Cricket: complex, unknowable cricket

 Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

Old Trafford 2005: one in a scarcely imaginable run of four matches carved from gold © Getty Images

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This is Martin Amis, writing about chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps nowhere in human activity, is the gap between the trier and the expert so astronomical."

Is he right? In the field of human activity, at least, I can think of another arena in which the knowledge gap between amateur and pro is vast - that of theoretical physics. The latest man to try and bridge it is the particle physicist and former keyboard player with D:Ream (best-known hit - "Things Can Only Get Better"), Dr Brian Cox. 

He has a new TV series called The Human Universe, and he kicked it off with an interesting analogy for beginning to understand exactly what theoretical physicists are on about.

"Cricket" he began, is "unfathomable" to those who don't understand it, yet "bewitching" to those that do. "And all of [cricket's] complexity emerged from a fixed set of rules."

He held up the single page of a scorebook on which he'd written down the formula for the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the Theory of Relativity, and then flicked through a copy of the Laws of Cricket. "By this notation at least," he said, "cricket is more complex than the universe."

Maybe that's because Einstein never bothered with an equation to sum the Laws up, yet it's a clever way of illustrating that an understanding of the rules of anything doesn't necessarily lead to an understanding of the subject that those rules govern. To return to chess and Martin Amis, here he is on a match between Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short: "They are trying to hold on to, to brighten and to bring to blossom, a coherent vision which the arrangement of the pieces may or may not contain."

Cricket and chess are superficially simple. Sit someone in front of a chess board and you can explain the basics of the pieces and the moves in a few minutes. Show them a cricket bat and ball and a set of stumps and the idea and aims of the game become apparent. Where the genius lies - and where Cox's analogy holds quite nicely - is in the infinite small variations that these simple structures contain. The complexities mount when the knowledge and ability of the players grows: as Amis said, they are trying to bring about a vision from within the rules that isn't actually there until it happens.

This is obvious in cricket, where the game is built around endless repetitions of the same actions - the ball is bowled, the ball is hit (or not) - which, under different conditions and with various personnel, become increasingly complex as they happen again and again until stories emerge from within them.

The other day I watched a rerun of the 2005 Ashes. Once again, it gripped. Of the 1778 Test marches played before the ones in those series, along came, at random, four in a row that finished in teeth-grinding tension. Taking a wider view, they were barely different from all of the other games of cricket in history: it was simply the appearance of these very tiny complexities, one after the other, that made them what they were.

Sometimes we can feel these patterns emerging, at others we're simply too close to make them out. The brilliance of the design of the game provides a framework that stretches off into the future. We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket itself is universal.

Martin Amis was fascinated by chess because he felt it was "unmasterable", and it was, by any individual. "It is a game that's beyond the scope of the human mind," he wrote. And yet the human mind has devised computer programs that are able to analyse any game and beat any player. Theoretically at least, machines have reached "the end" of chess.

Despite the obsession with stats, that fate can't really await cricket. It may not be quite as complex and unknowable as deep space, but it needs a bigger book of Laws. What an invention it is.

------Further Thought by Samir Chopra in Cricinfo

The renewability of cricket

 

The 45-year-old professor, the older version of the once-15-year-old schoolboy, sees a very different game of cricket from his younger counterpart  © Getty Images

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My Cordon colleague Jon Hotten writes, in his recent post, "Cricket: complex, unknowable cricket": 

The brilliance of the design of the game provides a framework that stretches off into the future. We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket itself is universal.

I think Jon must have meant something other than "universal", because otherwise the contrast made here doesn't work. I suspect he wanted to say something like "cricket is infinitely extensible" or "renewable".

Be that as it may, I want to suggest here that "we, as players and spectators" have a great deal to do with the perceived complexity of cricket. Quite simply, this is because we change over time; we do not bring, to our encounters with the game in the middle, a stable, enduring entity, but one subject constantly to a variety of physical, emotional, psychological, and of course, political variations. This perennially in flux object brings to its viewings of cricket a variety of lenses; and we do not merely perceive, we interpret and contextualise, we filter and sift. (As John Dewey, the great American pragmatist philosopher noted, "Thought is intrinsic to experience.") These interpretations and contextualisations change over time.

The 45-year-old man, the professor, the older version of the once-15-year-old schoolboy, sees a very different game of cricket from his younger counterpart. And as he continues to "grow" and change, he will continue to "see" a different game played out in front of him. He will renew cricket, make it extensible and renewable. The seemingly infinite variations possible in a 30-hour, 450-over encounter between 22 other humans, each playing cricket ever so differently from those that have preceded him, will provide ample fodder for this extensibility and renewability.

A game of cricket exists within a larger symbolic order of meaning. When a young spectator sees men in white pick up bat and ball, he understands their activities within a perceptual framework in which active fantasy and wishful longing play an active part. As he grows, matures, acquires a political and aesthetic sense, and hopefully expands his intellectual, emotional and romantic horizons he will revise this, and come to understand the game differently. He may go on to watch umpteen variations on the fourth-innings chase theme, and each one will be uniquely located within this under-construction framework.

Anna Karenina is a classic precisely because in the face of changing readings it continues to speak to us, across time and space and idiosyncratic translations

Consider, by way of analogy, the reading of the classics, great works of literature, which continue to be read for years and years after their writing. Read Anna Karenina as a youngster, perhaps for a high-school class in literature, well before you have ever dated, or been in a serious romantic relationship; you will experience the heartbreak - and tragedy - of the adults at the centre of its story very differently when, 15 years later, you have acquired a few scars (and perhaps a child) of your own. Of course, Tolstoy's masterwork is a classic precisely because in the face of such changing readings it continues to speak to us, across time and space and idiosyncratic translations. This is why Susan Sontag - like others before her - suggested the classics were worth reading several times over; each reading was likely to be a new one, a co-operative, joint construction of meaning by the reader and the writer.

Cricket's games do not exist in isolation. They are played within larger political and economic realities, ones that affect its spectators and its players; these too change our understanding of the game. The benefactions of empire in the past are now the property of its subjects; witness the turmoil this has caused in our recent relationship to the game. The conflict in the middle can come to be understood very differently in these circumstances. Where the youngster might have seen heroes in the past, he now may see villains.

These remarks above suggest another way in which cricket could continue to renew itself over time: it could be embedded within more cultures and societies; it could be written about, and understood by, a broader cross section of humanity than it has been thus far; the language of description for it could expand beyond its current repertoire. (I have been fortunate enough to talk about cricket in English, Hindi/Urdu, and Punjabi; trust me, the game is viewed very differently through these alternative linguistic lenses.) We might find, too, that the conversations that surround it in new climes and locales enrich our previous understandings of cricket.

Imagine a rich cricket literature in not just English but in other languages too. Who knows what new classics, new understandings of cricket, we might find there?

Why did Britain’s political class buy into the Tories’ economic fairytale?

Falling wages, savage cuts and sham employment expose the recovery as bogus. Without a new vision we’re heading for social conflict

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Sunday 19 October 2014 17.46 BST

Demonstrators among tens of thousands who protested about austerity in London on Saturday. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images

The UK economy has been in difficulty since the 2008 financial crisis. Tough spending decisions have been needed to put it on the path to recovery because of the huge budget deficit left behind by the last irresponsible Labour government, showering its supporters with social benefit spending. Thanks to the coalition holding its nerve amid the clamour against cuts, the economy has finally recovered. True, wages have yet to make up the lost ground, but it is at least a “job-rich” recovery, allowing people to stand on their own feet rather than relying on state handouts.

That is the Conservative party’s narrative on the UK economy, and a large proportion of the British voting public has bought into it. They say they trust the Conservatives more than Labour by a big margin when it comes to economic management. And it’s not just the voting public. Even the Labour party has come to subscribe to this narrative and tried to match, if not outdo, the Conservatives in pledging continued austerity. The trouble is that when you hold it up to the light this narrative is so full of holes it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese.

First, let’s look at the origins of the deficit. Contrary to the Conservative portrayal of it as a spendthrift party, Labour kept the budget in balance averaged over its first six years in office between 1997 and 2002. Between 2003 and 2007 the deficit rose, but at 3.2% of GDP a year it was manageable.

More importantly, this rise in the deficit between 2003 and 2007 was not due to increased welfare spending. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, social benefit spending as a proportion of GDP was more or less constant at about 9.5% of GDP a year during this period. The dramatic climb in budget deficit from there to the average of 10.7% in 2009-2010 was mostly a consequence of the recession caused by the financial crisis.

First, the recession reduced government revenue by the equivalent of 2.4% of GDP – from 42.1% to 39.7% – between 2008 and 2009-10. Second, it raised social spending (social benefit plus health spending). Economic downturn automatically increases spending on many social benefits, such as unemployment benefit and income support, but it also increases spending on things like disability benefit and healthcare, as increased unemployment and poverty lead to more physical and mental health problems. In 2009-10, at the height of the recession, UK public social spending rose by the equivalent of 3.2% of GDP compared with its 2008 level (from 21.8% to 24%).

When you add together the recession-triggered fall in tax revenue and rise in social spending, they amount to 5.6% of GDP – almost the same as the rise in the deficit between 2008 and 2009-10 (5.7% of GDP). Even though some of the rise in social spending was due to factors other than the recession, such as an ageing population, it would be safe to say that much of the rise in deficit can be explained by the recession itself, rather than Labour’s economic mismanagement.

When faced with this, supporters of the Tory narrative would say, “OK, but however it was caused, we had to control the deficit because we can’t live beyond our means and accumulate debt”. This is a pre-modern, quasi-religious view of debt. Whether debt is a bad thing or not depends on what the money is used for. After all, the coalition has made students run up huge debts for their university education on the grounds that their heightened earning power will make them better off even after they pay back their loans.

The same reasoning should be applied to government debt. For example, when private sector demand collapses, as in the 2008 crisis, the government “living beyond its means” in the short run may actually reduce public debt faster in the long run, by speeding up economic recovery and thereby more quickly raising tax revenues and lowering social spending. If the increased government debt is accounted for by spending on projects that raise productivity – infrastructure, R&D, training and early learning programmes for disadvantaged children – the reduction in public debt in the long run will be even larger.

Against this, the advocates of the Conservative narrative may retort that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that the recovery is the best proof that the government’s economic strategy has worked. But has the UK economy really fully recovered? We keep hearing that national income is higher than at the pre-crisis peak of the first quarter of 2008. However, in the meantime the population has grown by 3.5 million (from 60.5 million to 64 million), and in per capita terms UK income is still 3.4% less than it was six years ago. And this is even before we talk about the highly uneven nature of the recovery, in which real wages have fallen by 10% while people at the top have increased their shares of wealth.

But can we not at least say that the recovery has been “jobs-rich”, creating 1.8m positions between 2011 and 2014? The trouble with this is that, apart from the fact that the current unemployment rate of 6% is nothing to be proud of, many of the newly created jobs are of very poor quality.

The ranks of workers in “time-related unemployment”, doing fewer hours than they wish due to a lack of availability of work – have swollen dramatically. Between 1998 and 2005, only about 1.9% of workers were in such a position; by 2012-13 the figure was 8%.

Then there is the extraordinary increase in self-employment. Its share of total employment, whose historical norm (1984-2007) was 12.6%, now stands at an unprecedented 15%. With no evidence of a sudden burst of entrepreneurial energy among Britons, we may conclude that many are in self-employment out of necessity or even desperation. Even though surveys show that most newly self-employed people say it is their preference, the fact that these workers have experienced a far greater collapse in earnings than employees – 20% against 6% between 2006-07 and 2011-12, according to the Resolution Foundation – suggests that they have few alternatives, not that they are budding entrepreneurs going places.

So, in between the people in underemployment (6.1% of employment) and the precarious newly self-employed (2.4%), 8.5% of British people in work (or 2.6 million people) are in jobs that do not fully utilise their abilities – call that semi-unemployment, if you will.

The success of the Conservative economic narrative has allowed the coalition to pursue a destructive and unfair economic strategy, which has generated only a bogus recovery largely based on government-fuelled asset bubbles in real estate and finance, with stagnant productivity, falling wages, millions of people in precarious jobs, and savage welfare cuts.

The country is in desperate need of a counter narrative that shifts the terms of debate. A government budget should be understood not just in terms of bookkeeping but also of demand management, national cohesion and productivity growth. Jobs and wages should not be seen simply as a matter of people being “worth” (or not) what they get, but of better utilising human potential and of providing decent and dignified livelihoods. Ways have to be found to generate economic growth based on rising productivity rather than the continuous blowing of asset bubbles.

Without a new economic vision incorporating these dimensions, Britain will continue on its path of stagnation, financial instability and social conflict.

Ebola and failing markets tell us that we need to work together

Governments must heed the warnings of our brightest minds and reshape our societies to help those most in need

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 19 October 2014

Janet Yellen, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, who said last week that inequality is un-American. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP

Last week, the world’s stock and bond markets swung wildly. They worried about the threat of world deflation, falling oil prices and further systemic weaknesses in the financial system. But perhaps they were most concerned about whether spooked governments had the will to do anything, even if those governments could agree on what that should be. If they can’t manage a co-ordinated response to Ebola or one against the cruelties of Isis, then it is hardly likely they are going to find common ground in managing the fissures in the world economy.

It is not as though there is not the beginning of a policy and intellectual consensus about what is wrong. Inequality is increasingly understood to be poisoning everything; governments cannot continue with business as usual policies; interdependencies have to be recognised and acted on. The problem is doing any of it.

Thus only last week, Janet Yellen, chair of the US Federal Reserve, joined one of her predecessors, Alan Greenspan, and the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, in arguing that the growth of inequality was not only wrong morally but having increasingly baleful economic consequences. Then there were the strictures of the managing director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde.

Inequality, they all say, fosters fear, creates too much demand for credit to compensate for squeezed living standards, drives asset price bubbles, catalyses financial instability, weakens banks and, by displacing too much risk on to those who cannot bear it, undermines the legitimacy of capitalism. You have to blink with incredulity – and then blink again at markets falling because they want to see purposeful government action.

But governments everywhere seem paralysed, relying on central bankers’ promises not to raise interest rates to keep everyone calm and buy time for a few more months. No electoral majority can be mustered for even common sense, centrist radicalism that might address inequality or put economies stricken by the legacy of too much private debt and low demand back on their feet. They are stymied by their terror of going beyond the comfort zone of business as usual, as if the world had not changed after the financial crisis. It demands thinking – and doing – the hitherto unthinkable. Austerity remains the conventional wisdom.

In any case, rightwing populists challenge any such imaginative action as wrong. It’s not the aftermath of the financial crisis that’s the problem for them. It is foreigners, immigrants and the EU. We don’t need to look out for others, act purposefully to reshape our economies to lower inequality or accept interdependencies, declaim the world’s Nigel Farages. We are going to look out for number one, lock out foreigners and the rest of the world will meekly accept our assertion of self-interest.

This incubus goes far beyond economics. Thus the Ebola crisis has been gathering force for over a year. But it has taken the prospect of 10,000 new cases a week by December in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea for it to become a global threat. It’s taken this to shock world governments into a response that even now is grudging and inadequate. To stem the epidemic, burials have to be safe and more than 70% of new sufferers immediately isolated, but for that there has to be a vast expansion of the health infrastructure, along with thousands of doctors and nurses.

West Africa has neither, nor is any crash mobilisation yet in prospect. Governments have been more preoccupied with stopping cases arriving in Europe, Japan and the US than getting involved in the messy and expensive business of tackling Africa’s health inequalities, the root of the epidemic. Only in the past week has there been some movement, with Britain committing £125m to Sierra Leone and others beginning to make common cause. But only $100,000 of the $1bn UN fund has been subscribed. The reality of interdependence, even before a global epidemic, is hard to accept.

If this is hard, it is much harder to accept the interdependency of global finance and beyond that the interdependencies of whole societies such as our own. Nobody is dying a horrible death. But it is very striking how difficult it is to convince the financial, political and intellectual elite that what happened in 2008/9 changed everything. For a generation, western societies in general, and Britain in particular, relied on the massive growth of private credit to mask the dysfunctionality of their capitalism. There was too little attention paid to ensuring the mass of people had economic opportunity in businesses that invested, innovated and grew. The assumption became rooted that the state was the problem and that business and markets would provide, which they could as long as private debt levels doubled every 20 years.

What is so chilling about George Osborne’s approach to running the economy is that he really believes he can go back to those times. So do Republicans in the US and so in her way does Angela Merkel. As Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the FT, writes in his magisterial account of today’s global economy, The Shifts and the Shocks, the elites have not been disabused of the notion that global finance can continue as before. The vast overhang of private debt is depressive, he argues. Governments must spend and borrow more for perhaps another decade. Central banks must continue with extraordinary monetary policies. Banks and banking need wholesale reform. Deflation, not inflation, is the threat.

Wolf applauds the world’s governments for acting so positively for 18 months after the crisis – and lambasts them for thinking all was well too soon and cutting spending when the co-dependency of state and market and need for extraordinary measures have never been more apparent. The result is self-defeating secular stagnation threatening to topple into worse – in essence, this is what spooked the markets last week.

Finance needs further reshaping; we need purposeful action to lower inequality, which will involve raising taxes on the wealthy, while governments have to borrow and spend, with infrastructure spending being an easy win. Parallel policies are needed abroad.

Europe or foreigners are not the cause of our ills. Ukip and the Tory right will make things worse, not better. Just as the best in the world can see what needs to happen in West Africa, so the best are dissociating themselves from the prescriptions of the right. Nigel Farage and the British right have to be understood for what they are: the political equivalent of Ebola – a virus that threatens our economic and social health.

How to be fitter, happier and more successful: stop dreaming and start getting real

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some negative thinking, you might get that promotion you actually need

• 
• • Oliver Burkeman
  •  
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 16 October 2014 13.15 BST

‘Daydreaming can be great,’ Gabriele Oettingen says. ‘Positive dreaming is problematic, because it feigns that you’ve already attained these desired futures.’ Illustration: Allan Ajifo / flickr via Creative Commons

In 2011, the New York University psychologist Gabriele Oettingen published the results of an elegant study, conducted with her colleague Heather Kappes, in which participants were deprived of water. Some of these parched volunteers were then taken through a guided visualisation exercise, in which they were asked to picture an icy glass of water, the very thing they presumably craved. Afterwards, by measuring everyone’s blood pressure, Oettingen discovered that the exercise had drained people’s energy levels, and made them relax. The implication is startling: picturing an imaginary glass of water might make people less motivated to get up and head to the watercooler or the tap in order to quench their real, non-imaginary thirst.

This conclusion is precisely the reverse of one of the central tenets of pop psychology: the idea that picturing the future you desire makes it more likely you’ll attain it. Again and again, in her research, Oettingen has shown that making a fantasy of something you want can make it harder to achieve in reality. Imagine yourself having a productive week, and you’ll accomplish less. Imagine receiving a windfall of cash, and you’ll be less motivated to engage in the kinds of activities that might bring you money. Intriguingly – though admittedly the link may not be causal – there’s even a relationship between how much “positive thinking” language American presidents use in their inaugural speeches, and how much unemployment rates change by the end of their presidential terms. The more positive the fantasy about the future, the fewer jobs in real life.

Fist-pumping motivational gurus have long claimed that your brain “can’t distinguish between reality and imagination”. Ironically, Oettingen’s experiments show they’re right about that – but also that the conclusion they draw is spectacularly wrong. Attempting to “experience your success as if it had already materialized” is a fast-track to disappointment.

Thankfully, not all kinds of thinking about the future are quite so self-sabotaging. In Oettingen’s new book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, published in the US on Thursday and elsewhere next month, she makes the case for “mental contrasting”, a technique that involves methodically combining positive and negative thoughts about your own future, in a way that seems to work strikingly well if you’re trying to replace bad habits or mindsets with good ones. Over the last decade, in studies conducted by Oettingen and other researchers, mental contrasting has been shown to double the amount of exercise people engage in; to increase their fruit and vegetable intake by 30%; and to help people suffering from chronic pain become more physically active. When low-income schoolchildren in Germany and the US were trained briefly in the method, it led to increased school attendance and better academic performance.

The technique’s full formal name is less than catchy – “mental contrasting with implementation intentions” – so in her book, Oettingen rebrands it as “Woop”, for “wish, outcome, obstacle, plan”. The acronym sets out the four stages of the process. First, spend a minute or two thinking in detail about something you wish to accomplish; second, vividly imagine the best thing you associate with having achieved that outcome. (That “best thing” might be an emotion, a promotion, praise – anything, really.) Third, ask yourself what internal obstacle’s most likely to get in the way. (This isn’t about your boss, or your spouse, so much as that weakness inside you that holds you back from better pay or a better relationship.) Finally, formulate an “if-then” plan for what you’ll do when that obstacle arises. (“If I find myself feeling terrified when I stand up in front of the audience, then I’ll recall how diligently I’ve rehearsed.” “If I find myself checking Twitter, I’ll get up from my desk immediately.”)

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of positive daydreaming if it makes you feel good, so long as you don’t expect anything more than feeling good. “Daydreaming can be great!” Oettingen told me the other day. “It’s only when it comes to actually realizing these dreams that positive dreaming is problematic, because it feigns that you’ve already attained these desired futures. You relax, your energy goes down. It’s a question of: ‘Why face the hardships of the bumpy road to achieving these things in real life, if you can float away on dreams?’”

Mental contrasting retains the most useful part of positive fantasies: it clarifies what you want, and reminds you how good it can feel to attain, say, a pay increase, a new job, a smaller waistline or a happier relationship. But then it exploits the motivating power of knowing what you have not yet attained – that there’s serious ground you’ll have to cover. (Getting fit, improving a marriage, making more money – it all takes work.) Finally, the Wooping technique nudges you to plan in advance for what you’ll do once, inevitably, your own flawed personality gets in the way.

And so mental contrasting pushes back against one of the great, disempowering lies of positive thinking: that transformative change, personal or societal, can be made effortless. It can’t. In fact, Oettingen’s research suggests, convincing yourself that life’s meant to be easy just makes it appreciably harder. The best way to quench your thirst for change, it seems, is to remind yourself that the glass is still half empty.