Monthly Archives: October 2013

RIP: IHT

Published by peter on 2013-10-20 in Globalization, Obituaries and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

This week the death was announced of The International Herald Tribune, and her replacement by the International Edition of The New York Times.   Born in Paris in 1887, the deceased reached maturity in 1967, when she became jointly and equally owned by The Washington Post and The New York Times.  From then to 2003 were her glory years, perhaps because neither newspaper parent was able to impose their own, provincial culture on the cosmopolitan IHT editorial team in Paris.   Here is Hendrik Hertzberg:

The first time I ever went anywhere outside the United States was in 1960. I was seventeen, I was by myself, and I was in Paris. At the earliest possible moment, I did four things. I sat down at a little table at an outdoor café. I ordered a glass of red wine. I lit a Gauloises. And I opened up my copy, freshly bought, of the Herald Tribune. Only then did I no longer feel like a tourist or a high-school kid. I was suddenly something better: an American in Paris.”

But no marketing manager can stomach a brand he does not control, so the NYT broke up the marriage with The Post in order to take full control of the IHT in 2003.  The IHT was never the same since.  Editorial control seemed to shift from Paris to Manhattan.   The content seemed suddenly to be centred on events in New York, instead of on the world itself.   New Yorkers don’t like to think of themselves as provincial, but they often are.  The arts section is now a mash-up of the NYT arts section, for instance.
And for all their prizes, the editors of the NYT seems to lack some basic newspaper management skills.  Why change the font?   Why, one has to ask, must the cartoon page shift its position in the paper from day to day, like some permanent floating crap game?     Now, in just a few days under its new name, the newspaper’s op-ed page has shifted elsewere in the paper.    It seems that the editors mis-understand the nature of a newspaper – indeed, THIS newspaper – in the life of its readers, if they think we don’t care about such matters.
Now, instead of a paper written for and by English-speaking readers around the world, it has become a paper written by journalists in New York City for readers from New York City.  The world’s loss, alas.
UPDATE (2016-07-31):  And now?  From buying it every day, now, I hardly ever do.  The newspaper is a poor skeleton of its former fleshy self, and shamefully provincial.

The death of Enos Nkala

Published by peter on 2013-10-18 in Africa, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

The death has occurred of Enos Nkala (1932-2013), co-founder of ZANU, former Zimbabwean Senator, and ZANU-PF Minister in the government of Robert Mugabe (1980-1989).  As Minister for Home Affairs, he was chief prosecutor of the Gukurahundi, the brutal genocidal campaign waged by ZANU-PF against supporters of PF-Zapu and the people of Matabeleland.    This prosecution was undertaken despite Nkala being Ndebele himself.   In a more just world, he would have died in prison.
The Telegraph obituary of Nkala is here.  The writer says:

Nkala became Mugabe’s most feared enforcer after the collapse of an uneasy coalition between the ruling Zanu-PF party and Joshua Nkomo, the leader of the Zapu party. This was essentially a truce between Zimbabwe’s two largest tribes: Mugabe’s majority Shona people and Nkomo’s Ndebele. The deal fell apart in 1982 when Nkomo was ejected from the cabinet and accused of planning armed rebellion.
This supposed plot was almost certainly an invention, but Mugabe retaliated in January 1983 by sending a special army unit to Matabeleland, the home of the Ndebele in western Zimbabwe. The Fifth Brigade’s task was to wage war on the population, eradicating Zapu and enforcing support for Mugabe by terror and violence.”

Well, either Joshua Nkomo was plotting against the government of Robert Mugabe while he was a Minister in that government or he was not.  At the press conference he gave in Salisbury (as it still then was) in February 1982 upon his dismissal, Nkomo was reported by Newsweek (February 1982) to have  admitted that he had indeed sought the assistance of the apartheid Government of South Africa to stage a coup and to overthrow Mugabe.   South Africa had, apparently, refused his request.
The crimes of the Mugabe regime against the people of Matabeland were genocidal and deserve to be punished as crimes against humanity.   It does not diminish these crimes in any way to say the truth – that Mugabe’s government was also right to be suspicious of plots by PF-Zapu and Nkomo to overthrow by illegal, unparliamentary means the legitimately-elected, majority government of Zimbabwe.   Later in 1982, somebody – and this was no paranoid invention of a crazed megalomaniac – blew up most of the planes of the Zimbabwean Air Force while they were parked on an airforce base at Gweru.  The plots and enemies of ZANU-PF were real.
 

Specialization

Published by peter on 2013-10-06 in Economics, Globalization, Manufacturing and Politics. 0 Comments

Our modern, technologically-advanced, societies require very specialized knowledge and expertise to function.   In such societies, it benefits individuals to specialize. Despite the beliefs of management consultants and the old Bell System, it is not true that everyone can do anything.

In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, the British Government successfully promoted the development of a highly-specialized cadre of nuclear energy physicists and engineers, able to design, build and operate nuclear power stations.  Once that  technology became mature, however, Government policy shifted and it was thought that country could purchase nuclear power technology “off the shelf”; the country had no need for the skills involved (it was argued) and thus de-skilled.  The French government took a different view, with the consequence today that young French nuclear engineers are in high demand in Britain.

Just as it benefits individuals to specialize, so too with cities and regions.  If there are many companies in the same industry near to one another, recruitment of specialized, skilled staff is easier, exchanges of ideas and business occurs more often, and collaborative partnerships and common campaigns are facilitated.   This is why, for example, the world’s leading commercial insurance companies operate near to one another in Trinity Square, London, and have done for centuries.  This is why Stamford, CT, is a similar centre for insurance companies.  This is why, despite the so-called abolition of distance by the Internet, the key US companies in telemedicine all operate within a few blocks of one another in Manhattan.   Michael Porter’s work on regional industrial clusters has been rightly compelling in explaining the causes and consequences of these phenomena.

But what of countries?  Most national borders are historical or geographic artefacts, contingent accidents of history that could well be otherwise.   So, prima facie, what is true of regions should also be true of countries:  it should benefit countries to specialize.  Since David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in 1817, economists have believed that countries gain from specialization in the production of goods for which they have relative advantage (despite the theory’s flaws).    Why then do many people think it necessary for countries to NOT specialize, to have strong services sectors AND strong manufacturing industries AND a strong agricultural base?   Many Marxists seem to think this – that all countries should have large manufacturing sectors – and none I have questioned has ever been able to give me a good justification as to why.   (Perhaps believing that a proletarian revolution is a necessary stage of every country’s history leads one to believe that an industrial working class is also necessary, and hence a large manufacturing sector.)
Since the Great Global Recession of 2007-?, conventional public policy wisdom in Britain has been that the country’s economy needs “rebalancing” to reduce the role and proportion of financial and professional services, and increase the role of manufacturing.   But why?  Surely, most jobs in services are better paid, have better working conditions, and are generally more intellectually and emotionally challenging,  than the repetitive, dirty, noisy, foul-smelling, physically-demanding jobs of factories.  Of course, modern factories are often clean, quiet, and air-conditioned, because robots, unlike people and trades unions, refuse to work in any other conditions.

Now, according to The Economist,  the British Government is planning to throw money at industrial sector strategy again – “picking winners” is the term of art.  Not only did this fail last time Britain did it (in the 1960s and 1970s), but even MITI – the once all-powerful Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry – failed at it.   Japanese attempts to enter the avionics industry were a bust, for example, despite MITI’s great desire, focus, power, and resources.

I can see a valuable role for government in overcoming problems of collective action – for example, when the actors lack knowledge of each other’s capabilities, beliefs or intentions, or when there are network effects or externalities associated to actions, or when it is in everyone’s interest to do something, but in no one’s interest to be the first to do that something. In these cases, government can can bring relevant actors or stakeholders together; it can convene; it can co-ordinate; it can develop common visons for the future; it can suggest, request, cajole, morally suade, and even harry participants to act for the collective good against their own self-interest.  But none of these government actions or policies requires the government to choose winning companies or perhaps even winning sectors or regions. And none requires vast sums of money.
 

Danish surname mystery

Published by peter on 2013-10-05 in Culture and Politics. 0 Comments

According to this list, the 20 most popular Danish surnames all end in “-sen” (meaning “son of”).  Surname #21 is Møller, and the next 7 surnames again end in “-sen“.  Surname #29 is Lund and of the next 21 surnames (ie, numbers 30 through 50 inclusive), fully 15 also end in “-sen“.

As I browsed this list, I thought of the characters in the TV series Borgen, a fictional series about Danish coalition politics.   I struggled to think of any characters with a surname ending in “-sen”.  The Wikipedia page for the series lists 28 recurring characters whose surnames we learn.  Of these 28, only 5 characters (18%) have surnames ending in “-sen”.  One of these 5 characters is the Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg, whose husband’s surname is “Christensen“; almost never in the series is she called by her husband’s surname.  Interestingly,  9 of the actors playing these 28 characters (32%) have names (which may be real or stage names) ending in “-sen“.

Here are the surnames of the 28 recurring characters in Borgen listed on the Wikipedia page, in alpha order.  Where the surname appears in the list of the top 100 Danish surnames, I include its position in the list in parantheses following the name. Thus, “Chistensen”, for example, is the 6th most common surname.

Christensen (6), Dahl (52), Diwan, Fønsmark, Friis (61), Hedegård (98), Hesselboe, Hesselboe, Holm (32), Höxenhaven, Juul (96), Kiær (48), Klitgaard, Kruse (92), Laugesen, Lindenkrone, Lund (29), Madsen (12), Marrot, Mørch, Munk, Nagrawi, Nedergaard, Nyborg, Saltum, Sejrø, Thorsen (89), Toft (71).

For comparison, I also looked at the character names of the Danish TV series The Killing.  In Season 1, there were 11 main characters, of whom only 2 (the victim’s parents) have a surname ending in “-sen”.  In Season 2, just 2 of the 13 main characters do, and in Season 3, not a single one of the 12 main characters does.

How very curious. I checked the list of current members of the Folketing, the Danish Parliament, and a mere 26 of the 179 members have names ending in “-sen”, just 14.5%.   The ranked list of surnames shows that, of the top 100 names, those ending in “-sen” or “-son” are held by at least 49.6% of Danes (2,774,269 out of 5,590,000). So perhaps having a relatively rare surname is an advantage in Danish politics.  I wonder if the writers of Borgen and The Killing were worried about their characters being mistaken for living politicians or other well-known people, or about foreign viewers not being able to distinguish one Mads Kaspar Somethingsen from another.

Or, perhaps, there is a class or status aspect at work here, with common surnames considered déclassé, and thus less likely to be used by screenwriters or actors. (HT: SP)

Cultures of disrespect

Published by peter on 2013-10-03 in Politics. 0 Comments

The right-wing press are always keen to complain that we are on a fast track to hell in a handbasket, because people in our modern society allegedly lack due respect.  How right they are!  Journalists from one newspaper group hacked into the mobile voice mail box of a dead child.   How disrespectful to the family of the child is that?    And another newspaper  – which had consistently supported appeasement with the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s  – just this week traduced the memory of a man who had joined the Royal Navy to fight for his adopted country in World War II.     Oh the irony of Nazi appeasers accusing an ex-serviceman of disloyalty to Britain!   How they must have all laughed about that in the editorial planning meeting!
And as if to prove there is no threshold below which some journalist will not sink, a reporter from the same newspaper group gate-crashed a private memorial service for a recently deceased family member, held in a hospital, and questioned participants on their attitudes to another deceased.
Have newspaper owners and journalists no sense of decency?