Will Hutton in The Guardian
The southern corner of Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, reserved for fans from visiting teams, was eerily empty as the game against the Bundesliga champions, Bayern Munich, began last week. Instead, there was a banner. “£64 for a ticket. But without fans football is not worth a penny,” it read. After five minutes, the Bayern Munich fans cascaded into the stands to loud applause from the 60,000-strong home crowd. Everyone knew a powerful point had been made.
Except Arsenal do have a huge fan base and they do pay £64 a ticket because that is the price the market will bear. The clapping against blind market forces came as much from the management consultants, newspaper columnists, media multimillionaires, ex-central bankers and university vice-chancellors who now constitute Arsenal’s home base, as much as painters, plumbers and assembly line workers.
Yet everyone was united in understanding the Germans’ protest. Football has to be more than a money machine. Passion for a club is part of an idea of “we” – a collective identity rooted in place, culture and history – that defines us as men and women. £64 tickets redefine the Arsenal or Bayern Munich “we” as those with the capacity to pay.
Britain in 2015 is in a crisis about who the British “we” are at every level. Decades of being told that there is nothing to be done about the march of global market forces has denuded us of the possibility of acting together to shape a world that we want, whether it’s the character of our football clubs or our manufacturing base.
The same day that the Arsenal crowd was clapping the Bayern Munich fans, Tata Steel announced it was mothballing its steel plants in Scotland and Teesside. Over the last fortnight, Redcar’s steel mill has been shut as Thai owner SSI has gone into receivership, while manufacturing company Caparo is liquidating its foundry division in Scunthorpe. A pivotal component of our manufacturing sector, with incalculable effects across the supply chain, is being shut.
Yet when questioned, business secretary Sajid Javid’s trump answer is that the British government does not control the world steel price. He will, of course, do everything he can to soften the blow and help unemployed steel workers retrain or start their own businesses. But the message is unambiguous. Vast, uncontrollable market forces are at work. The government will not even raise the matter of how China exports steel to Britain at below the cost of production and intensifies the crisis.
It becomes purposeless to talk about what “we” might do because there are no tools for “us” to use. The new world is one in which each individual must look after her or himself. Even the trade unions and new Labour leadership, aghast at the scale of the job losses, do not have a plausible alternative – except to plead that the £9m proposed support package for unemployed steel workers in Scunthorpe is paltry.
There could have been, and still are, alternatives, but they are predicated on a conception of “we” resisted by right and left. A stronger steel industry, more capable of riding out this crisis, could have been created by more engagement with Europe and refashioning the ecosystem in which production takes place.
But since the collapse of Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, governments of all hues have abjured any attempt to keep the pound stable and competitive, either pegging sterling against the euro and dollar or even – perish the thought – joining the euro. The pound, except for a short period after the banking crisis, has been systematically overvalued for a generation. Manufacturing production has stagnated as imports have soared. The trade deficit in goods in 2014 was a stunning £120bn, or some 7% of GDP. Yet dissociating Britain from all European attempts to manage currency movements and keeping the independent pound floating is as widely praised by John McDonnell on the left as John Redwood on the right. A devastated manufacturing sector, and now the crisis in the steel industry, is too rarely mentioned as part of the price. Alongside pegging the exchange rate should have been a determined effort to develop areas of industrial strength, with government and business working closely as co-creators. Yet even such a relationship – close to unthinkable in a British context – would have needed business keen on creating value rather than a high share price and a government setting some ambitious targets backed by spending the necessary billions.
Britain, for example, could have had a brilliant civil nuclear industry, a vibrant aerospace sector, the fastest growing windfarm industry, clusters of hi-tech business all over the country – and a hi-tech steel industry. Instead it is no better than a mendicant subcontractor. It does not have a share stake in Airbus, while France and China are building our nuclear power stations. Our green industries, once the fastest growing in Europe, are shutting. Only banks and hedge funds are protected and nurtured in a vigorous, uncompromising industrial policy, but they don’t buy much steel. They are the “we” behind which even ultra-libertarian Sajid Javid will throw the awesome weight of the state. Scunthorpe, Redcar, Teesside and the West Midlands are not; they can go hang.
And yet. Part of the reason the “northern powerhouse” is such a powerful idea is that it redefines the “we” so that the priorities and aspirations of the north are as valid as those of a hedge fund manager or the pampered board of HSBC. It is also obvious that newly empowered public authorities will have to co-create the vision with private partners and work with a Conservative government and the EU. There will be no “northern powerhouse” if it is locked out of European markets, nor is much progress likely with a third-rate transport and training infrastructure. It also needs a prolonged period of exchange rate stability.
Little of this easily fits the categories in which either Javid on the right or McDonnell and Corbyn on the left think. There is a powerful role for public agency and public spending, but it is much less directive, statist and top-down than traditional left thinking. Equally, the driver of any growth has to be vigorous, purposeful capitalism, but one co-created between private and public in a manner foreign to the traditional libertarian right. And there should be no place for hostility to Europe, also part of this reformulated “we”.
In this sense, there is a golden thread between the applause of the crowd in the Emirates and the way the “northern powerhouse” is taking shape, along with dismay at our dependence on China to build our nuclear power stations. There has been too much of a surrender to supply and demand. It is time to shape markets and football leagues alike. There is a “we”. It could be different.
Sunday, 25 October 2015
Saturday, 24 October 2015
My atheism does not make me superior to believers. It's a leap of faith too
Ijeoma Olua in The Guardian
I don’t believe in a higher power, but the fact we’ve never proven there isn’t one means there could be a God.
There are many different ways in which people come to atheism. Many come to it in their early adult years, after a childhood in the church. Some are raised in atheism by atheist parents. Some come to atheism after years of religious study. I came to atheism the way that many Christians come to Christianity – through faith.
I was six years old, sitting in my frilly yellow Easter dress, throwing black jelly beans out into the yard, when my mom explained the story of Easter to me. She explained Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as the son of God, going into great detail. And when she was finished telling me the story that had been a foundation of her faith for the majority of her life, I looked at her and said: “I don’t think that really happened.”
I didn’t come to this conclusion because the story of a man waking from the dead made no sense – I wasn’t an overly analytical child. I still enthusiastically believed in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. But when I searched myself for any sense of belief in a higher power, it just wasn’t there. I wanted it to be there – how comforting to have a God. But it wasn’t there, and it isn’t to this day.
The same confidence that many of my friends have in the belief that Jesus walks with them is the confidence that I have that nobody walks with me. The cold truth that when I die I will cease to exist in anything but the memory of those I leave behind, that those I love who leave are lost forever, is always with me.
These are my truths. I don’t like these truths. As a mother, I’d give anything to believe that if anything were to happen to my children they would live forever in the kingdom of a loving God. But I don’t believe that.
But my conviction that there is no God is nonetheless a leap of faith. Just as we have been unable to prove there is a God, we have also been unable to prove that there isn’t one. The feeling that I have in my being that there is no God is what I go by, but I’m not deluded into thinking that feeling is in any way more factual than the deep conviction by theists that God exists.
I keep this fact in mind – that my atheism is a leap of faith – because otherwise it’s easy to get cocky. It’s easy to look at acts of terror committed in the names of different gods, debates about the role of women in various churches, unfamiliar and elaborate religious rules and rituals and think, look at these foolish religious folk. It’s easy to view religion as the root of society’s ills.
But atheism as a faith is quickly catching up in its embrace of divisive and oppressive attitudes. We have websites dedicated to insulting Islam and Christianity. We have famous atheist thought-leaders spouting misogyny and calling for the profiling of Muslims. As a black atheist, I encounter just as much racism amongst other atheists as anywhere else. We have hundreds of thousands of atheists blindly following atheist leaders like Richard Dawkins, hurling insults and even threats at those who dare question them.
Look through new atheist websites and twitter feeds. You’ll see the same hatred and bigotry that theists have been spouting against other theists for millennia. But when confronted about this bigotry, we say “But I feel this way about all religion,” as if that somehow makes it better. But our belief that we are right while everyone else is wrong; our belief that our atheism is more moral; our belief that others are lost: none of it is original.
Perhaps this is not religion, but human nature. Perhaps when left to our own devices, we jockey for power by creating an “other” and rallying against it. Perhaps we’re all part of a system that creates hierarchies based on class, gender, race and ethnicity because it’s the easiest way for the few to overpower the many. Perhaps we all fall in line because we look for any social system – be it Christianity, Islam, socialism, atheism – to make sense of it all and to feel like we matter in a world that shows time and time again that we don’t.
If we truly want to free ourselves from the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic tendencies of society, we need to go beyond religion. Yes, religion does need to be examined and debated regularly and fervently. But we also need to examine our school systems, our medical systems, our economic systems, our environmental policies.
Faith is not the enemy, and words in a book are not responsible for the atrocities we commit as human beings. We need to constantly examine and expose our nature as pack animals who are constantly trying to define the other in order to feel safe through all of the systems we build in society. Only then will we be as free from dogma as we atheists claim to be.
There are many different ways in which people come to atheism. Many come to it in their early adult years, after a childhood in the church. Some are raised in atheism by atheist parents. Some come to atheism after years of religious study. I came to atheism the way that many Christians come to Christianity – through faith.
I was six years old, sitting in my frilly yellow Easter dress, throwing black jelly beans out into the yard, when my mom explained the story of Easter to me. She explained Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as the son of God, going into great detail. And when she was finished telling me the story that had been a foundation of her faith for the majority of her life, I looked at her and said: “I don’t think that really happened.”
I didn’t come to this conclusion because the story of a man waking from the dead made no sense – I wasn’t an overly analytical child. I still enthusiastically believed in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. But when I searched myself for any sense of belief in a higher power, it just wasn’t there. I wanted it to be there – how comforting to have a God. But it wasn’t there, and it isn’t to this day.
The same confidence that many of my friends have in the belief that Jesus walks with them is the confidence that I have that nobody walks with me. The cold truth that when I die I will cease to exist in anything but the memory of those I leave behind, that those I love who leave are lost forever, is always with me.
These are my truths. I don’t like these truths. As a mother, I’d give anything to believe that if anything were to happen to my children they would live forever in the kingdom of a loving God. But I don’t believe that.
But my conviction that there is no God is nonetheless a leap of faith. Just as we have been unable to prove there is a God, we have also been unable to prove that there isn’t one. The feeling that I have in my being that there is no God is what I go by, but I’m not deluded into thinking that feeling is in any way more factual than the deep conviction by theists that God exists.
I keep this fact in mind – that my atheism is a leap of faith – because otherwise it’s easy to get cocky. It’s easy to look at acts of terror committed in the names of different gods, debates about the role of women in various churches, unfamiliar and elaborate religious rules and rituals and think, look at these foolish religious folk. It’s easy to view religion as the root of society’s ills.
But atheism as a faith is quickly catching up in its embrace of divisive and oppressive attitudes. We have websites dedicated to insulting Islam and Christianity. We have famous atheist thought-leaders spouting misogyny and calling for the profiling of Muslims. As a black atheist, I encounter just as much racism amongst other atheists as anywhere else. We have hundreds of thousands of atheists blindly following atheist leaders like Richard Dawkins, hurling insults and even threats at those who dare question them.
Look through new atheist websites and twitter feeds. You’ll see the same hatred and bigotry that theists have been spouting against other theists for millennia. But when confronted about this bigotry, we say “But I feel this way about all religion,” as if that somehow makes it better. But our belief that we are right while everyone else is wrong; our belief that our atheism is more moral; our belief that others are lost: none of it is original.
Perhaps this is not religion, but human nature. Perhaps when left to our own devices, we jockey for power by creating an “other” and rallying against it. Perhaps we’re all part of a system that creates hierarchies based on class, gender, race and ethnicity because it’s the easiest way for the few to overpower the many. Perhaps we all fall in line because we look for any social system – be it Christianity, Islam, socialism, atheism – to make sense of it all and to feel like we matter in a world that shows time and time again that we don’t.
If we truly want to free ourselves from the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic tendencies of society, we need to go beyond religion. Yes, religion does need to be examined and debated regularly and fervently. But we also need to examine our school systems, our medical systems, our economic systems, our environmental policies.
Faith is not the enemy, and words in a book are not responsible for the atrocities we commit as human beings. We need to constantly examine and expose our nature as pack animals who are constantly trying to define the other in order to feel safe through all of the systems we build in society. Only then will we be as free from dogma as we atheists claim to be.
Friday, 23 October 2015
Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power
Constitutional crisis looms after anti-austerity Left is denied parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government
Ambrose Evans Pritchard in The Telegraph
Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.
Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.
He deemed it too risky to let the Left Bloc or the Communists come close to power, insisting that conservatives should soldier on as a minority in order to satisfy Brussels and appease foreign financial markets.
“In 40 years of democracy, no government in Portugal has ever depended on the support of anti-European forces, that is to say forces that campaigned to abrogate the Lisbon Treaty, the Fiscal Compact, the Growth and Stability Pact, as well as to dismantle monetary union and take Portugal out of the euro, in addition to wanting the dissolution of NATO,” said Mr Cavaco Silva.
“This is the worst moment for a radical change to the foundations of our democracy.
"After we carried out an onerous programme of financial assistance, entailing heavy sacrifices, it is my duty, within my constitutional powers, to do everything possible to prevent false signals being sent to financial institutions, investors and markets,” he said.
Mr Cavaco Silva argued that the great majority of the Portuguese people did not vote for parties that want a return to the escudo or that advocate a traumatic showdown with Brussels.
This is true, but he skipped over the other core message from the elections held three weeks ago: that they also voted for an end to wage cuts and Troika austerity. The combined parties of the Left won 50.7pc of the vote. Led by the Socialists, they control the Assembleia.
The conservative premier, Pedro Passos Coelho, came first and therefore gets first shot at forming a government, but his Right-wing coalition as a whole secured just 38.5pc of the vote. It lost 28 seats.
Newly re-elected Portuguese prime minister Pedro Passos CoelhoThe Socialist leader, Antonio Costa, has reacted with fury, damning the president’s action as a “grave mistake” that threatens to engulf the country in a political firestorm.
“It is unacceptable to usurp the exclusive powers of parliament. The Socialists will not take lessons from professor Cavaco Silva on the defence of our democracy,” he said.
Mr Costa vowed to press ahead with his plans to form a triple-Left coalition, and warned that the Right-wing rump government will face an immediate vote of no confidence.
There can be no fresh elections until the second half of next year under Portugal’s constitution, risking almost a year of paralysis that puts the country on a collision course with Brussels and ultimately threatens to reignite the country’s debt crisis.
The bond market has reacted calmly to events in Lisbon but it is no longer a sensitive gauge now that the European Central Bank is mopping up Portuguese debt under quantitative easing.
Portugal is no longer under a Troika regime and does not face an immediate funding crunch, holding cash reserves above €8bn. Yet the IMF says the country remains “highly vulnerable” if there is any shock or the country fails to deliver on reforms, currently deemed to have “stalled”.
Public debt is 127pc of GDP and total debt is 370pc, worse than in Greece. Net external liabilities are more than 220pc of GDP.
The IMF warned that Portugal's “export miracle” remains narrowly based, the headline gains flattered by re-exports with little value added. “A durable rebalancing of the economy has not taken place,” it said.
“The president has created a constitutional crisis,” said Rui Tavares, a radical green MEP. “He is saying that he will never allow the formation of a government containing Leftists and Communists. People are amazed by what has happened.”
Mr Tavares said the president has invoked the spectre of the Communists and the Left Bloc as a “straw man” to prevent the Left taking power at all, knowing full well that the two parties agreed to drop their demands for euro-exit, a withdrawal from Nato and nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under a compromise deal to the forge the coalition.
President Cavaco Silva may be correct is calculating that a Socialist government in league with the Communists would precipitate a major clash with the EU austerity mandarins. Mr Costa’s grand plan for Keynesian reflation – led by spending on education and health – is entirely incompatible with the EU’s Fiscal Compact.
The secretary-general of the Portuguese Socialist Party, Antonio Costa, appears on Saturday after the election results are made public Photo: EPAThis foolish treaty law obliges Portugal to cut its debt to 60pc of GDP over the next 20 years in a permanent austerity trap, and to do it just as the rest of southern Europe is trying to do the same thing, and all against a backdrop of powerful deflationary forces worldwide.
The strategy of chipping away at the country’s massive debt burden by permanent belt-tightening is largely self-defeating, since the denominator effect of stagnant nominal GDP aggravates debt dynamics.
It is also pointless. Portugal will require a debt write-off when the next global downturn hits in earnest. There is no chance whatsoever that Germany will agree to EMU fiscal union in time to prevent this.
What Portugal needs to pay off (Source: Deutsche Bank)The chief consequence of drawing out the agony is deep hysteresis in the labour markets and chronically low levels of investment that blight the future.
Mr Cavaco Silva is effectively using his office to impose a reactionary ideological agenda, in the interests of creditors and the EMU establishment, and dressing it up with remarkable Chutzpah as a defence of democracy.
The Portuguese Socialists and Communists have buried the hatchet on their bitter divisions for the first time since the Carnation Revolution and the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship in the 1970s, yet they are being denied their parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government.
This is a dangerous demarche. The Portuguese conservatives and their media allies behave as if the Left has no legitimate right to take power, and must be held in check by any means.
These reflexes are familiar – and chilling – to anybody familiar with 20th century Iberian history, or indeed Latin America. That it is being done in the name of the euro is entirely to be expected.
Greece’s Syriza movement, Europe’s first radical-Left government in Europe since the Second World War, was crushed into submission for daring to confront eurozone ideology. Now the Portuguese Left is running into a variant of the same meat-grinder.
Europe’s socialists face a dilemma. They are at last waking up to the unpleasant truth that monetary union is an authoritarian Right-wing enterprise that has slipped its democratic leash, yet if they act on this insight in any way they risk being prevented from taking power.
Brussels really has created a monster.
If trade helps improve human rights, it's about time we let North Korea and Isis run some of our industries
Mark Steel in The Independent
Xi Jinping and David Cameron attend a joint press conference in 10 Downing Street Suzanne Plunkett - WPA Pool/Getty Images
I expect the Government is worried after the state visit from the President of China that we weren’t quite grovelling enough. George Osborne must be fretting – “We should have let him win Strictly Come Dancing” – while Cameron shakes his head and says, “My idea was to give him Joanna Lumley as a present.
“In return they might have agreed to buy the New Forest, instead we didn’t get so much as a panda.”
Iain Duncan Smith will demand that next time, instead of giving him a length of red carpet, we nail Tibetan monks to the floor so he can walk on them.
Theresa May will complain the premier should have been allowed to partner Wayne Rooney up front against Manchester City, and Jeremy Hunt probably wishes he’d read out the poem he’d written specially, that starts “O President Xi, even your wee, is wine finer than Jesus’s from Galilee.”
Sajid Javid and China's Gao Hucheng sign an agreement in 10 Downing Street while David Cameron and Xi Jinping look on
Geroge Osborne and China's Xu Shaoshi shake hands after signing an agreement
Xi Jinping and David Cameron attend a joint press conference in 10 Downing Street Suzanne Plunkett - WPA Pool/Getty ImagesI expect the Government is worried after the state visit from the President of China that we weren’t quite grovelling enough. George Osborne must be fretting – “We should have let him win Strictly Come Dancing” – while Cameron shakes his head and says, “My idea was to give him Joanna Lumley as a present.
“In return they might have agreed to buy the New Forest, instead we didn’t get so much as a panda.”
Iain Duncan Smith will demand that next time, instead of giving him a length of red carpet, we nail Tibetan monks to the floor so he can walk on them.
Theresa May will complain the premier should have been allowed to partner Wayne Rooney up front against Manchester City, and Jeremy Hunt probably wishes he’d read out the poem he’d written specially, that starts “O President Xi, even your wee, is wine finer than Jesus’s from Galilee.”
Sajid Javid and China's Gao Hucheng sign an agreement in 10 Downing Street while David Cameron and Xi Jinping look on
As usual the person who tried to really spoil the occasion was Jeremy Corbyn, who’s such an extremist communist that he insisted on complaining about the behaviour of communist China.
If he was a sensible moderate of the centre ground, he’d have donated his beard as a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and ignored the habit of sentencing people to death at mass rallies. Those rallies are a sign that China is becoming more liberal – it’s a nice touch to allow the masses to be involved, making the occasion a people’s execution.
According to Amnesty International, China executes more people than the rest of the world put together. And that’s just the sort of efficiency and high rates of productivity we need to aspire to if we’re to make British industry great again.
For too long the West has been prepared to trudge along, wiping out prisoners one at a time on Death Row with (eventually) lethal injections and cumbersome hangings, but the Chinese Communist Party have set a new standard, zapping them away dozens at a time, with a "can-do" spirit that makes them ideal for building our nuclear power plants.
They’re so imaginative with new technology that while constructing this power station they may develop a new efficient method of providing energy, which is to use the heat from all the Tibetan monks that set themselves alight in protest at the Chinese occupation.
Cameron insists he did discuss human rights in private with President Xi, and I’m sure he was very influential. He probably made such an impression that the President persuaded Cameron to execute people by firing squad, then send the family a bill for the bullet, so who says there’s no meaningful dialogue?
The Prime Minister explained how these discussions work: “The more we trade, the better placed we are to discuss human rights.” In that case we should try this method everywhere. To start with we can ask North Korea to run a couple of our industries – small ones to get started, such as water and the Premier League – and then we’ll be in an ideal position to chat to Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un about the way he starves people to death.
Then we can start a lively sword deal with Isis. If that goes well we can invite them to run our banks, which will make us suitably placed to point out we take a very dim view of their policy on massacring Christians.
This is one more example of how the Tories have occupied the centre ground of politics. They’ve become such pacifists that Cameron will surprise us in the debate about Syria by saying: “What they all need over there is some love. So I’ve invited all the factions to tea with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, then we’ll ask them all to present their business plan on Dragon’s Den and see if we can get a bit of trade started so we’ll be better placed to discuss human rights.”
To be fair to President Xi, he did say his government’s record on human rights leaves “room for improvement.” As he displayed such self-awareness, I hope Cameron said to him, “Oh Mr President, please don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Because it’s not the President’s fault if the laws in China leave room for improvement.
If he was a sensible moderate of the centre ground, he’d have donated his beard as a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and ignored the habit of sentencing people to death at mass rallies. Those rallies are a sign that China is becoming more liberal – it’s a nice touch to allow the masses to be involved, making the occasion a people’s execution.
According to Amnesty International, China executes more people than the rest of the world put together. And that’s just the sort of efficiency and high rates of productivity we need to aspire to if we’re to make British industry great again.
For too long the West has been prepared to trudge along, wiping out prisoners one at a time on Death Row with (eventually) lethal injections and cumbersome hangings, but the Chinese Communist Party have set a new standard, zapping them away dozens at a time, with a "can-do" spirit that makes them ideal for building our nuclear power plants.
They’re so imaginative with new technology that while constructing this power station they may develop a new efficient method of providing energy, which is to use the heat from all the Tibetan monks that set themselves alight in protest at the Chinese occupation.
Cameron insists he did discuss human rights in private with President Xi, and I’m sure he was very influential. He probably made such an impression that the President persuaded Cameron to execute people by firing squad, then send the family a bill for the bullet, so who says there’s no meaningful dialogue?
The Prime Minister explained how these discussions work: “The more we trade, the better placed we are to discuss human rights.” In that case we should try this method everywhere. To start with we can ask North Korea to run a couple of our industries – small ones to get started, such as water and the Premier League – and then we’ll be in an ideal position to chat to Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un about the way he starves people to death.
Then we can start a lively sword deal with Isis. If that goes well we can invite them to run our banks, which will make us suitably placed to point out we take a very dim view of their policy on massacring Christians.
This is one more example of how the Tories have occupied the centre ground of politics. They’ve become such pacifists that Cameron will surprise us in the debate about Syria by saying: “What they all need over there is some love. So I’ve invited all the factions to tea with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, then we’ll ask them all to present their business plan on Dragon’s Den and see if we can get a bit of trade started so we’ll be better placed to discuss human rights.”
To be fair to President Xi, he did say his government’s record on human rights leaves “room for improvement.” As he displayed such self-awareness, I hope Cameron said to him, “Oh Mr President, please don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Because it’s not the President’s fault if the laws in China leave room for improvement.
Geroge Osborne and China's Xu Shaoshi shake hands after signing an agreement
Hundreds of the country’s lawyers have just been put in jail for criticising the regime, so there’s a distinct shortage of expert advice for him to draw on. Cameron also insisted the Chinese government is becoming more liberal. One example of this growing political correctness is they’ve removed all mentions of democracy from text books in schools, with a directive to “Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms.”
Because when a teacher has to shout “WHAT have I told you about maligning socialism in the corridor?” things are moving in the right direction.
But there is, of course, still “room for improvement”. So hopefully the questions in maths lessons will soon include the following: what percentage of Guiyang province was rightfully jailed for slandering the Sports and General Fitness Secretary of Chenzhou North-West Region Communist Party’?
Not everyone will understand the benefits of this state visit - not least if they’re a steelworker about to be put out of work. But as the Prime Minister explained, the way to create employment is to ensure we have a strong economy.
And if we allow our industry to shut down, that will strengthen our economy beautifully, which will mean we have more jobs.
The best thing we can do, in fact, is close down the entire country. Then we could all agree to work in clothes shops in China for 18 hours a day for 90 pence a week. We’ll all be extremely well off, and if any of us are jailed for slandering a party leader we’ll be perfectly placed to discuss our human rights.
Because when a teacher has to shout “WHAT have I told you about maligning socialism in the corridor?” things are moving in the right direction.
But there is, of course, still “room for improvement”. So hopefully the questions in maths lessons will soon include the following: what percentage of Guiyang province was rightfully jailed for slandering the Sports and General Fitness Secretary of Chenzhou North-West Region Communist Party’?
Not everyone will understand the benefits of this state visit - not least if they’re a steelworker about to be put out of work. But as the Prime Minister explained, the way to create employment is to ensure we have a strong economy.
And if we allow our industry to shut down, that will strengthen our economy beautifully, which will mean we have more jobs.
The best thing we can do, in fact, is close down the entire country. Then we could all agree to work in clothes shops in China for 18 hours a day for 90 pence a week. We’ll all be extremely well off, and if any of us are jailed for slandering a party leader we’ll be perfectly placed to discuss our human rights.
Expecting Sehwag to do the unexpected
Siddhartha Vaidyanathan in Cricinfo
Opposition captains always feared: what if Sehwag gets going? Everyone else just learned to accept that he would forever surprise
Going up: Sehwag constantly turned traditional batting concepts on their head © AFP
The heart wishes Virender Sehwag had retired after a rousing Test, his team-mates chairing him off the ground, the crowd bidding him adieu with a standing ovation. The mind understands that this was never going to come to pass, that Sehwag's days as an international cricketer were long past, and that he would tweet the news of his exit (as he had promised late last year) and be off without a fuss.
The end was as abrupt as it was apt. Not for him a press conference bathed in emotion, or a speech that tugged at heartstrings. There was no grand felicitation, there were no teary goodbyes. Instead he went his own way, wrapping up with a tweet that started "I hereby… " and a statement that began, "To paraphrase Mark Twain…"
None of this should come as a surprise; to have experienced Sehwag's career is to have come to expect the unexpected. During times when conventional wisdom advised circumspection, he would blast off. Where other batsmen shut shop a few overs before stumps, he saw it as an opportunity to pick off boundaries. When opposition captains pushed mid-off and mid-on back, he didn't look at it as a chance for singles; instead he was determined to launch the ball over the fielders' heads. Where team-mates used the services of a nightwatchman, he deemed it an insult ("If I can't play for 25 minutes, I'm not much of a batsman.")
Stories of Sehwag's counter-intuition are legion. He once charged a medium-pace bowler in a Ranji Trophy game, swished wildly, and missed by more than a foot. That in itself should come as no surprise, except, as his former team-mate Aakash Chopra wrote on this website, it was little but an act. On "one of the worst pitches", Sehwag was actually trying to mess with the bowler's length. Sure enough, the trick rattled the opponent. The next two balls pitched short. And Sehwag smashed two fours.
Paul Harris ended up the loser in his contest with Sehwag in 2008 © Getty Images
The common refrain while talking about Sehwag's batting is how his approach was so simple, how the see-ball-hit-ball approach served him so well. This, of course, is partly true - he has himself acknowledged the value of clearing all clutter from the mind - but it is also somewhat reductionist. Sehwag might not have analysed ground conditions and wagon wheels with a high level of granularity (and, back in 2006, he might not have known about Pankaj Roy and Vinoo Mankad's record partnership) but he was far from unschooled. He analysed his innings and dismissals, and spoke to those he respected about technical glitches, taking on advice from openers as varied in approach as Sunil Gavaskar and Kris Srikkanth. He enjoyed chatting with psychologist Rudi Webster (he was especially curious to hear about the early struggles of Viv Richards, whom Webster likened Sehwag to) and sometimes surprised team-mates by reeling off names of bowlers he had faced in stray innings.
Most significantly he was astute enough to constantly upend traditional approaches to batting. Where Sachin Tendulkar was bogged down, padding away Ashley Giles bowling over the wicket, Sehwag backed away and slashed; charged diagonally and slashed; and, in what was little short of a tight slap across the bowler's face, reverse-swept without a care in the world. None of this was blind slogging; it was a planned assault to disrupt a bowler's rhythm, nullifying his negative tactics. Six years on, when another left-arm spinner targeted his pads, Sehwag challenged him: "Come round the wicket and first ball I'll hit you for a six." Paul Harris - with a long-off, long-on, deep midwicket and a deep point - accepted the dare. And sure enough, the first ball soared over the sightscreen.
Such provocation wasn't merely an instinctive flash of bravado. Like the smartest of bowlers, Sehwag understood when to needle the opposition and when to send out a message by shutting up. Against Australia in Chennai in 2004, he made friendly small-talk with some fielders as he walked off after the first day's play. But come the end of the fourth day, with India chasing a tricky target, he pounded a drive past Glenn McGrath and strode off, chin up, with a raging sense of purpose. "You have to show the other team that you're here to win," he would later say of that unforgettable walk-off.
Fury Road: Sehwag set up India's record chase against England in Chennai in 2008 © AFP
It has often been pointed out that Sehwag averaged slightly over 30 in the third and fourth innings of Tests with just one hundred, a stat used to demonstrate his frailty under "scoreboard pressure". What is not highlighted as much is that he averaged a mighty 65.91 in the second innings of Tests, with 12 hundreds - many of which came after the opposition had piled on massive scores. When New Zealand amassed 630 in Mohali in 2003, Sehwag responded with 130; when South Africa piled on 510 in Kanpur in 2004, he answered with 164; when Pakistan erected 679 in Lahore in 2006, he blitzed 254; and when South Africa put on 540 in Chennai in 2008, he smoked the fastest Test triple-hundred. As important as it is to celebrate Sehwag the match-winner, it's vital to hail Sehwag the match-saver: the opening batsman who drew games not by playing out time but by rollicking along at berserker pace, eliminating threats of India following on.
What this meant was that, despite his poor fourth-innings record, teams were often hesitant to declare in the third innings, the fear of "what if Sehwag gets going?" never far from their calculations. There is no stat to quantify the psychological effect that Sehwag had on fielding teams but an Ian Chappell quote from 2005 sums up the sentiment: "Sehwag can change the course of a match with the ease of Moses parting the Red Sea".
Over the years there were a number of innings when Sehwag parted the metaphorical Red Sea, but the apex of match-changeability arrived on that December afternoon in 2008 - a month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai - when England set India 387 for victory in Chennai. The odds were grim. No team had chased more than 155 at the ground and no team had achieved a fourth-innings target of more than 276 at any Indian venue.
None of this mattered to Sehwag. He had begun the fourth day by telling Ravi Shastri, "We could easily chase 300-plus against England," and then gone on to burn the batting manual, juddering a 68-ball 83 to fire-start the chase. There were rasping upper cuts and swirling sixes; the short balls ending up in the V between point and third man, the full ones in the V between square leg and midwicket. It was a kind of innings that galvanises the team to dare to dream; an innings that sends shock waves through the fielding side; and an innings that makes ten-year-olds want to reach for their bats, getting them hooked to the game for good.
Once the win was achieved, Tendulkar was asked about Sehwag's mighty eruption. "We are quite used to that," he said with a smile. "You kind of expect something which is not expected."
He may as well have been summing up a once-in-a-lifetime career.
Opposition captains always feared: what if Sehwag gets going? Everyone else just learned to accept that he would forever surprise
Going up: Sehwag constantly turned traditional batting concepts on their head © AFPThe heart wishes Virender Sehwag had retired after a rousing Test, his team-mates chairing him off the ground, the crowd bidding him adieu with a standing ovation. The mind understands that this was never going to come to pass, that Sehwag's days as an international cricketer were long past, and that he would tweet the news of his exit (as he had promised late last year) and be off without a fuss.
The end was as abrupt as it was apt. Not for him a press conference bathed in emotion, or a speech that tugged at heartstrings. There was no grand felicitation, there were no teary goodbyes. Instead he went his own way, wrapping up with a tweet that started "I hereby… " and a statement that began, "To paraphrase Mark Twain…"
None of this should come as a surprise; to have experienced Sehwag's career is to have come to expect the unexpected. During times when conventional wisdom advised circumspection, he would blast off. Where other batsmen shut shop a few overs before stumps, he saw it as an opportunity to pick off boundaries. When opposition captains pushed mid-off and mid-on back, he didn't look at it as a chance for singles; instead he was determined to launch the ball over the fielders' heads. Where team-mates used the services of a nightwatchman, he deemed it an insult ("If I can't play for 25 minutes, I'm not much of a batsman.")
Stories of Sehwag's counter-intuition are legion. He once charged a medium-pace bowler in a Ranji Trophy game, swished wildly, and missed by more than a foot. That in itself should come as no surprise, except, as his former team-mate Aakash Chopra wrote on this website, it was little but an act. On "one of the worst pitches", Sehwag was actually trying to mess with the bowler's length. Sure enough, the trick rattled the opponent. The next two balls pitched short. And Sehwag smashed two fours.
Paul Harris ended up the loser in his contest with Sehwag in 2008 © Getty ImagesThe common refrain while talking about Sehwag's batting is how his approach was so simple, how the see-ball-hit-ball approach served him so well. This, of course, is partly true - he has himself acknowledged the value of clearing all clutter from the mind - but it is also somewhat reductionist. Sehwag might not have analysed ground conditions and wagon wheels with a high level of granularity (and, back in 2006, he might not have known about Pankaj Roy and Vinoo Mankad's record partnership) but he was far from unschooled. He analysed his innings and dismissals, and spoke to those he respected about technical glitches, taking on advice from openers as varied in approach as Sunil Gavaskar and Kris Srikkanth. He enjoyed chatting with psychologist Rudi Webster (he was especially curious to hear about the early struggles of Viv Richards, whom Webster likened Sehwag to) and sometimes surprised team-mates by reeling off names of bowlers he had faced in stray innings.
Most significantly he was astute enough to constantly upend traditional approaches to batting. Where Sachin Tendulkar was bogged down, padding away Ashley Giles bowling over the wicket, Sehwag backed away and slashed; charged diagonally and slashed; and, in what was little short of a tight slap across the bowler's face, reverse-swept without a care in the world. None of this was blind slogging; it was a planned assault to disrupt a bowler's rhythm, nullifying his negative tactics. Six years on, when another left-arm spinner targeted his pads, Sehwag challenged him: "Come round the wicket and first ball I'll hit you for a six." Paul Harris - with a long-off, long-on, deep midwicket and a deep point - accepted the dare. And sure enough, the first ball soared over the sightscreen.
Such provocation wasn't merely an instinctive flash of bravado. Like the smartest of bowlers, Sehwag understood when to needle the opposition and when to send out a message by shutting up. Against Australia in Chennai in 2004, he made friendly small-talk with some fielders as he walked off after the first day's play. But come the end of the fourth day, with India chasing a tricky target, he pounded a drive past Glenn McGrath and strode off, chin up, with a raging sense of purpose. "You have to show the other team that you're here to win," he would later say of that unforgettable walk-off.
Fury Road: Sehwag set up India's record chase against England in Chennai in 2008 © AFPIt has often been pointed out that Sehwag averaged slightly over 30 in the third and fourth innings of Tests with just one hundred, a stat used to demonstrate his frailty under "scoreboard pressure". What is not highlighted as much is that he averaged a mighty 65.91 in the second innings of Tests, with 12 hundreds - many of which came after the opposition had piled on massive scores. When New Zealand amassed 630 in Mohali in 2003, Sehwag responded with 130; when South Africa piled on 510 in Kanpur in 2004, he answered with 164; when Pakistan erected 679 in Lahore in 2006, he blitzed 254; and when South Africa put on 540 in Chennai in 2008, he smoked the fastest Test triple-hundred. As important as it is to celebrate Sehwag the match-winner, it's vital to hail Sehwag the match-saver: the opening batsman who drew games not by playing out time but by rollicking along at berserker pace, eliminating threats of India following on.
What this meant was that, despite his poor fourth-innings record, teams were often hesitant to declare in the third innings, the fear of "what if Sehwag gets going?" never far from their calculations. There is no stat to quantify the psychological effect that Sehwag had on fielding teams but an Ian Chappell quote from 2005 sums up the sentiment: "Sehwag can change the course of a match with the ease of Moses parting the Red Sea".
Over the years there were a number of innings when Sehwag parted the metaphorical Red Sea, but the apex of match-changeability arrived on that December afternoon in 2008 - a month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai - when England set India 387 for victory in Chennai. The odds were grim. No team had chased more than 155 at the ground and no team had achieved a fourth-innings target of more than 276 at any Indian venue.
None of this mattered to Sehwag. He had begun the fourth day by telling Ravi Shastri, "We could easily chase 300-plus against England," and then gone on to burn the batting manual, juddering a 68-ball 83 to fire-start the chase. There were rasping upper cuts and swirling sixes; the short balls ending up in the V between point and third man, the full ones in the V between square leg and midwicket. It was a kind of innings that galvanises the team to dare to dream; an innings that sends shock waves through the fielding side; and an innings that makes ten-year-olds want to reach for their bats, getting them hooked to the game for good.
Once the win was achieved, Tendulkar was asked about Sehwag's mighty eruption. "We are quite used to that," he said with a smile. "You kind of expect something which is not expected."
He may as well have been summing up a once-in-a-lifetime career.
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Why too much choice is stressing us out
Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian
Once upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”. Product choice was unlimited, shelving reached the ceiling, nutmeg came in 12lb boxes and the express checkout had a sign reading, “1,000 items or less”. In the end the Simpsons returned to Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart.
In doing so, the Simpsons were making a choice to reduce their choice. It wasn’t quite a rational choice, but it made sense. In the parlance of economic theory, they were not rational utility maximisers but, in Herbert Simon’s term, “satisficers” – opting for what was good enough, rather than becoming confused to the point of inertia in front of Monstromart’s ranges of products.
This comes to mind because Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis seems bent on making shopping in his stores less baffling than it used to be. Earlier this year, he decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from Tesco’s shelves. This was, in part, a response to the growing market shares of Aldi and Lidl, which only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines. For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups while in Aldi there is just one in one size; Tesco offered 224 kinds of air freshener, Aldi only 12 – which, to my mind, is still at least 11 too many.
Now Lewis is doing something else to make shopping less of an ordeal and thereby, he hopes, reducing Tesco’s calamitous losses. He has introduced a trial in 50 stores to make it easier and quicker to shop for the ingredients for meals. Basmati rice next to Indian sauces, tinned tomatoes next to pasta.
What Lewis is doing to Tesco is revolutionary. Not just because he recognises that customers are time constrained, but because he realises that increased choice can be bad for you and, worse, result in losses that upset his shareholders.
Scrapping 30,000 products ... Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis is streamlining the supermarket experience. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
But the idea that choice is bad for us flies in the face of what we’ve been told for decades. The standard line is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose. That wasn’t how endless choice was supposed to work, argues American psychologist and professor of social theory Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. “If we’re rational, [social scientists] tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. This view is logically compelling, but empirically it isn’t true.”
Consider posh jams. In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
Now consider – and there’s no easy way to say this – your pension options. Schwartz found that a friend’s accounting firm was offering 156 different retirement plans. Schwartz noted that there was a shift of responsibilities from employer to employee in this seemingly benign transfer of choice: “When the employer is providing only a few routes to retirement security, it seems important to take responsibility for the quality of those routes. But when the employer takes the trouble to provide many routes, then it seems reasonable to think that the employer has done his or her part. Choosing wisely among those options becomes the employees’s responsibility.”
Posh jam conundrum ... too many options can be baffling. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
But that’s the problem. Which of us, really, feels competent to choose between 156 varieties of pension plan? Who wouldn’t rather choose to lie in a bath of biscuits playing Minecraft? And yet, at the same time, we are certain that making a decision about our workplace pensions is an important one to get right. But instead of making that choice, Schwartz says, many defer it endlessly. One of his colleagues got access to the records of Vanguard, a gigantic mutual-fund company, and found that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2% – even though by not participating, employees were passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution.
But even if we do make a choice, Schwartz argues, “we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from”. When there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen.
Increased choice, then, can make us miserable because of regret, self-blame and opportunity costs. Worse, increased choice has created a new problem: the escalation in expectations. Consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options.
In the good old days there was just one kind of jeans ... Photograph: Ben Margot/AP
Schwartz’s suggestion is that, at a certain point, choice shifts from having a positive relationship with happiness to an inverse one. So, what’s the answer? “The secret to happiness is low expectations,” he says, sensibly.
No wonder, then, we aren’t happy. In the 10 years since Schwartz wrote his book, the ideology of unlimited choice has expanded into unlikely areas – schools, sex, parenting, TV – and expectations have risen as a result. Equally importantly, new tactics have developed to help consumers deal with the downsides of choice. For instance, Schwartz notes, there is an increasing reliance on recommendation engines to help people cope with choice. “The internet hath created a problem that it is now trying to solve,” he says.
One of the areas affected is dating. Relationships are being treated like any other product – online we can browse and compare prospective sexual partners.
“I think dating sites are now the most common path for meeting romantic partners, and the overwhelming amount of choice that dating sites have created is a real problem,” says Schwartz. One of those problems was noted by the comedian Aziz Ansari in his book Modern Romance. In it, a woman recounts meeting a man on the dating app Tinder, then spending the journey to their first date swiping through the service to see if anyone better was available. Failure to commit to a date or a relationship can itself be a choice – indeed, the sociology professor who helped Ansari with his book, Eric Klinenberg, wrote Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone to account for those who have stepped off the treadmill of dating, the nightmare of having more choice but less reason to choose. Hence, too, Japan’s soshoku danshi or herbivore men who, so corrupted by the endless choices offered by online pornography, are no longer interested in real sex or romantic relationships. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo fears that, thanks to how online pornography is offering more choices for masturbatory satisfactions, becoming more interactive and immersive, choosing real-life romantic relationships will become even less appealing.
BT vying with Sky for football coverage is good news, right? Not necessarily ... Photograph: Rex Shutterstock
There’s another problem with choice: it can be more apparent than real – that is, a seeming increase in choice masks the fact that you’re paying more for the same stuff you had before. My Guardian colleague Barney Ronay identified this when he considered football on TV recently. The ostensibly good news is that BT Sport is competing with Sky for football rights. It now exclusively shows European Champions League football, which should mean more choice, lower customer outlay and more joy, shouldn’t it? But if you are already a Sky Sports subscriber (or, perhaps more pertiniently, watched the free-to-air games on ITV), it means the opposite. If Barney wants to watch the same amount of football as last year, he will now have to pay more.
That sort of phenomenon repeats itself across TV more generally. To watch all the good stuff on TV now involves paying money in the form of monthly subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Sky, BT and Blinkbox, as well as having a Freeview box. But who can afford that kind of outlay? A decade ago everything you could ever wish to watch was on Sky (if you were prepared, admittedly, to pay a monthly subscription to Murdoch). A decade before that, all good TV was on terrestrial, so once you had paid for the telly and the licence you were set. What is sold to us as increased choice has thus made us poorer and, if Ronay’s experience is anything to go by, more disappointed. As Ronay says: “for the captive consumer this isn’t really a proper choice at all, but an opportunity to spend the same and get less, or alternatively spend more and get the same.”
UK TV: how much does it cost to watch everything?
Anger at this state of affairs is comprehensible to anyone who lives in an advanced western society in 2015 and has to choose between mobile phone plans, schools, and water, gas and electricity suppliers – not to mention minimally distinguishable prospective dates. Admittedly these are the choices typical of decadent westerners in the era of late capitalism, but that thought doesn’t make the burden of choice any easier to bear.
Consider electricity, says Professor Renata Salecl, author of The Tyranny of Choice. “Privatisation of electricity did not bring the desired outcome – lesser prices, better service – however, it did contribute to the anxiety and feeling of guilt on the side of the consumers. We feel that it is our fault we are paying too much and we are anxious that a better deal is just around the corner. However, while we are losing valuable time doing research on which provider to choose, we then stop short of actually making the choice.”
So we do nothing, and corporations profit from this inertia.
All of this confounds the idea that human beings act in such a way that they maximise their wellbeing and minimise their pain. “People often act against their wellbeing. They also rarely make choices in a rational way.”
The political idea of allowing parents to choose between schools was to apply the presumed rigour of the market to education so that underperforming schools would improve or close. Standards would rise and formerly illiterate brats in key stage II would relax after double quantum physics by dancing around the maypole singing settings of Horace’s verse in Latin, just like in Michael Gove’s dreams.
Education has become a consumer good, and could all go wrong ... Illustration from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Challenging the rhetoric of choice ... Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images
In 2015, though, there are counter-tendencies to the stress-inducing extension of choice. Not only is Tesco reducing its number of products, but the new leader of the Labour party has just been elected on a political platform that, in part, challenges the rhetoric of choice. Jeremy Corbyn proposes to renationalise not just the rail network but public utilities (gas, electricity and water), partly in the hope that the reduction of choice will provide a fairer, less anxiety-inducing experience for their users.
Perhaps, Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies. But before you counter with something along the lines of “Why don’t you go and live in North Korea, pinko?” consider this: Paypal founder Peter Thiel argues that monopolies are good things and that competition, often, doesn’t help either businesses or customers. “In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” Competition, in short, is for losers.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that successful capitalists like Thiel would be supporting Corbyn in his plan to recreate the state monopolies of yore or submit schools once more to local education control, but it does mean the rhetoric of choice and competition is at least being challenged and not only from the political left.
“At least we are talking about a political and economic choice,” says Salecl, “and are not simply following the ‘desires’ of the market.” Perhaps: if she’s right about that, then we are opting for something we haven’t done for a long time.
Once upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”. Product choice was unlimited, shelving reached the ceiling, nutmeg came in 12lb boxes and the express checkout had a sign reading, “1,000 items or less”. In the end the Simpsons returned to Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart.
In doing so, the Simpsons were making a choice to reduce their choice. It wasn’t quite a rational choice, but it made sense. In the parlance of economic theory, they were not rational utility maximisers but, in Herbert Simon’s term, “satisficers” – opting for what was good enough, rather than becoming confused to the point of inertia in front of Monstromart’s ranges of products.
This comes to mind because Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis seems bent on making shopping in his stores less baffling than it used to be. Earlier this year, he decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from Tesco’s shelves. This was, in part, a response to the growing market shares of Aldi and Lidl, which only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines. For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups while in Aldi there is just one in one size; Tesco offered 224 kinds of air freshener, Aldi only 12 – which, to my mind, is still at least 11 too many.
Now Lewis is doing something else to make shopping less of an ordeal and thereby, he hopes, reducing Tesco’s calamitous losses. He has introduced a trial in 50 stores to make it easier and quicker to shop for the ingredients for meals. Basmati rice next to Indian sauces, tinned tomatoes next to pasta.
What Lewis is doing to Tesco is revolutionary. Not just because he recognises that customers are time constrained, but because he realises that increased choice can be bad for you and, worse, result in losses that upset his shareholders.
Scrapping 30,000 products ... Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis is streamlining the supermarket experience. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
But the idea that choice is bad for us flies in the face of what we’ve been told for decades. The standard line is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose. That wasn’t how endless choice was supposed to work, argues American psychologist and professor of social theory Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. “If we’re rational, [social scientists] tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. This view is logically compelling, but empirically it isn’t true.”
Consider posh jams. In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
Now consider – and there’s no easy way to say this – your pension options. Schwartz found that a friend’s accounting firm was offering 156 different retirement plans. Schwartz noted that there was a shift of responsibilities from employer to employee in this seemingly benign transfer of choice: “When the employer is providing only a few routes to retirement security, it seems important to take responsibility for the quality of those routes. But when the employer takes the trouble to provide many routes, then it seems reasonable to think that the employer has done his or her part. Choosing wisely among those options becomes the employees’s responsibility.”
Posh jam conundrum ... too many options can be baffling. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
But that’s the problem. Which of us, really, feels competent to choose between 156 varieties of pension plan? Who wouldn’t rather choose to lie in a bath of biscuits playing Minecraft? And yet, at the same time, we are certain that making a decision about our workplace pensions is an important one to get right. But instead of making that choice, Schwartz says, many defer it endlessly. One of his colleagues got access to the records of Vanguard, a gigantic mutual-fund company, and found that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2% – even though by not participating, employees were passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution.
But even if we do make a choice, Schwartz argues, “we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from”. When there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen.
Increased choice, then, can make us miserable because of regret, self-blame and opportunity costs. Worse, increased choice has created a new problem: the escalation in expectations. Consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options.
In the good old days there was just one kind of jeans ... Photograph: Ben Margot/AP
Schwartz’s suggestion is that, at a certain point, choice shifts from having a positive relationship with happiness to an inverse one. So, what’s the answer? “The secret to happiness is low expectations,” he says, sensibly.
No wonder, then, we aren’t happy. In the 10 years since Schwartz wrote his book, the ideology of unlimited choice has expanded into unlikely areas – schools, sex, parenting, TV – and expectations have risen as a result. Equally importantly, new tactics have developed to help consumers deal with the downsides of choice. For instance, Schwartz notes, there is an increasing reliance on recommendation engines to help people cope with choice. “The internet hath created a problem that it is now trying to solve,” he says.
One of the areas affected is dating. Relationships are being treated like any other product – online we can browse and compare prospective sexual partners.
“I think dating sites are now the most common path for meeting romantic partners, and the overwhelming amount of choice that dating sites have created is a real problem,” says Schwartz. One of those problems was noted by the comedian Aziz Ansari in his book Modern Romance. In it, a woman recounts meeting a man on the dating app Tinder, then spending the journey to their first date swiping through the service to see if anyone better was available. Failure to commit to a date or a relationship can itself be a choice – indeed, the sociology professor who helped Ansari with his book, Eric Klinenberg, wrote Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone to account for those who have stepped off the treadmill of dating, the nightmare of having more choice but less reason to choose. Hence, too, Japan’s soshoku danshi or herbivore men who, so corrupted by the endless choices offered by online pornography, are no longer interested in real sex or romantic relationships. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo fears that, thanks to how online pornography is offering more choices for masturbatory satisfactions, becoming more interactive and immersive, choosing real-life romantic relationships will become even less appealing.
BT vying with Sky for football coverage is good news, right? Not necessarily ... Photograph: Rex Shutterstock
There’s another problem with choice: it can be more apparent than real – that is, a seeming increase in choice masks the fact that you’re paying more for the same stuff you had before. My Guardian colleague Barney Ronay identified this when he considered football on TV recently. The ostensibly good news is that BT Sport is competing with Sky for football rights. It now exclusively shows European Champions League football, which should mean more choice, lower customer outlay and more joy, shouldn’t it? But if you are already a Sky Sports subscriber (or, perhaps more pertiniently, watched the free-to-air games on ITV), it means the opposite. If Barney wants to watch the same amount of football as last year, he will now have to pay more.
That sort of phenomenon repeats itself across TV more generally. To watch all the good stuff on TV now involves paying money in the form of monthly subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Sky, BT and Blinkbox, as well as having a Freeview box. But who can afford that kind of outlay? A decade ago everything you could ever wish to watch was on Sky (if you were prepared, admittedly, to pay a monthly subscription to Murdoch). A decade before that, all good TV was on terrestrial, so once you had paid for the telly and the licence you were set. What is sold to us as increased choice has thus made us poorer and, if Ronay’s experience is anything to go by, more disappointed. As Ronay says: “for the captive consumer this isn’t really a proper choice at all, but an opportunity to spend the same and get less, or alternatively spend more and get the same.”
UK TV: how much does it cost to watch everything?
Anger at this state of affairs is comprehensible to anyone who lives in an advanced western society in 2015 and has to choose between mobile phone plans, schools, and water, gas and electricity suppliers – not to mention minimally distinguishable prospective dates. Admittedly these are the choices typical of decadent westerners in the era of late capitalism, but that thought doesn’t make the burden of choice any easier to bear.
Consider electricity, says Professor Renata Salecl, author of The Tyranny of Choice. “Privatisation of electricity did not bring the desired outcome – lesser prices, better service – however, it did contribute to the anxiety and feeling of guilt on the side of the consumers. We feel that it is our fault we are paying too much and we are anxious that a better deal is just around the corner. However, while we are losing valuable time doing research on which provider to choose, we then stop short of actually making the choice.”
So we do nothing, and corporations profit from this inertia.
All of this confounds the idea that human beings act in such a way that they maximise their wellbeing and minimise their pain. “People often act against their wellbeing. They also rarely make choices in a rational way.”
The political idea of allowing parents to choose between schools was to apply the presumed rigour of the market to education so that underperforming schools would improve or close. Standards would rise and formerly illiterate brats in key stage II would relax after double quantum physics by dancing around the maypole singing settings of Horace’s verse in Latin, just like in Michael Gove’s dreams.
Education has become a consumer good, and could all go wrong ... Illustration from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
So education has become a consumer good, and my daughter’s is something I’m encouraged to think about as though it were a trip to the shops to buy shoes. Can I buy the best education for my daughter, possibly by moving house, lying about my real address or selling a kidney for private schooling? I’m not sure, but one thing I am becoming increasingly convinced of is what Salecl says: “Ideology that convinces us that everyone can make it if only he or she makes the right choice relies on blindness – we do not see that social constraints stop us making out of our lives what we wish for. And when we think about choice as a primarily individual matter, we also become blind about broader social, political choices.”
What she means, I think, is that the ideology of choice makes us forget that some things shouldn’t be bought and sold, and they are the most important things of all. What’s more, having made a decision, we don’t want to hear we have got our choices wrong. “We are constantly under the impression that life choices we made after careful planning should bring us expected results – happiness, security, contentment – and that with better choices, traumatic feelings that we have when dealing with loss, risk and uncertainty can be avoided.” No wonder, then, that Slacel’s most recent work is on the power of denial and ignorance. “When people are overwhelmed by choice and when they are anxious about it, they often turn to denial, ignorance and wilful blindness.”
Schwartz demurs, arguing that some extensions of choice can be a good thing. When I tell him about the preponderance of academies and free schools that, seemingly, increase choice for British parents, he says a similar phenomenon, charter schools, has arisen in the US. “There is something good about this, since public education in much of the US is dreadful, and competition might make it better. But there is no doubt it is stressing parents out big time.”
As with choosing a pension, choosing a school leaves scope for regret, shame and fear of missing out. And, in extremis, the terrifying sense that I might inadvertently choose an option that will mess up my daughter’s future.
What she means, I think, is that the ideology of choice makes us forget that some things shouldn’t be bought and sold, and they are the most important things of all. What’s more, having made a decision, we don’t want to hear we have got our choices wrong. “We are constantly under the impression that life choices we made after careful planning should bring us expected results – happiness, security, contentment – and that with better choices, traumatic feelings that we have when dealing with loss, risk and uncertainty can be avoided.” No wonder, then, that Slacel’s most recent work is on the power of denial and ignorance. “When people are overwhelmed by choice and when they are anxious about it, they often turn to denial, ignorance and wilful blindness.”
Schwartz demurs, arguing that some extensions of choice can be a good thing. When I tell him about the preponderance of academies and free schools that, seemingly, increase choice for British parents, he says a similar phenomenon, charter schools, has arisen in the US. “There is something good about this, since public education in much of the US is dreadful, and competition might make it better. But there is no doubt it is stressing parents out big time.”
As with choosing a pension, choosing a school leaves scope for regret, shame and fear of missing out. And, in extremis, the terrifying sense that I might inadvertently choose an option that will mess up my daughter’s future.
Challenging the rhetoric of choice ... Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images
In 2015, though, there are counter-tendencies to the stress-inducing extension of choice. Not only is Tesco reducing its number of products, but the new leader of the Labour party has just been elected on a political platform that, in part, challenges the rhetoric of choice. Jeremy Corbyn proposes to renationalise not just the rail network but public utilities (gas, electricity and water), partly in the hope that the reduction of choice will provide a fairer, less anxiety-inducing experience for their users.
Perhaps, Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies. But before you counter with something along the lines of “Why don’t you go and live in North Korea, pinko?” consider this: Paypal founder Peter Thiel argues that monopolies are good things and that competition, often, doesn’t help either businesses or customers. “In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” Competition, in short, is for losers.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that successful capitalists like Thiel would be supporting Corbyn in his plan to recreate the state monopolies of yore or submit schools once more to local education control, but it does mean the rhetoric of choice and competition is at least being challenged and not only from the political left.
“At least we are talking about a political and economic choice,” says Salecl, “and are not simply following the ‘desires’ of the market.” Perhaps: if she’s right about that, then we are opting for something we haven’t done for a long time.
Tuesday, 20 October 2015
Adil Rashid's England leg-spin ignites the hopes of cricket's romantics
Vic Marks in The Guardian
All hail Adil Rashid! Not because he is suddenly the spinning messiah that we have all been craving since the retirement of Graeme Swann, but because he has survived.
Rashid will play in the next Test in Dubai and there should be a spring in his step. During his debut he probably had better things to do than wonder whether he might become England’s Bryce McGain, the Australian leg-spinner, who made his debut in Cape Town in 2009. It didn’t go frightfully well for Bryce, 18-2-149-0, though there must – in the manner of Chris Cowdrey – be a damn good after-dinner routine there somewhere.
It looked a bit bleak for Rashid after 34-0-163-0 in the first innings at Abu Dhabi – at least Bryce conjured a couple of maidens against South Africa. In these circumstances a Test match becomes an eternity. When will the next chance come around to make a contribution? But Rashid managed to hold his nerve. As he waited there was consolation in the fact that none of the other spinners were taking wickets. Then, when he was tossed the ball again, the batsmen were surprisingly under a bit of pressure; the ball gripped and once the hurdle of that first wicket had been leapt, something clicked to the tune of 5-64.
Whereupon leg-spinners around the world, whether amateur or professional, rejoiced – for they are a breed apart; they have a peculiar bond like wicketkeepers (“Do you want to have a look at my new inner gloves?” “Ooh, yes please.”) They recognise the tightrope that they have to walk every time the ball is tossed in their direction. By comparison finger-spinning is a low-risk doddle.
It is probably inadvisable for aspiring youngsters to study the history of English leg-spin since any research might persuade them to give up forthwith and bowl some medium-pacers instead. Last week the name of Tommy Greenhough of Lancashire was recalled for the first time in a while, since he was the last English leg-spinner to take five wickets in a Test match – in 1959.
Since then the specialists have been Robin Hobbs (12 wickets in seven Tests at 40 apiece), Ian Salisbury (20 wickets at 76 in 15 Tests), Chris Schofield (two Tests against Zimbabwe but no wickets) and Scott Borthwick, who has four wickets in his solitary Test at Sydney at an impressive average of 20, but who realistically is only likely to resurface at the top level if he bats in the first six. In the 60s there were the gifted casuals such as Bob Barber (42 wickets) and Ken Barrington (29), batsmen who could bowl. On this evidence there is not much encouragement for English wrist-spinners. Yet still leg-spinners prompt much wish fulfilment among the romantics.
There was great excitement when Salisbury took five wickets in his first Test match at Lord’s in 1992 against Pakistan, but that would be his best effort over the eight-year span of his Test career. Dear old Christopher Martin-Jenkins spent ages advancing his cause but in the end even he had to acknowledge that it wasn’t working. Salisbury, by the way, after coaching at county level for a while, is now doing some fine work with England’s Physical Disability Squad. He spoke movingly at the Cricket Writers’ lunch about how fulfilling this role was for him, let alone those he has been coaching.
There is the same yearning for Rashid to succeed. This is understandable, for wrist-spin is a glorious art to behold. The googly duping an unsuspecting batsman is a wonderful sight from most perspectives – though not all. Here writes a man, who padded up rather ineffectively to Abdul Qadir’s googly on his Test debut at Headingley only to hear the ball clunk on to off stump.
Later in Pakistan the mysteries of Qadir remained indecipherable. After a torrid time batting against him in a Test at Karachi, one journalist, Pat Gibson, who would become a valued colleague and guide, unkindly noted in his copy: “I don’t know what Marks read at Oxford … but it certainly wasn’t wrist spin.” Eventually I did score some runs against Qadir but only on flat, slow pitches later in the series – by adopting a West Country version of French cricket.
Qadir was a brilliant, exuberant bowler with all the varieties of the traditional wrist-spinner. The ball would fizz down often prompting this kind of thought process among callow batsmen. “Whoopee! He’s bowled me a full toss. Where shall I hit it? Hang on; it’s dipping. Not to worry. It’s a juicy half-volley. No problems here. Oh no … it keeps on dipping … where’s the damn thing going to pitch? Where’s it gone?”
The best spin bowlers obviously get the ball to turn off the pitch, but their greatest attribute is to make the ball dip in such a way that the batsmen cannot judge the length. Shane Warne in his pomp got the ball to swerve in to the right-hander menacingly. So did Qadir. And on a very good day so might Rashid. The extra spin that the wrist can impart enables the back of the hand men to find more “dip”. But this is such a difficult art to master.
I was impressed by Rashid when he was interviewed by Mike Atherton, another leg-spinner, after the game in Abu Dhabi. He was quite matter-of-fact, as if his Test match ordeal was a commonplace occurrence for a wrist spinner. He rejected the notion that he would have to bowl quicker in Test cricket (in fact he propels the ball at similar pace to Warne). And that sounded sensible to me. It might be lovely if Rashid could bowl at 53mph or more but the fact is that he has been bowling around the 47-49 mph mark throughout his career. That is his natural pace. It would make no sense for him to overhaul his method now because he has finally been promoted to Test level. Only the very best spinners can operate at significantly different paces according to the conditions.
For the moment Rashid has to stick to what he knows. Indeed for some bowlers it is almost impossible to change one’s natural pace significantly. This clearly applied to Monty Panesar, who was always less effective when he tried to bow to those yearning for him to bowl slower. In Dubai Rashid may be more relaxed now.
Meanwhile Alastair Cook is learning how best to use him. Rashid rarely operates as a stock bowler in the first innings of the match when playing for Yorkshire so he’s unlikely to be good at that for England against better players. Currently it is hard to imagine him as a solitary spinner in the Test team. We should not expect too much from him at this stage of his international career. This may make him seem like a luxury, someone who has to be protected sometimes. Hard-nosed coaches and pundits tend to be wary of such players – until the last two days of the game when the ball starts to misbehave and there’s a match to be won.
All hail Adil Rashid! Not because he is suddenly the spinning messiah that we have all been craving since the retirement of Graeme Swann, but because he has survived.
Rashid will play in the next Test in Dubai and there should be a spring in his step. During his debut he probably had better things to do than wonder whether he might become England’s Bryce McGain, the Australian leg-spinner, who made his debut in Cape Town in 2009. It didn’t go frightfully well for Bryce, 18-2-149-0, though there must – in the manner of Chris Cowdrey – be a damn good after-dinner routine there somewhere.
It looked a bit bleak for Rashid after 34-0-163-0 in the first innings at Abu Dhabi – at least Bryce conjured a couple of maidens against South Africa. In these circumstances a Test match becomes an eternity. When will the next chance come around to make a contribution? But Rashid managed to hold his nerve. As he waited there was consolation in the fact that none of the other spinners were taking wickets. Then, when he was tossed the ball again, the batsmen were surprisingly under a bit of pressure; the ball gripped and once the hurdle of that first wicket had been leapt, something clicked to the tune of 5-64.
Whereupon leg-spinners around the world, whether amateur or professional, rejoiced – for they are a breed apart; they have a peculiar bond like wicketkeepers (“Do you want to have a look at my new inner gloves?” “Ooh, yes please.”) They recognise the tightrope that they have to walk every time the ball is tossed in their direction. By comparison finger-spinning is a low-risk doddle.
It is probably inadvisable for aspiring youngsters to study the history of English leg-spin since any research might persuade them to give up forthwith and bowl some medium-pacers instead. Last week the name of Tommy Greenhough of Lancashire was recalled for the first time in a while, since he was the last English leg-spinner to take five wickets in a Test match – in 1959.
Since then the specialists have been Robin Hobbs (12 wickets in seven Tests at 40 apiece), Ian Salisbury (20 wickets at 76 in 15 Tests), Chris Schofield (two Tests against Zimbabwe but no wickets) and Scott Borthwick, who has four wickets in his solitary Test at Sydney at an impressive average of 20, but who realistically is only likely to resurface at the top level if he bats in the first six. In the 60s there were the gifted casuals such as Bob Barber (42 wickets) and Ken Barrington (29), batsmen who could bowl. On this evidence there is not much encouragement for English wrist-spinners. Yet still leg-spinners prompt much wish fulfilment among the romantics.
There was great excitement when Salisbury took five wickets in his first Test match at Lord’s in 1992 against Pakistan, but that would be his best effort over the eight-year span of his Test career. Dear old Christopher Martin-Jenkins spent ages advancing his cause but in the end even he had to acknowledge that it wasn’t working. Salisbury, by the way, after coaching at county level for a while, is now doing some fine work with England’s Physical Disability Squad. He spoke movingly at the Cricket Writers’ lunch about how fulfilling this role was for him, let alone those he has been coaching.
There is the same yearning for Rashid to succeed. This is understandable, for wrist-spin is a glorious art to behold. The googly duping an unsuspecting batsman is a wonderful sight from most perspectives – though not all. Here writes a man, who padded up rather ineffectively to Abdul Qadir’s googly on his Test debut at Headingley only to hear the ball clunk on to off stump.
Later in Pakistan the mysteries of Qadir remained indecipherable. After a torrid time batting against him in a Test at Karachi, one journalist, Pat Gibson, who would become a valued colleague and guide, unkindly noted in his copy: “I don’t know what Marks read at Oxford … but it certainly wasn’t wrist spin.” Eventually I did score some runs against Qadir but only on flat, slow pitches later in the series – by adopting a West Country version of French cricket.
Qadir was a brilliant, exuberant bowler with all the varieties of the traditional wrist-spinner. The ball would fizz down often prompting this kind of thought process among callow batsmen. “Whoopee! He’s bowled me a full toss. Where shall I hit it? Hang on; it’s dipping. Not to worry. It’s a juicy half-volley. No problems here. Oh no … it keeps on dipping … where’s the damn thing going to pitch? Where’s it gone?”
The best spin bowlers obviously get the ball to turn off the pitch, but their greatest attribute is to make the ball dip in such a way that the batsmen cannot judge the length. Shane Warne in his pomp got the ball to swerve in to the right-hander menacingly. So did Qadir. And on a very good day so might Rashid. The extra spin that the wrist can impart enables the back of the hand men to find more “dip”. But this is such a difficult art to master.
I was impressed by Rashid when he was interviewed by Mike Atherton, another leg-spinner, after the game in Abu Dhabi. He was quite matter-of-fact, as if his Test match ordeal was a commonplace occurrence for a wrist spinner. He rejected the notion that he would have to bowl quicker in Test cricket (in fact he propels the ball at similar pace to Warne). And that sounded sensible to me. It might be lovely if Rashid could bowl at 53mph or more but the fact is that he has been bowling around the 47-49 mph mark throughout his career. That is his natural pace. It would make no sense for him to overhaul his method now because he has finally been promoted to Test level. Only the very best spinners can operate at significantly different paces according to the conditions.
For the moment Rashid has to stick to what he knows. Indeed for some bowlers it is almost impossible to change one’s natural pace significantly. This clearly applied to Monty Panesar, who was always less effective when he tried to bow to those yearning for him to bowl slower. In Dubai Rashid may be more relaxed now.
Meanwhile Alastair Cook is learning how best to use him. Rashid rarely operates as a stock bowler in the first innings of the match when playing for Yorkshire so he’s unlikely to be good at that for England against better players. Currently it is hard to imagine him as a solitary spinner in the Test team. We should not expect too much from him at this stage of his international career. This may make him seem like a luxury, someone who has to be protected sometimes. Hard-nosed coaches and pundits tend to be wary of such players – until the last two days of the game when the ball starts to misbehave and there’s a match to be won.
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