Author Archive for peter

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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?

Does evo-psych explain anything at all?

Published by peter on 2013-09-28 in Culture, Religion and Science. 0 Comments

Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology have long struck me as arrant nonsense, because they ignore human free will and self-reflection, and thus our ability to rise above our own nature.   There are no pianos on the savanna, as I have remarked before, so an evolutionary psychologist will have a major challenge to explain a desire to play the piano in evolutionary terms.
Christopher Booker, in a review of E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, views similarly the flaws of evolutionary theory when applied to human behaviours:

It is our ability to escape from the rigid frame of instinct which explains almost everything that distinguishes human beings from any other form of life. But one looks in vain to Wilson to recognise this, let alone to explain how it could have come about in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. No attribute of Darwinians is more marked than their inability to grasp just how much their theory cannot account for, from all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable, that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ‘conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants.
But it is this which also gives us our disintegrative propensity, individually and collectively, to behave egocentrically, presenting us with all those problems which distinguish us from all the other species which still live in unthinking obedience to the dictates of nature. All these follow from that split from our selfless ‘higher nature’, with which over the millennia our customs, laws, religion and artistic creativity have tried their best to re-integrate us.
Nothing is more comical about Darwinians than the contortions they get into in trying to explain those ‘altruistic’ aspects of human nature which might seem to contradict their belief that the evolutionary drive is always essentially self-centred (seen at its most extreme in Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ theory). Wilson’s thesis finally crumbles when he comes up with absurdly reductionist explanations for the emergence of the creative arts and religion. Forget Bach’s B Minor Mass or the deeper insights of the Hindu scriptures — as a lapsed Southern Baptist, he caricatures the religious instinct of mankind as little more than the stunted form of faith he escaped from.
His attempt to unravel what makes human nature unique is entirely a product of that limited ‘left-brain thinking’ which leads to cognitive dissonance.
Unable to think outside the Darwinian box, his account lacks any real warmth or wider understanding. Coming from ‘the most celebrated heir to Darwin’, his book may have won wide attention and praise. But all it really demonstrates is that the real problem with Darwinians is their inability to see just how much their beguilingly simple theory simply cannot explain.”

Political invective

Published by peter on 2013-09-28 in Politics and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

I’ve long been a fan of good political vitriol.   Here was a catalog, compiled by journalist Mungo MacCallum,  of words used by Paul Keating in the Australian Commonwealth Parliament to describe his opponents.    With such a past, it is good to see that some folks are still hard at work keeping standards of vitriol high:
Here is Telegraph financial journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, skewering (and rightly so) that smug and arrogant architect of our common European Economic Disaster, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble:

I apologise personally to Mr Schäuble for calling him a dangerous mediocrity: arrogant, shallow, narrow-minded, provincial, and unscientific in equal degree. This was shockingly rude. It brings shame to Fleet Street.”

And here, on David Cameron, is Jake Davis, aka Topiary, who has not lost his way with words since being the tweet-face of Anonymous and LulzSec:

David Cameron is an absolute wet-lipped Eton-spawned fleshnugget with no actual perspective on global policy. I hate the Tories with a burning passion reserved for the Westboro Baptist Church. The fault of cyberbullying lies with the parents, like all fault for everything, especially the troubles in Syria.”
 

Recent Reading 9

Published by peter on 2013-08-26 in Books, Concats, Literature and Recent Reading. 0 Comments

The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:
Anita Raghavan [2013]:  The Billionaire’s Apprentice:  The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund.  (New York:  Business Plus).   This is a fascinating and excitingly-written account of the rise and fall of several people, many of them Americans of South Asian descent, associated with the activities of the Galleon hedge fund.  First among these is billionaire Tamil-American Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon, and convicted insider-trader.  In the next tier are his many insider informants, primaily Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar, both prominent partners of McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm.  Indeed, Gupta was three times elected global MD of McKinsey by his fellow partners, and thus the book has lots of fascinating information about The Firm and its operations, incidental to the main story.
Insider trading is a strange crime.  Surely most traders engaged in trading for its own sake (and not hedging some activity or transaction in non-financial markets) seek to take advantage of something they know that others don’t, even if it is just knowledge arising from more clever or faster analysis, or the knowledge that comes from aggregating views across multiple trades.   And who, exactly, are the victims here, since any trading requires a willing counterparty?    But even if insider-trading is not considered an evil, there is great dishonour in breaching confidences gained in positions of trust, and there seems little doubt that Rajaratnam’s informants did that.
An odd feature of the book, where so many prominent Indian Americans and South-Asian businesspeople are name-checked, is the failure to mention Praful Gupta.   As far as I am aware, the two Guptas were no relation, and met when they were fellow students at Harvard Business School.  Rajat Gupta, in a newspaper interview in 1994, said they became and remained very good friends.  While Rajat pursued a career with McKinsey, Praful became a management consultant and partner with Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and later a senior executive with Reliance Industries.
An annoying feature of the writing is the author’s repeated confusion about tense.   On page 217, for instance, we read, “In 2005, Lloyd Blankfein’s predecessor and former secretary of the Treasury Henry M. “Hank” Paulson Jr. had approached Gupta about joining the Goldman board of directors.”  But Hank Paulson only became Secretary of the US Treasury in 2006, where he remained until January 2009.   At the time this sentence was written by Raghavan in 2012 or 2013, Paulson was a former Treasury Secretary, but not in 2005, the time referred to at the opening of the sentence.   There are similar instances of inaccurate or confused tense on pages 257, 288, 347, and 362, and no doubt more that I did not catch.  These appear so frequently that one is tempted to consider them not mere lapses nor evidence of a non-grammatical linguistic style, but indicative of a more fundamental difference between the author’s conceptualization of time and that of most speakers of English. There are also a number of confusions or ambiguities of subject and object, and of deictic markers, in sentences throughout the text.
 

Abuse of media power (again)

Published by peter on 2013-08-26 in Culture. 0 Comments

I have complained before that The Grauniad sometimes looks as if it’s no more than the internal corporate newsletter of the people who work for it.   Their sister title, The Observer, has a particularly egregious example of such behaviour this weekend.  Of the 18 pages devoted to arts preview coverage, 6 entire pages are devoted to one person, 7 pages if you count the cover.  Who is this paragon?  Did some famous artist just die?  What artist or actor or dancer or musician or film-maker or writer deserves such coverage?  Why, it was  none of these!  The coverage is for the newspaper’s film-critic, Philip French, who hasn’t even died, but is merely retiring.   And guess what?  As well as these 7 out of 18 entire pages, another half-page is given over in the reviews section to French’s latest film review! 

It’s good see the Guardian/Observer’s Marketing Department so successfully targeting that crucial demographic, current and former Guardian/Observer employees who know Philip French.   Pity that doing so alienates the rest of us.