol misuse”. No bureaucratic curiosity about how a 51-year-old’s life came to be cut so short.

Which leaves his only brother, Dave, dealing with the grief and asking all the whys. Why did Simon die so young? Why did no one else try to help?

No obituaries will be written for Simon, no plaques mounted, no tributes passed by politicians. But if you want to understand how Britain fails so many people in so many places, it’s stories like his you need to study.

Some people’s lives are like arrows, flying straight to their destinations. Not Simon’s. The Rhymney Valley, in south Wales, is where he was born and died, but it wasn’t where he spent most of his adult years, and it was never where he meant to land up. Bright boys, he and Dave had one notion drummed into them: get an education, and get out. On TV, Dave remembers, “We’d see the yuppie revolution going on in London – the Porsches and the red braces. It may as well have been another country.” For them, Thatcher meant mines closing, factories shutting, men being laid off in their thousands, and families going under.


Yet there are so many people like Simon, all surplus to requirements of this shrunken economy


Both sons flew away. Simon was the high-flyer, leaving Wales to do a science degree, going to Cambridge for postgraduate study, and becoming a software engineer with a giant defence firm. He married and settled far away, in Bushey, on the outskirts of London. He had got on his bike; he had looked for work. Now he was earning three times what his younger brother was making, and raring to join the yuppies.

Just as he was starting to live the dream, the dream fell to bits. He got divorced. He got laid off. Then their mother’s breast cancer returned – this time for good. The prodigal son moved back, moved in, and became her carer. Dave doesn’t remember him complaining once during the years their mother spent deteriorating and then dying.

Such setbacks await all of us, but one test of any civilised society is how well it supports us through them. In Simon’s case, Britain botched this test – over and over again. By the time his mother died, he had spent seven years outside the job market. It was 2007, the start of the credit crunch, and the economy was slowing. Even in boomtown London such a gap on the CV would have raised recruiters’ eyebrows. Here in south Wales, where jobs were already scarce, it was the kiss of death. Besides, it simply did not have positions for Si, with his Cambridge postgrad and software engineering background.

Simon “spent 25 years building up to be somebody”, says Dave. A quarter-century observing the social mobility rules laid down by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. He had aspired, he’d grafted, he’d kept his side of the bargain. But while social mobility trumpets opportunity for individuals, it ignores the communities where those people live. The result was that Simon’s ambitions had outgrown his home, and now he was trapped.

Dave showed me the small terrace house their mother passed on to Simon, where he spent the last years of his life. No one was about as we walked through the speck of a village – just two long rows of cars parked outside the train station. This is the new Welsh commuter class that economists such as Cardiff University’s Calvin Jones talk about, the people who travel from the valleys to staff the call centres, shops and other minimum-wage employers in Cardiff or Newport.

Governments in Westminster and Cardiff Bay have spent decades promising to rebuild the shattered economy of south Wales. Serious money has been spent on shopping malls, new motorways and sweeteners for big business. Each time, the firms come, take the cash and – at best – leave a few poverty-paying jobs. You see the same cycle in so many deindustrialised parts of Britain. And each time, the politicians learn no lessons, and try the same thing again.
A few minutes from Simon’s old home is the town of Bargoed, where the greatest excitement in recent years was the opening of a Morrisons. Much of the rest of the high street is just memories: a huge statue to commemorate dead miners, the chapel turned into a library, and shop after shop with its shutters pulled down for good.

A rural bus services in Fochriw village, Bargoed. South Wales is one of the poorest regions of the UK. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Simon signed on at the jobcentre, which told him to apply for 35 jobs a week. He sent off to become a teaching assistant, a warehouse operative, all the minimum wage jobs going. Barely an application led to an interview. Sometimes, “angry and very down”, he’d miss his targets or appointments. He would get sanctioned, go broke, and have to call on Dave to tide him over.

After years of knockbacks, Simon declared he’d never be able to work again. It came almost as a relief. “It meant he didn’t have to think of himself as such a failure. Now he could be a victim.”

Simon had always been a pub man. But now he’d get up in the morning and start on a glass of watered-down scotch and a sci-fi DVD. By the end of a day, he’d have finished the DVDs, his fags and an entire bottle of Scotch. Why does Dave think no employer wanted him? His answer comes back in a small, tight voice. “No one wants a 50-year-old, unemployed, overweight, drinking guy on the books, do they?”

Yet there are so many of them, all surplus to the requirements of this shrunken economy. A GP in Bargoed estimates that up to one in 10 of her patients have some kind of drink or drug addiction. Up to one in three suffer depression or anxiety. In these parts, a newborn boy can expect to live just over 61 years in good health; in the richest parts of London, it’s 75 years.

Having been one of Blair’s strivers, Simon was now one of George Osborne’s skivers. He was moved on to disability benefits, before the Department for Work and Pensions assessors declared him fit for work. His money would periodically stop until his GP contested the verdict. This spring, he was moved on to universal credit, which meant six weeks with barely a penny. Again and again, it was Dave who had to bail him out. It was Dave who suggested jobs Simon could apply for, small businesses he might start. The younger brother was filling in for the state, while Si lived in ripped clothes and ate junk. “The government was abusing a vulnerable man.”

Alcoholic Simon would go to the local NHS drink service once every few weeks – and every few months, he’d end up in such a bad state he would be admitted to hospital. They’d “dry him out, then spit him out”, says Dave. According to the thinktank the Nuffield Trust, the Welsh health system is underfunded by £500m a year.

Simon died in his small house, waiting to go back into hospital to dry out. He grew up in a town with men who’d had to dig out children from the Aberfan mining disaster; he died the year Grenfell Tower burned down. When such obvious tragedies strike, the politicians and the press vow to tackle the social injustices that caused them. But Simon was just one man dying in plain sight of his neighbours, his family and state officials. Far easier to chalk up his death to a fatty liver and booze, rather than inequality and austerity and the false promises peddled by politicians from Thatcher to May. A dead man, a dying town: he spent his last days being told he’s fit for work in an economy that has next to no work.
What’s left is a younger brother beating himself up about what he should have done and angry at others for letting them both down.

Before we part, Dave asks: “Why wasn’t there someone who could step in and help? Is that naive of me? To think that a modern, 21st-century society could do that for people who need it?”

The names in this piece have been changed and details obscured in order to protect the identity of Simon’s family

Signs that Britain may not Brexit after all the fuss

Sean O'Grady in The Independent

Is this it? The moment when the May premiership is over? Could Corbyn end up taking power in a matter of weeks? It’s at least possible, though I concede it sounds far-fetched at first.

In history, some British Prime Ministers have had their premierships wrecked by the “Irish Question”. Others, in more recent times, have been destroyed by Europe. Theresa May is unique in managing to combine both famously intractable and insoluble issues into one lethal cocktail.

And so, it seems she is about to swallow the poison. Her premiership may be even shorter than many anticipated, and a Jeremy Corbyn-led government could be a fact of British life by the time the snows melt next year. Here’s how.

From what we can discern, the Government is perfectly happy to concede “special status” for Northern Ireland / Ireland in the Brexit talks – anathema to the Ulster Unionists. This is because the Government desperately needs to get onto the second phase of the process – the trade talks for the whole UK – and MPs, without being too crude about it, are happy to sign whatever the EU sticks under their nose and worry about the consequences later.

In the end, they will risk their support from the DUP to get moving on Brexit. Jobs (Tory MPs’ included) are at stake. After all, ministers such as David Davis always say that “nothing’s agreed until everything’s agreed”, so having now ratted on the Democratic Unionists, they can, in due course, re-rat on the Irish and the EU, after a trade deal is sorted out. 

With a bit of luck, some creative ambiguity and some more bribes and false promises for the DUP, Theresa May might just pull it off. Perfidious Albion would have foxed the Unionists in the wider national (i.e. Tory) interest.
For such an unlucky Prime Minister, it would be a bit of a turnaround – but, as in horse-racing and football, the form book does count for something; the litany of May’s calamities suggest she won’t, in fact, get away with it.

The DUP could quite conceivably get so angry that they’d scrap their agreement with the Tory-minority Government and resolve to get rid of them. Then May would have to appeal to the Opposition parties, especially Labour, to rescue her in the Commons.

Fat chance. If Corbyn wants, he could find any number of grounds for voting May out of office, but failure of Brexit is a pretty good one. He could then either cobble together a new Frankenstein coalition or, more realistically, follow the provisions of the Fixed Term Parliament Act to secure a fresh general election. With an eight-point poll lead over the Conservatives, wouldn’t you?

Of course that would mean the DUP would let in the “Sinn Fein-loving Corbyn” (as they might see it), so they’d have a tough choice, but they might have sufficient fear about what their constituents in Ulster would do to them if they kept the treacherous Tories in power that they’d feel they have nothing to lose.

In which case we’d have an election in, say, February, and perhaps another hung Parliament – but this time with Labour as the largest party, able to govern in its own right, though constrained by parliamentary arithmetic. 

The incoming government would ask, if it was sensible, to put Brexit on pause while it changes policy, and the EU would happily oblige if there was a chance of reversing Brexit – via, say, a second referendum. Or Corbyn and Keir Starmer could just agree to stay in the single market and some version of the customs union. Arlene Foster might in fact be able to live with that.

In which case, by spring, it would all be over for May, Boris, Gove and the old gang, and they could get on with their civil war in earnest.

Not for the first time, the ball is in Jeremy Corbyn’s court, both in terms of unseating Theresa May and stopping Brexit, or at least a hard Brexit. The Irish Question and the European issue will, not for the first time, have altered the course of British history, and end prematurely some once-glittering political careers.

'Would you be willing?': Words to turn a conversation around (and those to avoid)

Rosie Ifould in The Guardian


It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it – isn’t it? According to language analysts, we may have this wrong. ‘‘We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realise,” says Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction at Loughborough University. Stokoe and her colleagues have analysed thousands of hours of recorded conversations, from customer services to mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. They discovered that certain words or phrases have the power to change the course of a conversation.

Some of these words are surprising, and go against what we’ve been taught to believe. (For example, in a study of conversations between doctors and patients, evidence showed that doctors who listed “options” rather than recommended “best-interest” solutions, got a better response, despite the suggestion from hospital guidelines to talk about the best interests of the patient.) But, from conversation analysts such as Stokoe to FBI negotiators and communication coaches, we’re learning which words are likely to placate or persuade us. Here are some of the biggest dos and don’ts.

Do use: willing

One of the first words Stokoe came across that seemed to have a magical effect on people was “willing”. “It started with looking at mediation telephone calls,” she explains – that is, calls to or from a mediation centre, where the aim was to persuade people to engage with mediation to resolve their conflicts. “When they’re in a dispute, people usually want a lawyer or the police. They don’t really want mediation, so they’re quite resistant.”

Stokoe found that people who had already responded negatively when asked if they would like to attend mediation seemed to change their minds when the mediator used the phrase, “Would you be willing to come for a meeting?” “As soon as the word ‘willing’ was uttered, people would say: ‘Oh, yes, definitely’ – they would actually interrupt the sentence to agree.” Stokoe found it had the same effect in different settings: with business-to-business cold callers; with doctors trying to persuade people to go to a weight-loss class. She also looked at phrases such as “Would you like to” and “Would you be interested in”. “Sometimes they worked, but ‘willing’ was the one that got people to agree more rapidly and with more enthusiasm.”

What to say Deploy it when you’ve already been met with some resistance: “I know it’s not your first choice, but would you be willing to meet on Friday?”

Don’t use: just

In 2015, Ellen Leanse, a former Google executive, wrote a LinkedIn blog about the way men and women use the word “just”’. In the blog, which went viral, she claimed that women use it far more often than men. “It hit me that there was something about the word I didn’t like. It was a ‘permission’ word – a warm-up to a request, an apology for interrupting, a shy knock on the door before asking: ‘Can I get something I need from you?’”

Leanse asked her co-workers to have a moratorium on the word “just”, banning it from their communication. She claimed the difference in how confident people felt was noticeable after a few weeks. Her evidence wasn’t scientific, but, even so, “just” is one of those words that has a habit of creeping into our emails and spoken conversations. Fine if you’re trying to be placatory, but if you want to have more authority, lose the “just”.

What to say Try your own experiment over the next week. Read your emails back before you send them and count the number of times that “I just wanted to” or “Could I just” appear. Edit them out and see the difference in tone.

Do use: speak (instead of talk)

The word “talk” seems to make a lot of people resistant to conversation. “We observed this when looking at interactions between police negotiators and suicidal persons in crisis,” Stokoe says. Negotiators who used phrases such as, “I’m here to talk” met with more resistance. “Persons in crisis would often respond with something like: ‘I don’t want to talk, what’s the point in talking?’”

When the verb was “speak”, however, persons in crisis were more likely to open up the conversation or offer new information.

Why the difference? Stokoe suspects it’s because the cultural idioms associated with “talk” cast a negative shadow. “‘You’re all talk; talk is cheap; you talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk’: we seem to think that people who want to talk don’t place much value on what we’re saying.”

There was a similar difference in the effectiveness of the word “sort”, as opposed to “help”. “Let’s sort it” feels much more direct and active. “There’s no point in trying to fake a softly-softly relationship with someone in crisis. Better to be practical and direct.”

What to say If you really want someone to engage with you, use, “Can I speak to you about this?”, rather than “Can we talk?”

Don’t use: How are you?

Stokoe uses her research to work with groups on improving their communication, including groups of business-to-business cold callers. “One of the main messages of that work was to tell people to stop building rapport,” she says. “Sales people are trained to do small talk at the beginning of calls, but we were able to show with our research that it doesn’t work.

“Not only is there no evidence of reciprocal rapport-building, but also you’re more likely to irritate the other person and extend the length of that call.”

It’s not so much that the “How are you?” is rude, but rather that it’s false. In real life, no one asks “How are you today?” in that cold-call way, if they know the person and genuinely want an answer to the question. We would rather they got to the point.

What to say The next time you have to speak to someone you don’t know, don’t be overly friendly. Stick to being polite.

Do use: some (instead of any)

“Anything else I can do for you?” Sounds like a perfectly reasonable question, doesn’t it? But John Heritage and Jeffrey Robinson, conversation analysts at the University of California, Los Angeles, looked at how doctors use the words “any” and “some” in their final interactions with patients. They found that “Is there something else I can do for you today?” elicited a better response than “Is there anything else?”
“Any” tends to meet with negative responses. Think about meetings you’ve been in – what’s the usual response to “Any questions?” A barrage of engaging ideas or awkward silence? It’s too open-ended; too many possibilities abound. Of course, if you don’t want people to ask you anything, then stick to “Any questions?”

What to say: Try not to use “any” if you genuinely want feedback or to open up debate. “What do you think about X?” might be a more specific way of encouraging someone to talk.

Don’t use: Yes, but

If you’re stuck in a circular argument and you’re convinced that you’re the reasonable one, try listening out for how often you both use the phrase “Yes, but”.

“We all know the phrase ‘Yes, but’ really means ‘No, and here’s why you’re wrong’,” says Rob Kendall, author of Workstorming. A conversation expert, Kendall sits in on other people’s meetings as an observer. The phrase “Yes, but” is one of the classic warning signs that you’re in an unwinnable conversation, he says. “If you hear it three or more times in one discussion, it’s a sign that you’re going nowhere.”

What to say Kendall advises shifting the conversation by asking the other person “What’s needed here?” or, even better, “What do you need?” “It takes you from what I call ‘blamestorming’ to a solution-focused outcome.”

Rapport-building may be of little value in cold calls, but it can be essential if you’re trying to bring someone round to your point of view or end a conflict. As former FBI negotiator Chris Voss writes in Never Split The Difference, his manual of persuasive techniques, there are five stages in what’s known as the “behavioural change stairway model” that take anyone from “listening to influencing behaviour”. The first stage is active listening – namely, being able to show the other person that you have taken in what they’ve said and, more importantly, have a sense of what it means to them.

Rather than focusing on what you want to say, listen to what the other person is telling you, then try to repeat it back to them. Start with, “It seems like what you’re saying is” or “Can I just check, it sounds like what you’re saying is”. If that feels too contrived, it often works simply to repeat the last sentence or thought someone has expressed (known in counselling practice as “reflecting”).

What to say Try, “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated with this situation – is that right?” Always give the other person the opportunity to comment on or correct your assessment.

Do use: Hello

“‘Hello’ is a really important word that can change the course of a conversation,” Stokoe says. “It’s about how you respond to people who are what we call ‘first movers’ – people who say something really critical, apropos of nothing.” It might be the work colleague who steams up to your desk with a complaint or the neighbour who launches into a rant about parking as you’re putting out the bins. “What do you do with that person? Rather than respond in the same manner, saying something nice, such as a very bright ‘Hello!’, derails and socialises that other person a little bit.”

What to say Use it when you want to resist getting into a confrontation. “You have to be careful not to sound too passive-aggressive,” Stokoe says, “but just one friendly word in a bright tone can delete the challenge of the conversation.”

The Hadiya case: Is it Human Rights v Conservative Hindu Parents?

By Girish Menon

The Hadiya case, currently pending in the Indian Supreme Court, has attracted a lot of debate between the conflicting ideas of an adult’s right to choose and the unreasonable expectations of conservative Hindu parents.

I have gathered from various media reports that Hadiya previously known as Akhila converted to Islam and then sought a husband via a matrimonial advertisement. Through this medium she met and subsequently married Shafin. Hadiya continues to love Shafin and wishes to live with him but is currently not permitted to do so by an interim Supreme Court order arising out of a campaign by her parents.

The Context

India has been an area of frenetic conversion activity by Islamist and Christian denominations.

The Islamists aided and funded by Saudi and Pakistani resources have been active in India subterraneously and have indulged in proselytisation as illustrated by this latest India Today video. India to them is a ‘dar-ul –harb’ (territory of war) and Ghazwa-e-Hind (conquest of India) is their religious duty.

Various Christian churches have also been actively saving heathen souls. Funded by American and European resources a state like Nagaland has become 100 % Christian post 1947.

The Hindus have responded, rather feebly, with their own organisations and programmes like ‘ghar wapasi’ (return home to your roots). Since 2014, under the current supportive government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi they have tried to check the growth and power of the Islamic and Christian organisations.

 Hadiya's embrace of Islam will not be complete without considering this bigger picture issue.

Don’t parents have any say after their child becomes an 18 year old adult?

In the absence of any welfare state provisions in India it is the bank of mum and dad that funds an adult till such time s/he is able to become independent.

In some cases when the 18 year old adult makes wrong decisions it is again the same parents who come to the rescue of such individuals.

Under these circumstances, don’t Hadiya's parents have any say in her life especially in her decision to convert to Islam and to marry a person of her choice?

In my view there is a deliberate attempt to convert the highly complex Hadiya case into a false dichotomy of an individual’s human rights versus her conservative Hindu parents. The case should also consider the data on proselytisation by various groups, how did Hadiya decide to convert to Islam and who will pick up the pieces for Hadiya if she ends up with the Islamic state?

(Inputs received from Gopa Joseph, Suhail Rizwy and Deniz Cris)