The Future of Work

 A recent special in The Economist painted a notably optimistic picture about the future of work. Largely limited in its scope to developed countries, it pointed to a number of trends and data points to support a theory that before the pandemic things were getting better for most workers and that the pandemic, while disastrous for many, might accelerate some even more beneficial changes. By and large I found the report quite compelling, and a few of its insights very helpful.

 

One starting point of the report was to look at employment trends in the years immediately before the pandemic. In most industrialised countries unemployment was low and falling, real wages were rising at all levels but especially at the bottom of the wage ladder, and job satisfaction was increasing.

 

While this is true and encouraging, one of my main problems with the report is its choice of starting point, a favourite trick of all statisticians wishing to make an argument. Inequality was indeed falling in 2016-19, but this can be as a minor correction after years of rising inequality. Whether you start around the financial crisis or go back as far as 1980, it becomes less tenable to point to a gain of a percent or two as a triumph for unbridled capitalism and trickle down theory.

 

Even so, we on the left have to acknowledge that capitalism is the force that creates innovation that leads to opportunity for many and the chance for more fulfilling lives for most of us. It is galling to admit the truth that the best recent years for the low-waged came under Trump and May/Johnson and despite regressive tax policies.

 

To its credit, the report does acknowledge that leftist policies may have played a part in the revival, notably minimum wages, long derided as job killers on the right but now accepted as smart by all but the most rabid.

 

The Economist report discusses automation extensively, referring to the many times in history that pessimists have predicted the collapse of employment prospects owing to various technological advances, most recently AI and robots. We are reminded that new generations machines do indeed remove jobs, but that so far new jobs have been created elsewhere in the economy to compensate. Sometimes the new jobs are made possible by the machines. Usually the new jobs are more fulfilling than the jobs they replace.

 

If we were not so wedded to the idea of work as always a good thing and full employment a key policy goal, then I think we would be able to celebrate automation even more. Who wants to spend forty hours of every week flipping burgers or stacking boxes? In earlier days, a lot of work was downright unhealthy, such as mining, and led generations to early graves.

 

The only reason people flip burgers is to earn enough money to live a decent life. Well, can we not let a machine flip the burgers and either find different work, divide the remaining work more equally or find alternative compensation for those displaced?

 

The same argument can be used to defend offshoring. Trade is all about specialisation. If workers in a less developed country can improve their life with work that is no longer viable in a developed one, then everybody can gain.

 

The report is clear that the pandemic has been a catastrophe in any aspects of work. Many lost good jobs and are still out of work. Some are fearful of returning to work or have been partially disabled by long covid. Many others have been forced to continue working at great risk to their health, and indeed many have died.

 

There is also a widened cleavage in society between those forced to work at dangerous jobs and those now able to be well paid working safely in their homes, many of whom now rarely see their less fortunate brethren. Historically such shifts have presaged civil unrest.

 

But the report finds evidence that the good jobs have improved. People are saved commutes and many like a hybrid experience. The trend for improving job satisfaction has accelerated. A hypothesis is that the pandemic have forced manages to do a better job, being more diligent about communication and engagement. Seeing each other in our homes may have humanised us too.

 

Taking a longer perspective, I would also argue that many lower paid jobs have improved as well. On the left we love to hate Amazon, with its pay by the hour and defined expectations. But Amazon pays fairly and clear expectations are good. Keeping a job with Amazon does not require accepting leers from peers or other abuse from a boss or having to do the well-connected long-serving guy’s shift for him, or accepting cash so the bosses can fiddle the taxman.

 

Another radical shift I would advocate is that all jobs be like gig jobs. We can all negotiate our hours week-by-week and year by year. We would not have any tenure, but could also have more autonomy over our careers. This would help people build families and be better for women and working pensioners.

 

A gig approach would also be a great way to engineer mobility. One issue in today’s economy is that people struggle to move quickly enough where the jobs are. People will not risk moving when in a unionised, tenured, protected job, but are in the wrong place with the wrong skills when that job vanishes. The report highlights Denmark, where a tough regime with low employee tenure is matched by generous support for the jobless seeking new work.

 

The Economist reportalso comments on public policy. Even in the few weeks since publication, its main claim has been vindicated. The claim is that the pandemic has opened up possibilities that had been closed for forty years. The vindication has come in the series of transformative policies now with a chance of progress in the US congress. The cash payments and the infrastructure plans have drawn most comment and are welcome enough, but for me the biggest news is elsewhere. The child tax credit, family leave and subsidised childcare and boost for carers would move the US at least some of the way towards European good practice and might signal a welcome new normal in family and welfare policy.

 

Excited as I am about this, part of me wonders why Clinton and Obama did so little. With one party committed to an absence of government, the inaction of Clinton and Obama has led to forty years of regression. The pandemic is part of the answer, because it has awakened the general population and spurred innovation by economists. But another enabler has been the era of ultra-low interest rates, making debt less of a constraint to central bankers. It is neat, because in a way the corporates and bankers have been hoist by their own petard. Having created a debt-lenient environment for their own benefit, central bankers have belatedly caught up.

 

I do wish the Biden team were rather more imaginative. To be fair, they probably only have two years to make a difference. But old-fashioned protectionism, support for restrictive unions and hurling cash at sectors is not ideal. Much of the cash for the care sector may be wasted or purloined by suppliers. I still believe Reimbursement for Care would work better. It would target precisely the same goals, but use the market and individual incentive to drive radically improved outcomes.

 

Despite my reservations, I was encouraged by the Economistreport. Perhaps the generation entering the workforce really do have fulfilling careers to look forward to, and not just the privileged few who can saunter through college and into protected professions. Such progress is not before time.           

The Football Fiasco

 It has been a dramatic week in the world of European soccer. On Sunday twelve of the biggest clubs announced a breakaway league, but the adverse reaction from fans and everybody else led their plan to collapse by Wednesday.

 

The background is evergreen tension between the wishes of the biggest clubs and the various governing bodies. Fans and governments tend to prefer stability and tradition, and also have to ensure that the game is nurtured at grass roots level. The big clubs and star players want money; an entertaining competitive product for TV with familiar teams is the recipe to maximize revenue.

 

This has always been a messy compromise. National leagues have so far been sacrosanct. Rules and marketing practices have evolved slowly. The European dimension beloved of the biggest has been addressed via a midweek tournament called the Champions League, which is neither a league nor for exclusively for champions. The result has been too many matches, jeopardising player health and squeezing international schedules and domestic cups.

 

The big clubs have been angling for more, and a long negotiation has been reaching a unsatisfactory conclusion through a further expansion of the Champions League. The big clubs, considering themselves untouchable, were using brinkmanship to get the best deal. At the last minute somebody stood up to them and that caused them to injudiciously play their nuclear card. It blew up in their faces. Billionaires have been humiliated for ridiculous comments such as that they were “saving football”.

 

Interestingly, the part of the plan that riled everybody else was that the new league would be a closed shop with limited promotion and relegation. It is no coincidence that Americans now own many of the big clubs, a place where the practice of franchises without relegation is normal. Owners argue that they cannot invest for long-term development without certainty of their place. This is poppycock. Did Nokia and Blackberry have guaranteed positions in the mobile phone industry? Would there have been more investment and innovation if that had been the case? Of course not.

 

As a keen watcher of sports on both sides of the Atlantic, I can see advantages in both sets of practices. It is shame that neither seems to learn from the other. American sports benefit from rules to create parity and from innovative ways to make games more entertaining such as playoffs and a bias for offence. The young do like shorter games with more click bait highlights. The European practice of promotion and relegation is its strongest aspect, because it gives everybody hope and fear and because it makes more games meaningful. In Europe we do not see the ugly practice of “tanking”.

 

I think soccer has the opportunity to embrace most of these good practices without sacrificing its core. Rather than bastardising the Champions League further, I think the time has come to make the top primary weekend leagues European. At the same time the game can embrace rule changes and structures to add entertainment.

 

My European structure would create three leagues of eighteen teams to be played on a home and away basis on weekends from September until April. Those fifty-four teams would no longer play in domestic leagues, which would become like lower divisions. Extensive play offs in April and May would allow a second champion to be crowned (and more high profile games for television), but also engineer promotion and relegation between the European league division and between the third European division and national leagues.

 

The midweek schedule immediately becomes lighter, giving space for winter breaks, rest and international matches, as well as national and European knockout cup tournaments like a revived FA Cup and the former European Cup.

 

The big boys would have high profile and meaningful games every week, but without guarantees against relegation. TV would happily pay for an attractive slate of games but should be forced to cover the lower European leagues as well, just as they now agree to cover women’s leagues.

 

For the strong countries like England, more than half of the current premier league would usually qualify for one of the three European leagues, and the top national league would be an upgraded version of today’s Championship. For lower profile countries like Belgium or Romania, only the top few teams would qualify and the national leagues would look much as they do today, but with an extra incentive at the top end, helpful for teams like Celtic or Porto, who currently play in leagues with little competition.

 

The only downside that I see is that fans will have to travel further for matches, but with Ryanair and Easyjet perhaps that is not an issue. An alternative would be to split European leagues two and three as 2A and 2B on a regional basis to reduce long distance travel.

 

Then the new European leagues should embrace the idea of entertainment over tradition. One reason this does not happen is that traditionalists like to compare statistics historically. Baseball is so obsessed with this that it changes more slowly than other US games, and its audience has diminished as a result. For baseball the pandemic was a godsend: it enabled smart changes such as shortening extra innings games and seven innings double headers. Only the diehard would relish games of six hours and 18 innings, and thankfully they don’t happen any more.

 

I would fractionally increase the size of goals to favour the offence: the goalless draw is the single biggest impediment to the take up of soccer in the USA. I would have a shortened penalty shoot out at the end of each draw too and bonus points for goals. An example could be: six for a win plus a bonus for three goals; two for a draw plus one for winning the shootout plus one each for two or more goals; one point for scoring a goal in a loss.

 

Next I would have a stopping clock to reduce time wasting, and even a rule stipulating that there must be a shot after a full two minutes in possession. Four quarters of thirty minutes each would please the TV companies anxious to show advertisements.

 

In a different innovation, I would introduce a salary cap. Currently in the English premier league the top teams have a wage bill that is 8-10 times that of the minnows: it is no wonder so many games are mismatches. As well as parachute payments to cushion the blow for relegated teams, I would have “expansion” subsidies for promoted ones, to ensure some sort of parity.

 

Fewer games, more quality, more meaningful games between closely matched teams, more match ups between giants, fewer injuries, more goals, less passing for minutes on end around the half way line, the excitement of shoot outs and play offs, retention of hope for the smallest and fear for the largest. Who could complain at that delightful menu? It might even be enough to “save football”, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to see Real Madrid relegated every so often?

We Deserve Nationalism

 For a family living in the US, we view a surprisingly large number of BBC programmes. For the most part these are cheap imports bought by PBS, who stick to their format of having no adverts but as a consequence have no money either, so make pitifully few programmes of their own, and spend nearly as much time begging as mainstream channels do on advertising.

 

Sadly, the British imports are about as good as it gets here, if you discount sport and platforms like Netflix or Hulu. We may choose to watch an episode of As Time Goes By from 1990 for the tenth time, but that is an improvement on America’s Got talent or Yet Another Routine Terribly Acted Crime Show with no Character Development. Sometimes it does feel as though we are living in a time warp – I think we may be about five years behind on Midsummer Murders.

 

One bright spot on PBS is a one-hour evening news programme, though I do think it is time for Judy Woodruff to retire and hand over to the excellent Amna Nawaz. The news hour avoids sensationalism and covers foreign stories in some depth. In the Trump era they did occasionally fall into the trap of focusing on his daily horror show, but Trump made that trap hard to avoid. Sometimes it feels as though there is no news nowadays, deprived as we are of Trump’s one-man show.

 

To its credit PBS also shows a half hour world news bulletin from the BBC, a strong programme that complements the news hour well. But last Friday night a strange thing happened. I tuned in, expecting to see the perennially chirpy Katty Kay, but instead found a sombre broadcast from several dull old white men in dark suits and black ties. Prince Philip had died.

 

Even half an hour of this coverage was too much for me. It was like being transported fifty years, before even As Time Goes By and more like Pathé news. All other news was blacked out. Long fawning obituaries followed long platitudes about how sad the Queen must be feeling. Had these people never seen The Crown? What about all Philip’s love children: weren’t they sad as well?

 

Apparently the BBC received a record number of complaints about its coverage, and quite right too. I suppose they were caught by Catch 22, because anything lighter would be attracted the ire of Colonel Blimp, and Colonel Blimp often writes to his Tory MP.    

 

The experience made me reflect about how far we have come as humanity and how far we still have to travel. Twenty years ago few would have complained, because the alternative TV fare might have been equally bland. We have been watching Peaky Blinders and The Great recently, and the crude and irreverent portrayal of history is so refreshing compared with Pride and Prejudice and its ilk. But Prince Philip dies and we are thrust back into the past. We hear of a lifetime of service and the grace of God and all the propaganda that used to be in our history books and brought back memories of singing the national anthem and Onward Christian Soldiers in freezing school halls.

 

Somehow we are supposed to still accept this guff. Life is simple. The British are good and everybody else tries hard but doesn’t reach our standards. We are known around the world for our sense of fair play. The old days were wonderful. Our army would never commit atrocities. Churchill is only a hero. Slavery was mainly about others and it was we Brits that got rid of it. The empire developed the world. The British Isles are a natural union of like-minded nations of shared values and mutual respect (except, temporarily, for the Irish).

 

Somehow all this persists. It seems to be a good substitute for serious thought, rather like a Hollywood blockbuster. It seems to win votes, and sell papers. It might feel like a threadbare coat, one where we must be careful to pick the frayed edges in case it falls apart but one that still keeps us cosy and reminds us of mum.

 

Of course we Brits think we are unique in all this, in fact we have to think that or it would all be exposed as ridiculous. But here is a secret. It is the same everywhere, to a greater or lesser extent.

 

In the US, no politician can wear a suit that does not have the flag displayed on its lapel. The most respected institution by far, admittedly among an unappetising bunch, is the military. Nobody stops to consider just how truly dreadful the track record of the military has been since 1945, both in its commanders’ choices and its execution. This week the announcement of an Afghan pull out, after twenty years of death and destruction and waste of precious treasure, was greeted with a collective shrug, even though nobody could think of anything positive the escapade had actually achieved. I have no problem with lauding veterans, as long as we remember to laud care workers as well, which we never do except for a few weeks in a pandemic.

 

There are still no go areas for the media. The Economist, brilliant in every other respect, still publishes its monthly rubbish from MI5. The news hour, balanced in most fields, did not pause to consider just how shameful it is that an ally, one that receives more aid than anybody else despite being quite rich, should brazenly raid a facility of another country, and then show off about it. How can the US lecture China about values and a rules based world when that is not challenged at all?

 

It is not just nation states; it is the churches as well. We listen to a gospel in which the primary message to love all others, and ten minutes later we pray, but only for our own tribe. How the Evangelicals can attend church with any sort of clear conscience is entirely beyond me. Yet on balance the Christians are probably less hypocritical than most others. Going back to Prince Philip, tomorrow his funeral service will make some very dodgy claims indeed about Britain and its royalty.

 

Does all this matter? Surely it is harmless, even good, if we all feel a bit proud of our nations and show respect for historical tradition? I believe it matters a lot. How can we learn across cultures if we are all stuck in our complacent bubbles? How can we take the best from different systems if each frames the other as an evil mortal enemy? How can we respond rationally to a shift in prevailing power? How can we disarm and stay safe while we glorify a militaristic approach? How can we effectively deal with the increasing list of issues that span the globe, such as economics, climate, cyber regulation and pandemics?

 

There I another specific risk. One large part of the political spectrum is tempted to build a platform around this stuff. It is far from coherent, and a situation develops where it becomes the entire platform. They then have no choice but to amplify it and stick with it. This is called nationalism. We have seen in the 1930’s how this can spread like a cancer, and it is happening again. This is how world wars happen.

 

There are reasons for optimism. Firstly, we can celebrate the EU a truly extraordinary human achievement and something to build on. Then there are many trends that work against nationalism, including education, the end of blind deference and reduction in class barriers, globalisation, mass mingling via migration, social media and sharing of cultures. Going back to PBS, we see more and more thoughtful series with subtitles, opening windows onto other viewpoints and cultures.

 

The nationalists are loud and proud and dangerous. The rest of us must counter this with our own pride, pride in humanity. We have ample weapons if we pause to notice them. If we stay lazy and smug and silent, we deserve the ugly consequences.   

The Cautionary Tale of Andrew Cuomo

 There are a few routes to success as a politician. Sadly, most of them crowd out the people who might make the best politicians. Andrew Cuomo represents a good example of one archetype. He is not the worst leader the world has ever seen, but he has flaws common to that archetype, and these have recently been cruelly exposed.

 

It is not easy to succeed at politics, whether local or national, large or small, democratic or autocratic. Even those who succeed struggle to sustain that success. Enoch Powell, a classic example of a different archetype, is credited with quipping that all political careers end in failure.

 

To understand why success is tough to achieve and usually ephemeral, we need to try to understand personalities and systems. To even want to be a politician requires an unusual personality type. It needs supreme self-confidence, resilient against constant attack. It needs some vision, a platform that can carry a message that will inspire followers. It requires the ability to lead a team, involving detailed planning, coaching, courage and much besides. And it needs some charisma to convey a message of content and of trust.

 

In most societies, success requires lots of other things as well, factors which narrow down the list of candidates and eliminate most of the potential talent. In the USA especially, it requires vast sums of money. Donors are needed to build and sustain name recognition, and investments of time and money are needed that are beyond ordinary people. Once a reputation has been established, the investment of time does not go away but it does become possible to become rich – which provides its own pitfalls.

 

Another prerequisite is often the head start from a network or position. It helps to have royal blood or a title or a father who is an army general or a business titan or a gang leader, or a bit of luck gaining exposure on a talent show or other media outlet – itself often far from a meritocratic process. In more traditional societies, nearly all opportunity is inherited. In the west, we scoff at the “big man” of Africa or the nomenklatura of Russia, but the leaders of our own countries often have rather similar profiles.

 

Andrew Cuomo ticks nearly all of the boxes to have a chance of success. Most important, he is the son of a successful politician. His dad was governor of New York State from 1983-1994. This gave Andrew an enormous head start. Name recognition was handed on a plate, and so were a huge bank account and a massive list of potential donors and operatives. Whereas most newcomers need a vision that explodes into public consciousness, Andrew’s could evolve from a satisfactory starting point of continuing the legacy of Dad. 

 

Growing up in a political family offered other benefits too. Some of the personality traits, like the salesman’s knack of being able to recover from being knocked down, might be inherited or developed during childhood or simply copied. Watching how Dad coped with adversity will have developed resilience in the son. Sadly, the less salubrious aspects of the paternal template will have been transferred as well.

 

In recent months, the Cuomo template has been laid bare, good and bad. On the plus side, his communication skills early in the pandemic were outstanding and truly valuable. In contrast to Trump, his measured daily news conferences became required viewing and a source of comfort. It was clear he was using his influence to prioritise and to marshal resources. His compassion was authentic, and his work rate exemplary. He kept a clear focus even when provoked and showed considerable courage.

 

But the cautionary tale was waiting in the wings to bite him. The classic politician has a personality type that exudes hubris, and Andrew Cuomo chose to cash in on his celebrity by writing a hubristic book. He did it while the pandemic was far from defeated, and the need for a tidy story led him to spin his questionable decisions regarding nursing homes.

 

In reality, Cuomo was probably between a rock and a hard place when it came to nursing homes. It was only a year ago, but we forget how deep were the ignorance and panic when the pandemic struck New York so brutally. The hospitals could not cope, and patients who seemed to have recovered had to be sent somewhere. It was hard to see any other solution than to send them back to their nursing homes, and trust that their contagion had reduced and that the homes were able to quarantine these people satisfactorily. It was a risk, but what else could he do?

 

The problem was not the decision but the book. The book needed a tidy story, so the figures were massaged. And this left Cuomo open to attack should his popularity wane.

 

What is now obvious was that many people were waiting for a chance to attack a vulnerable Cuomo. His leadership style has been one of bullying. He has managed the message and ruthlessly supressed opposition. He has built his own brand by appealing directly to the people and then exploited it by forcing others into subservience to him or to risk attack. He has cultivated key elements of the press, trade unions, donors and other interest groups. Power comes above all else.

 

His current personal crisis was catalysed by revelations of another vulnerability, when many women have come forward accusing him of making them uncomfortable. In the age of “me too”, this is toxic for a Democrat.

 

So we have seen a familiar pattern for people of his style. He rides triumphantly on a seemingly smooth sea, until the sea is revealed to be anything but smooth underneath. One point of vulnerability quickly becomes a storm. Past bullying catches up with him as everybody can’t wait to pile in.

 

Now he faces enquiries from a torrent of accusations by women, a review of his potential cover up of the nursing home scandal, and other abuses of power, cheered on by De Blasio, Kim and others who have suffered bullying over the years.

 

But there is another takeaway, one that suggests that it is too soon to write Cuomo off. People with his skillset fight ruthlessly to the end using all means at their disposal. Favours are called in, procedural tricks are utilised. It helps that he has carefully failed to cultivate any successor, instead choosing tame surrogates as deputies. He can point to enduring support among those in the electorate who have bought into his brand.

 

There are eerie similarities with another brilliant but ruthless politician from another part of the world, Bibi Netanyahu. The personality types are similar. The Netanyahu story is further advanced than the Cuomo one, and might provide good clues as to how the Cuomo one might develop. Bibi is still standing after facing years of constant attack and many apparently damning revelations. Do not count out either man yet.

 

Supporters of both men would argue that we should accept the good with the bad when it comes to this sort of leader. The same bullying and bending of the rules and brand building and courage can be a recipe to really get things done, especially in crises. Netanyahu can rightly be proud of his country’s vaccination record. Distasteful as it is to many of us, he has also advanced the narrow political interests of his base. Cuomo has also achieved a lot for New York.

 

Personally I don’t buy that version of events. I like to believe that there are routes to success that include more integrity. If we had a politics that was not stacked against talent, we could hope for more role models of talent with integrity.    

A Sex Consent App

 An official in Australia recently made a tentative proposal that an app be developed so that both parties can positively confirm consent before sex is initiated.

 

The poor man was pilloried for this suggestion. I guess it didn’t help that he was a middle-aged man, and his job related to law enforcement. How could such a fellow claim to understand the nuances of modern life? How could anybody try to reduce our most romantic engagements to a scientific button pushing exercise? Actually, I think the poor fellow is on to something.

 

While I am at it, I would love for a second, related app to be developed. This one would require positive consent for the possibility of a pregnancy arising.

 

Imagine the benefits of these two little apps. Women (and men) would be protected from the “he said, she said” ambiguity that comes up in legal cases, and more often stops legal cases or even formal disputes from arising. There would be full equality between the partners in terms of responsibility and accountability, for both sex and pregnancy. Unwanted pregnancies, that have blighted countless female lives since time immemorial, would become a thing of the past.

 

These potential benefits are so large that surely it is worth trying to address the legitimate issues that would make it difficult to implement these apps. Rather than quoting an issue and immediately dismissing the ideas, we would embrace the dream of the ideas and work back to try to address the issues.

 

The issues arise in at least four categories. There are technical concerns, privacy issues, ethical or moral or spiritual matters, and concerns about loss of romantic spontaneity and the joy of “the game”. Let us address them each in turn.

 

Technical issues are critical, but given the rate of medical and IT progress in the last few years they are probably surmountable quite quickly. For the pregnancy consent, the challenge is a medical one. Reliable contraception would need to be the default for both women and men. Both parties would need to actively “turn it off” for pregnancy to become possible, each having to signal agreement for both themselves and their partner. The contraceptive device could be physical or pharmaceutical, whichever can be proved to be 100% reliable. I sense the medical community could quickly come up with this if it had the will. For established couples, they could choose to change their default (only with each other) to “on”, perhaps needing to be positively reconfirmed monthly.

 

For the sex consent app, the technical issue is more about definition. What is sex? Does it have to involve penetration? Andrew Cuomo is about to lose is job (quite rightly) for far more modest transgressions. But an app is unlikely to work for leering or innuendo or even touching. So the issue of abuse and consent would not entirely go away with an app. It would also not eliminate rape: it would only make it indisputable that it had occurred. This issue would require more thought. Perhaps there can be a series of levels of activity, each requiring additional consent with the app. No doubt that could be other rules for same sex couples, and for young people or couples with a large age difference. This could become very complicated very quickly.

 

Next there are privacy concerns. The entire sexual history of all of us would be sitting on the Internet. These are obviously dangerous data, open to significant abuse in the wrong hands. Even if the company operating the app platform made promises about deletion or encryption or protection, it would take a while for us to build trust. Hopefully this challenge is surmountable technically.

 

The third group of concerns are about ethics and morals. Religious lobbies would doubtless reject the ideas out of hand, especially my one about pregnancy. The element of chance is considered by many to be an application of the will of God and something that we humans have no right to tamper with.

 

Of course the same arguments have been used against abortion, contraception and sex before marriage. Indeed, such people don’t seem to approve very much of sex at all (especially not for women, interestingly). Just like with contraception, it will be argued that the pregnancy app is a license for loose morals, allowing sex without its potential consequence. Then men in many cultures believe they have a right to demand sex whenever they feel like it.

 

There will be no winning over these constituencies. I can make as many liberal counter arguments as I like, about the grinding poverty caused by unwanted pregnancies, failed marriages or overpopulation, or about the sickness misery caused to victims of sexual abuse, about pervasive sexual inequality, or even the abuse of power by some women who may threaten a partner or even become pregnant deliberately without consent.

 

Society would need to be ready to accept the apps, and the politics would be fraught in many countries. Debate should be welcomed, for these are fundamental changes and no doubt there would be unintended consequences. But it is surely a good thing that the debates starts as quickly as possible and from a basis of knowledge and real possibilities rather than loose speculation.

 

The fourth concern is about the positive aspects of sexual ambiguity. Romance, chivalry, spontaneity and uncertainty provide a lot of joy for many people (and a lot of misery for others). It does seem rather heartless to potentially turn all of this off, reducing such joys to the pressing of buttons. My belief is that we would find new normals that continued to offer the same joy, but took away many of the negative consequences. It would be hard to predict how this would evolve, and perhaps some positive aspects of romance might be lost, even permanently.

 

So be it. The same sorts of arguments were used against bans of smoking or imposition of seatbelts or curtailing other reckless behaviours. Sometimes the benefit to society is so great that new rules or norms simply make sense.

 

Which brings me back to the potential benefits of these innovations. I would guess that a large majority of women have suffered an unwanted pregnancy or at least weeks of horrific fear contemplating its possibility. Many live with crushing guilt or some societal ostracism due to their sexual history. Our most important tasks on earth, to find the joy of love and to procreate, are too often sources of random outcomes and of misery.

 

In fifty years time, people will look back on our current society and shake their heads in disbelief about how we handle love, sex and pregnancy. A mature society should find a better way. Let us start solving the technical challenges now, in a way that guards our privacy. Then we can start hacking away at the moral objections and challenge the romantic ones.      

Please can we sing again

 My optimism about the next phase of the pandemic feels more justified with each passing week. The vaccine programmes are ramping up and getting shots into people’s arms, including my own. Europe seems a long way behind the US and the UK, but it is roughly where those countries were just one month ago, so I predict that the wait will not be too long for most people. As for developing countries, I also think that the current pessimism is misplaced. Once the west and China get up to 60%, they will start to donate huge quantities, and many countries can hope for something like herd immunity by the end of 2021.

 

What happens next? One challenge for all countries is how to get the rate of vaccinated adults up from 60% to 80%, once the vaccine becomes available to all who want it. Depending on the level of fear and distrust and laziness, many might choose to delay or avoid their shot. For this phase I love the Israeli initiative to give all vaccinated people a green symbol on a national app. Restaurants, clubs, businesses and synagogues then have a choice whether to opt in or opt out. If they opt in, then they can only admit vaccinated people, but then those people can behave without restriction. If they opt out they can continue to admit the non-vaccinated, but the overall business then remains subject to restrictions on capacity, mask wearing and so on. I find this brilliant, and I believe the main effect will be to quickly persuade many of the reluctant to get vaccinated, once they see their lives becoming sadder than their peers. I hope other countries adopt this sort of scheme, and not just for travel.

 

In the US, I can already sense the coming surge of people no longer following the stricter guidelines, supported by businesses anxious to rebuild their followings. I feel it myself. On Friday I will visit a museum on the subway, and I would have few qualms with other such ventures, and this feeling will become stronger with every passing month. I don’t think this sort of behaviour is reckless so long as it is within limits – I will still wear a mask in many situations and avoid crowds, and will continue with the added hand washing and so on. But we won’t want to hear any longer of more stringent restrictions. The CDC obviously sense this coming, and today announced that gatherings containing only vaccinated people are now permitted in houses and without masks.

 

So soon I will be looking for some updated realistic guidance about choral singing. Those of us who sing in groups have been almost silenced throughout the pandemic, because the science suggests that the droplets we emit through energetic singing are especially dangerous. That science is supported by a tragic incident at the start of the pandemic, where disease and even death ripped through a choir who organised one rehearsal too many. It is chastening to realise that I believe that I attended a rehearsal for a different choir on exactly the same day.

 

Now there is a need for some sensible risk management. I accept that we cannot go back to singing as we did, even if a group is fully vaccinated. But the current guidance, which is to hardly sing at all except outdoors or in tiny, tiny groups, already feels too restrictive. It is a year to the day from the last time I was able to sing with my wonderful church choir, and we are all becoming less patient now. Next month, by which time most or maybe all of us will have been vaccinated, that impatience will grow, and with it the temptation to invent our own solution.

 

So I am hoping that the various associations are busy creating new guidelines. Conceding that I am a total amateur, I can suggest a few.

 

Firstly, ventilation seems to be critical. I have one choir that rehearses in a tiny space below ground level and with tiny windows. I don’t think we can sing there any more. Venues will have to be spacious and airy and equipped with devices to increase ventilation.

 

We probably should have implemented this years ago. I have probably been merrily passing on flu viruses in choir rehearsals forever. This extra awareness is one of the beneficial side effects of the pandemic.

 

Other steps depend on whether everybody in a group is vaccinated. Even if they are, I suggest that we stand at least three feet apart horizontally (so I cannot stretch out my arm and touch the torso of my neighbour), six feet apart vertically (so that I can’t emit particles to anybody directly in front of me) and fifteen feet away for people facing me (such as an audience, congregation or conductor). If we are seated, this can be easily arranged via spacing seats and have neighbouring rows offset, like they do in theatres. Perhaps a conductor would have to wear a face shield if he or she needed to be closer to the group. If not everybody is vaccinated, the distances will have to be larger, or perhaps unvaccinated singers will need to be placed in positions at the end of rows and further apart.

 

Then there are sensible other measures to reduce risk, but ideas that might take longer to get used to. We could restrict forte singing to specific short bursts. We could wear masks when not at our seats, like people do at restaurants now. We could institute regular five-minute breaks for the ventilation to do its job, and sanitation protocols too. We should also be careful about communal water or food – again, something we probably always should have been.

 

A tougher alternative would be to sing with a mask on, except for a few minutes each rehearsal or in performances (where spacing might have to be even wider, and the gap to the nearest audience member might need to be larger still). But, having sung with a mask on for the last few months, I don’t like the idea. It took me a while to get used to breath control while masked, until I realised that most of the problem lay in my brain. More seriously, diction is a disaster in masks, and diction is too important in any choir to sacrifice easily.

 

Another restriction is about singing when sick or sickening with anything viral. Again, we should not have been doing this in the past, but now it has become obvious. We don’t want to let down the group or to miss a concert experience, but the risk is too high. Some of my smaller groups will find it difficult to adapt to this one. At church, with only one or two to a part, we may need to institute a system of understudies and last minute backups. Sometimes the director might have to postpone a planned song and replace it with something simpler and not dependent on a missing singer. We will have to get used to it, but it is a price worth paying.

 

I hope I am not being reckless with these ideas. While vaccinations are not available to all they are probably premature, but in just one more month we will be a lot further forward with immunisation. It is surely better to be prepared with something that is relatively safe and also practical, rather than have groups making up their own rules in the rush to start singing again.

 

Today I received my first invitation to sing in a project for twelve months. The project is planned for August and I probably cannot make it, but simply receiving the e-mail made it feel like spring. Relief is on the way. Let us embrace it with due caution but also with realism about risks. 

The Minimum Wage

 In the USA, Joe Biden and the Democrats were trying to sneak in a huge increase of the federal minimum wage to from $7.25 per hour to $15. They were thwarted in the effort by an obscure senate procedure when an official deemed that the measure did not fit into a bill primarily about budgets. Now they will struggle to enact any increase, because they will need ten Republican votes. They only secured seven Republican votes to convict the ringleader of an attempted coup, so it is hard to see them gaining ten votes for very much at all.

 

The minimum wage is one of those policies that has gained credence over the last twenty years or so. Back in the days before the Great Wrong Turning around 1980, the effective floor in wages was set by generally low levels of unemployment and by active trade unions. Reagan and Thatcher destroyed the unions except in a few sectors, and the idea of unemployment has become more complex with the workforce being less defined than before, now including many more women, seniors, part-timers and gig workers.

 

Wage exploitation has always been present. When I was a regional manager for Shell’s petrol station business, we had a model used to make sure our station operators made a living but not an unreasonably good one, and that included a national recommendation for the hourly pay of cashiers. The more marginal stations would come to us for subsidies and we would often happily pay out, since we did not want them to cut costs or services too deeply and we wanted to keep our stations operating.

 

My region included many deprived areas including the valleys of South Wales, and we had several stations collected subsidies. One day I was visiting a station and happened to get into conversation with the cashier, who revealed that she was being paid about a third of our recommended wage. The station operator didn’t receive any subsidy after that, even though I had to stand up to some flak from his highly placed freemason friends.

 

When such practice became more widespread in the 1990’s, the left started advocating for national minimum wages. In the UK, it was one of Tony Blair’s signature initiatives. The right fought them tooth and nail, supported by analysis published in, inter alia, The Economist.

 

My favourite periodical argued, with some merit, that a minimum wage was a market distortion that would create the wrong incentives and ultimately cost jobs. If the differential between the lowest and the median wage in firms became too low, the incentive to work hard and be promoted would be reduced. Marginal firms would be unable to survive with higher wage bills. Firms would turn to automation, or offshoring, accelerating unemployment further. Disaster was predicted.

 

The arguments seem reasonable, but the facts generally proved otherwise. Unemployment did not spike. Automation and offshoring did happen, but the trend did not accelerate and is arguably better for innovation and for consumers anyway. Firms did go under, but new ones took their place. Differentials did not narrow because firms moved their whole wage structures to retain incentives. We should remember that this was the time when managers were awarding themselves 30% rises and stock options galore, so the incentive argument was always rather tenuous.

 

I have always felt the minimum wage argument to be more about human decency than economics. In the nineteenth century people worked for nothing, and we even had slavery. We still have human trafficking and exploitation, but surely our goal should be to reduce this, even if it distorts markets somewhat. Slave owners argued that plantations would become unprofitable without slaves, after all. There is surely a decent minimum that a human should receive for an hour’s honest labour. Unscrupulous employers will always try to squeeze wages if they can. Minimum wages are good things. If firms cannot survive while paying a decent human wage, society should not want those firms anyway: if consumers really do want or need such firms, they will pay more for their goods, as market economics dictates. If a consequence is higher unemployment, it is up to the welfare state to step in.

 

The right often argues in favour of tax credits instead of minimum wages. Under this system, a firm can pay below the minimum wage, and the difference is made up by the state via a sort of negative income tax. This has merit in some circumstances, but the right should listen to their own arguments. Tax credits are much more complex, much more open to fraud or exploitation or missing their intended beneficiaries, they have incentive issues and are a greater market distortion than minimum wages. Forget about it.

 

To their credit, The Economist has shown a recent trend of ditching some of its ideological positions and showing greater humanity, always guided by data. The minimum wage is one example of a policy they now generally support. Others include place-based support for the unemployed and some interventionist housing policies. In my opinion, it is an even better magazine as a result.

 

Now, what about Biden and the USA? I have a few suggestions for an optimal policy. Whether it stands any hope of becoming law is another thing entirely.

 

Firstly, I sympathise with an argument made by Republicans and some Democrats that the minimum wage should vary across the country. A fair wage for a fair hour’s work is universal, but it is easier to live decently on $10 per hour in Kansas than it is in San Francisco. I would propose a lower absolute national minimum wage, but with a mandated supplement based on a rental cost indicator by locality. This might even create a $20 minimum wage in San Francisco.

 

Second, why is the minimum wage not index linked so it rises automatically with inflation or median wages? Social security and some other benefits are index linked. Avoiding index linking is a clever trick by the right. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for a long, long time, during which it has progressively become less of a fair recompense for an hour’s labour, even in Kansas.

 

Lastly, let us not forget the egregious exceptions, most notably the minimum wage for tipped employees, which languishes at $2.13 per hour. Isn’t that a national disgrace? It is surely time to eliminate tips as an excuse for employers to treat their staff like chattel. Uber is trying and before the pandemic a few restaurants also joined a campaign to remove tips from the economy, or at least reduce them to a small, genuinely discretionary payment for exceptional service.

 

Highlighting the tipped minimum wage foreshadows the argument we will hear from employers. The pandemic has the restaurant industry on its knees. Demanding a potential tripling of staff wages will destroy it. There will no doubt be an onion handy to induce some tears as this argument is made.

 

Perhaps I would support a transition period of a couple of years for the tipped minimum to be abolished. But I would rather see fewer, well-run, quality restaurants offering fair wages to staff and not bullying customers with 15% tip standards than the inhuman mess we had before the pandemic. A tip should be discretionary. A wage should allow somebody to live with decency and not be exploited by their boss. This is simple humanity.