Wednesday, 8 July 2020
Tuesday, 7 July 2020
Kerala’s next crisis: How to deal with return of lakhs of ‘Gone to Gulf’ people
More than 5 lakh Keralites are expected to return from Gulf & state has to deal with plight of those losing jobs there and erosion of its remittance economy writes BOBBY GHOSH in The Print
Gone to Gulf.” That phrase came up a lot in conversations among grown-ups that I overheard as a schoolboy in Kerala during the early 1980s. My father, who managed a lobster-export business in the port of Kochi, was constantly griping about workers who quit on short notice — or none at all — to take up jobs in the Gulf cities of Muscat, Doha or Jeddah.
His friends — executives in rubber or coffee plantations, officials in the state-run shipyard or port authority — had the same problem: a constant exodus of workers, most of them “gone to Gulf.”
The jobs there were usually menial, and Dad harrumphed about Keralites giving up a gig at an air-conditioned lobster-processing plant “to get roasted in the desert sun.” He was astonished when his secretary, a university graduate he had marked for a bright future in the company, gave it up for a job pumping gas in Sharjah.
But neither Dad nor his friends could compete with the salaries being offered in the Persian Gulf countries. In their helplessness, they took empty comfort in making dire predictions of the day when Arab employers, having built all the palaces they could want, would finally send the foolish young Keralites back home, to beg for their old jobs.
Instead, years later, my father would join the exodus, agreeing to manage a small shipyard near Dubai, lured by the prospect of a final payday before retirement. He was not amused when I suggested that he had been inspired by that promising young secretary and “gone to Gulf” himself.
Four decades on, the dark auguries of Dad and his friends are coming true for many Keralites in the Gulf: Their Arab employers are laying them off in large numbers. And not just them, or there. The coronavirus pandemic has been devastating for foreign workers everywhere.
The official numbers have yet to be reported, but it’s safe to say that so far thousands have died and millions have lost their jobs. The impact on their families back home has been doubly debilitating: The loss of income from abroad — often from the sole breadwinner in the family — comes at a time of acute local hardship.
For economies that depend on this foreign income, the outlook for 2020 is bleak. The World Bank expects a 20% plunge in remittances to low- and middle-income countries. This plunge would be the steepest in history, far exceeding the 5% dip after the 2009 global financial crisis. The pain will be felt acutely in Kerala, which has an unhealthy addiction to remittances, and has failed to create alternative opportunities for its labour force.
This loss of income is likely just the start of a long cycle of despair. It will be years before countries that employ large numbers of foreign workers fully recover from the economic damage caused by the pandemic. Even when they do, they will have less room for migrants. Fewer Keralites will have the opportunity to join the ranks of the “gone to Gulf,” with profound economic implications for their families and their state.
Gulf’s localisation
In the petrostates of the Arabian Peninsula, the post-pandemic economic downturn will add impetus to long-standing programs designed to replace foreign workers with locals. Authorities in six member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have for years been pressing employers — using catchphrases like “Saudization” and “Omanization” — to reduce their dependence on foreigners.
These initiatives have tended to wax and wane with the price of oil: When it is high, unemployed citizens can depend on generous government subsidies, allaying concerns about foreigners taking all the jobs. It helps that many of the jobs done by migrants are unattractive, menial and low-paying.
But years of low oil prices combined with the swelling ranks of unemployed locals have forced authorities to take localization programs more seriously. These programs are at the heart of ambitious economic and social reforms being pursued by new, young rulers like Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said.
This reformist zeal is bad news for countries at the other end of the migration chain. Since the fall in oil prices in 2014, remittances from the GCC have plateaued. (In the case of Saudi Arabia, they have fallen precipitously.)
This year, judging by the early indicators, they are projected to go off a cliff. Remittances from the United Arab Emirates to India are expected to drop 35% in the second quarter alone. The UAE is the GCC’s largest source of remittances, and India is their top recipient.
Indeed, India should have experienced a slowing of money flows over the past few years. It bucked the trend in large part due to massive flooding in Kerala in 2018 and 2019, which led to spikes in remittances as Keralites in the Gulf sent home larger-than-usual sums to help with relief and reconstruction.
But that streak is about to be snapped. Unlike previous natural disasters, the pandemic is depleting the flow of money from abroad.
What happens now
Many tens of thousands have already lost jobs to the pandemic’s economic impact, and it may be months before an accurate count is available. Emirates, the Dubai-based airline and one of the UAE’s largest employers, will eventually trim 30,000 from its rolls. (Dubai, it is worth remembering, was already experiencing its fastest pace of job losses in a decade before the pandemic struck.) Unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands of Indians have registered for special repatriation flights from the UAE.
Among Keralites who have lost white-collar jobs in Dubai, panic has set in. Few have any expectation of finding work back home, much less work that will sustain the lifestyle they enjoyed in the Gulf. “Those who have lost their jobs but have EMIs (equated monthly installments) to pay are stuck,” says Mangottil. “People are applying for jobs that pay half their previous salaries.” When hope is finally extinguished, they will swell the ranks of returnees to Kerala.
What awaits them allows for little optimism. Top state officials, already working flat out to contain the coronavirus spike, have not yet articulated a strategy for dealing with the returning migrants. The government has announced some self-employment schemes, involving small loans and subsidies. But these were conceived before the pandemic, when the returnees numbered in three or four digits, not six.
The glass-half-full view is that the returnees will bring world-class skills and reserves of experience not easily found in Kerala. S.D. Shibulal, co-founder of the tech giant Infosys and one of the state’s more successful entrepreneurs, reckons that a nascent knowledge industry “offers good opportunities for returnees to invest.”
Putting what the World Bank’s Ahmad calls the “skills dividend” to use, however, will be a challenge for a state where socialist policies and powerful unions have created a reputation for hostility toward business. Kerala ranks 21st among 29 states in the Indian government’s ease-of-doing-business rankings.
Changing that perception will require more than efficient management of natural calamities. Competition for investment is fierce among Indian states and will grow fiercer as investments shrink with a slowdown in the global economy. Even if returning Keralites feel inclined to invest in business, there’s no guarantee they will restrict themselves to their home state.
Some officials argue that it would be short-sighted to focus too much on the returnees and lose sight of Kerala’s competitive advantage in the global labour market. Exporting workers is what the state does best. If demand shrinks in the Gulf, it will eventually pop up elsewhere: It’s a matter of pointing the outflow of migrant Keralites in the right direction. Government energies, these officials argue, are better expended on ensuring that the next generation of leavers has the right skills to compete and succeed wherever opportunities arise.
Even before the pandemic, says Tharoor, “Kerala’s big question has always been, How do we get enough people working abroad and sending money home?” That question is now being asked by the governments of dozens of countries that depend on remittances. The past few months have made finding the answer much more urgent.
Gone to Gulf.” That phrase came up a lot in conversations among grown-ups that I overheard as a schoolboy in Kerala during the early 1980s. My father, who managed a lobster-export business in the port of Kochi, was constantly griping about workers who quit on short notice — or none at all — to take up jobs in the Gulf cities of Muscat, Doha or Jeddah.
His friends — executives in rubber or coffee plantations, officials in the state-run shipyard or port authority — had the same problem: a constant exodus of workers, most of them “gone to Gulf.”
The jobs there were usually menial, and Dad harrumphed about Keralites giving up a gig at an air-conditioned lobster-processing plant “to get roasted in the desert sun.” He was astonished when his secretary, a university graduate he had marked for a bright future in the company, gave it up for a job pumping gas in Sharjah.
But neither Dad nor his friends could compete with the salaries being offered in the Persian Gulf countries. In their helplessness, they took empty comfort in making dire predictions of the day when Arab employers, having built all the palaces they could want, would finally send the foolish young Keralites back home, to beg for their old jobs.
Instead, years later, my father would join the exodus, agreeing to manage a small shipyard near Dubai, lured by the prospect of a final payday before retirement. He was not amused when I suggested that he had been inspired by that promising young secretary and “gone to Gulf” himself.
Four decades on, the dark auguries of Dad and his friends are coming true for many Keralites in the Gulf: Their Arab employers are laying them off in large numbers. And not just them, or there. The coronavirus pandemic has been devastating for foreign workers everywhere.
The official numbers have yet to be reported, but it’s safe to say that so far thousands have died and millions have lost their jobs. The impact on their families back home has been doubly debilitating: The loss of income from abroad — often from the sole breadwinner in the family — comes at a time of acute local hardship.
For economies that depend on this foreign income, the outlook for 2020 is bleak. The World Bank expects a 20% plunge in remittances to low- and middle-income countries. This plunge would be the steepest in history, far exceeding the 5% dip after the 2009 global financial crisis. The pain will be felt acutely in Kerala, which has an unhealthy addiction to remittances, and has failed to create alternative opportunities for its labour force.
This loss of income is likely just the start of a long cycle of despair. It will be years before countries that employ large numbers of foreign workers fully recover from the economic damage caused by the pandemic. Even when they do, they will have less room for migrants. Fewer Keralites will have the opportunity to join the ranks of the “gone to Gulf,” with profound economic implications for their families and their state.
Gulf’s localisation
In the petrostates of the Arabian Peninsula, the post-pandemic economic downturn will add impetus to long-standing programs designed to replace foreign workers with locals. Authorities in six member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have for years been pressing employers — using catchphrases like “Saudization” and “Omanization” — to reduce their dependence on foreigners.
These initiatives have tended to wax and wane with the price of oil: When it is high, unemployed citizens can depend on generous government subsidies, allaying concerns about foreigners taking all the jobs. It helps that many of the jobs done by migrants are unattractive, menial and low-paying.
But years of low oil prices combined with the swelling ranks of unemployed locals have forced authorities to take localization programs more seriously. These programs are at the heart of ambitious economic and social reforms being pursued by new, young rulers like Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said.
This reformist zeal is bad news for countries at the other end of the migration chain. Since the fall in oil prices in 2014, remittances from the GCC have plateaued. (In the case of Saudi Arabia, they have fallen precipitously.)
This year, judging by the early indicators, they are projected to go off a cliff. Remittances from the United Arab Emirates to India are expected to drop 35% in the second quarter alone. The UAE is the GCC’s largest source of remittances, and India is their top recipient.
Indeed, India should have experienced a slowing of money flows over the past few years. It bucked the trend in large part due to massive flooding in Kerala in 2018 and 2019, which led to spikes in remittances as Keralites in the Gulf sent home larger-than-usual sums to help with relief and reconstruction.
But that streak is about to be snapped. Unlike previous natural disasters, the pandemic is depleting the flow of money from abroad.
Kerala’s Gulf handicap
Kerala, which has ancient ties to the Gulf, will likely feel the pinch more than other Indian states. It receives nearly a fifth of remittances to the country, most of it from the GCC, whose members are home to between 2 million and 2.5 million Keralites. Although the state government doesn’t publish annual remittance figures, they are thought to consistently account for over a third of Kerala’s GDP.
This dependence leaves the government of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan handicapped even as it grapples with the impact of the pandemic. Kerala was the first Indian state to record a case of Covid-19 — a student who had returned from university in Wuhan, the Chinese ground zero of the crisis. Vijayan, a Marxist who had won acclaim for his adroit administration during the floods in the previous two years, moved quickly to flatten the curve.
Now the pandemic is spiking again, in Kerala as well as across India. With a loss of state revenues due to the effects of the lockdown, Vijayan could really use another surge in remittances from the Gulf. But this time, it is the diaspora that is in distress, and he must deal with the plight of Keralites who are losing their livelihoods in the GCC as well as the anxieties of their families at home.
The state expects more than 500,000 Keralites to return, many of them in the special repatriation flights organized by the Indian government. This figure is almost certainly an underestimate. Many others will make the return journey months from now, as companies and governments cut more jobs in the Gulf. “It will be a long time before we know how many Keralites have come home,” says S. Irudaya Rajan, who researches migration and remittance flows at the Center for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital.
Speaking to me privately, some Kerala government officials say they are not especially alarmed about the localization efforts of the Gulf states. The demand for Kerala’s best and brightest, they say, will resume after the pandemic. Just because the authorities want jobs to be filled by locals doesn’t mean there are sufficient numbers of locals who can fill them.
But Shashi Tharoor, a member of India’s parliament from the state, allows that business may never return to usual. “It’s not just about Arabs taking jobs, but the jobs themselves disappearing for good,” he says.
Junaid Ahmad, the World Bank’s country director in India, likens Kerala’s challenge to that of post-conflict countries, where governments must reintegrate former fighters into society, by training and providing them with economic opportunities. Vijayan has to do the same for the returning Keralites, Ahmad says, “but instead of working with a peace dividend, he has to do this despite a loss in remittances.”
What’s more, he has to do it under extreme pressure at a politically inopportune moment. Diaspora groups are a powerful lobbying force in the state, and Vijayan faces elections in less than a year.
The remittances trap
The recalibration of Kerala’s remittance-dependent economy will take longer. The migration of Keralites to the Gulf began in the 1970s; it was already a steady stream when I was a schoolboy in Kochi. By the turn of the century, nearly 1.5 million Keralites lived and worked in the GCC.
Kerala was uniquely positioned to cater to the seemingly insatiable demand for foreign workers from the petrostates. A long maritime history had made Keralites culturally prone to seeking their fortune abroad, and a series of business-unfriendly governments, not all of Vijayan’s Marxist stripe, had prevented the development of a robust private sector at home. (The company that employed my father in Kochi had left Kerala before I finished high school.)
Kerala’s proud record for near-total literacy gave its citizens a leg-up over other Indians — not to mention Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and others — seeking jobs in the Gulf. Despite their better education, the overwhelming majority of Keralites did jobs that indeed required being “roasted in the desert sun,” as Dad put it. In the classic migration pattern, young men endured great physical hardship and forewent luxuries to save up, remit money home and bring over friends and relatives. The steady exodus allowed the state government to get away with its poor economic management; jobs in the Gulf made up for unemployment and remittances fueled consumption. The running joke was that Kerala had a “money-order economy.”
But the money coming from the GCC was rarely put to the most efficient use: Much of it went into personal consumption — families bought gold and property, built homes. Bungalows popped up in formerly poor villages throughout the state.
This spending yielded little employment outside the construction sector, and even there much of the work involved back-breaking labour, hardly in keeping with the aspirations of educated Keralites. In an ironic echo of migration patterns in the Gulf, Kerala began to attract low-cost labour from other Indian states. The remittances were never used to build a significant industrial base, or to develop an information-technology sector comparable to its neighbours. In the absence of a sizeable private sector, “there were no other investment possibilities,” says Reuben Abraham, CEO of the IDFC Institute, a public-policy think tank.
Still the remittances kept growing. In time, Keralites began to climb the value chain abroad, from blue- to white-collar jobs, from construction to banking, insurance and other services. This ascent, in addition to the size of the settled diaspora, meant that although other Indian states sent more workers to the Gulf annually, Keralites were able to send more money home.
Now, Keralites risk becoming victims of their own success: It is those white-collar jobs that are most likely to be localised. “Saudis and Emiratis are not going to work on construction sites,” says Rajeev Mangottil of VPS Healthcare, a large Keralite-owned company that runs a chain of hospitals in the GCC. “Foreigners who are working in offices are very vulnerable right now.”
Kerala, which has ancient ties to the Gulf, will likely feel the pinch more than other Indian states. It receives nearly a fifth of remittances to the country, most of it from the GCC, whose members are home to between 2 million and 2.5 million Keralites. Although the state government doesn’t publish annual remittance figures, they are thought to consistently account for over a third of Kerala’s GDP.
This dependence leaves the government of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan handicapped even as it grapples with the impact of the pandemic. Kerala was the first Indian state to record a case of Covid-19 — a student who had returned from university in Wuhan, the Chinese ground zero of the crisis. Vijayan, a Marxist who had won acclaim for his adroit administration during the floods in the previous two years, moved quickly to flatten the curve.
Now the pandemic is spiking again, in Kerala as well as across India. With a loss of state revenues due to the effects of the lockdown, Vijayan could really use another surge in remittances from the Gulf. But this time, it is the diaspora that is in distress, and he must deal with the plight of Keralites who are losing their livelihoods in the GCC as well as the anxieties of their families at home.
The state expects more than 500,000 Keralites to return, many of them in the special repatriation flights organized by the Indian government. This figure is almost certainly an underestimate. Many others will make the return journey months from now, as companies and governments cut more jobs in the Gulf. “It will be a long time before we know how many Keralites have come home,” says S. Irudaya Rajan, who researches migration and remittance flows at the Center for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital.
Speaking to me privately, some Kerala government officials say they are not especially alarmed about the localization efforts of the Gulf states. The demand for Kerala’s best and brightest, they say, will resume after the pandemic. Just because the authorities want jobs to be filled by locals doesn’t mean there are sufficient numbers of locals who can fill them.
But Shashi Tharoor, a member of India’s parliament from the state, allows that business may never return to usual. “It’s not just about Arabs taking jobs, but the jobs themselves disappearing for good,” he says.
Junaid Ahmad, the World Bank’s country director in India, likens Kerala’s challenge to that of post-conflict countries, where governments must reintegrate former fighters into society, by training and providing them with economic opportunities. Vijayan has to do the same for the returning Keralites, Ahmad says, “but instead of working with a peace dividend, he has to do this despite a loss in remittances.”
What’s more, he has to do it under extreme pressure at a politically inopportune moment. Diaspora groups are a powerful lobbying force in the state, and Vijayan faces elections in less than a year.
The remittances trap
The recalibration of Kerala’s remittance-dependent economy will take longer. The migration of Keralites to the Gulf began in the 1970s; it was already a steady stream when I was a schoolboy in Kochi. By the turn of the century, nearly 1.5 million Keralites lived and worked in the GCC.
Kerala was uniquely positioned to cater to the seemingly insatiable demand for foreign workers from the petrostates. A long maritime history had made Keralites culturally prone to seeking their fortune abroad, and a series of business-unfriendly governments, not all of Vijayan’s Marxist stripe, had prevented the development of a robust private sector at home. (The company that employed my father in Kochi had left Kerala before I finished high school.)
Kerala’s proud record for near-total literacy gave its citizens a leg-up over other Indians — not to mention Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and others — seeking jobs in the Gulf. Despite their better education, the overwhelming majority of Keralites did jobs that indeed required being “roasted in the desert sun,” as Dad put it. In the classic migration pattern, young men endured great physical hardship and forewent luxuries to save up, remit money home and bring over friends and relatives. The steady exodus allowed the state government to get away with its poor economic management; jobs in the Gulf made up for unemployment and remittances fueled consumption. The running joke was that Kerala had a “money-order economy.”
But the money coming from the GCC was rarely put to the most efficient use: Much of it went into personal consumption — families bought gold and property, built homes. Bungalows popped up in formerly poor villages throughout the state.
This spending yielded little employment outside the construction sector, and even there much of the work involved back-breaking labour, hardly in keeping with the aspirations of educated Keralites. In an ironic echo of migration patterns in the Gulf, Kerala began to attract low-cost labour from other Indian states. The remittances were never used to build a significant industrial base, or to develop an information-technology sector comparable to its neighbours. In the absence of a sizeable private sector, “there were no other investment possibilities,” says Reuben Abraham, CEO of the IDFC Institute, a public-policy think tank.
Still the remittances kept growing. In time, Keralites began to climb the value chain abroad, from blue- to white-collar jobs, from construction to banking, insurance and other services. This ascent, in addition to the size of the settled diaspora, meant that although other Indian states sent more workers to the Gulf annually, Keralites were able to send more money home.
Now, Keralites risk becoming victims of their own success: It is those white-collar jobs that are most likely to be localised. “Saudis and Emiratis are not going to work on construction sites,” says Rajeev Mangottil of VPS Healthcare, a large Keralite-owned company that runs a chain of hospitals in the GCC. “Foreigners who are working in offices are very vulnerable right now.”
What happens now
Many tens of thousands have already lost jobs to the pandemic’s economic impact, and it may be months before an accurate count is available. Emirates, the Dubai-based airline and one of the UAE’s largest employers, will eventually trim 30,000 from its rolls. (Dubai, it is worth remembering, was already experiencing its fastest pace of job losses in a decade before the pandemic struck.) Unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands of Indians have registered for special repatriation flights from the UAE.
Among Keralites who have lost white-collar jobs in Dubai, panic has set in. Few have any expectation of finding work back home, much less work that will sustain the lifestyle they enjoyed in the Gulf. “Those who have lost their jobs but have EMIs (equated monthly installments) to pay are stuck,” says Mangottil. “People are applying for jobs that pay half their previous salaries.” When hope is finally extinguished, they will swell the ranks of returnees to Kerala.
What awaits them allows for little optimism. Top state officials, already working flat out to contain the coronavirus spike, have not yet articulated a strategy for dealing with the returning migrants. The government has announced some self-employment schemes, involving small loans and subsidies. But these were conceived before the pandemic, when the returnees numbered in three or four digits, not six.
The glass-half-full view is that the returnees will bring world-class skills and reserves of experience not easily found in Kerala. S.D. Shibulal, co-founder of the tech giant Infosys and one of the state’s more successful entrepreneurs, reckons that a nascent knowledge industry “offers good opportunities for returnees to invest.”
Putting what the World Bank’s Ahmad calls the “skills dividend” to use, however, will be a challenge for a state where socialist policies and powerful unions have created a reputation for hostility toward business. Kerala ranks 21st among 29 states in the Indian government’s ease-of-doing-business rankings.
Changing that perception will require more than efficient management of natural calamities. Competition for investment is fierce among Indian states and will grow fiercer as investments shrink with a slowdown in the global economy. Even if returning Keralites feel inclined to invest in business, there’s no guarantee they will restrict themselves to their home state.
Some officials argue that it would be short-sighted to focus too much on the returnees and lose sight of Kerala’s competitive advantage in the global labour market. Exporting workers is what the state does best. If demand shrinks in the Gulf, it will eventually pop up elsewhere: It’s a matter of pointing the outflow of migrant Keralites in the right direction. Government energies, these officials argue, are better expended on ensuring that the next generation of leavers has the right skills to compete and succeed wherever opportunities arise.
Even before the pandemic, says Tharoor, “Kerala’s big question has always been, How do we get enough people working abroad and sending money home?” That question is now being asked by the governments of dozens of countries that depend on remittances. The past few months have made finding the answer much more urgent.
Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame
Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print
When an internship is a phone call away
In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.
The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.
We are all complicit
It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.
We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.
Copy-paste woke culture
To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.
In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.
If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.
And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.
Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?
Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.
It will be your turn next
Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?
If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.
You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.
We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.
Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.
This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.
Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.
This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.
A drain on the GDP
This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.
The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.
India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates.
This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.
The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.
India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates.
When an internship is a phone call away
In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.
The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.
We are all complicit
It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.
We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.
Copy-paste woke culture
To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.
In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.
If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.
And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.
Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?
Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.
It will be your turn next
Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?
If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.
You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.
Monday, 6 July 2020
It seems black lives don't matter quite so much, now that we've got to the hard bit
Many who were quick to support Black Lives Matter protests are fading away as it becomes clear what real change demands writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian
Black Lives Matter mural in Shoreditch, London. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock
It didn’t take long. The wheels of the Black Lives Matter movement are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion. A few short weeks ago, politicians were eager to be photographed taking the knee in solidarity with the movement; now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement demands – such as moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to prevent crime occurring in the first place. After a respectful period during which it would have been tone deaf to object to public support of the cause of the day, the BBC banned its hosts and presenters from wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of “political” opinion.
Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?
We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.
Before protest there is a oppression, lack of popular support, and the hard work of awareness-raising. After that comes the high-octane action, the moral clarity – and allies hop on board. But once the first blood rush of protest subsides, the people who are still on the streets are mocked by their erstwhile allies, impatient to find fault with the movement and get back to their lives without any further disruption. What was universally celebrated a few weeks ago is now faintly embarrassing: too radical, too combative, almost comically unrealistic. You might think of the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter protests so far as like that famous quote misattributed to Gandhi, but this time in reverse: first you win, then they fight you, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you.
We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed. In the Windrush scandal, popular anger and support for the victims of the Home Office is what put a stop to their deportations and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd. National fury, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, managed to pressure an obstinate, bunkered government into scrapping the outrageous NHS surcharge for NHS staff, and extending residency rights to all the bereaved families of NHS victims of coronavirus. If it hadn’t been for Boris Johnson’s terror of losing him, the country’s disgust at Dominic Cummings would have turfed him out too, so mortally had he wounded the nation’s sense of justice.
But when it comes to the underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good.
The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism.
Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships.
But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard. If it wasn’t, the long arc of history that allegedly bends towards justice would be a very short one. And change is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be political.
Movements such as Black Lives Matter aren’t hobbies or social clubs or edgy pop culture moments to be accessorised with. Change is supposed to have an agenda, otherwise it’s just a trend. When we hear that liberal politicians think the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are nonsense, or that wearing a badge is political, or that support needs to be scaled back because it looks like there might be other, more nefarious forces at play, what we are really being told is: this is hard – and we are retreating to our comfort zones.
It didn’t take long. The wheels of the Black Lives Matter movement are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion. A few short weeks ago, politicians were eager to be photographed taking the knee in solidarity with the movement; now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement demands – such as moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to prevent crime occurring in the first place. After a respectful period during which it would have been tone deaf to object to public support of the cause of the day, the BBC banned its hosts and presenters from wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of “political” opinion.
Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?
We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.
Before protest there is a oppression, lack of popular support, and the hard work of awareness-raising. After that comes the high-octane action, the moral clarity – and allies hop on board. But once the first blood rush of protest subsides, the people who are still on the streets are mocked by their erstwhile allies, impatient to find fault with the movement and get back to their lives without any further disruption. What was universally celebrated a few weeks ago is now faintly embarrassing: too radical, too combative, almost comically unrealistic. You might think of the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter protests so far as like that famous quote misattributed to Gandhi, but this time in reverse: first you win, then they fight you, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you.
We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed. In the Windrush scandal, popular anger and support for the victims of the Home Office is what put a stop to their deportations and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd. National fury, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, managed to pressure an obstinate, bunkered government into scrapping the outrageous NHS surcharge for NHS staff, and extending residency rights to all the bereaved families of NHS victims of coronavirus. If it hadn’t been for Boris Johnson’s terror of losing him, the country’s disgust at Dominic Cummings would have turfed him out too, so mortally had he wounded the nation’s sense of justice.
But when it comes to the underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good.
The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism.
Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships.
But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard. If it wasn’t, the long arc of history that allegedly bends towards justice would be a very short one. And change is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be political.
Movements such as Black Lives Matter aren’t hobbies or social clubs or edgy pop culture moments to be accessorised with. Change is supposed to have an agenda, otherwise it’s just a trend. When we hear that liberal politicians think the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are nonsense, or that wearing a badge is political, or that support needs to be scaled back because it looks like there might be other, more nefarious forces at play, what we are really being told is: this is hard – and we are retreating to our comfort zones.
A 'Mild Attack' of Corona could be Dangerously Misleading
Otherwise healthy people who thought they recovered from coronavirus are reporting persistent and strange symptoms - including strokes writes Adrienne Matei in The Guardian
‘It’s important to keep in mind how little we truly know about this vastly complicated disease.’ Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters
Conventional wisdom suggests that when a sickness is mild, it’s not too much to worry about. But if you’re taking comfort in World Health Organization reports that over 80% of global Covid-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic, think again. As virologists race to understand the biomechanics of Sars-CoV-2, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: even “mild” cases can be more complicated, dangerous and harder to shake than many first thought.
Throughout the pandemic, a notion has persevered that people who have “mild” cases of Covid-19 and do not require an ICU stay or the use of a ventilator are spared from serious health repercussions. Just last week, Mike Pence, the US vice-president, claimed it’s “a good thing” that nearly half of the new Covid-19 cases surging in 16 states are young Americans, who are at less risk of becoming severely ill than their older counterparts. This kind of rhetoric would lead you to believe that the ordeal of “mildly infected” patients ends within two weeks of becoming ill, at which point they recover and everything goes back to normal.
While that may be the case for some people who get Covid-19, emerging medical research as well as anecdotal evidence from recovery support groups suggest that many survivors of “mild” Covid-19 are not so lucky. They experience lasting side-effects, and doctors are still trying to understand the ramifications.
Some of these side effects can be fatal. According to Dr Christopher Kellner, a professor of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, “mild” cases of Covid-19 in which the patient was not hospitalized for the virus have been linked to blood clotting and severe strokes in people as young as 30. In May, Keller told Healthline that Mount Sinai had implemented a plan to give anticoagulant drugs to people with Covid-19 to prevent the strokes they were seeing in “younger patients with no or mild symptoms”.
Doctors now know that Covid-19 not only affects the lungs and blood, but kidneys, liver and brain – the latter potentially resulting in chronic fatigue and depression, among other symptoms. Although the virus is not yet old enough for long-term effects on those organs to be well understood, they may manifest regardless of whether a patient ever required hospitalization, hindering their recovery process.
Another troubling phenomenon now coming into focus is that of “long-haul” Covid-19 sufferers – people whose experience of the illness has lasted months. For a Dutch report published earlier this month (an excerpt is translated here) researchers surveyed 1,622 Covid-19 patients with an average age of 53, who reported a number of enduring symptoms, including intense fatigue (88%) persistent shortness of breath (75%) and chest pressure (45%). Ninety-one per cent of the patients weren’t hospitalized, suggesting they suffered these side-effects despite their cases of Covid-19 qualifying as “mild”. While 85% of the surveyed patients considered themselves generally healthy before having Covid-19, only 6% still did so one month or more after getting the virus.
After being diagnosed with Covid-19, 26-year-old Fiona Lowenstein experienced a long, difficult and nonlinear recovery first-hand. Lowenstein became sick on 17 March, and was briefly hospitalized for fever, cough and shortness of breath. Doctors advised she return to the hospital if those symptoms worsened – but something else happened instead. “I experienced this whole slew of new symptoms: sinus pain, sore throat, really severe gastrointestinal issues,” she told me. “I was having diarrhea every time I ate. I lost a lot of weight, which made me weak, a lot of fatigue, headaches, loss of sense of smell …”
By the time she felt mostly better, it was mid-May, although some of her symptoms still routinely re-emerge, she says.
“It’s almost like a blow to your ego to be in your 20s and healthy and active, and get hit with this thing and think you’re going to get better and you’re going to be OK. And then have it really not pan out that way,” says Lowenstein.
Unable to find information about what she was experiencing, and wondering if more people were going through a similarly prolonged recovery, Lowenstein created The Body Politic Slack-channel support group, a forum that now counts more than 5,600 members – most of whom were not hospitalized for their illness, yet have been feeling sick for months after their initial flu-like respiratory symptoms subsided. According to an internal survey within the group, members – the vast majority of whom are under 50 – have experienced symptoms including facial paralysis, seizures, hearing and vision loss, headaches, memory loss, diarrhea, serious weight loss and more.
“To me, and I think most people, the definition of ‘mild’, passed down from the WHO and other authorities, meant any case that didn’t require hospitalization at all, that anyone who wasn’t hospitalized was just going to have a small cold and could take care of it at home,” Hannah Davis, the author of a patient-led survey of Body Politic members, told me. “From my point of view, this has been a really harmful narrative and absolutely has misinformed the public. It both prohibits people from taking relevant information into account when deciding their personal risk levels, and it prevents the long-haulers from getting the help they need.”
At this stage, when medical professionals and the public alike are learning about Covid-19 as the pandemic unfolds, it’s important to keep in mind how little we truly know about this vastly complicated disease – and to listen to the experiences of survivors, especially those whose recoveries have been neither quick nor straightforward.
It may be reassuring to describe the majority of Covid-19 cases as “mild” – but perhaps that term isn’t as accurate as we hoped.
Conventional wisdom suggests that when a sickness is mild, it’s not too much to worry about. But if you’re taking comfort in World Health Organization reports that over 80% of global Covid-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic, think again. As virologists race to understand the biomechanics of Sars-CoV-2, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: even “mild” cases can be more complicated, dangerous and harder to shake than many first thought.
Throughout the pandemic, a notion has persevered that people who have “mild” cases of Covid-19 and do not require an ICU stay or the use of a ventilator are spared from serious health repercussions. Just last week, Mike Pence, the US vice-president, claimed it’s “a good thing” that nearly half of the new Covid-19 cases surging in 16 states are young Americans, who are at less risk of becoming severely ill than their older counterparts. This kind of rhetoric would lead you to believe that the ordeal of “mildly infected” patients ends within two weeks of becoming ill, at which point they recover and everything goes back to normal.
While that may be the case for some people who get Covid-19, emerging medical research as well as anecdotal evidence from recovery support groups suggest that many survivors of “mild” Covid-19 are not so lucky. They experience lasting side-effects, and doctors are still trying to understand the ramifications.
Some of these side effects can be fatal. According to Dr Christopher Kellner, a professor of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, “mild” cases of Covid-19 in which the patient was not hospitalized for the virus have been linked to blood clotting and severe strokes in people as young as 30. In May, Keller told Healthline that Mount Sinai had implemented a plan to give anticoagulant drugs to people with Covid-19 to prevent the strokes they were seeing in “younger patients with no or mild symptoms”.
Doctors now know that Covid-19 not only affects the lungs and blood, but kidneys, liver and brain – the latter potentially resulting in chronic fatigue and depression, among other symptoms. Although the virus is not yet old enough for long-term effects on those organs to be well understood, they may manifest regardless of whether a patient ever required hospitalization, hindering their recovery process.
Another troubling phenomenon now coming into focus is that of “long-haul” Covid-19 sufferers – people whose experience of the illness has lasted months. For a Dutch report published earlier this month (an excerpt is translated here) researchers surveyed 1,622 Covid-19 patients with an average age of 53, who reported a number of enduring symptoms, including intense fatigue (88%) persistent shortness of breath (75%) and chest pressure (45%). Ninety-one per cent of the patients weren’t hospitalized, suggesting they suffered these side-effects despite their cases of Covid-19 qualifying as “mild”. While 85% of the surveyed patients considered themselves generally healthy before having Covid-19, only 6% still did so one month or more after getting the virus.
After being diagnosed with Covid-19, 26-year-old Fiona Lowenstein experienced a long, difficult and nonlinear recovery first-hand. Lowenstein became sick on 17 March, and was briefly hospitalized for fever, cough and shortness of breath. Doctors advised she return to the hospital if those symptoms worsened – but something else happened instead. “I experienced this whole slew of new symptoms: sinus pain, sore throat, really severe gastrointestinal issues,” she told me. “I was having diarrhea every time I ate. I lost a lot of weight, which made me weak, a lot of fatigue, headaches, loss of sense of smell …”
By the time she felt mostly better, it was mid-May, although some of her symptoms still routinely re-emerge, she says.
“It’s almost like a blow to your ego to be in your 20s and healthy and active, and get hit with this thing and think you’re going to get better and you’re going to be OK. And then have it really not pan out that way,” says Lowenstein.
Unable to find information about what she was experiencing, and wondering if more people were going through a similarly prolonged recovery, Lowenstein created The Body Politic Slack-channel support group, a forum that now counts more than 5,600 members – most of whom were not hospitalized for their illness, yet have been feeling sick for months after their initial flu-like respiratory symptoms subsided. According to an internal survey within the group, members – the vast majority of whom are under 50 – have experienced symptoms including facial paralysis, seizures, hearing and vision loss, headaches, memory loss, diarrhea, serious weight loss and more.
“To me, and I think most people, the definition of ‘mild’, passed down from the WHO and other authorities, meant any case that didn’t require hospitalization at all, that anyone who wasn’t hospitalized was just going to have a small cold and could take care of it at home,” Hannah Davis, the author of a patient-led survey of Body Politic members, told me. “From my point of view, this has been a really harmful narrative and absolutely has misinformed the public. It both prohibits people from taking relevant information into account when deciding their personal risk levels, and it prevents the long-haulers from getting the help they need.”
At this stage, when medical professionals and the public alike are learning about Covid-19 as the pandemic unfolds, it’s important to keep in mind how little we truly know about this vastly complicated disease – and to listen to the experiences of survivors, especially those whose recoveries have been neither quick nor straightforward.
It may be reassuring to describe the majority of Covid-19 cases as “mild” – but perhaps that term isn’t as accurate as we hoped.
This pandemic has exposed the uselessness of orthodox economics
Post Covid-19, our priority should be to build resilient systems explicitly designed to withstand worst-case scenarios opines Jonathan Aldred in The Guardian
‘Framing the future in terms of probabilities gives us the illusion of knowledge and control, which is extraordinarily tempting, but it’s all hubris.’ Photograph: Daniel Sorabji/AFP via Getty Images
Even before the pandemic came along, the world economy faced a set of deepening crises: a climate emergency, extreme inequality and huge disruption to the world of work, with robots and AI systems replacing humans.
Conventional economic theories have had little to offer. On the contrary, they have acted like a cage around our thinking, vetoing a range of progressive policy ideas as unaffordable, counter-productive, incompatible with free markets, and so on. Worse than that, economics has led us, in a subtle, insidious way, to internalise a set of values and ways of seeing the world that prevents us even imagining various forms of radical change.
Since economic orthodoxy is so completely embedded in our thinking, escape from it demands more than a short-term spending splurge to prevent immediate economic collapse, vital though that is. We must dig deeper to uncover the economic roots of the mess we’re in. Putting it more positively, what do we want from post-coronavirus economics?
Mainstream economics has taught us that the only rational way to deal with an uncertain future is to quantify it, by assigning a probability to every possibility. But even with the best expertise in the world, our knowledge often falls far short. Frequently we struggle to predict which outcomes are more likely. Worse still, there may be outcomes we haven’t even considered, futures that no one had imagined, as the pandemic has so vividly shown.
Framing the future in terms of probabilities gives us the illusion of knowledge and control, which is extraordinarily tempting, but it’s all hubris. In the run-up to the 2007 financial crisis, bankers were proud of their models. Then that August, the Goldman Sachs chief financial officer admitted the bank had spotted huge price moves in some financial markets, several times in one week. Yet according to its models, each of these moves was supposed to be less likely than winning the UK national lottery jackpot 21 times in a row. World events sometimes demand humility.
There are clear lessons here for how to address the climate emergency: rather than focusing on the average climate impacts predicted by mathematical models that depend on probabilistic knowledge that is highly unreliable, we must think seriously about worst-case scenarios, and take steps to avoid them. Yet economic orthodoxy pushes us away from precautionary action. If mainstream economics has a single overarching objective or principle, it is efficiency.
Efficiency means getting the most “bang for your buck”, the most benefit for every pound spent. Any other course of action is wasteful, surely? But eliminating waste implies eliminating excess capacity, and we now see the consequences of that in health systems worldwide. Our obsession with efficiency, if it means failing to plan for a pandemic or a climate emergency, will cost lives.
Our priority should be resilience, not efficiency. We need to build resilient systems and economies that are explicitly designed to withstand worst-case scenarios – and have a fighting chance of coping with unforeseen disasters too.
Ultimately the problem with economic orthodoxy lies in how it frames our values and priorities. Decisions must always be about trade-offs – the weighing up of costs against benefits, ideally measured through prices in markets. If we take our ignorance about the future seriously, this cost-benefit calculus should not even get started. Because costs outweighing benefits is the oldest excuse for not taking precautions – and is a recipe for disaster when the benefits, or the costs of inaction, are vastly undervalued.
Cost-benefit thinking also leads us to assume that all values can be expressed in monetary terms. Many politicians and business leaders fixate on statements such as “a 2°C rise in average global temperature will reduce GDP by up to 2%”, as though a fall in GDP measures the true costs of the climate emergency.
In practice, this thinking means that the value of everything is measured by how much people offer to pay for it. Since the rich can always pay more than the poor, priorities get skewed towards the desires of the rich, away from the needs of the poor. So more money is spent on R&D for anti-wrinkle creams than for malaria treatments. Big Pharma has been relatively uninterested in developing vaccines, because a vaccination programme only works if the poor get vaccinated too, which limits the price manufacturers can charge.
We might seem to be beyond that now: the world has woken up, and rich countries will spend “whatever it takes” to tackle the pandemic. But Covid 19 vaccine research – and countless other fields of medical research with the potential to save as many lives in the long-term – needs continuous, reliable funding over many years. Once the market sees better profit elsewhere, funding will be cut, and the researchers will retire or move on, their experience lost.
Economic orthodoxy supports the narrative that this pandemic is a unique disaster no one could have prepared for, and with no wider lessons for economics and politics. This story suits some of the world’s billionaires, but it’s not true. There is an alternative: the pandemic provides further evidence that to tackle the climate emergency, inequality and any emerging crises, we must re-think our economics from the bottom up.
Even before the pandemic came along, the world economy faced a set of deepening crises: a climate emergency, extreme inequality and huge disruption to the world of work, with robots and AI systems replacing humans.
Conventional economic theories have had little to offer. On the contrary, they have acted like a cage around our thinking, vetoing a range of progressive policy ideas as unaffordable, counter-productive, incompatible with free markets, and so on. Worse than that, economics has led us, in a subtle, insidious way, to internalise a set of values and ways of seeing the world that prevents us even imagining various forms of radical change.
Since economic orthodoxy is so completely embedded in our thinking, escape from it demands more than a short-term spending splurge to prevent immediate economic collapse, vital though that is. We must dig deeper to uncover the economic roots of the mess we’re in. Putting it more positively, what do we want from post-coronavirus economics?
Mainstream economics has taught us that the only rational way to deal with an uncertain future is to quantify it, by assigning a probability to every possibility. But even with the best expertise in the world, our knowledge often falls far short. Frequently we struggle to predict which outcomes are more likely. Worse still, there may be outcomes we haven’t even considered, futures that no one had imagined, as the pandemic has so vividly shown.
Framing the future in terms of probabilities gives us the illusion of knowledge and control, which is extraordinarily tempting, but it’s all hubris. In the run-up to the 2007 financial crisis, bankers were proud of their models. Then that August, the Goldman Sachs chief financial officer admitted the bank had spotted huge price moves in some financial markets, several times in one week. Yet according to its models, each of these moves was supposed to be less likely than winning the UK national lottery jackpot 21 times in a row. World events sometimes demand humility.
There are clear lessons here for how to address the climate emergency: rather than focusing on the average climate impacts predicted by mathematical models that depend on probabilistic knowledge that is highly unreliable, we must think seriously about worst-case scenarios, and take steps to avoid them. Yet economic orthodoxy pushes us away from precautionary action. If mainstream economics has a single overarching objective or principle, it is efficiency.
Efficiency means getting the most “bang for your buck”, the most benefit for every pound spent. Any other course of action is wasteful, surely? But eliminating waste implies eliminating excess capacity, and we now see the consequences of that in health systems worldwide. Our obsession with efficiency, if it means failing to plan for a pandemic or a climate emergency, will cost lives.
Our priority should be resilience, not efficiency. We need to build resilient systems and economies that are explicitly designed to withstand worst-case scenarios – and have a fighting chance of coping with unforeseen disasters too.
Ultimately the problem with economic orthodoxy lies in how it frames our values and priorities. Decisions must always be about trade-offs – the weighing up of costs against benefits, ideally measured through prices in markets. If we take our ignorance about the future seriously, this cost-benefit calculus should not even get started. Because costs outweighing benefits is the oldest excuse for not taking precautions – and is a recipe for disaster when the benefits, or the costs of inaction, are vastly undervalued.
Cost-benefit thinking also leads us to assume that all values can be expressed in monetary terms. Many politicians and business leaders fixate on statements such as “a 2°C rise in average global temperature will reduce GDP by up to 2%”, as though a fall in GDP measures the true costs of the climate emergency.
In practice, this thinking means that the value of everything is measured by how much people offer to pay for it. Since the rich can always pay more than the poor, priorities get skewed towards the desires of the rich, away from the needs of the poor. So more money is spent on R&D for anti-wrinkle creams than for malaria treatments. Big Pharma has been relatively uninterested in developing vaccines, because a vaccination programme only works if the poor get vaccinated too, which limits the price manufacturers can charge.
We might seem to be beyond that now: the world has woken up, and rich countries will spend “whatever it takes” to tackle the pandemic. But Covid 19 vaccine research – and countless other fields of medical research with the potential to save as many lives in the long-term – needs continuous, reliable funding over many years. Once the market sees better profit elsewhere, funding will be cut, and the researchers will retire or move on, their experience lost.
Economic orthodoxy supports the narrative that this pandemic is a unique disaster no one could have prepared for, and with no wider lessons for economics and politics. This story suits some of the world’s billionaires, but it’s not true. There is an alternative: the pandemic provides further evidence that to tackle the climate emergency, inequality and any emerging crises, we must re-think our economics from the bottom up.
Sunday, 5 July 2020
The ‘Yes sir!’ society
THERE are two lessons from the tragic PIA crash in Karachi, and if we don’t learn from them, the almost 100 victims would have died in vain writes Irfan Husain in The Dawn.
Firstly — and more easily fixable — is the business about pilots flying on fake licences. There is nothing to suggest that the captain of the ill-fated PIA flight was one of them, but his mishandling of the aircraft is an indicator of the culture of incompetence that rules our skies.
When an Airblue plane crashed a few miles from Islamabad a decade ago, killing all on board, the inquiry report shone a laser on the relationship between the captain and his first officer. Although the latter informed the captain that their approach was too low, and they should pull up, he was ignored because to have agreed would have indicated that his junior knew more than the captain did.
Then there was the near-tragedy at Islamabad airport some 30 years ago when the PIA Jumbo scraped home on its belly. Initially, the pilot was praised for executing a masterful belly landing, saving many lives. It then emerged that he had switched off the sensor that warns pilots they were too close to land without lowering the undercarriage.
I’m sure there are many other examples of why PIA is considered such a dangerous airline to fly on. The powerful pilots union (Palpa) prevents any meaningful punishment for blatantly dangerous manoeuvres.
But fake licences should not surprise us: remember the recent Axact scandal where millions of dollars were coined by the Karachi-based firm selling fake degrees around the world? After a flurry of arrests and court cases, the whole affair seems to have been forgotten.
Perhaps even a dysfunctional country like Pakistan can fix the problem of fake licences. But if this happens, it’ll be due more to foreign pressure and our image abroad than any concern for the lives of Pakistani passengers.
However, it is the second problem that is far more pervasive and deeply entrenched. As the Airblue report highlighted, the rigid hierarchy, even on a three-man flight deck, was such that the first officer could not do more to convince his captain of his dangerous approach than utter emollient words like ‘Sir, are too low’. The captain was apparently too full of his authority to agree, and insisted on maintaining his course: any change would have implied that his junior officer knew more than he did.
Now multiply this attitude across our entire society. When the boss is convinced he (seldom she) knows best, you will never get the optimum outcome. Take Kargil as an example of poor planning resulting from this rigid hierarchical approach.
When Musharraf cursorily ran the broad outline of his madcap adventure past Nawaz Sharif, there were few of the obvious questions that should have been asked. The kitchen cabinet reportedly saw the prime minister’s mild approval, and kept quiet. Musharraf’s team, for their part, only spoke out against the enterprise after they had retired. They, too, were prisoners of the ‘Yes, sir! No, sir!’ syndrome. To this day, the report of the debacle has not been released, even as an internal case study, as far as I know.
But it’s not just the military that operates on this principle. When I was president of a private university, I used to call weekly meetings of the teaching staff. At these sessions, I put forth my ideas for changes, and asked my colleagues to give counter-arguments. Although these were educated, intelligent people, they almost always stayed quiet, or agreed with me.
And when I monitored classes from the back of the room, I noticed that students hardly ever asked questions. Although I hated interfering, I would almost urge them to query or criticise. Again, silence. So clearly, the senior/junior hierarchy was at work. This is why we produce so few inquiring, curious minds.
Sucking up to the boss for promotions is a global malady, but mostly, it ends at the end of work. Here, we live with it each moment of our lives.
Our brainwashing begins earlier than the classroom. Boys are deemed too inexperienced to choose their careers, so their fathers decide. Girls aren’t practical enough to choose their husbands, so their parents use force, if necessary, to select a ‘suitable’ spouse. I know things are changing for the younger generation in a certain class. But for the majority, these major decisions are still made by parents.
Much of Asia is prisoner to this paternalistic approach, and is the poorer for it. Individuality is crushed, and bad decision-making is just one result. When people end up in the wrong career, or a disastrous, abusive marriage, relations between parents and their children can be ruined for life.
I am informed by a friend that Japan Airlines trains its pilots to overcome their childhood conditioning, and stand their ground. But how do we transfer this to our entire society?
Firstly — and more easily fixable — is the business about pilots flying on fake licences. There is nothing to suggest that the captain of the ill-fated PIA flight was one of them, but his mishandling of the aircraft is an indicator of the culture of incompetence that rules our skies.
When an Airblue plane crashed a few miles from Islamabad a decade ago, killing all on board, the inquiry report shone a laser on the relationship between the captain and his first officer. Although the latter informed the captain that their approach was too low, and they should pull up, he was ignored because to have agreed would have indicated that his junior knew more than the captain did.
Then there was the near-tragedy at Islamabad airport some 30 years ago when the PIA Jumbo scraped home on its belly. Initially, the pilot was praised for executing a masterful belly landing, saving many lives. It then emerged that he had switched off the sensor that warns pilots they were too close to land without lowering the undercarriage.
I’m sure there are many other examples of why PIA is considered such a dangerous airline to fly on. The powerful pilots union (Palpa) prevents any meaningful punishment for blatantly dangerous manoeuvres.
But fake licences should not surprise us: remember the recent Axact scandal where millions of dollars were coined by the Karachi-based firm selling fake degrees around the world? After a flurry of arrests and court cases, the whole affair seems to have been forgotten.
Perhaps even a dysfunctional country like Pakistan can fix the problem of fake licences. But if this happens, it’ll be due more to foreign pressure and our image abroad than any concern for the lives of Pakistani passengers.
However, it is the second problem that is far more pervasive and deeply entrenched. As the Airblue report highlighted, the rigid hierarchy, even on a three-man flight deck, was such that the first officer could not do more to convince his captain of his dangerous approach than utter emollient words like ‘Sir, are too low’. The captain was apparently too full of his authority to agree, and insisted on maintaining his course: any change would have implied that his junior officer knew more than he did.
Now multiply this attitude across our entire society. When the boss is convinced he (seldom she) knows best, you will never get the optimum outcome. Take Kargil as an example of poor planning resulting from this rigid hierarchical approach.
When Musharraf cursorily ran the broad outline of his madcap adventure past Nawaz Sharif, there were few of the obvious questions that should have been asked. The kitchen cabinet reportedly saw the prime minister’s mild approval, and kept quiet. Musharraf’s team, for their part, only spoke out against the enterprise after they had retired. They, too, were prisoners of the ‘Yes, sir! No, sir!’ syndrome. To this day, the report of the debacle has not been released, even as an internal case study, as far as I know.
But it’s not just the military that operates on this principle. When I was president of a private university, I used to call weekly meetings of the teaching staff. At these sessions, I put forth my ideas for changes, and asked my colleagues to give counter-arguments. Although these were educated, intelligent people, they almost always stayed quiet, or agreed with me.
And when I monitored classes from the back of the room, I noticed that students hardly ever asked questions. Although I hated interfering, I would almost urge them to query or criticise. Again, silence. So clearly, the senior/junior hierarchy was at work. This is why we produce so few inquiring, curious minds.
Sucking up to the boss for promotions is a global malady, but mostly, it ends at the end of work. Here, we live with it each moment of our lives.
Our brainwashing begins earlier than the classroom. Boys are deemed too inexperienced to choose their careers, so their fathers decide. Girls aren’t practical enough to choose their husbands, so their parents use force, if necessary, to select a ‘suitable’ spouse. I know things are changing for the younger generation in a certain class. But for the majority, these major decisions are still made by parents.
Much of Asia is prisoner to this paternalistic approach, and is the poorer for it. Individuality is crushed, and bad decision-making is just one result. When people end up in the wrong career, or a disastrous, abusive marriage, relations between parents and their children can be ruined for life.
I am informed by a friend that Japan Airlines trains its pilots to overcome their childhood conditioning, and stand their ground. But how do we transfer this to our entire society?
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