Tuesday 4 October 2011
Everybody Hurts - aka Weltschmertz
By Pritish Nandy in the Times of India
We all live with weltschmerz in these difficult times. There's no exact translation of this charming word coined by Jean Paul Richter in 1810. What it suggests is a kind of world weariness that has entered our lives. What you can call a universal pain. Everyone lives with it and yet everyone is in denial of it. That's why we have this great love affair with the entertainment business. Movies. Broadway. Vegas. The IPL. Formula One. We are living in the greatest era of escapism simply because we live in the greatest era of pain.
This pain is not always personal. It's not just about you and me and those who we love. You see it in the eyes of the urchin who comes begging to you at a street corner. She has lost her childhood, her innocence. You see it in the eyes of those who work for you at home, cooking, cleaning, washing your clothes, or taking your well groomed dogs out for a walk. Each one of them, however well you may take care of them, dreams that one day they will walk away to be their own master. You see it in the eyes of your colleagues at work, however enthusiastic they may be about what they do. The long travel to work, the pitiable condition of public transportation, the missing footpaths, the growing pollution, the problems with putting kids through school and college, the frequent confrontations over rent, power, water, tax: everything contributes to this weltschmerz. It's everywhere.
I see it in parties and film premieres too. There's something very tragic in watching middle aged men and women dressed in absurd designer togs, their hair dyed and faces botoxed, prancing around like teenagers and pretending to have a great time. There are more sad-eyed drunks and dope heads there than in the dance bars of suburban Mumbai or the glitzy discotheques of five star hotels. While the real youngsters of this generation, equally sad-eyed, shot and lonely, are racing down empty Mumbai roads late at night on rented souped up bikes trying to prove their machismo. They challenge danger because they find it tougher to challenge life. They hide their pain by escaping it. So do their parents who helplessly watch them suffer, knowing that sermons don't help.
The day we all realise this, that the rich is in as much pain as the poor, that the employer is having as tough a time as the employee, that the cop who asks you for a bribe lives as sad a life as you, the pickpocket you catch has risked being lynched because he has no other alternative means of livelihood, that the movie star you idolise is as lonely as you are, that the one who brutalises you is perhaps as brutalised by life as you are, the less we will seek to blame others for our fate. You will feel less anger against that guy in the tax office who asks you for a bribe when you realise he is still paying back, after ten years on his job, his father's debt for getting him the job. We are lucky. The Americans are consuming today what their next 13 generations will have to pay for. The Greeks will be lucky if their next generation can survive their current crisis.
We have, all of us, mortgaged our futures to pay for being around. No, I am not saying this. Ask anyone who understands economics or the environment and they will tell you this. Yet man bravely strides ahead. As we flirt with more pain, more danger, we discover more and more ways to seek gratification, more technology to flaunt, more entertainment to excite us and, most important, more dreams to chase. So we pursue new ways to earn more money, grow more food, hunt down more pleasures, seek to extend our life spans. British scientists recently declared that by 2050 we will find a way to overcome mortality.
This is the miracle of our times. Even as most things go wrong, man's ingenuity to seek hope and happiness keeps improving. But where we fail most is in sustaining relationships. The best companies collapse, as do the best marriages, the best rock groups, the most intense relationships because our weltschmerz makes us lonely islands of pain. That's why last week, when R.E.M broke up after 31 years, I remembered their most popular song, which became the anthem of our times. Everybody hurts. Yes, everybody hurts. And that is why we hurt each other so much.
Saturday 1 October 2011
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Friday 30 September 2011
Journalist opens a Public Register of income. I wish all others follow.
A register of journalists' interests would help readers to spot astroturfing
Pieces paid for by lobby groups would become apparent if, like me, other writers opened a public registry of their interests
Expenses submitted by David Heathcoat-Amory MP for horse manure.
Journalists are good are dishing it out, less good at taking it.
We demand from others standards we would never dream of applying to
ourselves. Tabloid newsrooms fuelled by cocaine excoriate celebrity
drug-takers. Hacks who have made a lifetime's study of abusing expense
accounts lambast MPs for fiddling theirs. Columnists demand
accountability, but demonstrate none themselves. Should we be surprised
that the public place us somewhere on the narrow spectrum between
derivatives traders and sewer rats?
No one will be shocked to discover hypocrisy among hacks, but there's also a more substantial issue here. A good deal of reporting looks almost indistinguishable from corporate press releases. Often that's because it is corporate press releases, mindlessly recycled by overstretched staff: a process Nick Davies has christened churnalism. Or it could be because the reporters work for people who see themselves, as Max Hastings said of his employer Conrad Black, as "members of the rich men's trade union", whose mission is to defend the proprietorial class to which they belong.
But there are sometimes other influences at play, which are even less visible to the public. From time to time a payola scandal surfaces, in which journalists are shown to have received money from people whose interests they write or talk about. For example, two columnists in the US, Doug Bandow and Peter Ferrara, were exposed for taking undisclosed payments from the disgraced corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff. On top of the payments he received from the newspapers he worked for, Bandow was given $2,000 for every column he wrote which favoured Abramoff's clients.
Armstrong Williams, a TV host, secretly signed a $240,000 contract with George W Bush's Department of Education to promote Bush's education bill and ensure that the education secretary was offered slots on his programme. In the UK, a leaked email revealed that Professor Roger Scruton, a columnist for the Financial Times and a contributor to other newspapers, was being paid £4,500 a month by Japan Tobacco International to write on "major topics of current concern" to the industry.
These revelations were accidental. For all we know, such deals could be commonplace. While journalists are not subject to the accountability they demand of others, their powerful position – helping to shape public opinion – is wide open to abuse.
The question of who pays for public advocacy has become an obsession of mine. I've seen how groups purporting to be spontaneous gatherings of grassroots activists, fighting the regulation of tobacco or demanding that governments should take no action on climate change, have in fact been created and paid for by corporations: a practice known as astroturfing. I've asked the bodies which call themselves free-market thinktanks, yet spend much of their time promoting corporate talking-points, to tell me who funds them. All but one have refused.
But if I'm to subject other people to this scrutiny, I should also be prepared to expose myself to it. So I have done something which might be foolhardy, but which I feel is necessary: I've opened a registry of my interests on my website, in which I will detail all the payments, gifts and hospitality (except from family and friends) I receive, as well as the investments I've made. I hope it will encourage other journalists to do the same. In fact I urge you, their readers, to demand it of them.
Like many British people, I feel embarrassed talking about money, and publishing the amounts I receive from the Guardian and other employers makes me feel naked. I fear I will be attacked by some people for earning so much and mocked by others for earning so little. Even so, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it didn't occur to me to do this before.
A voluntary register is a small step towards transparency. What I would really like to see is a mandatory list of journalists' financial interests, similar to the House of Commons registry. I believe that everyone who steps into public life should be obliged to show who is paying them, and how much. Publishing this register could be one of the duties of whatever replaces the discredited Press Complaints Commission.
Journalists would still wield influence without responsibility. That's written into the job description. But at least we would then have some idea of whether it's the organ-grinder talking or his monkey.
No one will be shocked to discover hypocrisy among hacks, but there's also a more substantial issue here. A good deal of reporting looks almost indistinguishable from corporate press releases. Often that's because it is corporate press releases, mindlessly recycled by overstretched staff: a process Nick Davies has christened churnalism. Or it could be because the reporters work for people who see themselves, as Max Hastings said of his employer Conrad Black, as "members of the rich men's trade union", whose mission is to defend the proprietorial class to which they belong.
But there are sometimes other influences at play, which are even less visible to the public. From time to time a payola scandal surfaces, in which journalists are shown to have received money from people whose interests they write or talk about. For example, two columnists in the US, Doug Bandow and Peter Ferrara, were exposed for taking undisclosed payments from the disgraced corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff. On top of the payments he received from the newspapers he worked for, Bandow was given $2,000 for every column he wrote which favoured Abramoff's clients.
Armstrong Williams, a TV host, secretly signed a $240,000 contract with George W Bush's Department of Education to promote Bush's education bill and ensure that the education secretary was offered slots on his programme. In the UK, a leaked email revealed that Professor Roger Scruton, a columnist for the Financial Times and a contributor to other newspapers, was being paid £4,500 a month by Japan Tobacco International to write on "major topics of current concern" to the industry.
These revelations were accidental. For all we know, such deals could be commonplace. While journalists are not subject to the accountability they demand of others, their powerful position – helping to shape public opinion – is wide open to abuse.
The question of who pays for public advocacy has become an obsession of mine. I've seen how groups purporting to be spontaneous gatherings of grassroots activists, fighting the regulation of tobacco or demanding that governments should take no action on climate change, have in fact been created and paid for by corporations: a practice known as astroturfing. I've asked the bodies which call themselves free-market thinktanks, yet spend much of their time promoting corporate talking-points, to tell me who funds them. All but one have refused.
But if I'm to subject other people to this scrutiny, I should also be prepared to expose myself to it. So I have done something which might be foolhardy, but which I feel is necessary: I've opened a registry of my interests on my website, in which I will detail all the payments, gifts and hospitality (except from family and friends) I receive, as well as the investments I've made. I hope it will encourage other journalists to do the same. In fact I urge you, their readers, to demand it of them.
Like many British people, I feel embarrassed talking about money, and publishing the amounts I receive from the Guardian and other employers makes me feel naked. I fear I will be attacked by some people for earning so much and mocked by others for earning so little. Even so, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it didn't occur to me to do this before.
A voluntary register is a small step towards transparency. What I would really like to see is a mandatory list of journalists' financial interests, similar to the House of Commons registry. I believe that everyone who steps into public life should be obliged to show who is paying them, and how much. Publishing this register could be one of the duties of whatever replaces the discredited Press Complaints Commission.
Journalists would still wield influence without responsibility. That's written into the job description. But at least we would then have some idea of whether it's the organ-grinder talking or his monkey.
Wednesday 28 September 2011
Tuesday 27 September 2011
Should government reward 'good' businesses?
By Robert Peston on the BBC
A happier, more cohesive society would be filled with businesses that offer rich and fulfilling employment, don't pollute, don't impose big risks on taxpayers, pay taxes that more than cover their net drain on social resources, train the younger generation for life in an uncertain economic world, and so on.
It's a lovely ideal that the market hasn't delivered, because the market doesn't always reward those businesses that do good things, or penalise businesses that do bad things.
To put it in highfalutin' economic terms, there are plenty of externalities generated by companies: these are the various impacts that companies have on society and the economy that aren't captured by the pricing mechanism.
That is one reason why we have government, to deal with those externalities. Right now, for example, the current government is amending the tax system to impose bigger penalties on large emitters of carbon dioxide. And it has already imposed a special levy on banks, because of its view that the financial risks taken by banks impose a potential cost on taxpayers, for which the banks have not been paying.
These judgements about the good and bad that companies do are never simple to make or uncontroversial. Think about the threats that heavy energy users and banks have been making about jobs going abroad if the special tax burdens they face aren't lifted.
In recent times, governments have tended to penalise negative externalities - like pollution - while ignoring positive externalities. And the reason is largely to do with history: providing state rewards for businesses that are deemed to be good is felt to be uncomfortably close to the failed industrial policies of the 1960s and 1970s of picking so-called winners.
So should government play a more active role in rewarding the good that companies do, while also imposing new penalties on a wider number of bad effects?
The Labour leader appears to think so. Here is an extract from the official briefing notes for the speech he is to make later today at his party's annual conference:
"Ed Miliband will call for radical changes in the way businesses are rewarded to create a something for something deal in our economy.
"He will challenge the idea that all businesses are the same and will call for rewards and incentives linked to the long-term value they create and the wealth they build.
"He will say businesses which secure governments contracts will be required to offer young people apprenticeships. And he will open up the prospect of major reforms to the tax and regulation system to create incentives for companies that make a wider contribution to the economy, e.g. through long-term investment or building skills."
In concrete terms, what he means is "Rolls-Royce good, Southern Cross bad".
He wants to support companies that win large export orders, collaborate with universities to develop valuable intellectual property and provide highly skilled manufacturing jobs in Britain (like Rolls). And he wants to penalise those that place big financial bets, where the winnings (if any) are restricted to a few well-heeled owners, and losses fall on innocent bystanders.
Which is all very well, except that it is hard to create general rules that define all the good businesses and all the bad businesses in a fair and accurate way.
For example, even if a Labour government wished to discriminate against businesses owned by private equity, on the basis that it believed they were more likely to invest too little in training and R&D, that would not necessarily have spared the residents of Southern Cross's care homes from heartache and anxiety - because it was listed on the stock market at the time that it collapsed.
What is more, not all private equity businesses take the kind of extreme financial risks that Southern Cross took when it was owned by private equity. And if your bugbear happens to be another species of debt-financed institution, the hedge funds, don't forget that some of them have been more effective than regulators at spotting dangerous bubbles in markets.
Also, judgements about the merits of businesses and business leaders are subject to change. So for example I understand that in an early version of his speech, Ed Miliband was going to say that it was wrong of the last Labour government to reward Sir Fred Goodwin - widely seen as responsible for the calamitous near-failure of Royal Bank of Scotland - with a knighthood (he may yet say this).
But this is to forget that until Royal Bank of Scotland became obsessed with growing bigger and bigger from 2005 or so and onwards, Goodwin was widely seen as one of the more talented British business leaders - who had overseen a highly effective and long overdue modernisation of NatWest's systems and network.
Which is why Mr Miliband will - I am sure - resist the temptation to argue that ministers should reward or punish companies, with special grants or exceptional taxes, on a case by case basis.
That would almost certainly be the road to industrial desertification and corruption.
Does that mean there is nothing government can do to encourage sustainable long term wealth creation?
Well, there is evidence that the tax rewards accruing to debt finance have encouraged banks, property companies, hedge funds and private-equity businesses to take dangerous risks, while discouraging long-term investment as opposed to short-term asset trading, and also shrinking tax revenues paid by the corporate and financial sectors.
This was an argument that George Osborne, the chancellor, took seriously in opposition, but seems to have subsequently discarded - although the Independent Commission on Banking recently flagged up the tax advantages of so-called leverage or borrowing as a contributor to the lethal explosion in the growth of banks' balance sheets relative to their capital resources.
So finding a way to enhance the rewards of equity-financed investment, and reduce the rewards of debt-financed investment, could go some way to reducing the most toxic of externalities afflicting our economy - namely an urge to borrow that has foisted record debts on the British economy and hobbled its ability to grow.
Difference between Westerners and Asians
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