Thursday 6 December 2018
Wednesday 5 December 2018
‘An education arms race’: inside the ultra-competitive world of private tutoring
A growing number of parents and guardians are paying for children as young as four to receive additional tuition. What is fuelling this booming industry asks Sally Weale in The Guardian?
‘I’m trying to do something for him that I never got’ ... Geoff Clayton, Brooklyn’s grandfather. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond/Guardian
“The world is very competitive and everybody is working very hard,” said Ijaz. “I know the school are doing very well, but there are 30 students in each class. It’s one teacher and support staff. They try their best to help, but I realise if I’m going to give my kids some extra help it’s going to be brilliant for their future. Anyone who does a bit extra always gets ahead.”
He is ambitious for his children. “I warn my kids they should be top – or among the top five at least – in class. They are doing well. I don’t mind paying extra. I’m investing in their future. I know the importance of education. My kids love it.”
Abubakar, a quiet, serious child, is planning to sit the 11-plus to win a place at grammar school. Sometimes he does not feel like starting work, “but when I’ve started I like to carry on”. Amna is a chatty livewire and wants to be a paleontologist. “I’m good at maths, but the thing I’m best at is history,” she chirps. “My brother does hard work. I’m doing the same now. I want to be the same as him.”
Geoff Clayton, a retired garage worker, has been bringing his 10-year-old grandson, Brooklyn, to Explore Learning for about nine months. Brooklyn lives with his grandparents and likes football, Minecraft and maths. “He’s done really well,” says Clayton. “His reading has got a lot better, everything’s got better.” The membership takes a significant chunk out of his pension, but he is happy to pay it to give Brooklyn “a bit of a leg up”.
“Nowadays, it’s all about exams and certificates and what you know,” he says. “When I left school, it was more: ‘Can you do the job?’ Brooklyn has done a heck of a lot better since coming here. Sometimes he moans, but he’s OK once he’s here. It does work if you’re prepared to put the time and effort in.”
The Sutton Trust, a charity that seeks to improve social mobility through education, has documented a huge rise in private tuition in recent years. Its annual survey of secondary students in England and Wales revealed in July that 27% have had home or private tuition, a figure that rises to 41% in London.
The Bradford outpost of Explore Learning, which now has 139 centres across the UK. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond/Guardian
With tutoring commanding a fee of about £24 an hour, rising to £27 in London (although many tutors charge £60 or more), the trust is concerned that the private tuition market is putting children from poorer backgrounds at even greater disadvantage. To redress the balance, it would like to see the government introduce a means-tested voucher system, paid for through the pupil premium funding that schools receive to support disadvantaged pupils.
“We are in an education arms race,” says Peter Lampl, the founder of the trust. “Parents are looking to get an edge for their kids and having private tuition gives them that edge. But if we are serious about social mobility, we need to make sure that the academic playing field is levelled outside the school gate.”
Initiatives aimed at making tuition more accessible already exist: some agencies pledge a proportion of their tuition to poorer pupils for free, while non-profit programmes such as the Tutor Trust connect tutors with disadvantaged schools. Explore Learning offers “scholarships” that give a 50% discount to parents on income support or jobseeker’s allowance. Parents can also use childcare vouchers and tax-free childcare schemes to help pay for tuition.
Nevertheless, huge inequities in education persist. Nowhere is this more evident than in children’s battle to pass the 11-plus to get into grammar school. Research published earlier this year revealed that private tutoring means pupils from high-income families are much more likely to get into grammar schools than equally bright pupils from poorer families. John Jerrim and Sam Sims from the Institute of Education at University College London looked at more than 1,800 children in areas where the grammar school system is in operation. They found that those from families in the bottom quarter of household incomes in England have less than a 10% chance of attending a grammar school, compared with a 40% chance for children in the top quarter.
If we are serious about social mobility, we need to make sure the academic playing field is levelled outside school - Peter Lampl, the Sutton Trust
They also established that wealthier families are much more likely to use private tutors to prepare their children for the entrance exam. Fewer than 10% of children from families with below-average incomes received coaching, compared with about 30% from households in the top quarter. About 70% of those who received tutoring got into a grammar school, compared with 14% of those who did not.
Alexa Collins lives in Buckinghamshire, which operates a grammar school system. She could not afford tuition to prepare her daughter for the 11-plus; despite being a top performer at primary, she failed the test, but has since thrived at her comprehensive, gaining nine GCSEs.
Collins, who went to grammar school herself but received no coaching, says she is ideologically opposed to tutoring because it is unfair to those who cannot afford it. Although she can see the case for short-term tutoring on a specific subject when a child is struggling, she adds: “I think it’s awful, that idea of tutoring kids from seven to push them through this exam. How can you possibly put that pressure on them?”
Another parent, who wishes to remain anonymous but lives in Kent, which operates grammar schools, says her son tackled the 11-plus without a tutor. “It felt morally wrong to claim an advantage by paying cash. It’s so unfair.” As she tried to coach her son, she felt at huge disadvantage. “So much depends on a parent’s skills to teach. A tutor would know the best way to teach the 11-plus concepts. I was terrible at maths at school, so I was really stuck.”
“The government claims that expanding grammars will boost social mobility,” said Jerrim, a professor of education and social statistics at UCL, when the research was published. “But our research shows that private tuition used by high-income families gives them a big advantage in getting in.” One of the factors behind the increase in tuition, he says now, is the pressure exerted by school league tables and growing accountability measures. “Those schools might well be passing pressure on to parents,” he says. “It’s not a negative reflection on schools and the job that they are doing; it’s more a reflection of the pressure they are under to achieve results.”
A callout asking Guardian readers about their experiences of tuition drew hundreds of responses from tutors, parents and school teachers. One tutor told of being approached by parents of children as young as three or four; another had been hired to provide extra coaching for pupils whose parents were already paying for all of the privileges of private schools, including Marlborough and Eton. “We pay thousands of pounds a year on school fees,” said one parent. “If he needs a little help with certain subjects, why wouldn’t you help him?” There also appears to be a trend for university students to buy extra tuition. Most are already paying £9,250 a year in tuition fees, so why not spend a little more to ensure they get the best possible degree?
The Profs, which launched in 2014, specialises in degree-level and professional-qualification tutoring. According to its website, an undergraduate teacher with a master’s in the required subject costs upwards of £70 an hour (plus a £50 placement fee); tutors specialising in applications to Oxbridge and Ivy League universities start at £120 an hour, plus a £250 consultation fee. According to Leo Evans, one of the founders of The Profs, university lecturers can struggle to address individual learning difficulties. “Catching stragglers and helping them get on top of their studies is a useful social function. Also, for students with disabilities and impairments, it’s essential.”
I don’t mind paying extra. I’m investing in their future’ ... Malik Ijaz and his wife, Ayesha, bring a son and a daughter to the Bradford classes. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian
Other responses to our callout came from parents who were worried about schools’ increasingly limited resources due to budget cuts. Much of the additional support that was once available in classrooms is disappearing and some specialist teachers are in short supply. These parents see tutoring as a way of patching the gaps in their children’s education. “It’s only one hour a week, but the practice crammed into that time is like a full week of lessons at school,” said one parent, who is a teacher. “The ability to check every week how well the information is being retained is great. It also provides ‘real-time’ feedback that we don’t get from schools.”
Some parents buy extra tuition to support children with special educational needs such as dyslexia, which mainstream schools are increasingly unable to meet. The new, tougher GCSE exams are also a factor, with some parents hiring private tutors to help children who are struggling to secure the level 4 or above required in English and maths.
One mother from Nigeria said she sought extra support for her child as a practical response to racial discrimination: “Any child from a minority has to be many times better than their white counterparts to be able to get into the top schools and universities.” Another parent told of a daughter with cancer who missed a year of formal education, but got through with the help of a tutor. Another respondent claimed the shadow tutoring workforce “props up” some “outstanding” schools – private, grammar and state.
Not everyone was positive about the impact of tuition. “It can cause students to not work in lessons,” said one teacher. Another said: “The need for tutoring frightens me. Schools should be able to offer students the support they need in class sizes that are manageable.” While one parent said: “I resent it when having a tutor is seen as a class crime,” another acknowledged the unfairness at the heart of the system: “I feel uncomfortable that we can afford to pay for this privilege.”
The callout also revealed the appeal of private tuition for teachers, whose salaries have been depressed for years while the demands upon them have grown. Some said they did private tutoring to boost their income; others, tired of the one-size-fits-all approach in schools, have quit their jobs to do it full time.
Asked about the boom in private tuition, the Department for Education responded that standards are rising in schools and that the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils is shrinking. “While we believe families shouldn’t have to pay for private tuition, it has always been part of the system and parents have freedom to do this,” a spokesman said.
“Tutoring is huge, it’s getting bigger and it’s not going away,” says the Sutton Trust’s Lampl. “You can’t stop people from doing it. What we’ve got to do is make it more accessible for parents who currently can’t afford it.”
Clayton, the retired garage worker from Bradford, is not a rich man, but he wants to invest what he has in his grandson’s future. His hopes for Brooklyn are modest and honourable and shared by parents and grandparents everywhere. “I want Brooklyn to have a good start in life … Nobody gave me a leg up. I’m trying to do something for him that I never got. I hope he ends up being a decent person when he grows up and gets a decent job and doesn’t have to struggle.”
As dusk falls in the Girlington district of Bradford, a trickle of cars begin to arrive in front of a small parade of shops. Parents who have just collected their children at the end of the school day are dropping them off at the Explore Learning tuition centre for extra maths and English coaching. The children sit at a cluster of computer terminals, where they log in to begin their evening studies. The atmosphere is relaxed and lighthearted. The children stay for an hour to work through their lessons, helped where necessary by a member of staff, with 15 minutes’ playtime at the end.
Located next to a Domino’s and a Subway, the Bradford branch of Explore Learning is a tiny window into Britain’s booming private tuition sector, now worth an estimated £2bn. At one time, private tuition meant a weekly one-to-one session at home with a tutor, the preserve of the privileged few. It is still not cheap – Explore Learning’s standard membership costs £119 a month, plus a £50 registration fee – but it is now on offer on our high streets, in supermarkets and increasingly online, with tutors offering their services from as far afield as India and Sri Lanka. Tutees include children who are little older than toddlers, pupils at prestigious private schools and undergraduates struggling at university. All are caught up in an educational arms race, which experts say is exacerbating social inequality.
The success of Explore Learning reflects some of these changes. The business was founded in 2001 by Bill Mills, a Cambridge maths graduate, and now has 139 centres around the country (plus five in Texas run by a sister company). They are located mainly in shopping centres, so busy parents can get on with their weekly shop while their offspring perfect their times tables, punctuation and grammar. Most of the children, who are aged four to 14, come at least a couple of times a week – the membership allows for up to nine sessions a month. Saturday and Sunday afternoons are the busiest times in the Bradford branch, which has 290 children on its books. The tutor-tutee ratio is one to six, but the tutors are not usually qualified teachers; they may be students or mothers returning to the workplace. All are trained in the teaching materials and behaviour management.
The families who use the centre come from various walks of life. Some parents have their own businesses; others work at Bradford Royal Infirmary. There are families from Latvia, Poland and the Philippines. The parents talk about giving their children “an edge”, the “leg up” they never had. Among them are a shift worker, Malik Ijaz, and his wife, Ayesha, who have been bringing nine-year-old Abubakar and his seven-year-old sister, Amna, to the centre for nearly two years. It is a big expense for the family, but the children’s education is a priority. Ijaz works extra shifts to be able to afford it. A third child, four-year-old Ali, will come when he is older.
Located next to a Domino’s and a Subway, the Bradford branch of Explore Learning is a tiny window into Britain’s booming private tuition sector, now worth an estimated £2bn. At one time, private tuition meant a weekly one-to-one session at home with a tutor, the preserve of the privileged few. It is still not cheap – Explore Learning’s standard membership costs £119 a month, plus a £50 registration fee – but it is now on offer on our high streets, in supermarkets and increasingly online, with tutors offering their services from as far afield as India and Sri Lanka. Tutees include children who are little older than toddlers, pupils at prestigious private schools and undergraduates struggling at university. All are caught up in an educational arms race, which experts say is exacerbating social inequality.
The success of Explore Learning reflects some of these changes. The business was founded in 2001 by Bill Mills, a Cambridge maths graduate, and now has 139 centres around the country (plus five in Texas run by a sister company). They are located mainly in shopping centres, so busy parents can get on with their weekly shop while their offspring perfect their times tables, punctuation and grammar. Most of the children, who are aged four to 14, come at least a couple of times a week – the membership allows for up to nine sessions a month. Saturday and Sunday afternoons are the busiest times in the Bradford branch, which has 290 children on its books. The tutor-tutee ratio is one to six, but the tutors are not usually qualified teachers; they may be students or mothers returning to the workplace. All are trained in the teaching materials and behaviour management.
The families who use the centre come from various walks of life. Some parents have their own businesses; others work at Bradford Royal Infirmary. There are families from Latvia, Poland and the Philippines. The parents talk about giving their children “an edge”, the “leg up” they never had. Among them are a shift worker, Malik Ijaz, and his wife, Ayesha, who have been bringing nine-year-old Abubakar and his seven-year-old sister, Amna, to the centre for nearly two years. It is a big expense for the family, but the children’s education is a priority. Ijaz works extra shifts to be able to afford it. A third child, four-year-old Ali, will come when he is older.
‘I’m trying to do something for him that I never got’ ... Geoff Clayton, Brooklyn’s grandfather. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond/Guardian
“The world is very competitive and everybody is working very hard,” said Ijaz. “I know the school are doing very well, but there are 30 students in each class. It’s one teacher and support staff. They try their best to help, but I realise if I’m going to give my kids some extra help it’s going to be brilliant for their future. Anyone who does a bit extra always gets ahead.”
He is ambitious for his children. “I warn my kids they should be top – or among the top five at least – in class. They are doing well. I don’t mind paying extra. I’m investing in their future. I know the importance of education. My kids love it.”
Abubakar, a quiet, serious child, is planning to sit the 11-plus to win a place at grammar school. Sometimes he does not feel like starting work, “but when I’ve started I like to carry on”. Amna is a chatty livewire and wants to be a paleontologist. “I’m good at maths, but the thing I’m best at is history,” she chirps. “My brother does hard work. I’m doing the same now. I want to be the same as him.”
Geoff Clayton, a retired garage worker, has been bringing his 10-year-old grandson, Brooklyn, to Explore Learning for about nine months. Brooklyn lives with his grandparents and likes football, Minecraft and maths. “He’s done really well,” says Clayton. “His reading has got a lot better, everything’s got better.” The membership takes a significant chunk out of his pension, but he is happy to pay it to give Brooklyn “a bit of a leg up”.
“Nowadays, it’s all about exams and certificates and what you know,” he says. “When I left school, it was more: ‘Can you do the job?’ Brooklyn has done a heck of a lot better since coming here. Sometimes he moans, but he’s OK once he’s here. It does work if you’re prepared to put the time and effort in.”
The Sutton Trust, a charity that seeks to improve social mobility through education, has documented a huge rise in private tuition in recent years. Its annual survey of secondary students in England and Wales revealed in July that 27% have had home or private tuition, a figure that rises to 41% in London.
The Bradford outpost of Explore Learning, which now has 139 centres across the UK. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond/Guardian
With tutoring commanding a fee of about £24 an hour, rising to £27 in London (although many tutors charge £60 or more), the trust is concerned that the private tuition market is putting children from poorer backgrounds at even greater disadvantage. To redress the balance, it would like to see the government introduce a means-tested voucher system, paid for through the pupil premium funding that schools receive to support disadvantaged pupils.
“We are in an education arms race,” says Peter Lampl, the founder of the trust. “Parents are looking to get an edge for their kids and having private tuition gives them that edge. But if we are serious about social mobility, we need to make sure that the academic playing field is levelled outside the school gate.”
Initiatives aimed at making tuition more accessible already exist: some agencies pledge a proportion of their tuition to poorer pupils for free, while non-profit programmes such as the Tutor Trust connect tutors with disadvantaged schools. Explore Learning offers “scholarships” that give a 50% discount to parents on income support or jobseeker’s allowance. Parents can also use childcare vouchers and tax-free childcare schemes to help pay for tuition.
Nevertheless, huge inequities in education persist. Nowhere is this more evident than in children’s battle to pass the 11-plus to get into grammar school. Research published earlier this year revealed that private tutoring means pupils from high-income families are much more likely to get into grammar schools than equally bright pupils from poorer families. John Jerrim and Sam Sims from the Institute of Education at University College London looked at more than 1,800 children in areas where the grammar school system is in operation. They found that those from families in the bottom quarter of household incomes in England have less than a 10% chance of attending a grammar school, compared with a 40% chance for children in the top quarter.
If we are serious about social mobility, we need to make sure the academic playing field is levelled outside school - Peter Lampl, the Sutton Trust
They also established that wealthier families are much more likely to use private tutors to prepare their children for the entrance exam. Fewer than 10% of children from families with below-average incomes received coaching, compared with about 30% from households in the top quarter. About 70% of those who received tutoring got into a grammar school, compared with 14% of those who did not.
Alexa Collins lives in Buckinghamshire, which operates a grammar school system. She could not afford tuition to prepare her daughter for the 11-plus; despite being a top performer at primary, she failed the test, but has since thrived at her comprehensive, gaining nine GCSEs.
Collins, who went to grammar school herself but received no coaching, says she is ideologically opposed to tutoring because it is unfair to those who cannot afford it. Although she can see the case for short-term tutoring on a specific subject when a child is struggling, she adds: “I think it’s awful, that idea of tutoring kids from seven to push them through this exam. How can you possibly put that pressure on them?”
Another parent, who wishes to remain anonymous but lives in Kent, which operates grammar schools, says her son tackled the 11-plus without a tutor. “It felt morally wrong to claim an advantage by paying cash. It’s so unfair.” As she tried to coach her son, she felt at huge disadvantage. “So much depends on a parent’s skills to teach. A tutor would know the best way to teach the 11-plus concepts. I was terrible at maths at school, so I was really stuck.”
“The government claims that expanding grammars will boost social mobility,” said Jerrim, a professor of education and social statistics at UCL, when the research was published. “But our research shows that private tuition used by high-income families gives them a big advantage in getting in.” One of the factors behind the increase in tuition, he says now, is the pressure exerted by school league tables and growing accountability measures. “Those schools might well be passing pressure on to parents,” he says. “It’s not a negative reflection on schools and the job that they are doing; it’s more a reflection of the pressure they are under to achieve results.”
A callout asking Guardian readers about their experiences of tuition drew hundreds of responses from tutors, parents and school teachers. One tutor told of being approached by parents of children as young as three or four; another had been hired to provide extra coaching for pupils whose parents were already paying for all of the privileges of private schools, including Marlborough and Eton. “We pay thousands of pounds a year on school fees,” said one parent. “If he needs a little help with certain subjects, why wouldn’t you help him?” There also appears to be a trend for university students to buy extra tuition. Most are already paying £9,250 a year in tuition fees, so why not spend a little more to ensure they get the best possible degree?
The Profs, which launched in 2014, specialises in degree-level and professional-qualification tutoring. According to its website, an undergraduate teacher with a master’s in the required subject costs upwards of £70 an hour (plus a £50 placement fee); tutors specialising in applications to Oxbridge and Ivy League universities start at £120 an hour, plus a £250 consultation fee. According to Leo Evans, one of the founders of The Profs, university lecturers can struggle to address individual learning difficulties. “Catching stragglers and helping them get on top of their studies is a useful social function. Also, for students with disabilities and impairments, it’s essential.”
I don’t mind paying extra. I’m investing in their future’ ... Malik Ijaz and his wife, Ayesha, bring a son and a daughter to the Bradford classes. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian
Other responses to our callout came from parents who were worried about schools’ increasingly limited resources due to budget cuts. Much of the additional support that was once available in classrooms is disappearing and some specialist teachers are in short supply. These parents see tutoring as a way of patching the gaps in their children’s education. “It’s only one hour a week, but the practice crammed into that time is like a full week of lessons at school,” said one parent, who is a teacher. “The ability to check every week how well the information is being retained is great. It also provides ‘real-time’ feedback that we don’t get from schools.”
Some parents buy extra tuition to support children with special educational needs such as dyslexia, which mainstream schools are increasingly unable to meet. The new, tougher GCSE exams are also a factor, with some parents hiring private tutors to help children who are struggling to secure the level 4 or above required in English and maths.
One mother from Nigeria said she sought extra support for her child as a practical response to racial discrimination: “Any child from a minority has to be many times better than their white counterparts to be able to get into the top schools and universities.” Another parent told of a daughter with cancer who missed a year of formal education, but got through with the help of a tutor. Another respondent claimed the shadow tutoring workforce “props up” some “outstanding” schools – private, grammar and state.
Not everyone was positive about the impact of tuition. “It can cause students to not work in lessons,” said one teacher. Another said: “The need for tutoring frightens me. Schools should be able to offer students the support they need in class sizes that are manageable.” While one parent said: “I resent it when having a tutor is seen as a class crime,” another acknowledged the unfairness at the heart of the system: “I feel uncomfortable that we can afford to pay for this privilege.”
The callout also revealed the appeal of private tuition for teachers, whose salaries have been depressed for years while the demands upon them have grown. Some said they did private tutoring to boost their income; others, tired of the one-size-fits-all approach in schools, have quit their jobs to do it full time.
Asked about the boom in private tuition, the Department for Education responded that standards are rising in schools and that the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils is shrinking. “While we believe families shouldn’t have to pay for private tuition, it has always been part of the system and parents have freedom to do this,” a spokesman said.
“Tutoring is huge, it’s getting bigger and it’s not going away,” says the Sutton Trust’s Lampl. “You can’t stop people from doing it. What we’ve got to do is make it more accessible for parents who currently can’t afford it.”
Clayton, the retired garage worker from Bradford, is not a rich man, but he wants to invest what he has in his grandson’s future. His hopes for Brooklyn are modest and honourable and shared by parents and grandparents everywhere. “I want Brooklyn to have a good start in life … Nobody gave me a leg up. I’m trying to do something for him that I never got. I hope he ends up being a decent person when he grows up and gets a decent job and doesn’t have to struggle.”
Tuesday 4 December 2018
Opec: why Trump has Saudi Arabia over a barrel
David Sheppard and Ed Crooks in The FT
Reneé Earls has lived her whole life in west Texas, and watched oil booms come and go, but she has never seen anything like the buzz of activity in the industry today. “We are a hopping spot,” she says. “If you’re not working here, that’s because you’re not looking for a job, or you are unemployable . . . If you have a skill and want to work, you can name your price.”
Reneé Earls has lived her whole life in west Texas, and watched oil booms come and go, but she has never seen anything like the buzz of activity in the industry today. “We are a hopping spot,” she says. “If you’re not working here, that’s because you’re not looking for a job, or you are unemployable . . . If you have a skill and want to work, you can name your price.”
Ms Earls is chief executive of the chamber of commerce in Odessa, in the heart of the Permian basin, the shale formation stretching from west Texas into New Mexico that is the red-hot centre of the latest US oil boom. Production in the region rose by 1m barrels a day in the year to August, contributing to a record-breaking 2.1m b/d increase in US output that has made the country the world’s largest crude producer.
The shale boom has not only transformed once rundown towns deep in the west Texas desert; it is increasingly reshaping the landscape of international politics. The emergence of the US as a born-again energy superpower — one of the key factors in the recent fall in oil prices — has led politicians in Washington to weigh how it might reshape some of its oldest alliances, raising uncomfortable questions for the oil producers of the Middle East .
For Saudi Arabia, the US’s chief ally in the Arab world, the past two months have delivered a stark lesson in how its relationship with Washington has been redefined by the Texas oil revolution.
On Thursday and Friday ministers from Opec, the oil cartel that controls roughly a third of global production, and its allies including Russia and Kazakhstan, will meet in Vienna to decide how to respond to the 30 per cent plunge in oil prices to around $60 a barrel over the past two months. With US output surging, and Russia and Saudi Arabia also producing at close to record levels, traders are convinced the market will be awash with oil next year.
Previously such a fall would have prompted Opec and its allies to agree to cut production. But for Saudi Arabia, which remains the world’s top oil exporter and the cartel’s de facto leader, that decision has been complicated by the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
The gruesome killing of the Saudi Arabian journalist and Washington Post columnist, a critic of the royal family, has revealed fissures in its prized relationship with the US.
US president Donald Trump has maintained his backing for Riyadh and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s day-to-day ruler widely known as MBS, despite reports that the CIA has concluded that he ordered the operation against Khashoggi at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. But his stance comes with conditions attached, one of which lies at the heart of the kingdom’s wellbeing: the oil price.
In statements, tweets and private communications Mr Trump has made clear his support for lower oil prices and his opposition to Riyadh moving to cut production, heaping pressure on a royal court shaken by the international backlash against the Khashoggi killing. The pressure from the White House has come despite Saudi Arabia raising production this summer to help make sure the market remained well supplied as the US reimposed sanctions on Iran. Riyadh’s position as Tehran’s chief rival in the region reflects a core part of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.
“The priority for Saudi Arabia is shoring up MBS’s position, and the key part of that is securing Trump’s backing,” says Derek Brower, a director of RS Energy Group. “Trump has clearly linked his support for MBS with several things . . . but it’s oil that seems to be at the top of his agenda.”
For the Trump administration, the calculation is straightforward. Lower oil prices mean cheaper petrol, providing a boost for consumers. The president has hailed the recent fall in prices as a “tax cut”, giving him some good news after a stock market wobble triggered by his confrontation with China over trade.
For Saudi Arabia, that creates a dilemma. Khalid al-Falih, its energy minister, has pushed ahead with plans to drum up support for cutting oil production by more than 1m b/d, but observers think he will be constrained by the need to appease Mr Trump.
Bob McNally, a consultant who has advised US administrations on oil policy, says Riyadh’s position is precarious. “If they orchestrate a high-profile Opec-plus cut that boosts Brent crude back up towards $70 they risk Trump’s wrath,” he says. “[But] if Riyadh bends entirely to Trump’s will and keeps production at record levels, an inventory glut will return and the bottom will fall out of crude prices.”
Ellen Wald, author of a history of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, says the “ultimate success” for Riyadh from this week’s meeting would be “to quietly let people know that a cut is happening to raise the price, without drawing attention to the activity of Opec specifically.”
Yet history suggests that kind of mixed message risks pleasing no one — angering Mr Trump while not doing much to raise prices.
The stakes for Saudi Arabia are higher than just a single decision on output. Its alliance with the US has long been underpinned by oil supplies, with the resultant petrodollars recycled back into the American economy through the purchase of military hardware.
After a fall in prices in 2014, Riyadh renewed its attempts to diversify and modernise both its economy and wider society, aiming to reduce its dependence on oil revenues. But for the programme to have a chance of success, Saudi Arabia needs a higher oil price in the short term to help fund the changes.
The shale boom is eroding the foundations of one of the pillars of the alliance. US net oil imports, which peaked at about 13m b/d in 2005, have dropped to about 2.4m b/d this year. By the end of next year, they could be running at just 330,000 b/d, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Saudi Arabia’s crude supplies remain crucial to the world economy, and to US consumer fuel prices. But Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says the US economy is much less vulnerable to a spike in prices than it was even a decade ago.
The evidence of the crude price fall four years ago and subsequent recovery is that the impact of changes on the American economy is now roughly neutral. “The US is not in the position it was in 2007-08, when we were facing a rising oil price that put strain on the current account deficit and the dollar,” she says. “That’s a big change.”
As politicians start to grasp the implications of that shift, it is strengthening the argument that the US no longer needs to shackle itself to Riyadh.
“The atmosphere in Washington has certainly changed following the killing of Jamal Khashoggi,” says Helima Croft, a former CIA analyst who now runs RBC Capital Markets’ natural resources analysis. “Politicians see the surge in US oil production and are wondering aloud whether the alliance is as necessary as it once was.”
Those questions are also starting to drive activity in Congress. Last week, the Senate voted 63-37 to advance a resolution demanding that the president end US armed forces’ activity “in or affecting Yemen”, where Saudi Arabia’s war against Iran-aligned Houthi rebels has exacerbated what aid groups describe as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Legislation that would allow the US to impose criminal penalties on members of Opec and their allies for acting as a cartel has also been making progress. For Saudi Arabia, which has extensive assets in the US including the largest refinery in North America, that legislation is a genuine threat.
Tim Kaine, the Democratic senator from Virginia who was a co-sponsor of the bipartisan legislation on Yemen, suggested the Khashoggi death had been the last straw for some. “It was really important for the Senate to send a message to Saudi Arabia: ‘you do not have a free pass’,” Mr Kaine told National Public Radio last week. “The president’s signal of complete impunity is not in accord with American values.”
In the autumn of 2014, the Saudi government tried to reassert its authority in the oil market against the nascent threat from shale. As a global glut of crude swelled up, Riyadh declined to cut production, in the belief it could drown the Texas producers in a sea of cheap oil.
But shale proved far more resilient than Saudi Arabia — the only country with significant spare production capacity — had hoped. Two years on Opec members returned to restricting output, with the help of Russia and other non-member producers, to lay the foundations for a recovery in prices.
As the oil price has fallen this autumn, the memories of that episode have been resurfacing. But Jason Bordoff of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy says there is at least one crucial difference. “We now know how resilient shale can be. We saw how companies could cut costs and become more efficient to keep producing. That complicates Opec’s decision-making,” he says. “This time around, Opec knows it can’t kill shale, but maybe just wound it.”
Ms Earls says the people of Odessa have been watching as oil prices have plunged in the past two months. Fundamentally, though, they “still feel very confident”, she adds, because of the producers’ long-term commitment. The Permian Strategic Partnership, an industry-backed group that works with communities to help develop badly-needed infrastructure including roads, houses and schools, estimates a further 60,000 jobs will be createdby 2025, a huge increase for an area that had a population of about 330,000 last year.
The rate at which new wells are brought into production in the Permian was already expected to slow, in part because of a shortage of pipeline capacity. If the fall in prices is sustained, it could mean the industry slows further across the US, raising questions too for the White House.
The gains to consumers from lower fuel prices will be offset by the hit to investment. The oil-dependent economies of Texas and North Dakota would bear the brunt of the hit, but it would also extend to other industries such as steelmaking, which has benefited from the boom in pipeline construction.
Bernadette Johnson, vice-president of market intelligence at Drillinginfo, a research group, says there are several oil producing regions, such as the Denver-Julesburg Basin of Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska, where a fall in US crude from $60 to $50 would make a significant difference to the economics.
“The companies think that it may just be a temporary thing, and that prices will rebound,” she says. “If the oil price stays where it is, we will see companies start to react.”
Yet while there may be a temporary slowdown, there is a general confidence in the US industry that its growth can continue. US officials say they are not concerned about the impact of lower oil prices, arguing that the industry will be able to continue to grow thanks to technological improvements and efficiency gains. Others are more sceptical, noting that US production contracted in 2016 when prices were at their nadir.
Will Giraud, executive vice-president of Concho Resources, one of the leading producers in the Permian Basin — where production is approaching 3.7m b/d — told investors last month: “I think there are several more years of very high growth, and it’s likely that the Permian gets into the 5m-6m or maybe even 7m b/d of production and then sustains that for a decent period.”
In the face of rampant US shale output, Saudi Arabia looks like it may still decide that angering Mr Trump is a price worth paying for a production cut that props up the oil price, whatever the heightened risks from the Khashoggi affair. But regardless of what the Saudis decide, the flow of oil from places such as Odessa will keep quietly eroding one of the old certainties that underpinned their relationship with the US. As Mr Brower at RS Energy puts it: “The pressures that Saudi Arabia are under are already immense.”
Monday 3 December 2018
The Stark Evidence of Everyday Racial Bias in Britain
Poll commissioned to launch series on unconscious bias shows gulf in negative experiences by ethnicity
Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian
Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.
As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.
It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.
The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.
The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”
In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.
Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.
One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.
However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.
People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.
The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.
Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.
A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”
Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian
Half of black, Asian and minority ethnic respondents in the poll said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.
A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.
The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.
A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.
The survey found that 43% of those from a minority ethnic background had been overlooked for a work promotion in a way that felt unfair in the last five years – more than twice the proportion of white people (18%) who reported the same experience.
The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.
The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.
The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:
• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.
• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.
• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.
“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.
Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”
The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.
The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.
The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:
• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.
• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.
• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.
“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.
Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”
Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.
As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.
It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.
The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.
The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”
In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.
Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.
One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.
However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.
People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.
The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.
Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.
A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”
Friday 30 November 2018
Brace yourself, Britain. Brexit is about to teach you what a crisis actually is
Seven decades of prosperity have lulled the UK into thinking we’re special – that disasters only happen to other people writes David Bennun in The Guardian
Britain is not Kenya. It is, in the ordinary run of things, much better protected against such convulsions than a country such as Kenya. But do away with the ordinary run of things, and any place in the world can suffer as Kenya did then. You don’t have to look too far back at European history to see it, nor do you have to look away from home. The British people I know who most swiftly grasped and vividly understood the implications of present events as they began to unfold are Northern Irish. There’s a reason for that.
Democratic institutions, the rule of law, civic infrastructure, a culture of local and national governance in which corruption, while ever present, is exceptional rather than institutional: these things, flawed as they may be and ever improvable as they are, take generations, even centuries to build. But once they topple, they can topple at terrifying speed and with terrifying effect. Britain has forgotten what that’s like.
All the talk about the “Blitz spirit” comes from people who have never known what it is to truly fear everything crashing down around you. In liberal democracies enthusiasm for a revolution usually comes from people who have known nothing but the safety and freedom of the “system” – which is to say the imperfect protective structure – that they abhor. Talk to anyone who has experienced the glories of such upheaval and they are generally not quite so keen on it.
To be, politically speaking, a grownup is something to be sneered at these days. It means you’re lacking in imagination, in boldness of vision, in belief in a better country or a better world. That’s a view held invariably by people who would, without grownups running things, have been lucky to survive long enough to articulate it. Similarly, a contempt for expertise is inevitably expressed by those who, without experts contributing to society as they do, would be lucky to have a voice to speak with, let alone a platform on which to use it. Expertise, like democracy, is far from infallible; each, however, is always preferable to the alternative.
When the grownups fail, as they periodically do, and badly, what you need is better grownups. Awful things have happened, and do happen, in this country, chiefly as a result of bad policy and worse enactment. We don’t need to have homelessness, dependency on food banks or deprived areas ruled by criminals and bullies. We can afford to act against these evils, but we let them happen all the same. That shames us. Hand the keys and the controls over to eternal teenagers – populists of either stripe – and what you’ll get is a situation where that choice is gone.
We’re not special. If, in a deluded fit of national self-harm that ever more resembles the drift into war in 1914, we allow ourselves to wreck the complicated machinery that underpins our everyday lives without us ever having to think much about it, nobody will be coming to rescue us. Cassandra, as Cassandras are always ready to remind you, was right.
Keeping calm in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire: ‘The idea that we’re protected, we’re exceptional, is not articulated … but it’s there.’ Photograph: JOHN ROBERTSON
Most British people don’t have the first inkling of what a crisis is. They think it’s a political thing. “Government in crisis”, and so on. Whatever happens at the top, life will go on as ever. There will be food in the shops, medical supplies in the hospitals, water in the taps and order on the streets (as much as there usually is). Anyone who warns you otherwise is a catastrophist, a drama queen, a scaremonger, a Cassandra.
That’s what a seven-decade period of general peace and collective prosperity does for you. It makes you think it’s normal, rather than a hard-won, fragile rarity in history. It makes most people complacent, and turns a small but unfortunately influential number into the kind of adolescent romantics who think you can smash up everything in the house and stick two fingers up to Mummy and Daddy because, no matter what you do, they will always be there to make it right in the end. Mummy and Daddy won’t let anything too bad happen to us.
The idea that we’re protected, we’re exceptional, is not articulated or usually even conscious. But it’s there. That this is who we are. Disaster – mass, national disaster – happens to other people, in other places.
But there is no such rule. No such guarantee. Mummy and Daddy won’t always come to bail us out. And if you’ve ever lived in one of those other places, chances are you will have seen how quickly what you thought was an orderly society can disintegrate under pressure. If you’ve never known gunfire and mobs on the streets, or empty taps and empty shelves, or power that’s off more than it’s on, or morgues full of the victims of racial, political or tribal violence, you don’t have a clue how easily that can happen.
I experienced all these things when I was growing up in Kenya. Some were routine; the more severe, mercifully less so. Branded on my memory from an attempted coup d’état in 1982 is the sound of automatic rifle fire along the road; the crowds surging like waves; confusion and misinformation crackling from the radio; most of all, hearing the account of my late father, a doctor, of the aftermath of what I can best describe as a pogrom, unleashed by the breakdown of order, against the Asian people of Nairobi, his hospital full of the dead and grievously wounded people, many of them children no older than I was.
All the talk of “Blitz spirit” comes from people who have never known what it is to truly fear everything crashing down
Most British people don’t have the first inkling of what a crisis is. They think it’s a political thing. “Government in crisis”, and so on. Whatever happens at the top, life will go on as ever. There will be food in the shops, medical supplies in the hospitals, water in the taps and order on the streets (as much as there usually is). Anyone who warns you otherwise is a catastrophist, a drama queen, a scaremonger, a Cassandra.
That’s what a seven-decade period of general peace and collective prosperity does for you. It makes you think it’s normal, rather than a hard-won, fragile rarity in history. It makes most people complacent, and turns a small but unfortunately influential number into the kind of adolescent romantics who think you can smash up everything in the house and stick two fingers up to Mummy and Daddy because, no matter what you do, they will always be there to make it right in the end. Mummy and Daddy won’t let anything too bad happen to us.
The idea that we’re protected, we’re exceptional, is not articulated or usually even conscious. But it’s there. That this is who we are. Disaster – mass, national disaster – happens to other people, in other places.
But there is no such rule. No such guarantee. Mummy and Daddy won’t always come to bail us out. And if you’ve ever lived in one of those other places, chances are you will have seen how quickly what you thought was an orderly society can disintegrate under pressure. If you’ve never known gunfire and mobs on the streets, or empty taps and empty shelves, or power that’s off more than it’s on, or morgues full of the victims of racial, political or tribal violence, you don’t have a clue how easily that can happen.
I experienced all these things when I was growing up in Kenya. Some were routine; the more severe, mercifully less so. Branded on my memory from an attempted coup d’état in 1982 is the sound of automatic rifle fire along the road; the crowds surging like waves; confusion and misinformation crackling from the radio; most of all, hearing the account of my late father, a doctor, of the aftermath of what I can best describe as a pogrom, unleashed by the breakdown of order, against the Asian people of Nairobi, his hospital full of the dead and grievously wounded people, many of them children no older than I was.
All the talk of “Blitz spirit” comes from people who have never known what it is to truly fear everything crashing down
Britain is not Kenya. It is, in the ordinary run of things, much better protected against such convulsions than a country such as Kenya. But do away with the ordinary run of things, and any place in the world can suffer as Kenya did then. You don’t have to look too far back at European history to see it, nor do you have to look away from home. The British people I know who most swiftly grasped and vividly understood the implications of present events as they began to unfold are Northern Irish. There’s a reason for that.
Democratic institutions, the rule of law, civic infrastructure, a culture of local and national governance in which corruption, while ever present, is exceptional rather than institutional: these things, flawed as they may be and ever improvable as they are, take generations, even centuries to build. But once they topple, they can topple at terrifying speed and with terrifying effect. Britain has forgotten what that’s like.
All the talk about the “Blitz spirit” comes from people who have never known what it is to truly fear everything crashing down around you. In liberal democracies enthusiasm for a revolution usually comes from people who have known nothing but the safety and freedom of the “system” – which is to say the imperfect protective structure – that they abhor. Talk to anyone who has experienced the glories of such upheaval and they are generally not quite so keen on it.
To be, politically speaking, a grownup is something to be sneered at these days. It means you’re lacking in imagination, in boldness of vision, in belief in a better country or a better world. That’s a view held invariably by people who would, without grownups running things, have been lucky to survive long enough to articulate it. Similarly, a contempt for expertise is inevitably expressed by those who, without experts contributing to society as they do, would be lucky to have a voice to speak with, let alone a platform on which to use it. Expertise, like democracy, is far from infallible; each, however, is always preferable to the alternative.
When the grownups fail, as they periodically do, and badly, what you need is better grownups. Awful things have happened, and do happen, in this country, chiefly as a result of bad policy and worse enactment. We don’t need to have homelessness, dependency on food banks or deprived areas ruled by criminals and bullies. We can afford to act against these evils, but we let them happen all the same. That shames us. Hand the keys and the controls over to eternal teenagers – populists of either stripe – and what you’ll get is a situation where that choice is gone.
We’re not special. If, in a deluded fit of national self-harm that ever more resembles the drift into war in 1914, we allow ourselves to wreck the complicated machinery that underpins our everyday lives without us ever having to think much about it, nobody will be coming to rescue us. Cassandra, as Cassandras are always ready to remind you, was right.
Imran Khan - The first 100 days
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
Prime Minister Imran Khan is being hauled over the coals for failing to match words with deeds in his first 100 days in office. Indeed, he has made a laughing stock of himself by justifying 19 controversial decisions and 35 U-Turns so far as tactical policy befitting “great leaders” like Hitler and Napoleon. Since he wittingly proposed the 100-day yardstick to measure his government’s performance, he has only himself to blame for this media onslaught.
The most urgent item on PM Imran Khan’s agenda is related to the crisis in the economy manifested by a yawning gap in the balance of payments, falling forex reserves and a plummeting rupee. As opposition leader, he had thundered endlessly against crawling to the IMF or foreign countries for financial bailouts. Instead, he had pinned his hopes on billions in donations from overseas Pakistanis and tens of billions from unearthing black money stashed abroad. The problem arose when, after assuming office, he persisted in his delusionary approach, and the situation went from bad to worse. When his finance minister, Asad Umar, dared to baulk, he was forced to eat his words. It was only when the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, “launched” himself purposefully that Imran Khan reluctantly packed his achkan, dragged himself off to Saudi Arabia and China with bowl in hand, and Asad Umar sat down to engage the IMF, both making a bald-faced virtue out of necessity.
But even this belated dawning of “wisdom” has failed to yield the desired results. China is not even ready to reveal the nature of its help. The Saudis have made an insignificant deposit that doesn’t tally with the tall expectations of government. And the IMF delegation has returned to Washington without any commitment, leaving the PM and his FM wringing their hands in despair.
The second item related to the efficient and honest functioning of government. On that score, there is even more confusion and contradiction. Parliament cannot function properly without consensual committees to steer legal reforms and oversee public accounts. But the hounding of the opposition parties at the behest of the interior ministry and civil-military “agencies” directed by Imran Khan himself has log-jammed the core committees. Worse, the PM’s intent to run Punjab from Bani Gala via a weak chief minister in a sea of cunning contenders for power like the Punjab Governor and the Speaker of the Provincial Assembly, has deadlocked the bureaucracy and administration. The rapid postings and transfers of high and low officials at one power broker’s behest or another’s has led to lack of direction and motivation.
The third agenda item is foreign policy. Here, too, the government’s stumbling is embarrassing. When the need of the hour is to keep the American beast at bay so that it doesn’t waylay the IMF on its way to Pakistan or lean on the Saudis to put pressure on us, Imran Khan has tried to win cheap brownie points at home by counter-tweeting President Trump. On the Afghanistan front, the war of words and proxy terrorism continues unabated even as Islamabad vows to be part of the solution rather than the problem.
Now Pakistan’s reopening of the Kartarpur corridor to the Sikh shrine of Baba Guru Nanak is being billed as some sort of “peace breakthrough” in Indo-Pak relations. It is nothing of the sort. Like the IMF, China and Saudi Arabia “openings”, this initiative comes courtesy General Bajwa whose bear hug of Indian cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu at Imran Khan’s oath taking ceremony in Islamabad put Indian PM Narendra Modi and Punjab state CM Amarinder Singh in a tight corner. Neither politician’s prospects are too bright in the forthcoming elections in Punjab state next year. Therefore, they have reluctantly yielded to the Pakistani proposal only to curry favour with tens of millions of devout Sikhs. It is a tactical and short term concession as the hard, anti-Pakistan statements from Amarinder Singh and the Indian FM Sushma Swaraj, coupled with PM Modi’s refusal to attend the SAARC summit for the third year running, prove. Indeed, even as the Kartarpur protocol was being signed, proxy terrorists were taking a toll at the Chinese Consulate in Karachi, SP Tahir Dawar’s murdered body was being handed over to the Pak authorities at the Afghan border, suicide bombers were striking in the lower Orakzai Agency and India’s brutal repression in Held Kashmir showed no sign of abating.
On the Pakistan side, too, General Bajwa’s initiative is tactical, aimed only at reducing current Indian hostility – in the form of armed conflict along the LoC and proxy terrorism across the country – that destabilizes Pakistan and makes Imran Khan’s job of focusing on government difficult. This is the same Miltablishment that winked at the Labaiq Ya Rasul Allah during Nawaz Sharif’s time and crushed it in Imran Khan’s, the same that kicked Nawaz out for wanting to promote peace with India and is propping up Imran now at Kartarpur.
The Miltablishment has put all its eggs in Imran Khan’s basket. It will take more than 100 days of incompetence to shake its faith in their chosen man.
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Bombs or Bread?
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times 16 Nov 2018
As we all know, the civil-military relationship in Nawaz Sharif’s time was severely strained. Among the factors often cited are Mr Sharif’s dogged pursuit of ex-army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, for the treasonable coup of 1999; his rush to “befriend” the hawkish Indian PM, Narendra Modi, without clearing the tactics and strategy with the Miltablishment; the “misuse” of the Pakistan-based jihadis in the proxy war with India, that led to the altercation reported in “Dawnleaks”; and Mr Sharif’s refusal to give the Miltablishment a seat at the roundtable determining CPEC projects and contracts.
But in a recent TV interview, Ishaq Dar, the ex-PMLN Finance Minister, has made a startling admission. He alluded to the issue of increasing defense budgets as the most significant area of conflict between the PMLN government and the Miltablishment. It appears that the Miltablishment wanted “more” money for new weapons systems because of the rising security threat from India but the PMLN government was strapped for funds and declined to do the needful.
The “Defense Budget” remains a sore point with every elected civilian government. At one time, it hovered around 30% of all budgetary expenditures and became grist for critics’ mills. So the Musharraf government cunningly took out military pensions from the Defense Budget and clubbed them with government expenditures, thereby reducing its weight as a percentage of budget expenditures and making it more palatable. When Coalition Fund Support from the US kicked in during the war against terrorism in FATA, it was also toted up outside the ambit of the Defense Budget. It has now become normal practice to post an increase of approximately 10 percent every year over actual expenditures for defense in the preceding year whilst beefing up the defense spending in supplementary budgets during the rest of the year, in effect giving the military much more than a 10% increase. The low levels of budgetary revenue collection and consequent government expenditures have also made defense budgets look overly inflated in percentage terms, especially in relation to India.
The security concerns of the Pak military have increased manifold for three main reasons. First, the aggressive nature of the Modi regime with its constant threat of “strategic strikes” across the LoC and its support of proxy war against Pakistan from non-state actors based in Afghanistan. Second, the perennial threat from its Cold Start Doctrine, now baptized afresh as Pro-Active Operations. Third, India is shopping for advanced weapons systems, the foremost being its proposed purchase of the Russian S-400 Triumf long-range, anti-missile system for over US$5.5 billion which is viewed in Islamabad as a major new threat. Now India has commissioned its first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, armed with a 750km range submarine launched missile fitted with a nuclear warhead. Both these acquisitions are going to compel Pakistan to seek expensive equivalent systems to redress the security imbalance.
In other words, the Pakistan military will want lots more money going forward. The problem is that Pakistan’s economy has been failing and increasingly unable to bear this burden. Therefore, the choice of “bombs or bread” is bound to echo ever more furiously in the corridors of power, leading to renewed strains in civil-military relations and political instability that will in turn hamstring economic development and further strain the budget. When will this vicious circle end to create space for poverty alleviation, education, health, human resource development, etc.?
By definition, a “national security state” like Pakistan with a “permanent” and powerful enemy on its border like India requires a high level of defense preparedness. This is testified by the four wars, countless border skirmishes, and reciprocal proxy-terrorisms between the two in the last 70 years. Ostensibly, the root cause is the unresolved dispute over Kashmir. But we need to ask and answer some pertinent questions here.
How have many countries resolved similar border and territorial disputes in modern times without resorting to wars and proxy-terrorism? Which of the two is the originator of the wars in the subcontinent, regardless of the political provocation by the other? Why has the nuclearisation of the subcontinent spurred the conventional arms race instead of freezing it as originally argued? Who is hurting the most from this arms race, not just in financial terms but also in the cost to representative democracy of an overbearing political-military industrial complex that has created violent non-state actors at home to retain its political hegemony? Why is such a national security state unable to fully exploit Pakistan’s strategic location at the crossroads of three civilisations and markets – South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle-East – instead of replacing the yoke of one declining super power by that of another rising one? Why do we subscribe to the notion of a permanent enemy instead of a permanent peace in the national interest?
The USSR put a man in space and built over 10,000 nuclear bombs but couldn’t put enough bread on its shelves to feed its people. The arms race destroyed it. There are lessons in this for Pakistan.
Prime Minister Imran Khan is being hauled over the coals for failing to match words with deeds in his first 100 days in office. Indeed, he has made a laughing stock of himself by justifying 19 controversial decisions and 35 U-Turns so far as tactical policy befitting “great leaders” like Hitler and Napoleon. Since he wittingly proposed the 100-day yardstick to measure his government’s performance, he has only himself to blame for this media onslaught.
The most urgent item on PM Imran Khan’s agenda is related to the crisis in the economy manifested by a yawning gap in the balance of payments, falling forex reserves and a plummeting rupee. As opposition leader, he had thundered endlessly against crawling to the IMF or foreign countries for financial bailouts. Instead, he had pinned his hopes on billions in donations from overseas Pakistanis and tens of billions from unearthing black money stashed abroad. The problem arose when, after assuming office, he persisted in his delusionary approach, and the situation went from bad to worse. When his finance minister, Asad Umar, dared to baulk, he was forced to eat his words. It was only when the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, “launched” himself purposefully that Imran Khan reluctantly packed his achkan, dragged himself off to Saudi Arabia and China with bowl in hand, and Asad Umar sat down to engage the IMF, both making a bald-faced virtue out of necessity.
But even this belated dawning of “wisdom” has failed to yield the desired results. China is not even ready to reveal the nature of its help. The Saudis have made an insignificant deposit that doesn’t tally with the tall expectations of government. And the IMF delegation has returned to Washington without any commitment, leaving the PM and his FM wringing their hands in despair.
The second item related to the efficient and honest functioning of government. On that score, there is even more confusion and contradiction. Parliament cannot function properly without consensual committees to steer legal reforms and oversee public accounts. But the hounding of the opposition parties at the behest of the interior ministry and civil-military “agencies” directed by Imran Khan himself has log-jammed the core committees. Worse, the PM’s intent to run Punjab from Bani Gala via a weak chief minister in a sea of cunning contenders for power like the Punjab Governor and the Speaker of the Provincial Assembly, has deadlocked the bureaucracy and administration. The rapid postings and transfers of high and low officials at one power broker’s behest or another’s has led to lack of direction and motivation.
The third agenda item is foreign policy. Here, too, the government’s stumbling is embarrassing. When the need of the hour is to keep the American beast at bay so that it doesn’t waylay the IMF on its way to Pakistan or lean on the Saudis to put pressure on us, Imran Khan has tried to win cheap brownie points at home by counter-tweeting President Trump. On the Afghanistan front, the war of words and proxy terrorism continues unabated even as Islamabad vows to be part of the solution rather than the problem.
Now Pakistan’s reopening of the Kartarpur corridor to the Sikh shrine of Baba Guru Nanak is being billed as some sort of “peace breakthrough” in Indo-Pak relations. It is nothing of the sort. Like the IMF, China and Saudi Arabia “openings”, this initiative comes courtesy General Bajwa whose bear hug of Indian cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu at Imran Khan’s oath taking ceremony in Islamabad put Indian PM Narendra Modi and Punjab state CM Amarinder Singh in a tight corner. Neither politician’s prospects are too bright in the forthcoming elections in Punjab state next year. Therefore, they have reluctantly yielded to the Pakistani proposal only to curry favour with tens of millions of devout Sikhs. It is a tactical and short term concession as the hard, anti-Pakistan statements from Amarinder Singh and the Indian FM Sushma Swaraj, coupled with PM Modi’s refusal to attend the SAARC summit for the third year running, prove. Indeed, even as the Kartarpur protocol was being signed, proxy terrorists were taking a toll at the Chinese Consulate in Karachi, SP Tahir Dawar’s murdered body was being handed over to the Pak authorities at the Afghan border, suicide bombers were striking in the lower Orakzai Agency and India’s brutal repression in Held Kashmir showed no sign of abating.
On the Pakistan side, too, General Bajwa’s initiative is tactical, aimed only at reducing current Indian hostility – in the form of armed conflict along the LoC and proxy terrorism across the country – that destabilizes Pakistan and makes Imran Khan’s job of focusing on government difficult. This is the same Miltablishment that winked at the Labaiq Ya Rasul Allah during Nawaz Sharif’s time and crushed it in Imran Khan’s, the same that kicked Nawaz out for wanting to promote peace with India and is propping up Imran now at Kartarpur.
The Miltablishment has put all its eggs in Imran Khan’s basket. It will take more than 100 days of incompetence to shake its faith in their chosen man.
------
Bombs or Bread?
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times 16 Nov 2018
As we all know, the civil-military relationship in Nawaz Sharif’s time was severely strained. Among the factors often cited are Mr Sharif’s dogged pursuit of ex-army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, for the treasonable coup of 1999; his rush to “befriend” the hawkish Indian PM, Narendra Modi, without clearing the tactics and strategy with the Miltablishment; the “misuse” of the Pakistan-based jihadis in the proxy war with India, that led to the altercation reported in “Dawnleaks”; and Mr Sharif’s refusal to give the Miltablishment a seat at the roundtable determining CPEC projects and contracts.
But in a recent TV interview, Ishaq Dar, the ex-PMLN Finance Minister, has made a startling admission. He alluded to the issue of increasing defense budgets as the most significant area of conflict between the PMLN government and the Miltablishment. It appears that the Miltablishment wanted “more” money for new weapons systems because of the rising security threat from India but the PMLN government was strapped for funds and declined to do the needful.
The “Defense Budget” remains a sore point with every elected civilian government. At one time, it hovered around 30% of all budgetary expenditures and became grist for critics’ mills. So the Musharraf government cunningly took out military pensions from the Defense Budget and clubbed them with government expenditures, thereby reducing its weight as a percentage of budget expenditures and making it more palatable. When Coalition Fund Support from the US kicked in during the war against terrorism in FATA, it was also toted up outside the ambit of the Defense Budget. It has now become normal practice to post an increase of approximately 10 percent every year over actual expenditures for defense in the preceding year whilst beefing up the defense spending in supplementary budgets during the rest of the year, in effect giving the military much more than a 10% increase. The low levels of budgetary revenue collection and consequent government expenditures have also made defense budgets look overly inflated in percentage terms, especially in relation to India.
The security concerns of the Pak military have increased manifold for three main reasons. First, the aggressive nature of the Modi regime with its constant threat of “strategic strikes” across the LoC and its support of proxy war against Pakistan from non-state actors based in Afghanistan. Second, the perennial threat from its Cold Start Doctrine, now baptized afresh as Pro-Active Operations. Third, India is shopping for advanced weapons systems, the foremost being its proposed purchase of the Russian S-400 Triumf long-range, anti-missile system for over US$5.5 billion which is viewed in Islamabad as a major new threat. Now India has commissioned its first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, armed with a 750km range submarine launched missile fitted with a nuclear warhead. Both these acquisitions are going to compel Pakistan to seek expensive equivalent systems to redress the security imbalance.
In other words, the Pakistan military will want lots more money going forward. The problem is that Pakistan’s economy has been failing and increasingly unable to bear this burden. Therefore, the choice of “bombs or bread” is bound to echo ever more furiously in the corridors of power, leading to renewed strains in civil-military relations and political instability that will in turn hamstring economic development and further strain the budget. When will this vicious circle end to create space for poverty alleviation, education, health, human resource development, etc.?
By definition, a “national security state” like Pakistan with a “permanent” and powerful enemy on its border like India requires a high level of defense preparedness. This is testified by the four wars, countless border skirmishes, and reciprocal proxy-terrorisms between the two in the last 70 years. Ostensibly, the root cause is the unresolved dispute over Kashmir. But we need to ask and answer some pertinent questions here.
How have many countries resolved similar border and territorial disputes in modern times without resorting to wars and proxy-terrorism? Which of the two is the originator of the wars in the subcontinent, regardless of the political provocation by the other? Why has the nuclearisation of the subcontinent spurred the conventional arms race instead of freezing it as originally argued? Who is hurting the most from this arms race, not just in financial terms but also in the cost to representative democracy of an overbearing political-military industrial complex that has created violent non-state actors at home to retain its political hegemony? Why is such a national security state unable to fully exploit Pakistan’s strategic location at the crossroads of three civilisations and markets – South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle-East – instead of replacing the yoke of one declining super power by that of another rising one? Why do we subscribe to the notion of a permanent enemy instead of a permanent peace in the national interest?
The USSR put a man in space and built over 10,000 nuclear bombs but couldn’t put enough bread on its shelves to feed its people. The arms race destroyed it. There are lessons in this for Pakistan.
Bowel movement: the push to change the way you poo
Are you sitting comfortably? Many people are not – and they insist that the way we’ve been going to the toilet is all wrong. By Alex Blasdel in The Guardian
For their 27th wedding anniversary, the Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston gave his wife, Robin, a gift that promises “to give you the best poop of your life, guaranteed”. The Squatty Potty is a wildly popular seven-inch-high plastic stool, designed by a devout Mormon and her son, which curves around the base of your loo. By propping your feet on it while you crap, you raise your knees above your hips. From this semi-squat position, the centuries-old seated toilet is transformed into something more primordial, like a hole in the ground. The family that makes the Squatty Potty says this posture unfurls your colon and gives your faecal matter a clear run from your gut to the bowl, reducing bloating, constipation and the straining that causes haemorrhoids. Musing about the gift on one of America’s daytime talk shows in 2016, Cranston said: “Elimination is love.”
More than 5m Squatty Potties have been sold since they first crept on to the market in 2011. Celebrities such as Sally Field and Jimmy Kimmel have raved about them, and the basketball sensation Stephen Curry put one in every bathroom of his house. “I had, like, a full elimination,” Howard Stern, the celebrity shock jock, said after he first used one, in 2013. “It was unbelievable. I felt empty. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’” The Squatty Potty has been the subject of jokes on Saturday Night Live, and of adulation by the queen of drag queens, RuPaul. This January, after Squatty Potty LLC hit $33m in annual revenues, the business channel CNBC, which helped bring the footstool to fame through its US version of Dragon’s Den, hailed the device as a “cult juggernaut”.
The Squatty Potty’s success is partly down to “This Unicorn Changed the Way I Poop”, an online ad that launched in October 2015 and has since been viewed more than 100m times. In the video, a fey cartoon unicorn, its rear hooves perched upon a Squatty Potty, Mr-Whippies rainbow-coloured soft-serve ice-cream out of its butt and into cake cones while an Elizabethan Prince Charming details the benefits of squatting to poop. (“I scream, you scream, and plop, plop baby!”) At the end of the video, the prince serves the ice-cream to a gaggle of kids. (“How does it taste, is that delicious? Is that the best thing you’ve ever had in your life?”)
Squatty Potty’s unicorn advert, which has been viewed more than 100m times
At first, many people saw the footstool as little more than a joke Christmas present. But, like fresh bed linen and French bulldogs, the Squatty Potty exerts a powerful emotional force on its owners. “I have one and I have to tell you, it will ruin your life,” a Reddit user called chamburgers recently posted. “I can’t poop anywhere but at home with my Squatty Potty. When I have to poop at work I’m left unsatisfied. It’s like climbing into a wet sleeping bag.” Bobby Edwards, who invented the footstool with his mom, calls people like this “evangelists”. “They talk about it at dinner parties, they talk about whenever they can – about how the Squatty Potty has changed their life,” he told me. He sounded almost mystified.
The popularity of the Squatty Potty, and the existence of its many rivals and imitators, is one of the clearest signs of an anxiety that’s been growing in the west for the past decade: that we have been “pooping all wrong”. In recent years, some version of that phrase has headlined articles from outlets as diverse as Men’s Health, Jezebel, the Cleveland Clinic medical centre and even Bon Appétit. By giving up the natural squatting posture bequeathed to us by evolution and taking up our berths on the porcelain throne, the proposition goes, we have summoned a plague of bowel trouble. Untold millions suffer from haemorrhoids – in the US alone, some estimates run to 125 million – and millions more have related conditions such as colonic inflammation.
Where illness goes, big business follows. The markets for treating these ailments – with creams, surgery and haemorrhoid doughnut cushions – are worth many billions of dollars. Although diet is widely believed to be a contributing factor in these problems (eat your fibre!), lately attention has focused on the possible effects of toilet posture. The renowned Mayo clinic is now conducting a randomised controlled trial to see whether the Squatty Potty can ease chronic constipation, which afflicts some 50 million Americans, most of them women, many over 45 years old.
An Ancient Egyptian toilet bowl from the New Kingdom period (1600-1100 BC). Photograph: Science Photo Library
The recorded history of human defecation can be read as a series of attempts at differentiation: how do we separate our excrement from our bodies, our sewage from our homes and cities? How do we keep the sounds and smells of our bodily functions from infesting other people’s senses? How do we enforce social hierarchies by dividing the bodies of the powerful from the bodies of the oppressed?
To these questions, the bathroom with its seated water closet, or flush toilet, was a surprisingly recent but remarkably potent answer. Though sit-down privies and latrines have existed at least since Egyptian antiquity, for almost all of history the vast majority of Homo sapiensdefecated squatting, in the open. As the planet filled up and humans clustered together in cities over the second half of the previous millennium, open defecation became a scourge, leading to rising rates of diseases such as dysentery – still a major problem in parts of the world without modern sanitation.
It’s generally held that the water closet was invented by an English nobleman at the end of the 16th century. But it wasn’t until the the industrialisation of Britain’s potteries and ironworks in the mid-19th century that water closets ceased to be the preserve of the wealthy. As they spread to homes across northern Europe, toilets led to revolutions in sanitation, medicine, social relations and even psychology.
With more and more people going to the bathroom at home and in private, defecation became a solitary and almost unspeakably vulgar act. Some wrongly believe that other people’s bowel movements elicit universal disgust. But as recently as the 16th century, a treatise on etiquette scolded well-to-do Europeans not to flaunt the stinking cloth with which one wipes one’s arse. For several hundred years, into the 18th century, English monarchs did their business in front of literal privy councils while enthroned upon an upholstered box containing a chamber pot. Indeed, “social defecation” has been observed across times and cultures. In the 1970s, the anthropologist Philippe Descola documented it among the previously uncontacted Achuar people in the Amazon; open-plan, ni-hao (“hello”) bathrooms are still common in many parts of China.
In the period of late empire in which it was popularised, the private toilet and bathroom came to be seen as the sine qua non of European achievement. “The Civilisation of a People can be measured by their domestic and Sanitary appliances,” the pioneering Victorian sanitary engineer George Jennings wrote in the 1850s. It’s a sentiment still shared by many a bewildered western tourist when first confronted in parts unknown by what appears to them to be a tiled hole in the ground.
A ‘close stool’ chamber pot, circa 1670-1705, from Hampton Court Palace. Photograph: Royal Collection Trust
So profound is the link between the water closet and people’s vision of the modern west that the German architect Hermann Muthesius predicted in 1904 that “when all the fashions that parade as modern movements in art have passed away,” the bathroom, with its beautifully functional fixtures, would be “regarded as the most eloquent expression of our age.” Edward Weston, one of the fathers of artistic modernism, agreed. After spending two weeks in the autumn of 1925 photographing his toilet, he pronounced its “swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours” a rival to the most celebrated sculpture of so-called western civilisation, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Like any technological solution, however, the water closet set in motion new problems. The use of water to dispose of faeces has been “a central element of our perilous fantasy that the planet was created for human convenience,” one Canadian scholar has written. Alongside improved hygiene and stronger taboos also came an explosion in various so-called “modern” diseases, such as haemorrhoids and constipation, which were attributed to seated toilets. One 20th-century physiotherapist described constipation as “the greatest physical vice of the white race”.
Antidotes, such as low-to-the-ground toilets known as “health closets”, which would allow for a half-squat position, have been on the market in Britain since at least the 1920s, Barbara Penner notes in her book Bathroom. Around mid-century, a predecessor of the Squatty Potty was on sale at Harrods. In the mid-1960s, in the US, a Cornell University architecture professor named Alexander Kira proposed a number of squatting and semi-squatting toilet designs in his monumental study The Bathroom, in which he called the seated toilet “the most ill-suited fixture ever designed”. Yet no solution to the problems posed by the modern toilet really took off. Until now.
The most primitive things sometimes require extraordinary sophistication to produce. The passage of a humble turd demands the orchestration of the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system, muscles skeletal and smooth, three anal reflexes, two sphincters and a weight of cultural knowledge about where and when it’s appropriate to go. It is a “masterful performance”, writes the German scientist Giulia Enders in her international bestseller, Gut.
On its descent through our bodies, faecal matter traverses a landscape marked by the poetry of the gastroenterologist: the flaps of tissue that project into the rectum, known as the “valves of Houston”; the bouquet of blood vessels contained in the “anal crypt”. As the rectum fills with the products of digestion, it signals, through nerves running into the sacral region of the spinal cord, that defecation may be necessary. The internal and external anal sphincters then begin a culturally mediated pas de deux, the former pressing for release and the latter restricting discharge until the opportune moment.
When that time comes, a person may perform the Valsalva manoeuvre, increasing the pressure inside the abdomen by exhaling against a closed airway as if popping one’s ears on a flight. The pelvic floor muscles relax, the perineum descends, and the external anal sphincter opens up, delivering your creation into the world. It takes mammals about 12 seconds to pass a stool, with humans accomplishing the task at a rate of one to two centimeters of faeces per second. In a deep squat, with our buttocks about 150mm from the floor, it takes us under a minute, on average, to go from initiation to a sense of elimination, according to one study.
An advert for a pedestal closet toilet, 1899. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy
It’s a commonplace that social media such as Instagram pressure us to present perfect versions of ourselves: here we are, beautiful and happy, living our best lives #blessed. Like the earlier craze for colonics, the fad for clean eating and the mania for mindfulness, the Squatty Potty seems to translate this perfectionism to our internal states. “The Squatty Potty almost turns the body itself into this efficient flushing mechanism,” like the complex sewage systems we’ve constructed, Barbara Penner said. “There is this element of ‘Let’s empty ourselves out’.” The implicit notion seems to be that ridding ourselves of “bad” foods, unthoughtful thoughts and every last pellet of faeces can help us achieve not only health, but something approaching a state of purity.
At the same time, social media has had other, more humanising effects. In the 1970s, Alexander Kira of Cornell University diagnosed Americans with a psychological and cultural aversion to squatting, as well as to talking openly about our basest bodily functions. Today, after little more than a generation, people are opening up about defecation in a way that was presaged by early, faeces-focused social media sites such as poopreport.com and ratemypoo.com. These sites were often anonymous and almost completely free from the cultural censors that ran traditional media. By contrast, today people happily put their names to stories about their bowel movements, and you can read about anal fissures in the pages of the New York Times.
This unabashed attitude is a major part of the Squatty Potty’s appeal, too. By combining the science of the puborectalis with the whimsy of crapping unicorns (and, in a later ad, gold-bullion pooping dragons), the company is trying to transform the private indignity of awkward bowel movements into an almost universally shared joy. “If you’re a human who poops from your butt,” this stool’s for you, the prince in the unicorn video avers. People were listening: in the three months after the video aired, the company sold 195,000 footstools, and grossed more than $7m.
The Squatty Potty website features a nearly endless feed of Instagram testimonials for its products, which now include a nine-inch version, a bamboo version, a kids’ version that looks like a hippopotamus, stools in black, grey and pink, and a host of other faeces-related goodies, such as witchhazel-infused foam that turns standard-issue toilet paper into flushable wet wipes and a plunger shaped like the poop emoji. New footstools are shipped with a pin-on badge that reads “I POOPED TODAY!”
But this sudden enthusiasm for disclosing private habits masks a deeper truth: shitting and shit have never stopped being profoundly public. Behind the closed door of the bathroom have always lurked the public structures – the pipes, the laws, the labour – that manage human waste. And, behind those, lie defecation’s two inescapable conditions: our bodies and the planet.
There’s a set of common fallacies that equate the “natural”, the “healthy” and the “good”. We often decide that something we think is good must also be healthy (that morning cup of coffee or nightly glass of red wine, say) or natural (polyamory for some, religion for others). But we also like to run things in the opposite direction: if we believe something is natural, whatever that means, we often assume it must also be healthy and good. Our caveman ancestors, in their wise state of nature, ate nothing but acorns and barbecued mammoth? Me eat nut butter and grass-fed steak!
Squatting may be natural, but the question remains: is the Squatty Potty also good? Post Darwin, we no longer tend to believe a couple of hundred or thousand years of human ingenuity can improve upon the immemorial march of evolution. Those who think the water closet has been vindicated by history ignore how contingent, and in some ways irrational, modern sewage systems with seated toilets really are. This is underscored by the fact that billions of people regularly use modern, hygienic squat toilets to poop.
So it does seem plausible that the Squatty Potty might return us to a sort of pooping Eden. But the limited research that exists on footstools is equivocal. In three studies that were either uncontrolled or had very small sample sizes, there was evidence that squatting to defecate has positive effects on the ease and extent of elimination. When it came to simulating a squat by using a footstool, though, the results were inconclusive. The semi-squat position did not appear to open the anorectal angle, or reduce the amount of straining needed to go, though the studies were not rigorous enough to establish anything approaching a scientific fact.
That doesn’t mean you need to hit the squat toilets that still exist along the French motorway or – to the horror of the Daily Mail – in Rochdale’s Exchange shopping mall. Dr Adil Bharucha, who is leading the Mayo clinic’s randomised controlled trial of the Squatty Potty, hopes that his study will establish more conclusively whether the Squatty Potty works, and why.
Of course, even if it does cut down on haemorrhoids and constipation for many people, this doesn’t make the Squatty Potty natural. Rather, the stool shows it’s actually impossible to go “back.” “We are locked into these systems and patterns of use,” Barbara Penner said. “But the Squatty Potty intervenes into that system and modifies it without actually requiring a massive retrofitting of the system.” (One Reddit user suggests crapping in 10-inch stiletto heels.) It’s also pleasantly low-tech, something of a riposte to wifi-connected toilets that heat your bum cheeks and analyse your urine for you – and whoever else has access to the data.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has claimed to discern in the toilet designs of Germany, France and England basic ideological differences between Europe’s three principal cultures. Germany’s “lay and display” toilets, which allow excrement to rest on an exposed shelf for inspection before being suctioned away, reveal a blend of conservatism and contemplativeness. French toilets, designed to remove faecal matter as swiftly as possible, express that people’s revolutionary hastiness. Anglo toilets reflect a pragmatic medium: according to Žižek, “the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected”.
If the Squatty Potty expresses a worldview, it may be an almost evangelical one: a yearning to purify and perfect ourselves, to be saved from the messiness of this world. Part of the fantasy of the Squatty Potty, Penner pointed out, is that it will completely separate our faeces from our bodies the way sewerage purports to separate it completely from our lives. (Bobby Edwards says his hope was simply to create a successful business, and to help people.)
It’s tempting to read into this lust for evacuation an anxiety about our current age, when our rejectamenta of various kinds are bearing back down on us from all sides. We are now realising that there is no “away” to which we can flush our excrement; it is always coming back to us in some form, be it faecal bacteria in seafoam, or the hundreds of thousands of pounds of human excrement that climbers have left on the slopes of Denali, north America’s highest, and among its wildest, peaks. The complete evacuation of faeces from our bodies and our world is a chimera.
But the Squatty Potty also represents a more worldly sort of devotion. Our anal sphincters “are concerned with some of the most basic questions of human existence,” Giulia Enders, the scientist, writes: how we navigate the boundaries between our internal and external worlds. One might add the spiritual world, too. The simple hedonism of a full bowel movement reminds us that the body is the ultimate seat of the soul. Like Bryan Cranston, we all want the ecstacy of elimination, the self-love we feel after a really good shit.
For their 27th wedding anniversary, the Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston gave his wife, Robin, a gift that promises “to give you the best poop of your life, guaranteed”. The Squatty Potty is a wildly popular seven-inch-high plastic stool, designed by a devout Mormon and her son, which curves around the base of your loo. By propping your feet on it while you crap, you raise your knees above your hips. From this semi-squat position, the centuries-old seated toilet is transformed into something more primordial, like a hole in the ground. The family that makes the Squatty Potty says this posture unfurls your colon and gives your faecal matter a clear run from your gut to the bowl, reducing bloating, constipation and the straining that causes haemorrhoids. Musing about the gift on one of America’s daytime talk shows in 2016, Cranston said: “Elimination is love.”
More than 5m Squatty Potties have been sold since they first crept on to the market in 2011. Celebrities such as Sally Field and Jimmy Kimmel have raved about them, and the basketball sensation Stephen Curry put one in every bathroom of his house. “I had, like, a full elimination,” Howard Stern, the celebrity shock jock, said after he first used one, in 2013. “It was unbelievable. I felt empty. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’” The Squatty Potty has been the subject of jokes on Saturday Night Live, and of adulation by the queen of drag queens, RuPaul. This January, after Squatty Potty LLC hit $33m in annual revenues, the business channel CNBC, which helped bring the footstool to fame through its US version of Dragon’s Den, hailed the device as a “cult juggernaut”.
The Squatty Potty’s success is partly down to “This Unicorn Changed the Way I Poop”, an online ad that launched in October 2015 and has since been viewed more than 100m times. In the video, a fey cartoon unicorn, its rear hooves perched upon a Squatty Potty, Mr-Whippies rainbow-coloured soft-serve ice-cream out of its butt and into cake cones while an Elizabethan Prince Charming details the benefits of squatting to poop. (“I scream, you scream, and plop, plop baby!”) At the end of the video, the prince serves the ice-cream to a gaggle of kids. (“How does it taste, is that delicious? Is that the best thing you’ve ever had in your life?”)
Squatty Potty’s unicorn advert, which has been viewed more than 100m times
At first, many people saw the footstool as little more than a joke Christmas present. But, like fresh bed linen and French bulldogs, the Squatty Potty exerts a powerful emotional force on its owners. “I have one and I have to tell you, it will ruin your life,” a Reddit user called chamburgers recently posted. “I can’t poop anywhere but at home with my Squatty Potty. When I have to poop at work I’m left unsatisfied. It’s like climbing into a wet sleeping bag.” Bobby Edwards, who invented the footstool with his mom, calls people like this “evangelists”. “They talk about it at dinner parties, they talk about whenever they can – about how the Squatty Potty has changed their life,” he told me. He sounded almost mystified.
The popularity of the Squatty Potty, and the existence of its many rivals and imitators, is one of the clearest signs of an anxiety that’s been growing in the west for the past decade: that we have been “pooping all wrong”. In recent years, some version of that phrase has headlined articles from outlets as diverse as Men’s Health, Jezebel, the Cleveland Clinic medical centre and even Bon Appétit. By giving up the natural squatting posture bequeathed to us by evolution and taking up our berths on the porcelain throne, the proposition goes, we have summoned a plague of bowel trouble. Untold millions suffer from haemorrhoids – in the US alone, some estimates run to 125 million – and millions more have related conditions such as colonic inflammation.
Where illness goes, big business follows. The markets for treating these ailments – with creams, surgery and haemorrhoid doughnut cushions – are worth many billions of dollars. Although diet is widely believed to be a contributing factor in these problems (eat your fibre!), lately attention has focused on the possible effects of toilet posture. The renowned Mayo clinic is now conducting a randomised controlled trial to see whether the Squatty Potty can ease chronic constipation, which afflicts some 50 million Americans, most of them women, many over 45 years old.
The Squatty Potty
People often say pooping is taboo, but lately it seems more like a cultural fetish. There are poop emoji birthday parties for three-year-olds, people WhatsApping photos of their ordure to friends, TripAdvisor threads on how to avoid or avail yourself of squat toilets. Through the miracle of online media, you can now discover that, in the past year, both Brisbane, Australia and Colorado Springs, Colorado, suffered reigns of terror by mystery “pooping joggers” who ran around crapping on people’s lawns. There’s a whole YouTube subculture devoted to infiltrating restrooms with vintage toilets and surreptitiously flushing them over and over again (one of thesechannels has more than 16m views). The renowned novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has devoted passage after passage to his bowel movements. You can even read opinion pieces about the pleasures of evacuating in the nude.
But it’s the banal Squatty Potty that’s doing the most to change not just how people discuss poop, but how they actually do it. “It’s piercing that final veil around bodily use and bodily functions,” Barbara Penner, professor of architectural humanities at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and one of the preeminent scholars of the modern bathroom, told me. Perhaps it’s because this small, unlovely stool embodies a grand ambition: to upend two centuries of western orthodoxy about going to the loo.
Shitting, like death, is a great leveller. It renders beluga caviar indistinguishable from tinned ham, a duchess as creaturely as a dog. Even God’s only son may be transformed by the act: the stercoranistes, an early Christian sect, believed in a double transubstantiation, Christ into the communion wafer, and thence into dung. Though at different times and places the excrement of certain personages – be they the Dalai Lama or those with “healthy” gut biomes – has been revered for its healing powers, shit itself is a strict egalitarian. Faecal-borne disease knows no kings; cholera can kill anyone.
People have long tried to resist the democratic power of defecation, imposing rigorous distinctions on and through the act. Since at least the 19th century, bathrooms have been arenas of racial and gender oppression, from the Jim Crow south to the era of trans rights. Hinduism is infamous for its caste system, according to which the Dalits, formerly known as “untouchables”, are forced to manually dispose of the faeces of higher castes. In Kenya, the nomadic Samburu use personal trowels to cover their excrement; the beading on the handle expresses the owner’s status within the tribe. In the US and UK, the bathroom is often, per square foot, the most expensive room in the home. Wedgwood, who made your posh grandmother’s dinner set, made her posh grandmother’s toilet pan.
People often say pooping is taboo, but lately it seems more like a cultural fetish. There are poop emoji birthday parties for three-year-olds, people WhatsApping photos of their ordure to friends, TripAdvisor threads on how to avoid or avail yourself of squat toilets. Through the miracle of online media, you can now discover that, in the past year, both Brisbane, Australia and Colorado Springs, Colorado, suffered reigns of terror by mystery “pooping joggers” who ran around crapping on people’s lawns. There’s a whole YouTube subculture devoted to infiltrating restrooms with vintage toilets and surreptitiously flushing them over and over again (one of thesechannels has more than 16m views). The renowned novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has devoted passage after passage to his bowel movements. You can even read opinion pieces about the pleasures of evacuating in the nude.
But it’s the banal Squatty Potty that’s doing the most to change not just how people discuss poop, but how they actually do it. “It’s piercing that final veil around bodily use and bodily functions,” Barbara Penner, professor of architectural humanities at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and one of the preeminent scholars of the modern bathroom, told me. Perhaps it’s because this small, unlovely stool embodies a grand ambition: to upend two centuries of western orthodoxy about going to the loo.
Shitting, like death, is a great leveller. It renders beluga caviar indistinguishable from tinned ham, a duchess as creaturely as a dog. Even God’s only son may be transformed by the act: the stercoranistes, an early Christian sect, believed in a double transubstantiation, Christ into the communion wafer, and thence into dung. Though at different times and places the excrement of certain personages – be they the Dalai Lama or those with “healthy” gut biomes – has been revered for its healing powers, shit itself is a strict egalitarian. Faecal-borne disease knows no kings; cholera can kill anyone.
People have long tried to resist the democratic power of defecation, imposing rigorous distinctions on and through the act. Since at least the 19th century, bathrooms have been arenas of racial and gender oppression, from the Jim Crow south to the era of trans rights. Hinduism is infamous for its caste system, according to which the Dalits, formerly known as “untouchables”, are forced to manually dispose of the faeces of higher castes. In Kenya, the nomadic Samburu use personal trowels to cover their excrement; the beading on the handle expresses the owner’s status within the tribe. In the US and UK, the bathroom is often, per square foot, the most expensive room in the home. Wedgwood, who made your posh grandmother’s dinner set, made her posh grandmother’s toilet pan.
An Ancient Egyptian toilet bowl from the New Kingdom period (1600-1100 BC). Photograph: Science Photo Library
The recorded history of human defecation can be read as a series of attempts at differentiation: how do we separate our excrement from our bodies, our sewage from our homes and cities? How do we keep the sounds and smells of our bodily functions from infesting other people’s senses? How do we enforce social hierarchies by dividing the bodies of the powerful from the bodies of the oppressed?
To these questions, the bathroom with its seated water closet, or flush toilet, was a surprisingly recent but remarkably potent answer. Though sit-down privies and latrines have existed at least since Egyptian antiquity, for almost all of history the vast majority of Homo sapiensdefecated squatting, in the open. As the planet filled up and humans clustered together in cities over the second half of the previous millennium, open defecation became a scourge, leading to rising rates of diseases such as dysentery – still a major problem in parts of the world without modern sanitation.
It’s generally held that the water closet was invented by an English nobleman at the end of the 16th century. But it wasn’t until the the industrialisation of Britain’s potteries and ironworks in the mid-19th century that water closets ceased to be the preserve of the wealthy. As they spread to homes across northern Europe, toilets led to revolutions in sanitation, medicine, social relations and even psychology.
With more and more people going to the bathroom at home and in private, defecation became a solitary and almost unspeakably vulgar act. Some wrongly believe that other people’s bowel movements elicit universal disgust. But as recently as the 16th century, a treatise on etiquette scolded well-to-do Europeans not to flaunt the stinking cloth with which one wipes one’s arse. For several hundred years, into the 18th century, English monarchs did their business in front of literal privy councils while enthroned upon an upholstered box containing a chamber pot. Indeed, “social defecation” has been observed across times and cultures. In the 1970s, the anthropologist Philippe Descola documented it among the previously uncontacted Achuar people in the Amazon; open-plan, ni-hao (“hello”) bathrooms are still common in many parts of China.
In the period of late empire in which it was popularised, the private toilet and bathroom came to be seen as the sine qua non of European achievement. “The Civilisation of a People can be measured by their domestic and Sanitary appliances,” the pioneering Victorian sanitary engineer George Jennings wrote in the 1850s. It’s a sentiment still shared by many a bewildered western tourist when first confronted in parts unknown by what appears to them to be a tiled hole in the ground.
A ‘close stool’ chamber pot, circa 1670-1705, from Hampton Court Palace. Photograph: Royal Collection Trust
So profound is the link between the water closet and people’s vision of the modern west that the German architect Hermann Muthesius predicted in 1904 that “when all the fashions that parade as modern movements in art have passed away,” the bathroom, with its beautifully functional fixtures, would be “regarded as the most eloquent expression of our age.” Edward Weston, one of the fathers of artistic modernism, agreed. After spending two weeks in the autumn of 1925 photographing his toilet, he pronounced its “swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours” a rival to the most celebrated sculpture of so-called western civilisation, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Like any technological solution, however, the water closet set in motion new problems. The use of water to dispose of faeces has been “a central element of our perilous fantasy that the planet was created for human convenience,” one Canadian scholar has written. Alongside improved hygiene and stronger taboos also came an explosion in various so-called “modern” diseases, such as haemorrhoids and constipation, which were attributed to seated toilets. One 20th-century physiotherapist described constipation as “the greatest physical vice of the white race”.
Antidotes, such as low-to-the-ground toilets known as “health closets”, which would allow for a half-squat position, have been on the market in Britain since at least the 1920s, Barbara Penner notes in her book Bathroom. Around mid-century, a predecessor of the Squatty Potty was on sale at Harrods. In the mid-1960s, in the US, a Cornell University architecture professor named Alexander Kira proposed a number of squatting and semi-squatting toilet designs in his monumental study The Bathroom, in which he called the seated toilet “the most ill-suited fixture ever designed”. Yet no solution to the problems posed by the modern toilet really took off. Until now.
The most primitive things sometimes require extraordinary sophistication to produce. The passage of a humble turd demands the orchestration of the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system, muscles skeletal and smooth, three anal reflexes, two sphincters and a weight of cultural knowledge about where and when it’s appropriate to go. It is a “masterful performance”, writes the German scientist Giulia Enders in her international bestseller, Gut.
On its descent through our bodies, faecal matter traverses a landscape marked by the poetry of the gastroenterologist: the flaps of tissue that project into the rectum, known as the “valves of Houston”; the bouquet of blood vessels contained in the “anal crypt”. As the rectum fills with the products of digestion, it signals, through nerves running into the sacral region of the spinal cord, that defecation may be necessary. The internal and external anal sphincters then begin a culturally mediated pas de deux, the former pressing for release and the latter restricting discharge until the opportune moment.
When that time comes, a person may perform the Valsalva manoeuvre, increasing the pressure inside the abdomen by exhaling against a closed airway as if popping one’s ears on a flight. The pelvic floor muscles relax, the perineum descends, and the external anal sphincter opens up, delivering your creation into the world. It takes mammals about 12 seconds to pass a stool, with humans accomplishing the task at a rate of one to two centimeters of faeces per second. In a deep squat, with our buttocks about 150mm from the floor, it takes us under a minute, on average, to go from initiation to a sense of elimination, according to one study.
Ancient Roman communal toilets at Ephesus in Turkey. Photograph: Leonid Serebrennikov/Alamy
But to perform this act on a seated toilet, which can range from a standard 13 or 14 inches tall to a “comfort height” of as much as 20 inches, more than doubled that time. Imagine that your bowels are a prison revolt, and the inmates – your faeces – are trying to storm the gates. If they have to take a hard corner, they’re going to lose momentum and get trapped. With a straight shot, they can easily come pounding down the door. When we sit to defecate, we need to force our feces through a bend in our rectum created by a little hammock-shaped muscle called the puborectalis. While standing or sitting, the puborectalis helps to keep us continent by cinching our bowel closed. In a full squat, that cinch relaxes, the bend or “anorectal angle” opens up, and intra-abdominal pressure rises, reducing the need to push.
This is an eminently good thing. Straining to force your crap around the puborectalis can induce haemorrhoids, intestinal inflammation, fainting – even strokes, brain haemorrhaging and heart attack. One theory has it that the pain from a thrombosed haemorrhoid was so distracting that it cost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo. Elvis Presley’s personal physician famously speculated that a cardiac arrest brought on by straining is what finally did the King in. The kink in your tail may also give you a backlog of faeces that’s not able to leave the gut on schedule. This “faecal stagnation” is thought to be a factor in colon cancer, appendicitis and inflammatory bowel disease. It’s estimated that the average adult produces over 300 pounds of faeces in a year; legend wrongly but tellingly has it that John Wayne died with 40 pounds, or more than a month’s worth, of crap in his gut, and Elvis with something like 60.
The Squatty Potty was born in similarly unfortunate circumstances. “I was constipated my whole life,” Judy Edwards, the Squatty Potty co-creator, admitted in 2016. For a long time, she had been using a little footstool in the bathroom. “We’d teased her about it for years, about this stupid poop stool she’d bring on vacation,” her son Bobby told me. But the footstool wasn’t quite right, so one day, after Bobby, who was working as a building contractor, started taking design classes, Judy asked him to take a look at it. “She took me to the bathroom and she showed me how it worked, and as she was sitting there explaining it to me, it’s like a light went on in my head,” Bobby said.
With paint cans and phone books, they determined the perfect height and width for a new stool. The template Bobby created became the design of the first Squatty Potty. “It was hilarious,” Bobby said. “I thought, this is brilliant, I can picture the infomercial now.” The Edwardses began manufacturing the first Squatty Potties in their garage in 2010.
But sales were sluggish. The family is from St George, Utah, a high-desert town where 70% of the 80,000 residents are Mormons like Judy – not the sort of folks who gossip about their bodily emissions on a regular basis. “She’s a believer, she’s super faithful, she goes to temple every Sunday,” Bobby said of his mother. “That was an interesting dynamic when we were creating this. We embarrassed her a lot.” (This wasn’t so much of a problem for him, Bobby added; he left the church at 17, when he came out as gay.) One local woman told Judy she should be ashamed of what she was producing.
People’s reluctance to embrace the Squatty Potty wasn’t helped by the fact that the Edwardses promoted it at the local trade show with a skeleton on a toilet. (Although the Squatty Potty itself is designed to be as discreet as possible – the standard, white plastic version almost blends away into the colourless expanse of many modern bathrooms – the marketing could never afford to be minimalist.) But friends and family to whom the Edwardses had gifted Squatty Potties where pleasantly surprised by the stools, so Bobby and Judy carried on. St George might not have been ready for the Squatty Potty, but it was about to make a bigger splash than they could ever have imagined.
One of the dizzying ironies of our time is that an earlier reverence for the trappings of civilisation seems to be giving way to a pervasive distrust of modern habits and modern technology. Cars have ruined cities, atomised people and poisoned the atmosphere. Plastics have poisoned the seas. Deodorants and air fresheners have poisoned us. Antibacterial soap has led to the rise of superbugs. Your chair is killing you. So are your running shoes. If you listen to Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, the development of agricultural civilisation may be the gravest mistake humans ever made. For vigour and vitality, you should renounce thousands of years of grain-based eating and return to a paleolithic diet.
We have even come to look upon the toilet with a jaundiced eye. As a result, there’s something beguiling about the suggestion that the Squatty Potty, for the few moments we mount it, allows us to return to a more natural state. “It’s all about basic mechanics,” Bobby Edwards told an interviewer in 2014. “It’s about taking it back to the way it was done thousands of years ago.”
But for all its squat-like-our-ancestors logic, it’s no surprise that the rise of the Squatty Potty tracks the spread of social media. The vogue for lifestyles that are cleaner, greener, more organic, paleo, supposedly more in tune with human evolution, and closer to nature has largely spread through hi-tech means. (To a dieter’s exasperation, there seem to be more paleo apps than paleo-conforming appetisers.) One of Squatty Potty’s earliest significant sales boosts came in 2011, from a vegan blogger with 75,000 followers. It has also been lauded by influential blogs and websites such as The Paleo Mom, Wellness Mama and the Mother Nature Network.
But to perform this act on a seated toilet, which can range from a standard 13 or 14 inches tall to a “comfort height” of as much as 20 inches, more than doubled that time. Imagine that your bowels are a prison revolt, and the inmates – your faeces – are trying to storm the gates. If they have to take a hard corner, they’re going to lose momentum and get trapped. With a straight shot, they can easily come pounding down the door. When we sit to defecate, we need to force our feces through a bend in our rectum created by a little hammock-shaped muscle called the puborectalis. While standing or sitting, the puborectalis helps to keep us continent by cinching our bowel closed. In a full squat, that cinch relaxes, the bend or “anorectal angle” opens up, and intra-abdominal pressure rises, reducing the need to push.
This is an eminently good thing. Straining to force your crap around the puborectalis can induce haemorrhoids, intestinal inflammation, fainting – even strokes, brain haemorrhaging and heart attack. One theory has it that the pain from a thrombosed haemorrhoid was so distracting that it cost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo. Elvis Presley’s personal physician famously speculated that a cardiac arrest brought on by straining is what finally did the King in. The kink in your tail may also give you a backlog of faeces that’s not able to leave the gut on schedule. This “faecal stagnation” is thought to be a factor in colon cancer, appendicitis and inflammatory bowel disease. It’s estimated that the average adult produces over 300 pounds of faeces in a year; legend wrongly but tellingly has it that John Wayne died with 40 pounds, or more than a month’s worth, of crap in his gut, and Elvis with something like 60.
The Squatty Potty was born in similarly unfortunate circumstances. “I was constipated my whole life,” Judy Edwards, the Squatty Potty co-creator, admitted in 2016. For a long time, she had been using a little footstool in the bathroom. “We’d teased her about it for years, about this stupid poop stool she’d bring on vacation,” her son Bobby told me. But the footstool wasn’t quite right, so one day, after Bobby, who was working as a building contractor, started taking design classes, Judy asked him to take a look at it. “She took me to the bathroom and she showed me how it worked, and as she was sitting there explaining it to me, it’s like a light went on in my head,” Bobby said.
With paint cans and phone books, they determined the perfect height and width for a new stool. The template Bobby created became the design of the first Squatty Potty. “It was hilarious,” Bobby said. “I thought, this is brilliant, I can picture the infomercial now.” The Edwardses began manufacturing the first Squatty Potties in their garage in 2010.
But sales were sluggish. The family is from St George, Utah, a high-desert town where 70% of the 80,000 residents are Mormons like Judy – not the sort of folks who gossip about their bodily emissions on a regular basis. “She’s a believer, she’s super faithful, she goes to temple every Sunday,” Bobby said of his mother. “That was an interesting dynamic when we were creating this. We embarrassed her a lot.” (This wasn’t so much of a problem for him, Bobby added; he left the church at 17, when he came out as gay.) One local woman told Judy she should be ashamed of what she was producing.
People’s reluctance to embrace the Squatty Potty wasn’t helped by the fact that the Edwardses promoted it at the local trade show with a skeleton on a toilet. (Although the Squatty Potty itself is designed to be as discreet as possible – the standard, white plastic version almost blends away into the colourless expanse of many modern bathrooms – the marketing could never afford to be minimalist.) But friends and family to whom the Edwardses had gifted Squatty Potties where pleasantly surprised by the stools, so Bobby and Judy carried on. St George might not have been ready for the Squatty Potty, but it was about to make a bigger splash than they could ever have imagined.
One of the dizzying ironies of our time is that an earlier reverence for the trappings of civilisation seems to be giving way to a pervasive distrust of modern habits and modern technology. Cars have ruined cities, atomised people and poisoned the atmosphere. Plastics have poisoned the seas. Deodorants and air fresheners have poisoned us. Antibacterial soap has led to the rise of superbugs. Your chair is killing you. So are your running shoes. If you listen to Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, the development of agricultural civilisation may be the gravest mistake humans ever made. For vigour and vitality, you should renounce thousands of years of grain-based eating and return to a paleolithic diet.
We have even come to look upon the toilet with a jaundiced eye. As a result, there’s something beguiling about the suggestion that the Squatty Potty, for the few moments we mount it, allows us to return to a more natural state. “It’s all about basic mechanics,” Bobby Edwards told an interviewer in 2014. “It’s about taking it back to the way it was done thousands of years ago.”
But for all its squat-like-our-ancestors logic, it’s no surprise that the rise of the Squatty Potty tracks the spread of social media. The vogue for lifestyles that are cleaner, greener, more organic, paleo, supposedly more in tune with human evolution, and closer to nature has largely spread through hi-tech means. (To a dieter’s exasperation, there seem to be more paleo apps than paleo-conforming appetisers.) One of Squatty Potty’s earliest significant sales boosts came in 2011, from a vegan blogger with 75,000 followers. It has also been lauded by influential blogs and websites such as The Paleo Mom, Wellness Mama and the Mother Nature Network.
An advert for a pedestal closet toilet, 1899. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy
It’s a commonplace that social media such as Instagram pressure us to present perfect versions of ourselves: here we are, beautiful and happy, living our best lives #blessed. Like the earlier craze for colonics, the fad for clean eating and the mania for mindfulness, the Squatty Potty seems to translate this perfectionism to our internal states. “The Squatty Potty almost turns the body itself into this efficient flushing mechanism,” like the complex sewage systems we’ve constructed, Barbara Penner said. “There is this element of ‘Let’s empty ourselves out’.” The implicit notion seems to be that ridding ourselves of “bad” foods, unthoughtful thoughts and every last pellet of faeces can help us achieve not only health, but something approaching a state of purity.
At the same time, social media has had other, more humanising effects. In the 1970s, Alexander Kira of Cornell University diagnosed Americans with a psychological and cultural aversion to squatting, as well as to talking openly about our basest bodily functions. Today, after little more than a generation, people are opening up about defecation in a way that was presaged by early, faeces-focused social media sites such as poopreport.com and ratemypoo.com. These sites were often anonymous and almost completely free from the cultural censors that ran traditional media. By contrast, today people happily put their names to stories about their bowel movements, and you can read about anal fissures in the pages of the New York Times.
This unabashed attitude is a major part of the Squatty Potty’s appeal, too. By combining the science of the puborectalis with the whimsy of crapping unicorns (and, in a later ad, gold-bullion pooping dragons), the company is trying to transform the private indignity of awkward bowel movements into an almost universally shared joy. “If you’re a human who poops from your butt,” this stool’s for you, the prince in the unicorn video avers. People were listening: in the three months after the video aired, the company sold 195,000 footstools, and grossed more than $7m.
The Squatty Potty website features a nearly endless feed of Instagram testimonials for its products, which now include a nine-inch version, a bamboo version, a kids’ version that looks like a hippopotamus, stools in black, grey and pink, and a host of other faeces-related goodies, such as witchhazel-infused foam that turns standard-issue toilet paper into flushable wet wipes and a plunger shaped like the poop emoji. New footstools are shipped with a pin-on badge that reads “I POOPED TODAY!”
But this sudden enthusiasm for disclosing private habits masks a deeper truth: shitting and shit have never stopped being profoundly public. Behind the closed door of the bathroom have always lurked the public structures – the pipes, the laws, the labour – that manage human waste. And, behind those, lie defecation’s two inescapable conditions: our bodies and the planet.
There’s a set of common fallacies that equate the “natural”, the “healthy” and the “good”. We often decide that something we think is good must also be healthy (that morning cup of coffee or nightly glass of red wine, say) or natural (polyamory for some, religion for others). But we also like to run things in the opposite direction: if we believe something is natural, whatever that means, we often assume it must also be healthy and good. Our caveman ancestors, in their wise state of nature, ate nothing but acorns and barbecued mammoth? Me eat nut butter and grass-fed steak!
Squatting may be natural, but the question remains: is the Squatty Potty also good? Post Darwin, we no longer tend to believe a couple of hundred or thousand years of human ingenuity can improve upon the immemorial march of evolution. Those who think the water closet has been vindicated by history ignore how contingent, and in some ways irrational, modern sewage systems with seated toilets really are. This is underscored by the fact that billions of people regularly use modern, hygienic squat toilets to poop.
So it does seem plausible that the Squatty Potty might return us to a sort of pooping Eden. But the limited research that exists on footstools is equivocal. In three studies that were either uncontrolled or had very small sample sizes, there was evidence that squatting to defecate has positive effects on the ease and extent of elimination. When it came to simulating a squat by using a footstool, though, the results were inconclusive. The semi-squat position did not appear to open the anorectal angle, or reduce the amount of straining needed to go, though the studies were not rigorous enough to establish anything approaching a scientific fact.
That doesn’t mean you need to hit the squat toilets that still exist along the French motorway or – to the horror of the Daily Mail – in Rochdale’s Exchange shopping mall. Dr Adil Bharucha, who is leading the Mayo clinic’s randomised controlled trial of the Squatty Potty, hopes that his study will establish more conclusively whether the Squatty Potty works, and why.
Of course, even if it does cut down on haemorrhoids and constipation for many people, this doesn’t make the Squatty Potty natural. Rather, the stool shows it’s actually impossible to go “back.” “We are locked into these systems and patterns of use,” Barbara Penner said. “But the Squatty Potty intervenes into that system and modifies it without actually requiring a massive retrofitting of the system.” (One Reddit user suggests crapping in 10-inch stiletto heels.) It’s also pleasantly low-tech, something of a riposte to wifi-connected toilets that heat your bum cheeks and analyse your urine for you – and whoever else has access to the data.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has claimed to discern in the toilet designs of Germany, France and England basic ideological differences between Europe’s three principal cultures. Germany’s “lay and display” toilets, which allow excrement to rest on an exposed shelf for inspection before being suctioned away, reveal a blend of conservatism and contemplativeness. French toilets, designed to remove faecal matter as swiftly as possible, express that people’s revolutionary hastiness. Anglo toilets reflect a pragmatic medium: according to Žižek, “the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected”.
If the Squatty Potty expresses a worldview, it may be an almost evangelical one: a yearning to purify and perfect ourselves, to be saved from the messiness of this world. Part of the fantasy of the Squatty Potty, Penner pointed out, is that it will completely separate our faeces from our bodies the way sewerage purports to separate it completely from our lives. (Bobby Edwards says his hope was simply to create a successful business, and to help people.)
It’s tempting to read into this lust for evacuation an anxiety about our current age, when our rejectamenta of various kinds are bearing back down on us from all sides. We are now realising that there is no “away” to which we can flush our excrement; it is always coming back to us in some form, be it faecal bacteria in seafoam, or the hundreds of thousands of pounds of human excrement that climbers have left on the slopes of Denali, north America’s highest, and among its wildest, peaks. The complete evacuation of faeces from our bodies and our world is a chimera.
But the Squatty Potty also represents a more worldly sort of devotion. Our anal sphincters “are concerned with some of the most basic questions of human existence,” Giulia Enders, the scientist, writes: how we navigate the boundaries between our internal and external worlds. One might add the spiritual world, too. The simple hedonism of a full bowel movement reminds us that the body is the ultimate seat of the soul. Like Bryan Cranston, we all want the ecstacy of elimination, the self-love we feel after a really good shit.
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