A Word in Your Ear

 For as long as I can remember, I have been somewhat deaf. My right ear performs well, but my left one significantly less so. I can’t remember what first triggered me to realize this, because it is possible to live with partial deafness without being aware of it, a bit like living with a weakened sense of smell: the only gauge I have really is myself, so as long as there is no change, how can I tell of any disability?

 

One of my favourite books is Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. Funny and touching, the book chronicles exploits of a character of about my age, and I can empathise with all of it. I recommend it as reading for anybody who might be deaf or who interacts with somebody who is – I suppose that encompasses most of us.

 

More men have hearing impairment than women, and for most it is correlated with ageing. I suppose I am rather lucky that my hearing appears very stable.

 

The clearest symptom of deafness is in some ways the opposite of what we might assume. True, it can be revealing when somebody struggles to make out what you are saying. But I find that usually deaf people talk more loudly than others.

 

Have you noticed how you always shout into your mobile phone, especially when outdoors? We all do, and on a subway carriage it can be both annoying and funny to witness people screaming into a device. Our bodies are reacting to a difficulty in hearing the other end of a conversation. Somehow we assume that the other side is talking too quietly, so we react by talking louder ourselves as a signal to them. In my experience, most of the deaf people I meet are the ones who habitually talk louder. I include myself on this list.

 

One sad effect of the pandemic has been to exclude us from the old people’s home where we volunteer. There nearly everybody is deaf, simply because they are so old. They can’t hear, so they shout. Often I will serve a table of residents with their dinner and walk away but continue to hear their conversation clearly. They might not be so candid if they knew I could hear them. It may be true that I have no idea how to serve a sandwich, but most of them would be ashamed to tell me to my face, yet that is what they are effectively doing.

 

Hearing is a poor relation among the senses, at least compared with sight. We are all encouraged to test our eyes regularly through our lives, and technology has evolved to offer effective, though overpriced, remedies. I took Lasik eye surgery about fifteen years ago and would also recommend that. By contrast, most deaf people don’t even know they are deaf, and until recently hearing aids were awkward, ineffective and very expensive.

 

I am happy to report that this is changing, and I’m delighted that eighteen months ago I checked what was available, something I’ve done from time to time for a while. The diagnostic process was efficient and my doctor was kind enough to whisper that I should visit Costco, of all places, to buy a hearing aid. Specialists are still charging thousands, but Costco has the same or better technology and better service for a tiny fraction of the price. My single hearing aid was $800, not trivial but perhaps my best investment of the last few years considering the benefits to everyday living. I love it, and it is so unobtrusive that the only people who ever notice I am wearing it are other people who use hearing aids.

 

For me, a singer, the biggest benefit was in how I was able to hear music in a choral setting. I had always experienced that I could hear the singer on my right loud and clear, sometimes too loud and too clear, might sound from the one on my left was barely audible. I expected the hearing aid to remedy this but it did far more. The actual effect was a bit like the difference between listening in mono and stereo. The whole sound came to life for me thanks to my hearing aid, and I am convinced it has made me a much better singer.

 

All of this is preamble. The pandemic has been tough for all of us, but spare a thought for those of us who are hard of hearing.

 

The pandemic will have made it obvious to most of us how much we listen with our eyes. But listening has become so much harder lately with everybody wearing masks. Firstly, the mask itself obscures the sound of the talker, especially clarity of consonants. Next, we often have additional hurdles such as standing farther apart and Perspex screens. But the worst part is that we can’t read the lips of our interlocutor, but have only our ears to rely on.

 

For the most part I suppose I am no worse off than anybody else because my hearing aid corrects most of the deficiency. But the correction is not total, and in the summer I sometimes did not wear my hearing aid, because the one thing it does not like at all is moisture, and humid weather makes ears and everything else more moist. None of this helps outdoor dining, with all its ambient noise. Furthermore, I suspect I am a better lip reader than most people, simply because I have had more recourse to using it than people with perfect ears, so my disadvantage in not seeing somebody else’s mouth may be greater.

 

I have noticed one other disadvantage. I’m sure anybody who wears glasses have noticed how masks make them fall off more, simply because there is more clutter on the face and around the ears. Now imagine adding a hearing aid to that equation! I’m so happy to be singing again, with a mask on, as volunteer cantor at a local church. But I’m sure the congregation are taking much amusement from the sight of me trying to stop my glasses falling off, as my left ear is completely overloaded with devices and objects.

 

I concede this has been a very convoluted way to relate a modest anecdote. But there may be a few other takeaways available.

 

Firstly, now may be a very good time to establish if you are a bit deaf. Understanding through a mask is a handicap for everybody, but do you find you are really struggling? If so check your experience with others and test out different things, such as standing to favour one ear then the other. Ask people if you shout down your phone more than most people.

 

If you come away with some doubts then get a hearing test. In most developed countries the costs have come down and the remedies have improved.

 

Next, try to be tolerant of people who are struggling to understand what you are saying. And try to annunciate consonants more clearly than usual. I promise you we are doing our best and it is not easy.

 

Next, I wonder if there is an opportunity here for producers of masks and of spectacles. Asia’s experience suggests that masks are here to stay in our lives. I see people putting effort into fashion, but not yet into design.

 

Finally I wonder if deafness is part of the cause of some other things we are witnessing. I watched the gruelling and depressing Presidential debate on Tuesday. True, they were not wearing masks, but here were three old dudes standing farther apart than they usually would. I wonder how many of them are a bit deaf? I wonder how many even know? Certainly they were shouting enough. Biden in particular seemed a little slow to pick up what was being said in the cacophony.

The Pandemic: Winning the Second Half

 When a soccer team is losing heavily at half time, it is traditional for the coach to use the half time team talk to motivate his team to win the second half. It gives a target and can avoid heads dropping, at least until the opponents score yet again when battle resumes.

 

Humanity has certainly conceded many goals in the first half to the Coronavirus. Perhaps now we are close to half time and ready to regroup and accept some sage advice from our coaches. One part of that surely has to be to look forwards and not backwards. There will be plenty of time for recriminations after the outbreak is over, and plenty of opportunity to win the second half, because we know our opponent better by now and can adopt smarter tactics.

 

A key prerequisite for the coach is to define what winning is. A defensive minded coach might argue to minimize deaths. But this can be fine-tuned. Excess deaths compared to normal is a better target, not least because it avoids the effortful need to accurately assign each death to Coronavirus or something else. We can be smarter too if we measure something like excess healthy years lost, because surely the death of a centenarian, tragic though it may be, is more harmful than the death of an otherwise healthy child.

 

This might satisfy our defensive minded coach. But what about the offence? It may be that we can take steps to reduce excess healthy years to nearly zero, but at what cost to our economy and future well-being? There is a valid argument to risk a little on defence if that enables our children to resume learning or more of our poor to resume earning, for surely those things will help us in future matches. It might even help immediately if we can avoid mental health or drug issues. The question becomes a balance: what is the appropriate policy enable humanity to thrive somewhat, while keeping excess healthy years lost low?

 

By now we have a lot of data. And based on the data I find myself playing more offence than defence. This virus requires a defence, but science and experience and improved behaviour have helped. Last week The Economisttabulated what had been a theory of mine for a while. The 2020 ‘flu’ season in the southern hemisphere has barely existed. It stands to reason. The vulnerabilities to ‘flu’ are similar to those for Coronavirus, and by training ourselves to minimise the new virus we reduce the incidence of ‘flu’ as well.

 

Before 2020, I certainly never bothered with washing my hands so often or was careful about what I touched or from where I ate. I happily shook hands and hugged and would never have dreamt of wearing a mask. I sang loudly and often, spreading droplets generously, and would have to be very sick before choosing to stay home. Well, that is most of us, and it stands to reason, at least to me, that fewer folk will suffer ‘flu’ as a result.

 

Then there is the risk from the virus itself. In March and April it is no wonder so many New Yorkers who picked up the virus went on to die. The hospitals had few effective drugs. And contagion was so rife that we were told not to go to hospital at all unless we had been very sick for several days, so by the time many people arrived they were beyond cure.

 

Now medicine has worked out that steroids are effective, especially early on. So long as an outbreak is relatively contained, there is enough capacity in hospitals. For most of us, our odds are pretty good. And many of those for whom the odds are not good reside in nursing homes or can be a focus for isolation.

 

We are all waiting for a vaccine, and of course an effective widely-available vaccine would be wonderful, but I think we are talking up the vaccine too much. It will probably end up like the ‘flu’ vaccines. It will take a long time for most of us, many people seem likely not to take it, and it won’t work for everyone anyway, especially as the virus mutates.

 

Luckily. There is much that we can do with a vaccine. So long as outbreaks are contained relatively quickly, we don’t need to abandon our offence completely. Given the ‘flu’ benefits and the medical advances, excess years lost seem likely to remain quite low, so long as the most vulnerable are isolated. I suspect we are already close to a situation where the risk from driving our car on the highway becomes lower than the risk from Coronavirus.

 

This assumes that outbreaks are contained, and by now we have a good idea how to do that too, though practice in many countries remains woeful. Why is it such a hardship to wear a mask, and wear it properly? The politicians who have equivocated on this truly have blood on their hands. If everybody avoids crowds and wears their masks and maintains good hygiene, we can otherwise live normally, except where there is community spread.

 

Avoiding community spread is all about testing and tracing. Again, there is good practice available and woeful project management in many places. We took a test in August, and received our result thirteen days later. That is almost worthless. It has taken far to long here and elsewhere for reliable tests to be readily available and return results quickly. If that is in place, then contact tracing can be effective too.

 

Can we do this even better than current good practice? I think the real game changer is less about a vaccine and more about an instant test, one we can self-administer like a pregnancy test. This is how professional sports have been able to resume, and it would be wonderful if that sort of test became available to all of us. Then we could do almost anything, even sing or party or go to the theatre. For if even a thousand people enter a clean space, they can do whatever they like if nobody has the virus already: they will all exit virus-free as well.

 

Perhaps singing and parties and theatres are not top priority, though it would certainly help the mental health of many if they were. But school certainly is a top priority, and so is work. Many people will work from home in future, so it should be possible now to handle the resumed demand on public transit and in offices and retail establishments. This would be a good moment to increase the taxes on car use, to influence more people to return to public transport rather than use their car or even buy a new car.

 

With cases rising around Europe this prognosis may appear over-optimistic. For sure there will be outbreaks, and local governments must quickly snap back quarantine measures when these become too dangerous. But for most of us, most of the time, we can confidently move towards normality, thus improving our mental and economic health.

 

Critical to all this is public health messaging that is clear and consistent. We can acknowledge that, while the virus remains deadly to some, the overall impact on lives lost no longer justifies extreme measures. Most importantly, everybody must play by the hygiene rules, notably wearing a mask, and strictly following periodic orders to stay at home. A focus should remain on provision of frequent tests with rapid results, and the possible game changer of the self-administered test.

 

In some places the first half performance was so bad that winning the second half would be a daunting challenge. How can a public trust leaders who have equivocated on hygiene? In these places, sadly including the one where I live, restoring that trust has to be the only priority, and that precludes more nuanced messages about opening up.

 

But elsewhere, even when two or three down at half time, ways are opening up to win the second half. Whisper it softly, but that might even include some fun. After the drubbing of the first half, we surely need that.

 

Even if the second half is won, the end result of the match will be defeat. Most obviously, that is reflected in the mourning that has touched most of us over lives taken to early. But the pandemic had exposed other fundamental weaknesses in our team, from urban design to care for the elderly to underclasses and precarious jobs and health care systems. The time to address these failings will be with us soon enough. But for now let us win the second half.

Staying Positive in Covid USA

 I have to confess to being rather down on the USA lately. It is not the first time I have succumbed to this emotion, might it might be the strongest case so far. Never before have I found myself mentally counting the months until we might return to Europe.

 

The causes are obvious. We are all living through a pandemic. We see suffering around us and our own lives are restricted compared with normal times, while our fear of the virus does nothing to improve anybody’s behaviour but adds stress as we consider our mortality.

 

Living in the USA amplifies these causes and adds additional ones. Having lived through April in New York, the anxiety might be a bit higher. And the range of opinions and responses to the risk among individuals can make us angry. It really isn’t that inconvenient to wear a mask in public, and most people in most other countries don’t seem to equate it with an assault on liberty.

 

These attitudes are the real stress multiplier when expanded to include the whole, toxic, political environment. The lost opportunities here are a terrible human tragedy, acted out in real time and on a relentlessly downward path. I will have a pain deep in my stomach from now until the election, and probably afterwards depending on the aftermath.

 

The hardest part to reconcile is that regardless of the result, somewhere above fifty million people will vote for a man so lacking in competence and humanity as to be a caricature. He does not try to hide his personality and the results are obvious to anybody with the slightest curiosity, yet fifty million people will actively seek four more years of it. Fifty million.

 

When Hillary used the deplorable word in 2016 we all winced and knew it was a horrible error and also thought it was plain disrespectful. When I am in a good mood I still think that, but increasingly I have to stop myself thinking the same way. We can all see the ghettos and the homeless and the abused and the guns and the pitiful education and the broken healthcare and the greed and the filth and the potholes. We can all the narcissism and the gangsterism and the incuriosity and the hubris and the hypocrisy and the bullying and the recklessness and the callousness and the corruption and the lies and lies and lies. Fox News makes a token effort to obscure some of it, but surely it does not take more than a child’s intelligence and curiosity to look past that? Fifty million!

 

So I feel myself becoming negative, and that is not healthy for me or for anybody else. I am always at my most snide when feeling negative. So I need a campaign to restore positivity.

 

Let us start as usual with counting blessings. It is shaming how simple this is. All my issues with Covid are luxury first-world problems. True, all the reasons to savour living in New York City have vanished for the time being. But I can make rent. My family are thriving and we are enjoying each other’s company. I can live a comfortable, even complacent life. While so many have lost so much, I cannot complain about restaurants being closed or choirs being on hold. The US is making horrible mistakes, but I don’t have to worry about what I write or think, not yet at least, and I can always leave if I feel like it.

 

Next is to highlight the positive things that we still have. NYC has lost its culture for a while but its diversity is still intact. I can’t attend the US Tennis Open or the Mets in person, but sport on TV is back and the US does sports very well.

 

We are also locked out of our volunteering while the residents of the home are at such a risk, but we can go to church again. There is something very comforting about a quiet hour meditating along with wonderful people. It is healthy to actively appreciate things we came to take for granted.

 

There are other things I can do to fight the negativity. Now outdoor pools are closed again and the pool in my gym will not open soon, but at least now the weather is conducive to walking again. Too many hours on the couch each day is never a positive thing.

 

Taking on a bigger project also makes sense. I did this at the start of the pandemic by writing something substantial, and now I can return to that and improve it with another draft. Reading is always an enjoyable education.

 

But I can also return to my long-term goals and use those to find new priorities. Early music is on hold for now, but I can at least study and listen to it more. Slow projects are limited when most of our time has to be spent at home. But there is still some scope for enlightenment. Simplification has almost been forced upon us, but I can look for opportunities to simplify that are less temporary.

 

The scope from these three themes is somewhat limited and obvious, but the fourth one has rich scope. I have a goal to seek out kindness. And I am realising that a lot of my negativity comes from a shortage of that kindness.

 

In part, this comes back to the politics. I can’t change the atmosphere, but I can retreat from it. Everything I see and read makes me angry, so I can help my own health by seeing and reading more. I already avoid the pitfalls of social media, but I can also further restrict my TV diet.

 

There is more I can do to seek out kindness in my everyday life. I have come to realise that a lot of my appreciation of church, choirs and volunteering comes from the soaking up the kindness of the people I encounter with these activities, which in turn makes me kinder, or at least less unkind. It is comforting to believe that these things will all return, but I need to do more to fill the gap. There are opportunities with family. I have to be active in seeking these out and finding other things.

 

Negativity creeps up on all of us for time to time. It is a particular risk just now, with the pandemic. The risk is higher in the US because of the politics. So we will do well to look for ways to counter the negativity. The solutions will differ for all of us, though there will be common themes, such as counting blessings, remembering goals and fighting lethargy. Reducing twitter time would probably help most people too.

 

We can also help each other, even if our usual channels have been cut off. I have always valued and admired people who have a sunny aura, and recognise my own tendency to bring clouds. For the next few months, I will try to be a little bit sunnier, and a little bit kinder.

Is West still Best?

 I was brought up to believe that the form of capitalist representative democracy practiced in nations such as my own was not only the fairest and the freest but also the most effective system available to man. I used to believe it. Now I am not so sure.

 

Of course the terms and definitions involved here are ambiguous and emotionally charged. It is amazing how the word socialism has become so toxic in the US, for example, despite few people understanding what it means. Democracy, authoritarianism and dictatorship certainly have overlaps and also examples within each category that have little in common. The same can be said of capitalism, socialism and communism. There are also features of each of the models of power that are incorrectly ascribed to the economic models, and vice versa.

 

Exhibit A to support my comfortable hypothesis that west is best was always the USSR. It was a rather ambiguous example while I was growing up, because we were simultaneously supposed to believe that the soviets were both inefficient and dangerous. But then came 1989 and the utter wreck of the soviet-led communist economies became apparent for all of us to see. QED.

 

In case there was any doubt, we could quote exhibit B, the Reagan Thatcher revolution of the 1980’s. Everyone could see that this had its downsides, but we could not deny that the privatisation of state companies was a masterstroke. Just imagine how the Internet and smart phone eras would have progressed if the stodgy old telephone service still existed!

 

There have been other exhibits from around the globe. India was stuck until it started to unleash free markets. Venezuela shows what happens when socialism is unbridled. Comparing North Korea with South Korea is pretty conclusive.

 

The logic seemed pretty watertight and the west duly crowed for a while, with The Economist among the cheerleaders. But over the last twenty years the dominant idea has started to fray around the edges. Might we all be wrong?

 

In the case of the power systems, democracy usually avoided the very worst outcomes. Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s purges and Pol Pot are not great advertisements for dictatorships. But we should remember that Hitler was elected into power in a democracy, and more recently so were Salvini and Orban and some unsavoury characters closer to home. Democracy was perfectly happy to defend slavery, and a partial democracy led to apartheid.

 

Singapore is an interesting example to defend a rather autocratic regime. Lee Kuan Yew might have had more difficulty implementing his housing and developmental policies in a true democracy. Perhaps Dubai can be claimed as a similar example. Still, there are also many counter-examples to knock the gloss from authoritarianism.

 

The arguments for different economic models are more nuanced. A starting point has to be that the power of markets and free capital and joint stock companies has been the primary driver for unprecedented global development since 1945. 2020 will start a historical blip, but the global trend in poverty reduction is truly impressive.

 

Meanwhile, the form of communism practised in the USSR led to stagnation and misery. But we should be too sweeping. The USSR was characterised by brutal rule by an elite focused only on maintaining power and using corruption as an everyday weapon. Marx did not envisage such constraints, though he might have supported five year plans and fell central control, and they did not work out too well.

 

A capitalist system with property rights, company law, predominantly market mechanisms and the encouragement of innovation had a good track record until recently. But the most capitalist economies have been largely stagnant since 1980, all the while suffering increasing inequality. Meanwhile most of global growth has been generated by a notionally communist economy, China. The Economist and other westerners have sniffed at China throughout its rise, belittling its products, methods, expertise and much besides, but have been blindsided again and again. China often messes things up when it tries something new, but it learns quickly and succeeds in the end.

 

The Economist tried to define China’s chosen economic model for the coming years, and concluded that it is a powerful one. State companies compete with private ones under arcane rules giving both a chance and allow a mixture of overarching strategy and entrepreneurial fire. Infrastructure has been modernised, and next will come finance, seeking to remove dependence on the US. Health and education reforms are following, but even the starting points are arguably stronger than many in the west. The latest index of top universities has Chinese institutions marching up the league table. Everyone must pay fealty to the communist party, but that is ideologically light nowadays, in most cases simply a commitment to play within certain boundaries and not be corrupt.

 

This new hybrid model is rather interesting, and The Economist feels right in paying it some respect. One way to look at competing economic systems is via an analogy with sports. In soccer, debates rage all the time about the respective merits of a back four and a back five – the way players are deployed around the pitch. Many ideologues declare one system better, just like we do for capitalism. But the reality is subtler.

 

Each system has advantages and disadvantages. A team can succeed with either, so long as it has a strategy and applies it consistently, for example recruiting players to fit the chosen method. The method itself should be rather adaptable, depending on the talent available, current fashions and opponents, and the rules in force. Every system should evolve.

 

When I compare the economic prospects of the US and China over the next twenty years, naïve commentary starts by pointing out that one’s system is inherently superior, perhaps because it has done well in the past or because we are fans of that team. But any deeper analysis suggests the Chinese are poised to win big.

 

One team has a clear strategy. One team is investing in talent. One team plays to the limit of the rules but does not think it is above them. One team has a couple of greedy players, several fat and lazy old ones and others bought on the cheap and paid nearly nothing. One team looks forward and innovates and respects its competition. One team has a head coach who grabs power but does seem to care about more than whether he looks good wearing a mask. Can we really believe that the one on the losing end of all these comparisons will win anyway because they are playing with a back four?

 

But a back four system can still win. Germany seems to be doing OK, and it doesn’t have to suppress a chunk of its population to do so. So how is Germany different to the US? It protects its institutions, values competence and competition (to an extent). But it can be argued that at the core, the difference is a long-term drive towards equality of opportunity. As a football team, it values teamwork, and it is hard to win for long without that.

 

Perhaps US capitalism is now on a path like the USSR, condemned to cycles of instability from terminal inequality. Increasingly, order is only maintained by feeding the beast of inequality and suppressing the cries of the rest. Institutions crumble, congress enacts nothing, and greed, spin and lobbying win out, all different manifestations of corruption.

 

I am not defending the brutality around the periphery of China, and nor am I writing the USA off, because it still has considerable strengths even if it has just spent four years actively undermining them. But if I compare a hungry young Chinese person, trained to work, targeted at nationally valuable sectors, able to apply fantastic infrastructure and banking, with a US filled with entitled, corporeal, undereducated, angry kids looking to make a quick buck in corrupt finance or law, it feels like watching the recent Bayern Munich-Barcelona soccer match. It finished 8-2. And a Bayern player scored one of the two.   

Mad Men and Old Boys Clubs

As life temporarily without some social pleasures drifts along, we have been spending some evenings watching Mad Men. We are enjoying it, and, like all the best TV, it prompts useful thoughts, notably about what a similar series created in the future and our own times might look like.

 

The long-running series was written from 2005 and covers the 1960’s in New York. I love the writing. It is not sensationalist and is notably patient, letting characters and storylines develop slowly and being ready to divert into all sorts of plot niches. It is a thoughtful commentary on its time. Sadly, I find some of the acting to be unworthy of the material.

 

The overwhelming impression from the series is how everybody’s life choices are circumscribed by the accident of their birth and by stifling societal norms. The executives are nearly all male, white and born to affluence. They are privileged yet largely blind to it, often feeling entitled to even more than they have. They are thoughtlessly lewd towards all women, objectifying the entire gender. To them women are eye candy and sport, until they are married to one, at which point nothing changes in the attitude towards other women but the wife becomes a housekeeper and mother and a source of abuse and resentment. It is galling to see this attitude portrayed in such a naked way.

 

The white women mainly appear happy to go along with the expectations. They strut around the office competing on looks and coyness, hunting a husband to make them secure, after which they become suffocated in the world of child rearing and dull pursuits, in fear of the social opprobrium from divorce while turning a blind eye to their spouse’s serial infidelity.

 

Anybody challenging these norms is in for a tough time. Divorced women are ostracized. Even though contraception is hard to obtain and men demand sex all the time, and woman getting pregnant is ruined. Heaven help you if you happen to be gay or disabled. Promotion for the men comes more from social status than merit. Most couples are unhappy, but keep up appearances relentlessly.

 

These are the included strata. We see glimpses of other strata, be that uneducated men or all blacks. They know their place and had better stick to it or they will soon be on the street and no doubt rejected by their own kind too. To the included, the excluded are barely visible.

 

Part of the story is how one woman challenges the expectations simply by being kind and honest and just a little bit ambitious. She has partial success, but suffers in many ways on her journey, from her family, male and female colleagues and her own doubts.

 

It is also how noticeable how everybody drinks and smokes all the time, even in hospitals or on planes. With sex and gambling, most people will have some form of addiction or other mental illness, but it all swept under the carpet of expectations.

 

I find the picture painted to be quite realistic. New York and the advertising business might be on the extreme end of examples, but most flaws will be evident anywhere and in any vocation.

 

The first takeaway is to challenge any temptation for nostalgia. True, this world was simpler, but it certainly wasn’t fairer or kinder or happier or more productive. Anyone campaigning for a return to this form of society has either been duped or comes from the tiny demographic that the norms were designed to serve.

 

The depiction can help us to be tolerant of older people. Biden may have been overly physical when he started out and far from woke, but we should be careful judging him against standards that were very different then.

 

The show also helps me realize not just how far we have come but how messy the process of change had to be. It is no wonder that entrenched groups have fought every step and also that people have struggled to embrace their new emancipation, because we all lacked education and role models to guide us. It has not helped that lawmakers largely still come from the privileged former world and laws have failed to keep up with modern needs. Employment, schooling, welfare and much besides still assume a model of a dominant male and a child-rearing housewife. I sometimes wonder whether Mitch McConnell and others have ever met anybody that doesn’t have a nanny.

 

We can also reflect how in much of the developing world the norms of 1960’s Americas still apply today, overtly or covertly. This is a source of continuing hardship for many, and a massive development opportunity for humanity.

 

The show brilliantly depicts how most of the glaring flaws are simply invisible to most characters, and I can see how this has been true of myself. I look at my Cambridge matriculation photo of 1979 and wonder why I never noticed how white and privileged it is – heck, we even thought we were progressive when we started admitting women!

 

Taking that thought further might be the most fruitful opportunity from watching Mad Men. Things that are wrong but engrained are often invisible to us unless we work really hard to challenge ourselves. So what is it about the developed world in 2020 that still holds us back or perpetuates inequality and misery? If Mad Men were written in 2050 and set in 2020, what would it reveal?

 

I am sure it would have a lot of fun with the large devices everybody seems wedded to. I suspect equivalent for the smoking would be watching everyone take their life into their hands driving cars, something that by 2050 will seem unconsciously reckless. Guns could see similar treatment: they simply should not be present in a civilized society. As for social changes, I hope that humanity will no longer suffer the blight of homelessness, and I can hope for progress on mental illnesses and addictions.

 

But, just as in Mad Men, I suspect the clearest revelations will be about Old Boys Clubs. In 1960 our lives were proscribed and conformance was almost mandatory. By 2020 conformance has become optional but the constraints from birth have barely loosened.

 

Rich kids, usually white, have more stable homes, better education, inherited wealth, an abundance of second chances, and faces that fit. The upper echelons of most professions are stuffed with these privileged brats. I was one of them. My kids are numbered among them too.

 

Wealth taxes and leveled up education are the two biggest imperatives, but there are still countless other less visible blights that a new Mad Men could reveal. How can we still tolerate freemasons? How unfair are alumni preferences for colleges? How stacked are most recruitment processes? How over-protected are the unionized occupations?

 

Who you know and where you come from still matter far too much. Mad Men helps us to see how we have progresses, but also how far we still have to travel. The slowest change will come in the least visible areas. Sexism, ageism, racism and discrimination against disables and gay people has reduced and will reduce further, but these are just the visible areas.

 

We have only reached series three, so we are about a third of the way through Mad Men. I suspect I’ll stay hooked until the end. And hopefully the show will continue to spark useful thoughts as well as straightforward enjoyment.  

In Praise of Indecisiveness

 Many of us have spent the last four years pondering why anybody would ever consider voting for Donald Trump. The charge sheet is so full and indisputable, the outcomes so tragic, the values so evil, surely everybody must be able to see through the bluster by now.

 

But it hasn’t happened. There was a moment a month or so ago when it felt like the house of cards may be tumbling, but the approval share and voting intentions seem to be trending back into the narrow band they have followed throughout the presidency. The base is still largely loyal despite everything.

 

Johnson in The Economist offered a new twist on the conundrum in his article last week. He or she was discussing how we form spoken sentences. Unless we are reading a script, we are always talking and speaking at the same time. During a sentence, we know what we want to say but sometimes our words take us into a cul de sac. Then we always have to think about the next sentence, so we will often pause, or fill in time with “like” or “you know” or just sounds like “um”.

 

For most of us, the general impression we leave is one of indecision. But this is one of many ways in which Trump is different. His way of filling space while planning the next sentence is to repeat the last one, which serves to emphasise is point. And if he finds himself in a cul de sac, his tendency is to plough right through it. That is how he ends up using nonsense words like “bigly” – he has messed up the sentence construction, needs an adverb to close out, so just invents one. Most of us would pause, um and ah, and backtrack to earlier in the sentence to have another go, but Trump famously has no reverse gear. According to Johnson, these habits, natural or learned, have an effect of appearing decisive. People might laugh at “bigly”, but they take away an impression of somebody who is confident and driven and decisive.

 

Compare this with Joe Biden. His mind does seem to be slowing up a bit, so he ends up in a lot of cul de sacs. And his method of filling space is to ramble. Often his stories and his sentences go off into the weeds and lose clarity of message, not to mention becoming boring. He can deliver a scripted speech, he can also hold an informal crowd, but sound bites are not for him.

 

So Trump is able to come across as strong and decisive, partly because of his manner of speaking, and partly because he simply never backtracks or apologises, just digging himself into deeper and deeper holes of lies, somehow with impunity. Why is it that strong and decisive might be such important attributes to a segment of the electorate?

 

There are some situations where decisiveness is critical. If there is extreme urgency then a decision is required. Also, if there is gridlock or stalemate, then a decision can break the deadlock. Furthermore, simple, clear-cut situations can benefit from clear, aggressive decisions, especially where the decision maker has obvious power and resources.

 

Herein lies the clever part for Trump’s team. They have spent cultivating a climate where a segment of the electorate perceives exactly that environment. Most of the discussion on Fox News is not about Trump or anything he wants to do, it is all about urgent threats. Some threats are external, like caravans of immigrants or plotting Chinese, while most are internal, in the form of the evil Democrats who would destroy everything given even a sniff of power.

 

This narrative creates urgency and it also creates simplicity, in the form of a crusade for good against dangerous enemies. Fox has to do nothing to play up gridlock, for that is there already in congress. And the resources of the US are also obvious – adding to the impatience when a problem can seem intractable.

 

Fox and Trump have even more of a following wind with the core supporters. An important American cultural trait is liberty and a sort of frontier mentality. America is also home to Hollywood, where stories are always simple, where using power pays dividends and where the good guys always win. This is an attractive backdrop for people who may be struggling with complexity in their own lives and may be lashing out for others to blame.

 

I believe that in most situations decisiveness is a positive disadvantage, especially as a core characteristic or a leader. Somebody anxious to show up as decisive as a goal is likely to follow a whole series of damaging strategies.

 

Decisiveness works against collegiality and expertise. It prizes loyalty over competence. A need for decisiveness can oversimplify a challenge and show a lack of flexibility or agility when a situation changes. If a situation is nuanced, or the range of stakeholders is large, if a team is required to decide and then implement, or if there is plenty of uncertainty and negative consequences of poor decisions, then indecision is just what the doctor ordered.

 

Barack Obama was famously indecisive. I once heard him explain that every problem that reached his desk was difficult, precisely because easy problems were already solved by others. Perhaps Obama took his strength of analysis too far, but in somebody carrying around a box with a big red button that is fine by me.

 

I find indecisiveness as a underrated quality in all leaders. If I think of my heroes, a lot of them placed great store on data, teamwork, a willingness to challenge assumptions and to change ones mind, and a dose of humility. Most of the other kind of leader gets caught out in the end, whether it is in politics or business or religion or anywhere else. Simplicity is good when it is not really just an excuse to be slapdash.

 

I have never studied it in depth, but the fourth letter in a Myers Briggs profile measures something akin to decisiveness. J people like to simplify challenges and move forward, while P folk are happier trying to cope with uncertainty. As a proud P, I always found it rather simplistic when J was associated with leaders. The classic business leader is ENTJ – extrovert, intuitive, thinking and judging.

 

I often wondered whether ENTJ really were good leaders, or just the leaders we tend to become landed with. It certainly feels quite a masculine and unforgiving style.

 

Back to Trump, he is a case study of why extreme decisiveness is a fatal flaw in a leader. Administration competence, never high, is now threadbare. And the most important evidence is to look not at decisions but to outcomes.

 

The Coronavirus is an obvious example, but I find China to be a more compelling one. In the case of China, what is sold as decisiveness is in reality little more than bullying and bluster. There has been no consistency, no strategy and no follow through, and the outcome is a China that has done precisely nothing to fix legitimate grievances and which has only become stronger in relation to the US. It did not have to be this way, and, to be fair, Trump and his cronies are not alone in lacking a clear strategy. But the outcome is a new cold war that may linger for generations and make us all poorer in every sense.

 

It is a tempting strategy for the Biden campaign to demonstrate these terrible outcomes to the electorate, but I am not sure it will work. The Fox crowd is not listening and is only interested in simple sound bites, and is anyway convinced that, even if Trump’s outcomes have been less than ideal, the Democrats would do far worse. The decisive aura can overcome many obvious failures.

 

I recommend a more aggressive strategy, focusing on the man not his decisions. Decisive leaders collapse quickly when they are no longer seen as strong personally. He is old, he makes many mistakes, everybody around him hates him and Coronavirus has shown him up as highly fallible. He also is easily bated. I think I would be using Kamala and Michelle to rattle his cage as hard as they can. I think he will self-destruct even in the eyes of his base.        

Fixing Structural Inequality

 With the rekindling of Black Lives Matter, there has been a flurry of articles about structural inequality in the USA. Many quote the statistic of median family wealth for white and black families, with whites up in six figures and blacks essentially at zero. I am also struck by the extent of the historical abuses, not just the well-known Jim Crow ones but more recent restrictions of housing zones and job biases.

 

The debate is eye opening and makes me weep. As a European, I am also reminded of discrimination in my own country, obvious while I was a child but still in existence in much of society. It is past time to fix this.

 

The Economist occasionally tries to defend the policies of the last forty years by demonstrating how inequality in developed countries has been broadly static, as measured by the share of income and wealth of the top 1% or 5%. This may be true, but it is far from acceptable. From before the days of Downton Abbey, inequality of opportunity has been a scourge, and the period from 1945-80 was exceptional in enacting policies to reduce it. The fact that inequality has been static since then shows how policy has been ineffective; anything less than a gradual decline is a calumny.

 

Inequality is often portrayed as a race issue, but I think this is another simplification. It is worse than that. I have not read Casteby Isobel Wilkerson, but her basic premise is that societies remain stratified, with many layers. Yes, most African-Americans are near the bottom, but there are other factors in play, and focusing solely on race may lead to suboptimal remedies.

 

Focus on race also gives an uncomfortable argument to racists. Most Asian Americans and Jews also arrived in America with nothing and were discriminated against, yet these groups have largely escaped poverty. It is a good question as to why, because putting similar conditions in place for groups that have not escaped might be good policy, but the question can drift into racist territory. Thinking of castes can help.

 

There is no doubt that the Trump administration has damaged the cause of equality like few before it, and they fully deserve their comeuppance from the pandemic and race protests, hopefully throwing them out of office soon. But there is a lot of shoddy journalism on this topic like so many others.

 

It is shoddy to equate the equality issue with race. It is shoddy to define equality of outcome as a goal, when equality of opportunity should be the true measure. And many are shoddy in analyzing which neo-liberal nationalistic policies are the worst culprits.

 

A great example was in Time a couple of weeks ago. They tried to come up with a list of the administration’s ten most damaging actions regarding (poorly defined) equality. I can only assume this was delegated to some kids on a Friday afternoon. The list was a perfect example of how The Economist is superior when it comes to rigorous numerical analysis. The list included a decision to outlaw Trans people from the military, but failed to mention the 2018 tax package. The former was indeed a terrible choice, but the impact on equality is surely minimal given the number of people affected. The latter affected everybody, significantly and in a lasting way.

 

So I have tried to make my own list. Arguably I have cheated in that I have included inactions as well as actions. I have also not made big efforts to quantify impacts. Nonetheless, an incoming administration might use the list when defining its policies to restore the necessary trend towards equality of opportunity.

 

The tax package must be number one. Reagan (and Thatcher) rebalanced fiscal policy away from equality. At least in Europe future governments have been more balanced, but in the US Bush 43 added fuel to the fire and Trump’s only legislative accomplishment set things ablaze further. The impact has been to allow the already wealthy to take rent from the economy, embedded inequality, removing resources for a generation from other reforms and even stifling consumption and growth.

 

My number two is also a tax matter, but more specific. The main reason that wealth inequality persists across generations is the effective absence of an estate tax. Bush/Cheney did an impressive job of gutting estate taxes in the US, by reframing them as death taxes. It is true, that is what they are, but surely kids of wealthy people have enough advantages already without allowing them to simply inherit the wealth of their parents. I think I would set estate taxes for inheritances above $1 million at close to 100%, and eliminate foundations and other loopholes too. Use it or lose it.

 

My third item is also an omission and relates to gun control. Every so often an incident, usually a school shooting, offers an opportunity to enact gun reforms, not to eliminate hunting rifles, but to strengthen background checks, eliminate weapons of war and enact an effective register. Trump missed his chance after Parkland, because many of his party remain wedded to the NRA. And we always equate this is issue with white school kids, while the overwhelming majority of victims are from poor black neighbourhoods. Tackling gangs without tackling guns cannot be effective, and reforming the police would be much easier if the streets were not full of guns. It is easier not to be trigger-happy and to avoid unconscious racist profiling if you are not in fear for your life.

 

None of these three items made the list in Time. Criminal justice did, and ironically it is the area of Trump’s greatest achievement, the bill that started to correct the ridiculous levels of incarceration in the US. How can a black community hope to create any wealth while so much of its male population is behind bars?

 

Next on my list comes housing, and once again it is a sin of omission. Eviction Remains one of my favourite books, and 2021 will see a terrible tide of evictions across the US as temporary programs taper off while unemployment continues to rage. Housing support is criminally underfunded by congress while city rents continue to skyrocket and little new public housing is constructed. Minimum wages are creeping up in some cities but are full of loopholes, most notably for tipped workers, whose minimum wage in some states remains around $2 per hour. It is hard indeed to escape poverty in these conditions. More subtly, I believe co-ops are a source of continuing racial bias.

 

There are many candidates to round out the list. Perhaps next would come the relentless prioritisation of capital over labour. Consumer rights have been gutted, and the stock market used as an awful proxy for growth. The stock market makes people with wealth wealthier, at the expense of those without. It should not grow faster than median earnings, but that has almost been a policy of the administration. Listen also to McConnell: his top priority in the next relief package is liability protection for businesses. It is a valid item, but it betrays his priorities – the donors and lobbyists he meets every day, rather than the struggling people he doesn’t.

 

The list must include failure to rebalance school finance per pupil so that poorer areas do not lose out compared to richer ones. The lack of any infrastructure investment harms the poor most, especially public transit and Internet availability.  We must also include allowing the number of people without health insurance to grow and the attempt to link Medicaid with employment.

 

Packing the Supreme court, bloating the military (as opposed to social programs), protecting clannish religions, the trade disaster (harming poorer consumers), linking immigration entitlement to wealth and the general incompetence of the virus response could all the added to the list. And then there is the rhetoric, stoking caste supremacy daily.

 

The list is long and reform will take many generations. But crafting good policy is not helped by poor framing of the issue, misstating the goal or woefully lazy lists.