Romesh Ranganathan in The Guardian
It was the first day after half term, and I was walking the kids into school when I found myself stunned by a statement made by one of the other parents: “I know I’m a good parent.” How can you possibly know that? Hope? Yes. Strive? Sure. But know? Like, really know? I would argue that if you “know” you are a really good parent, you almost definitely aren’t. How can you be certain that nothing you have said or done has messed up your kids in some way? When I was a kid, my mum told me I had “cute little boobies” and I didn’t go swimming for six months. I still wear a T-shirt in the pool.
The ultimate aim of any parent is for their children to grow up to be happy. But how the hell do you achieve that? Two of our children are at primary school. We really worry about one of them. The other one makes us worry for the school. Last week, he told us his new favourite word was “vagina” and he was going to say it as much as possible. I’m imagining appropriate context was irrelevant to him. Then I became terrified there would be appropriate context. Or inappropriate context. Basically, I didn’t want him using the word vagina. But you can’t say that to him. If you react with shock or panic, you are basically giving that word magic powers. It suddenly becomes a word that will always get attention and then you are in Sainsbury’s and your kid is saying: “Can I have a fidget spinner? Can I have a fidget spinner? VAGINA.”
Parenting presents dilemmas like this all the time. Recently, my wife told me that some of the parents had been giving their children practice test papers and had arranged for them to have tuition. While this seems excessive for primary school, I understand. Education seems to be placing increased emphasis on assessment and tracking, which means parents are terrified that if their kid doesn’t exceed their expected learning level at six years old, they are immediately put in the class that ends up working at McDonald’s.
But what’s wrong with that? The general assumption by parents seems to be that higher attainment leads to better job prospects, which lead to better pay, which leads to happiness. But studies over the past couple of years show that not to be the case. While it is clear that there is a strong correlation between poor education and mental health issues, what has also been found is that the odds of personal happiness are equivalent regardless of levels of educational attainment. I have taken this to mean that I can stop reading with my kids. And, by that, I mean I can stop feeling bad about not doing it. If happiness is not impacted by attainment, then why the hell are we all making our kids unhappy by forcing them to work harder? If they want to study hard, great; but if they don’t, why not just let them be happy slackers?
I have even begun to wonder if a “normal” upbringing might be detrimental to our children. All of the most interesting people had a horrible time as kids. All the best rappers struggled. Kanye West is a notable exception, but in lieu of a terrible upbringing he is trying his hardest to have a truly dreadful adulthood. I am contemplating sending my children out on to the streets for six months to give them a sense of appreciation and a decent backstory.
I’m not even sure that child labour is a bad thing. It has a bad press and we are instinctively opposed, but I think it suffers from the issues of both being poorly regulated and using the wrong children. We should be using children from this country. Our children are spoilt. The lower labour costs will bring us right back into competitive manufacturing and our children might be a little more grateful. Our second son often shouts: “I don’t want to go to school.” How about you go and make iPhones for a couple of years? We’ll see how much you want to go to school then, mate.
This “happiness dilemma” was brought into sharp focus recently when one of our sons asked if he could play on the Xbox on a weekday. (We have a weekends-only policy, mainly because I am trying to make some progress on Grand Theft Auto.) I said no, and he got upset. He told me he didn’t love me any more. Two things occurred to me at this point: 1) I had directly reduced his immediate happiness and 2) Him telling me he didn’t love me had absolutely no effect. In fact, he taught me a valuable lesson on how transient the idea of love can be. It did make me wonder why we were doing it though. What are we training him for? When he grows up, he will be able to play whenever he wants. The obvious argument is we don’t want him playing it too much. But then, why not just let him play and then if it becomes excessive, just say: “You’re playing it a bit too much”? He will argue, we will have to demand he stops, he will then shout and we will have to discipline him. It appears that the reason we have introduced a “weekends-only” policy is so we can have an easier life.
I don’t think my wife and I are doing a bad job of parenting necessarily, but we have no idea how what we are doing is impacting their future happiness, and I am no closer to figuring out how hard to push them at school. I have noticed, however, that our youngest son has cute little boobies, but I haven’t mentioned it. That’s progress.
Monday 12 June 2017
Sunday 11 June 2017
The Islamic State as an excuse
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
Three men drove a van into a crowd in London on June 3, 2017, and then ran about stabbing people until efficiently shot down by British policemen. Immediately, the Islamic State (IS) claimed the attack — though, as yet, there is no proof that the IS was directly involved.
But of course the IS will claim any monstrous act in ‘the name of Allah’ committed by morons anywhere in the world. It suits the IS. And in some ways, such a claim suits almost everyone else too.
It suits many people
It suits people like Donald Trump. It enabled him to send out inane tweets, seeking to use this tragedy to further his xenophobic, undemocratic and unlikely-to-be-effective policy options in the U.S.
The IS claim also enabled British politicians, who (it has to be said to their credit) basically reacted with calm and restraint, to suggest international conspiracies (highly unlikely) and remedies (such as curbing Internet), which are unlikely to work and will probably have more drawbacks than advantages. It is nice to have a Dr. No version of the IS to blame, when you know that your own neo-liberal and post-Brexit actions – such as laying off policemen in London – probably contributed to the casualties.
Finally, it enabled peaceful religious Muslims — many of whom will be angry at me for saying this — from facing up to their responsibility in the matter. Do not misunderstand me: these religious Muslims hate what the IS stands for: this fact was brought home by the sad but necessary decision by 130 Muslim imams and leaders in U.K. not to perform the compulsory funeral prayers over the bodies of the three London attackers.
Yes, most religious Muslims have no sympathy for the IS. Such religious Muslims often castigate people like me for describing IS-murderers as Islamists. They are not Islamists because they have nothing to do with Islam, I am consistently told. I agree — but I also point out that the IS and such terrorists think that they have everything to do with Islam. Sheer repudiation does not suffice. It especially does not suffice if you are yourself Muslim.
The IS enables peaceful, religious Muslims — the vast majority — to shirk their inadvertent complicity in such violence. It is time to face up to this, instead of expressing surprise and horror when some nephew or son mimics the IS and kills innocent people in the name of Islam.
I have written a lot about the ‘us-them’ binarism that had undergirded colonial Western atrocities against the rest, and still dominates the thinking of people like Mr. Trump. But it has to be added: peaceful, religious Muslims harbour a similar ‘us-them’ binarism.
Many decent religious Muslims believe that their faith assigns them a position of moral superiority over others. This is a feeling other very religious people — Hindus, Christians, etc. — might tend to have too. However, many religious Muslims also believe that their faith will prevail on Earth in the future and at least assure them (and only them) of paradise after death.
I have met Christians and Jews with similar beliefs of being a kind of ‘chosen people’, but their ratio is far lower. For every Christian I have met who believed that I would go to hell because I do not believe in Jesus as the son of God, I have met a hundred who would laugh at the notion.
Unfortunately, I have met too many religious Muslims who believe that they are specially chosen, and anyone who does not share their faith is condemned to an eternity of hellfire.
Most religious Muslims do not act on this conviction; they do not even utter it in front of non-Muslims. They are decent people. But it lurks in the depths of their minds.
It can also be flaunted indirectly: for instance, recently a major Indian Muslim leader dismissed another Muslim for not being a ‘true Muslim’ because he read the Bhagavad Gita! Or, during the holy month of Ramzan, many religious Muslims give charity only to the Muslim needy. Us and them. Them and us.
Facing up to a flaw
This is the germ that runs through much of contemporary religious Muslim thinking, and drives the more confused of our Muslim children into mimicking the monstrosities of the IS. This germ makes Muslim youth vulnerable to extremist ideologies. To think that you are so special can very easily turn into a dismissal of the equivalent humanity of others, as casteist Hindus do with Dalits and as colonial Europeans did with the colonised at times.
Until more religious Muslims face up to this flaw in their thinking, their children will be vulnerable to such detestable ideologues as those of the IS — and Islam, as a faith, will be the target of hatred from at least some of those who are excluded from the category of being ‘chosen.’
The IS is not some Hollywood supervillain, an Islamic Dr. No, with highly trained agents present everywhere. It does not have that sort of clout outside the regions it controls and some neighbouring spaces.
But it is actually more dangerous because it can capitalise on the flaws in our thinking, those cracks in the floor of ordinary family homes, Muslim and non-Muslim. I have written about the cracks in the floors of ordinary European or American homes, with their ‘civilisational’ hubris. But it is time for religious Muslims to face up to the cracks in their own homes too.
Three men drove a van into a crowd in London on June 3, 2017, and then ran about stabbing people until efficiently shot down by British policemen. Immediately, the Islamic State (IS) claimed the attack — though, as yet, there is no proof that the IS was directly involved.
But of course the IS will claim any monstrous act in ‘the name of Allah’ committed by morons anywhere in the world. It suits the IS. And in some ways, such a claim suits almost everyone else too.
It suits many people
It suits people like Donald Trump. It enabled him to send out inane tweets, seeking to use this tragedy to further his xenophobic, undemocratic and unlikely-to-be-effective policy options in the U.S.
The IS claim also enabled British politicians, who (it has to be said to their credit) basically reacted with calm and restraint, to suggest international conspiracies (highly unlikely) and remedies (such as curbing Internet), which are unlikely to work and will probably have more drawbacks than advantages. It is nice to have a Dr. No version of the IS to blame, when you know that your own neo-liberal and post-Brexit actions – such as laying off policemen in London – probably contributed to the casualties.
Finally, it enabled peaceful religious Muslims — many of whom will be angry at me for saying this — from facing up to their responsibility in the matter. Do not misunderstand me: these religious Muslims hate what the IS stands for: this fact was brought home by the sad but necessary decision by 130 Muslim imams and leaders in U.K. not to perform the compulsory funeral prayers over the bodies of the three London attackers.
Yes, most religious Muslims have no sympathy for the IS. Such religious Muslims often castigate people like me for describing IS-murderers as Islamists. They are not Islamists because they have nothing to do with Islam, I am consistently told. I agree — but I also point out that the IS and such terrorists think that they have everything to do with Islam. Sheer repudiation does not suffice. It especially does not suffice if you are yourself Muslim.
The IS enables peaceful, religious Muslims — the vast majority — to shirk their inadvertent complicity in such violence. It is time to face up to this, instead of expressing surprise and horror when some nephew or son mimics the IS and kills innocent people in the name of Islam.
I have written a lot about the ‘us-them’ binarism that had undergirded colonial Western atrocities against the rest, and still dominates the thinking of people like Mr. Trump. But it has to be added: peaceful, religious Muslims harbour a similar ‘us-them’ binarism.
Many decent religious Muslims believe that their faith assigns them a position of moral superiority over others. This is a feeling other very religious people — Hindus, Christians, etc. — might tend to have too. However, many religious Muslims also believe that their faith will prevail on Earth in the future and at least assure them (and only them) of paradise after death.
I have met Christians and Jews with similar beliefs of being a kind of ‘chosen people’, but their ratio is far lower. For every Christian I have met who believed that I would go to hell because I do not believe in Jesus as the son of God, I have met a hundred who would laugh at the notion.
Unfortunately, I have met too many religious Muslims who believe that they are specially chosen, and anyone who does not share their faith is condemned to an eternity of hellfire.
Most religious Muslims do not act on this conviction; they do not even utter it in front of non-Muslims. They are decent people. But it lurks in the depths of their minds.
It can also be flaunted indirectly: for instance, recently a major Indian Muslim leader dismissed another Muslim for not being a ‘true Muslim’ because he read the Bhagavad Gita! Or, during the holy month of Ramzan, many religious Muslims give charity only to the Muslim needy. Us and them. Them and us.
Facing up to a flaw
This is the germ that runs through much of contemporary religious Muslim thinking, and drives the more confused of our Muslim children into mimicking the monstrosities of the IS. This germ makes Muslim youth vulnerable to extremist ideologies. To think that you are so special can very easily turn into a dismissal of the equivalent humanity of others, as casteist Hindus do with Dalits and as colonial Europeans did with the colonised at times.
Until more religious Muslims face up to this flaw in their thinking, their children will be vulnerable to such detestable ideologues as those of the IS — and Islam, as a faith, will be the target of hatred from at least some of those who are excluded from the category of being ‘chosen.’
The IS is not some Hollywood supervillain, an Islamic Dr. No, with highly trained agents present everywhere. It does not have that sort of clout outside the regions it controls and some neighbouring spaces.
But it is actually more dangerous because it can capitalise on the flaws in our thinking, those cracks in the floor of ordinary family homes, Muslim and non-Muslim. I have written about the cracks in the floors of ordinary European or American homes, with their ‘civilisational’ hubris. But it is time for religious Muslims to face up to the cracks in their own homes too.
Wednesday 7 June 2017
Why we inject cricket with a greater moral purpose
Suresh Menon in The Hindu
We pour into sport our highest emotions and our greatest passions because that is a way of rescuing it from meaninglessness
It is facile to say that Indians do not understand the concept of “conflict of interest”. We have had in a parliamentary panel on anti-tobacco legislation an MP known as the “beedi king of Maharashtra”. Vijay Mallya, of Kingfisher Airlines, served on the parliamentary panel on civil aviation.
It is not that we don’t understand the concept — we merely turn a blind eye to it, arguing that parliamentary panels, for instance, need “experts” in the field. Our faith in the integrity of our businessmen and politicians is touching.
Why therefore should we make such a big deal about conflicts of interest in cricket?
Undermining the spirit
The simple answer, of course, is that just because it is condoned elsewhere, it does not follow that cricket should too. It is ethically wrong, even if sometimes it is legal, as in the case of Rahul Dravid and others who are given a ten-month contract with the BCCI so they can then sign a two-month contract with an IPL team. Contracts with in-built loopholes are a testimony to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink style of the BCCI’s functioning. They go against the spirit of the game.
Many greats have played the dual game, but that doesn’t make it right. In 1956, as selector, Don Bradman picked the Australian team to England. He then wrote on the series for the Daily Mail. “He set an unusual precedent,” wrote his biographer Irving Rosenwater subtly.
In a clear-headed letter following his resignation from the Committee of Administrators, Ramachandra Guha makes a forceful point: “The BCCI management is too much in awe of the 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 commentators they favour are indebted to them and do not ever question their own mistakes or malpractices.”
Guha’s indictment of the system
Guha’s letter indicts the system, and if the BCCI (or the CoA, which sometimes looks and acts like the BCCI in different clothes) has the interests of the game at heart, then it will have to be acted upon. It has brought into focus another aspect of cricket corruption — the ethical one. It has taken a fan of cricket — and not just a fan of cricketers, which is what most Indians are — to point out the anomalies.
Guha has made the sensible suggestion that conflicts of interest which exist from the highest level to the lowest are best dealt with at the top, saying, “This would have a ripple effect downwards.”
So why cricket? Why should the sport — which is believed to mirror society — answer to a higher morality than other fields of human endeavour?
To understand this, one must acknowledge the essential nature of sport. It is artificial, it is in the large sense meaningless, it is “something that does not matter but is performed as if it did,” to quote Simon Barnes.
The very artificiality of sport gives us the right to inject it with a greater moral purpose than, say, business or politics. Even politicians who are otherwise known to be shady are expected to be honest on the sports field. Bill Clinton might have cheated on his wife, but had he cheated on a golf course, there would have been no redemption.
Being artificial means sport is not of the real world; the sharp practices of the real world should not be allowed to seep into sport. Thus sport cannot be a mere reflection of society, but has to belong to a higher realm, a fantasy world where everything is perfect. Or should aim to be.
Aspire for perfection
The argument here is not that cricket is perfect, but that it ought to aspire towards perfection, both on and off the field. The process is important even if the product sometimes disappoints.
We pour into sport our highest emotions and our greatest passions because that is a way of rescuing it from meaninglessness. It is relevant because our emotions make it relevant — and it gives us an opportunity to coat the essential artificiality of the activity with the reality of our most positive feelings.
Cricket is full of contradictions. Administrators who should be preserving its status as a touchstone of goodness cheat and lie, and live for the bottom line. Players who understand its place in society and owe everything to it, compromise for the extra dollar. It is a sickening win-win situation: the BCCI keeps the players happy in return for their silence.
One or the other group has to ensure they are guardians of the sport. In India, it was finally the Supreme Court which took upon itself that role because neither officials nor players had the inclination.
Guha’s letter has raised some fundamental questions. Not just about the BCCI or the CoA. But about our relationship with cricket. And how much we are willing to ignore uncomfortable truths so long as a Kohli scores a hundred or an Ashwin claims five wickets. Passion should be made of sterner stuff.
We pour into sport our highest emotions and our greatest passions because that is a way of rescuing it from meaninglessness
It is facile to say that Indians do not understand the concept of “conflict of interest”. We have had in a parliamentary panel on anti-tobacco legislation an MP known as the “beedi king of Maharashtra”. Vijay Mallya, of Kingfisher Airlines, served on the parliamentary panel on civil aviation.
It is not that we don’t understand the concept — we merely turn a blind eye to it, arguing that parliamentary panels, for instance, need “experts” in the field. Our faith in the integrity of our businessmen and politicians is touching.
Why therefore should we make such a big deal about conflicts of interest in cricket?
Undermining the spirit
The simple answer, of course, is that just because it is condoned elsewhere, it does not follow that cricket should too. It is ethically wrong, even if sometimes it is legal, as in the case of Rahul Dravid and others who are given a ten-month contract with the BCCI so they can then sign a two-month contract with an IPL team. Contracts with in-built loopholes are a testimony to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink style of the BCCI’s functioning. They go against the spirit of the game.
Many greats have played the dual game, but that doesn’t make it right. In 1956, as selector, Don Bradman picked the Australian team to England. He then wrote on the series for the Daily Mail. “He set an unusual precedent,” wrote his biographer Irving Rosenwater subtly.
In a clear-headed letter following his resignation from the Committee of Administrators, Ramachandra Guha makes a forceful point: “The BCCI management is too much in awe of the 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 commentators they favour are indebted to them and do not ever question their own mistakes or malpractices.”
Guha’s indictment of the system
Guha’s letter indicts the system, and if the BCCI (or the CoA, which sometimes looks and acts like the BCCI in different clothes) has the interests of the game at heart, then it will have to be acted upon. It has brought into focus another aspect of cricket corruption — the ethical one. It has taken a fan of cricket — and not just a fan of cricketers, which is what most Indians are — to point out the anomalies.
Guha has made the sensible suggestion that conflicts of interest which exist from the highest level to the lowest are best dealt with at the top, saying, “This would have a ripple effect downwards.”
So why cricket? Why should the sport — which is believed to mirror society — answer to a higher morality than other fields of human endeavour?
To understand this, one must acknowledge the essential nature of sport. It is artificial, it is in the large sense meaningless, it is “something that does not matter but is performed as if it did,” to quote Simon Barnes.
The very artificiality of sport gives us the right to inject it with a greater moral purpose than, say, business or politics. Even politicians who are otherwise known to be shady are expected to be honest on the sports field. Bill Clinton might have cheated on his wife, but had he cheated on a golf course, there would have been no redemption.
Being artificial means sport is not of the real world; the sharp practices of the real world should not be allowed to seep into sport. Thus sport cannot be a mere reflection of society, but has to belong to a higher realm, a fantasy world where everything is perfect. Or should aim to be.
Aspire for perfection
The argument here is not that cricket is perfect, but that it ought to aspire towards perfection, both on and off the field. The process is important even if the product sometimes disappoints.
We pour into sport our highest emotions and our greatest passions because that is a way of rescuing it from meaninglessness. It is relevant because our emotions make it relevant — and it gives us an opportunity to coat the essential artificiality of the activity with the reality of our most positive feelings.
Cricket is full of contradictions. Administrators who should be preserving its status as a touchstone of goodness cheat and lie, and live for the bottom line. Players who understand its place in society and owe everything to it, compromise for the extra dollar. It is a sickening win-win situation: the BCCI keeps the players happy in return for their silence.
One or the other group has to ensure they are guardians of the sport. In India, it was finally the Supreme Court which took upon itself that role because neither officials nor players had the inclination.
Guha’s letter has raised some fundamental questions. Not just about the BCCI or the CoA. But about our relationship with cricket. And how much we are willing to ignore uncomfortable truths so long as a Kohli scores a hundred or an Ashwin claims five wickets. Passion should be made of sterner stuff.
Even moderate drinking can damage the brain, claim researchers
Nicola Davis in The Guardian
Drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol can damage the brain and impair cognitive function over time, researchers have claimed.
While heavy drinking has previously been linked to memory problems and dementia, previous studies have suggested low levels of drinking could help protect the brain. But the new study pushes back against the notion of such benefits.
“We knew that drinking heavily for long periods of time was bad for brain health, but we didn’t know at these levels,” said Anya Topiwala, a clinical lecturer in old age psychiatry at the University of Oxford and co-author of the research.
Alcohol is a direct cause of seven forms of cancer, finds study
Writing in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the University of Oxford and University College London, describe how they followed the alcohol intake and cognitive performance of 550 men and women over 30 years from 1985. At the end of the study the team took MRI scans of the participants’ brains.
None of the participants were deemed to have an alcohol dependence, but levels of drinking varied. After excluding 23 participants due to gaps in data or other issues, the team looked at participants’ alcohol intake as well as their performance on various cognitive tasks, as measured at six points over the 30 year period.
The team also looked at the structure of the participants’ brains, as shown by the MRI scan, including the structure of the white matter and the state of the hippocampus – a seahorse-shaped area of the brain associated with memory.
After taking into account a host of other factors including age, sex, social activity and education, the team found that those who reported higher levels of drinking were more often found to have a shrunken hippocampus, with the effect greater for the right side of the brain.
While 35% of those who didn’t drink were found to have shrinkage on the right side of the hippocampus, the figure was 65% for those who drank on average between 14 and 21 units a week, and 77% for those who drank 30 or more units a week.
The structure of white matter was also linked to how much individuals drank. “The big fibre tracts in the brain are cabled like electrical wire and the insulation, if you like, on those wires was of a poorer quality in people who were drinking more,” said Topiwala.
In addition, those who drank more were found to fare worse on a test of lexical fluency. “[That] is where you ask somebody to name as many words as they can within a minute beginning with a certain letter,” said Topiwala. People who drank between seven and 14 units a week were found to have 14% greater reduction in their performance on the task over 30 years, compared to those who drank just one or fewer units a week.
By contrast, no effects were found for other tasks such as word recall or those in which participants were asked to come up with words in a particular category, such as ‘animals.’
Expert reaction to the the study was mixed. While Elizabeth Coulthard, consultant senior lecturer in dementia neurology at the University of Bristol, described the research as robust, she cautioned that as the study was observational, it does not prove that alcohol was causing the damage to the brain.
Even small amounts of alcohol increase a woman's risk of cancer
In addition, the majority of the study’s participants were men, while reports of alcohol consumption are often inaccurate with people underestimating how much they drink – an effect that could have exaggerated the apparent impact of moderate amounts of alcohol.
Dr Doug Brown, director of research and development at Alzheimer’s Society said that the new research did not imply that individuals should necessarily turn teetotal, instead stressing that it was important to stick to recommended guidelines.
In 2016, the Department of Health introduced new alcohol guidelines in the UK, recommending that both men and women drink no more than 14 units of alcohol each week – the equivalent of about six pints of beer or seven 175ml glasses of wine.
“Although this research gives useful insight into the long-term effects that drinking alcohol may have on the brain, it does not show that moderate alcohol intake causes cognitive decline. However, the findings do contradict a common belief that a glass of red wine or champagne a day can protect against damage to the brain,” said Brown.
Drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol can damage the brain and impair cognitive function over time, researchers have claimed.
While heavy drinking has previously been linked to memory problems and dementia, previous studies have suggested low levels of drinking could help protect the brain. But the new study pushes back against the notion of such benefits.
“We knew that drinking heavily for long periods of time was bad for brain health, but we didn’t know at these levels,” said Anya Topiwala, a clinical lecturer in old age psychiatry at the University of Oxford and co-author of the research.
Alcohol is a direct cause of seven forms of cancer, finds study
Writing in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the University of Oxford and University College London, describe how they followed the alcohol intake and cognitive performance of 550 men and women over 30 years from 1985. At the end of the study the team took MRI scans of the participants’ brains.
None of the participants were deemed to have an alcohol dependence, but levels of drinking varied. After excluding 23 participants due to gaps in data or other issues, the team looked at participants’ alcohol intake as well as their performance on various cognitive tasks, as measured at six points over the 30 year period.
The team also looked at the structure of the participants’ brains, as shown by the MRI scan, including the structure of the white matter and the state of the hippocampus – a seahorse-shaped area of the brain associated with memory.
After taking into account a host of other factors including age, sex, social activity and education, the team found that those who reported higher levels of drinking were more often found to have a shrunken hippocampus, with the effect greater for the right side of the brain.
While 35% of those who didn’t drink were found to have shrinkage on the right side of the hippocampus, the figure was 65% for those who drank on average between 14 and 21 units a week, and 77% for those who drank 30 or more units a week.
The structure of white matter was also linked to how much individuals drank. “The big fibre tracts in the brain are cabled like electrical wire and the insulation, if you like, on those wires was of a poorer quality in people who were drinking more,” said Topiwala.
In addition, those who drank more were found to fare worse on a test of lexical fluency. “[That] is where you ask somebody to name as many words as they can within a minute beginning with a certain letter,” said Topiwala. People who drank between seven and 14 units a week were found to have 14% greater reduction in their performance on the task over 30 years, compared to those who drank just one or fewer units a week.
By contrast, no effects were found for other tasks such as word recall or those in which participants were asked to come up with words in a particular category, such as ‘animals.’
Expert reaction to the the study was mixed. While Elizabeth Coulthard, consultant senior lecturer in dementia neurology at the University of Bristol, described the research as robust, she cautioned that as the study was observational, it does not prove that alcohol was causing the damage to the brain.
Even small amounts of alcohol increase a woman's risk of cancer
In addition, the majority of the study’s participants were men, while reports of alcohol consumption are often inaccurate with people underestimating how much they drink – an effect that could have exaggerated the apparent impact of moderate amounts of alcohol.
Dr Doug Brown, director of research and development at Alzheimer’s Society said that the new research did not imply that individuals should necessarily turn teetotal, instead stressing that it was important to stick to recommended guidelines.
In 2016, the Department of Health introduced new alcohol guidelines in the UK, recommending that both men and women drink no more than 14 units of alcohol each week – the equivalent of about six pints of beer or seven 175ml glasses of wine.
“Although this research gives useful insight into the long-term effects that drinking alcohol may have on the brain, it does not show that moderate alcohol intake causes cognitive decline. However, the findings do contradict a common belief that a glass of red wine or champagne a day can protect against damage to the brain,” said Brown.
Tuesday 6 June 2017
Public luxury for all or private luxury for some: this is the choice we face
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Imagine designing one of our great cities from scratch. You would quickly discover that there is enough physical space for magnificent parks, playing fields, public swimming pools, urban nature reserves and allotments sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. Alternatively, you could designate the same space to a small proportion of its people – the richest citizens – who can afford large gardens, perhaps with their own swimming pools. The only way of securing space for both is to allow the suburbs to sprawl until the city becomes dysfunctional: impossible to supply with efficient services, lacking a sense of civic cohesion, and permanently snarled in traffic: Los Angeles for all.
Imagine designing a long-distance transport system for a nation that did not possess one. You’d find that there is plenty of room for everyone to travel swiftly and efficiently, in trains and luxury buses (an intercity bus can carry as many people as a mile of car traffic). But to supply the same mobility with private cars requires a prodigious use of land, concrete, metal and fuel. It can be done, but only at the cost of climate change, air pollution, the destruction of wonderful places and an assault on tranquillity, neighbourhood and community life.
This conflict is repeated in financial terms. In order that the very rich can pay less tax, public playgrounds are allowed to fall apart. The beneficiaries might use the extra money to build private play barns for their children. Public toilets are closed so that some people can install gold-plated taps in their bathrooms. Public swimming pools are put on restricted hours so that the very rich can turn up the thermostats in their private pools. Public galleries need to charge for entry so that billionaires can expand their own art collections. Wealth that could be shared and enjoyed by all is sequestered by a few.
Public luxury for all, or private luxury for some: this is the choice we face at all times – especially at this election
It is impossible to deliver a magnificent life for everyone by securing private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication. Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging most people’s quality of life.
‘Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination.’ Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
This is a global issue, as well as a national one. According to the Global Footprint Network, every person in the UK uses the equivalent of 5 hectares of land and sea through the food we eat, the products we use and the carbon we release, which has to be absorbed somewhere if it is not to accelerate global warming. Yet the UK’s “biocapacity” (our ability to absorb these impacts) is a little over 1 hectare per person. Our extravagance is a cost that others must bear.
Kelvingrove Art gallery in Glasgow. ‘Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund, will reinvest in public galleries and museums.’ Photograph: VisitBritain/Britain on View/Getty Images
And they have another unexamined premise in common: that money legitimately buys you the power to take what you want from the world. There is an almost universal assumption in politics that you have the right to help yourself to as much of the global commons (atmosphere, soil, water, fish) as you can afford, though this reduces what is left for other people to share. You have the right to occupy as much physical space as your money can buy, regardless of the restrictions this imposes on others.
Where does this licence arise? Even if private wealth were obtained through the exercise of virtue (an unlikely proposition at the best of times) or through enterprise and hard work (ever less probable, in this new age of inheritance and rent), it is hard to discern the just principle that translates this money into permission to acquire the space and resources on which other people depend for a decent quality of life. When and by whom was this permission granted? How does it correspond to our notion of equal rights, or our concept of democracy, which is based on an equal power to decide?
You will not find these questions asked in this election or in any other. They are fudged by recourse to the magical belief that there is enough space and resources for everyone to do as they wish, that infinite growth ensures that no one – when the parties’ economic promises are fulfilled – will need to intrude on the interests of others. Yet, on this finite planet, they are the questions that will determine not only the quality of our lives but our security and, eventually, our survival. The primary task of all far-sighted politicians should be to decide first how much we can use, then how it can best be shared.
When the questions that count above all others are beyond the scope of politics, when almost everyone in public life is either too blinkered or too frightened to answer them, when – even in this great, defining election, which at last offers people meaningful political choice – neither large party can even name them, you begin to recognise how much trouble we are in.
Imagine designing one of our great cities from scratch. You would quickly discover that there is enough physical space for magnificent parks, playing fields, public swimming pools, urban nature reserves and allotments sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. Alternatively, you could designate the same space to a small proportion of its people – the richest citizens – who can afford large gardens, perhaps with their own swimming pools. The only way of securing space for both is to allow the suburbs to sprawl until the city becomes dysfunctional: impossible to supply with efficient services, lacking a sense of civic cohesion, and permanently snarled in traffic: Los Angeles for all.
Imagine designing a long-distance transport system for a nation that did not possess one. You’d find that there is plenty of room for everyone to travel swiftly and efficiently, in trains and luxury buses (an intercity bus can carry as many people as a mile of car traffic). But to supply the same mobility with private cars requires a prodigious use of land, concrete, metal and fuel. It can be done, but only at the cost of climate change, air pollution, the destruction of wonderful places and an assault on tranquillity, neighbourhood and community life.
This conflict is repeated in financial terms. In order that the very rich can pay less tax, public playgrounds are allowed to fall apart. The beneficiaries might use the extra money to build private play barns for their children. Public toilets are closed so that some people can install gold-plated taps in their bathrooms. Public swimming pools are put on restricted hours so that the very rich can turn up the thermostats in their private pools. Public galleries need to charge for entry so that billionaires can expand their own art collections. Wealth that could be shared and enjoyed by all is sequestered by a few.
Public luxury for all, or private luxury for some: this is the choice we face at all times – especially at this election
It is impossible to deliver a magnificent life for everyone by securing private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication. Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging most people’s quality of life.
‘Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination.’ Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
This is a global issue, as well as a national one. According to the Global Footprint Network, every person in the UK uses the equivalent of 5 hectares of land and sea through the food we eat, the products we use and the carbon we release, which has to be absorbed somewhere if it is not to accelerate global warming. Yet the UK’s “biocapacity” (our ability to absorb these impacts) is a little over 1 hectare per person. Our extravagance is a cost that others must bear.
Public luxury available to all, or private luxury available to some: this is the choice we face at all times, but especially at this election. It is the conflict between these two visions that defines – or should define – our political options. There is a significant difference between Labour and the Conservatives in this respect, but I wish it were stronger.
Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund, will reinvest in public galleries and museums. It will defend and expand our libraries, youth centres, football grounds, railways and local bus services. Unlike the Conservative manifesto, which is almost silent on the issue, Labour’s platform offers a reasonable list of protections to the living world.
But it also promises to “continue to upgrade our highways” (shortly after vowing to “encourage and enable people to get out of their cars”) and to provide new airport capacity. The conflicts are not acknowledged. Progress in the 21st century should be measured less by the new infrastructure you build than by the damaging infrastructure you retire.
Labour also misses a wonderful opportunity in its plans to expand affordable housing, to promote accommodation that both revives community and makes better use of space. In co-housing developments, people own or rent their own homes but share the rest of the land. Rather than chopping the available space into coffin-sized gardens in which a child cannot perform a cartwheel without hitting the fence, the children have room to run around together while the adults have space to garden and talk. Communal laundries release living space in people’s homes. Carpools reduce the need for parking. Isolation gives way to conviviality.
More importantly, and less surprisingly, the Labour manifesto fails to acknowledge the left’s great conundrum: the environmental damage caused by efforts to create jobs through economic growth. Like the Conservatives, like almost every party everywhere (the Greens are a notable exception), Labour’s economic vision is based on the presumption that there are no limits. Both conservative and social democratic parties see the world as a magic pudding that can never be exhausted. They build their economic programmes on a fairytale.
Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund, will reinvest in public galleries and museums. It will defend and expand our libraries, youth centres, football grounds, railways and local bus services. Unlike the Conservative manifesto, which is almost silent on the issue, Labour’s platform offers a reasonable list of protections to the living world.
But it also promises to “continue to upgrade our highways” (shortly after vowing to “encourage and enable people to get out of their cars”) and to provide new airport capacity. The conflicts are not acknowledged. Progress in the 21st century should be measured less by the new infrastructure you build than by the damaging infrastructure you retire.
Labour also misses a wonderful opportunity in its plans to expand affordable housing, to promote accommodation that both revives community and makes better use of space. In co-housing developments, people own or rent their own homes but share the rest of the land. Rather than chopping the available space into coffin-sized gardens in which a child cannot perform a cartwheel without hitting the fence, the children have room to run around together while the adults have space to garden and talk. Communal laundries release living space in people’s homes. Carpools reduce the need for parking. Isolation gives way to conviviality.
More importantly, and less surprisingly, the Labour manifesto fails to acknowledge the left’s great conundrum: the environmental damage caused by efforts to create jobs through economic growth. Like the Conservatives, like almost every party everywhere (the Greens are a notable exception), Labour’s economic vision is based on the presumption that there are no limits. Both conservative and social democratic parties see the world as a magic pudding that can never be exhausted. They build their economic programmes on a fairytale.
Kelvingrove Art gallery in Glasgow. ‘Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund, will reinvest in public galleries and museums.’ Photograph: VisitBritain/Britain on View/Getty Images
And they have another unexamined premise in common: that money legitimately buys you the power to take what you want from the world. There is an almost universal assumption in politics that you have the right to help yourself to as much of the global commons (atmosphere, soil, water, fish) as you can afford, though this reduces what is left for other people to share. You have the right to occupy as much physical space as your money can buy, regardless of the restrictions this imposes on others.
Where does this licence arise? Even if private wealth were obtained through the exercise of virtue (an unlikely proposition at the best of times) or through enterprise and hard work (ever less probable, in this new age of inheritance and rent), it is hard to discern the just principle that translates this money into permission to acquire the space and resources on which other people depend for a decent quality of life. When and by whom was this permission granted? How does it correspond to our notion of equal rights, or our concept of democracy, which is based on an equal power to decide?
You will not find these questions asked in this election or in any other. They are fudged by recourse to the magical belief that there is enough space and resources for everyone to do as they wish, that infinite growth ensures that no one – when the parties’ economic promises are fulfilled – will need to intrude on the interests of others. Yet, on this finite planet, they are the questions that will determine not only the quality of our lives but our security and, eventually, our survival. The primary task of all far-sighted politicians should be to decide first how much we can use, then how it can best be shared.
When the questions that count above all others are beyond the scope of politics, when almost everyone in public life is either too blinkered or too frightened to answer them, when – even in this great, defining election, which at last offers people meaningful political choice – neither large party can even name them, you begin to recognise how much trouble we are in.
Sunday 4 June 2017
'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.
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.”
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.
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.)
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
FacebookTwitterPinterest
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.
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.”
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
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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
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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
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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.
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