Tiger Mother's book makes case for ultra-strict Chinese parenting

 

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua set to stir controversy with critique of liberal western childrearing

'The solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child' ... Amy Chua. Photograph: Lorenzo Ciniglio/Polaris Less than a fortnight into the new year and already one of the most controversial books of 2011 has emerged. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – an autobiographical study of the failings of western parenting by Yale law professor Amy Chua – has just been published in the US to a mixed chorus of plaudits and outrage.
Chua – who is married to novelist Jed Rubenfeld, author of The Interpretation of Murder – relates in the book how she approached the rearing of her own two daughters, Sophia and Lulu, with the strictness of the Chinese child-rearing model she inherited from her own parents.
The Tiger, Chua explains, is "the living symbol of strength and power", inspiring fear and respect. And as a "Tiger mother" herself, she assumed the absolute right to dictate her children's activities and demand rigorous academic standards of them at all times, ridiculing them if necessary to spur them on to greater efforts.
Her children were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a playdate, watch TV or choose their own extracurricular activities. They were also expected to be top in every subject (except gym and drama) and never get anything other than A-grades – because, Chua explains, Chinese parents believe it is their responsibility to ensure their children's academic achievement above everything else.
Chua argues that western parents. with their emphasis on nurturing their children's self-esteem and allowing free expression, have set their children up to accept mediocrity. "Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently," she says. If their child doesn't achieve perfect exam results, the Chinese parent assumes it's because he or she didn't work hard enough. "That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child," Chua says. And it is crucial for a mother to have the "fortitude" to override her children's preferences, because to enjoy anything you have to be good at it, to be good at it you have to work, and children on their own never wish to work, she adds.
(Nor is it just solely in the arena of schoolwork that a healthy disregard for your child's feelings is recommended. Where a western mother would tremble, a Chinese mother, Chua says, would not hesitate to say to her child: "Hey fatty – lose some weight.")
The author admits her views are controversial even with her own husband, and unsurprisingly, her book has provoked an outcry. An extract published in the Wall Street Journal under the title "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" has attracted 3,500 comments, ranging from the horrified ("As a parent of two kids myself, I had an overwhelming, visceral response to this article. Her style borders on abusive"; "this woman's parenting style is reminiscent of Joan Crawford in 'Mommy Dearest'") to the laudatory ("Her style of parenting creates structure, discipline and work ethics. As long as you don't stop loving and supporting your kids, there is nothing wrong with having high expectations for them").
Chua's book may have started the ball rolling, but it won't be the only controversial title of early 2011. The anonymously-written O: A Presidential Novel, said to be written with insider knowledge of the White House and promising to be a new Primary Colors, is out in the US later this month. Meanwhile Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, Known and Unknown, comes out in February, with James Frey's new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, featuring a bisexual Christ returning to live in 21st-century New York, out in the spring.
In June, Michael Brooks will present an exposé of fraud, suppressed evidence and unethical PR games in the "highly competitive and ruthless" world of science in the book Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. Later in the year the regularly provocative Chuck Palahniuk will describe an 11-year-old girl's existence in hell in the novel Damned, which he himself described as "The Shawshank Redemption having a baby with The Lovely Bones, raised by Judy Blume".

Can we eat to starve cancer?

 Please do check out this video!

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html

The selfish search for the self

 

September 20, 2010

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The selfish search for the self

For these middle-class wives, theirs is an existential crisis borne out of over-high expectations and, frankly, emotional greed, consumerism of the heart

OK, let's get the ugly feelings over with. I am madly envious of the flush Elizabeth Gilbert, an unquestionably brilliant writer, whose autobiographical Eat, Pray, Love sold millions and is now a film with the delectable Julia Roberts. Oh, and endorsements gather around her as if she is the belle of a Hello! magazine party: there's Sophie Dahl and Elle Macpherson and Meg Ryan waxing lyrical. And the formidable Hillary Clinton and Oprah. Serious reviewers, too, have fallen for her charm and modern-day odyssey.
"If only," you think, if you have penned a modest memoir yourself - abject, I know - then it all boils over, staining the pages of the bestseller you are forcing yourself to read, really only to find stuff to mock and of course imitate. I am not alone in this world of seething writerly resentment. So discount, say, 30 per cent of what follows, put it down to the above. But the rest still holds.
But first the plot, which you probably know anyway, so loud and extensive has been the publicity. When in her mid-thirties, Gilbert was an East Coast writer and journalist, winner of many awards, starring in her own reality show of unending opportunities with her husband with whom she had been for eight years. One night in her bathroom she experienced a dramatic epiphany, only instead of seeing the light, she saw gloom and darkness ahead.
She didn't want to be married any more; wasn't cut out to be a mom; couldn't carry on with the role she had inhabited. It was, she says, a breakdown. So she went off to Italy to learn how to eat, to India for spiritual awakening and finally to Bali, where she found peace, equilibrium and a fab new husband and they live happily ever after.
The story is moving and believable. Up to a point. It certainly has captured the hearts of middle-class wives who find at a certain age that the house and hearth and husband don't satisfy all their longings. Theirs is a domestic existential crisis borne out of over-high expectations and, frankly, emotional greed, consumerism of the heart.
Gilbert joins the long line of American women who feel they must (temporarily) leave the richest and most self-regarding nation on earth in order to find their bodies and the meaning of life. It started back in the Sixties when stars went off to be hugged and consoled by dodgy men in saffron robes. Later, devotees of foreign enlightenment included Goldie Hawn and drug-addled pop singers. Some of the best songs in Joni Mitchell's album Blue tell that story of home and away. British celebs have gone for this therapy, too - ever since the Beatles got themselves their own guru. Some good comes of these earnestly undertaken journeys.
However, something different and deeply annoying is happening in Gilbert's case. The end of her marriage obviously causes her some pain, but, if it meant anything, she just couldn't have moved on so slickly. "I was the administrator of my own rescue," she says, an American true believer in can-do and must-have.
For the rest of us, when things fall apart, the dissolution of selfhood is so debilitating, you can't feed your children for days. But Gilbert got a book contract before setting off, planning a successful reincarnation, without risks. That is what the privileged do. And lordy lord, what a lot of tadpoles have spawned from this big, vain frog-turned-princess. Tour companies are offering great deals so you too can eat in Italy, pray in India and cool off in Bali. Breathless females write about their inner makeovers. One, for example, says: "I wasn't the only one ... there were students from all over the world, including Germany, Singapore and Canada, all of whom had read the book, which during our feverish conversations about it, soon took on something of a Bible-like status." A rich and stupid woman I know in India is about to set off on one as well, copying the worst of Western indulgences because now she can.
Gilbert's book is really about the winners who take it all in this monstrously unfair age of globalisation, just another form of exploitation, whereby Westerners appropriate ancestral knowledge and assets of nations, selling them back, keeping back all gain and kudos, all done shamelessly.
From these trips of profitable self-discovery, it is but a small step to the exciting new business opportunities on the financial pages of newspapers, which announce that water shortages the world over will bring vast fortunes for forward-thinking investors. Usually a picture of a child at a dry well accompanies these exciting tips.

There are individual Westerners - including Americans - who are neither so crass nor covetous. Like Katherine Russell Rich, also a journalist, who lost her job, had two bouts of cancer and took off to India to immerse herself in Hindi: "I no longer had the language to describe my life, so I decided to borrow someone else's." Her book, Dreaming in Hindi, is a story of a deep struggle with her own identity, the person she became as she acquired, slowly and painfully, another world language and worldview in a small town in Rajasthan. It is also a story of the kindness of strangers who wanted nothing in return and those who weren't at all kind or understanding.
It is a multi-layered book which examines the nature of language and addresses appalling political conflicts such as the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and the sexism of Asian societies. She is too courteous to expose the worst behaviour of some of her host families but you know, through her exact and carefully chosen words. Unlike Gilbert, Rich doesn't find the perfect jeans, or the perfect man as she goes back home. Her book will not be made into a Hollywood movie because there is no simple beginning, middle or blissful end. Hers is an exposition on the 21st century and how lost we all are.
With humility and an open mind, Westerners can genuinely connect even with those with whom they have nothing in common and experience uncertainty. There is hope here far bigger than that in Gilbert's romance. But, sadly, it is the latter that sells - and how.
y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk [y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk]
For further reading : 'Dreaming in Hindi: Life in Translation', Katherine Russell Rich (pbk 2010)

We lost sight of fairness in the false promise of wealth

 

Acceptance of inequality rests on assumptions that 'free markets' make us all richer in the end. Growth figures tell it differently



As Nick Clegg fends off accusations of selling out and Labour leadership candidates set out their stall, debates about inequality show no sign of going away. But the moral arguments are rarely extended far enough, and virtually no politician challenges a basic, erroneous premise that inequality is a price worth paying for a more efficient market system that enriches us all

• 
  
• The simplistic, free-market view of the Thatcher-Major era said equality of opportunity is all we need for a fair society. If no one had their market participation blocked, the result, however unfair it may look to some, should be accepted as fair. Today many people, both on the left and the right, recognise that this is not enough. We can accept the outcome of a competitive process as fair only when the participants have equality in basic capabilities; the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair if some contestants have only one leg.
• 
  
• Children who do not have some minimum level of nutrition, healthcare, and education cannot grow into fully capable adults. The Sure Start programme of the last Labour government and the coalition's pupil premium are based on recognition of this fact, although neither are of sufficient scale and depth to make a fundamental difference.
  
• 
  
• Unfortunately the debate more or less stops there. But, if we accept children should not be penalised for things beyond their control, shouldn't we accept the same for adults? Most people become unemployed through events such as a financial crisis. And yet, despite that, we insist on punishing the unemployed. A fairer solution would be to give them a second, third, or fourth chance through effective retraining and relocation programmes supported by an industrial policy geared towards generating high-productivity jobs. For some we already give second chances: the bankruptcy law offers business people protection from creditors and debt restructuring because we accept that businesses often fail due to factors outside their owner's control.
  
• But even giving adult workers second chances does not take us far enough towards a fairer society. We have to question an assumption that has dominated economic thinking over the last three decades – namely, the belief that maximising market freedom is the best way to generate wealth.
  
• 
  
• From this assumption came the argument that even committed egalitarians should let markets rip, because that would give them the maximum wealth to redistribute. In Britain, the natural "progressive" conclusion was the New Labour strategy that you regulate the City as little as possible because that will maximise the wealth it generates, which means more money for equality-enhancing programmes like Sure Start.
  
• 
  
• Sadly that assumption has been proved wrong. After three decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, growth has slowed down, rather than accelerated, in almost all countries. The world economy, which was growing at about 3% in per capita terms in the "bad old days" of widespread regulation and punitive taxation for the rich in the 1960s and 70s, has grown at about half that rate in the last three decades. In Britain, average annual per capita income growth rate was 2.4% in the 60s and the 70s, when the country was allegedly suffering from the "British disease"; but it fell to 1.7% during 1990 to 2009, after it is supposed to have been cured of the disease thanks to Margaret Thatcher's heroic struggle in the 1980s.
  
• 
  
• At the heart of this slowdown lies the free-market policy package. In developing countries it has led to breakneck liberalisation of trade, so destroying swaths of "infant" industries. In both developing and developed countries, policies to reduce inflation to very low levels have choked demand and made business loans expensive. And in Britain and the US, financial deregulation has played a crucial role in reducing growth.
  
• 
  
• Unleashing finance has enormously increased the power of mobile shareholders in pursuit of short-term profits and high dividends. The surest way to deliver these is to minimise long-term investments, such as machinery and research and development. Shareholders have encouraged such behaviour by paying astronomical salaries to managers good at making such cuts, even though they weaken the growth prospect of companies in the long run. Those shareholders don't necessarily care about the long-term future of their companies: they can always sell their shares.
  
• 
  
• If we cannot assume free-market policies to be the best at generating wealth, the British debate on equality needs a total rethink. We have to debate what our macroeconomic, industrial, financial, or even executive pay policies should be, as their exact shapes significantly affect the scale of wealth that markets create. It cannot be blithely assumed that markets know how to maximise wealth – while all we have to worry about is how to redistribute it through taxes and benefits.
  

Reading The Bowler

 

Keep an eye on the point of release, the wrist, the position of the seam and more

Aakash Chopra

August 26, 2010

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	Tait: when's the release? © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Glenn McGrath | Lasith Malinga | Shaun Tait

The replay comes up in slo-mo for us to get a closer look: Brett Lee runs in and bowls a short-pitched delivery at 150kph. Sachin Tendulkar seems to have all the time in the world to get into the right position - he goes back and across and plays it right under his eyes. The pace at which the TV camera reruns it makes it look a cakewalk, an everyday shot, but the batsman gets only a fraction of a second to judge, decide and execute. What is it that enables the likes of Sachin to tweak their responses and plan their shots?

Let me break it down further for you. At the point of release a batsman must ascertain the line and the length of the delivery, must weigh his options with regards to his response (attacking or defensive) and then move quickly to get his body into the right position to execute the option chosen. 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. The quicker the bowler, the less time you have in hand to act. If the batsman fails to get his calculations right in time, he is most likely doomed. Unlike against slower bowlers, with whom you may have a second chance.

Judging the length and line
If judging the length and line early makes batting relatively more easy and effective, failure to do so puts the batsman at a disadvantage.

To judge the length, the batsman must watch the point of release of the delivery. The earlier the release, the fuller the ball, which in effect means that if the bowler delivers the ball at the first point of release, it would result in a beamer. Every subsequent delay in release would mean a reduction in the length, with the bouncer being the last point of release. That's the reason every batsman is taught to be ready for the full ball first, because that's the first possibility; if the bowler passes that point of release without delivering, the mind starts sending the body signals to be prepared to go on the back foot.

Batsmen around the world are brought up playing bowlers with high-arm actions and hence their minds are attuned to trying to ascertain the length by looking at the point of release. But if you're up against someone like Lasith Malinga or Shaun Tait, both of whom have slinging, round-arm actions, it's simply not possible to know the length for sure at the time of the delivery, as there is always a doubt about whether the release was early or delayed. The angle at which the arm comes down leaves a lot to the imagination; unfortunately, though, there isn't much time to imagine at their pace.

Another important aspect that influences the ability to judge length is the position of the batsman's head in his stance. Ideally the head should be still and the eyes level to be able to judge the length correctly. If the head is tilted upwards, even slightly, all deliveries might seem short-pitched.

Next comes the line. Batsmen try to keep a close eye on the bowler's wrist at the point of delivery and the position of the wrist with regards to the crease. In the case of a fast bowler, the tilt of the wrist may help send the ball in the direction in the direction it is tilted towards. When Ishant Sharma's wrist tilts towards the on side, you're more or less sure the ball will swing in to the right hander. This isn't foolproof, though, especially when the ball is reverse-swinging. Waqar Younis used to keep the wrist completely upright, or even slightly tilted towards the off side, while making the ball dip in to the batsman.

Wrist position is a good giveaway when it comes to reading spinners, many of whom cock their wrists to bowl topspinners. Similarly, the back of a legspinner's hand will usually face the batsman when he tries to bowl a googly. These variations are subtle but if observed and decoded accurately, they can help the batsman.

Makhaya Ntini's wide-of-the-crease action gave away the angle of his stock deliveries, which came in to the right-hander, while Glenn McGrath's close-to-the-stumps action ensured the ball stayed on a well-defined line around the off stump. An offspinner will usually prefer to come in close to the stumps to bowl the topspinner or floater.

While the wrists and the action will give you clues, keeping a still head in the stance, almost in line with the toes, is vital to your ability to judge line correctly as a batsman. The moment the head starts falling over, the lines get blurred - a problem Rohit Sharma is facing at the moment. Since his head is falling over, he's either chasing balls that should be left alone (in the first ODI against New Zealand) or finding the ball finishing in line with the front pad instead of in line with the downswing of his bat. From there on it's just a matter of when and not if he misses one.

Swing and drift
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

The shiny surface, if visible, often gives away the direction in which the ball will move in the air. For instance, an offspinner's drift can be read by looking at which way the shiny part of the ball faces. If the ball is swinging conventionally, it will drift into the right-hander if the shiny side is outside, and vice versa. Keeping the shine facing the palm not only takes the ball away in the air, it also makes it skid after pitching, as the ball lands on the shiny side. Obviously, looking at the shine doesn't help much if you're up against the likes of Muralitharan, or someone who prefers to bowl with a scrambled seam.

Leg position
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.

There is a good chance, though, that these lines will get blurred when the ball's swinging or spinning too much. Murali and Warne have wreaked havoc because batsmen were never sure of the amount of turn off the surface while facing them. What started out seeming the correct place to plant the front foot often proved incorrect in the end. It's the same when the ball is reverse-swinging. Haven't we seen Waqar and Wasim hit people on the toes umpteen times?

Things are slightly more manageable on the back foot, because not only does the short ball give a little more time to adjust, it also doesn't swing as much.

The role bounce plays
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.

Then there's the rare breed of freakish actions, which take a while to make sense of. Remember Paul Adams and how he took the world by storm initially? He was bowling normal chinamen and wrong'uns but batsmen were hopelessly caught in the flurry of limbs. Such actions are a batsman's nightmare when you're up against them for the first time. Your brain will eventually find ways to look for certain nuances to decode the mystery. That's why it's important for these bowlers to keep evolving, because once the novelty wears off, they become easy pickings.

The management consultancy scam

 

August 20, 2010

Johann Hari:

"We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along", he says. "It's like robbing a bank but legal"

In the long fake boom of the Nineties and Noughties, we were sold a thousand scams. End government regulation of the financial system! Turn banks into casinos! Pay CEOs 500 times more than their staff! Bow, bow, bow before our mansion-dwelling overlords and the Total Efficiency they will bring! Yet from under the rubble left by these delusions, one of the greatest scams has skipped out unscathed, and it is now successfully selling itself as a solution to the fading of the boom-light. It is probably in your workplace now, or coming soon. Its name? Management consultancy.
There are now half a million management consultants in the world, and they all grumble that they face one question wherever they go: yes, but what is it that you actually do? They claim to be able to enter any organisation, watch its workers for a short period, and then - using graphs, algorithms, and a jargon that makes quantum physics look like Sesame Street - render it dramatically more efficient, for a fee. They are everywhere: in the US, AT&T (to pluck a random company) spent $500m on them in just five years, while the British state will soon be spending more on management consultants than on upgrading its nuclear weapons.
Yet the process of management consultancy has always been shrouded in priestly secrecy. Over the past few years there has been a string of memoirs by highly successful former management consultants, finally pulling back the flow-charts.
David Craig gives a typical explanation of what the consultants Actually Do. After getting a degree specialising in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop. In his brave memoir Rip Off! he explains: "We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along... It's like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7,000 per week." It consisted, he says, of "lies, lies and even more lies."
He worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week - and then tell the company's bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed - People Off Payroll.
Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 per cent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.
Yes, you might say, but surely he was just a bad management consultant. The rest must get results. The evidence suggests not. The Cranfield School of Management studied 170 companies who had used management consultants, and it discovered just 36 per cent of them were happy with the outcome - while two thirds judged them to be useless or harmful. A medicine with that failure-rate would be taken off the shelves.
Matthew Stewart, another former consultant, summarises his high-flying years in the industry by saying: "I felt like a snake oil salesman without snake oil." When he was sent into a company, he was told to use complex formulae to analyse the productivity of its staff, but he soon realised that the results were "nearly random... Similar results could have been achieved by having four monkeys throw darts at a few matrices." Yet, on this basis, he was taking a fortune in payments, and firing thousands of productive people.
The recession has given a fresh burst to this industry, as corporations beg to be told where to apply the leeches. The number of senior consultants has swollen by 10 per cent in the past year, while the number employed by local government has grown by 11 per cent.
But there is a growing body of academic research showing that the strategies pushed by these consultancies are in fact disastrous - and hasten the collapse of a company or service. Professor Wayne Cascio of the University of Colorado has studied the relative costs and benefits of POPing your workforce. Corporations and governments are receptive to the idea that the quickest, easiest way to save money is to fire workers. But Cascio has shown that, most of the time, the costs outweigh the gains. Obviously, you have immediately to find large amounts of redundancy and severance pay. But the costs don't stop there. Your workforce becomes very nervous - and a nervous workforce is dramatically less productive and less innovative. The best people leave. The service to the customer deteriorates - so they abandon you even more.
The facts backing this up are striking. The OECD has studied developed economies over a 20-year period, and it found labour productivity growth was much higher in the countries where it is hardest to fire people. The better you treat a workforce, the better they work. Professor Peter Cappelli studied 122 companies and found that lay-offs most often shrank their future profitability, instead of swelling it.
Yet this is the antithesis of the management consultancy mindset. Stewart says "consultants are the cattle prods of the modern corporation. The chief message to be communicated, in almost all situations, is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you have ever imagined." It's a dark, dehumanised vision of workers as cogs in a machine - and it's been there from the beginning. Frederick Taylor, the founder of management consultancy, compared workers to "an intelligent gorilla" and said "our scheme does not ask for any initiative in a man. We do not care for his initiative."
When challenged, the paltry evidence base of this industry soon becomes clear. Tom Peters, the author of management consultants' bible Excellence, snapped at an interviewer who asked about his way of analysing businesses: "Of course, we all know this is to some extent phoney baloney."
David Craig suggests a simple way to call their bluff. Insist that, from now on, all management consultants are paid by their results. If they promise greater productivity or higher sales, fine: don't pay them until it comes through. Today, almost no management consultancy works on this basis. If they did, they'd all be bankrupt.
And yet, and yet... you almost have to admire the rancid chutzpah of it. As the management consultant Bruce Henderson once sniggered: "Can you think of anything more improbable than taking the world's most successful firms and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses - and [getting them] to pay millions of pounds for this advice?" It's tempting to chuckle at the absurdity - until you realise the cack-handed consultants' scythe could come for you.
j.hari@independent.co.uk [j.hari@independent.co.uk]
For further reading
'House of Lies: How Management Consultant Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You The Time', by Martin Kihn (Grand Central, 2005); 'The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong', by Matthew Stewart (Norton, 2009)

The real villain is Klepto-Capitalism

 

 

DNA / R Jagannathan / Thursday, August 12, 2010 2:28 IST

 
Infosys Technologies' chairman and chief mentor NR Narayana Murthy has the ability to say it like it is. A year before he hangs up his boots, Murthy has cut loose on our unspeakable netas and babus, accusing them of a fundamental lack of ethical behaviour — though in not so many words.
Our netas, he said, saw no need for transparency and behaved like masters. Our IAS babus were no better. Their general administrative skills and colonial mindset were largely unrelated to the needs of the day. As for governance, there's no such thing, and accountability is largely absent in the system. His solution: abolish the IAS and set up an Indian Management Service manned by specialists who were paid market-clearing wages.
 
Murthy is only half-right. He has diagnosed the symptoms, and said little about the underlying disease. The IAS as such is not the problem. The question is: why does the IAS cadre behave like it does? Why does it treat its customers (citizens) like chattel? Why do their bosses (the babus) focus more on accumulating wealth than on delivering governance? The answer lies with us. Murthy himself excoriated citizens for apathy, which allowed corruption to flourish and criminals to go unpunished.
 
To understand the malaise at its roots, we need to start with our flawed democratic system. The cost of winning elections creates a huge demand for unaccounted cash to bribe the voter with. This is why no honest person can hope to get into politics. Even the not-so-dishonest politician needs lots of moolah to win the next election. This can only come from corruption.
The system is built around this fundamental flaw. This brings us to the next big stakeholder in corruption: business. Since businessmen cannot afford an unstable policy environment, they have a stake in funding sleazy politicians. Businessmen running competitive enterprises cannot afford to divert huge sums of money to bribery and skullduggery — unless there is another source for it.
This is one reason why they get into rent-seeking behaviour. In order to generate volumes of cash without business risk, they seek opportunities to make money out of scarcity. In the past this was done by manipulating the licence-permit raj.
 
In the post-liberalisation era, the focus has shifted to land ("they ain't making any more of it no more") and spectrum (again, a limited resource).
Ever wonder why no one can afford a decent home in Mumbai or in any of India's big cities? Politicians and businessmen have ganged up on you to bottle up available land and make money for themselves. Land is released by netas and babus in driblets, so that prices can be raised forever, and slush funds generated.
 
Former World Bank chief economist Raghuram Rajan makes the same point in his latest book Fault Lines. He told DNA in an interview: "The predominant sources of mega wealth in India today are not the software billionaires who have made money the hard way by being competitive in a global economy. It is the guys who have access to natural resources or to land or to particular infrastructure permits or licences. In other words, proximity to the government seems to be a big source of wealth."
 
This is why when Murthy talks of lack of transparency, it is a mere description of the problem, not its underlying cause. If the neta, the babu and the lala (the rentier class of businessmen) are hand-in-glove to make a pile for themselves by generating scarcity, why would any of them want to be transparent? The neta-babu-lala combine is replacing genuine, participative democracy with a narrow kleptocracy laced with populism. To bring in the vote, the politician prefers the grand feudal gesture (doles for the poor) to genuine empowerment and reform; the businessman prefers land-grab (klepto-capitalism) to building a genuinely profitable business model through hard work; and the bureaucrat prefers to block change rather than facilitate it since he has more to gain personally from it.
 
The only way to weaken the nexus is by making democracy cheaper and election funding transparent. This may not eliminate corruption altogether, but would take away the main reason for it. Elections can be made cheaper by state funding of political parties and tax-free contributions, but we also need to use technology better.
If, for example, we create a countrywide broadband network that can reach every village, no neta will need to hire hundreds of jeeps and helicopters to reach his message to voters. He can do it from anywhere. He can communicate directly with his voters — just as his rivals can. Voters, armed with Nandan Nilekani's unique ID, will even be able to vote over the internet. The only way to stymie a corrupt kleptocracy is to make democracy less expensive.