An MBA becomes PM, when the value of an MBA is questioned

 Stephen Chambers in The FT

Rishi Sunak is the first person of colour to become UK prime minister, the first Hindu and the richest premier in modern times. He is also, significantly, the first to hold an MBA degree. 

Sunak studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, as so many leading British politicians have. But it is his time at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — where he met his wife and was drilled in the finer points of competitive advantage and the capital asset pricing model — that sets him apart from his peers. 

Stanford Graduate School of Business sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, where Romanesque architecture, sunshine and social liberalism combine with libertarian and free market ideas and a core belief in the redeeming power of technology. It spans both suit-and-tie corporatism and T-shirt-and-sandal activism. Venture enthusiasm and techno-utopianism make for a heady business school environment. Two years in brutally competitive Palo Alto changes more than how people dress. 

Amid the Rodin sculptures on campus, Sunak will have absorbed Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder primacy, Michael Porter’s “five forces” framework for understanding how industries work, so-called Monte Carlo simulations, the innovator’s dilemma and an emphasis on spreadsheets — all of it flavoured with Silicon Valley’s distinctive “move fast and break things” worldview. He graduated in 2006, the year Twitter was founded. The financial crisis hadn’t happened so MBAs had not yet been blamed for causing it. This was also the founding year of TOMS shoes, which gave away one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair bought, the very model of the Silicon Valley social enterprise. 

The MBA has arguably been the most influential degree of the last 50 years. It has brought systematic discipline to practices that were previously ad hoc and weakly formalised, and serious analytical rigour to bear on starting, funding, running and advising businesses. It built a bridge between research in disparate disciplines and gave us a framework for talking about companies, competition, innovation and investment. 

But recently MBA influence has shown signs of waning. The traditionally high return on investment for the roughly quarter of a million students enrolled globally on such programmes is facing renewed scrutiny in the face of rising tuition fees, while those running the programmes have started to question their methods. What if shareholders aren’t the only people we should care about? What if markets don’t allocate resources optimally for social justice? What if the firm isn’t the most useful unit of analysis for getting things done? What if political reality isn’t captured or expressed by a spreadsheet? 

What does it mean to have an MBA as prime minister? Sunak’s Stanford education means he can run the numbers and pitch the vision. He can assess the net present value. He understands organisational behaviour and market-segmentation. But will any of this help when the rational expectations of MBA orthodoxy collide with politics and events? 

In his political career to date, Sunak has shown both TOMS shoes and Friedmanite instincts. The UK’s furlough scheme and “eat out to help out”, which he introduced as chancellor under Boris Johnson, were TOMS-ish, almost Keynesian. The austerity measures he is now contemplating suggest the opposite. And MBAs are very good at cutting costs. The economist Daron Acemoglu has suggested that employees in companies run by MBA graduates see their wages fall over a five-year period. Markets and owners like this. Employees probably don’t. 

Having an MBA in charge is reassuring if we think of the nation as a corporation. But critics of these programmes point to overconfidence, ethical lapses and a lack of real analytical or empirical evidence for widely adopted strategies. They bemoan an undue focus on case study learning, a lack of emphasis on softer skills, overreliance on corporate acquisitions rather than productivity improvements and a narrow focus on shareholder value. 

Business school admissions departments often say that their students are either “poets” or “quants”. Poets are usually humanities trained and uncomfortable with spreadsheets and valuation exercises. Quants are highly numerate, often with first degrees in engineering. Poets are comfortable with what Keats called “uncertainties, mysteries [and] doubts”. Quants are good at regression analysis. Poets sing, while quants count. Boris Johnson was a poet with a classics degree. He campaigned in poetry, and tried to govern in poetry as well. The UK’s new prime minister can clearly count, while his campaigning was done almost entirely in prose. But does Sunak’s MBA allow him to sing too?

Imran Khan has Pakistani army ducking & defending. Why it’s a historic moment for the subcontinent

Shekhar Gupta in The Print

Since its founding, Pakistan’s army has built a consistent record of launching wars on India and losing. It is a record of unblemished consistency. There is, however, another battlefield where it has an equally consistent record of winning. Which is where it is staring at defeat. We will elaborate on this in just a bit.

On fighting and losing wars with India, there will obviously be some nitpicking. The tough fact is, after so many wars, this army has lost almost half of Pakistan (Bangladesh), destroyed its polity, institutions, economy and entrepreneurship, and driven out its talent. Finally, it has even less of Kashmir (think Siachen) than it started out with.

So where is it that its record of winning has been equally consistent and it is now on the retreat?

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Check out this entire press conference by Lt Gen. Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, the serving chief of the almighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which vanquished the Soviet and American powers, the KGB and the CIA, in Afghanistan. Chaperoned by Lt Gen. Babar Iftikhar, the chief of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), he has spoken for nearly an hour and a half. All of this was invested in defending himself, the ISI, his chief and the army.

Now, never mind that Elon Musk has stolen that metaphor for posterity, please allow us also to use it: Let that sink in. This is the ISI that all of Pakistan both loved and feared, loved and loathed, that friend and foe held in awe. It only had to wink, nod and sometimes nudge, and most of the Pakistani media would fall in line. If you didn’t, you might end up in jail, exile, a corpse in a gutter or in a strange land. In some cases, all of these. Think Arshad Sharif, the former ARY anchor. He was fired and exiled, as was his boss. Sharif turned up dead in Kenya, apparently shot by the police in a matter of mistaken identity. If you believe that, you must be high on something totally illegal.

Now, we had the ISI chief, institutionally among the most powerful men in the world at any time, at a press conference with a hand-picked friendly audience (most of the respected publications were excluded). Usually, his word and his chief’s were an order for Pakistan’s media, politicians, and often also the judiciary. The chief of ISPR was his constant messenger.

Now, both of them, speaking on behalf of their institution, were claiming victimhood. When the Pakistani army goes to the media complaining about a political leader who they evidently fear, you know that its politics has taken a historic turn.
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Pakistan’s army is brilliant at scrapping with its political class and winning. Now it fears defeat at the hands of its politicians too. To that extent, Imran Khan might be on the verge of a victory that would mean even more in political terms than his team’s cricket World Cup win in 1992. If the Pakistani army can finally be defeated by a popular, if populist, civilian force, it’s a history-defining moment for the subcontinent.

It’s history-defining because an institution that was never denied its supreme power except for a few years after the 1971 defeat is now seeking public sympathy with its back to the wall under a mere civilian’s onslaught. Its word used to be a command for any government of the day. It could hire, fire, jail, exile, or murder prime ministers serving, former and prospective. To understand that, you do not have to go far.

In 2007, it looked as if Benazir Bhutto was on the ascendant, after her return from her second long exile (the first return was in 1986, which I had covered in this India Today cover story from Pakistan). She was assassinated despite so many warnings that her life was in danger. Nobody has been punished yet. It’s buried in Pakistan’s history of conspiracies and eternal mysteries like so many others. Her party’s government was kneecapped and her husband subsequently reduced to an inconsequential, titular president.

Nawaz Sharif came back with a comfortable majority. He too grew “delusional”, from his army’s point of view, in beginning to believe that he was a real prime minister. By 2018, this army, under a chief he had appointed, had conspired and contrived to get rid of him, jail and exile him. It ensured that his party didn’t get a majority in the election that followed. In the process, they also built, strengthened and employed Pakistan’s most regressive Sunni Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.
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Imran Khan was then the army’s candidate, and does it matter if he fell short of a majority? The army and the ISI collected enough small parties and independents to give him a comfortable majority. Albeit at their sufferance. A majority was no issue for one seen as the boy of the boys.

Until, this ‘boy’ also began to believe that he was a real prime minister and was causing ‘discomfort’ at the army GHQ.

Worse, his delusions weren’t just domestic. He was now seeing himself as the new leader of the Islamic Ummah, a 21st-century Caliph of sorts in his own right. He was talking in shariat terms, bringing a Quranic curriculum, building a new agenda that was as Islamist as it was anti-West. Both of these alarmed the army.

In the same state of political ‘high’, Imran started to believe he now bossed the army. That’s how the first, and decisive, fights broke out over top-level appointments. The first was over the appointment of the new ISI chief. The army chief had his way with Nadeem Anjum and Imran lost out over his insistence on continuing with Lt Gen. Faiz Hameed. This fight was, however, like a crucial league match before the final — the appointment of the new chief in November.

Think about what is the one thread that’s common to this entire ugly story of intrigue, betrayal, and now it seems, assassination too? General Qamar Javed Bajwa has been the army chief through all of these years. Appointed by Nawaz Sharif who he later fired and exiled, given a three-year extension by Imran Khan who he first created and then got fired, and now challenged by him.

Over the past five decades, two great political families have fought for democracy in Pakistan in their own patchy ways, although mostly by keeping the army GHQ on their sides. Both, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Sharifs’ Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) are now tired and spent forces. One because of its shrinking footprint from Punjab, and the other because its only popular leader, Nawaz Sharif, is hesitant to leave the safety of exile in London and join the fight at home. Both are counting on the army to save their throne and skins.

This used to be business as usual. If the army was on your side, the world was yours in Pakistan. The reason these aren’t usual times is that today it is the army that’s staring at the greatest, scariest existential threat to its power and stature. This threat has come from a populist, riding democratic power. So what if it’s that often nutty and deeply flawed Imran Khan. Did we ever argue democracy is perfect?

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Controversial new research suggests SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering

The claim has yet to be peer-reviewed writes The Economist

Oct 22nd 2022

Astring of about 30,000 genetic letters were all that it took to start the nightmare of covid-19, the death toll from which is likely to be more than 20m. Exactly how this story began has been hotly contested. Many think that covid-19’s emergence was a zoonosis—a spillover, as so many new pathogens are, from wild animals, for it resembles a group of coronaviruses found in bats. Others have pointed to the enthusiastic coronavirus engineering going on in laboratories around the world, but particularly in Wuhan—the Chinese city where the virus was first identified. In February 2021 a team of scientists assembled by the World Health Organisation (who) to visit Wuhan said a laboratory leak was extremely unlikely. However, this conclusion was subsequently challenged by the who’s boss, who said ruling out this theory was premature.

Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” in Wuhan. These markets sell live animals, often housed in poor conditions, and are known to be sites where new pathogens jump from animal to human. Early cases of covid-19 clustered around this market. But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.

The opposing idea of a leak from a laboratory is not implausible. The accidental escape of viruses from labs is more common than many people realise. The flu epidemic of 1977 is thought to have started this way. But an escaped virus does not imply an engineered virus. Virology labs are also full of the unengineered sort.

Research such as that done in Wuhan offers a number of ways for a virus to leak out. A researcher on a field trip could have picked it up in the wild and then returned to Wuhan, and so spread it to others there. Or someone might have been infected with a wild-collected virus in the laboratory itself. But some argue that sars-cov-2 could have been assembled in a laboratory from other viruses that were already to hand, and then leaked out.

Into this fray comes an analysis from an unlikely source. Alex Washburne is a mathematical biologist who runs Selva, a small startup in microbiome science based in New York. He is an outsider, although he has worked in the past on virological modelling as a researcher at Montana State University. For this study, Dr Washburne collaborated with two other scientists. One is Antonius VanDongen, an associate professor of pharmacology at Duke University, in North Carolina. The other, Valentin Bruttel, is a molecular immunologist at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Dr Washburne and Dr VanDongen have been active proponents of an investigation into the lab-leak theory.

The trio base their claim on a novel method of detecting plausibly lab-engineered viruses. Their analysis, published on October 20th on bioRxiv, a preprint server, suggests sars-cov-2 has some genomic features that they say would appear if the virus had been stitched together by some form of genetic engineering. By examining how many of these putative stitching sites sars-cov-2 has, and how relatively short these pieces are, they attempt to assess how much the virus resembles others found in nature.

They start from the presumption that creating a genome as long as that of sars-cov-2 would mean combining shorter fragments of existing viruses together. For a coronavirus genome assembly they say an ideal arrangement would be to use between five and eight fragments, all under 8,000 letters long. Such fragments are created using restriction enzymes. These are molecular scissors which cut genomic material at particular sequences of genetic letters. If a genome does not have such restriction sites in opportune places, researchers typically create new ones of their own.

They argue that the distribution of restriction sites for two popular restriction enzymes—BsaI and BsmBI—are “anomalous” in the sars-cov-2 genome. And the length of the longest fragment is far shorter than would be expected. They determined this by taking 70 disparate coronavirus genomes (not including sars-cov-2) and cutting them into pieces with 214 commonly used restriction enzymes. From the resulting collection, they were able to work out the expected lengths of fragments when coronaviruses are cut into varying numbers of pieces.

The paper, which as a preprint has received no formal peer review, and which has not been accepted for publication in a journal, will be picked apart in the coming days—as well it should be, for this is the way that science works. Early reactions, though, have been deeply divided. Francois Balloux, a professor of computational systems biology at University College London, said he found the results intriguing. “Contrary to many of my colleagues, I couldn’t identify any fatal flaw in the reasoning and methodology. The distribution of BsaI/BsmBI restriction sites in sars-cov-2 is atypical”. Dr Balloux said these needed to be assessed in good faith. But Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist and virologist at the University of Sydney, said that every one of the features identified by the paper was natural and already found in other bat viruses. If someone were engineering a virus they would undoubtedly introduce some new ones. He added, “there are a whole range of technical reasons why this is complete nonsense.”

Sylvestre Marillonnet, an expert in synthetic biology at the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry, in Germany, agreed that the number and distribution of these restriction sites did not look quite random, and that the number of silent mutations found in these sites did suggest that sars-cov-2 might have been engineered. (Silent mutations are a result of engineers wanting to make changes in a sequence of genetic material without making changes to the proteins encoded by that sequence.) But Dr Marillonnet also said that there are arguments against this hypothesis. One of them is the tiny length of one of the six fragments, something that “does not seem logical to me”.

The other point Dr Marillonnet makes is that it is not necessary for the restriction sites to have been present in the final sequence. “Why would people introduce and leave sites in the genome when it is not needed?” he wondered. Previous arguments in support of the possibility of a lab leak have stressed that a manipulated virus would not need to have any such tell-tales. However, Justin Kinney, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in New York, said that researchers have created coronaviruses before and left such sites in the genome. He said the genetic signature indicates a virus ready for further experiments and said it needed to be taken seriously, but warned the paper needed rigorous peer review.

Erik van Nimwegen, from the University of Basel, says there are only small scraps of information and it is “hard to pull anything definitive out of that”. He adds, “one cannot really exclude at all that such a constellation of sites may have occurred by chance”. The authors of the paper concede this is the case. Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, described the pattern, on Twitter, as “random noise”.

Any conclusion that sars-cov-2 was engineered will be hotly contested. China denies the virus came from a Chinese lab, and has asked for investigations into whether it may have originated in America. Dr Washburne and his colleagues say their predictions are testable. If a progenitor genome to sars-cov-2 is found in the wild with restriction sites that are the same, or intermediate, it would raise the chances that this pattern evolved by chance.

Any widely supported conclusion that the virus was genetically engineered would have profound ramifications, both political and scientific. It would put in a new light the behaviour of the Chinese government in the early days of the outbreak, particularly its reluctance to share epidemiological data from those days. It would also raise questions about what was known, when, and by whom about the presumably accidental escape of an engineered virus. For now, this is a first draft of science, and needs to be treated as such. But the scrutineers are already at work.

Rishi Sunak’s first job? Clearing up his own mess

 A clever man, with a penchant for bad ideas writes The Economist

Oct 25th 2022

Rishi sunak entered Downing Street clutching an invisible dustpan and broom. “Mistakes were made,” declared the new prime minister on October 25th, all but rolling up his sleeves. “I have been elected as leader of my party…to fix them.” The voice was passive but the identity of the culprit was clear—Liz Truss, Mr Sunak’s hapless predecessor, who managed just 49 days in the job. It is the morning after the night before in the Conservative Party. The grown-ups have returned to find the house has been trashed. Now Mr Sunak must start the clean-up.

There is just one problem with this narrative. Mr Sunak is a cause of the problem as well as the solution. The new prime minister is helping tidy up a mess that he helped create.

When the Conservative Party has erred in recent years, Mr Sunak has nearly always been in favour of the mistake rather than the fix. There were many reasons to support Britain leaving the eu. Mr Sunak, however, picked the worst one: he thought it was a cracking idea. Britain will be “freer, fairer and more prosperous outside,” wrote Mr Sunak in 2016. It was a pragmatic decision, not a romantic one. The fundamental problem at the heart of his own government will be a policy for which he long campaigned. Likewise, Mr Sunak was comfortable with a “no deal” Brexit so long as Britain actually left the eu. Mr Sunak has pledged a more constructive relationship with the bloc. Better not to have broken it at all.

After the referendum triggered three years of political deadlock, Mr Sunak supported an extraordinary solution to the mess: Boris Johnson. That decision can be put down to cynicism. Mr Johnson was likely to win regardless of whether he was endorsed by Mr Sunak, at the time a junior minister in the department for local government. But intellectual contortions were required to join the bandwagon. Theresa May was competent and diligent yet also a total failure, ran Mr Sunak’s logic, so it did not matter that Mr Johnson was neither competent nor diligent. In July Mr Sunak resigned from his position as chancellor of the exchequer, prompting a cascade of ministerial departures that ended Mr Johnson’s reign. But why put him in Downing Street in the first place?

Mr Sunak embodies the tension between the Tories’ lust for low taxes and their habit of making big-state promises. Colossal spending programmes during the pandemic made Mr Sunak briefly the most popular politician in the country. Yet these were also the decisions he most resented; he tried to curtail schemes such as furlough prematurely in a bid to save cash. In the spring of this year, Mr Sunak similarly dragged his feet on offering support for ballooning energy bills. He is, at heart, a small-state Conservative, even if he has showed a commendable ability to overcome his natural instincts when urgent need arises.

If fiscal conservatism comes first for Mr Sunak, what comes after is much more erratic. As an ambitious backbencher Mr Sunak supported low-tax “freeports”, which shuffle economic activity around rather than generating it. As chancellor Mr Sunak championed the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, when the government in effect paid unvaccinated people to sit together during a pandemic and infect each other. Mr Sunak pushed the Royal Mint to issue a non-fungible token this summer, just as the market for these digital assets crashed. Support for quixotic policy is the norm for Mr Sunak rather than the exception.

In politics, however, luck sometimes masquerades as judgment. Losing the leadership contest to Ms Truss this summer was a big stroke of fortune. During that campaign Mr Sunak predicted that Ms Truss would be a disaster, and she was. He warned that reckless spending commitments would force mortgage rates higher; his campaign team even put together a calculator, pointing out the high bills that would hit households if rates hit even 5%. Yet mortgage rates were heading up regardless of Ms Truss’s rash budget. Her errors have obscured the fact that, had Mr Sunak won in the summer, rising interest rates would have left him with tricky questions to answer. Instead he can pin it all on Ms Truss.

During the summer campaign, and throughout his time on the front benches, Mr Sunak has taken a path long followed by the Conservative Party, which has governed in its narrow political interest rather than the national one. Pledges to curtail onshore wind and solar development please a few zealots but make it harder for Britain to reach its climate goals. Slashing fuel duty as chancellor provided a few days of positive headlines, but failed to put much money in people’s pockets and did not help the environment. There is little evidence that Mr Sunak will take on the vested interests, often in his own party, that hold back Britain’s economy.

Standing on the shoulders of dwarves

The prime minister is a cut above most of his peers. But this is as much a function of a Conservative civil war that killed off competent colleagues as Mr Sunak’s own talents. Elected only in 2015, Mr Sunak has not been doing the job very long. Inexperience, even with copious intelligence, is always a problem. Yet the Conservative Party had nowhere else to turn. It would be comforting to think of Mr Sunak as a clever cynic, a gambler who bet big on Brexit and Mr Johnson and (with a helping hand from Ms Truss) became the youngest prime minister in two centuries. A more worrying analysis is that he is a bright and decent man with bad ideas.

On this reading Mr Sunak does not mark a change from the Tory policies that have left Britain in such a state. Rather he personifies them. The rot in the Conservative Party did not begin with Ms Truss. Britain’s departure from the eu, which Mr Sunak supported, is the thing that acts as a handbrake on the country’s economic prospects. Mr Johnson’s chaotic reign, which he also supported, caused even more ruin. It is the Conservative Party’s failure to take on its supporters that does so much damage to the country. Mr Sunak may be the only available man to fix the government’s errors. But he also helped make them.