Time spent in the pub is a wise investment

Sarah O'Connor in The FT

When I joined the Financial Times as a trainee in 2007, I spent a lot of time learning about credit default swaps and a similar amount of time in the pub. The CDS knowledge proved useful in the ensuing financial crisis, but 13 years later, I am glad of the hours spent in the pub too. 

It was how I got to know my colleagues, who taught me the FT’s folklore, its funny anecdotes and its subtle power dynamics. I just thought I was having fun, but an economist would have said I was building “social capital”, defined by the UK’s statistical office as “the extent and nature of our connections with others and the collective attitudes and behaviours between people that support a well-functioning, close-knit society”. 

Social capital is a fuzzy concept and hard to measure. But Covid-19 has made us think about who has it, who doesn’t, how we build it and how we lose it. 

I was near the end of my maternity leave when the pandemic started, so it has now been almost 18 months since I last worked in the office. I’m grateful every day for my store of social capital, which has helped me to stay connected, though I do get a twinge of anxiety with every new byline I don’t recognise. 

It has been much tougher for people starting out this year. If it is hard to maintain relationships via video calls, it is harder still to build them from scratch. I spoke recently to some senior accountants about their new crop of trainees. They were learning their trade, but there was no opportunity for general chit-chat before and after virtual meetings, and the trainees seemed to find it harder to ask “daft questions” in video calls than when “sitting round a table with a packet of biscuits”. 

Next year, employers will have to think creatively about how to help new employees “catch up” on forming social capital, especially in a world of “hybrid” work where people stay at home for several days a week. 

Inadequate social capital is a problem for organisations as well as individuals. Research suggests that social capital boosts efficiency by reducing transaction and monitoring costs. In other words, “society wastes resources when people distrust and are dishonest with each other”, according to Dimitri Zenghelis, leader of the Wealth Economy project at Cambridge university, which explores social and natural capital.  

I am often struck by the inefficiencies of distrustful workplaces. Companies using screenshot and mouse-tracking software can end up in a cat-and-mouse game with resentful workers using tech workarounds of their own. Employers who doubt the honesty and motivation of their staff compel line managers to hold “return to work” meetings with employees after every sickness absence, even of only a day. Factories and warehouses often have long queues at shift changes as staff go through scanners to prove they are not stealing. Covid-19 might push some employers further in this direction, particularly if they decide to use more offshore workers with whom they have no prior relationship. 

On the other hand, this year’s forced experiment with homeworking has made some employers realise their staff can be trusted to work productively without oversight. The key will be to hold on to that trust, and the efficiencies it brings, rather than slip back into old habits of micromanagement. 

Social capital matters for economies, too. For his book Extreme Economies, economist Richard Davies travelled to nine unusual places, from a refugee camp in Jordan to an Indonesian town destroyed by the 2004 tsunami. He was struck by how societies with higher social capital were more resilient when disaster struck. In Glasgow, by contrast, he argued that the replacement of tenement homes with tower blocks had dismantled the social capital of the people who lived there, making it harder for them to cope with economic decline. 

For both individuals and economies, social capital is an important buffer against unexpected hardships. Yet in the UK, where the Office for National Statistics has been trying to track various indicators of social capital over time, the trend has not been good. We exchanged favours or stopped to talk with our neighbours less often in 2017/18 than we did in 2011/12. Our sense of belonging to our neighbourhoods also fell. Parents became less likely to regularly give help to, and receive help from, their adult children. 

The pandemic has strained our ability to maintain the bonds between us, but it has also reminded us just how important they are. Any plan to “build back better” when the crisis ends should include plenty of time in the pub.

Modi is reaching out. AMU has a chance to take Muslims away from path of confrontation

Despite its characteristic boast, Aligarh could not chart a path for modernity and progress of Indian Muslims after Independence. PM Modi's centenary address is an opportunity opines NAJMUL HODA in The Print

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going to address the centenary celebrations of the Aligarh Muslim University on 22 December. The event is online. If it wasn’t for Covid, he would likely be on campus. This is the first time since 1964 that a prime minister of India is going to address AMU. Fifty-six years is a long time, and except for Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, no other prime minister thought of visiting the university, even though Aligarh is only 120 km from the national capital, and AMU is a fully funded central university whose Visitor is the President of India.

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The proposed address by PM Modi is a well-thought gesture full of symbolism. As he often emphasises, Modi is the prime minister of 130 crore Indians, which includes about 20 crore Muslims. He belongs to an ideological stream whose understanding of history is much different from how Muslims would look at India’s past and their role in it. Therefore, their idea of the present and the vision for the future remain equally contested. 

Past without a closure

The Aligarh Muslim University has been a part of that contentious history, and must face up to its history in the spirit of truth and reconciliation. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, the institution which became AMU in 1920, is alleged to have propounded the two-nation theory. It’s another matter that if his successors had not totally buried his social and political ideas, alongside his religious thought, there was much in his speeches and writings to place him among the founders of composite nationalism.

It was the Muhammadan Educational Conference, the vehicle of the Aligarh Movement, which doubled up as the founding session of the Muslim League at Dhaka in 1906. MAO College hosted the League till 1912 before its headquarters were shifted to Lucknow. The politics of Muslim separatism was institutionalised in Aligarh, which, by the 1940s, had become, in Jinnah’s words, “the arsenal of Muslim India”. Later, poet Jaun Elia would quip that Pakistan was a prank played by the juveniles of Aligarh (“Pakistan — ye sab Aligarh ke laundoń ki shararat thi”).

That this practical joke, by its sheer thoughtless adventurism, turned out to be a monumental tragedy, which sundered the country into two and the Muslim community into three, is yet to be confronted by Aligarh. The inability to confront its past, and the ruse of feigning amnesia in this regard, has also led to the collateral forgetting of nationalist and progressive streams, which though not dominant, were nonetheless quite robust strands. 

That this could happen despite the fact that AMU is endowed with a Centre of Advanced Study in History is even more surprising. History has to be written no matter what be one’s methodology, analytical tools, philosophical inclination and ideological orientation. Developing an Akbar-Aurangzeb centric school of history may be a noble endeavour, and nobler may be the zeal to argue how secular were the Muslim rulers — Aurangzeb being the most secular of them all — but expatiating on secular nationalism of people like Zakir Hussain and Mohammad Habib, in the face of frenzied communalism, would be much better if one didn’t fight shy of calling the mainstream Muslim communalism on the campus by its name.

This could not happen because post-Partition, Aligarh was reassured and rehabilitated, but not reformed. It reflects the high-mindedness of independent India’s leadership, how they protected and preserved AMU even as most of its faculty and students deserted it for the greener pasture of their conquest, Pakistan. An un-critiqued and un-reformed Aligarh would continue to inhabit the same narrative as earlier. Thus, despite its characteristic boast, Aligarh could not chart a path for modernity and progress of Indian Muslims and their integration and mainstreaming in the national life. The emotional chasm between the two communities kept widening despite the increasing commingling of people. And so, instead of giving intellectual leadership to the Muslim community, to which AMU considered itself traditionally entitled, and for which it is statutorily mandated by its founding Act, Aligarh chose the regressive path.

On such politically momentous issues as Shah Bano and Triple Talaq, despite having the material wherewithal to come up with its own progressive position, Aligarh’s intellectual sterility made it toe the line of the ulema and the reactionary Muslim Personal Law Board, the very people against whose thought the university was founded. It became complicit in the cultural regression and political alienation of the Muslim community, and could not intervene when a second separatist movement got underway in the name of identity. On the question of Babri Masjid, the Aligarh academia adopted the Leftist line of limited technical correctness, oblivious of the fact that the issue had far deeper implications for the Muslims than the Leftist arguments could see them through. 

A chance for reconciliation

Now that Prime Minister Modi, staunch in his own ideological position, is going to address AMU in a grand gesture of reaching out, its symbolism should not be lost on anyone. More so, as this moment comes not very long after the physical assaults and vicious propaganda against the university by Right-wing groups that swear allegiance to the Modi government. Stigmatising AMU over Jinnah’s portrait, which hung, among many others, in the student union’s building for he was an honorary member of it, was malicious, even as the arguments against removing it were too untenable to be sustained, too nuanced to be understood and too disingenuous to be given any credence.

Be that as it may, notwithstanding every imaginable criticism of AMU, the fact could not be ignored that this campus has the highest concentration of modern, educated Muslims anywhere in the world. So, even if it couldn’t realistically boast of being the intellectual vanguard of Indian Muslims, in sheer quantitative terms, and in view of its historical legacy, it has an unsurpassable symbolic value for the Muslim community.

Now that the prime minister is reaching out, should Aligarh, on behalf of the Muslims, not grasp the extended hand of friendship and reconciliation? It is for Aligarh to decide whether it would wean away Muslims from the path of confrontation, which, if not shunned, is bound to bring an unimaginable catastrophe, or to put them on the path of conciliation as Sir Syed did with the British.

An alumnus of AMU, Mukhtar Masood, mentions an anecdote in his book Awaz-e Dost, wherein some time after Independence, while addressing the governor of Uttar Pradesh, Sarojini Naidu, in the Union Hall, a student said, “Ya to hum aapke bade dushman hain ya chhote bhai hain (we are either your big enemy or little brother).” The reality is simpler than this. Muslims are neither. They are equal as Indians and citizens. Let this opportunity not be missed.

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UK and China: how the love affair faded

Patrick Wintour in The Guardian

In 2003, the Cabinet Office decided to allow the Chinese state-backed Huawei telecommunications network to start supplying BT for the first time. Nobody bothered to put a note on the security implications into the red box of the then business secretary, Patrica Hewitt. A minor discussion, solely on the competition implications, did take place.

The then head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, used to daily cooperation with BT to secure wire taps, was shocked and concerned when he heard of the plan, but was told: “It is nothing to do with you. These are issues we can control.”

The path was set fair for the open trading relationship with China which reached its zenith with George Osborne and David Cameron in 2015. “No economy in the world is as open to Chinese investment as the UK,” Osborne boasted on a five-day visit to China in September of that year. In a speech to the Shanghai stock exchange, he vowed London would act as China’s bridge to European financial markets. “Whatever the headlines … we shouldn’t be running away from China,” he said. “Through the ups and downs, let’s stick together.”

David Cameron and George Osborne visit the Forbidden City in Beijing in 2015. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/Press Association

Osborne knew he was taking a risky bet and Britain, against vehement US objections, joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

UK trade with China is worth approximately £7bn, making it Britain’s’s fourth-largest trading partner, the sixth-largest export market and the third-largest import market. By comparison, in 1999 China was the UK’s 26th largest export market and 15th largest source of imports.

But Britain is now veering away from China, despite Osborne’s pledge. It has moved from being China’s greatest advocate in Europe, a wide open door for Chinese investment, into one of its sternest critics. Overall, it represents as swift and complete a reversal in foreign policy as the UK’s shift from treating Russia as an ally in 1945 to cold war foe in 1946.

Yet how this course correction happened, the extent to which it was internally driven, or imposed on the UK by the Trump administration, and whether its limits has been finally set remains largely unresolved.

People walking past the Huawei logo during the Consumer Electronics Expo in Beijing. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images

In the last fortnight alone two major government bills have been published, one aimed primarily at screening out Chinese investment from 17 UK strategic industries, and another cutting Huawei out of the UK telecommunications network entirely from 2027. This reverses the decision taken, in defiance of the US, at the start of the year to give Huawei limited access.

A third bill, in front of the Lords, has been amended in an attempt to prevent any UK trade deals with China if its human rights record is found wanting.

The government’s integrated foreign and security policy review, due in the new year, will contain a British tilt to the Indo-Pacific, shorthand for greater political and military support for the forces of democracy in the South China Sea.

On the Tory benches, the intellectual commanding heights are now dominated by China critics, so much so, it is argued, that Sino-scepticism is the New Euro-scepticism. There is probably no more active group of parliamentarians than the Tory China Research Group, only set up in January. The group, established by Tom Tugendhat, the foreign affairs select committee chairman, and Neil O’Brien, now head of the Conservative policy board, were instrumental in March in mounting the rebellion of 40 MPs who pushed to have Huawei excluded.

Across the Tory thinktanks that matter – Policy Exchange, the Legatum Institute, Henry Jackson Society, – hostility to the Chinese Communist party is unanimous.

China footage reveals hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners. Photograph: youtube

Labour, committed to human rights, takes a similar view. It is a British human rights barrister, Rodney Dixon, who is leading the claim that China can be taken to the international criminal court over its treatment of Uighur Muslims. Hong Kong Watch is one of the most active pressure groups defending the steady stream of jailed activists. The UK has become a safe harbour for the exiles, and nearly 60,000 British National (Overseas) passports were handed out to Hong Kongers in September alone.

By contrast the business lobbies, especially finance capital that previously worked assiduously to secure deals with China, have fallen silent, or found themselves struggling for a hearing. British board members on Huawei such as Lord John Browne have resigned. Other former advocates for Huawei such as Alexander Downer, the former Australian high commissioner to London, have long converted, urging the UK to engage with the geopolitical threat posed by China, and “not just see the country as a place to sell Land Rovers and Jaguars”.

Huawei’s own warnings about the potential cost to the UK economy of delaying 5G are ignored.

It can be argued, as Keynes did, that when the facts change, it is advisable to change your mind. The destruction of Hong Kong’s freedoms, China’s secretive mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak, its wolf warrior diplomacy, the revelations about treatment of the Uighur people, the wholesale theft of intellectual property, and the bullying of one of the UK’s natural partners, Australia, has ended illusions about China. In July, the former head of M16 Sir John Sawers wrote that the last six months have “revealed more about China under President Xi Jinping than the previous six years”.

Rory Stewart, the former Foreign Office minister, says: “China has broken a lot of our beliefs about how we thought about things for 200 years. For 200 years there seemed to be a connection between economic growth and liberal democracy. Many, many people thought 20 years ago it was almost inevitable China would move in a liberal, democratic way. Today we are in a much more gloomy place.”

China’s entry into the WTO in December 2001 proved not to be the prelude to the country opening up, but instead a high-water mark.

But these views are now being wrapped into an ideological perception of China as an imperialist power intent on dominating the west technologically, politically and militarily, a view enshrined in a 70-page US state department policy paper entitled Elements of the China Challenge published this month. The paper argues the west utterly misconstrued China as a fledgling economic super power with no imperial ambitions, when in reality “it is determined fundamentally to revise the world order, placing the People’s Republic of China at the centre and serving Beijing’s authoritarian goals and hegemonic ambitions”.

Riot police detain a man as they clear protesters taking part in a rally against the national security law in Hong Kong in July. Photograph: Dale de la Rey/AFP/Getty Images

In a lecture given to Policy Exchange, Matthew Pottinger, Donald Trump’s chief adviser on China, drew a sinister portrait. “The party’s overseas propaganda has two consistent themes: ‘We own the future, so make your adjustments now.’ And: ‘We’re just like you, so try not to worry.’ Together, these assertions form the elaborate con at the heart of all Leninist movements.”

It is this kind of thinking deep in the Trump administration that led to the remorseless commercial and political pressure on the UK this summer to change its mind over Huawei.

There are distinctions between the America and British process of disillusionment, according to Sophie Gaston at the British Foreign Policy Group. The US came at the China issue via trade and the loss of manufacturing jobs while the UK came at it primarily through the lens of human rights and national security. But the two views have now blended into a melange of concern about human rights, the race for quantum supremacy and protection of the national infrastructure ranging from power stations to university freedom.

For Martin Jacques, the former British editor of Marxism Today and enthusiastic chronicler of China’s rise, the UK has been gripped by a form of paranoia – reds under the bed replaced by reds under the hard drive. “What’s happening is a very serious regression in the mentality in the UK toward China. It reminds me very much of the cold war. In fact, the thinking is cold war thinking: China is just the evil enemy that has to be rejected. The rightwing reduces China to the communist regime, the communist threat, and the whole Chinese history is lost in the process. So they have no understanding whatsoever of China really. They’ve just got this extraordinary backward view of China, which is just, frankly, plain ignorant. But it’s making the running.”

Another surprising figure despairing at the trend is Vince Cable. The Liberal Democrat was business secretary in the Osborne era and bemoans “the unholy alliance” of Trumpists, neocons, British Conservatives and Labour opposition who, he says, are blowing apart the government’s post-Brexit strategy to invest in China.

But Dearlove kicks back, arguing there is something sinister about China’s methods. He cites three Chinese maxims. “Kill with a borrowed sword – that is, get what you can. Loot a burning house – bear that in mind in terms of taking advantage of the current pandemic. The third one is hide a knife behind a smile.”

Xi Jinping waits to greet Theresa May in Beijing in 2018. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

China, he says, assembled an influence network in the UK. It “recruited a whole group of leading British business and political figures into that group who were designated cheerleaders for a burgeoning relationship with China. Huawei was an important part of that. The composition – the British membership of the Huawei board – was a very impressive lineup of people who were there to persuade us to drop our guard.”

Quite how far the UK, mired in recession, will go in specific policy terms to distance itself from China, and how China reacts, is in question. The China Research Group in its recent manifesto stops short of Trumpian decoupling of the west from China’s economy, but backs measures including sanctions on UK finance houses operating in Hong Kong that extend the reach of the Communist party, a ban on Chinese state-owned enterprises investing in UK critical infrastructure and a ban on UK firms exporting goods and services that are used to abuse human rights. Tariffs are mentioned only as a last resort.

Some of this is enough to make Lord Grimstone, the former head of Standard Chartered and now a trade minister, blanch. The new China-Britain Business Council chair, and head of public affairs at HSBC, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, has also been leading a discreet fightback, pointing out that after Brexit, Britain needs to insert itself into the Asian-Pacific growth area. China, after all, is the economy taking the world out of recession.

So far, the British elite have managed to keep the Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador, onside. Despite smarting from the Huawei 5G ban, he has not descended into the name-calling disfiguring Chinese relations with Australia. He has not, for instance, like his colleague in Canberra, sent a 14-point checklist of mistakes that the UK must correct.

Instead, he spoke last month to the third China-UK Economic Forum about the continued chances for synergy with UK business. Ahead of the forum, a survey showed continued Chinese enthusiasm to invest in the UK, despite a fall-back in investment due to coronavirus.

The Foreign Office is clearly nervous of being cast in a vanguard role, while Japan and Germany, for instance, allow Huawei into its 5G networks. The UK has not yet sanctioned anyone over Hong Kong, only provided safe haven. The Trump administration by contrast has sanctioned 14 Chinese officials specifically over Hong Kong, including the chief executive, Carrie Lamb.

Britain will also be cautious because it does not want to be left beached on the high tide of Trumpian anti-Chinese rhetoric only to find that tide went out with Joe Biden’s election. Biden is, at a minimum, likely to take a less aggressive unilateral sanctions-based approach to trade, and it is not yet clear if his planned alliance of democratic nations will be explicitly anti-Chinese.

If the Biden administration is interested in re-stabilising the US-China relationship, the UK is likely to want to be in the slipstream of this process, probably using the climate change agenda as the way back in.

After all, the advocates of pragmatic British engagement have not gone away, just gone quiet.

Lord Powell, a former chairman of the China-Britain Business Council and private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, put it succinctly in a lecture last year. He explained: “I have to admit when visiting China, as a I frequently do, I never get the sense that parliamentary democracy is anything like the highest priority for most people. At least at this stage in the country’s development, their priority is material progress, even if it comes at the price of freedom.”

He added: “I know pragmatism is a dirty word in any discussion of ethical values but when the other guy – in this case China – indisputably has the stronger hand, it is prudent not to provoke unwinnable fights.”

Are poor countries poor because of their poor people? Economic History in Small Doses 5

Girish Menon*

A bus driver in Mumbai gets paid around Rs.50 per hour whereas his equivalent in Cambridge gets paid £12 per hour. Using currency exchange rates, the Cambridge driver gets paid 24 times more than his Indian equivalent. Does that mean John the Cambridge driver is 24 times more productive than Om? If anything, Om would likely be a much more skilled driver than John because Om has to negotiate his way through bullock carts, rickshaws, bicycles and cows on the street.

The main reason why John is paid 24 times more than Om is because of protectionism. Some, British workers are protected from competition from workers in India, and soon from the EU, through immigration control.  (Technology has erased this protectionism in the relocation of many white collar jobs.) This form of protectionism goes unmentioned in the WTO (World Trade Organization) as countries raise their barriers to immigration of poor workers.

 Many people think that poor countries are poor because of their poor people. The rich people in poor countries typically blame their countries’ poverty on the ignorance, laziness and passivity of the poor. Arithmetically too, it is true that poor people pull down the national income average because of their large numbers.

 Little do the rich people in poor countries realize that their countries are poor not because of the poor but because of themselves. The primary reason why John is paid 24 times more than Om is because John works in a labour market with other people who are way more than 24 times more productive than their Indian counterparts. The top managers, scientists and engineers in the UK are hundreds of times more productive than their Indian equivalents, so the UK’s national productivity ends up being in the region of 24 times that of India.

In other words, poor people from poor countries are usually able to hold their own against counterparts in rich countries. It is the rich from the poor countries who cannot do that. It is their relative low productivity that makes their country poor. So, instead of blaming their own poor for dragging the country down, the rich of the poor countries should ask themselves why they cannot pull up the productivity and innovation in their own country,

Of course, the rich in rich countries need not get smug. They are beneficiaries of economies with better technology, better organized firms, better institutions and better physical infrastructure. Warren Buffet expressed it best:

 “I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later. I work in a system that happens to reward what I do well – disproportionately well.”

 

* Adapted from 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism by Ha Joon Chang