Life as a batsman

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

Batting is about death. And life of course. It's all about how useful - how good - a life you lead before you die. You are surrounded by pitfalls and bayed about by enemies, but the good person will come through adversity to triumph. And the less good person won't.

That life-and-death metaphor gives cricket its USP: its own particular force and vividness. Cricket - red-ball cricket in particular - is all about the little death of dismissal. Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means.

Batsmen, writes Simon Hughes, "are walking the tightrope between success and failure. One minuscule error and they're toast. Terminé. Caput."

Hughes has always brought an original mind to the interpretation of cricket. He invented the concept of The Analyst for Channel Four in Britain, and now he tries to analyse batsmanship in his latest, highly enjoyable book, Who Wants to be a Batsman? He calls on his experience of more than 200 first-class innings, and his career-long struggle to add a decent batting CV to the deceptively fast arm he possessed as a bowler.

He returns to the infinitely fragile nature of every batsman's experience. "In tennis, if you lose 6-0 6-0 and haven't returned a single ball, you will have still served a few yourself. You have contributed something to the match. In football, unless you score an own goal with the last kick of the game, you have got time to atone for any mistake you might have made. Hell, even if you have shanked every drive into the bushes on the golf course, there is always hope that you will nail one down the middle on the eighteenth…

"But nought in cricket. What has that achieved?"

Cricketers cherish the notion that a bowler can bowl a bad ball that's whacked for six and get a wicket next ball, but one error - one tiny, measly error - from the batsman and he's gone.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance

But it's not necessarily true. And even if it were, it wouldn't be unique in sport. Batsmen make mistakes and survive. Very few batsmen reach three figures without a play-and-miss or a false shot. Perhaps every century is a demonstration of how much the batsman has got away with.

Joe Root made a major error in the first Test of the recent Ashes series. He should have been out for nought and gone back to the pavilion asking himself what he had achieved. But Brad Haddin dropped the chance, Root made a century, England won and Root was the hero.

In other words, and contrary to standard wisdom, there is a margin for error in batting. The top players are better at coping with it, and above all, better at cashing in when matters beyond their control happen to work in their favour.

The routine humiliation of dismissal is not unique to cricket. There are quite a few sports in which your participation can be over before the finish - and long before you're ready to give up. Sonny Liston failed to complete either of his two fights against Muhammad Ali: quitting on his stool in the first and knocked out in the second.

In all jumping competitions in the horsey world your participation can end prematurely with an involuntary dismount. I have watched the Grand National favourite fall at the first fence. I have experienced a public crash-landing or two myself, as it happens, and believe me, it hurts more than being clean bowled - about which, too, I know in more detail than I would wish.

In sports more dangerous than cricket every competitor knows that participation could end with the assistance of a stretcher. In some sports real deaths happen more often than they do in cricket. Let's have a moment of silence for Phillip Hughes at this point - but we should also recall that in 1999 five people were killed in the equestrian sport of eventing.

Back to the pavilion before facing a ball: Usain Bolt is disqualified in the final of the World Athletics Championships © AFP

In track and field, errors are savagely punished, and sometimes it's worse than getting out first ball. It's like being sent back to the pavvy for taking guard wrong. You're out without running a single stride of the race. Terminé. Caput. It happened to Usain Bolt in the final of the World Championships in 2011.

So I dispute the self-pitying notion of all batsmen (and ex-batsmen in the commentary box) who tell us that batting is a uniquely fragile sporting discipline. It just feels like that when you're out there.

That doesn't mean that a batsman is not in a unique position, and that it's not fraught with psychological problems of all kinds. It's just that cricketers - tied up in the intricacies of a single sport - tend not to identify the uniquely troubling aspect of batsmanship. It's the twin load of responsibility. When you fail as a batsman you have not one but two reasons to feel bad. You have lost a contest against another individual - and you have also let down your colleagues. You have failed yourself andyou have failed your team.

That's a hefty burden to bear. Of course there's an essence of that in all team sports - it's rather the point of them. But in most team sports you are operating with others. A goalkeeper in football is not as isolated as he looks: he's in constant dialogue with his central defenders, and his distribution of the ball is a core skill.

A batsman is as lonely as a golfer or a tennis player - but he's also working for other people. In some competitions they make tennis players and golfers shoulder a batsman's twin responsibilities: the Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup, Davis Cup and Fed Cup. Often you see great players unable to cope with a secondary responsibility: Tiger Woods never got the hang of it.

A great batsman must be like a top Ryder Cup golfer, not once every two years but in every single innings. He must - like Colin Montgomerie - find inspiration in this double responsibility. Woods goes straight back to strokeplay golf; for a batsman there is no other game.

If you fail as a batsman, you must deal with your personal inadequacies. Graham Gooch began his Test career with a pair. Repeated failure will cost you your place in the team. Your career will suffer. So will your sense of self-worth. But failure will also cost your team. You will fail to contribute. You will stop feeling like a part of the whole. You will lose matches and even if no one says anything, you know what you've done and what you haven't done.

Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means

It's the double whammy that's unique to batsmanship. That extends to cricket's bastard sister, baseball; the difference here is that baseball is weighted towards the pitcher and a dismissal is a relatively trivial matter; it's a run that's a big deal. All the same, the batter and the batsman share a double burden .

It follows, then, that again and again Simon Hughes goes back to the mental side of things. He offers "Ten Wanna Be Batsman Rules": of these, eight are mental. One is semi-facetious (this is "Yozzer" writing after all) and rule eight is "play at the Oval." The only physical tip is "Keep the head still."

It's almost as if every batsman had the same amount of physical ability, and that the only difference between good and great was mental posture. That's clearly not true: David Gower, Brian Lara and Kevin Pietersen clearly had something extra. But they also had mental ability: they could put errors behind them, didn't get sucked into the wrong sort of confrontation, knew how to pace an innings, understood when to stick and when to twist.

In cricket you often see a player of (comparatively) limited physical ability playing any number of match-winning innings because of a great mental attitude. Alastair Cook is a classic example of this type.

A player with a lesser degree of pure talent never takes success for granted. He is naturally disposed to make the most of every let-off. Thus you can turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage. That's one of the most fascinating things about sport - and it's very cricket.

Batting is about shame and guilt: the shame of personal failure and the guilt at playing a part in team failure. It's also about escaping from - or being inspired by - these two things to find individual and corporate glory. You must sink yourself into the common cause without losing your sense of individuality.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance. Unsurprising, then, that excellence is a rare thing - and that we value it so highly when we find it.

Psychology experiments are failing the replication test – for good reason

John Ioannidis in The Guardian

‘The replication failure rate of psychology seems to be in the same ballpark as those rates in observational epidemiology, cancer drug targets and preclinical research, and animal experiments.’ Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Alamy


Science is the best thing that has happened to humankind because its results can be questioned, retested, and demonstrated to be wrong. Science is not about proving at all cost some preconceived dogma. Conversely religious devotees, politicians, soccer fans, and pseudo-science quacks won’t allow their doctrines, promises, football clubs or bizarre claims to be proven illogical, exaggerated, second-rate or just absurd.

Despite this clear superiority of the scientific method, we researchers are still fallible humans. This week, an impressive collaboration of 270 investigators working for five years published in Science the results of their efforts to replicate 100 important results that had been previously published in three top psychology journals. The replicators worked closely with the original authors to make the repeat experiments close replicas of the originals. The results were bleak: 64% of the experiments could not be replicated.
We often feel uneasy about having our results probed for possible debunking. We don’t always exactly celebrate when we are proven wrong. For example, retracting published papers can take many years and many editors, lawyers, and whistleblowers – and most debunked published papers are never retracted. Moreover, with fierce competition for limited research funds and with millions of researchers struggling to make a living (publish, get grants, get promoted), we are under immense pressure to make “significant”, “innovative” discoveries. Many scientific fields are thus being flooded with claimed discoveries that nobody ever retests. Retesting (called replication) is discouraged. In most fields, no funding is given for what is pooh-poohed as me-too efforts. We are forced to hasten from one “significant” paper to the next without ever reassessing our previously claimed successes.

Multiple lines of evidence suggest this is a recipe for disaster, leading to a scientific literature littered with long chains of irreproducible results. Irreproducibility is rarely an issue of fraud. Simply having millions of hardworking scientists searching fervently and creatively in billions of analyses for something statistically significant can lead to very high rates of false-positives (red-herring claims about things that don’t exist) or inflated results.

This is more likely to happen in fields that chase subtle, complex phenomena, in those that have more noise in measurement, and where there is more room for subjective choices to be introduced in designing and running experiments and crunching the data. Ten years ago I tried to model these factors. These models predicted that in most scientific fields and settings the majority of published research, findings may be false. They also anticipated that the false rates could vary greatly (from almost 0% to almost 100%), depending on the features of a scientific discipline and how scientists run their work.

Probably the failure rate in the Science data would have been higher for work published in journals of lesser quality. There are tens of thousands of journals in the scientific-publishing market, and most will publish almost anything submitted to them. The failure rate may also be higher for studies that are so complex that none of the collaborating replicators offered to attempt a replication. This group accounted for one-third of the studies published in the three top journals. So the replication failure rate for psychology at large may be 80% or more overall.

This performance is even worse than I would have predicted. In 2012 my anticipation of a 53% replication failure rate for psychology at large was published. Compared with other empirical studies, the failure rate of psychology seems to be in the same ballpark as replication failure rates in observational epidemiology, cancer drug targets and preclinical research, and animal experiments.

However, I think it is important to focus on the positive side. The Science paper shows that large-scale replication efforts of high quality are doable even in fields like psychology where there was no strong replication culture until recently. Hopefully this successful, highly informative paradigm will help improve research practices in this field. Many other scientific fields without strong replication cultures may also be prompted now to embrace replications and reproducible research practices. Thus these seemingly disappointing results offer a great opportunity to strengthen scientific investigation. I look forward to celebrate one day when my claim that most published research findings are false is thoroughly refuted across most, if not all, scientific fields.

Why happy couples cheat?

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The Elite Opt-out - 'Government officials should send their children to government schools'

Manish Sabharwal in The Indian Express

Earlier this month, the Allahabad High Court gave the state chief secretary till the next academic session to require anybody drawing a government salary to send their children to only government schools. The order also specified that the promotions and increments of violators should be deferred, and required that any fees paid to private schools by government servants be deducted from their salary and paid into the state treasury. The judge felt this extreme step was the only way to improve government schools. Is this judgment absurd or wonderful common sense?

This judgment pulls me in two different directions because of who I am (son of government servants who sent me to a private school) and what I do (our company hires only 5 per cent of the children who come to us for a job because their schools let them down). Who I am believes this judgment is absurdity. What I do believes it is wonderful common sense. Why this divergence?

The first reaction is because this judgment violates the fundamental rights of all children of government employees by limiting where they can go to school based on their parents’ profession. I know my professional progress is a child of my private school education; I would not be where I am if I had been forced into a government school in Uttar Pradesh (where my parents are from) or in Jammu and Kashmir (where my parents worked). It’s also unfair to hold every present government servant accountable for the actions and outcomes of a small number of past and present education department bureaucrats. It hardly seems fair that the judgment should not be applied to past politicians who have grossly distorted government school-teacher recruiting, compensation and performance management, or past judges whose judgments have distorted the governance of educational institutions. The problem with holding the current government-employee cohort accountable for school outcomes is the long shadow cast by education policy decisions, where toxic effects show up only after a decade.

But my second reaction is rooted in a recognition of human nature. Wouldn’t Employee’s State Insurance hospitals improve if we forced government servants to use them and abolished their exclusive Central Government Health Scheme? Wouldn’t EPFO reform have happened years ago if every government servant was forced to deal with the organisation for their pensions? Wouldn’t ministers standing in line for security and boarding at airports have forced security forces to reduce lines by junking the meaningless stamping, and checking of stamping, of hand baggage tags and boarding cards? Wouldn’t there have been more urgency for power reforms if distribution companies were prohibited from creating VIP areas where power is uninterrupted? Wouldn’t we have better urban planning, housing and public transport if government servants were not given houses and cars and all their benefits were monetised instead?

Given India’s poor service-delivery outcomes; it’s certainly a tantalising possibility to subject government servants to the consequences of their actions. This judgment is obviously the product of an interesting mind — Justice Sudhir Agarwal — but it is also a child of broader trends in society and merely reflects the rising aspirations and expectations of millions of Indians. India’s poor and youth are no longer willing to be held hostage to poor government provision. They recognise that “elite opt-out” accelerates the decline of the public system because powerful and loud voices don’t care. My parents retired to Kanpur, where the fastest growing industries are private bottled water, private security, private generators, private healthcare and private schools; the poor in UP are buying what should be public goods because their rights as consumers are greater than their rights as citizens. India is reaching the point where government sins of commission (what it does wrong) are not as toxic as government sins of omission (what it does not do). Alexander Hamilton wrote that the courts are the weakest of the three branches of government because they control neither sword nor purse. India’s courts cannot sustainably fix public service-delivery. Government schools can only be fixed by politicians obsessed with execution, not inputs.

The execution problem goes beyond schools. The Indian state has been designed for less complexity, scale and accountability than it faces. Going forward, the state must do fewer things, but do them well. It must retreat where the market works but act muscularly where the market fails. It must separate its role as policymaker, regulator and service-provider in all areas. It must create the hope of rising and fear of failing for the permanent generalist civil service and supplement them with specialist lateral entry. Fixing government schools is crucial to economic democracy; I work for a company that has hired somebody every five minutes for the last five years, but only hired five per cent of job applicants. You can’t teach kids in one year of vocational training at the exit gate of K-12 education what they should have learnt in the 12 years of school. An unskilled or unemployed Indian is not a free Indian. So — with all the hypocrisy of somebody whose turn for a government school education under this judgment is past — I hope the wonderful common sense that this judgment represents is upheld.

Financial markets are not free – they're one of the last bastions of socialism

Larry Elliot in The Guardian

 

You can’t buck the market, Margaret Thatcher once said, but the world’s policymakers have been giving it their best shot. Photograph: PA/PA


You can’t buck the market, so said Margaret Thatcher back in the late 1980s. Maybe you can’t, but the world’s policymakers are giving it their best shot.

Let’s just consider the context. During August there was a big sell-off in shares amid concerns that the Chinese economy was in trouble. The declines, however, followed a long bull market in which prices were supported by the quantitative easing programmes pursued by central banks rather than by underlying economic strength. A true believer in free markets would have seen the recent sell-off as both inevitable and healthy.

But financial markets are by no means free. They are, on the contrary, one of the last bastions of socialism left on earth. Everything possible is done to boost asset prices and when overstimulation leads to bubbles bursting it is all hands to the pump to prevent them from falling too far.

So, in the last couple of days we have seen the chief economist of the European Central Bank musing openly about the possibility of additional QE. We have had the president of the New York Federal Reserve dropping the biggest possible hint that an interest rate rise will be delayed. And we have had the authorities in Beijing buying up shares on the Shanghai stock market.

And guess what? It has worked. Shares have been going up around the world because investors have been given guarantees that they will be protected from the consequences of their own folly. Despite the upward revision to US growth figures, all that Wall Street needs to do to prevent a Fed rate rise is to have another flash crash between now and mid-September. The Fed will then back off. If things get really bad, it will need to consider a fourth dose of QE. Yes, really.

George Saravelos, of Deutsche Bank, says there is a reason western central banks, starting with the ECB and the Bank of Japan, might need to again resort to the electronic printing presses: China’s use of its foreign exchange reserves to defend the external value of the yuan.

Effectively, China has been selling a chunk of its holdings of foreign bonds, such as US Treasuries. QE involves buying bonds, so what the People’s Bank of China has been doing is QE in reverse or, as Saravelos puts it, quantitative tightening or QT.

Ostensibly, QT has always been part of the plan. When central banks embarked on their asset-buying programmes, the intention was that they would be sold back to the markets when things had returned to normal. The problem is that things have never returned to normal and, judging by recent events, never will.

Zero interest rates were supposed to be temporary. They are now the norm. QE was an unconventional measure for use in an emergency only. It is here to stay, albeit subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Clearly then, you can buck the market. Corrections can be delayed and halted, even reversed, by determined policy action. But, as the history of bubbles from Dutch tulips to subprime mortgages has shown, only for a while. In the long run, Mrs T was right.

Herath's cold summer at Staffs

Scott Oliver in Cricinfo

The United Nations is yet to release the definitive figures on this matter, but there cannot be many countries with a higher per capita average of hours spent smiling each day than Sri Lanka. At the risk of ethnic stereotyping, they are a happy bunch. Not Rangana Herath, though, at least not when he's bowling. At least not when I was fielding to his bowling.

If you were to manufacture a range of international-cricketer teddy bears, Herath Mudiyanselage Rangana Keerthi Bandara Herath would surely be the biggest seller. But don't let those cartoonishly cute and pudgy contours fool you. Herath's on-field manner is that of a prickly, pernickety upcountry bureaucrat, who, for his own barely acknowledged pleasure, is going to keep you occupied for hours doing something of little consequence. Just business, see.

This air of sternness frequently escalated into a full-fledged scowl during his sole, truncated North Staffordshire and South Cheshire League campaign for Moddershall in 2009, when a combination of lacerating Atlantic winds, green pitches and abysmal close catching left him with the unflattering statistics of 112-27-333-14 from eight league outings. That's an average of 23.79. To put that into context, his current Test bowling average in his homeland stands at24.86.

As with his eventual emergence from the shadow of Muttiah Muralitharan to be Sri Lanka's strike spinner, Ranga had fairly big boots to fill. He had been signed to replace South Africa's Imran Tahir - 80 wickets at 11 in our title-winning campaign the previous summer - and if you were to ask the club's ultras which of the two would go on to become the world's second-ranked Test bowler, it would have been a no-brainer: Tahir went through sides like a cheap samosa, Herath like porridge.

But then, the logic behind the signing was a little counter-intuitively tilted towards batting prowess. Rigorous online scorecard perusal duly threw up a recent 88 not out for Sri Lanka A in a 50-over game in Benoni against South Africa A, coming in at 94 for 6 and seeing them past the victory target a further 200 runs ahead. Box ticked, although subsequent first-hand evidence revealed a biffer with three main shots in his repertoire: pull, sweep, slog (and hybrid forms of those strokes). The posh side was only really used for leading edges.

Said research also disclosed that he had a carrom ball, a fact gleefully divulged to the local media, as was a list of Herath's high-profile victims, all incorporated into an artfully casual observation-cum-de facto press release designed to tweak the fret glands of the league's batsmen: "Anyone who's got Trescothick, Chanderpaul, Ponting, Kallis, Inzamam and Steve Waugh out has to be able to bowl a bit, so the club's delighted with the signing, particularly if the long-range forecasts for a hot, dry summer are correct."

Neither the weather nor the performance forecasts proved accurate, sadly, although clearly he could "bowl a bit". That said, we didn't want Herath to bowl so well that he would be picked up by a county (as Tahir had been the previous July by Hampshire, where he was retained for 2009) or picked by his country, for whom he had played the most recent of his then 14 Teststhe previous December, taking 1 for 115 against Bangladesh, which was, I suppose, both a good and bad omen.

Herath took 2 for 92 on debut, followed by 2 for 71. He bagged his solitary five-for the following week in a low-scoring win on a sticky dog, and just five more scalps over the next four weeks. His only game on a dustbowl turned out to be his final game, in which the wiles of former England batsman Kim Barnett, aged 48, (dropped second ball by yours truly) held him at bay, although Barnett did adjudge Herath the third best spinner he'd faced, after Warne and Muralitharan.



Where the plumbers, plasterers, policemen and pot-washers of North Staffs had succeeded against Herath, the Pakistani batsmen of 2009 failed miserably © AFP



While I remained confident he'd eventually come good should the summer ever arrive, we had expected a whole lot more. Alas, it was a tale of moist pitches and missed chances. The tracks were just too green and greasy, rendering his carrom ball the proverbial ashtray on a motorbike. Indeed, his subtle variations were so subtle, it seemed that they no longer really counted as variations. Rather, the batsmen didn't perceive them as variations, which was problematic since the whole point was to get them to see things that weren't there as though they were.

Yes, the returns were meagre and the supporters increasingly restless, yet we refrained from resorting to that occasional club cricket expedient of "accidentally" trapping his fingers in the door. And a good thing too, for in the dregs of a damp June Herath received a phone call from the Sri Lankan selectors: Murali had a shoulder injury, and he was needed.

Where the plumbers, plasterers, policemen and pot-washers of North Staffs had succeeded, the Pakistani batsmen failed miserably. Just hours after stepping off the plane, Herath would bag his first Test Man-of-the-Match award, in Galle, adding a decisive second-innings spell of 11.3-5-15-4 to a couple of useful cameos with the bat as Sri Lanka won by just 50 runs. In thenext game, another victory, he pocketed a maiden Test five-for as Pakistan ceded nine wickets for 35, and he followed it up with another five-for in the third game. So much for our two-wickets-per-game pro! Perhaps, ultimately, it was just a warm-weather thing - you know, needing to have feeling in his fingers, neshness such as that.

Anyway, the Moddershall hardcore may have groused at the comparison with Tahir, yet watching Herath dismiss Virat Kohli, Ajinkya Rahane and Rohit Sharma in Kumar Sangakkara's farewell series, perhaps they would have understood, belatedly, how in that busy, shuffling approach and snappy, narrow pivot; in the chest-on delivery imparting all the revs (and the curve, the drop) from the shoulder; in the clever use of the crease (something Tahir, less guileful, more heavy artillery, didn't do) and round-arm variation that either undercut or would spin sharply; and in the lesser-spotted carrom ball, there were the makings of a useful operator. It's a shame, I guess, that he kept his best performances for the Test arena.

China's economic woes extend far beyond its stock market

Michael Boskin in The Guardian

The Chinese government’s heavy handed efforts to contain recent stock market volatility – the latest move prohibits short-selling and sales by major shareholders– have seriously damaged its credibility. But China’s policy failures should come as no surprise. Policymakers there are far from the first to mismanage financial markets, currencies, and trade. Many European governments, for example, suffered humiliating losses defending currencies that were misaligned in the early 1990s.

Still, China’s economy remains a source of significant uncertainty. Indeed, although the performance of China’s stock market and that of its real economy has not been closely correlated, a major slowdown is under way. That is a serious concern, occupying finance ministries, central banks, trading desks, and importers and exporters worldwide.

China’s government believed it could engineer a soft landing in the transition from torrid double-digit economic growth, fuelled by exports and investments, to steady and balanced growth underpinned by domestic consumption, especially of services. And, in fact, it enacted some sensible policies and reforms.

But rapid growth obscured many problems. For example, officials, seeking to secure promotions by achieving short-term economic targets, misallocated resources; basic industries such as steel and cement built up vast excess capacity; and bad loans accumulated on the balance sheets of banks and local governments.

Nowhere are the problems with this approach more apparent than in the attempt to plan urbanisation, which entailed the construction of large new cities – complete with modern infrastructure and plentiful housing – that have yet to be occupied.

In a sense, these ghost cities resemble the Russian empire’s Potemkin villages, built to create an impressive illusion for the passing Czarina; but China’s ghost cities are real and were presumably meant to do more than flatter the country’s leaders.

Now that economic growth is flagging – official statistics put the annual rate at 7%, but most observers believe the real number is closer to 5% (or even lower) – China’s governance problems are becoming impossible to ignore. Although China’s growth rate still exceeds that of all but a few economies today, the scale of the slowdown has been wrenching, with short-run dynamics similar to a swing in the U S or Germany from 2% GDP growth to a 3% contraction.

A China beset by serious economic problems is likely to experience considerable social and political instability. As the slowdown threatens to impede job creation, undermining the prospects of the millions of people moving to China’s cities each year in search of a more prosperous life, the Communist party will struggle to maintain the legitimacy of its political monopoly. (More broadly, the weight of China’s problems, together with Russia’s collapse and Venezuela’s 60% inflation, has strained the belief of some that state capitalism trumps market economies.) 

FacebookTwitterPinterest Pedestrians in Hong Kong walk past an electronic board displaying the benchmark Hang Seng index. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Given China’s systemic importance to the global economy, instability there could pose major risks far beyond its borders. China is the largest foreign holder of US treasury securities, a major trade partner for the US, Europe, Latin America, and Australia, and a key facilitator of intra-Asian trade, owing partly to the scale of its processing trade.

The world has a lot at stake in China, and China’s authorities have a lot on their plate. The government must cope with the short-term effects of the slowdown while continuing to implement reforms aimed at smoothing the economy’s shift to a new growth model and expanding the role of markets. Foreign firms are seeking access to China’s rapidly growing middle class, which the McKinsey Global Institute estimates exceeds 200 million. But that implies a stable business environment, including more transparency in government approvals, and looser capital controls.

With these goals in mind, China’s government recently engineered a modest currency devaluation – about 3% so far. That is probably too small to alter the country’s trade balance with Europe or the US significantly. But it signals a shift toward a more market-oriented exchange rate. The risk on the minds of investors, managers, and government officials is that currency markets – or government-managed currencies buffeted by market forces – often develop too much momentum and overshoot fundamental values.

As China’s government uses monetary policy to try to calm markets, micro-level reforms must continue. China must deploy new technologies across industries, while improving workers’ education, training and health. Moreover, China needs to accelerate its efforts to increase domestic consumption, which, as a share of GDP, is far below that of other countries.

FacebookTwitterPinterest A bank clerk counts Chinese banknotes in Huaibei, Anhui province. The government recently engineered a modest currency devaluation. Photograph: AP

That means reducing the unprecedentedly high savings rate, a large share of which accrues to state-owned enterprises. If private firms and households are to replace government-led investment as the economy’s main drivers of growth, the state must reduce its stake in major enterprises and allow more profits to be paid directly to shareholders, while providing more of the profits from its remaining shares to citizens.

The shift away from excessive state control should also include replacing price subsidies and grants to favoured industries with targeted support for low-income workers and greater investment in human capital. In addition, China must reduce administrative discretion, introducing sensible, predictable regulation to address natural monopolies and externalities.

Back at the macro level, China needs to reallocate responsibilities and resources among the various levels of government, in order to capitalize on their comparative advantage in providing services and raising revenue. And the country must gradually reduce its total debt load, which currently exceeds 250% of GDP.

Fortunately, in facing the difficult adjustment challenges that lie ahead, China’s $3.6tn (£2.3tn) in foreign-currency reserves can serve as a buffer against unavoidable losses. But China must also avoid reverting to greater state control of the economy, a possibility glimpsed in the authorities’ ham-fisted response to the correction in equity prices. That approach needs to be abandoned before it does any more damage to China’s quest for long-term stability and prosperity.