Russia and Risk

 I love the way that board games become trendy again. I grew up with a tradition of a Sunday afternoon board game with my parents and sister, which usually ended in a tantrum from me whenever I did not win. The day I caught my mum cheating stands among the lasting traumas of my life. All good aides to growing up!

 

We didn’t possess Risk at home and in any case it needs more than four players to work well, but I remember a game of Risk from some point in my thirties.  One player, a very quiet lady, followed a strategy that differed markedly from everybody else. We were all frenetically gambling and fighting and conquering and suffering, while all she did was quietly build her resources. Then she chose her moment and wiped us all out within two moves. I was very impressed and took away more valuable life lessons.

 

I should have known better, because one game from my childhood was called “L’Attaque”. It was a great game, but should more correctly have been called “La Defense”, because the winning strategy was always to let your opponent do all the attacking.

 

I recalled many of these lessons, including the one about authority figures cheating, when reading about Russia’s military build up in Ukraine. There was a wonderful long article about the tangled history of Russia and Ukraine in the Christmas double issue of The Economist, followed up this week with a strong essay concerning the current situation. As always with The Economist, the first thing to do is strip away the MI5 propaganda: fortunately in this case that was relatively easy and the remaining content was still powerful.

 

Most of the article was spent trying to discern Putin’s motives. While more thoughtful than most such pieces, I was still left with the strong impression that the author was from the west, was schooled in the west, and thought like people in the west. When I worked in competitor intelligence our watchword was to walk in the shoes of the competitor. It is astonishing how poor we are at this in our complacent western bubble. Who, for instance, might think that taking out an ISIS leader would do anything but anger a new generation and act as a midwife for more ISIS’s? I was at least heartened by the self-awareness shown by quoting a recent remark of Alexei Navalny: :”Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps…it just takes my breath away”. What an indictment that is of eighty years of western intelligence!

 

So what traps is Putin setting? If we put ourselves in his shoes and think like Risk players we can find some answers.

 

First, Putin is a tactician more than a strategist. He probably does not know his endgame himself yet, he is simply building resources to give himself options. Hopefully he won’t be like that girl I played Risk with who devoured the rest of us.

 

Next, the long article makes clear that Russia has a unique view of its own history and role in the world. The bear is proud, defensive, fearful, vengeful, feels entitled and takes an expansive view of its own boundaries and role. Everything has to be seen in these contexts.

 

What this means with respect to Ukraine is manifold. Putin does not really accept that Ukraine is a different country, certainly not the parts of it (and there are many, and not just abutting Russia) where Russian is spoken and where there is Russian history. The frightening few weeks when the USSR broke up and an alcoholic Yeltsin and a few acolytes tried to reset the world order left a bitter mark, and we should remember that the west has reneged on many promises made at that time. Russia will see a western orientated Ukraine with military prowess as an unacceptable mortal threat. It is just as easy geographically to invade Moscow from Kyiv as it is to invade Kyiv from Moscow.

 

Most important, this is personal. A lot of politics is personal. 2016 is instructive. Putin did not interfere in the US election primarily because he thought he could outmanoeuvre Trump (though that was a big bonus), it was because he hated Hillary Clinton and bore a massive grudge against her. There are probably several people in Ukraine that we have never heard of that meet the same criteria.

 

Next, Putin is very comfortable with messiness. Most of us have a preference for clean solutions to problems. Indeed being uncomfortable with ambiguity is a limiting factor in many lives. Putin can tolerate a mess for a long time if it suits him. It is Risk all over again. Moldova has been a divided mess for 25 years. That is a lovely asset for Putin sitting ready for him to use when it suits. Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Georgia and now the Donbas follow the same pattern, as does Belorussia and now even Kazakhstan in their different ways. Russians love chess. Don’t look for endgames. They emerge, sometimes very slowly.

 

The Economist guessed that the main objectives of the troop build up might have been to shore things up at home via a manufactured crisis and to snub his nose at the west. Fair enough, and both have been achieved. But I don’t think it is as clean as that. Putin is ex KGB and will have a chessboard full of characters that he is trying to manipulate here, most of them in Russia or Ukraine. He doesn’t understand about communicating to an entire populace – the KGB just locked people up – but he knows how to structure a chessboard of powerful individuals. Many of the true targets here will be some oligarchs we have never heard of.

 

I wish we could analyse this more intelligently in the west. That probably starts by keeping anybody military out of the way. But if people believe what they say, they are so dumb that Navalny is proven correct on a daily basis. Take the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Somehow we are supposed to believe that this gives Russia extra leverage. That is nonsense. Europe has a shortage of reliable gas suppliers and supply routes. The new pipeline can only improve things. It does not have to be used. Europe can buy from elsewhere. The ones who lose by the new pipeline are the ones controlling the choke points, because adding a new supply line reduces their leverage. In practice, that means Ukraine, and it is the Hunter Biden’s and other overpaid parasitic consultants who are the ones peddling this nonsense. The sad part is how we continually fall for it.

 

My guess is that Putin will back down, unless he is provoked by something very personal. He is playing a long and messy game of Risk. Building up forces is cheap. Actually fighting is not, and usually ends badly. Putin is already lobbing jobs at the west saying it was us who created the crisis by stoking fear. There is truth to this (and also that there are a lot of troops surrounding Ukraine). Let him say it, and wait for him to withdraw and claim victory.

 

I find a clear parallel here with the west and China, most notably regarding Taiwan. Xi is not Putin: he is smarter, and actually cares for his people as well as his clos confidantes. He has a stronger hand, but is equally patient. I predict that Taiwan will be like Hong Kong. Within ten years China will have practical control, and they won’t fire a bullet to achieve it. The west won’t see it coming, at least won’t see how it is coming. A more detailed prediction is that TSMC, the world’s largest and most successful semiconductor producer, will play a key role in Xi’s strategy.     

Plan B Against Trump

 I still remember my emotions on the day after Trump was elected in 2016. IN common with others, I couldn’t watch as the results started to come in, and on the rainy Wednesday morning I was in a daze, unable to comprehend what had just happened. I went into Manhattan for a matinée and found the most people shared my somber, stunned, mood.

 

Later that week my thoughts moved more towards the implications and the damage that could be inflicted on our precious world, and to counting the months until the nightmare would be over. Each year brought outrage but also relief that somehow war hadn’t broken out and that some societal functions remained resilient against the onslaught. There was grim joy in concluding that Trump’s own gross incompetence had been one reason for the absence of many foretold disasters.

 

Then 2020 dawned and it became clear that the nightmare might indeed not end that year. Trump was at his high point in the polls, the Democrats looked likely to choose a vulnerable Bernie as candidate and the economy was humming along. As we now know, it was only Covid that turned things around, and even with that massive following wind, made only stronger by the deranged president, the election still finished in a near tie.

 

I still shake my head in sadness as I contemplate how over seventy million adults voted to re-elect Trump, how most of those still believe he won and how a frightening subset would contemplate violence to restore their imperium. As we look towards 2024, most commentators concede that a restoration to power is a likely scenario.

 

Just because we survived last time, we should not be complacent about a second dose. Trump himself will be older and would even less predictable and more intolerant. His next generation of yes men would be even more cynical than the last lot, have more nefarious agendas and perhaps be more competent. Weakened institutions, including the election process itself, might crumble under a new assault. China will be ready.

 

It is not disrespectful to democracy to dream up a strategy to stop this horrifying prospect, so long as the means are lawful. Indeed, it would be disrespectful to democracy not to focus huge efforts on such a strategy. So what should that strategy comprise?

 

Plan A was not too bad but is clearly proving insufficient. Apart from the morbid but clearly unreliable aspect of hoping Trump might die or become incapacitated, the components seem to be starving his voice, chipping away at Republicans, succeeding in government and legal avenues.

 

Some of these have had some success. The silencing, executed by social media platforms, must be a huge frustration for the ego-obsessed Trump. He has been driven towards marginal platforms with low resonance and to relying on proxies. Sadly, the main proxies remain effective. Fox News has not changed one iota. Nor has the populist press, and it is no coincidence that Murdoch owns many of those outlets too. The saddest part about all this is that many Americans only receive their news and opinion from this type of source, and the beguiling simple messages are constantly reinforced.

 

The legal approach is starting to bear fruit, but is inevitably slow, since that is how honest law operates. Those of us who hoped Trump might be in jail by now were always likely to be disappointed. There will no doubt be fines aplenty to come, but nothing to legally disqualify him. And any hopes that some of the mud might stick are delusional – Fox and others will only use setbacks as an opportunity for martyr and witch hunt narratives.

 

The other two plan A strategies have had almost no success. Almost no Republicans with any wish to retain or regain power have shown any backbone. To have hoped otherwise was always optimistic. To expect any change, especially after January 6, would be delusional. As for successful governing, this was always doomed. The 50-50 senate could not achieve much in the face of the resolute cynicism of McConnell, what is achieved legislatively will only bear fruit after several years, and the echo chamber will undermine any message. Opposition is much easier than governing, and the easiest part is pedaling strategies that need never be implemented (and even in government most Trump supporters don’t seem to have noticed that little of consequence was implemented). We can forget about Democratic success in government having an impact on voters.

 

So plan A has not really succeeded, though perhaps the legal approach can lead somewhere substantial in the end and must stay as a pillar in plan B too.

 

My main change in strategy would relate to the silent treatment. Having Trump deprived of his personal pulpit remains excellent, but it is not enough. Biden and Democrats seem to have been following a strategy of not mentioning Trump at all, perhaps hoping that this and the silent treatment will take him out of the news completely. This now feels foolhardy. Biden himself seems to have recognised this in recent weeks, especially with his personal attack of Trump in his speech on the anniversary of the insurrection.

 

I think the new strategy should involve more attacks, and be very focused on both Trump and aimed at those in his base. Endless outrage pieces have no impact, because the only ones outraged are the ones in the other echo chamber. The attacks have to chip away at the base somehow. That means repetition, simplicity, and a focus on demonstrating how Trump has no true respect for his own base and only harms them.

 

Trump is a walking scandal, and surely there is much more dirt than can be dug up, and not the lazy kind that only outrages people like me. What has he been on record saying about his own supporters? Who of his own base has he shamelessly robbed? Which of the values that his own base espouses has he trashed? I don’t think this would be an especially tough assignment for investigative journalists. Extend the field to include Trump’s acolytes and the assignment becomes easier still. What has DeSantis been up to? McCarthy? All the little Trumps?

 

This drumbeat of scandal can complement much simpler messaging from the Democrats about policy. It is tough for them to focus their messages, because there is so much they want to do and most of it is laudable. But is complex, hard to demonstrate, and also often easily drowned by some outrage from the other side. Immigration is a powerful Republican talking point. Where is the simple equally powerful (and less racist) message from the other side? I don’t currently see it, and without it the Trump faction could sweep the board, including by winning over many more Latino voters, who have become established in the USA by hard work and don’t see why it should be easier for others.

 

Then there are other potential opinion formers. Sports stars do their bit and there may some traction there. Companies can be stirred into action when their own interests are threatened or they see an interest in being responsible in front of their employees. What about churches? Money talks and habits die hard, but surely the Catholics ought to be progressive from their single issue campaign by now and noticing how the party they seem to lead towards has been captured by somebody whose values are the opposite of those in the Gospels.

 

Will plan B work better than plan A? Perhaps it will, and perhaps not. Playing dirty can feel like betraying values – remember Michelle Obama and “when the go low, we go high”? Perhaps I am panicking, but I think the time to go low has arrived. The stakes for all of us are too high this time.           

Whatever works

 I spent a fair chunk of my career trying to manage networks of petrol stations. Perhaps that sounds rather pathetic. But I am not complaining, because it gave me a good living, introduced me to interesting people and taught me many life lessons.

 

The first trick to managing networks of petrol stations is to understand one station. A petrol station is like many small businesses. People, detail, standards, expectations and money all matter a lot. Petrol stations have their own little quirks, and it helps to be an expert in those, but a lot of the skills are more generic and transferrable to other businesses.

 

So managing a network is mainly about optimizing its elements, and many of the same priorities are equally important at a network level. It is grinding work without quick fixes. We need to trust people but also to be skeptical. We need to see a big picture but to keep a close eye on tiny details. Count those cigarettes every day, and be seen to be counting them!

 

There are many levers to pull, but a lot of them are frustrating. In the same way that a soccer team relies on motivating different players in different ways, many levers work well on some stations but have unintended negative consequences on others. Grandiose strategies like brand differentiation are critical but often fail to match realities on the ground and only yield benefits in the long term. Pricing offers the temptation of immediate impact but can be a hornet’s nest. Station level details like recruitment and maintaining standards can seem to have little impact at network level. Some levers feel tempting but either carry prohibitive initial cost or face regulatory blockers.

 

In my experience, this often causes managers (including myself) to reach for the shiny lever called the system. In the case of petrol station networks, this refers to the contractual and operational relationship between the network owner and the managers of individual stations. Who should own what? How are incomes and costs shared? What leverage and security does each party have, and what risks? What procedures deal with special situations?

 

It is a gross simplification, but for stations owned by the network owner rather than individual operators, a key choice is between company operation and some form of franchise where the operator has more control. In the first case the operator is like a manager, paid a salary with incentives and bonuses, while in the second case the operator is more like a business owner, running their own ship within a framework of rules.

 

The generic pros and cons of each approach are obvious. Company operation seems to retain more control and sanctions, allows network level initiatives without negotiation and retains more upside. Franchises can incentivize hard work and care, so fraud will usually be less and decisions can be made with more agility.

 

I learned many lessons by living through this debate and through implementations. The first lesson is to avoid lazy labels. The top line may say company operation, but underneath the detail might work more like a franchise, and vice versa. The detail matters more than the label. In the same way, dogma does not help. Many of us lean towards a franchise or lean towards control, but we should always be open to whatever will work in a given situation, rather than simply applying our dogmatic bias to every case.

 

Next, resist pulling that lever! Change is always costly, slow, and loaded with unintended consequences. It is also never a panacea – a terrible network with terrible operation will not be transformed merely by a system change. But it is also important to pull that lever occasionally. Systems become tired and over time the flaws become endemic, so the time for change eventually comes around. Good practice is to evolve a system gradually via incremental change, but that can be difficult.

 

Next, context is everything. Are we growing or declining, and a market leader or a distant follower? What best fits the local economy, in terms of talent, regulation, common practice or other factors? How does the decision fit with our wider company culture and strategy?

 

Next, horses for courses. Not every station needs to have an identical model. Hybrids may be operationally necessary or even beneficial. We should play to our strengths, be adaptable and always learn.

 

Finally, implementation is everything. Details matter, and these include transition, training, communications, pace, handling of special situations and maintaining operational focus during change.

 

My example comes readily to mind when thinking about the much larger question of political systems for countries. There is constant chatter comparing democracy to autocracy, these days especially when it comes to the war of words between the USA and China. A few weeks ago, Chaguan, normally my favourite Economist writer, made a ritual defence of the values of the west in comparison to China, and it all rang very hollow to me. China has many flaws and engages in reprehensible behaviour, but lazy analysis abounds.

 

All of my generic lessons apply. The first is about lazy labels. Communism versus capitalism has overtones of company operation versus franchise, and democracy versus autocracy has its own generic pros and cons. In both cases, lazy labels only hinder intelligent thought and debate. Every model has its own quirks, and many details make up the overall picture. Chaguan relied on such lazy thinking, and sadly that is often all the west has to offer these days. Our system sucks but at least we can vote! Well maybe, but in the US votes are rare, usually meaningless in gerrymandered constituencies, appoint representatives who follow no manifesto and are often fodder for lobbyists and are stymied by dysfunction, corruption and inequity, including in the courts.

 

So we must look beyond labels and beware dogma. We should also resist pulling the system lever, especially without a strong implementation, as the Soviet Union tragically demonstrated in the 1990’s. Adaptable, incremental change within a system is key, and here the US is a disaster area, while China has recently done a wonderful job.

 

Then there is context. It can be argued that the current model in China is ideal for its stage of development, though I acknowledge that this would sound very hollow to somebody languishing in a Uighur indoctrination programme. The general context of the mind set of the majority of the people, the level of development and education, the relative position compared with other nations, and the international constraints and opportunities, would point towards centralised decision making within a structure of clear strategy and goals. They have also been smart with horses for courses. Xinjiang is a brutal example, Hong Kong and Macau also questionable but effective, and policies stratifying cities and regions are excellent. Look out for unexpected but brilliant moves concerning Taiwan, perhaps starting with the TSMC, the world’s leading microchip company.

 

And implementation is everything. It will not last, the time to pull the lever will come eventually as complacency sets in, and there will be losers as well as winners, but I sense the Chinese winning streak has some time to run yet. The quality of implementation is in a different league to their main adversary in so many areas, and I see little sign of that changing.

 

In the west, we would do well to go beyond dogmatic slogans and labels, and start to find some incremental fixes to our myriad problems. Oh, and perhaps it is a mistake to confront an adversary whose system may be less appealing but who seems to be playing a better game than us just now. 

Unhelpful Binaries

I wish a happy New Year and a healthy and less frustrating 2022 to everyone.

 

I had my second bout of Covid in the last week of 2021. The first time was at the start of the pandemic, and I only found out three months later when I took an antibody test. Then I could look back, recall a couple of days of a sore throat, and many possible occasions before the panic started when I could have picked it up from my heavily infested Queens neighbourhood.

 

This time had similarities. This new variant seems to everywhere just now, especially in heavily populated New York. We are smarter about hand washing, distancing and masking now, but the virus still got through despite my three vaccinations, probably at a family gathering. It is still not easy to get a PCR test, but I needed one for my church choir and managed to secure an appointment last Wednesday at a city run site, which duly came back positive, just as mild cold-like symptoms started to emerge. My wife and I had both taken antigen tests earlier in the week that came back negative.

 

My main takeaway from all this is about a series of unhelpful binaries. Whenever we take a binary, yes or no, approach to anything about Covid, we seem to make silly mistakes.

 

The first binary is about whether we have Covid or not. My suspicion is that most of us in densely populated areas where Omicron has started to spread have at least some Covid. But we are not encouraged to think that way; instead we divide the population into those that have it and those that do not. Especially at the beginning, when we thought Covid was almost a death sentence, this binary approach unnecessarily added to our panic. We wanted to call a priest for the last rites if we so much as touched a doorknob.

 

True, some communities did not have any Covid, so it was safe to do more or less anything there. Even now, in places with aggressive policies like China and Australia, Covid can be isolated and eliminated quickly. But most places are not like that. There is some Covid around and probably most of us have a bit of it some of the time. With Omicron the chances have gone up. Our challenge is not to keep it out completely, but to take smart steps to keep the level low enough to restrict the danger, and to further improve our odds by shoring up our immune defences via vaccinations and good hygiene.

 

This logic extends to tests. We tend to view test results as binaries. Indeed most tests come back with a binary positive or negative result. That is not as helpful as it could be. PCR tests are much more sensitive than antigen tests. The likelihood of false positives or false negatives is quite high with antigen tests. PCR tests measure not whether the subject has a current infection but a current or recent infection, so will give positive results for several weeks after somebody is clear of Covid. Even the most sensitive and well-executed tests have to set a cut off level to yield a positive result, and results may cluster around that level, so many positive tests will indicate only slightly higher levels than many negative ones. In practise test execution is mixed, especially when administered at home. All this also requires people to be able to actually find tests and to get results within a time interval where they are of any use.

 

Then there is the reliability of statistics to consider. Different cities and countries use different tests and test different subsets of the population. New York publishes the percentage of PCR tests administered at City sites that come back positive. This indicator is currently about 20%. While a frighteningly high figure, it does not mean that one in five New Yorkers are infected with Covid because the sample is very obviously a biased one. I have been saddened to see statistics used selectively and manipulated shamelessly to promote loaded messages through the pandemic. Some of this is nefarious, but official sources do not help their cause by using similar tactics.

 

The next binary is about safe practices. Of course no set of practises are completely safe, and no practise can guarantee you get Covid. It is all about odds, and should be explained as such. Instead we are offered precise guidelines, and many interpret these as a binary indicator of safety or danger. Last May I attended a Mets game masked and alone in a vast outdoor stand only after following intense protocols to gain admission. A week later I attended another game without any admission protocols and in a packed stand surrounded by unmasked people singing and baying loudly. It would be far better if the guidelines could have more nuance. It still feels very wrong to see vast loud and angry crowds packed in at football games. This is big money wielding an undue influence over public policy and rather an indictment of the intelligence of the attendees, but the binary communication of guidelines does not help. The same big money leads to reduced restrictions restaurants and bars, while I know from personal experience that alcohol is disastrous for self-discipline.

 

The next unhelpful binaries concern general statements about immunity and the pandemic overall. Herd immunity was an unfortunate term introduced in 2020, and still pervades conversation. There is no such thing as herd immunity; instead there is a level where susceptibility becomes less than voraciousness overall so the number of new cases diminishes. But people love to justify reckless behaviour by claiming that herd immunity has been reached. In the same way, no vaccine, booster or prior infection provides complete immunity; they simply improve our odds for a time. Similar logic can easily conclude that most binary claims about the end of the pandemic are rather meaningless. The pandemic will evolve and eventually diminish; it will not end.

A last common binary is about long Covid. We are led to believe that this is a specific additional ailment that afflicts a subset of sufferers. It feels far more likely that a spectrum is a better description, with Covid handicapping most of us to some extent long after we contract it. This weeks analysis of professional footballers whose average performance declined for several months after Covid bears this out. I know myself that walking up stairs had me out of breath for several months in 2020, and that there was more to it than wearing a mask. Yet I can hardly describe that as long Covid. 

 

I struggle to understand the reluctance to use the concept of probability when defining and communicating public policy for Covid. Most people gamble and indeed our screens are currently filled with inducements to gamble recklessly. So authorities must trust us to understand at least something about how odds work. Yet they cannot seem to trust us when it comes to health guidelines.

 

Occasionally something more helpful surfaces amid the cacophony. I still like the image of Covid as cigarette smoke, with contagious people equated to smokers. Being close to many heavy smokers in an unventilated space will very likely lead to some smoke entering my lungs, especially if the smokers are breathing all over me. But a few light smokers on the other side of a park won’t do me much harm, and any harm will vanish quickly unless my lungs are in really poor condition already. This feels an excellent image to understand Covid. Yet most of the time I am served up instead with platitudes are vaccination immunity and six feet being a universally safe distance. We can do better.

 

Covid is only an example of where binary thinking inhibits smart responses. For centuries sexuality was viewed in the same way, with predictably harmful results. What about foreigners? Communists? Christians? In practise many of us might share some features of all these categories but feel forced into binary positions.

 

The same simplistic guff applies to most discussion of criminality, dominated by a narrative of catching and neutralising the bad guys. Are most of us easily described as good or bad? If we are bad at a certain moment, why might that be? What is the best way to make us less bad more often? It is not difficult to find effective answers to these questions, but the lazy binary approach makes it much harder. 

Party like it is 1999

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Reckless Driving

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Attention Span

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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