Party like it is 1999

 The early days of the internet were wild. Even the most staid businesses started acting as if all the assumptions behind their business model had suddenly become invalid. I recall rooms full of ageing executives trying to pretend they understood presentations by youngsters full of jargon and devoid of true content. It was the time to be a faker.

 

I had my best business idea at this time. I made a half-hearted effort to convince Shell that our global station network, with parking, space, security and great locations would make an ideal fit with a start-up few had heard of called Amazon. Amazon worried that people would not order valuable or large things to be left at their homes, and it was holding back their expansion from books. I still think I was right, but knew even then that being right did not win any prizes. Still, I wish I had tried harder. I might have made a real difference.

 

A year later and the whole edifice collapsed. I had just been given a job trying to create an e-business for a part of Shell, and I think I was lucky. I was one of the many emperors strutting the world at the time with no clothes, and the collapse covered my nakedness and gave me a few months to segway into a more suitable job.

 

Reading The Economist last week made me wonder if we are in a phase that is a repeat of that frenzy. There are certainly similarities. Every article within the business section carried its own evidence.

 

Bartleby wrote about Theranos and the trial of Elizabeth Holmes. It seems barely credible that a company could attract such investment when its sole product did not work at all. Surely many of the employees must have suspected this? Surely the endless rounds of due diligence by investors must have included a review of the efficacy of the product? It seems not. The only thing the employees were watching was the company valuation. The only thing the investors were watching were other investors, sure that the herd could drive up the value and determined to be part of the greedy stampede. The story comes straight from 1999.

 

The main article was about charging electric vehicles. We are supposed to believe that EV’s will dominate the roads within a few years, but it is clear that the business model suffers from a major flaw – charging. Anybody who does not have a charger at home is in big trouble, because currently it takes all night to charge a vehicle just for a typical pattern of use. The next generation of faster chargers might just work if they are at people’s offices, but what about people who live in an apartment and don’t work in an office with a huge car park, ie most of us living in cities? There are on street chargers emerging, but they are too slow, often broken or blocked, and rarely in places where people want to spend a large chunk of their day. The super-fast chargers on highways currently take a full hour to add 400km of range. It takes me two minutes to add that range in my regular car. Who has a full hour to stand around?

 

No doubt the technology will develop, but wow, it has a long way to go. And my main takeaway is that not enough people are working on these pinch points and the ones that are do not have enough skills. GM’s solution is to put chargers in their dealerships. Think about how dumb that is. Reading this article was one of the few fleeting moments I wished I still worked with Shell. My skills could be helping with this.

 

Another article discussed phone apps for mental health counselling. This was another typical internet story. Some clever people saw a high demand, piggy backed on the trend for virtual consultations, signed up a few professionals and launched an app. Income immediately resulted, costs were minimal, and investors piled in. But nobody really took the time to make the operation sustainable. In particular, customers found their appointments revoked as the professionals overbooked their calendars and self-selected their client base. Also, privacy is absolutely central to this type of service, but that was largely ignored, with predictable consequences. Various fragile lives have no doubt been damaged, but, hey, somebody made a lot of money. Less flippantly, there is actually a germ of a good idea in here and one day it might actually benefit society.

 

Then there was an article about gig workers, another mega trend where people are making things up as they go along, meanwhile hoovering up investor capital. This article highlighted the different challenges businesses face in Europe compared with the USA. Even in the USA, nobody is making any money, while volume is king and margin and afterthought. But at least in the USA there is a path forward, because of an easy regulatory environment and large demand hubs full of rich and lazy potential clients who are used to tipping. Today I passed two petrol stations on opposite sides of a corner with a price difference of 14 cents per gallon (4%): that would never happen in Europe, because everybody looks after their pennies. Uber and others are discovering that fact in Europe too, and their business models often seem doomed as a result.

 

All these stories reminded me of 1999. Ideas and charisma trumped everything, detail and sustainability were afterthoughts, and money sloshed around. Until it didn’t. The whole edifice became unstable, people started realising that, and a crash occurred. Most daft businesses collapsed and naïve investors paid the bill (using our pensions). Might this happen again? The sheer weight of such flimsy stories is one indicator that a crash might come. But there are other indicators as well.

 

One risk is highlighted, obliquely, in another article ion the same business section of the same Economist. A massive legacy of 2021 will be how the Chinese authorities have acted to fundamentally change their business climate. IT is a miracle how they have achieved this without triggering a domestic or an international crash, and even without sounding warning bells in America. The USA already transfers lots of money to China every month owing to the voracious appetite of its consumers. Now the Chinese are repatriating the listings of many of its businesses, especially the ones of global significance. How is the west responding? The west is run by investors who need those businesses as vehicles to keep the wheels of greed turning. So more of our pension money is now heading for China too. It is part of a brilliant and transparent Chinese strategy to make us need them more then they need us, as insurance against another Trump. One possible outcome is a sulking west imposing all sorts of new restrictions, thereby harming our own economies and creating a confidence crisis.

 

There are other risk factors too. We have lived through an unusual age of free capital. That might be closing right now, as interest rate signals around the world start pointing upwards. There is nothing like a monthly interest bill for debt to expose flawed business models.

 

Lastly there is the US government. Even I they don’t panic about China and manage to forestall large interest rate rises, it will be a strange time for businesses. The next three years will produce nothing from Congress, and Biden will respond with executive actions, spraying ill-thought-through short-term incentives everywhere. That will quickly expose flimsy businesses on the wrong side of such incentives, while creating even flimsier new ones on the right side. Altogether this is not a recipe for a stable investment climate.

 

Given all of this, it might be a good time to recall the fundamental lessons from 1999. We can have fun and grow money based on charisma and ideas for a while, but need to be ready to jump before the music stops, which could be soon or not for a long time yet. And it is a good strategy to focus on companies that will emerge more strongly once the bubbles burst. Amazon was built on solid foundations and still has them in place, and in my opinion still has growth ahead. In this cycle, the same feels true of Tesla, so far ahead in so many critical areas. There are probably other good bets, maybe in digital health or battery technology. Interface bottlenecks are good places to look, and so are businesses relatively immune to the US/China decoupling. It feels a good time to be shopping less indiscriminately and more smartly.

Reckless Driving

 The trend has been obvious to me for some time. Every time I drive now I notice more reckless driving.

 

It is most noticeable on the highways. I am happily tootling along when suddenly somebody driving at an unsafe speed passes me. The car continues its course, dodging and weaving between lanes. But I know what usually follows. A second car comes along doing exactly the same thing. They are racing.

 

I am amazed at how these drivers seem to survive. I witness the aftermath of more and more accidents on the roads, but somehow I expect these lunatics to crash almost immediately. Whenever somebody reckless passes me, I instinctively slow down, just in case I am about to become part of a pile up.

 

These highway races are the obvious manifestation, but other examples of recklessness exist as well. I am noticing more drivers jumping lights and taking illegal turns. It seems that whenever I peer into another car, I see a driver more interested in their mobile phone than the road. And drivers are angrier too. Nowadays there is invariably a honk when a light changes to green, even when a dozen stationary cars are preventing progress.

 

I looed up a few statistics and they supported my anecdotal observations. Traffic fatalities in the US enjoyed a steady decline between 2006 and 2019, before increasing in 2020 and again sharply in 2021. The increase in 2020 occurred despite a drop in road usage due to the pandemic.

 

What might be causing this? As with so much else, the pandemic is an obvious place to start. Last March we suddenly experienced empty roads. Speedsters could have more fun. The cops had other things to worry about. The reckless got away with it and speed became a habit. Perhaps a general feeling of despair and a sense of devaluation of life added to the recklessness. The new habits persisted as the traffic came back to the roads. The result is mounting fatalities.

 

This explanation seems to make some sense. But then I compared the US statistics with Europe. I could not find much data about 2021, but 2020 saw a marked decline in road deaths in Europe. Clearly there were fewer of these desperate racers there, or if not then fewer of them were killing themselves.

 

These statistics match with other areas of human progress. Fifty years ago the US was ahead of most European countries. Twenty-five years ago it was in the middle of the pack, and ten years ago at the bottom. Since then the gap has only grown and the last two years have seen an acceleration in its widening. This is similar to trends in life expectancy overall, violent deaths, maternal mortality, educational attainment and a host of other areas.

 

So what might be behind this? It is possible to come up with a few theories.

 

We can start with the state of the infrastructure. The roads in the USA are in a terrible state, filled with potholes, poorly lit and littered with intrinsically unsafe junctions. Europe seems to do a better job of progressively eliminating these death traps. Perhaps the Biden infrastructure infusion will help, but I am not holding my breath. While the roads are so bad, reckless driving is more likely to lead to catastrophic outcomes.

 

We can add ingrained driving habits. Lane discipline here is almost non-existent. On a highway there is almost no concept of a slow or fast lane, merely lanes to choose between. The result is that racing becomes more fun, yet more perilous. Why has there been so little effort to encourage better behaviour?

 

There is minimal enforcement at the very front end, with driving tests. The physical test here requires almost literally driving around the block and parking. In Holland and elsewhere only drivers ready to face the roads safely are permitted to drive, and car ownership, including petrol, is more expensive. The reckless are usually young, poor and immature. In Europe these people are not driving at all.

 

Then there is enforcement. The police here are everywhere – except, it seems, patrolling the highways. In Europe I suspect these racers would be pulled up fairly quickly and be off the road for an extended period. More cameras are coming in, but far behind Europe and more for political theatre than anything else. The racers know where the cameras are, and Waze and other apps even tell them where to expect police – surely a travesty? With the technology available today, enforcement should be much better than it is. It is probably toxic politics that stops it.

 

I am disappointed in the insurance companies. Some seem to be embracing technology, but it is far too slow. Years ago I had an idea of an app that would allow everyday drivers to report the plate numbers of reckless drivers in real time. For me it is still a good idea waiting for insurance companies to take up. One result of the current US insurance climate, dominated by accident chasing lawyers filling the TV screens, is very high premiums, so high that reckless people, who may be the reckless drivers, don’t bother with insurance at all.

 

That leads to societal factors. Driving recklessly on unsafe roads is placing a low value of ones own life, as well as on the lives of everyone else. This implies a degree of desperation, or disconnection. Many communities here are places of despair and disdain. The one thing many youngsters locked into such environments seem to be able to afford is a cheap souped-up second hand car. Add in fast food and drugs, and disaster lurks. Reducing this is just one of many hidden benefits of a welfare and equity based polity – and the benefits flow to those of us caught in crossfire, reducing the risk death on the road and lowering premiums, as well as to the disadvantaged.

 

Then there is the freedom factor. The land of the free has produced a set of people who consider their freedom to mean doing whatever the heck they like, whatever the impact of anybody else. The Trump crowd epitomise this, and the vaccine refuseniks use such specious arguments. I often find myself arguing that refusing to be vaccinated is similar to refusing to follow stop signs or to drive on the allotted side of the road. Well, these reckless drivers are basically following that mantra. Much of the USA could find value from a crash course in understanding what freedom really means, before they experience a crash of a very different kind. 

 

Many of my blogs cast blame on Hollywood, and in this instance I will extend that to video games. Reckless driving in the real world is an extension of what many kids have been spending their time doing in the virtual arena during the pandemic. The difference of course is that computer games can’t kill you, but I wonder how many kids give this inconvenient fact as much consideration as they should. Movies don’t help when protagonists seem to be increasingly immortal.

 

Finally I wonder about the role of journalists. I had to work moderately hard to find my road accident statistics this morning. Occasionally we see reports or read articles about multiple pile-ups, especially if they offer a good picture or sentimental story, but I would like to see more focus on the underlying trends and issues. In the USA, there is also little effort, by journalists or seemingly by anybody else, to compare and learn from other countries. I wonder how many Americans realise what a dangerous society they live in compared with European peers.

 

It is hard to conclude which of these factors play a role, and especially which ones have led to the recent comparative decline in US road safety. But there is plenty of ammunition here in terms of ideas for campaigns to improve matters. Bill de Blasio started with a blaze of good intentions with his vision zero initiative, but as his term closes I hear fewer strong words and see less meaningful action, and the terrible results speak for themselves.

 

It is also worth noting that road safety is just one of many extreme sports we are forced to play by choosing to live here. The many other lagging areas will have overlapping sets of root causes, and the same frustrating lack of priority given to them by politicians, civil servants, journalists, or really anybody else.    

Attention Span

 One trend in society that has been undeniable during my lifetime is a reduction in attention spans. Everything happens much faster these days and there is no tolerance for wasting time. It would be stereotypical of somebody of my age to bemoan this trend, but I take more of a mixed position. The trend has certainly done some damage but it has had benefits as well. The trick would be to limit the damage while enjoying the benefits.

 

To comprehend just how strong the trend has been I only have to recall my own experiences. At school, lessons were forty-five minutes and once we reached fourteen most classes became double that length. At sixteen I sat a long series of three-hour exams (perched next to a huge south facing gym window during a historic heat wave), most of which required several essays to be scrawled in long hand.

 

When I started at work, I would often have to read or even create a business or project plan, and anything under fifteen pages of tight script was considered thin. In my thirties a rather austere mentor called Tony Brearley taught me the art of the concise note. I would pay visits to Shell businesses around Europe, and try to summarize my findings within two pages of (by now typed) script. I titled these Actions and Agreements and the struggle was always to find language that was clear, complete and concise. I have been grateful to Tony ever since, for that skill has served me well.

 

Nowadays I often need to compose e-mails or documents for choir business. The topics may be more mundane but the requirements are the same – clarity, completeness and concision. But I notice now that two pages is far too long: the most I can get away with is one page, and even then I have to accept that most people will not read the whole document. I have to place the critical bits in bold right at the top and refer to them again in cover notes. I am told that my language is too dense, and people request pictures or videos or other excuses to avoid spending a few minutes digesting something. I try to adapt but I always seem to be behind the trend.

 

You can see the same trend in all media. I started a subscription with the Guardian Weeklytwenty-five years ago, and the periodical is about the same overall size now as it was then. The difference is that each article is now about half as long, and most have pictures, whether or not the picture actually adds anything to the story. They also include sidebars so that our precious attention can be retained. I would much rather read properly researched stories presented in sufficient depth.

 

The Economistis a glorious exception, and that may be one reason I love it so much. It might also explain its successful growth in popularity. There can be a market for refusing to bow to a trend.

 

In TV, I notice a difference between the US and the UK. Pretty well everything produced primarily for a US audience nowadays pays homage to short attention spans, with fast moving plots and constant visualisation, at the expense of depth. Many of the best UK programmes have become successful precisely by bucking that trend. In comedy, look at The Caféor Detectorists, among others. I cruelly describe these shows as “nothing ever happens”, but that is their charm. In real life scenarios develop slowly, and individual characters respond to situations gradually. This sort of show allows an audience to empathise.

 

We can be grateful for Netflix, because slowly even the Americans are realising that different fare is effective for different segments, and new technology allows for more of those markets to be served. Now there are many more series that I can find to enjoy.

 

The same trend can be seen in sports. Cricket has retained its slow, strategic format but added faster alternatives. Baseball has not adapted, its devotees obsessed with historical statistics, and its popularity has suffered, though I adore the game just as it is. Rugby has been smartest, introducing a series of rule changes to add pace and entertainment. I still remember Billy Beaumont commenting on a dull international in the 1980’s: “That’s the goal in rugby; kick the ball off the pitch”.

 

The examples show that short attention spans have benefits, especially if flexible formats can satisfy different audiences. The demand for instant satisfaction has led to positive innovation in many fields.

 

What about politics? My daughter gave me a revealing quote when we saw her over the summer. “Has Biden done anything yet?” She picks up her news from the feeds on social media. Social media feed the frenzy for sensation. Biden doesn’t feature at all.

 

So who is the villain here? Is it social media, populist politicians, my daughter or none of the above? We can’t blame social media: they only give the public what they want. I can ask my daughter to show more interest in the world around her and to be more discerning about her sources, but that is her business really. And we can argue that the populist politicians are also only doing their job, at least as long as there are not lying: a good marketer understands media and message.

 

I can make a gripe about basic education. Advertisers, moviemakers and snake oil salesmen all have an incentive to try to simplify issues, so that an action or preference can be prompted by something as simple as a talking point. So education has to balance this tendency.

 

We could be taught a module on logical reasoning. It goes back to those over-long business plans that my career started with. The chapter headings remain as valid as they ever were. Define a problem or challenge, then a goal and why it is beneficial. Explore possible diagnoses and solutions, with pros and cons and risks and possible unintended consequences. Then propose a solution and a plan to achieve it, with roles, milestones, incentives, performance indicators and contingencies. If we could all mentally run through this sort of checklist every time we read that “the Dems want to give money to illegals”, and also understood a little more about all the pitfalls of our biases, then we could avoid falling for so much simplistic guff.

 

We should follow our own logic to avoid a simplistic narrative that things used to better before, and that Mark Zuckerberg and others are plotting to dumb down society for nefarious purposes (though Rupert Murdoch does have a lot to answer for). True, in the past plans were more thorough and political parties published long manifestos. But did anybody ever read them? I don’t think so. Complexity and fancy language was how the establishment elite kept control – Tony Brearley was a master of that and taught me the same dark art. Even my concise two-pagers were dense enough to bamboozle people whose native language was not English. If there is manipulation now, it is just different manipulation by different people.

 

And anyway, who wants to watch a sport when the ball is never on the pitch or when players waste time as a tactic? Let progress happen and don’t blame the platforms for doing a good job, indeed celebrate technology for allowing a segmented diet so even fogeys like me can be satisfied. But also champion education in the modern skills that we all need to navigate the world successfully. 

Eternal Apocalypse

 I had a very interesting weekend earlier this month, one that helped me to challenge my assumptions and prejudices. That is always a blessing.

 

On Saturday my wife and I were invited on a date with a good friend, a lady of about thirty for whom we have acted as sort of mentors for many years, and who has rewarded us by becoming an impressive woman who is always great company.

 

After some excellent Chinese food in Flushing, a place that now offers a wonderfully absorbing cultural experience if you are ever able to find any parking, our friend escorted us into a cinema to watch the Eternals movie from the Marvel franchise. It was our first experience back in front a giant movie screen and one more tentative step back towards a life before the pandemic.

 

Now, this movie is one I would never have chosen to watch. It is precisely the sort of thing that I disdain and look down my nose at. My basic stance on movies is that there is enough material available from real human experiences, real people doing real things in believable situations, and we should not look too far beyond that canvas. Superpowers and monsters and endless violence and computer generated graphics and ridiculous plots just leave me confused, disinterested and even angry. This movie turned out to be almost an exaggerated pastiche of all of those pet hates.

 

So I sat through this movie. Luckily, it was dark and our friend was across an aisle so I did not have to pretend that I was enjoying myself. I didn’t enjoy myself, at least not how I was supposed to. I spent the first part affirming all my prejudices. The plot is so ridiculous. The music is one long cliché after another. The violence is nauseating. How come somebody can suffer impossible injuries and survive, indeed recover in two minutes, while somebody else incurs rather less serious punishment and does die? And are we really supposed to find these awful jokes funny, such a the one about how somebody could not have commitment issues since they dated the previous boyfriend for over a hundred years?

 

Worst of all, how could anybody feel any empathy with any of these characters? They are sort of quasi humans, but obviously not real humans, so how can I project any human emotions onto them, even if these highly paid and highly trained actors are pretending as hard as they can with this junk?

 

Many of these prejudices remain and are even solidified after watching the movie. But after a while I did at least start to engage my sad brain. If I just treated the plot as a sideshow, I could try to admire the computer graphics as though admiring a painting in a gallery or a piece of modern music. Some of it was indeed quite cute on the giant screen. A Giotto or a Paolo Veronese is not depicting a credible scene either and doesn’t even offer perfect perspective, yet I claim to admire that art, so why not this art?

 

I still struggled with all the moralizing. Even though this movie was obviously trying its best to move past the narrative that America always wins in the end led by straight white men, in some ways that made it worse, because at least the traditional plot is not pretending to be more than it is. Here we had every diverse category under the sun, and some faux nuance about humanity learning steadily by recognizing its flaws, something that the all-seeing benevolent guides have to allow to happen despite the seemingly unnecessary suffering it causes.

 

After the movie I managed to keep my mouth shut in front of our friend, but could not put the film out of my mind once we got home. Then the next morning we got up and went to church.

 

The readings were all about the apocalypse, final judgment, omnipotent creator and the second coming. Father Boniface made a valiant attempt to preach on these subjects, but to my mind fell over at a hurdle towards the end of his chosen course. He tried to claim that although it was possible to lead a good and worthwhile life without any belief in an afterlife or higher purpose, somehow such lives lacked for something. I suppose he has to claim this, but I feel that it is perfectly possible to find a full purpose for a life without resorting to such stuff.

 

Father Boniface made reference to superhero movies during his homily, but even without that trigger I would have spent much of my Sunday comparing the two narratives of my weekend. On Saturday I watched an unbelievable plot filled with wild inconsistencies, driven by an arrogant urge to find comfort from feeling part of a species with a special purpose, and somehow deriving moral messages from selective logic. It left me feeling angry, superior and disdainful. On Sunday I listened to exactly the same thing, and, while I did not buy into the factual claims of the story, the experience left me feeling comforted. On Sunday I took what I liked and discarded the rest. On Saturday I could not really get past the discarding element.

 

It is strange how our attitude to the supernatural has evolved. Fifty years ago, and until now in many parts of the world, we were brainwashed and put under enormous peer pressure to believe Father Boniface’s story. Then the perpetrators, people like me, complained when people rebelled.

 

Now, in liberal societies at least, few consider themselves constrained by traditional religion, but somehow become attracted to the Marvel version, with all its escapism and none of the tough stipulations. And people like me complain again.

 

So I am in a small minority in both cases. In the case of these movies, that minority is tiny. Not only do I not appreciate the genre, I don’t even understand it; indeed I don’t even understand how anyone can appreciate it. I guess I have to accept that this all says a lot more about me than about everybody else, and that a lot of that is not flattering.

 

Even so, it does seem sad that this new religion has so many elements that seem detrimental to society. The portrayal of women, the glorification of violence and the lazy propaganda of the morals all jar. Perhaps most damaging is how this genre may incline us to recklessness. The impunity of the characters that we are supposed to resonate with must surely feed a dangerous sense of immortality and perhaps also selfishness.

 

I can bleat about this all I like, but then I have to confess that the damage still inflicted in the name of the former religion has been far more and remains far more even now. I can also bleat away, but clearly I am not going to change very much about all this. More likely I’ll just make myself more miserable and more intolerant and hence spread misery to others.

 

Altogether it proved to be rather humbling weekend. This is not the first occasion nor the only area of our lives where the woman we previously mentored now mentors us. And that is a wonderful blessing. Maybe Marvel could make a moral out of that? 

Covid and Consequences

 A couple of months into the pandemic, my daughter sent me a cartoon from a local paper. Two people were chatting. One asked the other what year some major event in their life occurred, perhaps a wedding. The other replied that it was 2020. Ah, said the first, I remember 2020; it was the first year of the pandemic.

 

At the time, the cartoon evoked a mixture of ridiculous humour and dread. We had navigated a couple of horrible months. We were starting to realise that this was not going away in a few weeks, as we all assumed at the start. But the idea that the pandemic would span multiple years still felt silly, though even the thought of it was scary.

 

Well, now 2021 is closing, and the cartoon, no doubt intended as a piece of silliness by its creator, has proven prophetic. Sure, we will all remember 2020, with its fear and its sirens and its temporary morgues and its ugly politics. But 2021 has been a pandemic year too, and probably 2022 will be as well. We read this week that Germany has its highest caseload since the pandemic started. Germany is not a vaccine laggard. And Delta has been public enemy number one for a long time now. Surely by now Epsilon and Zeta must be waiting in the wings with some superpower to frustrate our strategies.

 

I wish I was able to find more consistent and helpful information. I find the statistics of excess deaths to be very compelling, but these are not easy to come by. Counts of deaths attributed to Covid feel flaky to me, because the method by allocation must be subjective and open to political interference. I have a suspicion that excess deaths in much of the western world have converged to a rather low level by now, as vaccines and cures and hospital good practices do their thing. While some think flu fatalities will be especially high this winter, I suspect that the good hygiene practices we have all developed recently will hold it at bay.

 

But I don’t know. Excess deaths would be an excellent indicator, but only a few sources publish these and even The Economist has reduced the frequency of its excellent science based Covid reports. The data comparing Covid hospitalisation rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated seem to veer all over the place. I sense the official sources are nervous about telling us the truth. They want to keep the pressure up on the unvaccinated, so are reluctant to share news that would disincentivise anyone to get the shot or feed grist to the anti-vaccine misinformation mill.

 

As a result, I fear the rest of us may be taking precautions that inhibit our lives without giving many health benefits to society. True, most everyday precautions are not onerous. Wearing a mask in the theatre or supermarket is not tough. Frequent hand washing is simply good practice.

 

But other restrictions are more limiting. International travel rules are still confusing and feel unduly conservative. They start to feel analogous to the security precautions at airports. One person tries (and fails) to blow up a plane with a bomb in his shoe, so the whole of humanity have to sacrifice their time and their dignity every time they want to board a plane.

 

Another more selfish example is singing. Clearly singing is rather more dangerous than standing or speaking, because we expel air at others (as do fans at sports stadia, but that seems to be OK now, since big money and politician popularity require it). But the tendency to leave cautious practices in place is strong, and I suspect that is what is happening currently in many choirs. Before Covid, we would turn up for practice riddled with flu and nobody would consider that unusual. Now we are all sitting far apart and wearing uncomfortable and musically disastrous masks even if we are pretty sure that nobody within spitting distance is infected, and even if they are, our vaccinated bodies would probably shake off Covid rather easily.

 

In this environment, I actually think that the US and many European governments have done quite well. Clearly getting vaccines into arms has to be the top priority. Belatedly there is also some attention now to easier self-administered rapid testing. I suppose we have to accept some over cautious practices in the meantime.

 

In the politicised environment, I admire how Biden and many state and local politicians have handled the vaccine challenge. I still find it bizarre that arguably the single laudable achievement of the Trump presidency, the rapid investment and development of vaccines, has been undermined by his own acolytes.

 

Biden and others fist focussed on availability. Once this was universal, the message became one of encouragement, and even inducement. Only after these strategies were given time came pressure and mandates, and even then mandates often came with alternatives and plenty of time to comply. As a result, public opinion has swung behind mandates and against amateur medical experts and people equating freedom with their own selfishness. Aaron Rodgers, please shut up. This was always the most powerful incentive: by all means don’t take the vaccine, but don’t expect to be allowed to live a normal life if you hold out.

 

I wonder if there is one more weapon that by now could reasonably be used. As well as everything else, severe Covid is expensive. Hospitalisation costs a lot of money, and long Covid also harms the productivity of society over an extended period. Who should pay for this? In the US, most of us have health insurance, even if we have to be very careful to continually confirm that we are covered for what we need. So the state and the insurance companies pay most of the bill. But the insurance companies cannot print money, so if their outlays go up they have to increase premiums, paid by employers but ultimately the general public.

 

Nowadays smokers pay higher premiums for health insurance. People who frequently crash their fancy vehicles or get caught speeding or not wearing seat belts pay higher premiums for car insurance. What about those unvaccinated against Covid? Would it not be reasonable for their choice, a free one, to have a consequence in terms of its cost to society?

 

Gradually those in authority are putting reasonable pressure on people to get the shot. A health insurance levy would seem to me a fair next step, so long as there are waivers for genuine cases of medical unsuitability. My tolerance for these so-called freedom fighters is by now wearing rather thin. Most people in Africa still cannot get a vaccine for love or money, while here in the complacent rich world others could not be bothered to do their part.

 

There would also be a nice irony to an insurance penalty. Whose face do we often see on commercials for the State Farm insurance company, or least we used to before that company reconsidered its relationship? Why, it is Aaron Rodgers!  

Look Back in Anger

 Anger makes me angry. It is such a strong emotion but it achieves nothing. It lingers beyond any reasonable length of time and affects my ability to reason, my mood and the mood of those around me. I wish I did not get angry.

 

I suppose demonstrating anger can have some benefit on occasion. If I am interacting with somebody and I witness their anger, then I can modify my own behaviour, as well as making a mental note to try to avoid a similar situation in future.

 

It is also better to express anger than to bottle it up. Expressing it helps to work it through and move on more quickly, as well as giving useful signals to others. In a marriage, if nobody ever gets visibly angry, then perhaps there is a lot of resentment being built up and primed to explode into serious conflict.

 

I am not sure if I suffer more or less than others from anger, and also not sure if the emotion shows its ugly face more or less than when I was younger. I do know that I have learned a few tricks to mitigate it. Driving in New York is the most obvious one. I consciously set myself up in a cheerful mood when I am driving. It is one of my two driving rules, the other being never to be in a hurry. When I succeed, I can brush off the most terrible behaviour by other drivers with a snide remark (thankfully, one they will never hear) or a little joke. Safe in the bubble of my own vehicle, that helps avoiding any anger boiling up inside me.

 

I suspect I try the same approach outside the bubble, and there it is less successful. In an interaction with another, if I am becoming angry then there is a fair chance that the counterparty is becoming angry too. In that situation the snide remark or joke can be precisely the worst approach. I make that mistake time and again.

 

At work, I remember that I had an anger threshold. If anger was rising, I could give myself a little warning and cool it for a while. If that did not work, I would issue a warning to the room. Sadly, I was not very good at that, because people rarely seemed to notice. And that final trigger often came too late, only a few seconds before the explosion. There is little point of a warning when it arrives too late. Others were usually impaired by their own rising anger, and the explosion was rarely averted.

 

For the last couple of days I have suffered a simmering version of anger. There is no danger of an explosion. Indeed I understand that the anger is pointless. But I know it will only go away very slowly, and, while it is there, my disposition will be anything but sunny.

 

The trigger for this bout of anger is also rather typical. I don’t tend to become angry over injustice or misfortune. If I receive a parking ticket, even a harsh one, I can quietly process it by remembering the other hundred recent times when I had parked slightly illegally and got away with it.

 

No, this anger stems from politics. I was in a rather pointless discussion about Covid vaccinations. My basic opinion is that people should just shut up and get the vaccine, unless their medical or religious reason not to is unarguable. It is easy, it is free, it is painless, and it helps everybody, even if only marginally. There are too many amateur medics walking around spouting excuses. If this is about liberty, should we all stop obeying stop signs or driving on the correct side of the highway? Public safety requires rules, and it is no serious restriction of liberty to follow many of them.

 

My counterparty in the discussion sort of agreed with me, but then added that one reason that people were not getting vaccinated was that earlier the Democrats had sown distrust in the vaccine. Now I am fairly sure this argument is poppycock. The Democrats that I heard did no such thing, but did suggest, reasonably enough, that Trump was not trustworthy when touting remedies before medicine had supported them. Even if the claim is true, how could it be that the vaccination rate among Democrats is now much higher than among Republicans? It surely makes no sense that any Democrat campaign against trusting vaccines would be listened to more by people from the other party.

 

What a pointless thing this is to become angry about. The sad thing is that I can’t stop myself. Even sadder, I spend my life walking into similar situations. Isn’t that a definition of madness?

 

When I get angry, it lingers, and my anger spreads to encompass so many things. This week I am angry with myself for walking into a high anger-risk situation, then for becoming angry. I am angry with my wife for pointing this out, and with the counter party for not knowing better. But that is just the start. I am angry with Donald Trump, with Rupert Murdoch and the entire American or even global population for stalling the glorious progress of the enlightenment. Of course, all of it is pretty useless. It is true that great changes occur in society when people rise up, but the cost in anger is immense and I am not sure I can achieve much of that on my own.

 

My anger dies down after a while. After all West Ham beat Liverpool yesterday, and West Ham literally never beat Liverpool. But it takes longer than it should, and I have seen how some people become stuck in an angry attitude. It develops into rage and all logic goes out of the window, effective social life becomes impossible and everybody suffers. Go to a subway station in a poor part of the city and listen, and you will hear so much anger. There is also a macabre end game when anger becomes exhausted and is replaced by despair. At that point the mind expects the worst to happen, and is no longer angered by it but accepts it stoically like a zombie. Tragically, for many in twelve-step programs, this predicament is the best possible outcome.

 

I know anger is harmful, but is it becoming more prevalent? I know it feels that way, especially in the USA, but I have no reliable benchmark to prove it. What does seem to be clear is that one half of the political spectrum and most of the media provoke anger as their prime weapon to spur support and attention, and that modern technology makes that easier than ever. In this situation it would seem to be likely that anger has intensified.

 

What can be done? At the level of society, I can think of very little. It is good that the psychology profession has developed anger management therapies, but surely these can only effect a small segment of any population? For the storm of political anger, we probably have to ride it out and wait for education and technology to catch up as antidotes, but that will surely be a long wait.

 

At the individual level, the remedies are obvious but hard to grasp. Emotions are emotions and expressing them is better than bottling them up, so our best hope is to try to avoid trigger situations and then to use calming techniques once the anger has taken hold. I can’t claim to be very effective at either of these aids.

 

I am attracted to trigger situations ever so easily, and a part of me does not want to change that. We learn by engaging and provoking risky situations, and curiosity and learning are not things I want to temper. I might educate some others too. But I should certainly pull back more often – and a lifetime of failure should not defer me from continuing to try.

 

For me, calming techniques can alleviate symptoms, but a calm environment is really the only cure. I am lucky enough to enjoy that blessing for most of the time. Church helps, and so does volunteering. I am surrounded by many kind and calm people, notably my wife. This last observation is a salve for me, but only makes me feel sadder for those angry people in the subway. Anger is truly a blight for many, and the road to healing feels slow.

 

Now I have one more thing to be angry about.        

Correcting Inequality

 It is eleven years now since I implemented my decision to retire at fifty. At the time there were two major potential doubts, neither of which I fully thought through.

 

The first was that I would be bored out of my mind, miss the smart company and intellectual challenge of work, and somehow suffer pain from a bruised ego. Well, as it transpired, I need not have worried about that. I have found plenty to do and enjoyed exploring new pathways without the constraints of an employment contract and salary as primary considerations. I have discovered that people without fancy degrees can be invigorating company as well. And my ego feels just fine, thank you very much.

 

The second doubt concerned money. Would I run out? Would I have to constrain the lifestyle of my family beyond comfortable limits or even face the indignity of having to seek out paid work again when my peers are starting to enjoy retirement? Well, that one worked out well enough too, at least so far. Contrary to my expectation, I have not become poorer but richer, without putting much effort into it. Just by putting my capital assets to work a little bit I have created an income to more or less cover expenditure.

 

Thinking about this, it is really a scandal. I suppose I did subject myself to much arduous travel and some corporate indignities in building up my capital, so a bit of income as it gently winds down might be considered a fair return. But it is not winding down. I am living a stress free life, without much attempt to economise and even less effort at hustling, and my capital is not winding down at all. Perhaps this has been an especially lucky decade for my experiment, with no inflation and a long stock market boom, but I sense the exercise would not have led to much hardship in earlier decades either.

 

My capital grew primarily as a result of pay from my many years at Shell. I have shared before how I benefited from the revolution following the Great Wrong Turning around 1980. In the late 1980’s I regularly found 20% pay rises and stock option grants thrust into my arms, just as Thatcher’s government was reducing the tax burden for higher earners. Then I went abroad, and that continuing effect was multiplied by wildly generous expatriate benefits.

 

I suppose I worked hard and made a few sacrifices and even learned to be an effective corporate politician and sound manager despite my geeky (marginally autistic?) personality. But I should not polish that ego too much. I got a good job at Shell because I went to Cambridge. My path to Cambridge was eased by my parents splashing out on expensive private schooling. My mum helped further by paying for the deposit on the apartment I bought as soon as I started out in London. I had more than enough of a following wind.

 

Much is written about inequality of income, and rightly so. I remember a lovely quote from the Thatcher days that it seemed amazing that the prevailing thinking was that the best way to incentivise those on high pay was to give them more, but the best way to incentivise everybody else was to pay them less. That more or less sums up what happened, starting in the USA and spreading everywhere else.

 

The Economist and others like to point out the inequality of income is not actually getting worse. They show charts that include the effect of government transfers and taxes, and indeed the trend has flattened, especially if you start your time series after 2000 rather than in 1980. It feels a weak argument that something unjust has not become more unjust. As humanity develops, the trend line should be to reduce inequality of income.

 

But focus on inequality of income, laudable as it is, misses the wider point. Imagine two people with the same income, one with significant capital and the other none or even some debt. The first will buy a house and see its value expand, the second will always rent. The first will live in an area with enough supermarkets, little crime and good schools. The first will have no trouble finding side hustles, taking loans from banks and taking modest risks. The second has no ability to make such long-term choices; making rent is always the primary focus, and a mishap such as a car accident or medical event can be a catastrophe, while our first person can use savings or call in favours from friends to get past such moments.

 

The income disparity figures are unjust, but the bigger issue is disparity in wealth. And wealth begets wealth. Even if incomes were equalised, the wealthy would get richer and the poor poorer, only not as quickly. The key equation of Thomas Piketty claims that the return on capital will over time exceed the economic growth rate.

 

This has been my lucky surprise since retirement. I have lived the life of Riley and got richer, while many have struggled mightily and still accumulated no wealth at all. Yet some of my political peers and many of the public cannot see beyond the extensive current job openings and conclude that the poor must be lazy and undeserving.

 

I find this leads to a clear conclusion in public policy. To really address inequality, the focus must be on taxation of wealth and income from capital. It is true that slavery and Jim Crow and Redlining have locked out much of the population from any chance to accumulate wealth. Reparation in cash or subsidies or quotas will not fix this. The real issue is that the beneficiaries of those injustices acquired wealth, and that wealth continues to grow across generations. It applies to individuals, to communities and to whole nations, and it is unjust.

 

I am not a communist. I love markets and wealth creation and recognise that these good things have catalysed wonderful human development. Eliminating income inequality entirely would be disastrous, and building capital is a laudable aim. It just should not be so easy.

 

When I was growing up, taxes on income were too high. But I also recall that taxes on capital were higher still, and this good thing has reversed since the Great Wrong Turning. Even without resorting to trusts and offshore funds and obscure vehicles, capital is now taxed at the same or lower levels than income in many countries.

 

There are simple fixes available. Land and property should incur a larger share of the total tax burden than today. Capital should incur a tax a few percentage points higher than income, with lower thresholds. Capital should be periodically revalued to enable gains to be taxed more speedily. I can check the value of my shares every day, but do not need to pay tax on gains until I sell them. I would also favour a 3% wealth tax above a threshold. Politically tougher and harder to implement, there should be a global crackdown on avoidance vehicles.

 

But for me the most important change of all relates to inheritance. My parents gave me plenty of advantages during their lifetimes, starting with a stable home, an expensive education and valuable seed money. Surely that is enough advantage to be gained merely from the biological accident of birth? But one reason my capital has continued to grow has been via an estate legacy from my mother. Now what did I do to deserve that exactly? Perhaps the most invidious campaign by Republicans since 1980 has been to label inheritance tax as a tax on death. It is time for a serious campaign to reverse this.

 

I love The Economist to death, but they are curiously silent on these matters. Any mention of capital taxes comes with whining about how little they would raise and how hard they are to enforce, along with the trope about disincentives for creative enterprise. Until they and others change their tone on this, I won’t accept that they have really got the message about inequality.

 

Similarly, it is noteworthy that the biggest roadblocks to Biden’s laudable plan to develop human infrastructure in the US come on the funding side, especially when capital or wealth are involved. Should we be surprised when we observe the average wealth of a congressperson, or of the corporate lobbyists swirling around them? This is a tough pill to swallow, but any talk of true equality of opportunity is empty without it.        

Less Boss

 When I starting writing blogs, thirteen years ago now, I was a manager in a large corporation, and my most common topic was trying to help other employees to understand how their leaders were thinking and to give practical advice to succeed in a corporate environment.

 

Time and again I was drawn to the subject of The Boss. In my own experience, the effectiveness of my boss was the prime determinant of my own contentment at work. I took to giving presentations that demonstrated this point, and then advised people how to handle good and bad bosses, and to be better bosses themselves. If I were ever to write a business book, the title would be The Boss.

 

So it came as a pleasant surprise last week to read the Bartleby column in The Economist. I always enjoy Bartleby. In a clever innovation a couple of years ago, the magazine started it as a new column within its business section. Whereas all the other articles in the section wrote of strategy, acquisitions, profits and marketing, Bartleby wrote about people. The initial Bartleby was a grizzled corporate warrior called Philip Coggan who I imagined to be a bit like myself, curious but cynical: I enjoyed one of his books recently as well. He has now moved on, and I believe a series of guest Bartleby’s are currently writing. The material is still very strong.

 

The spin in this particular Bartleby article was about corporate delayering, a major trend of the last twenty years or so and one that I experienced myself at Shell. Many corporations started with a mindset that was rather military, with very firm fixed hierarchies and little delegation. Spans of control were small and clarity and expectation treasured. A modern buzzword, accountability, was assured in this type of organisation.

 

But the weaknesses of a hierarchical organization became apparent. It is slow, because any decision has to travel up and down a line. It is also, by its very nature, full of silos, so cross-functional teamwork is difficult to achieve.

 

As an aside, I always found it funny when I used to carry out staff surveys. Often the two most plaintive cries were that the organisation required stronger accountability but fewer silos. Nobody seemed to fathom that these two goals are more or less directly in contradiction. If you improve one, you invariably damage the other.

 

Anyway, businesses around the millennium swallowed the new logic of delayering, and, as tends to happen, took a good thing to a ridiculous extreme. In common with others, I often found myself with multiple bosses and an unmanageable number of direct reports, often spread across many countries. I developed a new metric to define how impossible a job was; multiply the number of bosses by the number of subordinates. My own personal best was in the thirties, but I know someone who achieved three figures.

 

Bartleby went down a similar logical path and indeed reached a very neat mathematical conclusion. A direct consequence of delayering for all employees is Less Boss.

 

Probably our first reaction to a world with Less Boss is to cheer. After all, what do bosses generally do beyond getting in our way and micromanaging us? Less Boss must imply more freedom, and freedom must be good, surely?

 

Predictably enough, things turned out very differently. Bartleby pointed out another corollary: having fewer bosses means that most bosses have less experience of the function when asked to manage senior staff. That is one reason why typically they were not very good at it.

 

Oh Bartleby, I can think of many more. Indeed I could even write a book about it! Start with the fact that leading a team is often a result of seniority and of success in technical fields. Many of these people appreciate the recognition, and the extra money, but have little appetite for being a line manager – indeed they resent the time lost from doing the technical things they love.

 

The wrong people are recruited for the wrong reasons and then they are given no help. Training in line management is non-existent, and good role models are few and far between. Line management is a subtle art, requiring patience and a variety of approaches to different situations and with different subordinates. Few can progress beyond a standard approach that enables survival but achieves little else.

 

Then delayering comes along and makes all of these problems a lot worse. The required time even for minimal line management was never fully appreciated. I learned this in reverse when my final job at Shell had no subordinates at all. I could not believe how much time this liberated, so much so that I became bored and even lost confidence because I could not accept that I was doing an adequate job without daily pressure.

 

Processes designed for an era of hierarchy were not modified when the structure changed, so line managers became swamped with requirements to remain involved in things subordinates could easily handle. The whole legal and compliance side only becomes tougher and takes a lot of time. A significant fraction of employees seem to be high maintenance types these days, and everybody needs more help and support navigating careers in a less structured environment. Then there is much more turnover than before, especially external turnover, and that places further strains on managers.

 

So we all end up receiving Less Boss and Bad or Unqualified or Uninterested Boss just at the time we need More and Better Boss. At Shell, I was first unlucky, suffering a breakdown largely because I imploded under the strain, but then became lucky as I rebuilt my career on a less ambitious trajectory. I decided to be a good boss first and foremost, and fortuitously ended up in a role with little pressure to do anything else but lots of potential to develop others. In the sea of line management blind mediocrity, being the one-eyed man was within my capability and my reputation flourished and good people flocked to me.

 

Bartleby’s simple mathematical proof of Less Boss allows me to see some of things we got right in that era, and also point to a more general way forward. Perhaps most important, I delegated, or at least shared, a lot of team building. The team helped to set standards and even led recruitment, so we always had momentum and peer pressure. Everybody knew I would be supportive when opportunities came to move on. I actively encouraged people to deal directly with the boss of my boss and with my peers.

 

I am not claiming miraculous foresight here. These moves started as survival strategies and experiments and I was lucky. But I can see now how they are good examples of how to escape Bartleby’s trap of Less Boss. Increasing company-wide delegated authorities would also help. So would a more analytical approach to where delayering can work and where it is doomed, but in terms of jobs and of people.

 

Thank you Bartleby, that business book I will probably never write has acquired another neat analytical lens, and perhaps even a catchy title.    

Supply Chains before our very Eyes

 When I first came to New York, a period coinciding with being time rich for the first time in my life, I drifted into a pleasant morning routine. On days when I needed to shop for groceries I would arrive soon after the store opened, to marvel at how short the lines were and how quickly I could complete my chore. Even now I pity the poor souls obliged to shop at these establishments at weekends, when the line can snake half way around the store.

 

There was a bit of a contradiction in having completed the chore quickly and efficiently, because in my new life I had no particular need to have done that, since the rest of a lazy day loomed ahead. So I would reward myself by visiting Panera bread for a relaxed café latte and a bagel. Over time, I continued my habit of rapid early shopping, but usually dispensed with Panera, mainly because I linked my consumption there with my expanding waistline. First the bagel had to go, and then I resolved to drink but one coffee per day, and, once our home espresso machine became as good as Panera’s, I reverted to drinking it at home.

 

There are two Paneras near me, one situated above Costco and the other close to Trader Joe’s. I became used to observing my surroundings. I concluded that both branches were well managed, with happy and efficient staff. From my years of experience working with petrol stations, I knew the signs to look for, and both Paneras scored high marks. They each had their distinctive morning clientele, and they were well set up to serve them, knowing the products to have in stock and the number of staff to have on hand to avoid long wait times.

 

This changed suddenly with the onset of the pandemic. I recall visiting a different Panera on Long Island early on, and wondering if nuclear Armageddon had arrived such was the atmosphere in the deserted café. Panera is exactly the sort of establishment that people cut completely from their routine, never being necessary and being rather heavy in human contact. The cafés stayed open, to their credit, but must have lost a lot of money for franchisees and the host brand.

 

Last week I found myself in Panera once again. My new habit has been to shop during the special senior early opening hours that both Costco and Trader Joe’s started, now with the added benefit that avoiding crowds might save me from a deadly disease. But, reasonably enough, as things are returning to normal, both chains are gradually eliminating this perk for seniors. I can only imagine that in 2020 the local budgets were so completely shot to pieces that some extra costs seemed to make little difference, but now as 2021 progresses budgetary pressures make sense once again.

 

So I was caught out, arriving at Costco soon after nine to find the place closed and finding I had an hour to fill. I did not have my newspaper with me, but, even so, a nostalgic visit to Panera beckoned invitingly.

 

But what a sad experience was awaiting me! The tables, closed off during most of the pandemic, lay open and inviting, but in the end I no need to regret leaving my newspaper at home because I never made it into the sanctuary of the table area. Instead, life became clogged up in the service area.

 

Queuing to order in Panera has become progressively more annoying over the years as the chain has sought to enter the digital age. Before there was a single line of people placing orders, so a good manager ensured enough staff and the wait was predictable. Then they introduced computer screens for some to place orders, which seemed to increase waiting times for traditional folk like me. But then they introduced an app so people could order remotely and, worse, those orders seemed to take priority over we luddites. So now we wait longer to order and have to wait even longer for our order to be prepared.

 

I could accept that before the pandemic, but not last week. I reached the front of the ordering line quickly enough, but could already see computer screen listing six or eight orders as under preparation. I ordered my latte and found a quiet part of the collection area, expecting a long wait. But clearly the servers were unable to process orders as quickly as they were arriving, no doubt many from the dreaded app, and the list of orders under preparation grew longer and longer. I did finally reach the top of the list, but by then I counted sixteen items beneath mine.

 

Through the pandemic I have found that most people find it relatively easy to remember to keep apart from each other. However, I have noticed two exceptions. When people are drunk or angry all concepts of social distancing are forgotten. I am not pointing fingers here – I am as guilty as anybody else.

 

The waiting area in Panera proved an instructive example. As the number of people waiting for their order increased, it became harder to stay apart. But we would have managed, except for the fact that many of the people were getting angry at the long wait. They pushed to the front, regardless of who else might be there, and started remonstrating with the poor servers, serving only to confuse and delay things further. Once I finally had my latte in hand, I departed the store as quickly as possible and drunk it after joining the growing line downstairs waiting for Costco to open.

 

Those minutes in line allowed me to think about what I had just experienced, and I found it a microcosm of the difficulties facing the world economy just now. We hear on the news about supply chain issues bedevilling many sectors, but sometimes it is not easy to bring these down to an understandable level.

 

The key concept is predictability. Twenty years ago I was presented a computer system that was to be linked to all the larger Shell shops in the world and could be used to manage inventory and staffing. By using the past as a guide for strong confidence intervals for the future, the system would drive out costs. I am delighted we did not buy it at the time because the technology was not mature enough, but now this is how most retail businesses function, including Panera.

 

By the pandemic threw it all into chaos. The algorithm kept guessing how many people like me would show up at which hours on Wednesday mornings and what sort of products they would buy, but suddenly the guesses became so poor as to be useless. Inventory piled up before recovering too slowly once customers started returning. Staffing models led to surpluses then shortages.

 

I expect my two franchisees will have lost a lot of money, unless Panera bailed them out. Probably they surrendered their agreements and Panera found it hard to recruit replacements, perhaps falling back on existing franchisees taking on extra outlets and appointing managers. These people did not have the skills, training or motivation, just at the moment when smart overriding of the algorithms became vital. Everything fell apart. I witnessed the result during my sad visit.

 

Even when the need for extra staff will have been correctly analysed, fewer people wanted to work in a customer-facing environment doing hours that conflicted with childcare needs. Maybe some no longer needed extra hustles while federal money was swelling their bank accounts, and others had left New York completely to save rent by staying upstate with their parents.

 

So the result was plain to witness, even in a relatively simple business like a branch of Panera. Now multiply that by hundreds or thousands or even millions, add in complexities like shipping and international duties (not to mention Brexit, you poor Brits), and, rather than being bemused at how things are collapsing, instead we should marvel that anything is functioning at all.

 

Old-fashioned sorts will hark back to days before predictive algorithms. I find it more comforting to be impressed by what those algorithms can achieve nowadays in normal times, and continuing to hope that those normal times might resume. Heck, then I might even reinstate my luxurious morning routines.