Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
PAKISTAN’S mad rush towards the cliff edge and its evident proclivity for collective suicide deserves a diagnosis, followed by therapy. Contrary to what some may want to believe, this pathological condition is not one man’s fault and it didn’t develop suddenly. To help comprehend this, for a moment imagine the state as a vehicle with passengers. It is equipped with a steering mechanism, outer body, wheels, engine and fuel tank.
Politics is the steering mechanism. Whoever sits behind the wheel can choose the destination, speed up, or slow down. Choosing a driver from among the occupants requires civility, particularly when traveling along a dangerous ravine’s edge. If the language turns foul, and respect is replaced with anger and venom, animal emotions take over.
Imran Khan started the rot in 2014 when, perched atop his container, he hurled loaded abuse upon his political opponents. Following the Panama exposé of 2016, he accused them — quite plausibly in my opinion — of using their official positions for self-enrichment. How else could they explain their immense wealth? For years, he has had no names for them except chor and daku.
But the shoe is now on the other foot and Khan’s enemies have turned out no less vindictive, abusive and unprincipled. They have recorded and made public his recent intimate conversations with a young female, dragged in the matter of his out-of-wedlock daughter, and exposed the shenanigans of his close supporters.
More seriously, they have presented plausible evidence that Mr Clean swindled billions in the Al Qadir and Toshakhana cases. Which is blacker: the pot or the kettle? Take your pick.
Everyone knows politics is dirty business everywhere. Just look at the antics of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s corrupt former prime minister. But if a vehicle’s occupants include calm, trustworthy adjudicators, the worst is still avoidable. Sadly Pakistan is not so blessed; its higher judiciary has split along partisan lines.
The outer body is the army, made for shielding occupants from what lies outside. But it has repeatedly intruded into the vehicle’s interior, seeking to pick the driver. Free-and-fair elections are not acceptable. Last November, months after the Army-Khan romance soured, outgoing army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa confessed that for seven decades the army had “unconstitutionally interfered in politics”.
But a simple mea culpa isn’t enough. Running the economy or making DHAs is also not the army’s job. Officers are not trained for running airlines, sugar mills, fertiliser factories, or insurance and advertising companies. Special exemptions and loopholes have legalised tax evasion and put civilian competitors at a disadvantage.
A decisive role in national politics, whether covert or overt, was sought for personal enrichment of individuals. It had nothing to do with national security.
While Khan has focused solely on the army’s efforts to dislodge him, his violent supporters supplement these accusations by disputing its unearned privileges. When they stormed the GHQ in Rawalpindi, attacked an ISI facility in Pindi, and set ablaze the corps commander’s house in Lahore, they did the unimaginable. But, piquing everyone’s curiosity, no tanks confronted the enraged mobs. No self-defence was visible on social media videos. The bemused Baloch ask, ‘What if an army facility had been attacked in Quetta or Gwadar?’ Would there be carpet bombing? Artillery barrages?
The wheels that keep any economy going are business and trade. Pakistanis are generally very good at this. Their keen sense for profits leads them to excel in real-estate development, mining, retailing, hoteliering, and franchising fast-food chains. But this cleverness carries over to evading taxes, and so Pakistan has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio among South Asian countries.
The law appears powerless to change this. When a trader routinely falsifies his income tax return, all guilt is quickly expiated by donating a dollop of cash to a madressah, mosque, or hospital. In February, the pious men of Markazi Tanzeem Tajiran (Central Organisation of Traders) threatened a countrywide protest movement to forestall any attempt to collect taxes. The government backed off.
The engine, of course, is what makes the wheels of an economy turn. Developing countries use available technologies for import substitution and for producing some exportables. A strong engine can climb mountains, pull through natural disasters such as the 2022 monster flood, or survive Covid-19 and events like the Ukraine war. A weak one relies on friends in the neighbourhood — China, Saudi Arabia, and UAE — to push it up the hill. By dialling three letters — I/M/F — it can summon a tow-truck company.
The weakness of the Pakistani engine is normally explained away by various excuses — inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment, state-heavy enterprises, excessive bureaucracy, fiscal mismanagement, or whatever. But if truth be told, the poverty of our human resources is what really matters.
For proof, look at China in the 1980s, which had more problems than Pakistan but which had an educated, hard-working citizenry. Economists say that these qualities, especially within the Chinese diaspora of the 1990s, fuelled the Chinese miracle.
The fuel, finally, is the human brain. When appropriately educated and trained, it is voraciously consumed by every economic engine. Pakistan is at its very weakest here. Small resource allocation for education is just a tenth of the problem.
More importantly, draconian social control through schools and an ideology-centred curriculum cripples young minds at the very outset, crushing independent thought and reasoning abilities. Leaders of both PTI and PDM agree that this must never change. Hence Pakistani children have — and will continue to have — inferior skills and poorer learning attitudes compared to kids in China, Korea, or even India.
The prognosis: it is hard to see much good coming out of a screeching catfight between rapacious rivals thirsting for power and revenge. None have a positive agenda for the country.
While the much-feared second breakup of Pakistan is not going to happen, the downward descent will accelerate as the poor starve, cities become increasingly unlivable, and the rich flee westwards. Whether or not elections happen in October and Khan rises from the ashes doesn’t matter. To fix what has gone wrong over 75 years is what’s important.
Saturday, 13 May 2023
Friday, 12 May 2023
One group of people can’t substitute their way out of inflation
Tim Harford in The FT
In a laboratory in College Station, Texas, in 1990, six lab rats pressed levers and lapped at tubes as root beer and tonic water were released. They were participating in the quest for an elusive quarry: the Giffen good.Robert Giffen was born in Lanarkshire in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s accession. He would become by turns assistant editor at The Economist, chief statistician at the Board of Trade, President of the Royal Statistical Society and co‑founder of the Royal Economic Society. An eminent Victorian indeed, even if one biographer sniffed, “He was one of those figures . . . whose not inconsiderable power and prestige appears to be disproportionate to their actual contribution to economic science.” Ouch.
Yet Giffen’s name is known to every economics student. This is not because of the research he published, but because of a thought experiment which reached his contemporary Alfred Marshall, who put it in his inescapable textbook Principles of Economics. The idea is that certain goods might be consumed more when their prices rise, because the increased cost backs consumers into a corner.
Here’s how I imagined it, as an impoverished student. My staple diet was jacket potatoes with cheese or tuna mayo, bought from a nearby kebab van. Imagine that the price of potatoes rose. Ordinarily, I’d be expected to buy fewer potatoes and more of something else.
The problem is everything else was still more expensive than potatoes. With my budget squeezed, I couldn’t afford the luxury of the cheese and tuna topping. The missing calories would come from . . . more potatoes.
In this example, potatoes are a “Giffen good”. Potatoes were a major part of my diet; when their price rose, I effectively became poorer and switched towards the cheapest foodstuff. The cheapest foodstuff was potatoes.
Of course, this did not actually happen. I was never that destitute and never such a potatophage. For about a century, economists looked for real examples of Giffen goods and did not find them until 1990, when economists Raymond Battalio, John Kagel and Carl Kogut demonstrated Giffen behaviour in lab rats. (The lab rats, I am assured, were well looked after by Battalio’s neighbour, a vet.)
The researchers offered the rats quinine-flavoured water, which the rats disliked, and root beer, which they loved. The effective prices of these drinks were changed by adjusting the volume of drink released each time the rat pressed a lever. Root beer was “expensive” because it was dispensed in smaller portions. And sure enough, it proved possible to provoke Giffen behaviour: when the cheaper quinine water became less cheap, rats still needed a drink and they cut back on the luxury of root beer, drinking more quinine water.
So are Giffen goods little more than a theoretical curiosity? Not quite. Eventually, the economists Robert Jensen, Nolan Miller and Sangui Wang used both public health data and a field experiment to demonstrate that in the poorest parts of Hunan, China, rice was a Giffen good. As Jensen wrote in 2008, “It’s funny that people have looked in crazy places for Giffen behaviour . . . and it turns out that it could be found in the most widely consumed food in the most populous nation in the history of humanity.”
Giffen goods also teach us something important about the impact of price rises on the poorest people. One of the most basic lessons of economics is that people respond to price hikes by finding cheaper options. If apples are expensive this week, buy oranges; when the price of oranges rises and the price of apples falls, switch back to apples again. Or just look for the bargain-basement option. If a West End show is too expensive, go to the cinema. If the cinema costs too much, watch television. You don’t have to pay higher prices; you can make do with a cheaper alternative.
Inflation is always a little lower than it seems once you allow for such substitutions. But one group of people can’t play that game: those who are already relying on the cheapest staples have nowhere to run from price rises.
So it wasn’t quinine water in a Texas laboratory, or rice in Hunan, that made me think recently of Giffen goods. It was the alarming rise in the price of a cheese salad sandwich. The latest data from the UK show that sliced white bread has risen in price by 29 per cent over the past 12 months, with tomatoes up 16 per cent, butter up 30 per cent, cheddar cheese up 42 per cent and cucumber 55 per cent more expensive. (Headline inflation, meanwhile, is just over 10 per cent.)
I am not claiming that cheddar cheese is essential to life; it just seems that way. Nor is it a Giffen good. But basic foodstuffs are Giffen-adjacent. They are the last resort of people who cannot afford fancier stuff.
Food poverty campaigners — most prominently Jack Monroe — have argued that the price of these basics has risen much faster than the general rate of inflation. As I’ve written before, it’s hard to be sure if that’s true. The Office for National Statistics tends to focus on the most popular products, not the cheapest bargains, and so the relevant data is patchy and experimental.
Whether or not inflation really is higher for the poorest households, what is not in doubt is that inflation hits them hardest. That is both because they are more vulnerable, and because they have less room for manoeuvre as they ponder their options in the supermarket aisle. The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, recently said that, “We’re all worse off.” Maybe so. But some of us are worse off than others.
Tuesday, 9 May 2023
The Kerala Story—It’s time Muslims give up their mediaeval ideal of conquest, conversion
The liberal-secular patrons of the Islamic preachers neither talk about conversions nor let others do the talking. They are devoid of integrity and lack tools to analyse the phenomenon writes IBN KHALDUN BHARATI in The Print
The central issue of the movie, The Kerala Story, is religious conversion of Hindus and Christians to Islam — a subject few wanted to talk about. Though the Islamic preachers and narrative makers never hid their intention, their liberal-secular patrons would neither talk about it nor let others do the talking. They have a vested interest in Muslim communalism, and are happy with the electoral gains accruing from Islamic radicalism. Thus, devoid of the integrity to acknowledge the disturbing reality, they also lack the tools to analyse the phenomenon.
Expectedly, the movie has stirred a hornet’s nest. Exposé of an open secret always does that.
The main objection raised against The Kerala Story has been the now-retracted figure of 32,000 conversions of girls in the state to supply soldiers for ISIS. The film producers now mention three girls who converted and went to fight for ISIS. However, beyond this quibbling over numbers, there have been no serious imputation of falsehood. The core content of the movie has a kernel of truth and is not being disputed. There is no accusation of peddling falsehood. Instead, some are questioning the motives behind telling this truth. It’s a politically inconvenient movie that brings to light the topic of religious conversion and its consequences.
There is no denying the fact that conversions happened in Kerala — of girls too! And, neo-converts, even girls, were sent abroad on jihadi missions to fight for ISIS. Women were not recruited in these missions for combat roles. Jihadi men needed comfort girls, and these women were jihad-prostitutes. We learnt about the story when some of them, incarcerated in Taliban’s jails in Afghanistan, begged the Indian government to bring them home.
The point to ponder is, when this news broke, what was the reaction of the Muslim community and the liberal-secular intelligentsia? Were they shocked with disbelief or just embarrassed about the revelation? Did they dismiss it as a freak incident or knowing it to be the tip of iceberg tried to retrieve the situation from increasing radicalisation.
Is it a secret that converting a non-Muslim to Islam is considered the greatest of virtues? Could people, even girls, be converted and despatched on jihadi missions without a general acceptance of conversion and jihad in the Muslim society? Did the people react then the way they are doing now at the movie about it? No, they didn’t, and therefore, there is a need to introspect, and understand what is going on.
Why convert?
The underlying concept behind converting people is that one’s own religion is the only truth, all else is falsehood. Thus, it becomes one’s duty to persuade others to convert to the “true” religion. If persuasion fails, and circumstances allow, the unheeding could be converted by deceit, temptation, or force. Throughout history, most conversions — a supremacist idea — have occurred through force or conquest. With the exception of Southeast Asia, Islam has mainly spread in areas that were conquered by Muslims. While Sufi mystics played a major role in cultivating converts, they could not have succeeded without the protection of the Islamic sword, as they had to reconcile people to the Muslim rule and the ruler’s religion. This was Islam’s version of the “Cross following the Flag.”
The community of converts
Today, the descendants of converts — some 80-90% of Indian Muslims — may regard the conversion of their ancestors as a divine blessing that saved successive generations from hellfire and ensured eternal paradise. However, the process through which this blessing was obtained is also a fact of history. If the story were to be told, it could severely undermine the basis of identity politics. Communal consciousness is shaped by suppressing memory and obfuscating history.
History of conversion
In India, the issue of conversion will remain contentious because, historically, it has been a corollary of conquest. Whether through persuasion, temptation, or compulsion, both the conqueror and the conquered viewed it as an insult added to injury. The consequences of these conversions are still present in the form of ever-increasing religious radicalisation and separatist politics, even 75 years after the Partition.
Politics of conversion
Now that the age of Islamic conquest is over, and wholesale conversion is no longer feasible, there has been a shift in strategy — to Dawah, i.e., preaching and proselytising. Earlier, groups converted, now individuals do. Sometimes, girls in love convert too. Such conversion is seen as poaching by the community that loses a member. No one remains in doubt about its political meaning. A religious conversion in India is not only about changes in one’s conception of the divine, vocabulary of prayer and ritual of worship. More than anything else, it is a change of community; switching of loyalty from one to another. For the Muslim, a conversion is a validation of his religion’s truth and is celebrated as a communal conquest. Correspondingly, every such conversion makes the Hindu seethe at the unending series of defeat and humiliation. Such contrast in emotions on two sides is inevitable in a situation where communities are seen as historical antagonists, competing with each other for the supremacy of their respective religions.
Conversion from Islam
Islamic jurisprudence is the best guide to understand the political import of religious conversion. According to it, a Muslim’s conversion to another religion is an act of apostasy, which renders him liable to death. The reasoning behind it is that a change of religion is not merely a change of one’s personal faith. It is tantamount to treason to the Islamic state, and is as grave a matter as a soldier’s desertion to the enemy camp. In this worldview, religions are political ideologies, and faith communities are warring armies. Therefore, the campaign to convert is prosecution of war by another means. A new convert to Islam is a victory for the religion that the community celebrates. But the rare conversion of a Muslim to another religion is high treason that Muslims can’t take in their stride, and for which the prescribed punishment is execution.
In an ideological framework where a new convert is actually a newly recruited soldier, the progression from conversion to military jihad is natural.
Ethics of pluralism
A pluralist and secular society cannot allow one community to have such designs on the other. A minority community, particularly, can’t afford such continued incursions into the majority, as it may incite a reaction leading to reverse conversion.
After the Prophet, the Muslims didn’t remain a faith group. They became a religion-based ethnicity. Therefore, seeking to convert non-Muslims to Islam is as ridiculous as converting Indians into Arabs. It creates confusion of identity, which leads to extreme fanaticism.
In a pluralist society like India’s, the Muslims would do better to recognise that all religions are equally true. If they can’t bring themselves to it, they should, at least, recognise that to the people of other faiths, their religion is as true as Islam is to a Muslim. And so, trying to convert others is as unacceptable as changing someone’s gender or skin colour.
It’s time that, in their own interest, Muslims renounced the mediaeval ideal of conquest and conversion. If they didn’t, this fantasy could turn into a nightmare.
“Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you” is a maxim everyone should remember.
The central issue of the movie, The Kerala Story, is religious conversion of Hindus and Christians to Islam — a subject few wanted to talk about. Though the Islamic preachers and narrative makers never hid their intention, their liberal-secular patrons would neither talk about it nor let others do the talking. They have a vested interest in Muslim communalism, and are happy with the electoral gains accruing from Islamic radicalism. Thus, devoid of the integrity to acknowledge the disturbing reality, they also lack the tools to analyse the phenomenon.
Expectedly, the movie has stirred a hornet’s nest. Exposé of an open secret always does that.
The main objection raised against The Kerala Story has been the now-retracted figure of 32,000 conversions of girls in the state to supply soldiers for ISIS. The film producers now mention three girls who converted and went to fight for ISIS. However, beyond this quibbling over numbers, there have been no serious imputation of falsehood. The core content of the movie has a kernel of truth and is not being disputed. There is no accusation of peddling falsehood. Instead, some are questioning the motives behind telling this truth. It’s a politically inconvenient movie that brings to light the topic of religious conversion and its consequences.
There is no denying the fact that conversions happened in Kerala — of girls too! And, neo-converts, even girls, were sent abroad on jihadi missions to fight for ISIS. Women were not recruited in these missions for combat roles. Jihadi men needed comfort girls, and these women were jihad-prostitutes. We learnt about the story when some of them, incarcerated in Taliban’s jails in Afghanistan, begged the Indian government to bring them home.
The point to ponder is, when this news broke, what was the reaction of the Muslim community and the liberal-secular intelligentsia? Were they shocked with disbelief or just embarrassed about the revelation? Did they dismiss it as a freak incident or knowing it to be the tip of iceberg tried to retrieve the situation from increasing radicalisation.
Is it a secret that converting a non-Muslim to Islam is considered the greatest of virtues? Could people, even girls, be converted and despatched on jihadi missions without a general acceptance of conversion and jihad in the Muslim society? Did the people react then the way they are doing now at the movie about it? No, they didn’t, and therefore, there is a need to introspect, and understand what is going on.
Why convert?
The underlying concept behind converting people is that one’s own religion is the only truth, all else is falsehood. Thus, it becomes one’s duty to persuade others to convert to the “true” religion. If persuasion fails, and circumstances allow, the unheeding could be converted by deceit, temptation, or force. Throughout history, most conversions — a supremacist idea — have occurred through force or conquest. With the exception of Southeast Asia, Islam has mainly spread in areas that were conquered by Muslims. While Sufi mystics played a major role in cultivating converts, they could not have succeeded without the protection of the Islamic sword, as they had to reconcile people to the Muslim rule and the ruler’s religion. This was Islam’s version of the “Cross following the Flag.”
The community of converts
Today, the descendants of converts — some 80-90% of Indian Muslims — may regard the conversion of their ancestors as a divine blessing that saved successive generations from hellfire and ensured eternal paradise. However, the process through which this blessing was obtained is also a fact of history. If the story were to be told, it could severely undermine the basis of identity politics. Communal consciousness is shaped by suppressing memory and obfuscating history.
History of conversion
In India, the issue of conversion will remain contentious because, historically, it has been a corollary of conquest. Whether through persuasion, temptation, or compulsion, both the conqueror and the conquered viewed it as an insult added to injury. The consequences of these conversions are still present in the form of ever-increasing religious radicalisation and separatist politics, even 75 years after the Partition.
Politics of conversion
Now that the age of Islamic conquest is over, and wholesale conversion is no longer feasible, there has been a shift in strategy — to Dawah, i.e., preaching and proselytising. Earlier, groups converted, now individuals do. Sometimes, girls in love convert too. Such conversion is seen as poaching by the community that loses a member. No one remains in doubt about its political meaning. A religious conversion in India is not only about changes in one’s conception of the divine, vocabulary of prayer and ritual of worship. More than anything else, it is a change of community; switching of loyalty from one to another. For the Muslim, a conversion is a validation of his religion’s truth and is celebrated as a communal conquest. Correspondingly, every such conversion makes the Hindu seethe at the unending series of defeat and humiliation. Such contrast in emotions on two sides is inevitable in a situation where communities are seen as historical antagonists, competing with each other for the supremacy of their respective religions.
Conversion from Islam
Islamic jurisprudence is the best guide to understand the political import of religious conversion. According to it, a Muslim’s conversion to another religion is an act of apostasy, which renders him liable to death. The reasoning behind it is that a change of religion is not merely a change of one’s personal faith. It is tantamount to treason to the Islamic state, and is as grave a matter as a soldier’s desertion to the enemy camp. In this worldview, religions are political ideologies, and faith communities are warring armies. Therefore, the campaign to convert is prosecution of war by another means. A new convert to Islam is a victory for the religion that the community celebrates. But the rare conversion of a Muslim to another religion is high treason that Muslims can’t take in their stride, and for which the prescribed punishment is execution.
In an ideological framework where a new convert is actually a newly recruited soldier, the progression from conversion to military jihad is natural.
Ethics of pluralism
A pluralist and secular society cannot allow one community to have such designs on the other. A minority community, particularly, can’t afford such continued incursions into the majority, as it may incite a reaction leading to reverse conversion.
After the Prophet, the Muslims didn’t remain a faith group. They became a religion-based ethnicity. Therefore, seeking to convert non-Muslims to Islam is as ridiculous as converting Indians into Arabs. It creates confusion of identity, which leads to extreme fanaticism.
In a pluralist society like India’s, the Muslims would do better to recognise that all religions are equally true. If they can’t bring themselves to it, they should, at least, recognise that to the people of other faiths, their religion is as true as Islam is to a Muslim. And so, trying to convert others is as unacceptable as changing someone’s gender or skin colour.
It’s time that, in their own interest, Muslims renounced the mediaeval ideal of conquest and conversion. If they didn’t, this fantasy could turn into a nightmare.
“Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you” is a maxim everyone should remember.
Monday, 8 May 2023
Negotiation in the age of the dual-career couple
Stefan Stern in The FT
To mark the recent centenary of the Harvard Business Review, editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius dipped into the archive and found, among other things, an article from 1956 titled “Successful Wives of Successful Executives”.
“It is the task of the wife to co-operate in working towards the goals set by her husband,” the article stated. “This means accepting — or perhaps encouraging — the business trips, the long hours at the office, and the household moves dictated by his business career.”
It got worse. The husband, the piece continued, “may meet someone who conforms more closely to the new social standards he has acquired while moving socially upward; he may discard his wife either by taking a new wife or by concentrating all his attention on his business.” Yuk.
The rise of the dual-career couple has transformed the politics of marriage since the 1950s but some tensions remain. A recently published book declares: “The most important career decision you’ll make is about whom to marry and what kind of relationship you will have.”
The words appear in “Money and Love: an Intelligent Road Map for Life’s Biggest Decisions”, written by Myra Strober, professor emerita at Stanford University, and Abby Davisson, a former executive at retailer Gap, and now a consultant.
The book takes a both/and rather than an either/or approach to the issues surrounding professional and domestic life. The authors reject an artificial notion of “balance”. Instead there are necessary, hard-headed but human trade-offs. “If you want lives that are not just two individuals pursuing career aspirations separately, then it takes a lot of negotiation and a lot of discussion, and compromise,” Davisson explained when I met the authors in London.
Strober led a course called “work and family” at Stanford’s graduate school of business (SGSB) for several decades until her retirement in 2018. She was one of the first female faculty members there on her appointment in the early 1970s.
“If I had proposed my course at the business school would be called ‘money and love’ instead of ‘work and family’ I would have had some pushback,” she told me. But wasn’t this in California in the days following the “summer of love”? “The business school was not buying that then either!” she noted.
Perhaps inevitably, in a book written by a business school professor and graduate, there is a checklist or framework to help the reader make better life decisions. These are the five Cs: to clarify what is important; to communicate effectively with a partner (or potential partner); to consider a broad range of choices, avoiding crude either/or decisions; to check-in with a sounding board of friends and family; and to explore the likely short-term and long-term consequences of any big decisions.
Actions will count as much as the thought processes that precede them.
Davisson said: “The mental models that we have, particularly from our parents, are incredibly powerful.” If you don’t see what an equal partnership looks like in your home, she added, it might be hard to imagine one.
“I have two boys,” she said, “and they see my husband as the head chef. They think it’s funny when I cook . . . They will have this model of us sharing the workload. All the home responsibilities do not fall on one person.”
During the Covid pandemic, employees, parents and carers had their roles blended as they worked from home and tried to keep family life going. For some that has been an opportunity to more equally share the domestic workload, for others it has made the mythical work/life balance harder to achieve.
The authors say more is needed. “We need to invest in excellent childcare,” Strober said. “This is something business leaders need to be thinking about.” Davisson added: “We see birth rates falling, people not wanting to fund the cost, and then we wonder why people are not having more children.”
Although Strober’s course was greatly valued by students — with men, incidentally, making up 40 per cent of participants — SGSB chose not to continue it after her retirement.
That risks the business school reverting to a too narrow focus on money and how to make it — without thinking about the human factor.
Strober is all too familiar with that split. She cites the 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith’s two books: The Wealth of Nations, which covers free markets and the workings of the economy; and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which focuses on social cohesion and relationships.
“Most people only know about The Wealth of Nations,” said Strober. “It’s too bad that he separated out those two books. Had he blended the discussion of wealth with the discussion of altruism we might not be quite so separated on them.”
We need both money and love. “Having money isn’t worth it unless you also have love,” Davisson said. And Strober’s final piece of advice? “The trick is to find someone to be your life partner who has the same philosophy as you do.”
To mark the recent centenary of the Harvard Business Review, editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius dipped into the archive and found, among other things, an article from 1956 titled “Successful Wives of Successful Executives”.
“It is the task of the wife to co-operate in working towards the goals set by her husband,” the article stated. “This means accepting — or perhaps encouraging — the business trips, the long hours at the office, and the household moves dictated by his business career.”
It got worse. The husband, the piece continued, “may meet someone who conforms more closely to the new social standards he has acquired while moving socially upward; he may discard his wife either by taking a new wife or by concentrating all his attention on his business.” Yuk.
The rise of the dual-career couple has transformed the politics of marriage since the 1950s but some tensions remain. A recently published book declares: “The most important career decision you’ll make is about whom to marry and what kind of relationship you will have.”
The words appear in “Money and Love: an Intelligent Road Map for Life’s Biggest Decisions”, written by Myra Strober, professor emerita at Stanford University, and Abby Davisson, a former executive at retailer Gap, and now a consultant.
The book takes a both/and rather than an either/or approach to the issues surrounding professional and domestic life. The authors reject an artificial notion of “balance”. Instead there are necessary, hard-headed but human trade-offs. “If you want lives that are not just two individuals pursuing career aspirations separately, then it takes a lot of negotiation and a lot of discussion, and compromise,” Davisson explained when I met the authors in London.
Strober led a course called “work and family” at Stanford’s graduate school of business (SGSB) for several decades until her retirement in 2018. She was one of the first female faculty members there on her appointment in the early 1970s.
“If I had proposed my course at the business school would be called ‘money and love’ instead of ‘work and family’ I would have had some pushback,” she told me. But wasn’t this in California in the days following the “summer of love”? “The business school was not buying that then either!” she noted.
Perhaps inevitably, in a book written by a business school professor and graduate, there is a checklist or framework to help the reader make better life decisions. These are the five Cs: to clarify what is important; to communicate effectively with a partner (or potential partner); to consider a broad range of choices, avoiding crude either/or decisions; to check-in with a sounding board of friends and family; and to explore the likely short-term and long-term consequences of any big decisions.
Actions will count as much as the thought processes that precede them.
Davisson said: “The mental models that we have, particularly from our parents, are incredibly powerful.” If you don’t see what an equal partnership looks like in your home, she added, it might be hard to imagine one.
“I have two boys,” she said, “and they see my husband as the head chef. They think it’s funny when I cook . . . They will have this model of us sharing the workload. All the home responsibilities do not fall on one person.”
During the Covid pandemic, employees, parents and carers had their roles blended as they worked from home and tried to keep family life going. For some that has been an opportunity to more equally share the domestic workload, for others it has made the mythical work/life balance harder to achieve.
The authors say more is needed. “We need to invest in excellent childcare,” Strober said. “This is something business leaders need to be thinking about.” Davisson added: “We see birth rates falling, people not wanting to fund the cost, and then we wonder why people are not having more children.”
Although Strober’s course was greatly valued by students — with men, incidentally, making up 40 per cent of participants — SGSB chose not to continue it after her retirement.
That risks the business school reverting to a too narrow focus on money and how to make it — without thinking about the human factor.
Strober is all too familiar with that split. She cites the 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith’s two books: The Wealth of Nations, which covers free markets and the workings of the economy; and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which focuses on social cohesion and relationships.
“Most people only know about The Wealth of Nations,” said Strober. “It’s too bad that he separated out those two books. Had he blended the discussion of wealth with the discussion of altruism we might not be quite so separated on them.”
We need both money and love. “Having money isn’t worth it unless you also have love,” Davisson said. And Strober’s final piece of advice? “The trick is to find someone to be your life partner who has the same philosophy as you do.”
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