The Hatred of Hillary

In the current edition, The Economist asks a very good question – why is Hillary so hated? The article then attempts to answer the question. I believe they only discovered two thirds of the right answer.

The first third of the story is to examine whether Hillary truly warrants hatred. Perhaps everyone is right to hate her, that her character or intentions or behaviour warrant such a reaction.

The article concludes, correctly in my view, that there is nothing to hate and plenty to admire. True, she is a career politician, so has to pivot (or triangulate) often, with some convictions that are hard to pin down. True, she is sometimes excessively private or defensive. And, true, she is a rotten public speaker.

But are those paltry flaws enough to engender hatred? Not many of us would escape if that were true. And there is undeniably much in the positive column. She has been a diligent public servant, and made a real difference for excellent causes, notably the rights of women and children. She has been cynical but also courageous, for example towards Putin. She works hard and is reputedly a demanding but a fair and somewhat empathetic boss. She handled the behaviour of her husband with great dignity. She clearly has a heart, and has been a good parent. What’s not to admire?

The Economist makes all these points, and also destroys the false or exaggerated claims against her such as Benghazi, e-mails or even Whitewater. There is really nothing to hate – yet she is widely hated.

This brings us to the second third of the discussion. Do lots of people have a strong propensity to hate her? That would help to explain why she would be hated despite the lack of objective grounds for hatred.

Here The Economist is brave, and points a finger squarely at gender as a root cause. I like this facet of the new brave Economist with its female editor – there was also an excellent, uncompromising article about gender abuse a couple of weeks ago. Here, the article concludes that behind the hatred of Hillary lies fear or jealousy or denigration of a successful woman. Traits that would be lauded in a man, such as persistence, determination, outspokenness, even success, are derided in a woman.

I wonder if this applies to me. I certainly struggled with all my female bosses. Margaret Thatcher certainly engendered more unfriendly emotion in me that any male public figure ever has (even including that disgrace to humanity called Trump). I still struggle to feel respect for my mum even four years after her death.

Hillary, and this hypothesis of The Economist about her, offers all men further cause to look more deeply at how we view women. The glass ceiling is certainly still present, evidenced in the US by the shameful pay gap and maternity provision. Even if we don’t fall into the Hate Hillary camp, are we doing enough to rectify historical wrongs?

And what about women? It is not only men who hate Hillary, and many women still claim to support Trump despite his proven abusive attitude. There must be some deep emotions at work here. Certainly in my work experience, the most destructive relationships I observed were between women. Women are not always their own best allies when it comes to female emancipation.

Anyway, I buy the argument from The Economist. Hillary is a stronger target for hatred because of her gender.

But that cannot be the whole story, or there would be widespread hatred of many successful and admirable women. Why is Hillary in particular hated? This is the third part of the story, the part I think The Economist missed or at least underemphasised.

The fact is that Hillary has been the target of a relentless, vitriolic, perhaps unprecedented campaign of hate for twenty years. And there is even a root cause for that, namely that those mounting the campaign have no other arguments left.

The extent of the campaign is clear, and dates from long before Donald Trump. There have been seventeen congressional investigations into Benghazi. Seventeen! Even Republicans have admitted that their primary motivation is the political one of discrediting Hillary.

The Republican cause has serious money behind it. And Hillary has been an obvious target ever since Bill was president. Tarnish Hillary, and Gore will be less likely to defeat Bush. Hillary was the presumptive candidate in 2008 to tarnish, until Obama showed up in left field. And she has been the 2016 presumptive candidate ever since 2008, really.

And the main reason the coalition of money has rounded on Hillary is the lack of any positive resonant alternative message. On social issues, the Republican base has lost all the arguments and demographics are chipping away at any remaining audience. On foreign policy, Bush’s wars have eliminated any appetite for further intervention. And on economic policy, the cracks in the edifice are even wider.

Republicans have a valid argument in highlighting the need to address the unsustainability of current entitlements and the trend of debt. But the greed coalition has tied them to eliminate tax as any part of a potential solution. So all they can do is to hammer on about more trade and ever smaller government, which plainly make the core issues facing voters - rising inequality, static median incomes, crippling personal debts and crumbling infrastructure – even worse.

That leaves Republicans and their hidden supporters two choices. One is to pander to conspiracy, nationalism and bigotry – the Trump platform. The other is to forget about any platform at all, and simply try to make the other side even less electable than they are – the Hate Hillary message, combined with shameful attempts to hamper voting.

To their credit, The Economist has started to highlight the cracks in the neo-liberal edifice, and a few lonely Republicans are starting to seek a new platform. Promoting competition, cushioning losers from globalisation, Keynesian fiscal intervention and rectifying the worst anomalies of the age of greed would form part of the core of this platform. Taxing carbon and Tobin would be great ideas too whose time may have finally come.

But, in the meantime, all we have is the wreckage of Trump and the residual hatred of Hillary. I predict a single term presidency with continued gridlock, during which most underlying issues deteriorate further. Even if the senate goes blue in 2016, it will revert red in 2018. In 2020, a Republican will be elected to the White House, because incumbency will only add fuel to Hillary hatred. Let us hope that by then they have some serious policies. It feels an unlikely hope.

The Economist asked a good question, and provided two thirds of a good answer. The final third of the answer exposes a void of policy of the right. As a self-appointed guardian of market friendly economic policy, perhaps the magazine can be part of the solution as well the diagnosis.   

The Grumpy Ones

Thanks to the by-lines in the sister magazine 1843 (which I am coming to like more and more), I now know The Economist’s current Schumpeter columnist as Adrian Wooldridge. In 1843, he writes a humorous end piece, chronicling various misfortunes. In this, and each week in Schumpeter, he gives us a strong glimpse into his peculiar personality. He could only be British, with a combination of self-deprecation, humour and cynicism, all traits that I share and admire.

A classic Wooldridge piece was his Schumpeter column of a couple of weeks ago, Against Happiness. I am sure he suggested the delightful title himself. In the article, he derides companies who seem to rate happiness as a goal or metric as much as they do profit, and especially tries to defend his personal right to be grumpy. I get accused of being grumpy every so often too, especially when annoyed by our cats, and I confess to something of a fondness for the state. A hero of mine used to be Victor Meldrew from the TV show One Foot in the Grave, an aging man who is permanently grumpy.

Wooldridge always hits the mark, and loves to destroy fashionable theories. But on this occasion I find his article a little lazy and scattergun, almost a grumpy tirade.

First, he takes on retailers who try to employ staff with engaging personalities. Now, what could be wrong with that? Customer interaction is at the heart of retailing, and we all feel better and buy more when it goes well. Only yesterday, I sat in Central Park in the sun and had (English Breakfast) tea at a delightful café with chatty, attentive staff. I tipped well (not a regular habit) and will visit again. Most visits to the DMV convey opposite experiences. And just see how you feel after buying coffee at a Dutch café.

Wooldridge has lived in the US for some time, and I suspect part of his problem is with the “have a nice day” culture here. I was also cynical at first, but I’ve come to believe that the sentiment is usually authentic – most people here are optimists and really do want me to have a nice day, irrespective of whether a prospective tip is part of the equation. I love it, though I know I could never emulate it.

Retailers have every right to focus on staff engagement, and to recruit accordingly. Mystery shoppers are fair game. So long as staff are not bullied or humiliated or asked to behave inappropriately, it is reasonable to demand courtesy and even pleasantness. Smart companies also give staff leeway as to how they implement good service.

Wooldridge than turns to other companies and a growing industry of happiness consultants and happiness KPI’s. Gimmicky or not, why should Google not have a “Jolly Good Fellow” on its books if it wants to and if it believes competitive advantage will result? Why shouldn’t smart consultants try to make a bit of money by advocating models, courses, KPI’s and all the rest of it? As Wooldridge acknowledges, staff engagement truly is a strong predictor of performance. Many other important indicators are hard to measure (innovation?), but that doesn’t mean we should not try. Further, surely we should laud countries like Bhutan (and, fleetingly, the UK) for identifying that having happy citizens might be a more laudable goal than things like GDP?

Why Wooldridge is on stronger ground is in his forensically cynical challenges of current practices to achieve happiness in firms. Google’s Jolly Good Fellow is seemingly pursuing other career opportunities just now. A lot of the models so far are pretty shallow.

But a root cause for this could be that seeking staff happiness is an afterthought or an activity of a single division. Firms only made progress on things like safety or diversity once they became expected priorities of everyone, and staff contentment may be the same. I can Wooldridge being one of those cynics trying to park the topic in HR. He partly gets it when he says that wishy-washy goals will be less effective than concrete steps, such as reducing annoyances like e-mails or meetings.

OK, so e-mails and meetings annoy him. But what about everyone else – what annoys them? If leaders care, they have a strange way of showing it. Many companies run annual staff engagement surveys. But these have become tick box exercises, designed more to salve the leaders’ consciences than to effect lasting change. Most surveys nowadays contain a question: “Has anything happened as a result of last year’s survey”? The typical results don’t throw leaders into a good light – nor indeed the surveys themselves.

I am associated with a company called Synthetron, which has found a better way. Synthetron sessions are online, anonymous, real-time dialogues of invited groups, moderated via a script. Participants are given time to think, air real concerns, build from each others’ ideas, and even to seek solutions. The dialogues are invariably revealing and point to practical ways forward, often local to business units.

Yes, these discussions complain of leadership gimmicks, and also moan about e-mails and meetings. But usually they unearth deeper root causes, such as inconsistent or disrespectful behaviour by leaders, incompetent or lazy line management, and poor communication and recognition.

Correcting such failings requires concerted efforts, and Jolly Good Fellows will not help much. But we find that if leadership teams really care deeply about the motivation of their staff, they find ways to improve engagement, and better performance follows.

Wooldridge reveals his real gripe at the end of his article, when he states that the cult of happiness is an unacceptable invasion of individual liberty. Wow. Perhaps he has received some feedback about his own grumpy attitude.

I used to receive such feedback at work (and still receive it at home), and I too resented it. But when I was able to step back, I came to see such feedback as justified and valuable, for many reasons.

During my career, I learned that I could really influence a group at a meeting or workshop. A combination of experience, intelligence, networking, courage and oratory could have people hanging on my every word. I guess the same factors in the end led to my success as an internal blogger. I loved this power, it really fed my ego, but eventually I abused it.

I would prioritise being right and winning the debate against the interests of the group. I would make being grumpy an art form. I would take pleasure in destroying arguments. In the end this became a limiting factor in my career, because I could not resist humiliating my boss and even their boss. Of course, this added to the legend of street credibility, but revenge was wrought – and quite rightly.

Being an effective corporate citizen is part of our job description, just like having a winning smile and an engaging manner is a fair expectation of customer facing staff. I forgot this, preferring grumpiness and power and cynicism over what my organisation needed from me, despites all my excuses about intellectual rigour and contributing to diversity. A degree of positivity is as much part of leadership as intelligence and empathy.

I learned this in the end, my career have been stalled in the meantime. I wouldn’t presume to suggest that the brilliant and inspiring Mr. Wooldridge has the same lesson to learn. But, if an organisation pays our wages, it most emphatically is not an invasion of liberty to demand less grumpiness.

Now, I’ll get back to grumpily kicking the cats.                     

1980 and the disastrous change of direction

I have a hypothesis is that we can divide global economic history since 1945 into two roughly equal halves, the period before 1980 and the period following 1980. Further, I claim that the change of direction undertaken around 1980 has been a disaster.

The period since 1945 has seen unparalleled progress for our world, despite what the US election candidates say. Life expectancy has increased, child mortality reduced, education improved, wars reduced, and material wellbeing increased for almost all, with prosperity spread more widely around the globe. It has been an extraordinary and unprecedented period of development, albeit with its resultant challenges such as global warming.

I think much of this progress has largely independent of prevailing economic wisdom. The driving forces have been technological. Medicine, communications and information technology have advanced so quickly that the world has become rapidly smaller, faster and smarter.

This spread of beneficial technology has driven other great trends. Human longevity is a direct consequence, and globalisation is as well. Urbanisation is a natural development from technology and education. Female emancipation and the great respectful social liberal trends come directly from education, which has reduced war, crime and intolerance.

Many liberal economists claim that these positive trends are accelerated by their policies. They have a point. Regimes paying little or no regard to markets tend to fail. Under communism, Russia lagged badly, and China only started moving forwards once strict communism was abandoned. Authoritarian regimes in Arabic countries have led to slower development, despite mineral wealth and some education. But I think the purists take their arguments too far. The Western democracies entered the period with a large lead. China and other states have not fallen further behind. And, while the modern titans such as Google cluster in the ultra-market-led US, that can be attributed to the size of the market and the beneficial starting position. Besides, why are they all in high-tax California rather than low-tax Texas? And how have the socially democratic Nordics done so well?

So, in assessing the relative success of economic orthodoxy since 1945, we need to see the context of this wonderful development everywhere. We also have to be careful not to pay too much heed to singular events. The collapse of communism was one of these, the oil shocks of the 1970’s another, and the emergence of China a third. So every trend line over 70 years is likely to be overlaid with cycles and the impact from unusual events. But 70 years is long enough to look for trends, and for turning points. That is what I have tried to do.

My hypothesis crystallised from an article in Time a couple of months ago plotting the US national debt since 1945. It was striking to me, in that the trend was of slow growth in debt up to 980 then exploding debt growth from then on.

So I’ve looked at other measures to see if I can see something similar, and indeed I can. The US poverty percentage fell from 13% in 1966 to 9,6% in 1978, but then grew again to 14% by 2010. Labour’s share in national income in the US was almost constant around 50% until 1980, but has fallen to 42,5% since. Global GDP growth was typically about 5% until 1970, but 3% since (the 70’s had the oil crises to explain the earlier turning point). Global GINI drifted upwards (less equal) until 1980 at about one percentage point per decade, but at two percentage points since. US GINI changed from almost flat to growing at two and a half percentage points around 1980. The ratio of CEO to typical worker salaries doubled in the 30 years from 1950, but multiplied six fold in the 30 years since.

These are just examples, and each one will have many causes. But everywhere I looked I saw the same thing, an inflection point around 1980 with a worse trend thereafter.

Of course I am biased, but I put most of this down to a rewriting of economic orthodoxy, or more correctly a rewriting of the political portrayal of economic orthodoxy, just after the time I first studied economics. I remember at the time that the theories, dominated by Keynes, were being challenged by new ideas. The first of these was monetarism, something I never really bought into.

We can characterise economics and economic policy from 1945-1980 by the idea of benign government intervention towards development and citizen welfare, including redistribution. Hence there was active demand management via fiscal and monetary policy, and investments in infrastructure, services and welfare, paid for by strongly progressive taxation.

The upsides of this era remain obvious, with simple examples including the interstate network in the US and the NHS in the UK. But demand management proved insufficient to handle some crises. Further, the emphasis on workers’ rights led to strong trade unions, who overplayed their hand, leading to strikes, inflation, and support for uncompetitive industries.

From about 1980, politicians found economists with theories to challenge this paradigm, and the neo-liberal era began. The key stakeholder moved from citizens to a nebulous group called investors, and government spending was to be minimised by any means possible in the name of markets and national competitiveness. To ensure incentives, taxation became markedly less progressive and welfare less generous.

We can see the results. I would argue that the philosophy has failed even by its own declared standards, since growth has slowed rather than grown. While inflation has been tamed, now we have pervasive deflation in its stead, with no remedy forthcoming from the neoliberals. Inequality has ballooned, starter homes have become unaffordable to any without parental support, competition within most industries has atrophied, new jobs are rare indeed and labour mobility has also collapsed, despite all these so-called incentives. Infrastructure and services have been left to wither. Even the finance sector, the main beneficiary of the policies, has proven unstable and is chronically underfunded, requiring assumptions for investment returns that are not sound. We now have the ludicrous situation that demand cannot be revived because the only people left with any disposable income are so rich that they can’t think of anything to spend on!

Meanwhile, the neoliberal agenda has been sold to the general public via a series of misleading arguments. The crisis of the 1970’s and the collapse of communism were used to claim that markets were infallible. The odious concept of trickle down was used to try to justify the greed of those padding their (reduced tax) salaries. Layabouts and migrants were pinpointed as welfare parasites. And wasteful projects were used to decry all government expense, while tax is portrayed as an unjustified affront to liberty and our effort.

To be fair, the shrinking world changed some things. National competitiveness became more important once trade and capital flows became less constrained – generally a good thing. Some rebalancing towards investors would have been necessary in any case, but not the total bowing down to the god of finance that we have seen.

We can speculate as to the motivation of the economists and politicians who led the change. Perhaps some were well meaning. It was true that unions were strangling development and needed to be constrained. But it is also tempting to accuse the greed of the elites, especially the financial elites, for being behind the change. 1945-1979 was rare in history in seeing earned wealth rising faster than inherited or residual wealth. The wealthy have certainly had their revenge.

Now even the Economist has noticed how broken the prevailing orthodoxy is, and has started advocating for Keynesian fiscal stimulus, especially via investment, for aggressively promoting competition, and also for protecting losers more generously. I don’t yet much appetite for progressive taxation, though they have quietly advocated land taxes as well as carbon ones. Perhaps one day they will come around to a Tobin tax.

The cause is urgent. The neo-liberal era has failed, and a new era is needed. Bernie Sanders has some answers, so does Thomas Piketty, but the various solutions have not yet coalesced. They must soon, for the people have worked out that they have been sold a bill of goods, and are clamouring for change. If that change does not come from a new economic paradigm, it may come from an older, harsher one, built on Trumpian hate and protectionism. Not much would be worse than neo-liberalism, but that certainly would be.