Perspectives on the Military

One of the things that differs most in the various countries that I’ve lived in is the armed forces – their size, purpose, reputation and impact. I think these differences are rather revealing and carry lessons for humanity.

I was brought up in the UK, a large traditional military power, indeed one with an empire, albeit rapidly declining. The top brass are very much part of the establishment and retain sizeable influence, for example in the continuing MI5 inspired gibberish that makes its way into The Economist every so often. The military is considered a worthy career, and remains segregated, with most officers recruited from military families and the posh schools: I endured a series of military recruitment lectures at school and we were all forced into playing toy soldiers. As a matured, sadly the reality of the UK military became dominated by a hopeless endeavour in Northern Ireland. That latest humiliation has had the beneficial side effect of inducing some humility into military strategy.

In Sweden, the military was rather an oddity in this deeply pacifist non-NATO nation, and were almost an extension of the police as a civil defence corps, despite the proximity of Russia and the aggressive behaviour of its submarines. As a result, the police and the military became genuinely polite and service minded, never abusing power and with high female penetration before anybody else.

The Norwegians were more proud of their military history, so a military career was more popular there, with a strong bent towards guerrilla defence and external peace keeping. There remains a confidence that not even the Russians would find it easy to invade Norway.

With their scale, geography and history, the Dutch have no such confidence, merely a goal to be strong professional allies to its partners and in its global peace keeping role, where, like Norwegians, they more than pull their weight. It is an unusual career, and one more likely chosen by someone also considering an NGO than someone looking for combat.

No doubt my perception would be different if I had lived in a state where the military often runs the country, or where surveillance is common, or where there is a history of coups. Pakistan, Thailand and Russia come to mind, as does much of Africa. Sadly, China, which achieved much of its growth without resorting to excessive domestic intolerance, is rapidly sliding, as witnessed by the disgrace in XinJiang.

Then there is the US. Here the military is revered. Since 9/11, that reverence extends to what are called first responders, mainly meaning the service and police. It is taboo to criticise these institutions, or their members or veterans, whose image is one of courageous service to a free nation. It is a wonderful marketing coup, and I believe it is very damaging.

The military are major investors in TV advertising. Occasionally in the UK, there would be recruitment commercials, which are fair enough, but in the US it goes much further, a very questionable use of taxpayer money. The military are very smart in sponsoring a lot of sport, consumers of which are a good target audience for them. Sponsorship enables commercials and other brand benefits, and, whether spontaneous or ordered, that extends to endorsements by players and commentators. There may be a segment in an NFL game where a player thanks the military for defending our country and our freedom that makes our great game possible. Commentators spout the same stuff, just more frequently.

What rubbish! It is ridiculous to suggest that the NFL would not exist without the military. Ireland has no real military, but hurling and Gaelic football thrive. Soccer is strong even in Russia. Venezuelans are quite good at baseball.

I have no problem with the use of commercials to encourage recruitment. I have little problem with the branding of military people as driven by service, even though that is only marginally true; most join primarily for the superior pay, training and pensions. But I have a big problem with the relentless branding of the military as defenders of liberty and the American way of life, without whom everything would collapse. That is dangerous nonsense.

I believe a society with military attitudes and approaches is usually a worse society. There are several reasons and manifestations for this.

Most obviously, military spending crowds out other spending. The US invests 3.5% of GDP on its military, despite have almost no obvious threat to its shores (yet it still labels the spending defence and somehow we swallow it). True, some of the money goes on wages to people needing jobs, some on equipment that keeps other honest souls gainfully employed, and some on innovative research. But what an inefficient way to spend so much money! Imagine if the jobs were carers, the equipment on education and the research into health. Instead, much gets blown up on battlefields or spent treating unnecessary veteran illnesses.

Next, military decisions are usually bad ones. The track record of the uber-resourced US military since 1945 is truly lamentable, from Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Shockingly awful policies have been executed terribly with disastrous consequences. They are always fighting the previous war with out-dated methods. If you include the CIA, the track record becomes even worse and immoral. We are led to believe that building ever more nuclear bombs has been the reason that we haven’t all been destroyed by nuclear bombs.

More subtly, military attitudes usually lead to bad places. The first step usually identifies enemies and the home team, to give a purpose for all the resources. Enemy threats are simplified and exaggerated, to the extent that we were led to believe that all Russians were evil. Military thinking always simplifies, and that is toxic when it comes to the home team. They overlook that borders are not fixed, that alliances can be subtle and change, and that personal loyalties are complex, as in the case of immigrants or a diaspora, not to mention white nationalists or homosexuals. Even a nation can be a fluid idea, but a military attitude hates ambiguity and encourages simplified boxes – almost always in a counter-productive way. Having defined friends and foes, a military mind set will set a goal of control, subservience or elimination rather than tolerance or inclusion or learning.

Next, military methods are usually suboptimal. Hierarchy and compliance are emphasised, priorities that encourage abuse of power, constrain innovation and are slow to recognise and embrace trends. It is a masculine way of thinking that might be good at putting out a fire but certainly doesn’t promote diversity or humanity or challenging shibboleths.

The military approach pervades the rest of society. Nations with a military attitude elect generals as political leaders, usually disastrously. An over-strong military can lead to an over-equipped and intolerant police force. Criminal justice policy can become austere. Trade can be viewed suspiciously. There is a habit of declaring war on all sorts of threats like drugs and doing much harm as a direct result. And majoritarian nationalism can flourish in such environments. All these weaknesses are evident in the USA.

I believe history supports my thesis that military is usually bad, notwithstanding what we are all taught about World War II. Just one example - Hilary Mantel displays the genius of Cromwell as somebody putting trade above war. If you look at nations that have punched above or below their weight over the last 50 years, the degree of military attitude feels like a correlating factor – just consider Singapore or Pakistan, Canada or Saudi Arabia.

So when Trump and NATO bang on about increasing defence spending I am a serious sceptic. Since 1960, global military spending has roughly halved as a share of GDP, and that has contributed to an age of rapid development. It would be a disaster if that trend reversed, but sadly that outcome is all too likely.

Still, at least we’ll be safe if we keep building lots more nuclear weapons. Perhaps.

I wish a joyful Christmas and peaceful 2020 to everybody.

Three Strikes and you are out

The polarisation is so deep in US society that I rarely meet anybody who might consider voting for Trump in 2020. True, one doesn’t brooch the subject of politics in polite society, so I might miss a few lurking MAGA’s hiding in plain sight. But I don’t think there are all that many. This is one of many factors that entrench that same polarisation, because we are not exposed to the other view even if we try to find it. Liberal periodicals are full of articles of brave journalists venturing to middle America earnestly trying to find out what (beyond lazy assumptions about racism) might fuel the other team: few resulting pieces read convincingly to me. I fear the other side don’t even look very hard, because they see liberal bias in everything they despise about establishment culture, and use that as fuel to become yet more stubborn.

I fully acknowledge that I am guilty of my own prejudice in the way I framed that last paragraph. My team are right, yet earnest and accommodating, while the other team just have their heads buried in the sand. They no doubt think the same of me. Such is our predicament.

Still, I tried an experiment of working out how I might use precious moments with someone who might actually be a possible Trump voter but might listen to me. These people might exist; actually I think I know one of them. My theory is that if meet Trumpers we tend to waste our opportunity, because we immediately display disrespect for them and lose our ability to articulate, such is our overwhelming disgust at the litany of the man’s sins. So out spews an incoherent mess that could be summarised as “it’s obvious, you cretin”. Strangely enough, that probably does not help to swing this poor waverer into my column.

So here is the elevator speech. I think there are three strikes. Take them together and the man should be voted out without any balancing consideration.

The first strike is the climate emergency. Isn’t it obvious by now that this is a slow moving wreck for humanity? OK, so the science is confusing and has a wide range of error, and environmental activists can be a bit of a pain in the butt with their cries for us to return to caves and subsistence living (all the time enjoying their comfortably central heated first world lives made possible by fossil fuels). True, if my Michigan factory has just been taken over by some Chinese who have laid most folk off and removed benefits from everybody else, I might have more pressing concerns. True, every politician equivocates and accepts messy compromises and lies and poses and generally fails when it comes to climate leadership.

But Trump is in a category of his own. He is actively stoking the crisis, and doing it brazenly just to spite his elitist enemies. Withdrawing from Paris may have been largely symbolic, but, wow, what a symbol. It might have been just about tenable as a negotiating ploy, if followed up by any sort of negotiation to amend the deal. Instead, we have climate erased from the website, non-participation in any discussion of the subject, and subsidies for coal, condemning his own supporters to early deaths and everybody else’s kids to a constrained life and possibly worse.

We are all a little bit guilty here. Intelligent people still refer to the climate crisis as an afterthought or as one item halfway down a list, rather than the emergency it is becoming. If I had a vote this week in the UK, I would vote green, unless I could be persuaded that my vote might tactically swing a marginal race. Isn’t it time that more of us took this line? But even if we don’t go that far yet, we can’t in all consciousness accept a leader who actively feeds that crisis. Surely that is the big picture in 2020, and any stuff about stock markets and China and abortion shouldn’t obscure that big picture? Strike one.

Strike two is the mess that is US foreign policy. All of the risks to Americans (and everybody else) have become graver as a direct result of Trump, with absolutely nothing on the positive side of the ledger. Start with the underreported story of nuclear proliferation, especially with Russia. Treaties have been left to rot, with the obvious consequences of loss of trust and proliferation. Of course Russia cheats and must be stood up to, but it is a dereliction of duty to just complain, then shrug, then walk away and spend. That only leads to accidents and eventual crisis.

Then look at everywhere else there are nuclear weapons. The Iran policy has only strengthened Iran (and Lockheed Martin’s sales to the paragon that is Saudi Arabia), the North Korea so-called policy has just encouraged the boy, and strengthened China, and the India policy has rekindled Kashmir and made war with Pakistan more likely. These are not mere human rights disasters; these are direct threats to world peace. Bullying Europeans into buying more weapons will only make matters worse.

Then there is China itself. I hear people say that it is good to stand up to China. Well, that is true, China is rising and leaders need to find a way to accommodate that safely and justly. China’s actions in Xinjiang are despicable, and its trade behaviour required moderation. But what has Trump achieved, in three whole years? The answer is nothing but destroying trust, reducing prosperity for everyone, enabling human rights abuse and reducing the long-term competitiveness of the US. For three years we have had posturing and threat but no proposal and no progress. My guess is that there will be much-trumpeted deal during 2020, timed for electoral effect, but that it will not address any of the structural issues, simply requiring China to buy more US stuff. Meanwhile, China builds influence through belt and road and an independent lead in next generation technology. Strike two.

Strike three is probity. This is about the standing of the presidency and key institutions, their ability to earn respect in the world and to maintain democracy and justice against periodic threats. It also relates to wider society, in establishing norms of decent behaviour.

It is fun and even fair to elect somebody who challenges the establishment, is blunt and occasionally disrespectful and who upends conventional wisdom. Elites can be smug. But Trump is a wrecking ball, one that ultimately damages everything he touches. Even among ardent supporters, few would deny that he bullied Ukraine towards a partisan goal, that he has openly demeaned women, that he pays scant regard to truth, that he blows his dog whistle cynically, that he undermines congress by blocking subpoenas, that he has multiple financial irregularities, that he uses key meetings as photo opportunities, and much else.

Institutions can withstand such an assault, with good luck, for four years, and might even emerge reinvigorated. But to risk four more years would be reckless in the extreme. We can all see it. Strike three.

So those are my arguments. I will try to avoid getting into the weeds of other areas, despite all the evidence and temptations. Healthcare, gun control, inequality, and all the departments with no competence and less policy are open targets. But perhaps then the discussion would get ambushed into risks relating to Elizabeth Warren or abortion or something about the stock market.

It is better to stick to the big picture. What are presidents for? Where do they have lasting influence? They must lead in the face of generational issues, they must conduct a sound foreign policy and they must defend the very institution they have been elected to lead. Nobody can realistically defend Trump in any of these three areas, and these are the areas that ultimately matter.

Would any of this speech work, even were I to get a chance to engage in a serious conversation with somebody leaning towards re-electing the man? I doubt it. Nobody wants to listen to someone so obviously representing the smug elite, and foreign to boot. But I have tried. I am ready.      

Home Field Advantage and other Lazy Assumptions

An amazing thing happened in the baseball World Series finals this year. The amazing thing was not that the Americans finally worked out that World Series is a ridiculous title for a tournament with just one token Canadian team playing in a sport that nobody out of the US, northern Latin America and Japan and Korea have any knowledge of. No, that lazy assumption persists. The amazing thing was that the away team won all seven matches. In over 1000 play off series, that had never happened before.

I would like to claim that the amazing thing is that most pundits thought this was amazing. Because home field advantage in most sports has been vanishing before our eyes, while we still make the lazy assumption that it is a large factor.

Here is a bit more evidence. In the NBA finals, the away team won five of the six games. In the NHL finals, five of the seven games went to the visitors. This year in the NFL, the home team has won just 53% of games, with 100 home wins and 90 away wins.

Soccer has a similar tale to tell. Here, I managed to find some historical comparisons. In the last thirty years, home wins in the premier league have declined on average from about 52% to about 42%. Thirty years ago, a home win was about 25% more likely than an away win, but now it is less than 10% more likely. A hundred years ago, home teams won over 65% of games.

It is not too difficult to identify several possible causes for the collapse of home field advantage. Many of the reasons that home advantage used to be significant have been offset in one way or another.

Playing at home was traditionally an advantage for a number of reasons. One was a home crowd that could gee up the home team while intimidating the away team. This can be intensely practical: in the NFL, a home team will enjoy a silent stadium when on offence, allowing for voice signals, but the crowd makes a din while the away team is on offence to make such signals impossible.

Then there are peculiarities of the venue. Even in soccer, where the pitch dimensions are rather uniform, Lee Dixon claimed it helped to know exactly where he was on the pitch by such things as advertising hoardings. In baseball, the field itself has strange dimensions and odd corners that must favour those familiar with it. It is more extreme in cricket, in which the home team actually prepares the pitch to suit their own team. I remember a game in the 1970’s when England prepared a pitch for Derek Underwood that was so biased that the opposition declared on 130-9. That is another lazy assumption – that the English are fair players.

Then there is preparation. In the NFL, it is always claimed to be a disadvantage to west coast teams to play one o’clock games on the east coast, effectively ten in the morning for their bodies, after a long flight. The travel itself takes up a chunk of possible training time. It is noticeable that home teams tend to win NFL games played on Thursdays, when the ratio of preparation time between the two teams would be most extreme.

Travel carries other risks. Players might not be so disciplined. Sleeping in a strange bed is always tougher for the first night. And then there is skulduggery. It wasn’t long ago that most of an England rugby team mysteriously acquired food poisoning just before playing South Africa away in a world cup game, and hotel fire alarms have a weird tendency of waking up visitors in the middle of the night.

Examining all of these partial causes of home advantage in turn, it is possible to see how that advantage has eroded over time. Most important is money and conditioning. Nowadays, teams have the resources to travel in style and stay in luxury facilities. Training and conditioning routines have matured so that teams can be made ready to produce peak performance at the time of the match. Regulations are better, skulduggery is harder, and pitch conditions are better and more uniform. Home advantage may have flipped, because trainers and medical staff can keep closer tabs on their players when on the road.

The crowd is still partisan, but not as it once was. At English soccer games, the away fans are often the most vocal, while many of the home supporters are either silent, or absent in the hospitality areas, or actively barracking their own team. How anybody can play well in Chicago, New York or Philadelphia escapes me, and indeed those cities often get the teams they deserve.

There is a tactical element as well. In soccer, attacking used to be more productive a strategy, and the home team is still expected to commit more players forwards. But for many teams now playing without the ball has become the most effective way to win. Leicester were brilliant trail blazers for this strategy when they won the league despite having the least possession in the whole division. They just soaked up pressure with men behind the ball and counter-attacked at pace when the opportunity arose. Most teams play a variety of this strategy now, but at home their fans expect more aggression.

As a result, playing at home can be a positive disadvantage, especially when teams are struggling. My own team, West ham, have been in a terrible slump, and it did not surprise me that the rare good result recently came in an away game against a good team, when they did not try to dominate possession. Being away also took pressure of players who had been sensing the intolerance of fans at home.

This all explains why home field advantage has been eroded. It also explains the situations where it is still strongest, for example midweek NFL games, or games very long distance travel to places with poor facilities like Russia (and also that teams often struggle in the games in short weeks immediately after such ventures). Home advantage still also persists when there is less money sloshing about and in less mature sports and events – it did not surprise me that Spain won the recent tennis Davis Cup at home, helped by a new tournament format with lots of quirks.

I find the persistence among pundits in failing to recognise a changing world instructive, because the same tendency exists elsewhere. We are often slow to recognise changing circumstances and too slow to challenge our assumptions. In soccer, the mantra of possession took the glaring counter example of Leicester to influence coaches. The power of statistics in baseball only became accepted once Oakland and others had demonstrated its effectiveness – this trend still has further to run.

What about outside of sports? Nobody expected the right wing of politics to move from the rich to the poor until Donald Trump and others came along, and in the current UK election old assumptions still colour commentary and even party tactics. An impeachment trial of public opinion was expected to move in decisive bands and based on facts, but nowadays everybody gets their news from their own bubble so new tactics are required.

In business, I believe that the advantages of scale have shifted. Scale used to be about production and distribution efficiency, but that has no value in most service industries, while network effects of communication and customer habit have become important. In most management situations, I believe scale is a positive disadvantage, since it works against agility.

What about warfare? The US always seems to be one war late when it comes to tactics. Last week’s Economist essentially torpedoed the value proposition of Aircraft Carriers, but still most powers want to build them, rather than spend somewhere more effective.

Assumptions die slowly, and we can all benefit from challenging the assumptions in our lives, whether we are a sports coach or a politician or just somebody trying to be a better parent. A good way to start a challenge is identify what factors cause an assumption to be true or false, and then examine trends that might influence those factors.              

Reporting 2020

We all need to buckle up for an ugly ride in 2020. The US presidential campaign will surely plough new depths and make existing chasms wider. We had better enjoy this Thanksgiving with our divided families because the next one will surely be tougher still. But one group has a real challenge, and that is anybody trying to report the campaign. This will be brutal.

We have had a few trial runs. In Europe, the Brexit referendum, the current UK campaign and recent elections in Italy, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere have involved outside interference and manipulation of the truth and its guardians. In the US, the 2016 campaign established the ugliness and the Mueller and impeachment probes have followed the new pattern. But a perfect storm awaits in 2020.

The media has a bad habit of writing about itself, but I for one do not mind because I find the material fascinating. Just this year I have enjoyed two Broadway plays about newspapers, Network and Ink, and recently loved a British TV import to PBS called Press. In different ways, they all addressed the same basic challenges facing reporters – moneyed owners, ambitious and unscrupulous editors, a public seeking click bait, and competition from new channels. I will predict that the 2020 US election will spawn some tremendous plays for us to enjoy, though only long after it is all over.

At the centre of it all lies the pantomime villain Donald Trump. Trump has been the biggest boon for all media for a generation, because everybody loves to read about Trump. Circulations are up after decades of steady decline, TV news has found a new following and even election turnouts have risen (from disastrous to merely dismal). But Trump poses unique challenges to reporters, and so far few have managed to rise to meet them.

It starts with coverage, truth and balance. Trump has found a way to create his own coverage and pays no respect to truth, thus challenging balance. The biggest mistake we all make with Trump is to over-estimate him. I do not accept that he has a masterful strategy, simply a punchers gut. But that gut seems to have been enough so far, and poor reporting may be partly to blame.

Trump just makes things up, out of a desire to impress and an arrogant sense of impunity. If he says it himself or if it is complimentary, then it is true; otherwise it is fake news. If found out lying or committing any misdemeanour, first he denies, then distracts, then condemns the messenger, and finally simply defies anybody to do anything about it, claiming various presidential and personal privileges. It works. Everybody knows he is guilty of everything thrown at him in the impeachment hearings so far, and he more or less admits it, bullies his party into ignoring it and trusts his public to overlook or even to applaud his actions. Then he changes the subject, and the press and public duly follow his lead.

This creates all sorts of challenges for reporters. First, it is not simple for an organisation professing to be balanced and respected to accuse of the president of the US of lying, again and again. It can be seen as unpatriotic. It can lead to legal challenge.  And it doesn’t really create great copy, being rather technical and monotonous. So what do they do? The PBS news hour uses the expression “claims without evidence”, but that loses impact after a while. Newspapers try ridicule, and leave it to their opinion columns to defend the truth. Fact checkers are quoted against the most egregious claims.

It is tough for reporters to cover this, especially when writing for a publication that tries to retain some sense of balance. Most failed in 2016: Trump’s team love to stir up scandal, such as the Hillary Clinton e-mails. Even if the worst claims about these were true, they paled into insignificance compared with misdemeanours from Trump. Yet somehow the press report both equally, perhaps trying to be balanced, or perhaps lazily picking up what they are fed most avidly. The result is confusion among the public, or a reason to feed existing prejudice, or a conclusion that all politicians lie so all claims can be ignored equally.

Often I wish there was better reporting in the US. Certainly, the BBC, The Guardian and The Economist seem more thorough. Most US outlets have few foreign or investigative reporters these days. Where are the stories about the housing crisis, or monopoly abuse, or military abuse, or the absence of policy of most administration departments? Why do most reporters lazily equate the economic reality of most families to the stock market and jobs report statistics? Then again, part of me has come to believe that even excellent reporting would be largely lost in today’s echo chamber.

Another issue is the unresolved responsibilities of social media providers. It is too easy to blame Facebook and others for every falsehood – like blaming the electricity company for a cold snap. But the providers do need clear policies and regulation, and so far this is absent, or at best emerging and inconsistent. Trump will exploit this in 2020 by feeding off and bullying the providers at the same time.

We can be sure there will be plenty of foreign interference in the 2020 election cycle. Russia almost has carte blanche and will remain several steps ahead of any attempt to rein it in. China will join the party in 2020, though it is unclear on which side. Then there is improper domestic interference from those with the plenty of money and lots to gain or lose. Look out for two or three more outrageous pro-Israel policy announcements in the next twelve months, and be very cynical about their provenance.

We can be sure of wild cards in 2020. The caravans will reappear, along with stories of immigrant crime. Whoever is the Democratic candidate will have some skeleton unearthed, no matter how flimsy or unreasonable. But I can think of three or four likely wild cards that are even more dangerous.

First is Trump’s health. I would be surprised if he gets through 2020 in any sort of strong mental condition. That might lead to hushed up stories, or still wilder behaviour or a debate about his readiness to continue. That could get very ugly.

Next are foreign victories. Trump will have noticed that he has the power to move the stock market daily by making some noise about the China trade talks. The Chinese will have noticed too. Trump will engineer a drop at some point and try to suggest that a Democrat victory would lead to such drops each week. Elsewhere, for sure, Trump will try to engineer some photo ops in 2020 with China, or North Korea or others. These are all dangerous.

Next there is the Supreme Court. Imagine a scenario where Ruth Bader Ginsberg is on a life support machine next August or September, and one side wants her declared dead so they can rush a new judge through the Senate before November? It is not so unlikely.

Then there is out and out cheating. Russian interference or not, voting technology in the US is pretty vulnerable, and gerrymandering and small-scale voter suppression are already rife. The demographics also mean that lopsided results are possible where one side wins many more votes but still loses. And if Trump does lose, even by the biased system in place, don’t expect him to accept the result. 2000 could seem like a genteel discussion before 2020 is over.

I normally like to propose solutions to problems raised in my blogs and to find a cause for optimism, but in this case I find that difficult. For reporters, I don’t see easy answers. Perhaps for the duration of 2020 news outlets can be clearer about sources, claims, facts, lies and opinions, maybe via clear labelling conventions. But even if they did, I am not convinced it would make much difference, because most people will somehow be fed what they want to read anyway.

As for optimism, I suppose we can enjoy some of the theatre, especially if the tragic flawed hero really does get his comeuppance in the end. And, whatever happens, it will pass and humanity will slowly learn and improve. That may not be much comfort for people facing injustice today, nor for Americans who love their country and humans who love their planet.

So I offer no parting optimism today. This will be the ugly. Buckle up.        

Peace

I’ve been noticing recently how often the Christian mass refers to peace as an ideal personal state. We wish each other a sign of peace. The blessing talks of the peace which passes all understanding. Grant us peace is the final line of the Agnus Dei. In the last of these, singing or speaking, I always make sure to pronounce grant with a dark English ah vowel, as a one-man protest against my American co-worshippers, which of course is a singularly unpeaceful act.

Some homilies I have heard lately have helped me by expounding on the subject of peace. There are many readings and homilies about forgiveness, and especially about making sure we do not become estranged from anyone in our family. Less convincing was a homily trying to convince me that true peace only comes from God: indeed that homily made me consider a very worldly alternative, a life where peace is the only goal, or at least the dominant goal. I don’t think God is strictly necessary to achieve that.

Another trigger for this thought was observing the old people at the residential nursing home we often visit. The physical lives of residents are of necessity slow and repetitive and sometimes frustrating, but many are as busy mentally as when they were younger. The ones who are happy are most at peace mentally. They are not so anxious about what others think of them or about what services they deserve or are being cheated out of. The peaceful ones have reconciled themselves with their families and with their own former behaviour and actions. Crucially, they have also come to peace with the prospect of their own death; the nuns do a wonderful job in this regard. Those residents mentally at peace are also often the least frustrated physically, being more ready to accept their own limitations and the series of small defeats that the last phases of life entail.

I am not sure if there is any correlation between mental peace and a delay in the onset of dementia, though I would not be surprised if there were. But I do think I have noticed a correlation between peace and the sort of ways dementia afflicts residents. The ones who get angry or intensely frustrated behave as though in very anxious dream-like scenarios, often taken from their earlier life. What are coming back to them, again and again, are scenes of deep stress, and I believe that many of the scenes are sources of unreconciled anxiety. It is a small sample size, but the same residents that seem to suffer the most in later stage dementia seem to be ones that were the least at peace with their surroundings before dementia set in.

So peace might be a great objective in the last phases of life, when by necessity ambition is reduced, but isn’t it a bit of a pathetic goal for earlier? Well, perhaps not. Peace is not the same as idleness. In fact, idleness is the enemy of peace, since it engenders boredom and dissatisfaction. Being active in mind and body fulfils us and leads to feelings of peace.

The best symptom of a peaceful life is one where sleep comes easily. That is not the same as a life filled with sleep, though it will certainly include enough sleep to stay healthy. More, it is about how easily we can fall asleep. Unless we have a chronic medical condition, we should be able to find sleep when we seek it, without too much tossing and turning. If we cannot, there is something in our brain that is not at peace. So the fact that many studies are showing that, in the developed world, we are generally not getting enough sleep, and furthermore are finding it harder to fall asleep, is not a good indicator for society.

We can use our goal of a peaceful life to help us regulate our activities and behaviours. There are numerous possible examples.

One good example is how we vacation. It is telling that commercials for vacations tend to show intimate couples enjoying peaceful meals at sunset in beachside restaurants. The reason for that is that this is indeed what our brains seek from vacations and what healthy vacations look like. But think of your most recent vacations. They might indeed have contained such intimate moments, but what else did we inflict on ourselves to achieve them? How much did we spend? How many hours did we stress ourselves in airport lounges and bus depots and hire cars? How many days did we tick off some place off a bucket list but stress out getting there and fending off other tourists just to get the perfect instagram post? How much misery did we impose on our small kids from disrupting their routines, and ourselves from handling those same kids in their misery?

Now, bucket lists are good and family time is precious. But let us get our priorities in order here. If we start a vacation plan with the top priorities being recharging and intimacy then we might choose differently. Within an hour’s drive nearly all of us have plenty of beauty and nature, often for free. The instagram feed might not be as momentarily impressive as the one with the Taj Mahal in the background, but my guess is that the smiles will look less forced.

A year of vacations might look very different with these priorities. There might be a couple of extra short trips just for the kids, like days in local water parks, but there might also be a longer break where those same kids stay with grandparents. There might still be a Taj Mahal, but not a Machhu Pichu and Table Mountain as well, but instead some local weekends, easier transit and longer stays with simpler plans.

An even more obvious example is how we use our phones. Our phones are brilliant, and they can help us find peace by improving relationships, nurturing curiosity and saving time, for example time in traffic jams or getting lost. But they can also be the enemy of peace. Do we really need an app to measure our sleep? Surely that app will only stress us out and reduce our sleep hours. Meditation type apps might work for some of us, but real meditation and time spent in nature is probably better. And the quest for streaks and photos to share and likes and click bait is surely working against peace, especially late at night. We all know we need to self-regulate our phone use and we all struggle to do it. “Does this help me find peace?” might work as an acid test in this struggle.

More fundamentally, we can ask ourselves if our relationships help us in our search for peace. All forms of intimacy help us feel warm inside. We can achieve intimacy through generosity, acceptance, openness and vulnerability. We can use the prospect of this as a guide in seeking new relationships, as a way of working on our own behaviour, and as a way of improving existing relationships. Then we can enjoy our beachside meals (and what might follow) even more!

I often wonder why my wife and I are in such a great mood every time we return from our service at the residential home. I think peace is at the heart of it. By spending time in a place of peace, with lots of love and a slow pace, those benefits rub off on us. And service itself has a peaceful dividend.

When I watch TV commercials, they often seem to be promoting behaviour that it is opposite of anything that will create peace. They are all about competition, acquisition and ways to get into debt and stress. I guess I should not be surprised, since peace itself is usually free and nobody could pay much for a commercial that doesn’t lead to purchases.

TV commercials, mobile phones, social media and news feeds are usually the enemy of peace. It is no surprise that happiness is correlated first with a lack of war and danger, then with rising income security, but seemingly with an upper limit after which richer societies do not become happier ones. Wealth gives us more opportunities to succumb to the seven deadly sins, an antonym for all of which could be peace. Evolution makes sure that we usually enjoy plenty of the positive benefits of those sins, and we should accept them and even indulge them in moderation. If we choose inner peace as a primary life goal, we can find the antidote.

Writing about peace as a goal made me look up the goals that I set ten years ago for my fifties, but have largely forgotten. Next year I will refresh them for my sixties. But when I read the goals I was quite encouraged, because most of them were very consistent with a quest for peace. With a little good judgement and a lot of serendipity, I have been able to follow the goals quite closely, and a lot of peace has followed. Next time, peace will be at the forefront of the exercise and not just a fortunate side effect.       

The UK Election

I surprised myself with my last blog about UK politics back in May. At the time, fog surrounded all predictions, yet I scored something like nine out of ten by anticipating Boris as prime minister and most of his actions since, culminating in a general election as an active policy. At the time, I predicted a landslide win for Boris in that election. Has anything changed in the interim?

Boris has actually been even more cunning than I gave him credit for. Ignore all of the lost commons votes and apparent chaos – that has all been part of the plan. Where he has outperformed my expectation is that he has actually negotiated a brexit deal with the EU, so that he can go to the country with a clear and simple platform that nobody can claim is not deliverable. Securing this, yet also securing an election but no second referendum, has been a masterstroke. It carries just one risk – Nigel Farage – but I believe that will be overcome as well.

This is a fascinating election, if one can look beyond the tragic state of the country and its politicians and the prospects for both. Most elections are about a hundred or so marginal seats, with preordained results in up to 80% of the constituencies. That favours incumbent parties, and means that few elections transform the electoral map. In the 1920’s, Labour usurped the Liberals. In 1945, Labour became fully established. In 2010, the Scottish Nationalists usurped Labour in Scotland. That is about it really.

But this election might be different. Outside of Scotland and Northern Ireland, almost all the seats are potentially up for grabs. The main immediate cause is Brexit, but the more fundamental shifts may be about the secular decline of Labour, the nationalist takeover of the Conservatives, and the rise of the Greens.

In a gross simplification of English and Welsh constituencies, most are either natural Conservative or natural Labour. The former comprises the whole south except the grittier parts of London and the most rural parts of the north; the latter gritty London, the whole of Wales and the rest of the north. What is interesting is that the centrist party, the liberals, tend to come second in Conservative seats, and have been most competitive in rural areas where the establishment is feared. In most natural Labour seats, it is the Conservatives who have come second, often a very distant second.

As a result the effect of Brexit and nationalism is skewed. Brexit is a nationalist urge strongest in poorer areas. In natural Labour seats a nationalist Tory party suddenly becomes competitive. In natural Conservative seats, the Liberals may become more competitive, but only where the remain vote was really strong such as around London and in posh university cities like Cambridge.

So in this election it is conceivable that the Conservatives might be competitive in almost every seat in England (and almost no seat outside England, which may not worry them too much because that is only about 12% of the total). It is even possible that they become more successful in traditional Labour seats than their own, achieving a reversal never seen in Britain before.

This is the context for an election where strange things might happen. Boris has a simple platform. He has his party committed to his Brexit deal, he has offered his bribes, and he can hint about a post-Brexit economy of low deregulation and parasitic finance, an attractive proposition for the wealthy and plenty of opinion formers, probably including Trump’s acolytes and the Russians. There will be some trumped up incident relating to immigrants to enable plenty of dog whistling. This is a formidable force.

Labour is offering a new referendum after a further negotiation, and otherwise a highly progressive agenda full of nationalisation and punishment of the rich, from a party obviously divided internally and trying to straddle its traditional voter base and radical London-centred young voters too. This is a tough challenge, made more so by a volatile leadership. Somehow in 2017 Labour outperformed, but that was against Theresa May. Now they have a cynical and aggressive Boris and all his vocal support against them. A total collapse is not impossible: it happened in Scotland (where the SNP will sweep the board again), so why not in England too?

The Liberals would cancel Brexit altogether, though they are smart enough to allow for a referendum if they are forced into coalition. This is also a clear and attractive platform, and they have just about recovered their brand after the battering from being in coalition (tough for what was historically a protest movement), but they have an untried new leader who might implode. The Greens are still small in the UK, but will partner with the Liberals to the benefit of both groups. The poor souls who departed the Tories or Labour on principle have no choice but to run as Liberals, unless they fancy trying their luck as independents. 

The fly in the ointment is Nigel Farage and his Brexit party. Farage today is the most powerful man in Britain, and he knows it. Trump and Putin know it too, and so does Boris. Maybe 25% of the electorate will follow his lead. If his party were to stand in open opposition to the Tories, the north would probably stay Labour and the south may turn Liberal. If he does a deal with Boris, both could become Conservative.

So I predict Boris will do a deal with him. Before I thought this would come before the election, but Boris has taken the risk of dealing with the EU first to create his simple platform and hand Farage his bargaining power. What will be the price? I shudder to think. It might involve criminal wealth, honours and titles, and further distancing over time from the EU. It will be mainly covert, and involve many foreigners. But I guess we can step back for a moment and admire Nigel Farage, who has somehow made himself the powerful Brit since Churchill.

Hence I predict a Tory landslide, but with plenty of uncertainty. Farage might become too greedy for even Boris to stomach, or may be vulnerable to a scandal. Boris might struggle to keep his party together, especially if Farage’s price is high, and Boris is a walking scandal who might score many own goals. Labour could surprise in either direction. I don’t see it (they are too dumb and arrogant), but they might even deal with the Liberals and Greens.

In this situation, if I were a betting man, I’d be scanning some outside bets, because this could just be the election to create extreme outcomes. I wonder what the odds are on the Tories winning 500 seats or Labour less than 50, or of Jo Swinson, or Phillip Hammond, or Ben Watson becoming prime minister. I can see paths for all these outcomes and think all are great bets at 100 to one.

One positive in all this will be a focus on individual politicians. If Labour is almost annihilated, the survivors will be good constituency MP’s in union cities. A few rebel independents may win. There will be great opportunities for talented young Liberals and Greens to emerge.

Despite all this, the two most likely outcomes are clear. We might get the nightmare of a repeat of the current parliament and current mess, and recycle the last two years as a result. Or we might get the other nightmare of Boris winning a landslide. The Irish will be sold down the river, the parasites will take over the city, the oligarchs will celebrate and the Scots will secede. Oh happy day.

But even then, we should not despair, because humanity will win out. Just as in the US, whether in 2020 or 2024 or even later, the pendulum will swing, and the longer the wait, the bigger the swing will be. In the UK, next time or the time after, the Greens might even win. 

On Dementia

There has been a flurry of research into dementia. This is most welcome and not before time. Because medical advances are enabling us to live longer, most of us will reach the point when our brains become our weakest link and succumb to dementia. I have witnessed how dementia can destroy quality of life, so anything that can understand it, defer it, ameliorate it or simply cope with it has immense value.

Just this last week I have seen references to two reports about factors appearing to make dementia more likely. One was about sports, and especially sports involving knocks to the head and possible concussions. The indication is that soccer players who head the ball a lot are three to five times more prone to dementia than most of us. I can only imagine what this would imply for NFL players or boxers. It calls to mind those sad last years of Muhammad Ali. It seems to make sense that bashing the brain repeatedly is not the healthiest thing for us to be doing. Within a generation, these sports will be outlawed or have been radically changed. Perhaps in soccer there is already enough relief through using less dense balls with softer impact.

The second report had more subtle conclusions. We have long thought that exercising the brain helps to keep it in shape, hence the craze for mind puzzles like word search or even Candy Crush. That can only be good for the mobile phone generation – so long as those benefits are not more than offset by any damage to the brain from electrical pulses and the like. This report confirmed the benefits of mild brain exercise, but concluded that too much brain exercise may be a bad thing. People with stressful brain occupations seemingly are more prone to dementia.

My guess is that this may be about sleep. Sleep is emerging as critical for health in so many ways. It feels intuitively correct that, since sleep is the sort of cleaning reset function for the brain, good sleep patterns will help to fight off dementia. Perhaps those rocket scientists are thinking so hard and so often that they take their problems to bed with them, and that disrupts sleep and its positive effects.

While it is good to understand the causes of dementia, for now the more urgent priority is what we can do about it. For a life with dementia can be a horrible one.

The clearest symptom of dementia is the loss of short-term memory. We all start to suffer from a bit of that from our fifties or earlier, and initially it can seem rather harmless and even quite funny. At the home where we volunteer, the majority of residents have some issues with short-term memory. Many times we will be asked for a bowl of soup by a resident who had already eaten one just five minutes before and forgotten all about it. At this stage the resident can share the joke: we point out that their soupspoon has vanished to the kitchen and they can accept that they must have already eaten their soup.

But as the short-term memory weakens the impact quickly ceases to be funny at all, and our experience is that the onset can happen within a few short weeks. First the resident can become frequently lost, and anxious about it. Then, they see themselves in a different scenario to the one they are really in, often regressing to moments from their youth.

I liken this to being awake in a dream. We often dream about situations from our past. The resident responds to that situation much as we imagine ourselves doing in dreams. Sadly, for many of us our most commonly recurring dreams recall stressful situations requiring urgent action, such as getting lost as a child or being betrayed by someone like a parent, or reliving situation where they may have behaved shamefully. As dementia takes hold, residents imagine themselves in these situations more and more frequently, and they become stressed, angry and even violent as a result.

Much though I have always admired the nuns and staff at the home we visit, I used to think that they sometimes did not treat all their residents well. Often you hear desperate cries emanating from bedrooms, with nobody seeming to rush to help. On other occasions staff could appear brusque or heartless. Now that we have witnessed late stage dementia ourselves we know better. If such a resident calls for help, it might or might not be possible to mollify them. But the likelihood is that the scenario is repeated only a few minutes later. Short of sitting with somebody 24/7, requiring an infeasible level of staffing, what can they do?

This is the real world described in the best article I have read about dementia, in last week’s Guardian Weekly by Sarah Boseley. The author struggles to help her own mother and writes with compassion and intelligence. It emerges that good practice dementia care has progressed, albeit slowly. My grandmother had dementia in her later years, and, like many, ended up in a cruel home, often chained to a chair to prevent her doing anything silly. What a miserable life that must have been.

But most options involve impossible levels of personal care. The article describes how societies evolve from one where women stay at home to care for elderly relatives, then employ low-cost home help for the task from developing countries, then resort to care homes. Even the best care homes lack resources for the level of personal care needed. So sometimes residents are still restrained, and often they are heavily sedated.

When resources are available, it is obvious that the best choice involves plentiful social interaction. Our own home organises bingo and crafts and prayer and puzzles and many other distractions and brain stimulation, but this can only defer the day when one-on-one care becomes necessary.

Even giving that care is difficult. If I sit with a suffering resident for 30 minutes, it can seem like hours and severely test my ability to find distractions and conversation that achieves more good than harm. Here again good practice has evolved. Before, carers were told to be brutally honest. If a nonagenarian resident is looking urgently for her mum, we were supposed to point out that mum had been dead for fifty years. But good practice now is to minimise suffering. One professional quoted three golden rules: don’t ask questions that may cause distress; listen and only offer information that will make them feel better; do not contradict. I find these helpful, and wish that my volunteer training had included some specific advice for handling such situations. But I can promise you that, golden rules or not, it is not at all easy – and I can always go home when I have had all that I can take. It is a bit like sitting with a three-year-old with toothache or earache – hard work and often depressing.

Boseley also describes some modern concepts for community living for people with dementia, such as a village in the Netherlands that is part of regular society but with external walls that residents cannot get past. To me this sounds brilliant but not scalable: it involves a lot of capital and plenty of training too.

But somehow we will need solutions. More of us are living longer, dementia will only become more common, and we will need more homes with smarter designs. Perhaps better drugs can help – at the moment homes seem to use general sedatives like morphine that surely have side effects. Perhaps more people can join the army of carers: I love the idea of siting care homes with nurseries, and I read recently that in the Netherlands they are even experimenting with using paroled prisoners. I applaud Boseley for a very balanced and well-researched contribution to this urgent debate.

Now, where did I leave that soup?

Poverty in America

The Economist included one of its excellent special reports last week, this time on the subject of poverty in America – meaning the US. I found the report enlightening and thought provoking, but also perhaps with a few gaps.

My first takeaway from the report was just how many archetypes of poverty exist in the US. The report looked into former mining communities in Appalachia and black towns in the Deep South. It also highlighted smaller cities in the rust belt, such as Youngstown, which have lost their only significant employer and seen a drain of resources ever since. Then there is urban poverty, both in struggling cities such as Detroit and in generally thriving ones like New York. In the latter it is possible to get a job, but sometimes not one paying enough to escape a life of constant hustle and rent arrears, mainly due to the lack of affordable housing. Then there are Native American communities, hidden places of suffering out of the public view.

We can add a few more categories. There are many people with outwardly affluent lives but who are riddled with debt and with no feasible way out. Addicts, of opioids or alcohol or anything else, have a similar prognosis. Often, people from these latter categories are hidden in plain view.

While it is hard to get a full picture, I have managed to observe people from many of the categories. Last week I was in Europe, and they exist there too, but somehow I get the sense that the numbers are smaller and the plights usually less desperate.

Other reading tells a similar story. I am still haunted by the book “Evicted”, about the poverty trap in Milwaukee. I also read a long article last week about workers on a tipped minimum wage. While we all read about the regular minimum wage and cheer that it is finally shifting upwards in many cities, we are rarely reminded that workers designated as tipped staff do not qualify; indeed the federal tipped minimum wage has remained unchanged at just over $2 per hour for decades, and over the bridge in New Jersey it is just over $2.50. In a poor town, many folk on that wage will work at a  down-at-heel diner, where tips will hardly be abundant. 

My instinct is supported up by the second takeaway from the Economist report. Data confirms the US to be an outlier among rich nations. Despite the official definition for income poverty being much lower than elsewhere, the US has a higher proportion of poor people than its peers. To be classed as poor in the US, you have to be very poor indeed. By the definitions of poverty in most of Europe, over a third of US households would be classed as poor. That is one large contingent of households, of voters, of misery and of lost opportunity.

My next takeaway from the Economist report is that it seems that not enough people care about poverty in the US. Otherwise, why is it so large? Why is that I watch Democratic presidential debates, and there is little discussion of poverty? Instead there is an emphasis on particular programs, such as higher minimum wages, universal healthcare and eliminating student loans.

While all of these would reduce poverty, they are not well targeted. A high federal minimum wage would work in affluent cities, but be wrong in poorer places where the cost of living is lower – there it would probably reduce employment. Universal healthcare would be good, but the bigger issue with healthcare is its overall cost to the economy, due to monopolies and poor incentives. And student loans are irrelevant to most of the poor, and eliminating them would on balance subsidise richer people with better prospects.

Sadly, I reach the conclusion that reducing poverty would be great policy but is currently seen as bad politics. The reasons for this are depressing. The most prevalent is that Republicans have managed to sell the line that a lot of poverty is due to individual laziness or bad character. The Economist report demonstrates plainly that this is rubbish, but the notion makes it hard for Democrats to champion poverty reduction as a goal – they can be painted as promoting handouts for the undeserving.

Then there are other Democratic calculations going on. I suspect that the reason they don’t highlight the tipped minimum wage is that they rely on donations from businesses that exploit it and from the organisation representing the minority of tipped employees who do very well from tips. A more defensible possibility is that they realise that grand federal programs are not the best way to address poverty, yet grand federal programs are all the news media wants to hear about. Lastly, there is the calculation that poor people don’t usually vote.

Perhaps this is a major missed opportunity. The media like grand federal programs, but even more they like grand federal goals, and eliminating poverty would be a powerful one. It is the antithesis of everything the Trump administration stands for. It would lead to many practical policies. And it might enthuse voters. A good argument can be made that poverty drives outcomes that swing voters really do care about such as crime.

The Economist report argues that Lyndon Johnson won an election on precisely that messaging back in the 1960’s. It also shows the good and bad side of what happened next. Civil rights were improved, and programs of Medicare and Social Security lifted a lot of people out of poverty. These policies were good for their time, but they ended up helping older people on average, and the policies failed to evolve to meet other needs. The Economist makes a compelling argument that the primary focus of a new federal goal should be children. That would even help the political marketing, because not even Republicans argue that poor children are undeserving.

It appears that Elizabeth Warren has an almost unstoppable path to the Democratic nomination. She is a master of detail, with a catchphrase of “I have a plan for that”. The problems are that big goals can get drowned out by all the detail, and that many plans feel more like nasty retribution towards the wealthy than anything more worthy. An umbrella goal of eliminating poverty within a generation and child poverty within fifteen years could alleviate those problems. It is positive, exciting and completely differentiated from anything Trump has to say. The many existing plans can fit neatly under the umbrella, while the umbrella helps with prioritisation and also indicates suitable policies locally. Cities need reformed housing support and more housing supply; struggling smaller cities need regeneration plans; the Deep South needs quality education for all. As a result, her campaign can focus on meaningful policies in swing states and districts.

Trump may often seem to be imploding but his message is simple and his base seemingly robust to anything. Warren is a powerful candidate, but is vulnerable to appearing vindictive and geeky. The Economist report on US poverty might have revealed an opportunity to give her a better chance of winning, and then a better chance of implementing good policies. We can all pray for those outcomes. 

Income Envy

One of the judgments around retiring early nine years ago was about money. Did I have enough? I had been well paid, well overpaid really, for fourteen expatriate years, and had paid off all debt and then saved what seemed quite a lot. There was a severance package available, half of a house in England to cash in, and the prospect of starting my pension at 55 if need be. My daughter would soon be off the payroll.

I can’t recall the calculations I made. No doubt there was some fancy spreadsheet. But whatever it said, it was hopelessly wrong. I did not reckon on significant earnings after retirement. I did not think about the prospect of an inheritance from my mum. I didn’t consider income from investments. But most of all, I underestimated my expenses. Part of that was about separating, remarrying and taking on two new kids. A lot of it was about moving to an expensive city like New York. And some of it just did not account for inflation and societal changes.

Luckily, even if almost every line of the spreadsheet turned out very wrong, the bottom line has turned out to be close., at least so far. Once upon I time I saw a documentary where all these rich people were shown obsessed with money and concerned to make more and more. One guy near the end of the show was different and seemed to enjoy his life a lot more despite having only modest wealth. The narrator asked him how much he had, and he responded with a single word – enough.

For sure bad things can happen. The stock market is bound to collapse at some point. One of the kids might need help. One of us might lose our good health. But most of the time, when I think a bit about it, I think I am the guy in the documentary. I have enough, probably, and what a rare blessing that is.

Most of the time, that means I don’t have serious negative thoughts about money. But occasionally I do, indeed more often recently. So I wondered what might have caused that. My answer is not about spreadsheets, but about stories. I have become susceptible to income envy.

I remember when I clearly had the first such twinge. This one did not directly concern money, but ambition. Shell has a system called CEP, in which people are assigned a job level to indicate where their careers could reach, a ceiling if you like. It is a good system, though it has flaws, mainly in how it is executed. I remember the day I found out that someone who had previously been my direct report had been promoted to a level that was higher than my own CEP.

For some reason, this briefly made me envious. It was a sign of being terminally overtaken in some great race. The feeling was quickly usurped by ones of pride and pleasure, but it had been present and was uncomfortable.

Of course, that experience quickly became commonplace, as my career plateaued and those of the many talented people I had tried to coach blossomed. Since then, many of my former reports have risen to impressive levels, inside Shell and outside. Some have thrown me some generous crumbs, and many are still kind enough to remember the help I gave them. I am not envious, even when I observe lifestyles that I never enjoyed and certainly are way beyond me now.  Well, maybe just a tiny bit envious, in weak moments.

My lifestyle is on a steady glide path downwards, yet I choose to live in a city of extremes where others have openly opulent lifestyles and many are on a stratospheric path. There could be a four-box model here, with wealth or the past on one axis, and income or the future on the other. Each box has its own characteristics and its pitfalls. My own box, of high past and modest future, can be a relaxing place to be, but can open up spasms of envy, and also of making unfair judgments on those in other boxes.

A typical New York story occurred recently when I met a choir friend for coffee. She explained that she might have to miss a few rehearsals because her husband had just changed job, from one Wall street firm to another. I expressed the hope that at, even if the new job meant longer hours and more stress, there might at least be the consolation of more money. Oh no, she said, he took a pay cut of $200,000 per annum, to move to a better environment. My jaw dropped. The passing twinge of income envy followed soon afterwards.

We have a good friend who is a Chinese lady in her late twenties. Other friends of ours had played an informal foster-parent role for her when she had lived in England, and we were delighted to inherit that responsibility when she moved to New York. We still give plenty of personal help and companionship to her, and we are delighted to serve and get a lot back in return from her. But within two years she has rocketed from the low past/ unrealized future box to the affluent present / spectacular future box in my model. Two years ago we were stocking her fridge and always paying for dinner. Now she spends more in a month than we do in a year. It is lovely to see it, and she remains the same unaffected young lady she always was, but I have to confess to just the occasional pang of income envy.

The stories with people I know well are always the most poignant, but in New York there are opportunities for income envy of strangers every day. My recent experience of buying a car had few positives, but one big negative was fighting off the envy of recognizing that others were shopping in an altogether more glamorous market than I was.

Occasionally I get some evidence that makes me rethink assumptions. My dentist is a lovely lady who works hard and deserves her success and high income. But, one day while with my mouth wide open in her chair, I started advocating against income inequality, and was quickly reminded that she was still paying off six figures of student debt, in her late forties with two kids in college. Both axes in the model can weigh heavily, and can challenge easy assumptions.

I once had a good friend who was in the same box as me, but in a more extreme place within the box. We called him the poorest rich guy we had ever met. He owned a huge estate, but it offered him no income at all and he lived as modestly as anyone I have ever known. Then we have all encountered the converse, someone addicted to luxury but mired in debt. Appearances can deceive, and models can be complicated.

Like all failings, the first step is to acknowledge it, and nowadays I have learned to recognise the income envy feeling and have found ways to move past it. It can help to cast my eye just a little wider and to observe the many people who are worse off than I am. But for this particular negative feeling, I can do that and then consider a more structural fix.

The fix goes back to that documentary and the magic word “enough”. The envy feeling always starts with a mental reference to a race, and the sense of being overtaken and having no way to overtake back. But if think a bit harder we can realise that there is no such race against others, just our own journey meandering through life. If we can convince ourselves that we have enough, then that journey can be peaceful even if we are overtaken, by one close friend or by a million New Yorkers. They are welcome to their own race; indeed I can wish them all the best and cheer them on from my seemingly diminished vantage point.

For me, that realisation helps every time the income envy twinge comes around, and helps me to find peace. For others, that same realisation could be even more powerful, if it stops the urge to stretch to buy something they can’t afford, just to impress the neighbours, wife, parent or ego. Positions in four-box models are subject to change, after all.