'It was quasi-religious': the great self-esteem con

Will Storr in The Guardian

In 2014, a heartwarming letter sent to year 6 pupils at Barrowford primary school in Lancashire went viral. Handed out with their Key Stage 2 exam results, it reassured them: “These tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique… They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister.”

At Barrowford, people learned, teachers were discouraged from issuing punishments, defining a child as “naughty” and raising their voices. The school’s guiding philosophy, said headteacher Rachel Tomlinson, was that kids were to be treated with “unconditional positive regard”.

A little more than a year later, Barrowford found itself in the news again. Ofsted had given the school one of its lowest possible ratings, finding the quality of teaching and exam results inadequate. The school, their report said, “emphasised developing pupils’ emotional and social wellbeing more than the attainment of high standards”. Somehow, it seemed, the nurturing of self-esteem had not translated into higher achievement.

The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s. Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our children – prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences.

One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the chief executive of British exams regulator Ofqual admitted the value of GCSEs and A-levels had been eroded by years of “persistent grade inflation”. In the US, between the late 60s and 2004, the proportion of first year university students claiming an A average in high school rose from 18% to 48%, despite the fact that SAT scores had actually fallen. None of this, says Keith Campbell, professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and expert on narcissism, serves our youngsters well. “Burning yourself on a stove is really useful in telling you where you stand,” he says, “but we live in a world of trophies for everyone. Fourteenth place ribbon. I am not making this stuff up. My daughter got one.”

Campbell, with his colleague Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, has argued that this kind of parenting and teaching has contributed to a measurable rise in narcissism: witness the selfie-snapping millennials. Although their findings are disputed, Twenge points to other research done in the US and beyond – “twenty-two studies or samples [that] show a generational increase in positive self-views, including narcissism, and only two [that] do not”.


To get ahead in the 1980s, you had to be ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself

How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John “Vasco” Vasconcellos. That year, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical Republican state governor to fund a three-year task force to explore the value of self-esteem. Vasco was convinced that low self-esteem was the source of a huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational failure, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and gang warfare. He became convinced that raising the population’s self-esteem would act as a “social vaccine”, saving the state billions.

But Vasco’s plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day. I spent a year trying to find out why – and discovered that there was, at the heart of his project, a lie.

***

John Vasconcellos grew up an obedient Catholic, an altar boy, the smartest kid in his class, whose mother swore that he never misbehaved. But, being such a devout Catholic, he knew that no matter how good he was, he could only ever be a sinner. At primary school, he ran for class president. “I lost by one vote. Mine,” he later said. He didn’t vote for himself because “I’d been drilled never to use the word ‘I’, never to think or speak well of myself.”

After a spell as a lawyer, Vasco entered politics. In 1966, aged 33, he was elected to the California state assembly. But there was a problem: his professional success was at odds with how he thought of himself; he felt he didn’t deserve it. At 6ft 3in and over 200lb, he would stalk the Capitol building in Sacramento, glowering and anxious in his smart black suit, perfect white shirt and arrow-straight tie, his hair cropped with military precision. “I found my identity and my life coming utterly apart,” he later said. “I had to go and seek help.”

That help came from an unusual Catholic priest: Father Leo Rock was a psychologist who had trained under the pioneer of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, a man who believed that the Catholics had it absolutely wrong. At their core, he thought, humans weren’t bad; they were good. And in order to thrive, people needed to be treated with “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers coined the phrase). Vasco began studying under Rogers himself, a man he later described as “almost my second father”. Through intense group therapy workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Vasco became a devotee of the human potential movement, based partly on the Rogerian idea that all you need to do to live well is discover your authentic inner self.

 Illustration: Franck Allais for the Guardian

Around the state capitol, Vasco’s colleagues began to notice the buttoned-up Catholic was unbuttoning. He grew his hair and wore half-open Hawaiian shirts on the floor of the senate, a gold chain nestled in his chest hair. One reporter described him as looking like “a cross between a rock star and a drug smuggler”. He became a human potential evangelist, preaching the innate goodness of humans and handing long book lists to colleagues. His self-hating Catholic self had washed away, and in its place was a great, glowing letter “I”.

Vasco knew he was in a unique position. As a politician, he could take everything he’d learned about human potential and turn it into policy that would have a real effect on thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. He decided to campaign for a state-financed task force to promote self-esteem: this would give the movement official affirmation and allow politicians to fashion legislation around it. Best of all, they could recruit the world’s finest researchers to prove, scientifically, that it worked.

In the mid-80s, the notion that feeling good about yourself was the answer to all your problems sounded to many like a silly Californian fad. But it was also a period when Thatcher and Reagan were busily redesigning western society around their project of neoliberalism. By breaking the unions, slashing protections for workers and deregulating banking and business, they wanted to turn as much of human life as possible into a competition of self versus self. To get along and get ahead in this new competitive age, you had to be ambitious, ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself. What Vasco was offering was a simple hack that would make you a more winning contestant.

Vasco’s first attempt at having his task force mandated into law came to a halt in 1984, when he suffered a heart attack. His belief in positive thinking was such that, in an attempt to cure himself, he wrote to his constituents asking them to picture themselves with tiny brushes swimming through his arteries, scrubbing at the cholesterol, while singing, to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat: “Now let’s swim ourselves/ up and down my streams/Touch and rub and warm and melt/the plaque that blocks my streams.” It didn’t work. As the senate voted on his proposal, Vasco was recovering from seven-way coronary bypass surgery.

After a second attempt was vetoed by the state governor, Vasco decided to enhance the name of his project, upgrading it to the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. He reduced the proposed budget from $750,000 a year to $735,000 over three, to be spent on academic research and the gathering of evidence in the form of public testimony. On 23 September 1986, Assembly Bill 3659 was signed into law.

The response from the California media was immediate and savage. One editorial, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called Vasco’s task force “naive and absurd”. Nothing made Vasco more angry than his ideas not being taken seriously, but he was about to become the joke of America.

***

Until Monday 9 February 1987, Vasco’s task force had been largely state news. But on that morning, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who had been tickled by the politician’s crusade, began an extraordinary two-week run of his popular Doonesbury strip devoted to it. By the end of that day, reporters were crowding Vasco on the floor of the assembly chamber. Rival politicians gave dismissive briefings – “You could buy the Bible for $2.50 and do better” – while the Wall Street Journal’s story bore the headline Maybe Folks Would Feel Better If They Got To Split The $735,000.


Vasco's credibility turned on a single fact: that the professors had confirmed his hunch. The only problem? They hadn’t

Vasco was livid. The media, he complained, were “terrible, cynical, sceptical and cheap”. Their problem? “Low self-esteem.”

Meanwhile, something remarkable seemed to be happening. The response from the people of California had been great. Between its announcement and the task force’s first public meeting in March 1987, the office received more than 2,000 calls and letters, and almost 400 applications to volunteer. More than 300 people came forward to speak in support of self-esteem at public hearings across the state. And even if the media’s tone wasn’t always respectful, Vasco himself was now a national figure. He appeared everywhere from Newsweek to the CBS Morning Show to the BBC. This, he sensed, could be a major opportunity.

But first he needed to find a way to wrench the media conversation upwards. And things, on that front, were going from unfortunate to ridiculous. It began with the announcement of the task force’s 25 members. On the upside, it was a diverse group, including women, men, people of colour, gay people, straight people, Republicans, Democrats, a former police officer and Vietnam veteran who’d been awarded two Purple Hearts. On the downside, it also included a white man in a turban who predicted the work of the task force would be so powerful, it would cause the sun to rise in the west. A delighted Los Angeles Herald told how, in front of the press, one member of the task force had asked others to close their eyes and imagine a “self-esteem maintenance kit” of magic hats, wands and amulets.

Vasco’s team began hearing testimony from people up and down California. They heard from an LA deputy sheriff who toured schools, attempting to reduce drug use by telling pupils, “You are special. You are a wonderful individual.” They heard from masked members of the Crips, who blamed their violent criminality on low self-esteem. One school principal recommended having elementary pupils increase their self-importance by doing evaluations on their teachers. A woman called Helice Bridges explained how she’d dedicated her life to distributing hundreds of thousands of blue ribbons that read Who I Am Makes A Difference.

With the national media given so much to snigger over, it was beginning to look as if Vasco’s mission was a bust. But there had been some good news: the University of California had agreed to recruit seven professors to research the links between low self-esteem and societal ills. They would report back in two years’ time. For Vasco, their findings would be personal. If the professors decided he was wrong, it was all over.

***
  Me, myself and I: a selfie-snapping millennial. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

At 7.30pm on 8 September 1988, Vasco met the scientists at El Rancho Inn in Millbrae, just outside San Francisco, to hear the results. Everything hinged on Dr Neil Smelser, an emeritus professor of sociology who had coordinated the work, leading a team who reviewed all the existing research on self-esteem. And the news was good: four months later, in January, the task force issued a newsletter: “In the words of Smelser, ‘The correlational findings are very positive and compelling.’”

The headlines quickly piled up: Self-Esteem Panel Finally Being Taken Seriously; Commission On Self-Esteem Finally Getting Some Respect. The state governor sent the professors’ research to his fellow governors, saying, “I’m convinced that these studies lay the foundation for a new day in American problem solving.”

Vasco’s task force was almost done: all they had to do now was build upon this positive tone with the publication of their final report, Toward A State Of Esteem, in January 1990. That report turned out to be a victory beyond the reasonable hopes of anyone who had witnessed its humiliating origins. The governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who’d privately mocked Vasco and his project, now publicly endorsed it, as did figures including Barbara Bush and Colin Powell. Time magazine ran with the headline, “The sneers are turning to cheers.”

The man they were calling the Johnny Appleseed of Self-Esteem appeared on the Today Show and Nightline, on the BBC and Australia’s ABC. The report went into reprint in its debut week and went on to sell an extraordinary 60,000 copies. Vasco’s publicists approached Oprah Winfrey, who ran a prime-time special examining why she believed self-esteem was going to be one of the “catch-all phrases for the 1990s”. Interviewed were Maya Angelou, Drew Barrymore and John Vasconcellos.


What had really happened at that meeting? I found the answer on an old audio cassette, hissy and faint

Four months after the launch of Toward A State Of Esteem, the papers were reporting that self-esteem was “sweeping through California’s public schools”, with 86% of the state’s elementary school districts and 83% of high school districts implementing self-esteem programmes. In Sacramento, students began meeting twice a week to decide how to discipline other students; in Simi Valley, kids were taught, “It doesn’t matter what you do, but who you are.” Political leaders from Arkansas to Hawaii to Mississippi began considering their own task forces.

As the months became years, the self-love movement spread. Defendants in drug trials were rewarded with special key chains for appearing in court, while those who completed treatment were given applause and doughnuts. Children were awarded sports trophies just for turning up; a Massachusetts school district ordered children in gym classes to skip without actual ropes lest they suffer the self-esteem catastrophe of tripping. Meanwhile, police in Michigan seeking a serial rapist instructed the public to look out for a thirtysomething male with medium build and “low self-esteem”.

The credibility of Vasco’s task force turned largely on a single fact: that, in 1988, the esteemed professors of the University of California had analysed the data and confirmed his hunch. The only problem was, they hadn’t. When I tracked down one renegade task force member, he described what happened as “a fucking lie”. And Vasco was behind it.

***

In an attempt to discover how America, and then the world, got conned so spectacularly, I travelled to Del Mar, California, to meet the task force member who’d predicted their work would cause the sun to rise in the west. David Shannahoff-Khalsa welcomed me into his bungalow, looking little changed from the old photographs I’d seen: face narrow, eyes sharp, turban blue. A kundalini yoga practitioner who believed meditation to be an “ancient technology of the mind”, Shannahoff-Khalsa had been so disillusioned by the final report, he’d refused to sign it.

Illustration: Franck Allais for the Guardian

As we sat and nibbled cheese, he picked up a thick book with a shiny red cover: The Social Importance Of Self-Esteem. This was the collected work of the University of California professors. He flicked through its pages, settling eventually on Smelser’s summary of the findings. “The news most consistently reported,” he read out loud, “is that the association between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant or absent.”

This was a radically different conclusion from that fed to the public. Shannahoff-Khalsa told me he was present when Vasco first saw preliminary drafts of the professors’ work. “I remember him going through them – and he looks up and says, ‘You know, if the legislature finds out what’s in these reports, they could cut the funding to the task force.’ And then all of that stuff started to get brushed under the table.”

How did they do that?

“They tried to hide it. They published a [positive] report before this one,” he said, tapping the red book, which deliberately “ignored and covered up” the science.

It was hard to believe that Vasco’s task force had been so rash as simply to invent the quote, the one that stated the findings were “positive and compelling”. What had really happened at that meeting in September 1988? I found the answer on an old audio cassette in the California state archives.

The sound was hissy and faint. What I heard, though, was clear enough. It was a recording of Smelser’s presentation to Vasco’s task force at that meeting in El Rancho Inn, and it was nowhere near as upbeat as the task force had claimed. I listened as he announced the professors’ work to be complete but worryingly mixed. He talked through a few areas, such as academic achievement, and said: “These correlational findings are really pretty positive, pretty compelling.” This, then, was the quote the task force used. They’d sexed it up a little for the public. But they had completely omitted what he said next: “In other areas, the correlations don’t seem to be so great, and we’re not quite sure why. And we’re not sure, when we have correlations, what the causes might be.”

Smelser then gave the task force a warning. The data was not going to give them something they could “hand on a platter to the legislature and say, ‘This is what you’ve got to do and you’re going to expect the following kind of results.’ That is another sin,” he said. “It’s the sin of overselling. And nobody can want to do that.”

I wondered whether Smelser was angry about the quote that got used. So I called him. He told me the university got involved in the first place only because Vasco was in charge of its budget. “The pressure [from Vasco] was indirect. He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to cut your budget if you don’t do it.’ But, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the university could devote some of its resources to this problem?’” It turned out that Smelser wasn’t at all surprised about their dubious treatment of the data. “The task force would welcome all kinds of good news and either ignore or deny bad news,” he said. “I found this was a quasi-religious movement, and that’s the sort of thing that happens in those dynamics.”

Vasco passed away, aged 82, in 2014, but I traced his right-hand man, task force chairman and veteran politician Andrew Mecca. When we finally spoke, he confirmed that it was the prestige of the University of California that had turned things around for Vasco. “That earned us some credibility stripes,” he said. Like Smelser, he felt that the university became involved only out of fear of Vasco. “John chaired their lifeblood. Their budget!” he chuckled.

How did he rate the academics’ research? “As you read the book,” he said, “it’s a bunch of scholarly gobbledegook.”

What was Mecca’s response when the data didn’t say what he wanted?

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I thought it was beyond science. It was a leap of faith. And I think only a blind idiot wouldn’t believe that self-esteem isn’t central to one’s character and health and vitality.”

Was Vasconcellos angry when he read the professors’ reports?

“The thing is, John was an incredible politician. He was pragmatic enough that he felt he had what he needed, and that was a scholarly report that pretty much said, ‘Self-esteem’s important.’ At least, that’s the spin we got in the media.”

Mecca told me that, prior to the final report’s publication, he and Vasco visited editors and television producers up and down the country, in a deliberate attempt to construct the story before it could be subverted. An extraordinary $30,000 was spent on their PR campaign: at its height, five publicists were working full time. “We decided to make sure we got out there to tell our story and not let them interpret it from the stuff that was being written by Smelser. We cultivated the message. And that positiveness prevailed.”

So nobody listened to what Smelser and Shannahoff-Khalsa were saying?

“I’m not sure anybody cared,” Mecca said. “Who remembers Neil Smelser or Shannahoff-Khalsa? Nobody! They were tiny ripples in a big tsunami of positive change.”

***

More than 20 years on, the effects of Vasco’s mission linger. Whether the tsunami of change he brought about was wholly positive remains doubtful. I spoke to educational psychologist Dr Laura Warren, who taught in British schools in the 90s, and remembers her school’s edict that staff use mauve pens to mark errors, in place of the negative red. “It was a policy of ‘reward everything that they do’,” she told me. “That turned out to be a terribly bad idea.”

The Ofsted inspectors discovered as much when they visited Barrowford primary school in 2015. But after their critical report became public, the headteacher, Rachel Tomlinson, defended herself in her local newspaper. “When we introduced the policy, it was after an awful lot of research and deliberation,” she said. “And I think it has been a success.”

Surge pricing comes to the supermarket

Tim Adams in The Guardian

In 1861 a shopkeeper in Philadelphia revolutionised the retail industry. John Wanamaker, who opened his department store in a Quaker district of the city, introduced price tags for his goods, along with the high-minded slogan: “If everyone was equal before God, then everyone would be equal before price.” The practice caught on. Up until then high-street retailers had generally operated a market-stall system of haggling on most products. Their best prices might be reserved for their best customers. Or they would weigh up each shopper and make a guess at what they could afford to pay and eventually come to an agreement.

Wanamaker’s idea was not all about transparency, however. Fixed pricing changed the relationship between customer and store in fundamental ways. It created the possibilities of price wars, loss leaders, promotional prices and sales. For the first time people were invited to enter stores without the implied obligation to buy anything (until then shops had been more like restaurants; you went in on the understanding that you wouldn’t leave without making a purchase). Now customers could come in and look and wander and perhaps be seduced. Shopping had been invented.


If you have enough data you can get closer to the ideal of giving your customers what they want at the time they want it - Roy Horgan, Market Hub CEO

For the last 150 years or so, Wanamaker’s fixed-price principle has been a norm on the high street. Shoppers might expect the price of bread or fish or vegetables to go down at the end of a day, or when they neared a sell-by date, but they would not expect prices to fluctuate very often on durable goods, and they would never expect the person behind them in the queue to be offered a different price to the one they were paying. That idea is no longer secure. Technology, for better and worse, through the appliance of big data and machine intelligence, can now transport us back to the shopping days of before 1861.

The notion of “dynamic pricing” has long been familiar to anyone booking a train ticket, a hotel room or holiday (Expedia might offer thousands of price changes for an overnight stay in a particular location in a single day). We are used to prices fluctuating hour by hour, apparently according to availability. Uber, meanwhile, has introduced – and been criticised for – “surge pricing”, making rapid adjustments to the fares on its platform in response to changes in demand. During the recent tube strikes in London, prices for cab journeys ‘automatically” leapt 400%. (The company argued that by raising fares it was able to encourage more taxi drivers to take to the streets during busy times, helping the consumer.)

What we are less aware of is the way that both principles have also invaded all aspects of online retailing – and that pricing policies are not only dependent on availability or stock, but also, increasingly, on the data that has been stored and kept about your shopping history. If you are an impulse buyer, or a full-price shopper or a bargain hunter, online retailers are increasingly likely to see you coming. Not only that: there is evidence to suggest that calculations about what you will be prepared to pay for a given product are made from knowledge of your postcode, who your friends are, what your credit rating looks like and any of the thousands of other data points you have left behind as cookie crumbs in your browsing history.

Facebook has about 100 data points on each of its 2 billion users, generally including the value of your home, your regular outgoings and disposable income – the kind of information that bazaar owners the world over might have once tried to intuit. Some brokerage firms offering data to retailers can provide more than 1,500 such points on an individual. Even your technology can brand you as a soft touch. The travel site Orbitz made headlines when it was revealed to have calculated that Apple Mac users were prepared to pay 20-30% more for hotel rooms than users of other brands of computer, and to have adjusted its pricing accordingly.

The algorithms employed by Amazon, with its ever-growing user database, and second-by-second sensitivity to demand, are ever more attuned to our habits and wishes. Websites such as camelcamelcamel.com allow to you monitor the way that best-buy prices on the site fluctuate markedly hour by hour. I watched the price of a new vacuum cleaner I had my eye on – the excitement! – waver like the graph of a dodgy penny stock last week. What is so far less certain is whether those price changes are ever being made just for you. (Amazon insists its price changes are never attempts to gather data on customers’ spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price available.)

Until quite recently this facility to both monitor the market and give consumers best price offers has looked like another advantage of the digital retailer over its bricks and mortar counterpart. Recently there have been efforts to address that inequality and replicate the possibilities of dynamic pricing on the high street.

Ever since data has been collected on customer purchases it has been possible to place shoppers into what analysts call “different consumer buckets”: impulse shoppers who were likely to buy sweets at the checkout counter; Fitbit obsessives willing to pay over the odds for organic kale. In her cheerily titled book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy Cathy O’Neil notes how by 2013, as part of a research project by the consultant Accenture using data from a major retailer, “it was possible to estimate how much it would cost to turn each shopper from one brand of ketchup or coffee to another more profitable brand. The supermarket could then pick out, say, the 15% most likely to switch and provide them with coupons. Smart targeting was essential, [as] they didn’t want to give coupons to shoppers happy to pay full price.”

Dynamic pricing is familiar to users of online travel websites such as Expedia. Photograph: Alamy

The obstacle to creating such “smart” pricing strategies in store has been the stubbornness of the paper price tag. A price change in most British retailers still involves a laconic employee manually updating them. In that, the UK currently lags quite far behind its neighbours in Europe (a fact noted last year by Nick Boles, then minister for skills, who praised French retailers for having systems that could change prices “90,000 times a day” while we still had minimum-wage employees traipsing along the aisles). Electronic price tags, which allow those 90,000 dynamic price changes, are a fact of life in most larger stores not only in France, but also in Germany and Scandinavia.

Within a couple of years it is likely they will become the norm here too – not least because cheap “price gun” labour might be harder to come by for supermarkets post-Brexit. That is certainly the view of Roy Horgan, chief executive of a company called Market Hub, which not only offers electronic shelf labels but also data analysis to keep prices competitive. Market Hub was created in 2010 by Horgan in part as a response to what he saw as a “race to the bottom” by retailers in his native Ireland in response to the financial crash. “We just thought that this can’t be the way to compete,” he says. “One of the things we are sure of is if you are copying your competitors’ strategy and you are losing, then they are losing too…” There had to be a smarter way.

Earlier this year the French market leader SES took a majority share in Horgan’s firm, giving it access to 15,000 stores. Only two or three of those at the moment are in Britain – Spar stores in Walthamstow and Hackney in London, where they are experimenting with dynamic pricing in the food hall, particularly with bread. The retailers show not only an uplift in revenue and profit (of 2.5%), but also a drop in wasted food of around 30%, according to Market Hub. They are selling their products in part as an eco-efficient system that prevents waste.

“When we set out,” Horgan says, “there were literally hundreds of startups analysing where customers were going in the store, or whatever. But there was also a ‘so what?’ about that. It didn’t make any difference without the ability to execute price [changes] and to make that change at the shelf. We developed a piece of software called Pulse, which analyses sales, weight, stock, and competitors’ prices that allows you to basically decide or not decide to take a trade. A city centre store will want to catch customers at the end of the day before they head home, so what level do you set your price at?”

Horgan suggests that British retailers are still a bit terrified that customers will be put off by changing prices – they notice one shift in price of a loaf of bread, but don’t see 50 changes of price in the vacuum cleaner they are browsing on Amazon. He believes that the system can benefit both consumer and retailer though, because it is about getting the right deal. “If you have enough data you can get closer and closer to the ideal, which is giving your customers what they want and at the time they want it, rather than overwhelming them with deals.”

It also perhaps has the potential to offer a glimmer of hope for the beleaguered high street. Shops are all too aware of the habit of “showrooming”, by which customers look at products in stores before going home and browsing the best deals for them online. Electronic price-tag systems can not only track online prices, they can – and sometimes do – also display at point of sale the hidden cost of shipping if the same product was bought online – a cost that most online customers don’t factor in. “There is a way for [high street] retailers to become profitable again,” Horgan insists.

So far, such systems have not entered the murkier waters of using the data to offer different customers different prices for the same product at the same moment. A couple of years ago B&Q tested electronic price tags that display an item’s price based on who was looking at it, using data gathered from the customer’s mobile phone, in the hope, the store insisted, “of rewarding regular customers with discounts and special offers” – rather than identifying who might pay top price for a product based on their purchasing history.

That trial hasn’t become a widespread practice, although with the advent of electronic systems and the greater possibilities of using your phone apps as a means of payment, it is probably only a matter of time. Should such pricing policies alarm us? The problem, as with all data-based solutions, is that we don’t know – no one knows – exactly which “consumer bucket” we have been put in and precisely why. In 2012, a Wall Street Journal investigation discovered that online companies including the office-supply store Staples and the furniture retailer Home Depot showed customers different prices based on “a range of characteristics that could be discovered about the user”. How far, for example, a customer was from a bricks-and-mortar store was factored in for weighty items; customers in locations with a higher average income – and perhaps more buying choice – were generally shown lower prices. Another study, in Spain, showed that the price of the headphones Google recommends to you in its ads correlated with how budget-conscious your web history showed you to be.

Increasingly, there is no such thing as a fixed price from which sale items deviate. Following a series of court judgments against other retailers advertising bogus sale prices, Amazon has tended to drop most mentions of “list price” or recommended retail price, and use instead the reference point of its own past prices.

This looks a lot like the beginning of the end of John Wanamaker’s mission to establish “new, fair and most agreeable relations between the buyer and the seller” and to establish something closer to a comparison site that works both ways – we will be looking for the low-selling retailer, while the retailer will equally be scanning for the high-value customer. The old criticism that consumer societies know the price of everything and the value of nothing is under threat: even the former certainty is up for debate.

Store wars: the future of shopping

Vending machines 2.0

Smart-Vend-Solutions-facial-recognition-vending-machine-in-use

The Luxe X2 Touch features facial recognition software to identify users and suggest purchases based on spending history or context, such as iced drinks on a hot day. It can also prevent children from buying cigarettes or alcohol, or keep hospital patients away from sugary or salty foods.

The Amazon Go store

The Seattle store is the first to eliminate checkout lines by using a mobile app. Customers simply scan their smartphone on entry and pick up what they want. Computer vision technology keeps track of their purchases and their Amazon account is debited when they are finished.

Automated assistants

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US home improvement store Lowe is introducing a new employee into its workforce: a robot that finds products for you. The robots, which will start roaming the aisles in San Jose, California, during the course of the year, speak several languages and can answer customers’ questions.

Beacons of hope

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Beacons are small, battery-operated, wireless devices that transmit a bluetooth signal to an appropriate smartphone app. This technology can be used to nudge customers into the store, suggest offers and purchases, and also stores information to monitor customer behaviour.

The Starship delivery bot

FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Starship Technologies/PA


Conceived by the founders of Skype, this is designed to deliver anything from groceries to books. The autonomous six-wheeled robot is speedy and saves you from lugging shopping bags, although it is questionable how safe it will be roaming the streets of Britain.

Pop-up shops

FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Katy Dillon


Got an idea for a shop, but worried about the commitment of opening one? Appear Hear is a website that helps you find short-term retail space and is designed to connect retailers, entrepreneurs, brands and designers alike. It has so far been used by top brands including Nike and Moleskine.

Tarek Fatah: Why his Indian TV show gets 100 million viewers

Britain is being led to an epic act of national self-harm

Will Hutton in The Guardian

Every day in Britain, 14,000 trucks come from and head to the European Union. If there is no Brexit deal with the EU, is every one of those trucks going to be inspected as they bring vital food and goods into the UK to see that the right tariff is being charged and correct regulation observed? If some trucks get delayed or traffic volumes plummet, who will organise food rationing in our supermarkets? Five days before a general election called to give the government a negotiating mandate for leaving the EU, is anyone aware of the risks? 

Equally, a quarter of British exports with the EU pass through one single port, Calais – £3bn a month – with zero border controls or inspection. Who in Calais is going to inspect these goods to see if they correspond to EU rules if we crash out with no deal? Has France any interest in investing quickly in the customs structure to keep British exports flowing? The M20 and M2 will become gigantic truck parks as drivers wait to be inspected. You might think that, just as a precautionary measure, as the prospect of the exit talks collapsing is less than two years away, the UK government would be investing in customs inspection depots in our great ports and along the land border with Ireland and also offering to build similar structures in France to ease the inevitable congestion on UK roads. Surely someone, somewhere might have asked these questions?

Nothing is being done at all. Mrs May and her breezy lead negotiator, David Davis, offer platitudes about Britain embracing the globe and no deal being better than a bad deal, but even the most innocent negotiator in the EU team can see this is vainglorious posturing. They are betting on a deal being struck – negotiators with few cards, nor making sure they hold better ones. As matters stand, the consequence of no deal would be calamitous.

For there are multiple areas where the same logic applies. It could be landing rights at EU airports or the export of drugs, suddenly to be treated as needing regulatory approval because they will come from a foreign country. There is the vast trade in dealing in euros in the City of London, surely certain to be repatriated to an EU member state. British universities will be barred from bidding for research grants. Some 55,000 EU nationals work in the NHS: are they to return and who is to replace them? An estimated 5,500 firms in financial services hold 330,000 passports to allow them to sell financial products across the EU – one of our few successful exports – with no questions or inspections asked. Again, this privilege is about to go in under two years. Companies with multiple operations around Europe, including Britain, will find that freely moving parts, people and data suddenly cannot be done.

For more than 40 years, Britain’s industrial policy has, in effect, been membership of the EU; 485 multinationals have their global or regional headquarters in the UK and core parts of manufacturing have been revived by foreign investment. At best, that now stagnates; at worst, they leave. There is no corner of British economic life that does not face disruption bleeding into mayhem as a consequence of no deal. The politician who declares that no deal is better than a bad deal is either supremely ignorant – or lying.

Which is why any economic forecaster who looks coolly at the facts has to project a fall in British trade. The World Bank believes that if Britain switches from single market membership to trading with the EU on World Trade Organisation terms – the “no deal” option – then British trade in goods with the EU will halve and trade in services will fall by 60% as these effects work through.

Yet that is only the beginning of the disaster. To keep exports of goods and services flowing to the rest of the world on the same terms as now, even before negotiating new deals, Britain will have to renegotiate 759 agreements with 168 countries that are now held by the EU, as the Financial Times disclosed last week. That is 759 opportunities for other countries, knowing our plight, to try to negotiate something better.

The clock is ticking. Decisions on where companies place exports and source imports in 2019 have to be taken in 2018. In reality, Britain has to find solutions to all these issues in less than 12 months.

It simply can’t be done within the time, nor is any network of replacement deals going to be superior to the ones we already have. Britain’s growth rate is at the bottom of the G7 and investment is falling. The Conservative manifesto commitment to leave the single market and customs union and seek a trade relationship outside any of the EU’s frameworks – not the EEA or even Efta – is a declaration of economic war upon ourselves. We are heading towards a first-order economic debacle. In Whitehall, morale is at rock bottom. Any civil servant who dares brief the prime minister or her inner circle on these realities is frozen out.
The EU could negotiate a British specific trade deal if it chooses, but there will be a high budgetary price. Britain, in essence, will be required to carry on contributing to the EU budget at current or even higher levels if it wants to keep vital goods flowing into the country in a customs deal, no less vital exports flowing out and some transitional arrangement during which we can try to renegotiate 759 trade agreements. Services, ranging from finance to the creative industries, in which Britain has a competitive advantage, can just take their chance. All influence on EU decisions will be lost. Some “deal”.

Britain will have to accept whatever the EU offers at whatever price. If the right of the Tory party and its media allies declare it unacceptable, the EU will shrug its shoulders and walk away. In any case, the European parliament, whose assent is required under article 50, will want tough terms to deter others from leaving. Nor will the government find popular support for no deal: Leavers voted to take back control, not for economic calamity.

A YouGov poll reports that 50% believe Britain should stay in the single market – only 29% do not and a narrow majority would even accept freedom of movement as the price of staying in. On these questions, Mr Corbyn and his party have been limp.

Britain is about to embark upon a national act of self-harm on an epic scale. The country, as it makes its decision on who it wants to lead the most important negotiations since the war, deserves to be warned. Instead, silence reigns.

‘Superstar culture afflicts Indian cricket,’ writes Ram Guha as he resigns from panel

Dear Vinod,

It has been a pleasure working with Diana, Vikram and you in the Supreme Court Committee of Administrators. It has been an educative experience, spending long hours with three top-flight professionals from whom I have learned a lot in these past few months. However, it has been clear for some time now that my thoughts and views are adjacent to, and sometimes at odds with, the direction the Committee is taking as a whole. That is why I eventually decided to request the Supreme Court to relieve me of the responsibility, and submitted my letter of resignation to the Court on the morning of the 1st of June.

For the record, and in the interests of transparency, I am here listing the major points of divergence as I see it:

1. The question of conflict of interest, which had lain unaddressed ever since the Committee began its work, and which I have been repeatedly flagging since I joined. For instance, the BCCI has accorded preferential treatment to some national coaches (read Dravid) , by giving them ten month contracts for national duty, thus allowing them to work as IPL coaches/mentors for the remaining two months. This was done in an adhoc and arbitrary manner; the more famous the former player-turned-coach, the more likely was the BCCI to allow him to draft his own contract that left loopholes that he exploited to dodge the conflict of interest issue.

I have repeatedly pointed out that it is contrary to the spirit of the Lodha Committee for coaches or the support staff of the Indian senior or junior team, or for staff at the National Cricket Academy, to have contracts in the Indian Premier League. One cannot have dual loyalties of this kind and do proper justice to both. National duty must take precedence over club affiliation.

I had first raised this issue to my COA colleagues in an email of 1st February, and have raised it several times since. I had urged that coaches and support staff for national teams be paid an enhanced compensation, but that this conflict of interest be stopped. When, on the 11th of March, I was told that that there was a camp scheduled for young players at the National Cricket Academy but at least one national coach was likely to be away on IPL work and might not attend the camp, I wrote to you:

No person under contract with an India team, or with the NCA, should be allowed to moonlight for an IPL team too.

BCCI in its carelessness (or otherwise) might have drafted coaching/support staff contracts to allow this dual loyalty business, but while it might be narrowly legal as per existing contracts, it is unethical, and antithetical to team spirit, leading to much jealousy and heart-burn among the coaching staff as a whole. This practice is plainly wrong, as well as antithetical to the interests of Indian cricket.

I would like an explicit and early assurance from the BCCI management that such manifestly inequitous loopholes in coaching/support staff contracts will be plugged.

Yet no assurance was given, and no action was taken. The BCCI management and office-bearers have, in the absence of explicit directions from the COA, allowed the status quo to continue.

2. I have also repeatedly pointed to the anomaly whereby BCCI-contracted commentators simultaneously act as player agents. In a mail of 19th March to the COA I wrote:

Dear Colleagues,

Please have a look at this news report:

http://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/pmg-signs-up-shikhar-dhawan-for-3-years-2776329/

Sunil Gavaskar is head of a company which represents Indian cricketers while commenting on those crickters as part of the BCCI TV commentary panel. This is a clear conflict of interest. Either he must step down/withdraw himself from PMG completely or stop being a commentator for BCCI.

I think prompt and swift action on this matter is both just and necessary. COA’s credibility and effectiveness hinges on our being able to take bold and correct decisions on such matters. The ‘superstar’ culture that afflicts the BCCI means that the more famous the player (former or present) the more leeway he is allowed in violating norms and procedures. (Dhoni was captain of the Indian team while holding a stake in a firm that represented some current India players.) This must stop – and only we can stop it.

Yet, despite my warnings, no action has been initiated in the several months that the Committee has been in operation.

As the mail quoted above noted, one reasons the conflict of interest issue has lingered unaddressed is that several of the game’s superstars, past and present, have been guilty of it. The BCCI management is too much in awe of these superstars to question their violation of norms and procedures. For their part, BCCI office-bearers like to enjoy discretionary powers, so that the coaches or commentrators they favour are indebted to them and do not ever question their own mistakes or malpractices. But surely a Supreme Court appointed body should not be intimidated by the past or present achievements of a cricketer, and instead seek to strive to be fair and just.

Conflict of interest is rampant in the State Associations as well. One famous former cricketer is contracted by media houses to comment on active players while serving as President of his State Association (read Ganguly). Others have served as office-bearers in one Association and simultaneously as coaches or managers in another. The awarding of business contracts to friends and relatives by office-bearers is reported to be fairly widespread.

Had we been more proactive in stopping conflict of interest within the BCCI (as per Lodha Committee recommendations, endorsed by the Court), this would surely have had a ripple effect downwards, putting pressure on State Assocations to clean up their act as well.

3. Unfortunately, this superstar syndrome has also distorted the system of Indian team contracts. As you will recall, I had pointed out that awarding MS Dhoni an ‘A’ contract when he had explicitly ruled himself out from all Test matches was indefensible on cricketing grounds, and sends absolutely the wrong message.

4. The way in which the contract of Anil Kumble, the current Head Coach of the senior team, has been handled. The Indian team’s record this past season has been excellent; and even if the players garner the bulk of the credit, surely the Head Coach and his support staff also get some. In a system based on justice and merit, the Head Coach’s term would have been extended. Instead, Kumble was left hanging, and then told the post would be re-advertised afresh.

Clearly, the issue has been handled in an extremely insensitive and unprofessional manner by the BCCI CEO and the BCCI office-bearers, with the COA, by its silence and inaction, unfortunately being complicit in this regard. (Recall that the Court Order of 30 January had expressly mandated us to supervise the management of BCCI.) In case due process had to be followed since Kumble’s original appointment was only for one year, why was this not done during April and May, when the IPL was on? If indeed the captain and the Head Coach were not getting along, why was this not attended to as soon as the Australia series was over in late March? Why was it left until the last minute, when a major international tournament was imminent, and when the uncertainty would undermine the morale and ability to focus of the coach, the captain and the team? And surely giving senior players the impression that they may have a veto power over the coach is another example of superstar culture gone berserk? Such a veto power is not permitted to any other top level professional team in any other sport in any other country. Already, in a dismaying departure from international norms, current Indian players enjoy a veto power on who can be the members of the commentary team (read departure of Harsha Bhogle). If it is to be coaches next, then perhaps the selectors and even office-bearers will follow?

5. Ever since the Supreme Court announced the formation of the COA, we have been inundated, individually and collectively, by hundreds of mails asking us to address various ills that afflict Indian cricket and its administration. While many of these issues were trivial or clearly beyond our purview, there was one concern that we should have done far more to address. This concerns the callous treatment to domestic cricket and cricketers, namely, those who represent their state in the Ranji Trophy, the Mushtaq Ali Trophy, and other inter-state tournaments. The IPL may be Indian cricket’s showpiece; but surely the enormous revenues it generates should be used to make our domestic players more financially secure? There are many more Indian cricketers who make their living via the Ranji Trophy than via IPL; besides, for us to have a consistently strong Test team (especially overseas) we need a robust inter-state competition and therefore must seek to compensate domestic players better.

And yet, shockingly, Ranji match fees have remained at a very low level (a mere Rs 30,000 odd for each day of play); moreover, cheques for match fees sent by the BCCI are sometimes not passed on by the state associations to the players. We need to learn from best practices in other countries, where domestic players are awarded annual contracts like those in the national team, while their match fees are reasonably competitive too.

Several months ago, the experienced cricket administrator Amrit Mathur prepared an excellent note on the need for better and fairer treatment of domestic players. Both Diana and I have repeatedly urged action, but this has not happened.

6. I believe it was a mistake for the COA to have stayed silent and inactive when the Supreme Court judgment was being so flagrantly violated by people clearly disqualified to serve as office bearers of state and even BCCI run cricket bodies. The disqualified men were openly attending BCCI meetings, claiming to represent their state association, and indeed played a leading role in the concerted (if fortunately in the end aborted) attempt to get the Indian team to boycott the Champions Trophy. All these illegalities were widely reported in the press; yet the COA did not bring them to the notice of the Court, and did not issue clear directions asking the offenders to desist either.

7. I believe that the lack of attention to these (and other such issues) is in part due to the absence of a senior and respected male cricketer on our Committee. Allow me to quote from a mail I wrote on 1 February 2017, before our first full meeting:


Dear fellow members,

I much look forward to meeting you all later today. I know Vikram already and greatly admire both Vinod and Diana for their remarkable work in their chosen fields, and am truly honoured to be working with them as well.

I presume apart from discussing IPL, etc, with the BCCI representative we will get some time to discuss the way forward separately. I have several ideas which I wish to share with you about our collective responsibility, and wanted in this mail to flag what is most important of these. This is that we must incorporate into our committee of administrators, either as a full member or as a special invitee, a senior male cricketer with the distinction and integrity that Diana has. That will greatly enhance both our credibility and our ability to make informed decisions.

The absence of a respected male cricketer in the COA has attracted a great deal of criticism already, much of it from important stakeholders in Indian cricket. It must be addressed and remedied. The amicus curae had suggested two outstanding names, Venkat and Bedi, both of whom were rejected because they were over seventy. However, there are some cricketers of the right age and experience who fit the bill. Based on my knowledge of the subject, I would say Javagal Srinath would be an excellent choice. He is a world-class cricketer, was a successful and scandal-free Secretary of the Karnataka State Cricket Association and is an ICC match referee, and comes from an educated technical background to boot. I strongly urge the Chairman and the other members to consider approaching him in this regard. He would complement Diana perfectly, and the combination of these two respected and top class former cricketers would enhance our credibility and effectiveness enormously.

While Srinath is in my view the best choice, there are other alternative names too. I hope we can set aside some time at our meeting to discuss and resolve the issue.

With regards
Ram

p.s. Needless to say, I have not discussed this with Srinath or with anyone else.

I raised this issue in a formal meeting of the COA as well, but unfortunately my proposal to invite a senior male cricketer to join the committee was not acted upon. We should have approached the Court to take necessary action, or else incorporated a senior, respected, male cricketer as a special invitee. With such a person on board the COA would have gained in experience, knowledge, understanding, and, not least, credibility. Indeed, had we such a person on board, the BCCI management and the office-bearers would have been compelled to be far more proactive in implementing the Lodha Committee recommendations than they have been thus far. As the only cricketer on the COA, Diana’s contributions have been invaluable; on many issues of administration and the rights of players she has brought a perspective based on a first-hand experience that the rest of us lacked. A male counterpart would have complemented and further enriched her contributions; but perhaps it is not too late to make amends.

8. While all our meetings were held in a cordial atmosphere, between meetings perhaps there was not adequate consultation, and there were several crucial decisions made where all the COA members were not brought into the loop. For instance, a capable, non-political Senior Counsel representing the COA and the BCCI in the Supreme Court was abruptly replaced by another Senior Counsel who is a party politician. Surely other COA members should have been consulted by email or by phone before this important change was made.
I have taken too much of your time already, but permit me to make one last suggestion. This is that the place vacated by me on the Committee of Administrators be filled by a senior, respected, male cricketer with administrative experience.

Let me in conclusion thank you for your courtesy and civility these past few months, and wish you and the Committee all the best in your future endevours.

With best wishes

Ramachandra Guha

Writing fiction is a prayer, a song: Arundhati Roy

Zac O'Yeah in The Hindu


Arundhati Roy opens her door and lets me in – into her kitchen. I wonder if I’ve knocked on the wrong door: the delivery entrance, perhaps? I quickly hand over the humble gift of fresh coffee beans I’ve brought her, on the assumption that all serious writers love coffee.

As we sit down around her solid wood kitchen table surrounded by funky chairs, I realize that the kitchen is the warm heart of her self-designed apartment in central New Delhi. Apart from long work counters, there’s a sofa, a bookshelf, a sit-out terrace with an antique-looking bench – altogether a place where one could spend a lifetime.

But right now she’s all over the world and is somewhat jet-lagged after having just flown in from New York. Following a bunch of interviews in town, she’s soon off again on a worldwide promotion tour for her new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades since the globally bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things. It appears to be the literary happening of the decade and according to her publishers ‘it reinvents what a novel can do and can be’. I’ve started reading it and can say that it is a ruthlessly probing and wide-ranging narrative on contemporary India, written with a linguistic felicity that reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children. On the whole, it makes interviewing her an intimidating prospect. While she makes coffee, I rig up my electronic defences consisting of three audio recorders (two of which conk out during the interview) and a backup video camera. She looks on bemusedly and seems used to a barrage of microphones. We embark on a three-hour interview session. Excerpts:

Generations of new Indian writers have seen you as an inspiration, as someone who allowed them to dream that one could sit in India and write and then be read all over the world. How does your iconic status feel to you? Do you ever think about it?

Not really, because I am equally balanced by the kind of rage and craziness that I evoke. For me, I live inside my work. Although I must say that I was thinking at some time about writers who like to remain anonymous – but I’ve never been that person. Because, in this country it is important, especially as a woman, to say: “Hey! Here I am! I am going to take you on! And this is what I think and I’m not going to hide.” So if I have helped to give courage to anybody… to experiment… to step out of line… That’s lovely, I think it is very important for us to say: “We can! And we will! And don’t f*** with us!” You know, come on.


I’ve noticed that you don’t often appear at literary festivals. There are more than a hundred in India these days, and I’ve been to quite a few myself, but never met you before. Do you keep away from other writers?

It’s not about other writers. I don’t know if you’ve read this essay I wrote called Capitalism – A Ghost Story and Walking with the Comrades? The thing is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is funded by a kind of notorious mining company that is silencing the voices of the Adivasis, kicking them out of their homes, and now it is also funded by Zee TV which is half the time baying for my blood. So in principle I won’t go. How can I? I’m writing against them. I mean, it’s not that I’m a pure person, like all of us I have contradictions and issues, I’m not like Gandhiji, you know, but in theory I abide by this. How can you be silencing and snuffing out the voices of the poorest people in the world, and then become this glittering platform for free speech and flying writers all around the place? I have a problem with that.


Do you read a lot of new Indian fiction or non-fiction?

When I’ve been writing this book, I haven’t been very up on current things. I’m not even on Facebook and all that. I don’t have any problem [with it], but as Edward Snowden told me, the CIA celebrated when Facebook was started, because they just got all the information without having to collect it. That aside, I think that when you’re writing, you tend to be a bit strange about reading: sometimes I’m not reading whole books, I’m dipping into things to check my own sanity. ’ (She waves her left hand in a kind of elegantly psychedelic mudra before her face.) ‘Am I on the same planet?


Is there any particular Indian writer who you admire?

I think that Naipaul is a very accomplished writer, although we are worlds apart in our worldviews. But I’m not really that influenced by anybody, you know. I have to say that I find it incredible that writers in India, or almost all Indian writers, or at least the well-known writers… Let’s not say writers, but there’s been a level of eliding of things that have been at the heart of the society, like caste. You see there is something very wrong here. It is like people in apartheid South Africa writing without mentioning that there is apartheid.


Your writing is hard-hitting and outspoken – have you experienced any adverse repercussions?

My God, that’s to put it mildly. Other than of course going to jail and all that. Even now, when the last book of essays was released in Delhi, called Broken Republic, a gang of vigilantes came on stage, smashed the stage up. The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever, I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere and I live perhaps alone, but in the heart of the crowd.


It must have been a bit of a shock, after expressing a personal opinion, to suddenly find yourself behind bars in Tihar Jail?

Tihar. (She sighs deeply.) Yes, it is shocking, but at the same time look at how many thousands of people are behind bars, people who have no understanding of the language, who don’t even know what they’re charged with. So I can’t really be dramatic about what happened to me, because people are in jail for years for nothing – nothing! It’s crazy! I’m currently being tried for contempt of court again for an essay I wrote called Professor P.O.W. which you can read in Outlook Magazine.


Have you ever felt that you should leave India and live in a country where you don’t have to face such problems?

Everything that I know is here! Everyone that I know! And I’ve never really lived outside, abroad, so the idea of going to live all alone in some strange country is also terrifying. But right now I think India is poised in an extremely dangerous place, I don’t know what is going to happen to anybody – to me or to anybody. There are just these mobs that decide who should be killed, who should be shot, who should be lynched, you know? I think it is probably the first time that people in India, writers and other people, are facing the kind of trauma that people have faced in Chile and Latin America. There’s a kind of terror building up here which we have not fully got the measure of. You go through periods when you are feeling very worried, then angry, and then defiant. I think this story is still unfolding.


Do you anticipate upsetting people with the new book? Though the mobs don’t read anything sophisticated, do they?

It’s never about the book or what they read or don’t read, it is about some arbitrary rules they have made about what can be said, what can’t be said, who can say what, who can kill whom – all of that. Yeah, I mean I live here, and I write here, and this book is about here. But the situation here is out of control, from the bottom! It is not about just getting killed, but it is about: How do you even sit in a train or a bus now if you are a Muslim without risking your life? So what happens with me, I have no idea. I’ve written a book and it’s taken me ten years to write it, and there are thirty countries in the world where the biggest publishers are publishing it. I’m not going to allow some idiots to come and disrupt it and snatch all the headlines. Why should I? It is not about their little brains, it is about literature. It has to be protected and tactically done in this climate.


Let’s talk about the book. What was it that made you publish a new novel after spending twenty years being a public intellectual?

Well, this novel has been ten years in the writing, but I think in the twenty years between The God of Small Things and now, I have travelled and been involved with so many things that are happening and written about them at length. There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.


So that is why you chose…

But it is not that. I didn’t choose to write fiction because I wanted to say something about Kashmir, but fiction chooses you. I don’t think it is that simple that I had some information to impart and therefore I wanted to write a book. Not at all. It is a way of seeing. A way of thinking, it is a prayer, it is a song.


In the book you use a remarkably poetic language to talk about the harshest subjects.

Language is something so natural to you, you know, not something you can manufacture, not for me.

Having studied architecture, you must have at some point thought of that as your field, while today you are one of the most celebrated novelists on the planet. What does your interest in language stem from?

Actually, the idea of language was far before architecture, because in a way architecture came to me as a very pragmatic thing. I left home when I was seventeen and I needed somehow to…

(At this point one of her dogs climbs all over me. I’m more accustomed to dogs barking the moment they see me but, puzzlingly, this one appears to want to lick my face. Arundhati laughs.)

She’s flirting with you. They are both street dogs. She was born outside a drain. Then her mother was hit by a car. That other one I found tied to a lamppost, cruelly.


Do your dogs have names?

Yeah, her name is Begum Filthy Jaan and this one is Maati K. Lal. That means “beloved of the earth”. Both Lal and Jaan mean beloved.


So they make up your family?

Yes.


They’re very well behaved to be street dogs.

Street dogs are more civilized than other dogs. They’re the best. I’m also a bit of a street dog.


I see. So we were talking about your relationship with language and how you left home at 17.

The relationship with language was there from the time I was very, very young. The only thing is that it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be in a position to be a writer.


Why not?

No money… How are you going to earn a living? In the early years of my life my only ambition was to survive somehow, pay my rent. So it didn’t seem like there’d ever be that time where you could actually sit and write something but you’d be so busy earning. It was just a question of: How do you survive?


How did you survive then?

I used to work in this place called the National Institute of Urban Affairs where I earned almost nothing. I used to live in this little hole-in-the-wall near the Nizamuddin Dargah and hire a bicycle for one rupee a day to go to work. All my time I spent thinking about money. (She giggles.)


So at that point you were almost about to become a bureaucrat?

No, no, architect! I could never have become a bureaucrat.


But a government servant?

No, not even that. I was just a temporary, you know at the edges of it.


So then the writing really started with the film scripts?

Basically after Annie [In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)] – a film that just made its own secret little pathways into the world away from the big hit films – I wrote a second film called Electric Moon and then The God of Small Things. And after that, the essays.


And now you’re making a fiction comeback. Was there any particular idea or incident that triggered off the new book? It seems to be a meditation on the state of the nation.

(She takes a large sip of coffee and rubs her eyes.) ‘It’s a meditation, let’s say, just a meditation. Always, some things spark something and I think in my case I don’t think what sparks it is necessarily what it’s about. Obviously so many years of one’s life and thinking and encounters and all that… but I think one of those nights that I used to spend in front of Jantar Mantar with all these [protesters] who come there, a baby did appear and people were asking: “What to do?” Nobody was sure what to do. So that was one of the things.


I recall that sequence in the novel, and you also narrate many of the individual stories behind the characters you meet at Jantar Mantar?

That was one of the ideas for me that I would – experiment. As you can imagine with any writer who writes a “successful” book, then everybody wants to sign contracts and give you lots of money… and I didn’t want that. I wanted to experiment. I wanted to write a book in which I don’t walk past anyone, even the smallest child, or woman, but sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a chat. It is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, as much as a map of a city or a building. Or like the structure of a classical raga, where you have these notes and you keep exploring them from different angles, in different ways, different ups, different downs.


About the first hundred pages of the book are set in Old Delhi. What is your relationship to that part of town?

I actually have a place there.


Near Jama Masjid?

Yes, a rented place, a small room, so I’ve been there for many years.


But why do you need that place when you have this apartment?

You sometimes feel under siege. It was not that I went there because I was going to write about it, but because I went there it became very much part [of the book]. I go there, wander around late at night.


All those rabid street dogs, they don’t chase you?

No. Not at all. Humans are rabid, dogs are okay.


The title is intriguing – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – because inside the book there’s quite a lot of darkness.

But yeah, there’s also quite a lot of light. And the light is in the most unexpected places.


There’s also a character called Tilo, who seems to me very much like Radha in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Is she a continuation of that character?

(She laughs.) She’s not actually like Radha when you carry on [reading]. Yeah, she’s in architecture school, but I think Tilo is a very different person actually.


But how much autobiographical detail do you use in your writing?

It is hard to say, because where does your imagination end and your experience begin? Your memories? It is all a soup. Like in The God of Small Things when Esthappen says, “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” Or if you’re happy in a dream, does it count? To me this book is not a thinly veiled political essay masquerading as a novel, it is a novel. And in novels, everything gets processed and sweated out on your skin, has to become part of your DNA and it is as complicated as anything that lives inside your body.


On that note, let me ask: in the years you worked on the novel, did you get tired of it at some point or were you happily engrossed in it for an entire decade?

When I write fiction I have a very easy relationship with it in the sense that I’m not in a hurry. Partly, I really want to see if it will live with me, you know, for long. If I got fed up with it, I would leave it and imagine the world would get fed up too. I need to develop a relationship with it almost like…(She goes quiet.)


Like with another human perhaps?

Or a group of humans. We all live together.


Nerdy question time – are there any rituals you have to go through like putting on a jazz record or uncorking a bottle of Old Monk before you start writing?

Let’s say when I was breaking the stones and really trying to understand what I was trying to do I would never be able to work for very long, just a few hours a day. There were two phases in writing this book, one was about generating the smoke, and then it’s like sculpting it, none of which is the same as writing and rewriting, or making drafts. But when you’re generating the smoke, it would be like – I could write three sentences and then just fall asleep out of exhaustion. But when the book was finally clear to me, I’d be working long hours. It was the same with The God of Small Things, there would be that single sentence which would send me to sleep. Like a strange trance almost.


Has your training as an architect been helpful to you?

Not just helped, it is central to the way I write.


How?

Because to me a story is like the map of a city or a map of a building, structured: the way you tell it, the way you enter it, exit it… None of it is simple, straightforward, time and chronology is like building material, so yeah, architecture to me is absolutely central.


I recall Vikram Chandra once telling me how he adapted a construction project management software, used by architects and builders to control the supply chains and all that, to plan and track all the elements in his novel Sacred Games. Do you – as an architect – plan your writing like that?

Oh God! There’s no algorithm involved in my writing, it is all instinctive… rhythm.


What’s a good writing day like then? You get up at five o’clock and take strong coffee or do you wake at three in the afternoon and pour yourself a glass of champagne before hitting the desk?

I don’t seem to have any rituals as such, it is just a very open encounter between me and myself and my writing. I don’t actually understand what we mean by “when you write” because I kind of wonder when am I not writing? I am always writing inside my head! But right now, I feel almost like if I weighed myself, I’d be half my weight, because the last ten years it’s just been in my head, all the time! At least now’ (she points at the book on the kitchen table) ‘it is with me, but it is not on the weighing scale. You know?


What do you do for inspiration?

You know, one of the reasons it would be so hard for me to leave this country, is that everywhere I turn there is something so deep going on. That way I’m lucky in terms of the worlds that I move through here whether it is in the Narmada Valley or in Kashmir. It is a very anarchic, unformatted world that I live in. To me, if anything it is an overload of every kind of stimulus. I suppose I’m not closed off in some family thing. There’s a porous border between me and the world and lots of things come and go. That’s the way I live. There are so many brilliant people doing things around me all the time, like even just in the process of making this book – if I want someone who is an insane … who’s actually not a human being, but a printing machine, I lean this way. If I want someone who is skulking around the city taking pictures, I lean that way. One is just surrounded by unorthodox brilliance all the time. And that’s my real inspiration. If I want really badly behaved dogs I have them too.(She laughs and hugs one of her dogs who is barking in the background, presumably impatient with our interviewing.)


Between writing fiction and non-fiction – which one gives you more pleasure or are they equally satisfactory?

No, there’s no comparison between them for me. Non-fiction is not about pleasure; non-fiction has a sort of urgency to it and another kind of intensity. But fiction is about pleasure. I know for some people it is very painful, but for me not.


What do you do then when you celebrate a good writing day or a well done story? Do you open a bottle of Old Monk?

(She bursts out laughing.)

You’re just stuck on your Old Monk! No, I… I think I just float around.

The myths about money that British voters should reject

Ha Joon Chang in The Guardian


Illustration: Nate Kitch


Befitting a surprise election, the manifestos from the main parties contained surprises. Labour is shaking off decades of shyness about nationalisation and tax increases for the rich and for the first time in decades has a policy agenda that is not Tory-lite. The Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are rejecting “the cult of selfish individualism” and “belief in untrammelled free markets”, while adopting the quasi-Marxist idea of an energy price cap.

Despite these significant shifts, myths about the economy refuse to go away and hamper a more productive debate. They concern how the government manages public finances – “tax and spend”, if you will.

The first is that there is an inherent virtue in balancing the books. Conservatives still cling to the idea of eliminating the budget deficit, even if it is with a 10-year delay (2025, as opposed to George Osborne’s original goal of 2015). The budget-balancing myth is so powerful that Labour feels it has to cost its new spending pledges down to the last penny, lest it be accused of fiscal irresponsibility.

However, as Keynes and his followers told us, whether a balanced budget is a good or a bad thing depends on the circumstances. In an overheating economy, deficit spending would be a serious folly. However, in today’s UK economy, whose underlying stagnation has been masked only by the release of excess liquidity on an oceanic scale, some deficit spending may be good – necessary, even.

The second myth is that the UK welfare state is especially large. Conservatives believe that it is bloated out of all proportion and needs to be drastically cut. Even the Labour party partly buys into this idea. Its extra spending pledge on this front is presented as an attempt to reverse the worst of the Tory cuts, rather than as an attempt to expand provision to rebuild the foundation for a decent society.

The reality is the UK welfare state is not large at all. As of 2016, the British welfare state (measured by public social spending) was, at 21.5% of GDP, barely three-quarters of welfare spending in comparably rich countries in Europe – France’s is 31.5% and Denmark’s is 28.7%, for example. The UK welfare state is barely larger than the OECD average (21%), which includes a dozen or so countries such as Mexico, Chile, Turkey and Estonia, which are much poorer and/or have less need for public welfare provision. They have younger populations and stronger extended family networks.

The third myth is that welfare spending is consumption – that it is a drain on the nation’s productive resources and thus has to be minimised. This myth is what Conservative supporters subscribe to when they say that, despite their negative impact, we have to accept cuts in such things as disability benefit, unemployment benefit, child care and free school meals, because we “can’t afford them”. This myth even tints, although doesn’t define, Labour’s view on the welfare state. For example, Labour argues for an expansion of welfare spending, but promises to finance it with current revenue, thereby implicitly admitting that the money that goes into it is consumption that does not add to future output.

 ‘It is a myth that, despite their negative impact, we have to accept cuts in such things as disability benefit, unemployment benefit, child care and free school meals.’ Photograph: monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images/iStockphoto

However, a lot of welfare spending is investment that pays back more than it costs, through increased productivity in the future. Expenditure on education (especially early learning programmes such as Sure Start), childcare and school meals programmes is an investment in the nation’s future productivity. Unemployment benefit, especially if combined with good publicly funded retraining and job-search programmes, such as in Scandinavia, preserve the human productive capabilities that would otherwise be lost, as we have seen in so many former industrial towns in the UK. Increased spending on disability benefits and care for older people helps carers to have more time and less stress, making them more productive workers.

The last myth is that tax is a burden, which therefore by definition needs to be minimised. The Conservatives are clear about this, proposing to cut corporation tax further to 17%, one of the lowest levels in the rich world. However, even Labour is using the language of “burden” about taxes. In proposing tax increases for the highest income earners and large corporations, Jeremy Corbyn spoke of his belief that “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden”.

But would you call the money that you pay for your takeaway curry or Netflix subscription a burden? You wouldn’t, because you recognise that you are getting your curry and TV shows in return. Likewise, you shouldn’t call your taxes a burden because in return you get an array of public services, from education, health and old-age care, through to flood defence and roads to the police and military.

If tax really were a pure burden, all rich individuals and companies would move to Paraguay or Bulgaria, where the top rate of income tax is 10%. Of course, this does not happen because, in those countries, in return for low tax you get poor public services. Conversely, most rich Swedes don’t go into tax exile because of their 60% top income tax rate, because they get a good welfare state and excellent education in return. Japanese and German companies don’t move out of their countries in droves despite some of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world (31% and 30% respectively) because they get good infrastructure, well-educated workers, strong public support for research and development, and well-functioning administrative and legal systems.

Low tax is not in itself a virtue. The question should be whether the government is providing services of satisfactory quality, given the tax receipts, not what the level of tax is.

The British debate on economic policy is finally moving on from the bankrupt neoliberal consensus of the past few decades. But the departure won’t be complete until we do away with the persistent myths about tax and spend.