Independent.co.uk
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
The entourage to Canada and the US will be 'humble' with only seven adults accompanying the couple. The national self-delusion is now untreatable
Monday, 20 June 2011
Pictures of Kate Middleton appear daily on the front pages. Last week, she showcased clothes costing £12,000. Didn't she look lovely? She smiled and waved too – such an exhausting job, who would want it? All the aspirational young women lining up to apply to St Andrews where Katie bagged her prince. The university is about to team up with the elite American William and Mary College in Virginia (note the monarchist moniker) to charge £18,000 a year for a joint BA degree. Perhaps the next Mrs Simpson will also come from there – rich North Americans love aristocratic connections and all things royal. And this summer they are in for the biggest treat.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (what do these titles mean? Is a duke higher than a prince? Who bloody cares?) are preparing to visit Canada and the US for their first official overseas tour starting 30 June. Expect a flood of images, nauseating sycophancy, endless smiles and airhead fashionista commentaries. The entourage will be "humble", say loyal watchers, with only seven adults accompanying the couple. So no lackey to put toothpaste on to a toothbrush, something Prince Charles must have. More modest still, no dresser or Lady in Waiting. And the people are lapping it all up, like hungry cats round a cream bowl. The downturn? Economic hard times? Cuts and public sector strikes? All the people need are the diverting accounts of the undeserving rich to get by. Only the really curmudgeonly or perfidious Commies would say otherwise. Those of us who can't stand the circus are made to feel treacherous outsiders – a cold place to be.
After the euphoria of the wedding, the phenomenal success of The King's Speech, the honeyed tributes to rude Prince Philip on his 90th birthday, I feel almost defeated. We republicans are losing the battle. There were moments when it seemed as if the nation was shaking, shuddering with righteous indignation at appalling royal behaviour. That fever went down, and we are back to the status quo.
In our flawed democracy, some are born to lord it over us, even if they are stupid, unattractive (in all senses), immoral, badly behaved, drunk, spoilt, adulterous, callous and irresponsible. Examples can be provided for all of these within the present lot of royals. Going back, the list would get more colourful still, with a long line of serious miscreants and corrupt blue-bloods. The point though is that even if they are perfect, they were handed status and wealth at birth and that is wrong. This Queen certainly deserves respect for her diplomacy and for embodying the transition from the British Empire to post-colonial nationhood. But she heads a morally indefensible institution and can't see the harm that does. This year, just after it was revealed that Prince Andrew, the wastrel "helicopter prince", was flying around doing deals with dodgy dictators, his mum stuck more medals on him and later on their irascible dad too, just a birthday present.
But, alas this country's not for turning. A cunningly managed restoration of popularity has ensured the future of the monarchy. Charles will be King; then William. Kate, the millionaires' daughter, will beget an heir and they will live happily ever after. And the people will happily pay for them. There is never going to be a royals expenses row. They are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, though they cost us millions, including their tax-free allowances and gargantuan security costs. It still isn't enough. In 2010, the Queen tried to get money for palace repairs from a state fund set aside for energy-saving changes to homes and hospitals. "Relative poverty" took on a whole new meaning then, as does the "relative" frugality of the coming Canadian trip.
Defenders of the family say their palaces attract tourists. In India after independence, they got rid of their Maharajahs and Maharanis but retained the opulent residences. Tell me the country gets fewer tourists because they don't have real royals any more. And anyway, only a small part of our tourism industry (one fifth) comes from overseas visitors – the sector as a whole makes up about 9 per cent of GDP. Legoland in Windsor has more visitors by far than Windsor castle. Supporters also exaggerate the effectiveness of British royals. The Queen's remarkable visit to Ireland, her undoubted dignity and moving speech, are given as an example. Was the Irish President Mary McAleese any less dignified or impressive? If they believe that, the national self-delusion is now untreatable.
One Quebec legislator, Amir Khadir, denounced the visit of the "parasites" and the Canadian premier quickly intervened, affirming that his people hold the couple "in very great esteem". That esteem should come only when the couple show they understand what so many of their people are going through. Britain is barely recovering from economic depths it reached last year. More than 100,000 disabled children will no longer receive extra money to help them cope; many families are already living below the poverty line and more will join them as new rules are passed. Kate, meanwhile, wears a gown costing nearly £5,000 to raise money for charity. A fat donation without the costly extravaganza would have done more good and appeared less self-serving.
Why aren't people more angry? They were with expense-claiming MPs who do long hours and put themselves up for tortuous elections. Even in Swaziland, where the King and his many wives rule absolutely, the women of the nation came out in 2008 to demonstrate against the outrageous royal lifestyles. Think about that.
The furious brigade will send off missives about how I have no right to criticise "their" Queen. Let them remember she was my Queen when I was born under the imperial sun. Previously her ancestors declared themselves rulers in India and elsewhere, without popular consent. Here, though, most of the people consent to the most blatant symbol of inequality and celebrate it. Kate has given them more reason and the jubilee next year gives them another boost.
Republicanism may well come to Swaziland one day. But not here. Not ever. Game, set and match to the wasteful Windsors.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
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Monday 20 June 2011
Europe's top industrial firms have a cache of 240m pollution permits
European Commission estimates energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7-12bn by the end of 2012
Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 June 2011 15.38 BST
larger | smaller
ArcelorMittal steel worker
Steel producer ArcelorMittal tops the list of firms with surplus of emissions trading permits, according to thinktank Sandbag. Photograph AP
Some of Europe's largest industrial companies gained billions of euros from the carbon emission rules they lobbied fiercely against, new analysis reveals today.
Ten steel and cement companies have amassed 240m carbon pollution permits from generous allocations, according to a report by Sandbag, the carbon trading thinktank, seen by the Guardian.
The free permits, granted to companies with a market value of €4bn (£3.5bn), can be sold or kept for future use. The European commission estimates that the entire energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7bn-€12bn by the end of 2012.
"More and more businesses see that Europe's future lies in a highly efficient economy with low pollution," Baroness Worthington, Sandbag's founding director, said. "But a small group of carbon fat-cat companies are trying to stop this, in spite of making billions from a windfall of free pollution permits."
The steelmaker ArcelorMittal leads the list of companies in the report, with a current surplus valued at €1.7bn, followed by Lafarge, the cement group.
Tata Steel, in third place with a surplus valued at €393m, last month announced 1,500 job losses at its plants in Lincolnshire and Teesside, blaming emissions regulations as well as the economic downturn. Karl-Ulrich Köhler, chief executive of Tata Steel Europe, said at the time: "EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry." Tata Steel declined to comment on the report.
The European Union emissions trading scheme (ETS) puts a cap on the carbon pollution emitted by energy and industrial companies. Those reducing their emissions can sell their spare permits to those who do not. But a combination of initial over-allocation by national governments and the economic decline has left the steel, cement, chemical, ceramic and paper sectors with many more permits than they need. The industries have lobbied hard against calls from governments including the UK for the tightening of the ETS and other emissions targets.
Eurofer, the lobby group representing all of Europe's steelmakers, said last month: "To remain competitive in the free, global steel markets, European steel needs … legislation that does not harm its competitiveness. But we are gravely concerned that EU climate change policy will do precisely that."
Cembureau, which lobbies for the cement industry, takes a similar line, stating: "It would be irresponsible to shift the [emissions] goalposts."
In the UK, the government has proposed incentivising low-carbon innovation by setting a British floor price for carbon from 2013. But this is opposed by the CBI. John Cridland, the director general of the employers' group, said: "It risks tipping energy-intensive industries over the edge."
The government has made some concessions, promising to produce plans later in 2011 to compensate businesses for any competitive disadvantage.
However, independent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that the carbon permits held by the steel industry would cover its emissions for the next 12 years. "If the steel sector [on aggregate] did not sell any of its surplus, it would not have a need to purchase emissions until 2023," said Guy Turner at Bloomberg NEF.
The Sandbag report, based on public data, also found that nine of the 10 "carbon fat cats" bought between them 24.4m permits from the cheaper international market, mainly from companies in China and India. These can be used within the EU's trading scheme, enabling companies to retain the more valuable European ETS permits. Furthermore, despite the European companies claiming that tougher emissions rules would drive business overseas, some were paying overseas steel and cement companies for their international carbon permits.
"Purchasing carbon offsets from foreign competitors would not seem to be the actions of businesses genuinely concerned that the ETS will drive business abroad," said Worthington.
Not all companies are resisting the tightening of the European ETS. Five major energy groups, including Britain's Scottish and Southern Energy, last week called for spare permits to be withdrawn, a proposal supported by Sandbag.
"Failure to do so could severely hamper business incentives to invest in low-carbon technologies, as the price signal will be skewed in favour of fossil-based solutions," their statement said.
The Guardian contacted all the companies named by Sandbag. Those who responded argued that the surplus permits arose from decreased production and might be needed when the economy recovered. They said that without protection, steel and cement making would be driven to countries with less CO2-efficient manufacturing practices. Many called for global regulation of emissions
A spokesperson for ArcelorMittal said: "As part of our corporate responsibility strategy, we have decided that any sale of such surplus allowances will be reinvested into projects aimed at the improvement of our energy efficiency footprint, as this will help to reduce our overall CO2 emissions."
Erwin Schneider, at the steelmaker ThyssenKrupp, said: "Companies make decisions based on expected future developments. Any earnings from the past will either have been reinvested already or paid out to shareholders. Therefore it seems to be very misleading to use historic numbers to address our future position."
Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 June 2011 15.38 BST
larger | smaller
ArcelorMittal steel worker
Steel producer ArcelorMittal tops the list of firms with surplus of emissions trading permits, according to thinktank Sandbag. Photograph AP
Some of Europe's largest industrial companies gained billions of euros from the carbon emission rules they lobbied fiercely against, new analysis reveals today.
Ten steel and cement companies have amassed 240m carbon pollution permits from generous allocations, according to a report by Sandbag, the carbon trading thinktank, seen by the Guardian.
The free permits, granted to companies with a market value of €4bn (£3.5bn), can be sold or kept for future use. The European commission estimates that the entire energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7bn-€12bn by the end of 2012.
"More and more businesses see that Europe's future lies in a highly efficient economy with low pollution," Baroness Worthington, Sandbag's founding director, said. "But a small group of carbon fat-cat companies are trying to stop this, in spite of making billions from a windfall of free pollution permits."
The steelmaker ArcelorMittal leads the list of companies in the report, with a current surplus valued at €1.7bn, followed by Lafarge, the cement group.
Tata Steel, in third place with a surplus valued at €393m, last month announced 1,500 job losses at its plants in Lincolnshire and Teesside, blaming emissions regulations as well as the economic downturn. Karl-Ulrich Köhler, chief executive of Tata Steel Europe, said at the time: "EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry." Tata Steel declined to comment on the report.
The European Union emissions trading scheme (ETS) puts a cap on the carbon pollution emitted by energy and industrial companies. Those reducing their emissions can sell their spare permits to those who do not. But a combination of initial over-allocation by national governments and the economic decline has left the steel, cement, chemical, ceramic and paper sectors with many more permits than they need. The industries have lobbied hard against calls from governments including the UK for the tightening of the ETS and other emissions targets.
Eurofer, the lobby group representing all of Europe's steelmakers, said last month: "To remain competitive in the free, global steel markets, European steel needs … legislation that does not harm its competitiveness. But we are gravely concerned that EU climate change policy will do precisely that."
Cembureau, which lobbies for the cement industry, takes a similar line, stating: "It would be irresponsible to shift the [emissions] goalposts."
In the UK, the government has proposed incentivising low-carbon innovation by setting a British floor price for carbon from 2013. But this is opposed by the CBI. John Cridland, the director general of the employers' group, said: "It risks tipping energy-intensive industries over the edge."
The government has made some concessions, promising to produce plans later in 2011 to compensate businesses for any competitive disadvantage.
However, independent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that the carbon permits held by the steel industry would cover its emissions for the next 12 years. "If the steel sector [on aggregate] did not sell any of its surplus, it would not have a need to purchase emissions until 2023," said Guy Turner at Bloomberg NEF.
The Sandbag report, based on public data, also found that nine of the 10 "carbon fat cats" bought between them 24.4m permits from the cheaper international market, mainly from companies in China and India. These can be used within the EU's trading scheme, enabling companies to retain the more valuable European ETS permits. Furthermore, despite the European companies claiming that tougher emissions rules would drive business overseas, some were paying overseas steel and cement companies for their international carbon permits.
"Purchasing carbon offsets from foreign competitors would not seem to be the actions of businesses genuinely concerned that the ETS will drive business abroad," said Worthington.
Not all companies are resisting the tightening of the European ETS. Five major energy groups, including Britain's Scottish and Southern Energy, last week called for spare permits to be withdrawn, a proposal supported by Sandbag.
"Failure to do so could severely hamper business incentives to invest in low-carbon technologies, as the price signal will be skewed in favour of fossil-based solutions," their statement said.
The Guardian contacted all the companies named by Sandbag. Those who responded argued that the surplus permits arose from decreased production and might be needed when the economy recovered. They said that without protection, steel and cement making would be driven to countries with less CO2-efficient manufacturing practices. Many called for global regulation of emissions
A spokesperson for ArcelorMittal said: "As part of our corporate responsibility strategy, we have decided that any sale of such surplus allowances will be reinvested into projects aimed at the improvement of our energy efficiency footprint, as this will help to reduce our overall CO2 emissions."
Erwin Schneider, at the steelmaker ThyssenKrupp, said: "Companies make decisions based on expected future developments. Any earnings from the past will either have been reinvested already or paid out to shareholders. Therefore it seems to be very misleading to use historic numbers to address our future position."
Sunday 19 June 2011
Who Is Undermining Parliament? Civil Society or Government?
Who Is Undermining Parliament? Civil Society or Government?
By Tapas Ranjan Saha
19 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
A debate is raging on the role of civil society and popular movements, and their impact on democracy. In a recent statement, Home Minister P Chidambaram said “Elected members cannot yield to civil society” since this might undermine “parliamentary democracy.” A beleaguered UPA Government is increasingly trying to discredit mass movements against corruption by declaring that civil society cannot usurp the right to legislate – a right which, in a democracy, is the exclusive preserve of elected representatives. This argument needs to be examined closely, because on the face of it, it seems to be premised on well-accepted principles of democracy. Are civil society activists and mass movements really holding Parliamentary democracy to ransom? Or is there a deeper, more shadowy threat to democracy that is kept hidden, with a skilful sleight of hand, by Chidambaram and his colleagues?
In the first place, the accusation that civil society activists are seeking to replace Parliament does not hold water. Civil society activists are seeking to shape the draft of laws, and they also seek to mobilise opinion on the content of the laws and hold elected representatives accountable to such opinion. In the process, common people are more closely informed and involved about specific clauses of laws and specific debates surrounding them, than ever before. But the actual task of enacting the laws still rests with MPs in Parliament; though it is true as a result of the civil society efforts at public participation, the debates within Parliament are more likely to be scrutinised intelligently and alertly by citizens.
Chidambaram and the Congress party seem to be uncomfortable with this continuous process of public participation and scrutiny of the trajectory of laws before they reach Parliament. In an article, Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari warned against street protests, which he equated with ‘street coercion' and fascism. Chidambaram criticised civil society members for challenging the Finance Minister to a televised debate, saying that after all, Parliamentary debates are televised and “voters exercise their franchise from time-to-time.” What the Government seems to be suggesting is that democracy is restricted to voters' right to elect representatives “from time-to-time.” Once people cast their vote, do they cede away their policy-shaping rights for the next five years to the representatives they elect? In other words, is the government suggesting that democracy be available to the citizens only once in five years? Do the people have no right to tell those representatives, through street protests when necessary, exactly what kind of laws they want enacted, especially when those laws often tend to have irrevocable consequences on their lives?
It is strange that the Govt which does not want civil society to dictate to Parliament, has no qualms about corporate CEOs and lobbyists as well as foreign powers dictating laws, policies and even Ministerial appointments. A glaring example was the Radia tapes revelation of how Mukesh Ambani and his lobbyist could even manage to dictate what stand the chief Opposition party will take in Parliament on a key question of energy policy. Wikileaks revealed the close scrutiny and immense influence exerted on India 's parliamentary processes, choice of Ministers (remember the Wikileaks revelation that Murli Deora's appointment as Petroleum Minister was influenced by the US ), foreign policy stances, economic policies and laws by the US . How come the Government does not consider such influence to be a threat to the sovereignty of India 's parliamentary democracy, but resents the scrutiny and influence by India 's own citizens?
Interestingly, the Government, which is raising its eyebrows about the role of civil society activists on the Lokpal panel, is itself appointing un-elected individuals – almost always corporate CEOs - in extremely strategic policy-making positions in ways that seriously undermine Parliament as well as people's right to know. A crucial instance is that of the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) – which has recently secured “in-principle” approval from the Cabinet Committee on Security. NATGRID's CEO is one Captain Raghu Raman, former CEO of Mahindra Special Services Group. Through what parliamentary or democratic process was he appointed? People are in the dark about why he was hand-picked by the Home Minister. Moreover his views and stances are not known to the public.
Civil society activists are public figures, whose ideas are ever open to public scrutiny and debate. We may not agree with everything that Anna Hazare proposes – but his ideas are out there in the open for us to criticize or assess on our own. But things are very different with the likes of Captain Raghu Raman. How many people are aware, for instance, of his views on national security and India 's democracy? When he was the Mahindra SSG boss, he penned an article titled ‘ A Nation of Numb People' in which he opined, “Enterprises would need to raise their own protection units…The idea is to … have private protection units that can work in close cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Think of it as a private territorial army . If the commercial czars don't begin protecting their empires now, they may find the lines of control cutting across those very empires.”
Can Chidambaram tell us why a man who thinks of corporations as ‘czars' with private ‘territories' with the right to command ‘private armies' to wage war on India's citizens is heading the most sensitive, all-compassing intelligence institution in our country? Are India 's Parliament and people aware that NATGRID is headed by a man whose worldview matches those of the worst banana republics?
Another instance Parliament being undermined is in the case of the UID Project. The UID Authority of India headed by Nandan Nilekani – another former CEO - UIDAI came into being without approval in Parliament, let alone wider debate in civil society. The National Identification Authority of India (NIAI) Bill, 2010 has been introduced in the Rajya Sabha, but is yet to be debated or passed, and it is yet to have been placed in the Lok Sabha. With a mere Cabinet approval as its basis, UIDAI headed by Nilekani has already signed MOUs in most states with a range of private agencies and government ministries, and UID cards are already being distributed. Does this not undermine Parliamentary democracy?
What are the credentials of individuals like Raghu Raman or Nilekani? They are not elected parliamentarians. They are not even politicians, who at any rate have to face elections periodically? Neither are they bureaucrats, bound to certain regulations and obligations. They are simply corporate CEOs, accountable only to protecting the interests of corporate profits! Yet we see they are being chosen through sheer discretion and positioned in strategic places to make far-reaching critical changes in our country's policy – that bode disastrous and irreparable implications for country's democracy and citizens' rights.
In a debate on a TV channel, responding to the issue of India signing on the UN Convention on Corruption, Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari declared piously that even a municipal law would take precedence over international laws if the former was contradicted by the latter. Such respect for India 's democratic institutions and sovereignty is commendable – but one wonders where it evaporates when it comes to economic policies dictated by the WTO? In those cases, why does the Indian Government argue that its hands are tied and it has no choice but to amend India 's laws in keeping with WTO directives? It seems the Government invokes the principles of Parliamentary democracy and sovereignty only according to convenience.
The processes initiated by mass movements and civil society activists – whether we agree with all their views or not – strengthen democracy. Citizens do have a right to tell their elected representatives what kind of laws they want enacted and what laws they want changed or scrapped. The SEZ Act was passed by Parliament without a word of dissent. But when implemented, it became clear that those citizens it would affect most – farmers – would not accept it. Would it not have been far more democratic that farmers should have had a right to scrutinise such a law before it was passed in Parliament? Now, farmers' mass protests against land grab are forcing governments to consider their opinions on existing laws on land acquisition and rehabilitation. Opinion is building in the country against the sedition law; earlier, mass protests have forced a debate on laws like AFSPA. These are all processes that are essential to a healthy democracy – and the Government only exposes its authoritarian impulse by trying to discredit such participative processes.
One reader's comment on the web page of a leading English daily that carried the news story – ‘Elected members cannot yield to civil society – Chidambaram' ( http://www.indianexpress.com/news/elected-members-cannot-yield-to-civil-society-chidambaram/800964/ ) hit the nail on the head. This reader has commented caustically, “Yes, they should yield only to corporates and plunderers of the nation.” It seems the UPA Government's bluster is able to convince fewer people every day, as the corporate-dictated corruption under its aegis becomes more and more obvious.
(The author teaches Economics at Sri Aurobindo College (Eve.), Delhi University )
By Tapas Ranjan Saha
19 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
A debate is raging on the role of civil society and popular movements, and their impact on democracy. In a recent statement, Home Minister P Chidambaram said “Elected members cannot yield to civil society” since this might undermine “parliamentary democracy.” A beleaguered UPA Government is increasingly trying to discredit mass movements against corruption by declaring that civil society cannot usurp the right to legislate – a right which, in a democracy, is the exclusive preserve of elected representatives. This argument needs to be examined closely, because on the face of it, it seems to be premised on well-accepted principles of democracy. Are civil society activists and mass movements really holding Parliamentary democracy to ransom? Or is there a deeper, more shadowy threat to democracy that is kept hidden, with a skilful sleight of hand, by Chidambaram and his colleagues?
In the first place, the accusation that civil society activists are seeking to replace Parliament does not hold water. Civil society activists are seeking to shape the draft of laws, and they also seek to mobilise opinion on the content of the laws and hold elected representatives accountable to such opinion. In the process, common people are more closely informed and involved about specific clauses of laws and specific debates surrounding them, than ever before. But the actual task of enacting the laws still rests with MPs in Parliament; though it is true as a result of the civil society efforts at public participation, the debates within Parliament are more likely to be scrutinised intelligently and alertly by citizens.
Chidambaram and the Congress party seem to be uncomfortable with this continuous process of public participation and scrutiny of the trajectory of laws before they reach Parliament. In an article, Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari warned against street protests, which he equated with ‘street coercion' and fascism. Chidambaram criticised civil society members for challenging the Finance Minister to a televised debate, saying that after all, Parliamentary debates are televised and “voters exercise their franchise from time-to-time.” What the Government seems to be suggesting is that democracy is restricted to voters' right to elect representatives “from time-to-time.” Once people cast their vote, do they cede away their policy-shaping rights for the next five years to the representatives they elect? In other words, is the government suggesting that democracy be available to the citizens only once in five years? Do the people have no right to tell those representatives, through street protests when necessary, exactly what kind of laws they want enacted, especially when those laws often tend to have irrevocable consequences on their lives?
It is strange that the Govt which does not want civil society to dictate to Parliament, has no qualms about corporate CEOs and lobbyists as well as foreign powers dictating laws, policies and even Ministerial appointments. A glaring example was the Radia tapes revelation of how Mukesh Ambani and his lobbyist could even manage to dictate what stand the chief Opposition party will take in Parliament on a key question of energy policy. Wikileaks revealed the close scrutiny and immense influence exerted on India 's parliamentary processes, choice of Ministers (remember the Wikileaks revelation that Murli Deora's appointment as Petroleum Minister was influenced by the US ), foreign policy stances, economic policies and laws by the US . How come the Government does not consider such influence to be a threat to the sovereignty of India 's parliamentary democracy, but resents the scrutiny and influence by India 's own citizens?
Interestingly, the Government, which is raising its eyebrows about the role of civil society activists on the Lokpal panel, is itself appointing un-elected individuals – almost always corporate CEOs - in extremely strategic policy-making positions in ways that seriously undermine Parliament as well as people's right to know. A crucial instance is that of the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) – which has recently secured “in-principle” approval from the Cabinet Committee on Security. NATGRID's CEO is one Captain Raghu Raman, former CEO of Mahindra Special Services Group. Through what parliamentary or democratic process was he appointed? People are in the dark about why he was hand-picked by the Home Minister. Moreover his views and stances are not known to the public.
Civil society activists are public figures, whose ideas are ever open to public scrutiny and debate. We may not agree with everything that Anna Hazare proposes – but his ideas are out there in the open for us to criticize or assess on our own. But things are very different with the likes of Captain Raghu Raman. How many people are aware, for instance, of his views on national security and India 's democracy? When he was the Mahindra SSG boss, he penned an article titled ‘ A Nation of Numb People' in which he opined, “Enterprises would need to raise their own protection units…The idea is to … have private protection units that can work in close cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Think of it as a private territorial army . If the commercial czars don't begin protecting their empires now, they may find the lines of control cutting across those very empires.”
Can Chidambaram tell us why a man who thinks of corporations as ‘czars' with private ‘territories' with the right to command ‘private armies' to wage war on India's citizens is heading the most sensitive, all-compassing intelligence institution in our country? Are India 's Parliament and people aware that NATGRID is headed by a man whose worldview matches those of the worst banana republics?
Another instance Parliament being undermined is in the case of the UID Project. The UID Authority of India headed by Nandan Nilekani – another former CEO - UIDAI came into being without approval in Parliament, let alone wider debate in civil society. The National Identification Authority of India (NIAI) Bill, 2010 has been introduced in the Rajya Sabha, but is yet to be debated or passed, and it is yet to have been placed in the Lok Sabha. With a mere Cabinet approval as its basis, UIDAI headed by Nilekani has already signed MOUs in most states with a range of private agencies and government ministries, and UID cards are already being distributed. Does this not undermine Parliamentary democracy?
What are the credentials of individuals like Raghu Raman or Nilekani? They are not elected parliamentarians. They are not even politicians, who at any rate have to face elections periodically? Neither are they bureaucrats, bound to certain regulations and obligations. They are simply corporate CEOs, accountable only to protecting the interests of corporate profits! Yet we see they are being chosen through sheer discretion and positioned in strategic places to make far-reaching critical changes in our country's policy – that bode disastrous and irreparable implications for country's democracy and citizens' rights.
In a debate on a TV channel, responding to the issue of India signing on the UN Convention on Corruption, Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari declared piously that even a municipal law would take precedence over international laws if the former was contradicted by the latter. Such respect for India 's democratic institutions and sovereignty is commendable – but one wonders where it evaporates when it comes to economic policies dictated by the WTO? In those cases, why does the Indian Government argue that its hands are tied and it has no choice but to amend India 's laws in keeping with WTO directives? It seems the Government invokes the principles of Parliamentary democracy and sovereignty only according to convenience.
The processes initiated by mass movements and civil society activists – whether we agree with all their views or not – strengthen democracy. Citizens do have a right to tell their elected representatives what kind of laws they want enacted and what laws they want changed or scrapped. The SEZ Act was passed by Parliament without a word of dissent. But when implemented, it became clear that those citizens it would affect most – farmers – would not accept it. Would it not have been far more democratic that farmers should have had a right to scrutinise such a law before it was passed in Parliament? Now, farmers' mass protests against land grab are forcing governments to consider their opinions on existing laws on land acquisition and rehabilitation. Opinion is building in the country against the sedition law; earlier, mass protests have forced a debate on laws like AFSPA. These are all processes that are essential to a healthy democracy – and the Government only exposes its authoritarian impulse by trying to discredit such participative processes.
One reader's comment on the web page of a leading English daily that carried the news story – ‘Elected members cannot yield to civil society – Chidambaram' ( http://www.indianexpress.com/news/elected-members-cannot-yield-to-civil-society-chidambaram/800964/ ) hit the nail on the head. This reader has commented caustically, “Yes, they should yield only to corporates and plunderers of the nation.” It seems the UPA Government's bluster is able to convince fewer people every day, as the corporate-dictated corruption under its aegis becomes more and more obvious.
(The author teaches Economics at Sri Aurobindo College (Eve.), Delhi University )
Engineers always do the business, Lord Sugar
Contrary to what the entrepreneur and Apprentice presenter says, we need more engineers in business
James Dyson
James Dyson
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011
Reality TV is anything but. If The Apprentice is to be believed, our economy will only recover if we all don pinstripe, spout jargon, shout over one another and deliver a "killer pitch". Fast, furious… and fired. Also, so it seems, there's no place for engineers. "I've never met an engineer who can turn his hand to business," pronounced Lord Sugar last week.
Safe to say I disagree with him – engineers can lead successful businesses. In fact, 15% of FTSE 100 companies have engineers on their board. They are analytical problem solvers – it's why the City loves engineers. I wish it didn't. I'm trying to lure another 400 bright minds to our Wiltshire laboratories.
But Britain has a very misplaced view of engineers. They're either seen as eccentric boffins who speak in algebraic formula, or fixers, sorting faulty cookers, broken-down cars. All important but, at base, engineering is about problem-solving and inventing, making lives better through developing new technology.
British companies such as Rolls-Royce, ARM and JCB are world leaders and they create jobs, technology and cash. And yet those who trade for a living still hold more respect than those who make things. But unless we invent and make more, Britain will have nothing left to export and our deficit will continue to grow. I understand the value of a good deal, but it's a shame our trains now need to be made in Germany rather than Derby.
India, China, France and Germany value their engineers and Barack Obama has announced plans to train an additional 10,000 US engineers every year (though I am sure he'll need more). In these countries, engineers lead businesses and often have a seat at the government table. Sony founder Akio Morita was astounded at how few engineers there were leading British businesses.
China, having already overtaken Japan as the world's second-biggest economy, is growing at around 9% a year and could overtake the US by 2030. No longer content with "Made in China", it has to be "Engineered in China". Its government knows the importance of creating intellectual property, which is one reason behind its staggering output of fresh engineering graduates every year – 300,000 against our own 20,000.
Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes. They create new technology and appealing products to export. But it's a long-term endeavour. And Britain, if it's to stay in the game, needs to invest now.
My charity conducts workshops in schools and universities across the UK. We encourage young people to find out how things work, brains and hands in tandem. I think Lord Sugar would be impressed by some these bright sparks. They want to make things but they are commercially savvy too. They've conceived the idea, developed a prototype and understand why it works better than anything else: who better to sell the concept?
Not every idea can be a winner, but some are. Yusuf Muhammed, a winner of our student design award, now sells his invention, Automist, a tap that detects a fire and emits a fine mist to put it out. The idea is on its way to commercial success.
And let's not forget that Lord Sugar has a lot to thank British engineers for, not least because John Logie Baird pioneered television.
James Dyson
James Dyson
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011
Reality TV is anything but. If The Apprentice is to be believed, our economy will only recover if we all don pinstripe, spout jargon, shout over one another and deliver a "killer pitch". Fast, furious… and fired. Also, so it seems, there's no place for engineers. "I've never met an engineer who can turn his hand to business," pronounced Lord Sugar last week.
Safe to say I disagree with him – engineers can lead successful businesses. In fact, 15% of FTSE 100 companies have engineers on their board. They are analytical problem solvers – it's why the City loves engineers. I wish it didn't. I'm trying to lure another 400 bright minds to our Wiltshire laboratories.
But Britain has a very misplaced view of engineers. They're either seen as eccentric boffins who speak in algebraic formula, or fixers, sorting faulty cookers, broken-down cars. All important but, at base, engineering is about problem-solving and inventing, making lives better through developing new technology.
British companies such as Rolls-Royce, ARM and JCB are world leaders and they create jobs, technology and cash. And yet those who trade for a living still hold more respect than those who make things. But unless we invent and make more, Britain will have nothing left to export and our deficit will continue to grow. I understand the value of a good deal, but it's a shame our trains now need to be made in Germany rather than Derby.
India, China, France and Germany value their engineers and Barack Obama has announced plans to train an additional 10,000 US engineers every year (though I am sure he'll need more). In these countries, engineers lead businesses and often have a seat at the government table. Sony founder Akio Morita was astounded at how few engineers there were leading British businesses.
China, having already overtaken Japan as the world's second-biggest economy, is growing at around 9% a year and could overtake the US by 2030. No longer content with "Made in China", it has to be "Engineered in China". Its government knows the importance of creating intellectual property, which is one reason behind its staggering output of fresh engineering graduates every year – 300,000 against our own 20,000.
Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes. They create new technology and appealing products to export. But it's a long-term endeavour. And Britain, if it's to stay in the game, needs to invest now.
My charity conducts workshops in schools and universities across the UK. We encourage young people to find out how things work, brains and hands in tandem. I think Lord Sugar would be impressed by some these bright sparks. They want to make things but they are commercially savvy too. They've conceived the idea, developed a prototype and understand why it works better than anything else: who better to sell the concept?
Not every idea can be a winner, but some are. Yusuf Muhammed, a winner of our student design award, now sells his invention, Automist, a tap that detects a fire and emits a fine mist to put it out. The idea is on its way to commercial success.
And let's not forget that Lord Sugar has a lot to thank British engineers for, not least because John Logie Baird pioneered television.
Testosterone and high finance do not mix: so bring on the women
Gender inequality has been an issue in the City for years, but now the new science of 'neuroeconomics' is proving the point beyond doubt: hormonally-driven young men should not be left alone in charge of our finances…
Tim Adams
Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011
Brokers Continue To Trade During Financial Turmoil
Panic hits the trading floor in October 2008. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
For the past few weeks I've had two books by my bed, both of which offer a first draft of what history may well judge the most significant event of our times: the 2008 financial crash. Read together, they are about as close as we might come to a closing chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. As literature, one of them – the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Treasury – doesn't always make for easy reading: there are far too many nameless villains for a start. And, quite pointedly, there is not a heroine in sight. Reading the report I became preoccupied by, among other things – the fairy steps from millions to billions to trillions, say – the overwhelming maleness of the world described. The words "she", "woman" or "her" do not appear once in its 662 pages. It is a book, like most historical tragedies, written about the follies and hubris of men.
The other book, an entirely compulsive companion volume, is Michael Lewis's best-selling The Big Short, which Google Earths you into the crisis. Rather than looking at a global picture, it lets you into the bedrooms and boardrooms of the individual corporate men who catastrophically lost billions of dollars and, on the other side of those bets, the extraordinary ragtag of obsessive individuals who saw what was coming and made eye-watering fortunes. It gives the crash a human face, and once again that face is universally male.
The books are linked by more than subject matter, though. Lewis, a one-time bond trader himself – he left, 20-odd years ago, in incredulity and disgust to write his insider's account, Liar's Poker – gave evidence to the Crisis Inquiry Commission over the course of its 18-month sitting. In the end, however, he refused to sign off the report; and not only did he refuse to sign it, he also refused to put his name to the dissenters' addenda to the report, which three of the committee insisted upon. And not only that, he did not add his name to that of the single individual who insisted on a further addendum stating that he dissented from the dissenters' view. Lewis was not a fan of the report.
The reason for this was simple, he suggested. He felt that the committee, for all its considered judgment, had not understood, from the outset, a single, pivotal word. That word was "unprecedented". Though the inquiry had set out in the belief that the crash was an event different in kind to anything that had gone before, it nevertheless proceeded to judge it in the terms of previous crashes. What it failed to do, in Lewis's eyes, was this: it neglected to look for the things that might have changed in Wall Street or the City, the things that might have made individuals on the trading floors act in ways that were seen to be entirely, unprecedentedly, reckless. When he came to consider these things himself, Lewis felt that perhaps chief among the unprecedented novelties was this one: women.
"Of course," he observed, with tongue firmly in cheek, "the women who flooded into Wall Street firms before the crisis weren't typically permitted to take big financial risks. As a rule they remained in the background, as 'helpmates'. But their presence clearly distorted the judgment of male bond traders – though the mechanics of their influence remains unexplored by the commission. They may have compelled the male risk-takers to 'show off for the ladies', for instance, or perhaps they merely asked annoying questions and undermined the risk-takers' confidence. At any rate, one sure sign of the importance of women in the crisis is the market's subsequent response: to purge women from senior Wall Street roles…"
When I first read those remarks it was not clear how much in earnest Lewis had been when he made them. Subsequently, though, I heard him speak at the London School of Economics, and he took this idea in a slightly different direction. When asked what single thing he would do to reform the markets and prevent such a catastrophe happening again, he said: "I would take steps to have 50% of women in risk positions in banks." Pressed on this, he went on to suggest how science reveals that women in general make smarter decisions regarding investment than men, that when it comes to money, women in couples are demonstrably better at evaluating risk than their partners, and single women much better still.
Though those of us males who have an uncanny sense of money always slipping through our fingers might anecdotally believe this to be true, I was surprised to hear it stated as a fact. It seemed to beg a number of questions. First, if women really are better at making these judgments, why is it always men, still, without exception, who troop out before select committees to explain where it all went wrong, and how they weren't really to blame. And second, would it really be different if women were in charge?
You don't have to look too far into the science to realise that Lewis's claim, in broad terms, stands up. The first definitive study in this area appeared in 2001 in a celebrated paper that broke down the investment decisions made with a brokerage firm by 35,000 households in America. The study, called, inevitably, "Boys will be Boys" found that while men were confident in making multiple changes to investments, their annual returns were, on average, a full percentage point below those of women who invested the family finances, and nearly half as much again inferior to single women.
A more recent study of 2.7 million personal investors found that during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, men were much more likely than women to sell any shares they owned at stock market lows. Male investors, as a group, appeared to be overconfident, the author of this study suggested. "There's been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they're doing, even when they really don't know what they're doing." A fact that will come as a surprise to few of us. Men, it seemed, typically believed they could make sense of every piece of short-term financial news. Women, never embarrassed to ask directions, were on the whole far more likely to acknowledge when they didn't know something. As a consequence, women shifted their positions far less frequently, and made significantly more money as a result.
Naturally, if these findings were widely applicable, then it would be hard not to agree with Lewis's suggestion for reforming the sharpest end of capitalism. Rather than ring-fencing casino investment banks or demanding that high street banks hold vastly greater capital, as we heard at the Mansion House last week, wouldn't a safer model just be to hire more women?
To argue this case, you would probably need more than just behavioural evidence; you might need to understand some of the mechanisms which produced the trillion-dollar bad decision-making that led to what happened in 2008. In recent years, and particularly since the crash, a new science of such decision-making – neuroeconomics – has become fashionable in universities and beyond. It proposes the idea that you will create a better understanding of how people make economic choices if you bring to bear advances in neurobiology and brain chemistry and behavioural psychology alongside traditional economic maths models. Not surprisingly, neuroeconomics has plenty to say about the question of whether decision-making, in high-pressure situations, divides on gender lines.
The problem is that most of the scenarios used to investigate this divide are artificial. It is one thing attaching someone to an MRI scanner and telling him or her that a million pounds rests on their decision in a game; it is another when that person actually stands to lose a million pounds. Only one study, as far as I could discover, has had access to the brain chemistry, the neural biology, of young men actually working on trading floors. But the results it produced were nonetheless startling.
The study was led by a pair of Cambridge researchers. One, Joe Herbert, is a professor of endocrinology, and the other, John Coates, a research fellow in neuroscience and finance. Herbert, a specialist in the effect of hormones on depression, was fascinated to put some of his theories about the role of chemicals on decision making into practice. The curious thing about banks, he told me, "was that they know all about computers and systems and markets but they know next to nothing about the human machine sitting in the chair in front of screens making decisions. Nothing. We aimed to correct that just slightly."
It was Coates, though, who made the experiment possible. Having met Herbert at his lab in Cambridge, I met Coates in a pub in west London. He had a special advantage in gaining access to bond traders' brains, he explained: he used to possess one himself. Sharp-eyed and fit-looking, Coates retains the intensity of a man who used to run a trading desk on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. He started off at Goldman Sachs and went on to Deutsche Bank. After some years trading, and making a lot of money out of a lot of money, he became increasingly fascinated by the way, during the dotcom years, the traders he worked alongside radically changed behaviour. They became, he says, "euphoric and delusional. They were taking far more risks, and were putting up trades with terrible risk-reward profiles". The dotcom was fun, in a way, he suggests; it was like the roaring 20s. "But I don't think anyone looks back on the housing bubble and laughs."
Coates was a relatively cautious trader himself, but there had been times when he too felt this surge, this euphoria: "When I had been making a lot of money myself, I felt unbelievably powerful," he recalls. "You carry yourself like a strutting rooster, and you can't help it. Michael Lewis talked about 'Big Swinging Dicks', Tom Wolfe talked about 'Masters of the Universe' – they were right. A trader on a winning streak acts exactly that way."
The second thing that Coates noticed was even more revelatory to him. "I noticed that women did not buy into the dotcom bubble at all," he says. "You couldn't find one who did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me."
With this cool fact in mind, Coates began splitting his time between his trading desk and the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, which is perhaps the world's leading institute for the study of brain chemicals. There he started to become interested in steroids, and in particular something called "the winner effect". This occurs when two males enter a competition and their testosterone levels rise, increasing their muscle mass and the ability of the blood to carry oxygen. It also enhances their appetite for risk. Much of this testosterone stays in the system of the winner of a competition, while the loser's testosterone melts away fast; in evolutionary terms, the loser retires to the woods to lick his wounds. In the next round of competition, though, the winner already has high levels of testosterone, so he starts with an advantage, and this continues to reinforce itself.
"Steroids," Coates explains, "like most chemicals in your body, display what is called an inverted U-shaped response curve." That is to say, when you have low levels of them you lack vitality, and do very poorly at mental and physical tasks. But as the levels rise you get sharper and more focused until you reach an optimum. The key thing is this, however: "If you keep winning, your testosterone level goes past that peak and sliding down the other side. You start doing stupid things. When that happens to animals, they go out in the open too much. They pick too many fights. They neglect parenting duties. And they patrol areas that are too large." In short, they behave like traders on a roll; they get cocky.
Coates became convinced that this winner effect was what he observed in bullish trading markets, and what ended up dramatically distorting them. It also explained why women were mostly immune to the euphoria, because they had only 10% of the testosterone of men. What struck him most, though, was that, for all the literature about financial instability, economics, psychology, game theory, no one had ever clinically looked at a trader who was caught up in a bubble.
Coates wrote a research proposal. He came back to Cambridge where he had done his first degree, and because of his background eventually gained access, with Herbert, to a major City bond-dealing floor in London. They tested the traders for two hormones in particular, testosterone and cortisol (the anxiety induced, depressive "stress hormone"), and mapped their levels over a period of weeks against the success or failure of trades, individual profit and loss. Coates had imagined the experiment to be a preliminary study but the correlations he found – for evidence of irrationality produced by the winner effect and its converse – was "an absolute dream". They not only discovered that a trader's morning testosterone level could be used to predict his day's profitability. They also found that a trader's cortisol rose with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. The results pointed to a further possibility: as volatility increased, the hormones seemed to shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.
Though the sample was limited, and suitable caution was needed in claiming too much, the correlations suggested that over a certain peak, testosterone impaired the risk assessment of traders. "And cortisol," he suggests, "was in some ways even more interesting than testosterone. We thought cortisol would rise when traders lost money," Coates says, making individuals more than usually cautious, "but actually it was going up incredibly when they were faced with just uncertainty. The stress hormones were switching over to emergency states all the time. There was an optimal level but these stress hormones can linger for months. Then you get all sorts of really pathological behaviours. If you are constantly prepared for high tension it affects your brain, and it causes you to recall stressful memories and become exaggeratedly risk-averse and kind of helpless."
Unfortunately this particular study ended in June 2007, before the full effect of the crisis, but its implications account, Coates believes, for some of what he subsequently heard from the trading floor. "If cortisol goes beyond a certain point, then it may become very difficult for traders to assess any risk at all. These guys are not built to handle adversity that well. There is an observable condition called 'learned helplessness', which if you are submitting to great stress over a long period of time makes you give up suddenly. Lab animals develop it: you open the cage and they won't escape. Traders have it too. They just slump in their chairs. In the crisis there were classic arbitrage opportunities as the markets were falling. Free money. But traders would sit there staring at the numbers and not touching it."
Since then, Coates has partly been working on the other strand of his original hypothesis, looking at the brain chemistry of women working in the markets. Because of the small sample sizes he has to work with – there were only three women out of 250 traders on the floor he first tested – the detail of that is far from complete, and he is properly reluctant to draw conclusions. What he will go so far as to say, though, is this. "Central bankers, often brilliant people, spend their life trying to stop a bubble or prevent a crash, and they are spectacularly unsuccessful at it. And I think it is because, at the centre of the market, you have these guys either ripped on testosterone or overwhelmed by cortisol so that they become completely price insensitive." Coates wrote a couple of articles after that research was published, suggesting that, if the winner effect was right, it was possible that bubbles were an entirely young male phenomenon. And if that were the case, then the best way of preventing boom and bust was to have more women and more older men – less in thrall to hormones – in the markets. "We know that opinion diversity is crucial to stable markets. What no one talks about is endocrine diversity, a diversity of hormones. The billion-dollar question is how to achieve it."
To most experienced, male, investment bankers, of course, this sounds like fighting talk. An old friend of mine, who traded his Cambridge English degree for an extremely lucrative life as a bond dealer, offered this, when I presented Coates's evidence to him. "It would be nice to think that having more female traders on the floor would make for less volatility," he said, "but that's wishful thinking. Financial markets are now global, so while we in the west might decide not to chase trends or react instinctively to breaking news because there are mature mothering types in boardrooms and sitting on risk committees, the rest of the world will, and our banks would lose out." And that's not all. "Many of the women I know who have managed money or have put capital at risk for banks have tended to be even more aggressive with risk than their male counterparts, as if perhaps to compensate for their supposed diffidence. Fighting their way through a male-dominated environment to a position in which they can invest/punt/ risk-manage, many women develop an ultra-masculine persona so as to be thought of as ballsy…"
Just a cursory glance through some of the recent spate of books and blogs written by young women who have worked in the City and lived to tell the tale would certainly seem to support this observation. Melanie Berliet, who worked as one of the only female traders in Wall Street, set the tone in her confessional blog: "If anything," she observed, "my token status gave me an extra thrill. I enjoyed being called a 'fucking dullard' or being instructed, patronisingly, to 'remove head from ass', because my reaction – to grin rather than cry – impressed the guys. I loved their attention and the daily opportunities to prove that I fitted in. What separated me from my colleagues was physical: my 5ft 9in, 120lb frame, my long, blondish hair – and my vagina. I had two options with my boss: trade sexual banter or resist. Typically, I chose the former. Like most traders, my base salary wasn't terribly high—$75,000 at the start of my third year. The bonus was all, and getting the right number rested on one thing, as I saw it: my willingness to promote my boss's fantasy of fucking me…"
John Coates doesn't believe the caricature, or at least he believes that in the upper reaches of banks, things have moved on. "A lot of my former colleagues are running divisions, or whole banks," he says. "I don't buy the sexist macho argument. The big investment banks desperately want women traders. But when they interview women who are qualified, the women don't want to do it…"
Neuroeconomics also starts to provide the answers to some of the reasons for that. Muriel Niederle is a professor at Stanford University, looking at gender differences in risk decisions. Over a period of years Niederle has developed clear evidence for the theory that though in non-competitive situations women demonstrate an advantage over men in making investment decisions, they either shy away completely from making those decisions in intensely competitive environments, or they respond less well than men to competition with very short-term high intensity and results-driven focus. This pattern is set, Niederle proves, from a very young age (and no doubt has a good deal to do with the differential presence of troublesome testosterone). Joe Herbert told me at his lab in Cambridge: "What is clear is that there are neurological differences between the sexes. Women, in very general terms, are less competitive, and less concerned with the status of being successful. If you want to make women more present, you have to remember two things: the world they are coming into is a man-made world. The financial world. So, either they become surrogate men… or you change the world."
Ah, changing the world. In the wake of 2008, there was a good deal of talk about that heady idea. Much of this talk concerned the creation of more gender balance in the city. The Economist coined the phrase "Womenomics" and argued that excluding nearly 50% of talent from crucial positions in business and finance was not only discriminatory but caused serious harm to stability and growth. Iceland's banks brought in women to clear up the mess that men had left. A good deal was made of the fact that the extraordinary success of microfinance in the developing world was because 97% of the loans were granted to women (men were – biologically? culturally? – not to be trusted). Science, neuroeconomics, was harnessed to develop some of those themes. And then, well, nothing. The commissions and the select committees decided that a return to something like the status quo, with all its implicit risks and inequalities, was the only option.
Womenomics still persists in a few places, however. The 30% Club was an initiative set up last November by executive women, and some senior men in FTSE 100 companies and accountancy and legal practices, to increase the number of women in decision-making and boardroom positions to that figure. It goes a little further than Lord Davies's recent report on the subject. But 30% is not an arbitrary number; it is thought – by neuroeconomists again, and through observation – to be the minimum proportion of women at the top of an organisation required to begin to change the culture; below that number, women tend to behave "like surrogate men"; above it, the subtle differences produced by gender might begin to influence the way decisions are made. In Britain there is still a good way to go: only 5.5% of executive directors in FTSE 100 companies are women (yet evidence shows that companies with women leaders have a 35% higher return on equity, and companies with more than three women on their corporate board have an 80% higher return on equity). On city trading floors, the percentage remains, for some of the reasons outlined above, at around 3% or 4%. Testosterone rules.
The country that has attempted most radically to change this balance is Norway, where a Conservative minister imposed a quota of 40% female directors in every boardroom. Most of the data suggests the initiative has been a great success, both culturally and commercially (though some, male, commentators argue that the turnaround is better explained by the spike in oil prices).
It would be hard to find many people in the city, even among women, who would favour quotas, though that argument can be made. John Coates, wearing his dealmaker's hat, suggests a practical solution. "The question is not whether men are risk takers and women are risk-averse. It is more what kind of risk do they want to take? My hunch is that women don't like high-frequency trading, so what you have to do is change the accounting period over which they are judged."
He then gives me a potted description of how things remain: "Say you have two traders. One trader makes $20m a year for five years, of which she might typically pocket a couple of million a year herself. At the end of five years she has made the bank the best part of $90m. Another trader makes $100m a year for four years. They don't want that guy to go off to a hedge fund so they let him take home $20m a year. But then in the fifth year – because of the winner effect – he loses $500m. That is essentially what happened in the financial crash. The bank has lost $100m and the trader has gained $80m. If you were judging these things over a five-year period, then you can see which person you would hire."
But, of course, that would require a very different idea of markets, and of money, to the one that is currently desperately being defended and remade. It would certainly require a greater degree of "endocrinal diversity". Still, the next time you hear someone suggest that things are getting back to "normal" in the city, and that we should at all costs start believing in exponential growth again, at least you can look him in the eye and state that you think his hormones might be playing up.
Neuroeconomics: Six things that the science of decision-making reveals
■ If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.
■ Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.
■ Men's brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.
■ Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.
■ Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.
■ Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions
Tim Adams
Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011
Brokers Continue To Trade During Financial Turmoil
Panic hits the trading floor in October 2008. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
For the past few weeks I've had two books by my bed, both of which offer a first draft of what history may well judge the most significant event of our times: the 2008 financial crash. Read together, they are about as close as we might come to a closing chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. As literature, one of them – the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Treasury – doesn't always make for easy reading: there are far too many nameless villains for a start. And, quite pointedly, there is not a heroine in sight. Reading the report I became preoccupied by, among other things – the fairy steps from millions to billions to trillions, say – the overwhelming maleness of the world described. The words "she", "woman" or "her" do not appear once in its 662 pages. It is a book, like most historical tragedies, written about the follies and hubris of men.
The other book, an entirely compulsive companion volume, is Michael Lewis's best-selling The Big Short, which Google Earths you into the crisis. Rather than looking at a global picture, it lets you into the bedrooms and boardrooms of the individual corporate men who catastrophically lost billions of dollars and, on the other side of those bets, the extraordinary ragtag of obsessive individuals who saw what was coming and made eye-watering fortunes. It gives the crash a human face, and once again that face is universally male.
The books are linked by more than subject matter, though. Lewis, a one-time bond trader himself – he left, 20-odd years ago, in incredulity and disgust to write his insider's account, Liar's Poker – gave evidence to the Crisis Inquiry Commission over the course of its 18-month sitting. In the end, however, he refused to sign off the report; and not only did he refuse to sign it, he also refused to put his name to the dissenters' addenda to the report, which three of the committee insisted upon. And not only that, he did not add his name to that of the single individual who insisted on a further addendum stating that he dissented from the dissenters' view. Lewis was not a fan of the report.
The reason for this was simple, he suggested. He felt that the committee, for all its considered judgment, had not understood, from the outset, a single, pivotal word. That word was "unprecedented". Though the inquiry had set out in the belief that the crash was an event different in kind to anything that had gone before, it nevertheless proceeded to judge it in the terms of previous crashes. What it failed to do, in Lewis's eyes, was this: it neglected to look for the things that might have changed in Wall Street or the City, the things that might have made individuals on the trading floors act in ways that were seen to be entirely, unprecedentedly, reckless. When he came to consider these things himself, Lewis felt that perhaps chief among the unprecedented novelties was this one: women.
"Of course," he observed, with tongue firmly in cheek, "the women who flooded into Wall Street firms before the crisis weren't typically permitted to take big financial risks. As a rule they remained in the background, as 'helpmates'. But their presence clearly distorted the judgment of male bond traders – though the mechanics of their influence remains unexplored by the commission. They may have compelled the male risk-takers to 'show off for the ladies', for instance, or perhaps they merely asked annoying questions and undermined the risk-takers' confidence. At any rate, one sure sign of the importance of women in the crisis is the market's subsequent response: to purge women from senior Wall Street roles…"
When I first read those remarks it was not clear how much in earnest Lewis had been when he made them. Subsequently, though, I heard him speak at the London School of Economics, and he took this idea in a slightly different direction. When asked what single thing he would do to reform the markets and prevent such a catastrophe happening again, he said: "I would take steps to have 50% of women in risk positions in banks." Pressed on this, he went on to suggest how science reveals that women in general make smarter decisions regarding investment than men, that when it comes to money, women in couples are demonstrably better at evaluating risk than their partners, and single women much better still.
Though those of us males who have an uncanny sense of money always slipping through our fingers might anecdotally believe this to be true, I was surprised to hear it stated as a fact. It seemed to beg a number of questions. First, if women really are better at making these judgments, why is it always men, still, without exception, who troop out before select committees to explain where it all went wrong, and how they weren't really to blame. And second, would it really be different if women were in charge?
You don't have to look too far into the science to realise that Lewis's claim, in broad terms, stands up. The first definitive study in this area appeared in 2001 in a celebrated paper that broke down the investment decisions made with a brokerage firm by 35,000 households in America. The study, called, inevitably, "Boys will be Boys" found that while men were confident in making multiple changes to investments, their annual returns were, on average, a full percentage point below those of women who invested the family finances, and nearly half as much again inferior to single women.
A more recent study of 2.7 million personal investors found that during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, men were much more likely than women to sell any shares they owned at stock market lows. Male investors, as a group, appeared to be overconfident, the author of this study suggested. "There's been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they're doing, even when they really don't know what they're doing." A fact that will come as a surprise to few of us. Men, it seemed, typically believed they could make sense of every piece of short-term financial news. Women, never embarrassed to ask directions, were on the whole far more likely to acknowledge when they didn't know something. As a consequence, women shifted their positions far less frequently, and made significantly more money as a result.
Naturally, if these findings were widely applicable, then it would be hard not to agree with Lewis's suggestion for reforming the sharpest end of capitalism. Rather than ring-fencing casino investment banks or demanding that high street banks hold vastly greater capital, as we heard at the Mansion House last week, wouldn't a safer model just be to hire more women?
To argue this case, you would probably need more than just behavioural evidence; you might need to understand some of the mechanisms which produced the trillion-dollar bad decision-making that led to what happened in 2008. In recent years, and particularly since the crash, a new science of such decision-making – neuroeconomics – has become fashionable in universities and beyond. It proposes the idea that you will create a better understanding of how people make economic choices if you bring to bear advances in neurobiology and brain chemistry and behavioural psychology alongside traditional economic maths models. Not surprisingly, neuroeconomics has plenty to say about the question of whether decision-making, in high-pressure situations, divides on gender lines.
The problem is that most of the scenarios used to investigate this divide are artificial. It is one thing attaching someone to an MRI scanner and telling him or her that a million pounds rests on their decision in a game; it is another when that person actually stands to lose a million pounds. Only one study, as far as I could discover, has had access to the brain chemistry, the neural biology, of young men actually working on trading floors. But the results it produced were nonetheless startling.
The study was led by a pair of Cambridge researchers. One, Joe Herbert, is a professor of endocrinology, and the other, John Coates, a research fellow in neuroscience and finance. Herbert, a specialist in the effect of hormones on depression, was fascinated to put some of his theories about the role of chemicals on decision making into practice. The curious thing about banks, he told me, "was that they know all about computers and systems and markets but they know next to nothing about the human machine sitting in the chair in front of screens making decisions. Nothing. We aimed to correct that just slightly."
It was Coates, though, who made the experiment possible. Having met Herbert at his lab in Cambridge, I met Coates in a pub in west London. He had a special advantage in gaining access to bond traders' brains, he explained: he used to possess one himself. Sharp-eyed and fit-looking, Coates retains the intensity of a man who used to run a trading desk on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. He started off at Goldman Sachs and went on to Deutsche Bank. After some years trading, and making a lot of money out of a lot of money, he became increasingly fascinated by the way, during the dotcom years, the traders he worked alongside radically changed behaviour. They became, he says, "euphoric and delusional. They were taking far more risks, and were putting up trades with terrible risk-reward profiles". The dotcom was fun, in a way, he suggests; it was like the roaring 20s. "But I don't think anyone looks back on the housing bubble and laughs."
Coates was a relatively cautious trader himself, but there had been times when he too felt this surge, this euphoria: "When I had been making a lot of money myself, I felt unbelievably powerful," he recalls. "You carry yourself like a strutting rooster, and you can't help it. Michael Lewis talked about 'Big Swinging Dicks', Tom Wolfe talked about 'Masters of the Universe' – they were right. A trader on a winning streak acts exactly that way."
The second thing that Coates noticed was even more revelatory to him. "I noticed that women did not buy into the dotcom bubble at all," he says. "You couldn't find one who did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me."
With this cool fact in mind, Coates began splitting his time between his trading desk and the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, which is perhaps the world's leading institute for the study of brain chemicals. There he started to become interested in steroids, and in particular something called "the winner effect". This occurs when two males enter a competition and their testosterone levels rise, increasing their muscle mass and the ability of the blood to carry oxygen. It also enhances their appetite for risk. Much of this testosterone stays in the system of the winner of a competition, while the loser's testosterone melts away fast; in evolutionary terms, the loser retires to the woods to lick his wounds. In the next round of competition, though, the winner already has high levels of testosterone, so he starts with an advantage, and this continues to reinforce itself.
"Steroids," Coates explains, "like most chemicals in your body, display what is called an inverted U-shaped response curve." That is to say, when you have low levels of them you lack vitality, and do very poorly at mental and physical tasks. But as the levels rise you get sharper and more focused until you reach an optimum. The key thing is this, however: "If you keep winning, your testosterone level goes past that peak and sliding down the other side. You start doing stupid things. When that happens to animals, they go out in the open too much. They pick too many fights. They neglect parenting duties. And they patrol areas that are too large." In short, they behave like traders on a roll; they get cocky.
Coates became convinced that this winner effect was what he observed in bullish trading markets, and what ended up dramatically distorting them. It also explained why women were mostly immune to the euphoria, because they had only 10% of the testosterone of men. What struck him most, though, was that, for all the literature about financial instability, economics, psychology, game theory, no one had ever clinically looked at a trader who was caught up in a bubble.
Coates wrote a research proposal. He came back to Cambridge where he had done his first degree, and because of his background eventually gained access, with Herbert, to a major City bond-dealing floor in London. They tested the traders for two hormones in particular, testosterone and cortisol (the anxiety induced, depressive "stress hormone"), and mapped their levels over a period of weeks against the success or failure of trades, individual profit and loss. Coates had imagined the experiment to be a preliminary study but the correlations he found – for evidence of irrationality produced by the winner effect and its converse – was "an absolute dream". They not only discovered that a trader's morning testosterone level could be used to predict his day's profitability. They also found that a trader's cortisol rose with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. The results pointed to a further possibility: as volatility increased, the hormones seemed to shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.
Though the sample was limited, and suitable caution was needed in claiming too much, the correlations suggested that over a certain peak, testosterone impaired the risk assessment of traders. "And cortisol," he suggests, "was in some ways even more interesting than testosterone. We thought cortisol would rise when traders lost money," Coates says, making individuals more than usually cautious, "but actually it was going up incredibly when they were faced with just uncertainty. The stress hormones were switching over to emergency states all the time. There was an optimal level but these stress hormones can linger for months. Then you get all sorts of really pathological behaviours. If you are constantly prepared for high tension it affects your brain, and it causes you to recall stressful memories and become exaggeratedly risk-averse and kind of helpless."
Unfortunately this particular study ended in June 2007, before the full effect of the crisis, but its implications account, Coates believes, for some of what he subsequently heard from the trading floor. "If cortisol goes beyond a certain point, then it may become very difficult for traders to assess any risk at all. These guys are not built to handle adversity that well. There is an observable condition called 'learned helplessness', which if you are submitting to great stress over a long period of time makes you give up suddenly. Lab animals develop it: you open the cage and they won't escape. Traders have it too. They just slump in their chairs. In the crisis there were classic arbitrage opportunities as the markets were falling. Free money. But traders would sit there staring at the numbers and not touching it."
Since then, Coates has partly been working on the other strand of his original hypothesis, looking at the brain chemistry of women working in the markets. Because of the small sample sizes he has to work with – there were only three women out of 250 traders on the floor he first tested – the detail of that is far from complete, and he is properly reluctant to draw conclusions. What he will go so far as to say, though, is this. "Central bankers, often brilliant people, spend their life trying to stop a bubble or prevent a crash, and they are spectacularly unsuccessful at it. And I think it is because, at the centre of the market, you have these guys either ripped on testosterone or overwhelmed by cortisol so that they become completely price insensitive." Coates wrote a couple of articles after that research was published, suggesting that, if the winner effect was right, it was possible that bubbles were an entirely young male phenomenon. And if that were the case, then the best way of preventing boom and bust was to have more women and more older men – less in thrall to hormones – in the markets. "We know that opinion diversity is crucial to stable markets. What no one talks about is endocrine diversity, a diversity of hormones. The billion-dollar question is how to achieve it."
To most experienced, male, investment bankers, of course, this sounds like fighting talk. An old friend of mine, who traded his Cambridge English degree for an extremely lucrative life as a bond dealer, offered this, when I presented Coates's evidence to him. "It would be nice to think that having more female traders on the floor would make for less volatility," he said, "but that's wishful thinking. Financial markets are now global, so while we in the west might decide not to chase trends or react instinctively to breaking news because there are mature mothering types in boardrooms and sitting on risk committees, the rest of the world will, and our banks would lose out." And that's not all. "Many of the women I know who have managed money or have put capital at risk for banks have tended to be even more aggressive with risk than their male counterparts, as if perhaps to compensate for their supposed diffidence. Fighting their way through a male-dominated environment to a position in which they can invest/punt/ risk-manage, many women develop an ultra-masculine persona so as to be thought of as ballsy…"
Just a cursory glance through some of the recent spate of books and blogs written by young women who have worked in the City and lived to tell the tale would certainly seem to support this observation. Melanie Berliet, who worked as one of the only female traders in Wall Street, set the tone in her confessional blog: "If anything," she observed, "my token status gave me an extra thrill. I enjoyed being called a 'fucking dullard' or being instructed, patronisingly, to 'remove head from ass', because my reaction – to grin rather than cry – impressed the guys. I loved their attention and the daily opportunities to prove that I fitted in. What separated me from my colleagues was physical: my 5ft 9in, 120lb frame, my long, blondish hair – and my vagina. I had two options with my boss: trade sexual banter or resist. Typically, I chose the former. Like most traders, my base salary wasn't terribly high—$75,000 at the start of my third year. The bonus was all, and getting the right number rested on one thing, as I saw it: my willingness to promote my boss's fantasy of fucking me…"
John Coates doesn't believe the caricature, or at least he believes that in the upper reaches of banks, things have moved on. "A lot of my former colleagues are running divisions, or whole banks," he says. "I don't buy the sexist macho argument. The big investment banks desperately want women traders. But when they interview women who are qualified, the women don't want to do it…"
Neuroeconomics also starts to provide the answers to some of the reasons for that. Muriel Niederle is a professor at Stanford University, looking at gender differences in risk decisions. Over a period of years Niederle has developed clear evidence for the theory that though in non-competitive situations women demonstrate an advantage over men in making investment decisions, they either shy away completely from making those decisions in intensely competitive environments, or they respond less well than men to competition with very short-term high intensity and results-driven focus. This pattern is set, Niederle proves, from a very young age (and no doubt has a good deal to do with the differential presence of troublesome testosterone). Joe Herbert told me at his lab in Cambridge: "What is clear is that there are neurological differences between the sexes. Women, in very general terms, are less competitive, and less concerned with the status of being successful. If you want to make women more present, you have to remember two things: the world they are coming into is a man-made world. The financial world. So, either they become surrogate men… or you change the world."
Ah, changing the world. In the wake of 2008, there was a good deal of talk about that heady idea. Much of this talk concerned the creation of more gender balance in the city. The Economist coined the phrase "Womenomics" and argued that excluding nearly 50% of talent from crucial positions in business and finance was not only discriminatory but caused serious harm to stability and growth. Iceland's banks brought in women to clear up the mess that men had left. A good deal was made of the fact that the extraordinary success of microfinance in the developing world was because 97% of the loans were granted to women (men were – biologically? culturally? – not to be trusted). Science, neuroeconomics, was harnessed to develop some of those themes. And then, well, nothing. The commissions and the select committees decided that a return to something like the status quo, with all its implicit risks and inequalities, was the only option.
Womenomics still persists in a few places, however. The 30% Club was an initiative set up last November by executive women, and some senior men in FTSE 100 companies and accountancy and legal practices, to increase the number of women in decision-making and boardroom positions to that figure. It goes a little further than Lord Davies's recent report on the subject. But 30% is not an arbitrary number; it is thought – by neuroeconomists again, and through observation – to be the minimum proportion of women at the top of an organisation required to begin to change the culture; below that number, women tend to behave "like surrogate men"; above it, the subtle differences produced by gender might begin to influence the way decisions are made. In Britain there is still a good way to go: only 5.5% of executive directors in FTSE 100 companies are women (yet evidence shows that companies with women leaders have a 35% higher return on equity, and companies with more than three women on their corporate board have an 80% higher return on equity). On city trading floors, the percentage remains, for some of the reasons outlined above, at around 3% or 4%. Testosterone rules.
The country that has attempted most radically to change this balance is Norway, where a Conservative minister imposed a quota of 40% female directors in every boardroom. Most of the data suggests the initiative has been a great success, both culturally and commercially (though some, male, commentators argue that the turnaround is better explained by the spike in oil prices).
It would be hard to find many people in the city, even among women, who would favour quotas, though that argument can be made. John Coates, wearing his dealmaker's hat, suggests a practical solution. "The question is not whether men are risk takers and women are risk-averse. It is more what kind of risk do they want to take? My hunch is that women don't like high-frequency trading, so what you have to do is change the accounting period over which they are judged."
He then gives me a potted description of how things remain: "Say you have two traders. One trader makes $20m a year for five years, of which she might typically pocket a couple of million a year herself. At the end of five years she has made the bank the best part of $90m. Another trader makes $100m a year for four years. They don't want that guy to go off to a hedge fund so they let him take home $20m a year. But then in the fifth year – because of the winner effect – he loses $500m. That is essentially what happened in the financial crash. The bank has lost $100m and the trader has gained $80m. If you were judging these things over a five-year period, then you can see which person you would hire."
But, of course, that would require a very different idea of markets, and of money, to the one that is currently desperately being defended and remade. It would certainly require a greater degree of "endocrinal diversity". Still, the next time you hear someone suggest that things are getting back to "normal" in the city, and that we should at all costs start believing in exponential growth again, at least you can look him in the eye and state that you think his hormones might be playing up.
Neuroeconomics: Six things that the science of decision-making reveals
■ If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.
■ Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.
■ Men's brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.
■ Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.
■ Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.
■ Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions
Friday 17 June 2011
What is talent in sport?
Is it just natural ability or the consistency that comes from perseverance?
Harsha Bhogle
June 17, 2011
My father believed - as was the norm with respectable middle-class families in the years gone by - it was important that his children were good at mathematics. If your child was good at mathematics, you had imparted the right education and fulfilled one of your primary duties as a parent.
He often quoted to us what his friend, a respected professor of the subject, used to say: "There should be no problem that you encounter in an examination for the first time." It meant you had to work so hard that you had, conceivably, attempted and vanquished every situation that could find its way into an exam paper. It begs the question: if you did achieve 150 out of 150 in an exam (which my wife very nearly did once, much to my awe), was it because you were extraordinarily intuitive or because you had worked harder than the others, so that you didn't "encounter any problem in an exam" for the first time?
In other words, is getting a "centum" (a peculiarly Tam Bram expression) a matter of genius or a matter of perseverance? It is an issue that many intelligent authors around the world have been debating for a while, and one that is at the heart of sport. Would anybody who solved a certain number of sums get full marks? Would two people, each of whom put in 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell's threshold for achievement) produce identical results? Or are some people innately gifted, allowing them to cross that threshold sooner?
We pose that question a great deal in cricket when we argue about talent. Players who play certain shots - the perfectly balanced on-drive for example - are labelled "talented" and put into a separate category. They acquire a halo, and in a near-equal situation they tend to get picked first. "Talent" becomes this key they flash to gain entry. And yet it is worth asking what talent really is.
Is it the ability to play the on-drive or, more critically, the ability to play that on-drive consistently? It is a critical difference. Consistency brings in an element of perseverance that you do not normally bracket with talent.
Let me explain. I have often, while watching Rohit Sharma bat, said "wow" out loud. I probably said it because I saw him play a shot I did not expect him to. Or maybe it was a shot very few players were able to play. Just as often, I find myself going "ugh" with frustration at him. It is probably because, having had the opportunity to go "wow", I now expected him to play the same shot again. And so, without explicitly stating it, I am invoking the assumption of consistency to assess talent. The old professor of mathematics would have said, "Play the shot so often that it is no longer a new shot when you play it."
It is while I was debating this in my mind that I became aware of why Sachin Tendulkar paid such high compliments to Gary Kirsten for throwing him balls. Tendulkar wanted to perfect a shot and needed someone to throw him enough balls to attain that perfection, so that when he attempted it in a match he wasn't doing it for the first time. And in a recent conversation he said he was at his best when he was in the "subconscious", not distracted by the "conscious", and able to play by instinct - which he had perfected through practice.
Now we often call Tendulkar a genius, and yet, as we see, the talent that we believe comes dazzling through is, in essence, the product of many hours of perseverance. Is Tendulkar, then, the supreme example of my father's friend's theory of doing well at maths? And assuming for a moment that is true, shouldn't we be honouring perseverance because that is what it seems "talent" really is?
And so it follows that when we complain that all talented players don't get to where they should, we are in effect saying that they didn't practise hard enough to be consistent. Maybe it means we should all use the word "talent" more sparingly; not bestow it on a player until ability has been married to hard work long enough to achieve consistency.
This is also the starting premise of a new book I hope to continue reading - Bounce by the former table tennis champion Mathew Syed. I am delighted by its opening pages, one of which said "talent is overrated". It is something I have long believed.
Harsha Bhogle
June 17, 2011
My father believed - as was the norm with respectable middle-class families in the years gone by - it was important that his children were good at mathematics. If your child was good at mathematics, you had imparted the right education and fulfilled one of your primary duties as a parent.
He often quoted to us what his friend, a respected professor of the subject, used to say: "There should be no problem that you encounter in an examination for the first time." It meant you had to work so hard that you had, conceivably, attempted and vanquished every situation that could find its way into an exam paper. It begs the question: if you did achieve 150 out of 150 in an exam (which my wife very nearly did once, much to my awe), was it because you were extraordinarily intuitive or because you had worked harder than the others, so that you didn't "encounter any problem in an exam" for the first time?
In other words, is getting a "centum" (a peculiarly Tam Bram expression) a matter of genius or a matter of perseverance? It is an issue that many intelligent authors around the world have been debating for a while, and one that is at the heart of sport. Would anybody who solved a certain number of sums get full marks? Would two people, each of whom put in 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell's threshold for achievement) produce identical results? Or are some people innately gifted, allowing them to cross that threshold sooner?
We pose that question a great deal in cricket when we argue about talent. Players who play certain shots - the perfectly balanced on-drive for example - are labelled "talented" and put into a separate category. They acquire a halo, and in a near-equal situation they tend to get picked first. "Talent" becomes this key they flash to gain entry. And yet it is worth asking what talent really is.
Is it the ability to play the on-drive or, more critically, the ability to play that on-drive consistently? It is a critical difference. Consistency brings in an element of perseverance that you do not normally bracket with talent.
Let me explain. I have often, while watching Rohit Sharma bat, said "wow" out loud. I probably said it because I saw him play a shot I did not expect him to. Or maybe it was a shot very few players were able to play. Just as often, I find myself going "ugh" with frustration at him. It is probably because, having had the opportunity to go "wow", I now expected him to play the same shot again. And so, without explicitly stating it, I am invoking the assumption of consistency to assess talent. The old professor of mathematics would have said, "Play the shot so often that it is no longer a new shot when you play it."
It is while I was debating this in my mind that I became aware of why Sachin Tendulkar paid such high compliments to Gary Kirsten for throwing him balls. Tendulkar wanted to perfect a shot and needed someone to throw him enough balls to attain that perfection, so that when he attempted it in a match he wasn't doing it for the first time. And in a recent conversation he said he was at his best when he was in the "subconscious", not distracted by the "conscious", and able to play by instinct - which he had perfected through practice.
Now we often call Tendulkar a genius, and yet, as we see, the talent that we believe comes dazzling through is, in essence, the product of many hours of perseverance. Is Tendulkar, then, the supreme example of my father's friend's theory of doing well at maths? And assuming for a moment that is true, shouldn't we be honouring perseverance because that is what it seems "talent" really is?
And so it follows that when we complain that all talented players don't get to where they should, we are in effect saying that they didn't practise hard enough to be consistent. Maybe it means we should all use the word "talent" more sparingly; not bestow it on a player until ability has been married to hard work long enough to achieve consistency.
This is also the starting premise of a new book I hope to continue reading - Bounce by the former table tennis champion Mathew Syed. I am delighted by its opening pages, one of which said "talent is overrated". It is something I have long believed.
Wednesday 15 June 2011
DRIFT - Spin Bowling
I receive a lot of e-mails asking about drift or curve.
For a right arm leg spin bowler the drift he/she is seeking is in toward a right hand batter which tends to square the batter up and then ideally the ball will spin away toward slip after landing.
Shane Warne created havoc with batsmen because of the drift and spin he achieved.
How does it happen?
Genuine drift, which should not be confused with the ball angling in to the batter by a slicing action at release, comes from several basic areas.
1) side on alignment toward the target area.
2) revolutions on the ball (mostly side spin)
3) strong shoulder rotation (180 degrees)
Breeze over the left shoulder can also encourage the ball to drift in toward the batter.
If, as a couple of boys have told me, the ball is "drifting" toward slip it is most likely the shoulders are rotating around the front leg creating an angle of release in that direction.
For a ball to genuinely drift toward slip the revolutions on the ball would normally be the opposite of the leg break eg; Googly or off spin.
The more over spin (top spin) on the ball at release the more the ball will "drop" on the batter and the less it is likely to curve inwards.
As a rule chest on spinners struggle for drift.
So, improve your alignment and impart lots of spin on the ball and await the outcome.
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