Deregulation of buses in 1986 was a disaster for those unable to afford a car. Municipalisation is the key to a fairer system
Owen Jones in The Guardian
Liverpool’s Queen’s Square bus station. Since 1986, ‘bus trips in big cities outside London have collapsed from 2bn to 1bn a year’. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Of the issues differentiating the metropolitan mindset in the capital from opinions voiced elsewhere, the starkest is probably transport. We hear much about the overcrowded rail network in London and the south east, where fares are among the most expensive in Europe. Of course we do: much of the national media works from London. And we have warm words for the buses in the capital, where since Ken Livingstone’s first mayoral administration, starting in 2000, the mayoralty and Transport for London have assumed regulatory powers, determining prices and frequency with dramatic success.
Travel outside London, however, and Britain’s deregulated bus system reveals itself as the source of widespread, justified disgruntlement – an overpriced, inefficient, poor-quality mess. According to a report to be published this week, since deregulation in 1986 – unleashed with the promise that “more people would travel” – bus trips in big cities outside London have collapsed from 2bn to 1bn a year. In London, on the other hand, where everything from how much we pay to which routes exist is decided by the mayor and Transport for London, bus use since the 1980s has gone in the opposite direction: from around 1bn to more than 2bn trips a year. Britain’s bus privatisation disaster is a story of profit before need, and a discomfiting tale for those who believe the private sector automatically trumps the public realm.
I asked Twitter for bad experiences of buses, and turned my feed into one long howl of anguish. Chronic delays, “virtually no evening travel”, old “clapped-out buses”, infrequency, poor punctuality, extortionate prices: these were common complaints. “No evening and barely a weekend bus service in Helmsley, North Yorks,” complained one. “Need a car to live here.” Another cry of frustration: “Costly, cash only, fragmented among several providers, no unified ticketing, virtually ends at 1800 hours, v[ery] poor on Sunday.”
It is the less well-off who suffer most. Fewer than one in three of the poorest tenth of the population own their own car. With our bus system in such a state, it is unsurprising that those with the least money are three times more likely to use a cab than the richest.
Our journey towards the great British bus disaster is uncovered in meticulous detail in the report, by Ian Taylor and Lynn Sloman. “Bus users in Britain inhabit different worlds,” they note, ranging from London’s centrally regulated bus system to rural dwellers who “live in a third world with a skeletal service or, in some places, no service at all”. Whatever Margaret Thatcher’s programme of deregulation in the 1980s offered, the opposite happened: fares rose, services worsened and bus use fell.
Private bus companies have one motive, after all: making profit, rather than catering to the needs of their users. Between 2003 and 2013, £2.8bn ended up as dividend payments in the bank balances of shareholders, rather than invested in improving bus services. About 40p in every pound of their total revenues comes directly from the taxpayer: yet another example of Britain’s publicly subsidised “free market” economy.
Bus services are a hopelessly confused patchwork of provision. Some tickets you can use with different providers, some you can’t. You may find enough buses at peak hours but struggle to catch one at other times. If you live in a rural area, you may struggle to find any buses to catch at all. Local authorities can pay for services deemed crucial for local communities, but they do so at great expense. Often the buses themselves are from another age: cold, noisy, rickety vehicles driven by woefully underpaid drivers. Those who can afford to insulate themselves by using their own vehicles can minimise the inconvenience, but that’s not an option for the less fortunate.
Our rail system, we debate. We know that a decisive majority of Britons want to see our railways publicly owned. But where is the debate about rescuing Britain’s bus services?
Bringing buses into accountable, municipal ownership would transform the system. Consider France, or Germany where apparently 88% of local public transport trips are on publicly owned trams, trains or buses, but also look closer to home. In 2013, after running a £8m surplus, municipally owned Lothian Buses in Edinburgh reported satisfaction rates of 96%, beating all competition in Britain. Nottingham City Transport – majority shareholder the city council – has satisfaction rates of 92% in “one of the least car-dependent cities” in Britain.
Here’s what municipalisation can achieve, say Taylor and Sloman. A “comprehensive network” for all communities, without allowing private companies to cherrypick the most profitable routes or obliging local authorities to intervene at “disproportionate cost”. Rather than having a bewildering array of fares, there could be “simple, area-wide fares” that – as in London – could be used across all transport services, from trains to buses, with daily costs capped. Instead of passengers being stuck for the best part of an hour at a freezing bus stop after changing buses, timetables could be coordinated, and public money be spent improving services, not frittered away as shareholder dividends.
We hear so little about buses, undoubtedly, because in London they are good enough for the middle classes to use, while outside the capital those with sharper elbows often avoid them. But here is surely an issue for Labour to champion. Those who suffer the most are often in areas where Labour could do well to try to win support, such as Cornwall, and in many Tory-dominated rural communities. Municipal ownership, with bus passengers encouraged to help run services, would improve the lives of many poorer citizens. There would also be fewer cars on the road. Whether or not Lady Lindsay of Dowhill ever really said “Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life”, the stigma could be overcome for the public good.
Putting the great bus privatisation disaster on the agenda would be another reminder that the inherent superiority of the market is not a foregone conclusion. This is a rich country. If we cannot even produce a decently functioning bus service for our citizens, we need to start asking ourselves some serious questions.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer. "My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
Search This Blog
Thursday 21 January 2016
Arguing the toss
Nathan Leamon in Cricinfo
Will awarding the toss to the away team even up the playing field and deliver more away Test wins, or is this yet another case of received cricketing wisdom not stacking up with the facts?
You will rarely be criticised for choosing to bat. Batting is the default setting; bowling first is seen as the gamble © Getty Images
On the first morning of the first Test between Pakistan and England in Abu Dhabi, three events came to mind. One current, one recent, one infamous. The first was the conversation between Michael Atherton and both captains at the toss and the unanimity of all concerned. The second, the recent proposal from Ricky Ponting and Michael Holding amongst others, that the toss be done away with in Test cricket and the choice given instead to the away captain. The other was Brisbane 2002, and Nasser Hussain choosing to bowl first on a day almost as hot as the one in Abu Dhabi.
Let's start with the second. The suggestion of awarding the toss to the away captain was made by Ponting as a possible solution to the perceived problem of home teams tailoring wickets to suit their strengths. And the resulting domination of home teams. "It has never been harder to win away from home", we are told repeatedly.
Ironically, the decline of away wins is one of those facts that is assumed to be true without often, it would seem, being checked. In fact, it has never been easier to win on the road. More Tests are won by the away team now than at any time in recent history.
AWAY WINS IN TESTS
Will awarding the toss to the away team even up the playing field and deliver more away Test wins, or is this yet another case of received cricketing wisdom not stacking up with the facts?
You will rarely be criticised for choosing to bat. Batting is the default setting; bowling first is seen as the gamble © Getty Images
On the first morning of the first Test between Pakistan and England in Abu Dhabi, three events came to mind. One current, one recent, one infamous. The first was the conversation between Michael Atherton and both captains at the toss and the unanimity of all concerned. The second, the recent proposal from Ricky Ponting and Michael Holding amongst others, that the toss be done away with in Test cricket and the choice given instead to the away captain. The other was Brisbane 2002, and Nasser Hussain choosing to bowl first on a day almost as hot as the one in Abu Dhabi.
Let's start with the second. The suggestion of awarding the toss to the away captain was made by Ponting as a possible solution to the perceived problem of home teams tailoring wickets to suit their strengths. And the resulting domination of home teams. "It has never been harder to win away from home", we are told repeatedly.
Ironically, the decline of away wins is one of those facts that is assumed to be true without often, it would seem, being checked. In fact, it has never been easier to win on the road. More Tests are won by the away team now than at any time in recent history.
AWAY WINS IN TESTS
Decade Win%
2010s 28.8
2000s 28.4
1990s 23.1
1980s 21.1
1970s 22.7
1960s 21.5
This is largely down to the decline in the draw. There have been more and more results in Tests and although the proportion of them that have gone the way of the visitors has shifted slightly in favour of the home team, this has resulted in a significant rise in away wins.
That said, there are other factors that suggest the balance of power is shifting slightly towards the home team. The gap between averages at home and averages away is growing, for example. So let's assume for now that the premise is true, and that home teams are increasingly dominant.
Holding and Ponting have suggested giving the toss to the visiting captain to prevent home teams stacking the conditions in their favour. I don't know whether this is a good idea or not. But there are three reasons that we should question whether it would achieve its aims.
Firstly, it assumes groundsmen can reliably bake certain characteristics into a pitch. In practice, pitch preparation seems to be an inexact science. I have stood before Test matches around the world and listened to groundsmen describe how the pitch is going to play, only to watch it do something completely different half an hour later.
It also presupposes that the interests of groundsman and home team are aligned, which is often not the case. In England for example, venues are heavily incentivised to maximise revenues from the Tests they host by ensuring five full days' play. So groundsmen, understandably, often pay less attention to the needs of the visiting circus than to the people who pay their salary for the other 51 weeks of the year.
Secondly, there is a law of unintended consequences in sporting rule changes that can often produce the opposite result to the one intended. If a home captain had control over the pitch, the framers of this law are assuming he would back away from tilting it in his favour. Is it not just as likely that he would go the other way and seek to produce a pitch so favourable that the toss was taken out of the equation? This after all is what MS Dhoni openly sought to do when England and Australia each last toured, produce pitches that turn big from ball one, and so take the toss out of the equation. Equally, you could imagine England or Australia producing genuine green-tops that would be as helpful to the quicks on day four as day one.
But lastly, and most importantly, it assumes that captains are able to use the toss to their advantage. This is not in any way proven. In fact the evidence suggests it just isn't the case.
At the time of writing, 1,048 Tests have been played since January 1990. During that period, the side that won the toss has lost slightly more (377) matches than it has won (374). Winning the toss in the modern era appears to give a side no advantage at all.
It wasn't always so. On uncovered pitches, batting first in almost all instances was a robustly successful strategy. If it rained during the match, the pitch would deteriorate, affecting the side batting second disproportionately. Until 1970, the side batting first in a Test won 36 per cent of matches, and lost 28 per cent.
But in the modern era, the advantage of winning the toss seems to have disappeared. This is, of course, stunningly counterintuitive. Test cricket is an asymmetric game. One team bats first, then the other. And the two teams' chances of winning are not equal. The team batting first has different requirements for victory to the team batting second, and the pitch changes over the course of the match, affecting the balance of power between bat and ball. Therefore, we would assume, teams that win the toss can choose the best conditions and so gain an advantage. But they don't. How can that possibly be?
Dropped catches and a sickening injury to Simon Jones didn't help Nasser Hussain after he chose to bowl in Brisbane in 2002 © Getty Images
Sometimes, a perfectly reasonable response to current circumstances becomes a habit, then a tradition, then an article of faith that outlives the circumstances that created it. We rarely question what we know to be self-evidently true. And so the bias towards batting first seems to have outlived the circumstances that created it by several decades.
"If you win the toss, nine times out of ten you should bat. On the tenth occasion you should think about bowling and then bat."
That was a very successful strategy to adopt for the first century of Test cricket. And one that is still the default setting for most captains. In the 700 Tests played since January 2000, nearly twice as many captains have batted first than have chosen to bowl. Is it still successful?
In a word, no. In that period, the side batting first has won 36 per cent of those Tests, the side bowling first 39 per cent. The bat-first bias at the toss would seem to be neutral at best, and probably counter-productive.
It is still hard to believe that captains aren't able to use the toss to their advantage. There are venues where the evidence is stark. Some pitches clearly favour the side batting first, some the side batting second. In the 40 Tests played in Lahore, the team batting first has won just three. Adelaide by contrast is a classic bat-first venue. It starts as a batsman's paradise, but by the fifth day can be very tricky to bat on, with considerable turn for the spinners. In the 74 Tests played at the ground the side batting first have won 35, the side batting second 19. Since 1990 averages in the first innings are 44.6, in the second 38.9, the third 30.1 and the fourth 27.1 and, as you would expect, in that period, 25 out of 26 captains have chosen to bat first, gaining a considerable advantage in doing so.
These are not isolated cases. Many pitches have similarly skewed characteristics. Galle and Old Trafford for example, both have similar records to Adelaide. Karachi is as bowl-first friendly as Lahore.
****
Captains' behaviour at the toss seems to be yet another example of received cricketing wisdom not concurring with the evidence. Where what teams do doesn't seem to maximise their chances of winning. Why is this the case?
Well, part of the story involves how our brains handle information. There has been a great deal of research into memory and perception, and the results are both surprising and illuminating when it comes to our decision-making in sport. For a start, our memories don't work as you might expect. They are not akin to a videotape; we don't record a series of events and then play them back as and when they are needed.
The disturbing truth is that our unaided recall is not very good. The human brain encodes less than 10 per cent of what we experience, the rest it simply makes up. Our minds construct a narrative around the coded memories we do have that fills in the gaps with a plausible story. Faced with a huge number of random or near random events (a cricket match, for instance) our brains pattern-spot, even when there is no pattern. Our minds look for those events that they can form into a pattern or story, and that becomes the meaning or lesson that we take away from the match. Even if the vast number of events that occurred didn't fit the pattern, we disproportionately remember the ones that did.
At their best then, our memories seem to work along the lines of Albert Camus's description of fiction, they are the lie through which we tell the truth. What we remember didn't actually happen, what we remember is a story that our brains have fabricated, but one that we hope contains the essential truth of what happened in a way that we can understand and retain.
Our fallible memories are only part of the reason captains and coaches behave the way they do. There is another, far more powerful reason to make the choices they make and one which is harder to argue against. For this we need to go back to Brisbane in 2002, and Nasser Hussain choosing to bowl.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was the first Test of the Ashes, an Australian team were at the peak of their powers and playing at home in 'Fortress Brisbane', the hardest ground in the world to win at as an away team. No visiting team had won in the last 26 Tests played at the 'Gabbattoir'. Hussain won the toss and chose to bowl, Australia were 364-2 by the close of play and went on to win comfortably.
It is no use looking back with hindsight and using that to determine whether a decision was right or wrong. I am sure that if Nasser had known that choosing to bowl first would bring a host of dropped chances, the loss of a bowler to injury and Australia piling up the first-innings runs, he would have chosen to have a look behind door B and strapped his pads on.
But he didn't know, and in evaluating a past decision, we shouldn't know either. We need to remain behind the veil of ignorance, aware of all the potential paths the match could have taken, but ignorant of the one that it did.
One way we can do that is to simulate the match. There are various models that allow us to simulate matches given the playing strengths of the two sides and give probabilities for the outcome. When we do this for that Brisbane Test, we get the following probabilities for England:
Decision Win Draw Lose
Bat First 4% 3% 93%
Bowl First 4% 10% 86%
Every batsman in Australia's top seven for that match finished his career averaging over 45 (three averaged 50-plus), none of the English players did, only two averaged 40. England had a decent bowling attack. Australia had Warne, McGrath and Gillespie with 1,000 wickets between them already.
England were a pretty good side, they'd won four, lost two of their previous 10 matches. But they were hopelessly outgunned, and in alien conditions. Steve Waugh, the Australian captain, was also going to bowl if he had won the toss. If he had done then Australia would almost certainly have won the match as well. Australia were almost certainly going to win regardless of who did what at the toss.
But none of that made any difference. Hussain's decision to bowl first was castigated by the public and press of both countries. Wisden described it as "one of the costliest decisions in Test history". One senior journalist wrote that the decision should prompt the England captain "to summon his faithful hound, light a last cigarette and load a single bullet into the revolver".
For Nasser in Brisbane, read Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston in 2005, another decision to insert the opposition that has never been lived down. Yet, if either of them had batted first and lost, no one would ever remember their decision at the toss. You will rarely if ever be criticised for choosing to bat. Batting is the default setting; bowling first is seen as the gamble. And remember, the side that bats first loses significantly more than it wins.
Test cricket is one of the greatest contests in sport, a brilliant, multi-faceted contest for mind and body. But it is also a game of numbers. If you can tilt the numbers slightly in your favour, get them working for you, not against you, plot a slightly more efficient path to victory, then you are always working slightly downhill rather toiling against the slope.
As I write this, Pakistan are about to go out and bowl for the fourth consecutive day of England's first innings in Abu Dhabi on a pitch that you could land light aircraft on. They have home advantage, have made the orthodox decision, played well, and yet there is only one team that can win the match from here, and it isn't them. If this is what home advantage and winning the toss looks like then they are welcome to it.
It is all but certain that if they had ended up batting second they would now be in a considerably better position. Reverse the first innings as they have happened and Pakistan would now be batting past an exhausted England side and about to put them under the pump for a difficult last three sessions. And in the alternative scenarios where one side or the other got a first innings lead, as we have seen, those work disproportionately in favour of the side batting second.
But, we all do it. We look at a pristine wicket, flat, hard and true, and batting seems the only option. It is written into our cricketing DNA. The evidence may suggest there is a small marginal gain in bowling. But small margins be damned. If the marginal gain erodes your credibility and authority, then that is probably not an exchange you are willing to make. There are tides you can't swim against.
Which brings us back to Alastair Cook and Misbah-ul-Haq, standing in Abu Dhabi in the baking heat. Both are men of considerable character; brave, implacable and preternaturally determined to win. Each has withstood the slings and arrows of captaining their country through some fairly outrageous fortunes. Each is ready to bat first without a second thought. Because while they are certainly brave, they are not stupid. And you would have to be really stupid to make the right decision.
And there of course you have the central problem of much decision-making in cricket. This pitch is slightly different to all the other pitches that there have ever been. And you don't know for certain how it is going to play, or how that will influence the balance of power in the match. There are those who would argue that this is why stats are useless, or at best very limited.
I would agree entirely that stats are never sufficient to make a decision. There is nuance and subtlety to weigh; the brain and eye have access to information that the laptop doesn't. The feel and instincts of coaches and players, the hard-wired learning from decades in the game, contains incredibly valuable information and will always be the mainstay of decision-making that must be flexible and fluid through changing match situations. But if we are honest, we must also accept that the sheer weight and tonnage of what we don't know about how cricket works would sink a battleship. To use stats and nothing else to make decisions would be incredibly foolish, and as far as I am aware no one ever has. But equally, to insist on making decisions on incomplete information, without ever reviewing the effectiveness of those decisions would seem almost equally perverse.
I'm not saying that everyone was wrong in Abu Dhabi. I'm not saying that Misbah should have bowled. The weight of opprobrium heaped on him doesn't bear thinking about. It's the sort of decision that ends captaincies. No, Misbah had only one option and he took it. But maybe, just maybe, one day there will come a time when it isn't such an obvious choice.
2010s 28.8
2000s 28.4
1990s 23.1
1980s 21.1
1970s 22.7
1960s 21.5
This is largely down to the decline in the draw. There have been more and more results in Tests and although the proportion of them that have gone the way of the visitors has shifted slightly in favour of the home team, this has resulted in a significant rise in away wins.
That said, there are other factors that suggest the balance of power is shifting slightly towards the home team. The gap between averages at home and averages away is growing, for example. So let's assume for now that the premise is true, and that home teams are increasingly dominant.
Holding and Ponting have suggested giving the toss to the visiting captain to prevent home teams stacking the conditions in their favour. I don't know whether this is a good idea or not. But there are three reasons that we should question whether it would achieve its aims.
Firstly, it assumes groundsmen can reliably bake certain characteristics into a pitch. In practice, pitch preparation seems to be an inexact science. I have stood before Test matches around the world and listened to groundsmen describe how the pitch is going to play, only to watch it do something completely different half an hour later.
It also presupposes that the interests of groundsman and home team are aligned, which is often not the case. In England for example, venues are heavily incentivised to maximise revenues from the Tests they host by ensuring five full days' play. So groundsmen, understandably, often pay less attention to the needs of the visiting circus than to the people who pay their salary for the other 51 weeks of the year.
Secondly, there is a law of unintended consequences in sporting rule changes that can often produce the opposite result to the one intended. If a home captain had control over the pitch, the framers of this law are assuming he would back away from tilting it in his favour. Is it not just as likely that he would go the other way and seek to produce a pitch so favourable that the toss was taken out of the equation? This after all is what MS Dhoni openly sought to do when England and Australia each last toured, produce pitches that turn big from ball one, and so take the toss out of the equation. Equally, you could imagine England or Australia producing genuine green-tops that would be as helpful to the quicks on day four as day one.
But lastly, and most importantly, it assumes that captains are able to use the toss to their advantage. This is not in any way proven. In fact the evidence suggests it just isn't the case.
At the time of writing, 1,048 Tests have been played since January 1990. During that period, the side that won the toss has lost slightly more (377) matches than it has won (374). Winning the toss in the modern era appears to give a side no advantage at all.
It wasn't always so. On uncovered pitches, batting first in almost all instances was a robustly successful strategy. If it rained during the match, the pitch would deteriorate, affecting the side batting second disproportionately. Until 1970, the side batting first in a Test won 36 per cent of matches, and lost 28 per cent.
But in the modern era, the advantage of winning the toss seems to have disappeared. This is, of course, stunningly counterintuitive. Test cricket is an asymmetric game. One team bats first, then the other. And the two teams' chances of winning are not equal. The team batting first has different requirements for victory to the team batting second, and the pitch changes over the course of the match, affecting the balance of power between bat and ball. Therefore, we would assume, teams that win the toss can choose the best conditions and so gain an advantage. But they don't. How can that possibly be?
Dropped catches and a sickening injury to Simon Jones didn't help Nasser Hussain after he chose to bowl in Brisbane in 2002 © Getty Images
Sometimes, a perfectly reasonable response to current circumstances becomes a habit, then a tradition, then an article of faith that outlives the circumstances that created it. We rarely question what we know to be self-evidently true. And so the bias towards batting first seems to have outlived the circumstances that created it by several decades.
"If you win the toss, nine times out of ten you should bat. On the tenth occasion you should think about bowling and then bat."
That was a very successful strategy to adopt for the first century of Test cricket. And one that is still the default setting for most captains. In the 700 Tests played since January 2000, nearly twice as many captains have batted first than have chosen to bowl. Is it still successful?
In a word, no. In that period, the side batting first has won 36 per cent of those Tests, the side bowling first 39 per cent. The bat-first bias at the toss would seem to be neutral at best, and probably counter-productive.
It is still hard to believe that captains aren't able to use the toss to their advantage. There are venues where the evidence is stark. Some pitches clearly favour the side batting first, some the side batting second. In the 40 Tests played in Lahore, the team batting first has won just three. Adelaide by contrast is a classic bat-first venue. It starts as a batsman's paradise, but by the fifth day can be very tricky to bat on, with considerable turn for the spinners. In the 74 Tests played at the ground the side batting first have won 35, the side batting second 19. Since 1990 averages in the first innings are 44.6, in the second 38.9, the third 30.1 and the fourth 27.1 and, as you would expect, in that period, 25 out of 26 captains have chosen to bat first, gaining a considerable advantage in doing so.
These are not isolated cases. Many pitches have similarly skewed characteristics. Galle and Old Trafford for example, both have similar records to Adelaide. Karachi is as bowl-first friendly as Lahore.
****
Captains' behaviour at the toss seems to be yet another example of received cricketing wisdom not concurring with the evidence. Where what teams do doesn't seem to maximise their chances of winning. Why is this the case?
Well, part of the story involves how our brains handle information. There has been a great deal of research into memory and perception, and the results are both surprising and illuminating when it comes to our decision-making in sport. For a start, our memories don't work as you might expect. They are not akin to a videotape; we don't record a series of events and then play them back as and when they are needed.
The disturbing truth is that our unaided recall is not very good. The human brain encodes less than 10 per cent of what we experience, the rest it simply makes up. Our minds construct a narrative around the coded memories we do have that fills in the gaps with a plausible story. Faced with a huge number of random or near random events (a cricket match, for instance) our brains pattern-spot, even when there is no pattern. Our minds look for those events that they can form into a pattern or story, and that becomes the meaning or lesson that we take away from the match. Even if the vast number of events that occurred didn't fit the pattern, we disproportionately remember the ones that did.
At their best then, our memories seem to work along the lines of Albert Camus's description of fiction, they are the lie through which we tell the truth. What we remember didn't actually happen, what we remember is a story that our brains have fabricated, but one that we hope contains the essential truth of what happened in a way that we can understand and retain.
Our fallible memories are only part of the reason captains and coaches behave the way they do. There is another, far more powerful reason to make the choices they make and one which is harder to argue against. For this we need to go back to Brisbane in 2002, and Nasser Hussain choosing to bowl.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was the first Test of the Ashes, an Australian team were at the peak of their powers and playing at home in 'Fortress Brisbane', the hardest ground in the world to win at as an away team. No visiting team had won in the last 26 Tests played at the 'Gabbattoir'. Hussain won the toss and chose to bowl, Australia were 364-2 by the close of play and went on to win comfortably.
It is no use looking back with hindsight and using that to determine whether a decision was right or wrong. I am sure that if Nasser had known that choosing to bowl first would bring a host of dropped chances, the loss of a bowler to injury and Australia piling up the first-innings runs, he would have chosen to have a look behind door B and strapped his pads on.
But he didn't know, and in evaluating a past decision, we shouldn't know either. We need to remain behind the veil of ignorance, aware of all the potential paths the match could have taken, but ignorant of the one that it did.
One way we can do that is to simulate the match. There are various models that allow us to simulate matches given the playing strengths of the two sides and give probabilities for the outcome. When we do this for that Brisbane Test, we get the following probabilities for England:
Decision Win Draw Lose
Bat First 4% 3% 93%
Bowl First 4% 10% 86%
Every batsman in Australia's top seven for that match finished his career averaging over 45 (three averaged 50-plus), none of the English players did, only two averaged 40. England had a decent bowling attack. Australia had Warne, McGrath and Gillespie with 1,000 wickets between them already.
England were a pretty good side, they'd won four, lost two of their previous 10 matches. But they were hopelessly outgunned, and in alien conditions. Steve Waugh, the Australian captain, was also going to bowl if he had won the toss. If he had done then Australia would almost certainly have won the match as well. Australia were almost certainly going to win regardless of who did what at the toss.
But none of that made any difference. Hussain's decision to bowl first was castigated by the public and press of both countries. Wisden described it as "one of the costliest decisions in Test history". One senior journalist wrote that the decision should prompt the England captain "to summon his faithful hound, light a last cigarette and load a single bullet into the revolver".
For Nasser in Brisbane, read Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston in 2005, another decision to insert the opposition that has never been lived down. Yet, if either of them had batted first and lost, no one would ever remember their decision at the toss. You will rarely if ever be criticised for choosing to bat. Batting is the default setting; bowling first is seen as the gamble. And remember, the side that bats first loses significantly more than it wins.
Test cricket is one of the greatest contests in sport, a brilliant, multi-faceted contest for mind and body. But it is also a game of numbers. If you can tilt the numbers slightly in your favour, get them working for you, not against you, plot a slightly more efficient path to victory, then you are always working slightly downhill rather toiling against the slope.
As I write this, Pakistan are about to go out and bowl for the fourth consecutive day of England's first innings in Abu Dhabi on a pitch that you could land light aircraft on. They have home advantage, have made the orthodox decision, played well, and yet there is only one team that can win the match from here, and it isn't them. If this is what home advantage and winning the toss looks like then they are welcome to it.
It is all but certain that if they had ended up batting second they would now be in a considerably better position. Reverse the first innings as they have happened and Pakistan would now be batting past an exhausted England side and about to put them under the pump for a difficult last three sessions. And in the alternative scenarios where one side or the other got a first innings lead, as we have seen, those work disproportionately in favour of the side batting second.
But, we all do it. We look at a pristine wicket, flat, hard and true, and batting seems the only option. It is written into our cricketing DNA. The evidence may suggest there is a small marginal gain in bowling. But small margins be damned. If the marginal gain erodes your credibility and authority, then that is probably not an exchange you are willing to make. There are tides you can't swim against.
Which brings us back to Alastair Cook and Misbah-ul-Haq, standing in Abu Dhabi in the baking heat. Both are men of considerable character; brave, implacable and preternaturally determined to win. Each has withstood the slings and arrows of captaining their country through some fairly outrageous fortunes. Each is ready to bat first without a second thought. Because while they are certainly brave, they are not stupid. And you would have to be really stupid to make the right decision.
And there of course you have the central problem of much decision-making in cricket. This pitch is slightly different to all the other pitches that there have ever been. And you don't know for certain how it is going to play, or how that will influence the balance of power in the match. There are those who would argue that this is why stats are useless, or at best very limited.
I would agree entirely that stats are never sufficient to make a decision. There is nuance and subtlety to weigh; the brain and eye have access to information that the laptop doesn't. The feel and instincts of coaches and players, the hard-wired learning from decades in the game, contains incredibly valuable information and will always be the mainstay of decision-making that must be flexible and fluid through changing match situations. But if we are honest, we must also accept that the sheer weight and tonnage of what we don't know about how cricket works would sink a battleship. To use stats and nothing else to make decisions would be incredibly foolish, and as far as I am aware no one ever has. But equally, to insist on making decisions on incomplete information, without ever reviewing the effectiveness of those decisions would seem almost equally perverse.
I'm not saying that everyone was wrong in Abu Dhabi. I'm not saying that Misbah should have bowled. The weight of opprobrium heaped on him doesn't bear thinking about. It's the sort of decision that ends captaincies. No, Misbah had only one option and he took it. But maybe, just maybe, one day there will come a time when it isn't such an obvious choice.
Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them
New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it.
George Monbiot in The Guardian
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Members of the Devon Regiment round up local people in a search for Mau Mau fighters in Kenya in 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.
The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.
Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".
There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.
The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.
Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".
----Also read
-----
The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?
Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.
Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.
The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.
Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.
Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.
No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".
The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.
Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.
What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.
The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?
Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.
Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.
The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.
Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.
Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.
No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".
The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.
Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.
What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.
The hidden wealth of nations
G Sampath in The Hindu
India’s biggest source of FDI is India itself, money departing on a short holiday to a tax haven and then routed back as FDI. Will the government muster up the political will to clamp down on the tax-allergic business elite?
This could be a bumper year for the ever-lucrative tax avoidance industry. The 2015 final reports of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-led project on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) — which refer to the erosion of a nation’s tax base due to the accounting tricks of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and the legal but abusive shifting out of profits to low-tax jurisdictions respectively — lays out 15 action points to curb abusive tax avoidance by MNEs. As a participant of this project, India is expected to implement at least some of these measures. But can it? More pertinently, does it have the political will?
The BEPS project is no doubt a positive development for tax justice. If India’s recent economic history tells us anything, it is that economic growth without public investment in social infrastructure such as health care and education can do very little to better the life conditions of the majority. Which is why curbing tax evasion to boost public finance is part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
However, notwithstanding the BEPS project, MNEs and their dedicated army of highly paid accountants are not about to roll over and comply. Again, if past history is any indication, the cat-and-mouse game between accountants and taxmen will continue, with new loopholes being unearthed in new tax rules.
Empowering tax dodgers
The primary cause of concern here is the quality of India’s political leadership, which has consistently betrayed its own taxmen. All it takes — regardless of the party in power — is for the stock market to sneeze, and the Indian state swoons. We’ve seen it happen time and again: the postponement of the enforcement of General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) to 2017, and more spectacularly, on the issue of participatory notes, or P-notes.
The primary cause of concern here is the quality of India’s political leadership, which has consistently betrayed its own taxmen. All it takes — regardless of the party in power — is for the stock market to sneeze, and the Indian state swoons. We’ve seen it happen time and again: the postponement of the enforcement of General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) to 2017, and more spectacularly, on the issue of participatory notes, or P-notes.
Last year, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) on black money had recommended mandatory disclosure to the regulator, as per Know Your Customer (KYC) norms, of the identity of the final owner of P-notes. It was a sane suggestion because the bulk of P-note investments in the Indian stock market were from tax havens such as Cayman Islands. But the markets threw a fit, with the Sensex crashing by 500 points in a day. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, which had come to power promising to fight black money, promptly issued a statement assuring investors that it was in no hurry to implement the SIT recommendations. Given such a patchy record, what are the realistic chances of India actually clamping down on tax dodging?
Let’s take, for instance, Action No. 6 of the OECD’s BEPS report: it urges nations to curb treaty abuse by amending their Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAA) suitably. The obvious litmus test of India’s seriousness on BEPS is its DTAA with Mauritius. By way of background, Mauritius accounted for 34 per cent of India’s FDI equity inflows from 2000 to 2015. It’s been India’s single-largest source of FDI for nearly 15 years. Now, is it possible that there are so many rich businessmen in this tiny island nation with a population of just 1.2 million, all with a touching faith in India as an investment destination? If not, how do we explain an island economy with a GDP less than one-hundredth of India’s GDP supplying more than one-third of India’s FDI?
We all know the answer: Mauritius is a tax haven. While not in the same league as Cayman Islands or Bermuda, Mauritius is a rising star, thanks in no small measure to India’s patriotic but tragically tax-allergic business elite. In Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson notes how Mauritius is a popular hub for what is known as “round-tripping”. He writes, “A wealthy Indian, say, will send his money to Mauritius, where it is dressed up in a secrecy structure, then disguised as foreign investment, before being returned to India. The sender of the money can avoid Indian tax on local earnings.”
In other words, it appears that India’s biggest source of FDI is India itself. Indian money departs on a short holiday to Mauritius, before returning home as FDI. Perhaps not all the FDI streaming in from Mauritius is round-tripped capital — maybe a part of it is ‘genuine’ FDI originating in Europe or the U.S. But it still denotes a massive loss of tax revenue, part of the $1.2 trillion stolen from developing countries every year.
What makes this theft of tax revenue not just possible but also legal is India’s DTAA with Mauritius. It’s a textbook example of ‘treaty shopping’ — a government-sponsored loophole for MNEs to avoid tax by channelling investments and profits through an offshore jurisdiction.
For instance, as per this DTAA, capital gains are taxable only in Mauritius, not in India. But here’s the thing: Mauritius does not tax capital gains. India, like any sensible country, does. What would any sensible businessman do? Set up a company in Mauritius, and route all Indian investments through it.
India signed this DTAA with Mauritius in 1983, but apparently ‘woke up’ only in 2000. India has spent much of 2015 ‘trying’ to renegotiate this treaty. But with our Indian-made foreign investors lobbying furiously, the talks have so far yielded nothing. Meanwhile, China, which too had the same problem with Mauritius, has already renegotiated its DTAA, and it can force investors to pay 10 per cent capital gains tax in China.
Changing profile of tax havens
Tax havens such as Mauritius thrive parasitically, feeding on substantive economies like India. Back in 2000, the OECD had identified 41 jurisdictions as tax havens. Today, as it humbly seeks their cooperation to combat tax avoidance, it calls them by a different name, so as not to offend them.
Tax havens such as Mauritius thrive parasitically, feeding on substantive economies like India. Back in 2000, the OECD had identified 41 jurisdictions as tax havens. Today, as it humbly seeks their cooperation to combat tax avoidance, it calls them by a different name, so as not to offend them.
The same list is now called — and this is not a joke — ‘Jurisdictions Committed to Improving Transparency and Establishing Effective Exchange of Information in Tax Matters’. Distinguished members of this club include Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, Cyprus, and of course, Mauritius.
Today the function of tax havens in the global economy has evolved way beyond that of offering a low-tax jurisdiction. Mr. Shaxson describes three major elements that make tax havens tick. First, tax havens are not necessarily about geography; they are simply someplace else — a place where a country’s normal tax rules don’t apply. So, for instance, country A can serve as a tax haven for residents of country B, and vice versa. The U.S. is a classic example. It has stringent tax laws, and is energetic in prosecuting tax evasion by its citizens around the world. But it is equally keen to attract tax-evading capital from other countries, and does so through generous sops and helpful pieces of legislation which have effectively turned the U.S. into a tax haven for non-residents.
Second, more than the nominally low taxes, the bigger attraction of tax havens is secrecy. Secrecy is important for two reasons: to be able to avoid tax, you need to hide your real income; and to hide your real income, you need to hide your identity, so that the booty stashed away in a tax haven cannot be traced back to you by the taxmen at home. So, even a country whose taxes are not too low can function as a tax haven by offering a combination of exemptions and iron-clad secrecy — which is the formula adopted by the likes of Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
Third, the extreme combination of low taxes and high secrecy brought about a new mutation of tax havens in the 1960s: they turned themselves into offshore financial centres (OFCs). The economist Ronen Palan defines OFCs as “markets in which financial operators are permitted to raise funds from non-residents and invest or lend the money to other non-residents free from most regulations and taxes”. It is estimated that OFCs are recipients of 30 per cent of the world’s FDI, and are, in turn, the source of a similar quantum of FDI.
Such being the case, all India needs to do to attract FDI is to become an OFC, or create an OFC on its territory — bring offshore onshore, so to speak. That’s precisely what the U.S. did — it set up International Banking Facilities (IBFs), “to offer deposit and loan services to foreign residents and institutions free of… reserve requirements”. Japan set up the Japanese Offshore Market (JOM). Singapore has the Asian Currency Market (ACU), Thailand has the Bangkok International Banking Facility (BIBF), Malaysia has an OFC in Labuan island, and other countries have similar facilities. OFCs, as Ronen Palan puts it, are less tax havens than regulatory havens, which means that financial capital can do here what it cannot do ‘onshore’. So every major hedge fund operates out of an OFC. Given the volume of unregulated financial transactions that OFCs host, it is no surprise that they were at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.
Apart from accumulating illicit capital (in the tax haven role), channelling this capital back onshore dressed up as FDI (in investment hub role), and deploying it to engage in destructive financial speculation (in OFC role), these strongholds of finance capital also serve a political function: they undermine democracy by enabling financial capture of the political levers of democratic states.
It is well known that political parties in most democracies are amply funded by slush funds that would not have accumulated in the first place had taxes been paid. But today, not least in the Anglophone world, global finance’s capture of the state appears more like the norm.
A lone exception seems to be Iceland, which began the new year on a rousing note — by sentencing 26 corrupt bankers to a combined 74 years in jail. Meanwhile in India, we continue to parrot long discredited clichés about the need for more financial deregulation and a weird logic that mandates a smaller and more limited role for public finance.
Tuesday 19 January 2016
People judge you based on 2 criteria when they first meet you
Jenna Goudreau in The Independent
People size you up in seconds, but what exactly are they evaluating?
Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has been studying first impressions alongside fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years, and has discovered patterns in these interactions.
In her new book, "Presence," Cuddy says people quickly answer two questions when they first meet you:
Can I trust this person?
Can I respect this person?
Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both.
Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.
But in fact warmth, or trustworthiness, is the most important factor in how people evaluate you. "From an evolutionary perspective," Cuddy says, "it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust."
It makes sense when you consider that in cavemen days it was more important to figure out if your fellow man was going to kill you and steal all your possessions than if he was competent enough to build a good fire.
While competence is highly valued, Cuddy says it is evaluated only after trust is established. And focusing too much on displaying your strength can backfire.
Cuddy says MBA interns are often so concerned about coming across as smart and competent that it can lead them to skip social events, not ask for help, and generally come off as unapproachable.
These overachievers are in for a rude awakening when they don't get the job offer because nobody got to know and trust them as people.
"If someone you're trying to influence doesn't trust you, you're not going to get very far; in fact, you might even elicit suspicion because you come across as manipulative," Cuddy says.
People size you up in seconds, but what exactly are they evaluating?
Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has been studying first impressions alongside fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years, and has discovered patterns in these interactions.
In her new book, "Presence," Cuddy says people quickly answer two questions when they first meet you:
Can I trust this person?
Can I respect this person?
Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both.
Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.
But in fact warmth, or trustworthiness, is the most important factor in how people evaluate you. "From an evolutionary perspective," Cuddy says, "it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust."
It makes sense when you consider that in cavemen days it was more important to figure out if your fellow man was going to kill you and steal all your possessions than if he was competent enough to build a good fire.
While competence is highly valued, Cuddy says it is evaluated only after trust is established. And focusing too much on displaying your strength can backfire.
Cuddy says MBA interns are often so concerned about coming across as smart and competent that it can lead them to skip social events, not ask for help, and generally come off as unapproachable.
These overachievers are in for a rude awakening when they don't get the job offer because nobody got to know and trust them as people.
"If someone you're trying to influence doesn't trust you, you're not going to get very far; in fact, you might even elicit suspicion because you come across as manipulative," Cuddy says.
"A warm, trustworthy person who is also strong elicits admiration, but only after you've established trust does your strength become a gift rather than a threat."
We’ve been conned by the rich predators of Davos
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Davos: ‘This week, some of the richest people on Earth will gather high up a snowy mountain in the world’s biggest tax haven.’ Photograph: Ruben Sprich/Reuters
As metaphors go, this one takes some beating. This week, some of the richest people on Earth will gather high up a snowy mountain in the world’s biggest tax haven. Most will have paid big money to attend the three-day meeting in Davos: the most exclusive memberships cost somewhere in the region of £100,000 each. From there, they will relay thoughts on global risks and opportunities to the ski-jacketed press corps. They will talk about gender inequality and technological innovation. The message will go out: however turbulent the global economy, it is being capably stewarded.
These are our economic elites as they want the rest of us stuck on the flatlands below to see them: big-thinking, well-intentioned, hard-working – and thoroughly meritocratic. This is also how they justify the mammoth rewards they enjoy: we sweat for it; we’re worth it. The follow-up is usually only implied, but it is the one that underpins the entire system: put in enough hours and this could be you.
Set against that promise the finding from Oxfam that 62 billionaires have more wealth than half the world’s population – 3.5 billion people – share between them.
Ponder those numbers for a moment because they make up possibly the most grotesque ratio in the world economy today. Go through the 62 richest people and plenty of names jump out to show that any notions of meritocracy are a big fat lie. None of those 3.5 billion men, women, boys or girls will be born into a fortune such as that enjoyed by the Waltons of Walmart fame, in which just six people own $149bn. Nor will they ever get to be a Saudi royal such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, worth $26bn.
I could pull out plenty of other names giving the lie to the complacent notion that this is the era of the self-made plutocrat. The top of the money tree is still festooned with inheritances. Just look at the widow of chocolatier Michele Ferrero, Maria Franca Fissolo, who at 98 is the fifth wealthiest woman on the planet; the offspring of the Lidl and Aldi dynasties and the three Mars siblings who are worth $80bn. One doesn’t need to be a Bolshevik to see that many of the world’s super-rich are recipients of dumb luck, born into the right family at the right time.
But that grotesque index tells us that something else has gone badly wrong. At the start of this decade, 388 billionaires owned as much as half the world. By 2011, that number had plunged to 117. Last year, it had fallen to 80. In other words, in the five years since the world recession, the very richest have grown inexorably wealthier. And that’s not because the global economy is booming, as every worker on a pay freeze and every family seeing their benefits cut knows. It’s because we are living in a period of trickle-up economics, in which the middle- and working-classes have handed over money to those right at the very top.
The 80s were the decade of trickle-down economics, with Thatcher and Reagan cutting taxes for the richest and promising that everyone else – from Easington to Port Talbot, Pittsburgh to Milwaukee – would soon feel the benefits. By contrast the past half-decade has been about trickle-up economics, in which the world’s most powerful central bankers have launched policies that have been explicitly about boosting the fortunes of the richest. The disbursement of thousands of billions in quantitative easing both in the US and the UK from 2009 onwards was meant to raise asset prices – and assets are by definition in the hands of the wealthy.
No wonder the Bank of England admitted that 40% of the gains from its £375bn QE programme went to the top 5% of British households. No wonder Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire hedge fund manager, labelled QE: “The biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the rich ever.”
The figures prove him right. According to the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, between 2009 and 2012 the top 1% of American households took 91 cents out of each extra dollar that the country earned. The other 99% of Americans had to share the remaining 9 cents between them.
This didn’t happen in a fit of absent-mindedness. Rather, decades of burgeoning inequality – of the Davos set scooping more and more of the gains from growth – have enabled the super-rich to pretend that their narrow sectional interests are what’s good for the world economy. Policies as manifestly unfair as QE would never have happened in a fairer economy – the UK and US would have relied instead on public investment and government programmes.
Massive inequality has allowed the 1% to buy political influence as never before in postwar history. Indeed, the super-rich now practically write their own tax laws – such as the way senior executives of Britain’s biggest businesses were invited by George Osborne to advise on overhauling corporation taxes. They get to ensure that tax havens are treated with due leniency, all the better to hide their trillions in them. They buy their own politicians, as with the shadow-bankers who funded the Conservative election campaign or the billionaire Koch brothers using their fortune to tip the US presidential contest. Indeed, the more ambitious decide to become politicians. Think not just of Donald Trump but former bond trader turned media mogul turned mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg.
The great mistake made by the mainstream left and right, even by NGOs such as Oxfam, is in imagining that the super-rich, now enjoying such massive riches, are somehow playing by the same rules as the rest of us. That they are “wealth creators” providing jobs and investment for the rest of us, or that they might give up their tax havens. If that ever were the case, it isn’t now. A tiny minority has gained from massive tax cuts and legislative leniency about where they shove their money. They have siphoned off gains in salaries and profits wherever possible and enjoyed hundreds of billions flowing into their asset markets. Meanwhile, the rest of us who provide the feedstock for their revenues see our welfare states hollowed out, our wages frozen and our employers failing to invest. But none of that matters very much in Davos.
Davos: ‘This week, some of the richest people on Earth will gather high up a snowy mountain in the world’s biggest tax haven.’ Photograph: Ruben Sprich/Reuters
As metaphors go, this one takes some beating. This week, some of the richest people on Earth will gather high up a snowy mountain in the world’s biggest tax haven. Most will have paid big money to attend the three-day meeting in Davos: the most exclusive memberships cost somewhere in the region of £100,000 each. From there, they will relay thoughts on global risks and opportunities to the ski-jacketed press corps. They will talk about gender inequality and technological innovation. The message will go out: however turbulent the global economy, it is being capably stewarded.
These are our economic elites as they want the rest of us stuck on the flatlands below to see them: big-thinking, well-intentioned, hard-working – and thoroughly meritocratic. This is also how they justify the mammoth rewards they enjoy: we sweat for it; we’re worth it. The follow-up is usually only implied, but it is the one that underpins the entire system: put in enough hours and this could be you.
Set against that promise the finding from Oxfam that 62 billionaires have more wealth than half the world’s population – 3.5 billion people – share between them.
Ponder those numbers for a moment because they make up possibly the most grotesque ratio in the world economy today. Go through the 62 richest people and plenty of names jump out to show that any notions of meritocracy are a big fat lie. None of those 3.5 billion men, women, boys or girls will be born into a fortune such as that enjoyed by the Waltons of Walmart fame, in which just six people own $149bn. Nor will they ever get to be a Saudi royal such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, worth $26bn.
I could pull out plenty of other names giving the lie to the complacent notion that this is the era of the self-made plutocrat. The top of the money tree is still festooned with inheritances. Just look at the widow of chocolatier Michele Ferrero, Maria Franca Fissolo, who at 98 is the fifth wealthiest woman on the planet; the offspring of the Lidl and Aldi dynasties and the three Mars siblings who are worth $80bn. One doesn’t need to be a Bolshevik to see that many of the world’s super-rich are recipients of dumb luck, born into the right family at the right time.
But that grotesque index tells us that something else has gone badly wrong. At the start of this decade, 388 billionaires owned as much as half the world. By 2011, that number had plunged to 117. Last year, it had fallen to 80. In other words, in the five years since the world recession, the very richest have grown inexorably wealthier. And that’s not because the global economy is booming, as every worker on a pay freeze and every family seeing their benefits cut knows. It’s because we are living in a period of trickle-up economics, in which the middle- and working-classes have handed over money to those right at the very top.
The 80s were the decade of trickle-down economics, with Thatcher and Reagan cutting taxes for the richest and promising that everyone else – from Easington to Port Talbot, Pittsburgh to Milwaukee – would soon feel the benefits. By contrast the past half-decade has been about trickle-up economics, in which the world’s most powerful central bankers have launched policies that have been explicitly about boosting the fortunes of the richest. The disbursement of thousands of billions in quantitative easing both in the US and the UK from 2009 onwards was meant to raise asset prices – and assets are by definition in the hands of the wealthy.
No wonder the Bank of England admitted that 40% of the gains from its £375bn QE programme went to the top 5% of British households. No wonder Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire hedge fund manager, labelled QE: “The biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the rich ever.”
The figures prove him right. According to the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, between 2009 and 2012 the top 1% of American households took 91 cents out of each extra dollar that the country earned. The other 99% of Americans had to share the remaining 9 cents between them.
This didn’t happen in a fit of absent-mindedness. Rather, decades of burgeoning inequality – of the Davos set scooping more and more of the gains from growth – have enabled the super-rich to pretend that their narrow sectional interests are what’s good for the world economy. Policies as manifestly unfair as QE would never have happened in a fairer economy – the UK and US would have relied instead on public investment and government programmes.
Massive inequality has allowed the 1% to buy political influence as never before in postwar history. Indeed, the super-rich now practically write their own tax laws – such as the way senior executives of Britain’s biggest businesses were invited by George Osborne to advise on overhauling corporation taxes. They get to ensure that tax havens are treated with due leniency, all the better to hide their trillions in them. They buy their own politicians, as with the shadow-bankers who funded the Conservative election campaign or the billionaire Koch brothers using their fortune to tip the US presidential contest. Indeed, the more ambitious decide to become politicians. Think not just of Donald Trump but former bond trader turned media mogul turned mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg.
The great mistake made by the mainstream left and right, even by NGOs such as Oxfam, is in imagining that the super-rich, now enjoying such massive riches, are somehow playing by the same rules as the rest of us. That they are “wealth creators” providing jobs and investment for the rest of us, or that they might give up their tax havens. If that ever were the case, it isn’t now. A tiny minority has gained from massive tax cuts and legislative leniency about where they shove their money. They have siphoned off gains in salaries and profits wherever possible and enjoyed hundreds of billions flowing into their asset markets. Meanwhile, the rest of us who provide the feedstock for their revenues see our welfare states hollowed out, our wages frozen and our employers failing to invest. But none of that matters very much in Davos.
Monday 18 January 2016
Are modern cricketers more open to experimentation?
V Ramnarayan in Cricinfo
It was a cool December evening in the early 1980s. Flute maestro Hariprasad Chourasia was about to enter the iconic Kalakshetra auditorium in Chennai to perform in a concert when a young enthusiast asked him, "Will you please play the raga Hemant for me?" His reply was quick - and surprising, coming as it did from a leading classical musician of several years' standing. He said, "Sorry, I haven't learnt the raga yet." Some years later, I had a similar conversation with TV Vasan, a percussionist who played the mridangam, a south Indian drum. He spoke about a conversation he once had with the doyen of Carnatic music, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar. Vasan, who had watched Iyengar practise a particular song some 500 times during the month, was eager to hear it in concert on the morrow. That was not to be. "I haven't mastered it," said the singer.
More recently I read about another old master's advice to young musicians. Semmangudi Srinivasier, grand old patriarch of Carnatic music, said to his disciples: "Practise every song at least a thousand times before you take it to the concert platform." MS Subbulakshmi, perhaps the best known south Indian voice, was famous for doing just that. She knew every lyric of every song backwards, regardless of language or complexity, and still had butterflies in her stomach before every concert. The rigour extended even to studio recordings, where she could well have resorted to external aids with nobody the wiser for it.
The situation is different today. Without criticising or condemning modern musicians, it can be said truthfully of most that they do not match the older generation in their preparation for performances. Many look into their iPads or cell phones while performing on stage, possibly because their song repertoires are far larger than those of their gurus were. It is not unusual for a song learnt in the morning to debut in the evening.
What has all this to do with cricket? It is that I find some parallels between the two. For instance, I remember watching Erapalli Prasanna, during his last Ranji Trophy match, I think, bowl in the nets a delivery that looked similar to the doosra of a later era. Bowling in an adjacent net, and fascinated by the new variation, I asked him how come I never saw the delivery in a match. "Haven't mastered it," was his reply.
In my experience, experiments were frowned upon in matches. You were sure to get a tongue-lashing from your seniors if you tried something novel in a game. Mumtaz Hussain, a successful left-arm spinner in first-class cricket, might have been even more successful if he had continued to bowl the chinaman and the googly as he had done in his university days, instead of turning into an orthodox spinner and serving his side in a risk-free manner. Though Bhagwath Chandrasekhar and Anil Kumble were unorthodox wrist spinners, much quicker than the norm, neither added variations - like a slower ball - to his armoury before he was well into his career. Similarly, most international bowlers were reluctant to try reverse swing until long after the Pakistanis unfurled it.
The second decade of this century has been a watershed in this regard, with both bowlers and batsmen increasingly ready to take risks. To the reverse sweep has been added the switch hit, and the likes of offspinner R Ashwin (among those whose actions have not been questioned) have been attempting numerous variations, including the legbreak, whose destructive potential is as yet unknown.
I shudder to think what choice French my captain might have resorted to had I resorted to such experimentation in my day. As a result of such a mindset - which most of my contemporaries shared - I was so cautious that once, after hitting Tamil Nadu batsman P Mukund's off stump in a Ranji Trophy match (by sheer fluke) with a delivery I bowled from round the wicket, gripping the ball with my palm, I never tried the variation in all 15 years of cricket that followed. However, lest I be misunderstood to be an advocate of the current trend of launching untested or insufficiently tested products, let me stress that I am indeed an admirer of the perfectionism of the old guard.
It was a cool December evening in the early 1980s. Flute maestro Hariprasad Chourasia was about to enter the iconic Kalakshetra auditorium in Chennai to perform in a concert when a young enthusiast asked him, "Will you please play the raga Hemant for me?" His reply was quick - and surprising, coming as it did from a leading classical musician of several years' standing. He said, "Sorry, I haven't learnt the raga yet." Some years later, I had a similar conversation with TV Vasan, a percussionist who played the mridangam, a south Indian drum. He spoke about a conversation he once had with the doyen of Carnatic music, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar. Vasan, who had watched Iyengar practise a particular song some 500 times during the month, was eager to hear it in concert on the morrow. That was not to be. "I haven't mastered it," said the singer.
More recently I read about another old master's advice to young musicians. Semmangudi Srinivasier, grand old patriarch of Carnatic music, said to his disciples: "Practise every song at least a thousand times before you take it to the concert platform." MS Subbulakshmi, perhaps the best known south Indian voice, was famous for doing just that. She knew every lyric of every song backwards, regardless of language or complexity, and still had butterflies in her stomach before every concert. The rigour extended even to studio recordings, where she could well have resorted to external aids with nobody the wiser for it.
The situation is different today. Without criticising or condemning modern musicians, it can be said truthfully of most that they do not match the older generation in their preparation for performances. Many look into their iPads or cell phones while performing on stage, possibly because their song repertoires are far larger than those of their gurus were. It is not unusual for a song learnt in the morning to debut in the evening.
What has all this to do with cricket? It is that I find some parallels between the two. For instance, I remember watching Erapalli Prasanna, during his last Ranji Trophy match, I think, bowl in the nets a delivery that looked similar to the doosra of a later era. Bowling in an adjacent net, and fascinated by the new variation, I asked him how come I never saw the delivery in a match. "Haven't mastered it," was his reply.
In my experience, experiments were frowned upon in matches. You were sure to get a tongue-lashing from your seniors if you tried something novel in a game. Mumtaz Hussain, a successful left-arm spinner in first-class cricket, might have been even more successful if he had continued to bowl the chinaman and the googly as he had done in his university days, instead of turning into an orthodox spinner and serving his side in a risk-free manner. Though Bhagwath Chandrasekhar and Anil Kumble were unorthodox wrist spinners, much quicker than the norm, neither added variations - like a slower ball - to his armoury before he was well into his career. Similarly, most international bowlers were reluctant to try reverse swing until long after the Pakistanis unfurled it.
The second decade of this century has been a watershed in this regard, with both bowlers and batsmen increasingly ready to take risks. To the reverse sweep has been added the switch hit, and the likes of offspinner R Ashwin (among those whose actions have not been questioned) have been attempting numerous variations, including the legbreak, whose destructive potential is as yet unknown.
I shudder to think what choice French my captain might have resorted to had I resorted to such experimentation in my day. As a result of such a mindset - which most of my contemporaries shared - I was so cautious that once, after hitting Tamil Nadu batsman P Mukund's off stump in a Ranji Trophy match (by sheer fluke) with a delivery I bowled from round the wicket, gripping the ball with my palm, I never tried the variation in all 15 years of cricket that followed. However, lest I be misunderstood to be an advocate of the current trend of launching untested or insufficiently tested products, let me stress that I am indeed an admirer of the perfectionism of the old guard.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)