Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

By TONY SCHWARTZ

Published: February 9, 2013 205 Comments

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings? 

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Golden Cosmos

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Golden Cosmos

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health. 

“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our resources are infinite.

Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.

Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.

“To maximize gains from long-term practice,” Dr. Ericsson concluded, “individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

I’ve systematically built these principles into the way I write. For my first three books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of the books took me at least a year to write. For my two most recent books, I wrote in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions — beginning first thing in the morning, when my energy was highest — and took a break after each one.

Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.

The power of renewal was so compelling to me that I’ve created a business around it that helps a range of companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department, Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.

Our own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal is central to how we work. We dedicated space to a “renewal” room in which employees can nap, meditate or relax. We have a spacious lounge where employees hang out together and snack on healthy foods we provide. We encourage workers to take renewal breaks throughout the day, and to leave the office for lunch, which we often do together. We allow people to work from home several days a week, in part so they can avoid debilitating rush-hour commutes. Our workdays end at 6 p.m. and we don’t expect anyone to answer e-mail in the evenings or on the weekends. Employees receive four weeks of vacation from their first year.

Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: August 17, 2011

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

 

Why You Need to Sleep On It

By JOHN TIERNEY

Suffering from decision fatigue? You may be expending your finite amount of willpower too early in the day.

 

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.
Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.
Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.
 
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control ­— the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.

But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?
“By the end, you could have talked me into anything,” Twenge told her new colleagues. The symptoms sounded familiar to them too, and gave them an idea. A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.

Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.

For a real-world test of their theory, the lab’s researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.
 
Any decision, whether it’s what pants to buy or whether to start a war, can be broken down into what psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it in 49 B.C., on his way home after conquering the Gauls, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to take his legions across the river with him, lest it be considered an invasion of Rome. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated the risks and benefits of starting a civil war. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”

The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

The experiment showed that crossing the Rubicon is more tiring than anything that happens on either bank — more mentally fatiguing than sitting on the Gaul side contemplating your options or marching on Rome once you’ve crossed. As a result, someone without Caesar’s willpower is liable to stay put. To a fatigued judge, denying parole seems like the easier call not only because it preserves the status quo and eliminates the risk of a parolee going on a crime spree but also because it leaves more options open: the judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth.

“By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”

Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the $2,000 price made that decision easy enough), but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.
As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.

Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.
 
Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget. In one study, he found that when the poor and the rich go shopping, the poor are much more likely to eat during the shopping trip. This might seem like confirmation of their weak character — after all, they could presumably save money and improve their nutrition by eating meals at home instead of buying ready-to-eat snacks like Cinnabons, which contribute to the higher rate of obesity among the poor. But if a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases.

And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.
 
The discovery was an accident resulting from a failed experiment at Baumeister’s lab. The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.

Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it.

The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Skeptics pointed out that the brain’s overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing, which doesn’t square easily with the notion of depleted energy affecting willpower. Among the skeptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually wound up at Dartmouth, where he became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behavior. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn’t see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels. To observe the process — and to see if it could be reversed by glucose — he and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter — a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food’s appeal registered more strongly while impulse control weakened — not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control — and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight. They start out the day with virtuous intentions, resisting croissants at breakfast and dessert at lunch, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower. As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:

1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.
2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.

As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more candy but not other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate. A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control (that’s why it’s convenient to use in experiments), but it’s just a temporary solution. The problem is that what we identify as sugar doesn’t help as much over the course of the day as the steadier supply of glucose we would get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.

The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn’t want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 percent. After lunch it soared up to 60 percent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3:10 p.m. and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1:27 p.m., the first case after lunch, and he was rewarded with parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the judge’s glucose levels.
 
It’s simple enough to imagine reforms for the parole board in Israel — like, say, restricting each judge’s shift to half a day, preferably in the morning, interspersed with frequent breaks for food and rest. But it’s not so obvious what to do with the decision fatigue affecting the rest of society. Even if we could all afford to work half-days, we would still end up depleting our willpower all day long, as Baumeister and his colleagues found when they went into the field in Würzburg in central Germany. The psychologists gave preprogrammed BlackBerrys to more than 200 people going about their daily routines for a week. The phones went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, then at the University of Würzburg, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. Half the people were feeling some desire when their phones went off — to snack, to goof off, to express their true feelings to their bosses — and another quarter said they had felt a desire in the past half-hour. Many of these desires were ones that the men and women were trying to resist, and the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shouldn’t sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they had already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previously reported one.

The results suggested that people spend between three and four hours a day resisting desire. Put another way, if you tapped four or five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. The most commonly resisted desires in the phone study were the urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or playing a game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking Facebook. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it. Their success was decidedly mixed. They were pretty good at avoiding sleep, sex and the urge to spend money, but not so good at resisting the lure of television or the Web or the general temptation to relax instead of work.

We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

Banker with African experience: 'Send everyone into real banking first'

A man who worked in major British banks across Africa says banks have lost touch with simple financial transactions
 

• Joris Luyendijk
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 January 2013 14.59 GMT

He wrote in to the banking blog saying "You haven't had anything about investment banking in Africa. Have I missed something?" We are meeting in a Starbucks off Bank, in the heart of the "square mile". He was born in east Africa, of Indian descent and worked for many years for major British banks, first across the African continent, later in London. He left some years ago for America.

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"I am good at maths and had the intellectual capacity to trade CDOs and other complex financial instruments. But it's just not real banking.

"I grew up in Kenya and in those days the British banks were sources of stability and pride. Indeed, they were the real safety net. My mother worked at a British bank. She never paid a medical bill in her life. The bank took care of that. In many African countries it was the biggest single employer, the biggest single taxpayer … The bank was funding people to go to university … Back in those days banking was a very staid, very respectable profession.

"I went to work for one of the British banks and it was great. I would work in all of the areas of proper commercial banking, each time in a different country. So I'd spend three months in Ghana, in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe. And learn about asset finance (help companies buy equipment), trade finance (help companies trade), balance sheet advisory, structural financing … This would be alternated by six months stints in London to learn risk and treasury management.

"As I said, I have a quantitative background and later on I worked in commodity trading, in London. I was analysing a £2bn book on a daily basis. I'd risk analyse all the trades, which was a truly privileged position as I could see everything that went into a decision to trade or not, as well as get to see the process from trade through settlement to collateral management.

"Working on a trading floor in London was an interesting and different experience. On a trading floor you'd have the back-office doing the paperwork, the middle-office looking at risk and compliance, traders in front office. In Africa the back- and middle-office could be in one person before skill levels built up enough for separating the functions.

"More importantly, the distance between your work and its consequences on the ground was very short in Africa. But in London the actual economy was so far removed from your work it might as well not exist. Traders would come into work, turn on the computer and on their screen they find money, right there. That creates such a different mentality from what I had been doing in Africa. That was very surprising for me to see, that you could be a trader without ever having seen what banking actually is. To this day I can go to Lagos and say: I built that shopping mall. And that bridge. What actual, concrete achievement can a trader point to? I hear someone complained there was no social function to trading recently?

"Why am I different from those who went onto the trading floor? I suppose it's personality and values. In the late 90s in Africa, I saw whole families, solid middle-class people, get wiped out by a combination of bad government and IMF policies and a corrupt financial sector. That really drove home to me just how important stable financial institutions are. Over-indebted countries, an insolvent banking sector, rising unemployment as social spending falls… may seem new to southern Europe but some of us watched this movie before.

"After a few years on that commodity trading desk, I was hired by a major European bank to set up an Africa desk. I thought, great. Some time after that, they closed the desk because they had decided to concentrate on the American sub-prime market. In essence, they went from real banking to moving around and speculating with pieces of paper.

"This showed how people at the top of banks have huge influence. They govern how capital is allocated. Given all the new regulation like Basel III and the Dodd-Frank act… All that happens with new, ever more complex rules is that people get very good at getting round them. More and more, success in investment banking amounts to being able to game the rules and get capital. Trading floor politicians, I call them.

"There was a time that you could be a very successful manager at a major company, say, Boots, and after managing and growing that business for a decade, you'd become a bank chairman. That is no longer the case. Now bankers are recruited straight out of elite universities, they've never seen how you actually run a business. All the way to the top it's an insulated community.

"Still, the financial industry can turn around very fast. You change the hiring and recruiting. Send everyone into real banking first, before they can go into investment banking. So everyone starts in retail, where you actually see that old lady stumble in with her savings to make a deposit, see that local businessman struggling to run his company and pay wages. You make a number of real loans to businesses, proper commercial lending. Next you spend two years in restructuring, cleaning up after a bad loan – and you learn what happens when your bank lends money to the wrong party.

"I recollect one bank, Standard Chartered used to do this. You could not go into corporate or investment banking before working in retail commercial banking.
"The industry also needs to change the rules. Banking must become very simple again, where everyone should be able to determine the health of an institution.
"I seem to recall reading that Barclays paid more in bonuses than in taxes or dividends one year? First time in my life that I wondered about what our industry had become? I thought of Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria… All these places were Barclays and Standard Chartered were the single biggest tax payer, single biggest employer. Tells you why the industry is pivoting away from the city.
"You're asking about finance and development? Well, there are difficult choices. Tobacco, agribusiness, mining used to build more schools, clinics and houses in Africa than any amount of aid. Do we want to see corporations increase their footprint? That's a typical trade-off. Major companies are often the only real safety net for their employees and families. But, say, with tobacco, is it acceptable … Canada is having this debate now.
"Anyway, by now they've probably stopped caring for employees anyway, forced by their shareholders to concentrate exclusively on their quarterly earnings. This has been happening across the board. When companies' decisions should factor in the next 25 years, these days it's more the next 25 weeks!
"It's rarely easy in Africa. Sure, you can demand that this western bank or that stop funding, say, mining. Let me tell you, there is a lot of shady money clamouring to replace us. Drug money, money from piracy, from trading blood diamonds and other illicit resource sales, money looted by corrupt officials … The mining company prefers to deal with a western bank, as they have high professional operating standards and support. If western banks withdraw, for example because we don't want to do any business in Zimbabwe any longer, then it's the other money moving in. That shady money will have no standards regarding corruption, pollution and workers' rights. Banks can spot and be a part of stopping corruption.
"In my experience battling corruption in Africa often comes down to a gut feeling. You're taking a company public, in a so-called IPO. Among the shareholders there's this one mysterious party holding 5%. Do you demand that party release all the names behind it, not just the shell companies but the actual owners? In return for access to western investors, our banks could if they wanted to.
"Africa desperately needs so-called 'deeper capital markets'. If more local people make local deposits, and they invest those in their own country, there are none of the currency or inflation risks you have with foreign investors. But since there are so few solid local places for the African middle class to invest in, most of it goes into real estate which then becomes massively overheated.
"Securitisation, currency and interest swaps ... These instruments, if applied correctly, could do a massive good in Africa. Africa desperately needs 10, 20, 30 years' money, ie long-term investments. To build roads, railroads, bridges, airports, irrigation projects.
"The City could do this. Go back to real banking."

Who takes the harshest anti-welfare line? Those on state benefits

I talked to families directly affected by the cuts and many wanted benefits themselves – yet resented anyone else getting them

• 
• • Fern Brady
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 February 2013 16.57 GMT

'Many interviewees had internalised a Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality'. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

 

Recent polls indicate attitudes towards benefits recipients have softened as more information comes out about the impact of the changes to the welfare system. However, having just completed a project with the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust where I interviewed about 150 families who will be directly affected by the cuts, I found the majority held the kind of attitudes that make the Daily Mail's headlines look positively leftwing.

While the latest British Social Attitudes Survey reflected less support among the overall population for unemployment benefits, what it doesn't tell you is that these anti-welfare attitudes are often held by those most in need of a comprehensive welfare state.

At JRHT I was given the unenviable task of informing people how welfare changes would personally affect them. Often people on the housing scheme were due to lose several benefits – losing their out-of-work employment and support allowance (ESA) as well as having to pay extra money for unusable box rooms as part of the bedroom tax, for example.

Logically, I'd expect those on the sharp end of things to be pro-welfare. But if anything, many interviewees had internalised a Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality, wanting benefits for themselves but resenting anyone else getting a handout.

There are almost too many examples to list but the kind of attitudes I heard daily went along these lines: the disabled man thinks it's wrong the drug user down the road gets methadone. The drug user is outraged that the large family next door gets a spare room and hopes they are hit by bedroom tax. The large family is sick of elderly people getting big houses they don't need. The elderly woman hopes these large families are forced to stop having kids once the money dries up. On and on it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other victims of the coalition government's Welfare Reform Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.

On being told of the cuts, one young mum exclaimed "Good! That means her down the road'll get her money taken away" referring to a resident with severe mental health issues (people with less visible disabilities like hers were all too frequently dismissed as "chancers").

Another tenant vented her frustration that her permanently disabled brother was having his support cut while in the same breath bitterly complaining about fraudulent disability living allowance (DLA) claimants (I contemplated having the comparatively low statistics for fraud tattooed on my face to save time repeating it).

One of the sentences I regularly heard – and was no less startled by each time – was "We're not on benefits." On a daily basis I spoke to people who were in receipt of tax credits, child benefit, ESA, DLA, income support and housing benefit yet still told me matter-of-factly "we don't claim benefits". Over time I understood that what this really meant was that they were striving to define themselves as something other than the endless media presentations of "scroungers".

The value of influencing attitudes towards social inequality is deeply underestimated. If you manage to persuade everyone that poverty is a moral condition and claiming benefits is the symptom, it's a guaranteed way to ensure those handing out the money treat recipients as guilty until proven innocent. Shame is being employed as an ingenious tool to ensure people feel constantly stigmatised. And if you feel undeserving you're hardly going to be forthcoming about what you're entitled to.
This isn't just about votes. The less people believe they're entitled to this money – and they are entitled – the less likely they are to maximise their income through benefits. It's ideal for the government because it fosters an environment in which people are less likely to appeal when their claim is rejected and less likely to support those around them who may be suffering as a result of the welfare changes.

In a way you have to marvel at it. How do you get people to accept a policy that's inexcusably prejudiced against the most vulnerable in society? Make sure they take on the same mean-spirited, self-serving attitude that influenced that policy in the first place. Genius.

Three kids and a flute

Amartya Sen's poser:

Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because she made it.

Sen argues that who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian and the Marxist would opt for Carla since she made it. The utilitarian will argue for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument.

Sen states there are no institutional arrangements that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted and just manner.

Other Comments:

1. Instead of asking how to allocate the flute between the three children, why not ask first under which rules would the flute have come into existence? If Carla knew she would not get the flute, she would not have made it. Therefore, just add a time dimension to the puzzle, and there's no puzzle at all: only a libertarian form of justice is consistent with the flute existing.

2. There are, alas, quite a few people who believe that if the flute isn't allocated according to their favorite rule, then it is better for the world if there is no flute.

3.  I agree Sen forgot about the production issue. He also neglected David, who says the flute is his because he is strongest and will hurt anyone who denies him.
 

This Poundland ruling is a welcome blow to the Work Programme

It's invaluable that three judges have ruled in the Cait Reilly case against an appalling back-to-work system

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 February 2013 15.02 GMT

Cait Reilly after winning her claim that requiring her to work for free was unlawful. Photograph: Cathy Gordon/PA

 

Before we get too excited about the judges' ruling in Reilly and Wilson v the secretary of state, this is not a judgment against slavery or forced labour. Both Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson lodged this appeal on the basis that, in forcing them to do unpaid work or lose their benefits, the government was breaching its own regulations.

You may think that there is a moral case to answer for the secretary of state, in pulling someone away from unpaid work in a sector they're interested in, forcing them instead to work unpaid stacking shelves in Poundland, with no training and no advancement of their skills, driving down wages for the rest of Poundland's employees while benefiting nobody but the retailer and the workfare provider. I know that's what I think.

You might think that when you train a skilled engineer to clean furniture – on the basis that the reason for his idleness was that he'd got out of the habit of work, that he needed to prove his mettle with whatever menial task you chose for him – there's a moral case to answer here, too. I'd agree.
But judges Black, Pill and Burnton haven't ruled on morality, they have merely ruled on nuts and bolts: Reilly was told that her scheme was mandatory, where in fact it was not. Wilson was told that if he refused to take part in a six-month work experience programme, he'd lose his benefits for that period. In fact, the maximum sanction would have been a two-week loss of benefits.

Nevertheless, though a ruling on slavery might have added some weight to it, this remains a punch in the face for this government, the Work Programme generally, and workfare in particular. Even the profile of these two cases significantly damages the reputation of this policy, whose raison d'etre is that long-term unemployment is the result of people getting out of the habit of work.

"What are the barriers that people have?" the employment minister Mark Hoban wondered aloud today on World at One. "One of the things people need to demonstrate to an employer is that they can turn up on time." This old chestnut – that long-term unemployment is the preserve of people who can't haul their sorry bones out of bed, must be countered all the time. The more cases we know about of unemployed people who are highly trained, gainfully occupied and routinely insulted by stupid workfare suggestions, the better.

On a practical note, people who've had their jobseeker's allowance stopped on grounds that are similar to Reilly or Wilson's can now claim the money back. This rights a grave social wrong, and delivers a sorely needed sanction to the workfare providers themselves, who understand nothing but money, and might finally question their deficiencies with cash at stake.

But most importantly, there is a growing sense that this back-to-work system is corrupt – my colleague Shiv Malik discovered recently that people on unpaid schemes were being counted as employed to massage the government's figures, even though by any reasonable person's understanding, they were not. Then the BBC revealed that people were being told to declare themselves "self-employed", even when they were simply without work, on the false basis that they could claim more in in-work benefits than JSA – the real benefit, of course, accruing to the Work Programme provider who could then claim them as having been "helped".

All the statistics released about the Work Programme show execrable results, and yet we've heard nothing about penalties, or remaking the contracts, or rethinking the system. There is a creeping sense that this is turning into a cash cow for the private sector, a get-out-clause for the government ("we've spent all this money, if people can't get jobs despite our help, it's because they are inadequate"), and unemployed people will be left at the bottom, ceaselessly harassed by a totally specious narrative in which their laziness beggars a try-hard administration.

A judge, casting doubt on all this in a sober way, is invaluable – three judges, better still. It makes me want to shake the legal profession by its giant hand.

Welcome to closet illiberalism

 

Vidya Subrahmaniam in The Hindu

   

 

Caste might be cast in stone judging from the way the dominant discourse gets conducted in India

“Caste is the most overwhelming factor in Indian life. Those who deny it in principle also accept it in practice. Life moves within the frontiers of caste and cultured men speak in soft tones against the system of caste, while its rejection in action just does not occur to them...” Socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia said this in 1964 but the words might be as relevant today as they were five decades ago.

The Ashis Nandy controversy illustrates the paradox of India’s opinion makers preaching caste equality while instinctively, reflexively, articulating positions that bunch them up on one side of the caste divide, thus reinforcing the very order that they have rejected. K. Satyanarayana exposes this contradiction with devastating examples in his article in The Hindu (editorial page, “The question of casteism still remains,” February 5, 2013). Mr. Nandy’s defenders have made the untenable legal claim that he should be judged not by what he said at the Jaipur Literature Festival but by his past record and scholarship. But worse, gradually the defence, which was originally grounded in Mr. Nandy’s right to free expression, has deteriorated into a free-for-all against Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBC) — who are presumed to have become “sacred cows” protected by “draconian” laws. If to question Mr. Nandy is intolerance, what does one call this rant?

Mr. Nandy’s initial statement was a qualified one: he said the Indian Republic was saved because the corrupt of today were from the “Scheduled castes, OBCs and now the tribals.” But the nuances went for a toss with his stunning insistence that West Bengal was free from corruption because “in the last hundred years, nobody from the OBCs, SCs and STs has come to power there. It is an absolutely clean State.” Forget the backhanded compliment to the Left Front leadership which has been deemed to be clean for being upper caste. The inescapable inference from this is that upper caste means no corruption regardless of the period of reference — today or a 100 years ago.

 

Nandy’s statement as peg

Per se this is indefensible. Yet if for no other reason than to make the caste debate meaningful, we also need to look at Mr. Nandy’s subsequent clarification — more so because contained in the clarification is an uncomfortable truth that the Indian intelligentsia has tiptoed around for too long. To quote Mr. Nandy: “What I meant was that most of the people getting caught for corruption are people from OBC, SC and ST communities, as they don’t have the means to save themselves unlike people from upper castes who can hide their corruption.” 

The Nandy episode would have been well served if this statement had become the peg on which to examine the persisting caste prejudices and double standards that allow one kind of corruption to be exposed and the other to be hidden. However, it is important to understand that exposés and blackouts happen not only because one section is smarter than the other, which surely it is, but because the dominant discourse in India – as is evident from l'affaire Nandy itself — continues to be shaped by the socially advantaged classes. The media, as surveys have established, are a classic example of this stranglehold but upper caste dominance is as much a reality in academia and other key policymaking institutions. This collective is superficially progressive. Yet at a subconscious level, its members harbour all the entrenched biases, resulting in the backward castes being censured far more severely than their “twice-born” counterparts for the same alleged crime — be it ostentation, self-promotion, a specific legal violation or patronage of a particular caste group. 

Mayawati and the Gandhis

A case in point is the differential treatment extended to Mayawati and the Nehru-Gandhis. This difference endures despite xenophobic intolerance of the First family by right-wing sections of the middle class. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief’s wealth and her self-projection — creating parks and monuments, naming projects after herself and celebrating lavish birthdays — have been obsessively written about by a media that ignored her political achievements until she compelled attention by forming in 2007 the first majority government in Uttar Pradesh in 17 years. The star of that watershed election was Ms Mayawati but the media ignored her, choosing instead to be embedded with Rahul Gandhi whose party finished last and is still stuck there. 

Compare the relentless focus on Ms Mayawati’s financial assets with the easy ride given to Robert Vadra. The Vadra real estate papers were avidly consumed in private, they had been available for years with the principal Opposition party, but the veil on the Gandhi son-in-law’s vast business empire was lifted only after Arvind Kejriwal made bold to mention the unmentionable. Today, while Ms Mayawati finds the law chasing her, there seem to be no such anxieties for Mr. Vadra. In Prime Minister Vajpayee’s time, similar deference was shown to his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya.

 

Tracking the BSP

I had my first real brush with deep-seated caste attitudes in 1988 when I was in Allahabad for a Lok Sabha by-election contested by Rajiv (Gandhi) challenger V.P. Singh. His opponents were Sunil Shastri from the Congress and Kanshi Ram from the BSP. Singh was the media darling and Mr. Shastri derived his importance from being his principal opponent. The BSP faced a near media blackout, and as it turned out, the party was equally contemptuous of the “manuwadi” press. BSP volunteers blocked me off from their meetings, saying they knew what I would write. Over the years, as I tracked the BSP’s astonishing growth, I could not help but notice the unfailingly skewed media coverage of the party, whose rallies would be reported, not for their content but for the traffic chaos they caused. 

As a part-time journalism teacher in 2005, I would discover the same unconscious bias in the essays turned in by my students. Writing on Ms Mayawati’s birthday, they left out the political aspects of the event, concentrating instead on her diamonds, her “flashy” clothes and the size of the cake she cut. They would accept later that diamonds and silks were worn by other women politicians too but that somehow, these outward manifestations hit the eye more in the BSP chief’s case. There is an ironic reality here that must be understood in its proper context. What people saw as distasteful flamboyance was a political tool that Ms Mayawati consciously employed, especially in the formative years when it was important for her to raise the self-esteem of her constituency. This was explained to me by the part Hindutva, part OBC Uma Bharti. The Dalit girls in her village were forbidden from crossing the threshold into even OBC homes. But they would rebel in their own way, wearing Mayawati hair clutches and imitating her mannerisms, thereby signalling that they would not be kept down by force. The handbag, symbolising status and accomplishment, is similarly a deliberate presence in the much-criticised Mayawati statues. 

Admittedly, the showmanship can get excessive, as it did in 2010 when the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister wore a gigantic garland of currency notes, estimated to add up to several crores of rupees. This kind of extravagant cash display undoubtedly raises questions about source and accountability. However, in all the outrage over this incident, the media missed mentioning that Indian politicians have traditionally been weighed against coins. At election time this becomes a means of adding to the party coffers without the bother of disclosing the source. 

There is equal duplicity around the perceived caste consciousness of parties such as the BSP and the Samajwadi Party (SP). As a journalist posted in Lucknow in the late 1980s, I was witness to the transfer of power in Uttar Pradesh from the Congress’s Narain Dutt Tiwari to the Janata Dal’s Mulayam Singh Yadav (now with the SP.) The latter took charge to immediate accusations of Yadavisation of government and bureaucracy. Nobody cared to find out which castes ruled in the previous regime. In 1984, 93.8 per cent of the principal secretaries and secretaries to the U.P. government were from the upper castes and 78.6 per cent of the District Magistrates were from the upper castes, including 41 per cent of Brahmins (Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution). 

Political empowerment of the backward castes is a dramatic reality today. But social attitudes have stayed frozen. Why else would 50 per cent of all Central schemes and projects be named after the Nehru-Gandhis? Why would there be a chorus of protests over Mayawati statues but not over the renaming of the Borivali National Park after that champion of democracy, Sanjay Gandhi? In her outstanding book, The Grammar of Caste, Ashwini Deshpande cites evidence from four pioneering studies on the Indian urban labour market to conclude that employers discriminate between equally meritorious candidates on the basis of their caste identities. “Employers talk the language of merit and confess a deep faith solely in the merit of the applicant. However, they also believe that merit is distributed along lines of caste, religious and gender divisions. Nowhere do employers see this as discrimination. It is as if they were describing a neutral and unbiased state of the world.” Back to 1964 and Ram Manohar Lohia?