Human Supply Chains

 When we think of supply chains, our first thoughts are of factories and shipping containers, with huge quantities of goods moving around the world, mainly emanating from China.

 

The current crisis of supply chains is mainly a result of what Covid has done to demand. A critical component of a just-in-time system is somewhat predictable demand. Everything else follows from that first input.

 

Years ago in Shell UK, there were many operational business committees, but the most important one was called the STBT or short-term business team. We spent days creating annual plans for the purposes of targeting and staffing, but these plans inevitably collapsed with the first dose of reality. The STBT had representatives from marketing, manufacturing, and logistics, and tried to make sense of the coming weeks. Oil tankage is limited and so is the capacity to move oil products around. Refineries cannot be turned up or down at will but can only be reset with some effort and cost.

 

The most important input from the STBT was the hardest to predict, and that was customer demand. What could we actually transfer to customers over the coming days and weeks, of which products and where? We had one specific advantage, namely the tankage at petrol stations and certain commercial customers. These acted as buffer capacity, where we could run stocks up or down at short notice with minimal cost. But our most valuable weapon was the past. What did we sell last month? What large orders are in the pipeline? What did we sell in the equivalent months last year? For all the variables involved, the total demand tended to follow a somewhat predictable pattern. With a few tweaks, we could feed that to the production side and they could respond accordingly, so long as there were in the midst of their own crisis.

 

Since those days technology has marched forwards. Businesses have been able to place many more inputs onto computers and use algorithms rather than committees to do the other steps. I am sure that Shell UK still has an STBT (no doubt having used half a dozen different acronyms since my day), but the role has evolved with technology, enabling faster responses and reduced tolerances.

 

What happened with the pandemic was a series of rather sudden and unexpected ruptures to demand. Previous crises were not like this. In the financial crisis demand plummeted, but across most categories following a demographic profile, so the algorithms could make a fairly good guess for most goods most of the time. In this crisis, people started buying different things in different ways at very short notice, and the guesses went haywire. Only now, two years later, have most algorithms started to recover a semblance of dignity.

 

We can overlook the fact that there are more to supply chains than products and factories and trucks. Another critical component are people, and not just the beleaguered managers of the STBT. Even in these days of automation, we still need people to man the factories and drive the trucks. With the global economy now based as much on services as on goods, we need people to execute those services as well.

 

This month I have been travelling in Europe. It has been a lovely experience in many ways, and once again I observe how Europe seems to have developed and become more liveable while the USA seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Another takeaway is how we had temporarily forgotten what a strain travel can be, with its crowded airports and teeming cities. Travelling during the height of the pandemic had its risks and its complications, but it was a joy to move around free of the crowds.

 

My travel has enabled me to witness the people supply chain crisis at first hand, most notably overt the last few days around the glorious city of Amsterdam. First, Schiphol airport, one of the most efficient in the world, is being hambled by staff shortages. It is no fun arriving on a flight that lands at 2AM. I promise you it is far less fun standing by the baggage conveyor belt for ninety minutes at that hour. I tried to stay calm by envisioning a team of just one or two baggage handlers trying to cope with an expected level of demand.

 

Then Amsterdam itself was packed with visitors and a joy to experience, but it seemed that every single establishment was short staffed. I had brunch at one large place where I estimated the team of five to have had less than a month of experience there in total, given their absence of teamwork and complete unfamiliarity with the IT system: everybody was being given the wrong items on their bills! Again, the staff and the customers were remarkably tolerant, as if this situation was quite normal.

 

Businesses have been caught out by the demand upswing. Large or small, they struggled to stay alive in 2020-21, cut staff to the bone and have been understandably cautious in rehiring. That side of the equation has not surprised me, but what has is the way the supply side has not been able to respond either. I can barely remember a time in my life when casual labour was in short supply: who would not welcome a side hustle?

 

I have been pondering the possible reasons for the shortfall. A good place to start is often demographics. Over the last fifty years, two groups have dominated this casual workforce, young adults and recent immigrants. Lo and behold, the EU birth rate declined close to an all-time low during the 1990’s, only to start climbing again after 2010. So the cohort of young adults is now at its minimum. Furthermore, most of these kids are now in tertiary education for longer. As students, they may still go for a hustle, but perhaps for fewer hours. This cohort has also been imaginative in finding alternative hustles to the traditional service sector, via various online activities.

 

And since 2016 immigrants have become less welcome across the EU. I find it pleasantly ironic that some of the very people who may be bemoaning the slow service of their latte may be the same ones who drove politicians to confine to camps in Greek islands the very Syrians and Afghans who would be only too happy to help. We reap what we sow.

 

Then there are the possible reasons related to Covid. Some people are still sick or afraid. Some used stimulus money to sort out the cash flow and can now be more fussy than before. Perhaps a bigger factor is where the young are now living. Many went back to families and away from large cities. You don’t commute a long way for a bar job so the cities may have fewer workers available as a result.

 

I expect things will balance out within a few months; after all that is how market economies work. Wages are rising and conditions are improving. Demand will become more predictable again. Tragically, Ukrainians may become a significant service workforce for an extended period. There is probably a downturn coming as monetary policy tightens, so more mature workers may soon be looking for casual work. Maybe, just maybe, a more humane immigration policy might emerge. That would a cause for celebration, even more than the joy of finally seeing my bag trundle onto the luggage belt at 4AM.

Stable and Unstable Systems

 I am no fan of Guardian writer George Monbiot. The phrase “crying wolf” might have been invented for this Cassandra of a journalist. If 5% of the apocalyptic prophesies peppering his articles had come true, we would all be dead by now. His speciality is environmental writing, and, while he does unearth excellent new angles of despair, his solutions tend to be wildly impractical, and the overall tone turns me off after a while.

 

Still, earlier this month he did introduce me to one of his smart new angles. The concept was simple enough, and even familiar, but I found the context to be new and it did then lead my mind down a few other paths that I found interesting. Monbiot divided systems up into stable and unstable ones. Both types of system are subject to change and even to shocks, but the stable ones can absorb most of these while the unstable ones are more fragile and liable to collapse completely.

 

Monbiot’s rather strange example was of the system of global food production and distribution, and true to his pessimistic form, he argued that this had possibly become unstable to the point of imminent collapse, which would presumably be defined by widespread famine across much of the world.

 

He pointed out a few potential root causes to support his claim. One was the concentration of food production. It is potentially a good thing when places with suitable climates or economic advantages come to produce more than their locally required share of certain foodstuffs. These places can produce at a better quality and cheaper and then trade with other places to create overall societal value, despite the additional costs of storage and distribution involved. Thus everyone can potentially have a broader diet with better nutritional content at an affordable cost.

 

The problem is that this improved system is more complex and has more components that can go wrong. Even a poor African nation with a harsh climate can produce enough for people to live on, otherwise its population would have died out long ago. Sure, there were droughts and diseases, but the simpler system could find ways to compensate over time, even at the expense of malnutrition and some death. With the new complex global system, that nation may have forgotten how to produce its staples and the people may have evolved to no longer be able to survive with that diet anyway. Yet there is no guarantee that the potentially abundant global diet will always make its way to every corner of the populated world.

 

In Monbiot’s view, this risk is then exacerbated by a tendency towards monopolies. Not only do a very few nations produce most of the world’s needs of specific crops, but the production and distribution are increasingly concentrated in a very small number of firms. These players buy each other out and relentlessly drive out costs to maximise returns to shareholders, but their operations may become so efficient that tolerances become too small.

 

Put these root causes together and add a shock or two and disaster becomes possible. Of course, the shocks we now face include the Ukraine war, on top of the coronavirus disruptions and against a background of growing hostility and suspicion between large nations. A disaster may indeed be about to manifest itself in wheat, in sunflower oil and in some key chemicals.

 

Here Monbiot rests his case. He may be right. There is certainly a looming crisis of hunger around the world. The Economist highlighted this in the very early stages of the war and the avoidance of famine has become an urgent consideration of the UN and the diplomatic efforts of altruistic countries. The intense concentration and tightness of supply chains will probably make this crisis more immediate and acute than it would have been before the onset of globalisation.

 

This is a fair and established argument. But, as usual, I fear Monbiot may be trying to lead us to places where his logic is less sound. He implies that the globalisation of a diet and concentration of production are inherently bad things, driven by his favourite evil force, capitalism. He regularly pins the blame for climate change and a host of other poor outcomes on the same forces. He is arguing that the market is not the best method to allocate such resources.

 

But do we really want to go back to subsistence diets? I am currently in the south of Portugal, and every day when I visit our small town, I see the impact of past diets: the older locals are emaciated and about a foot shorter than the younger ones or the expatriates. Were people happier then? I doubt it; healthy life expectancy was certainly much lower.

 

And if the market is so bad, we must consider the track record of the alternatives. What about the Irish famine of the 1840’s, or Stalin’s famines of the 1930’s or Mao’s of the 1960’s? Or the poverty in Venezuela, a land of abundant potential wealth, today?

 

Furthermore, when disaster does strike, won’t the market and technology help us to recover more quickly than we did in the past? It may be halting, and unfair, but recovery will occur somehow. As is happening around the world right now, companies will start to build in some resilience and governments will legislate to protect their citizens, especially those that might become violent or vote incumbents out of office.

 

So I don’t accept that the global food system is inherently unstable, and I don’t accept an implied argument that overriding the market is justified, except in smart ways of regulating emergency supplies and of encouraging competition.

 

But the distinction between stability and instability did lead me to consider other systems in that way. Monbiot’s conclusion that excessive complexity and uniformity are risk factors, while built in fail safes and contingencies are good, feels sound.

 

The human body is a wonderful example of a stable system, and we still don’t have the technology to fully understand how. Evolution is an amazing force towards stability. Somehow we seem able to heal from almost anything, and advances in medicine improve our abilities every day. Reproduction, cell renewal, bacteria and many other factors play a role in our remarkable stability.

 

The climate may well be an unstable system just now, as I am sure Monbiot was leading us to conclude from his article. There are too many inter-dependent parts, it is hard to see the full picture, and the human actors are not aligned in motives and incentives. Our progress will surely be messy and there will be disasters. But even here I think humanity will find a way to recovery, though perhaps with many decades of lost lives and less attractive conditions.

 

What about the financial and economic systems? In 2008 the financial system in the capitalistic world appeared unstable because so much risk was piled into so limited an asset class, so the scale of loss was large and the recovery slow. But ultimately the actors could align behind somewhat common goals, and with the help of some excellent political leadership, sound regulations emerged. As our collective understanding of economic drivers improves, the system promises to become even more stable, though not necessarily fairer. I am happy to join in with Monbiot’s frustration that, even with stable systems, humanity consistently falls below its potential.

 

Is the military equilibrium stable or unstable? That will likely be tested over the next few years. The concept of MAD never worked for me as an inherent stabiliser, and, indeed, the great powers are working to actively undermine it.

 

Then there is human governance. It is fashionable to argue that a system like the Chinese one is more stable than the current mess evident in democracies. But I feel we must take the long view. Concentration of power gets things done and can perform well over an extended period. But power dos tend to create corruption, and as inequities grow, and are bottled up via repression until they explode, and the longer the bottling up the greater the explosion tends to be.

 

Democracies, despite having more checks and balances, are not immune, as the current trends in the US demonstrate. But, sooner or later, there will be a reckoning and the people’s will be heard. Over time that will becomes more informed and fairer.

 

Overall, I find myself more in the camp of Steven Pinker than of George Monbiot. But even Pinker accepts that progress does not follow a straight line and that plenty of disasters pepper the path of development. 

Finding Peace

 Peace is underrated. If we are at peace, we are surely happy and contented, and in a state where we can experience joy. As an individual goal, perhaps there is none better.

 

It is not a coincidence that individual peace features so abundantly in the gospels, and in our liturgies. No doubt it is the same for other faiths. “Peace be with you” is one of the most common utterances, for good reason.

 

And at the end of life, helping residents to find an inner peace is a goal of the nuns running the home where we volunteer. They channel their own faith in support, but they are not imposing that faith on the residents. But they try to help the people to reconcile themselves to death by reaching a state of peace. Of course trying to reduce their levels of physical pain is a part of this process.

 

At its best, the renaissance music we love also exudes a sense of peace. Perhaps our favourite CD is by an a cappella group called The Sixteen with the title Music for Inner Peace. Invariably when we play it, the music weaves its magic and achieves the desired effect. I find it especially helpful when surrounded by noisy traffic and impatient New York drivers.

 

I am not advocating that we all lounge around in our bedroom slippers all day and become inactive. Peacefulness is not the same as inactivity. Indeed, if we are bored or slovenly, we may find it hard to achieve a state of peace. Time can drag and our thoughts can cause anxiety.

 

I am also not advocating that we should all explore drugs, or even become monks and nuns, though I sometimes envy the simplicity and certainty apparent in many of their lives.

 

Indeed, peace is one of those life goals that is treated more as a desired outcome than the result of a series of inputs. This is true for happiness and joy as well. Frantically seeking out these things, whether via retreats or drugs or sleep monitoring devices or the faddish ideas of some guru, risks being counterproductive.

 

Simplicity as a goal can be similar, in business as well as our personal lives. I witnessed many business campaigns aiming for simplicity, and they generally failed. I found that simplifying the business model itself was the key to achieving a simple business. What is our essence and our edge? What activities, products and customers are fundamental to those things? What stops us from eliminating everything else?

 

So, finding an inner peace is a great goal, yet actively searching for peace is likely to fail. Yet last month one of our kids paid me a big compliment when remarking that I exuded peace. I don’t think that she was saying that I had become a vegetable. So it set me thinking. Is that true? If so, how did I achieve that?

 

I reached for another tool familiar from a business setting, that is to look to opposites. If actively searching for peace is a chimera, how about trying to avoid its opposites?

 

Miriam Webster offered three overlapping definitions for peace, and many antonyms for each of these. Peace can be seen as a state without war, a freedom from disturbing thoughts or a freedom from disturbance. Antonyms are respectively conflict, stress or dread or anguish, and commotion or uproar. Now these are things we can usefully work on. 

 

Some conflict in life is almost inevitable. Rolling over and not sticking up for our rights and values is no recipe for peace – that will make us full of anguish. So the goal must be to avoid unnecessary conflict, to handle conflict, and to resolve conflict.

 

The religious example here is about resolving conflict. In Christian homilies, we are often offered the good advice to reach out to those with whom we have a broken relationship, one with suspicion and unresolved issues. This also forms a key element of twelve-step programs. This is tough to do, but it is easy to see how it can be effective. After some initial posturing, the other party will welcome our advances, and both of us can remove a simmering cause for the absence of peace.

 

As for avoiding and handling conflict, we should not run away from conflict completely, but try to learn skills of communication and of seeing things from the point of view of the other side. In my case, less impulsive showing off by putting others down would surely help. More fundamentally, we can to extent choose our relationships, especially the one with a prospective life partner. If, after a while, we find that we don’t often fall into conflict and that we resolve disputes easily, perhaps we are well matched. Dating websites might do well to emphasise that ability over a photo image or how somebody like animals or some boy band.

 

The second antonym is about fear, stress and anguish. Some of us find this easier than others. It certainly helps if we can love ourselves enough to be constantly regretful, or full of guilt, or with egos that need reassurance over what others are thinking about us. Finding peace with ourselves is key here. I like the commandment to love the Lord thy God (which I interpret of having the humility to accept fate), and to love thy neighbour as thyself. The part that we often forget is to love ourselves.

 

To an extent, we can also learn to live our lives to avoid the things that make us fearful or anxious. Choosing relationships come back here, but also choosing activities, and choosing where to take a risk for a thrill and where to be more cautious.

 

Then the last antonym is commotion or uproar. This is the one that advertisers and bankers undervalue, because they want us to live uproarious lives that involve spending more money. Being motivated to post an image a day on Instagram from a new location, activity or relationship might feed our ego in the short term but is likely to work against peace over time. We can make compromises. I love living in the city for its culture and vitality. But the incessant noise and reckless and angry behaviour by fellow drivers this morning made me feel anything but peaceful.

 

Another source of both commotion and anger can be following the news. Our news feeds and the lazier TV channels seek to funnel outrage, so they can get more clicks and perhaps to support the causes of their benefactors. We will do better if we proactively choose when and how to stay to up to date with current affairs. Again, social media do not help here. But the solutions are easily within our reach. I love to read The Economist and The Guardian Weekly, from cover to cover and at a measured pace, and to avoid too much impulsive searching for stories. Following the war in Ukraine from outrage to outrage is hardly a recipe for our peace (and still less, theirs), but I find I can keep some perspective and emotional balance by choosing my outlets and my frequency of updates.

 

There are other avenues to dig into here, and perhaps it will be a good holiday project for me to explore some of them. I am sure I could adjust my habits to yield more peace without sacrificing very much. My daughter’s welcome pronouncement I am doing that well already is no reason to ignore the possibility of doing better still. 

 

Peace might be the most underrated of all goals. At a personal level, peace in hearts and peace in relationships must be the best recipe for harmony. It is hard to imagine people at peace with themselves committing horrifying acts, or even allowing their nations to wage war or harbour grudges. A few elements of modern society conspire against us, but, unless we have more mental health issues than most or our circumstances are unusually tough, the remedies are readily available to us.      

Finding Hope

 Living in the USA, sometimes it is hard to be hopeful about the future of humanity. This week has seen an outpouring of grief over an especially horrific school shooting. That grief will pass soon enough, and similar death tolls on the streets of Chicago or Baltimore will scarcely register in people’s consciousness. In a similar way, we all notice when a Goldman Sachs employee is shot by a mentally sick guy on the subway here in New York, but not really when a black kid is caught in crossfire in the Bronx.

 

Common theme themes in all of this are sick, angry people and guns. Everywhere in the world has sick, angry people, and the number of them seems to have increased since the start of the pandemic. In many societies those sick people are kept somewhat in check by a suffocating family or community culture. Only in the US do many of them wander around with lethal guns.

 

There are many aspects of US society that I struggle with, but most of them I can come to accept as a weird compromise or as a legacy of a different time. This is a rich society where you must think twice about calling for an ambulance in case it bankrupts you, and where that same ambulance will be chased by parasitic lawyers. The squalor of deprived areas, so close to districts of showy opulence, is hard to accept. Why can nobody seem to get rid of the potholes? Why is the TV so bad, especially anything trying to be funny?

 

I can come to terms with all of these. But not about guns. Why would anybody ever want to go anywhere near a gun, except deep in the forest for hunting? Lives are precious, and all guns achieve is to waste them. The idea that if I had a gun, I could somehow be safer is plainly preposterous. So a bad guy enters my house and threatens me. By a miracle my gun is handy, and loaded, and I can remember how to use it and I can shoot the bad guy before he shoots me? Seriously? I am far more likely to shoot myself or my child or goad the bad guy to be reckless, and statistics indeed back up this more realistic hypothesis.

 

This week’s shooter became eighteen last week and rewarded himself by buying a semi-automatic lethal weapon, entirely legally and without need for license, registration or training. He would have had to wait three more years before legally enjoying a beer. This is madness, yet so broken is the society that nothing will change; indeed the Supreme Court is about to rule that my own state cannot prevent people from wandering the streets with their guns.

 

Sadly, it is not just a stray bullet that could kill me. On the highway today I will very likely encounter a couple of idiots racing each other, dodging between lanes of traffic. A headline recently pointed out that being shot has overtaken traffic accidents as the leading cause of death among young here. We might conclude that part of the reason was that traffic deaths have decreased. They have a little as car safety standards have improved, but not because of safer driving or safer roads. Road traffic death rates here are about three times those in Europe.

 

Ah, Europe, the land of milk and honey. Of course things are not perfect there. Racism in the east is endemic. Italy’s economic management is a disaster. Grinding poverty remains in rural Iberia. The Irish nuns still ruin the lives of unmarried pregnant girls. Modern day fascists proliferate in many places. Even the poster children of the north have their issues. Business corruption is endemic in Sweden, Norway produced Brevik, and the Finns are near the top of the table for alcoholic suicide as well as the tables for happiness and educational attainment. Then there is the UK. And then there is Russia.

 

Yet, despite its frustrating failings, and certainly excluding Russia and perhaps also the UK, I do get a strong sense that Europe is still improving as a place to live, step by gradual step. During the ten years when I lived in the Netherlands, the cities became more liveable in series of small ways that added up to big change. There was a relentless focus on housing and on mental health, and on infrastructure improvements.

 

In Portugal, I know a small town in the Algarve called Loulé quite well. In 2005, it was a bit of a dump, with many dilapidated houses and streets and obvious poverty. Year by year, the town has found ways to improve for its citizens. With its tourism and expatriation incomes and its access to EU funds, perhaps Loulé is slightly exceptional, but I believe most places in the EU have seen some improvements. This has occurred across many fields, including education of all ages, health provision, hygiene, nutrition, nightlife, the police, housing, civic amenities, elderly care, roads, and culture. In place like Bucharest or Loulé, the difference is stark, but I believe nearly everywhere has found some way to become more liveable.

 

I can only imagine the sense of improvement that must exist in Asia, and especially in China. That land seems to have crammed a century of development into a decade. Again, the flaws are clear

 

I simply do not see the same positive trends in the US, though of course there are bright spots, for example pre-school provision in New York. The city is still filthy, and many people seem determined to make that worse. The roads are still terrible, and the standard of driving has deteriorated. Public schools are depressing, more like jails than places for joy and development. More people are getting fatter and lazier, even in New York. Homelessness and housing are major problems. The police are rude and seem to ignore most issues. All sorts of anti-social and destructive behaviour is justified by a concept of liberty that seems to mean doing whatever one damn well likes irrespective of the impact on others.

 

Reading the US section of The Economist each week, it is easy to diagnose the root causes of the problems and hard to avoid the conclusion that nothing will improve any time soon. Congress is broken, and the public discourse is more about abortion or historical racism or critical race theory or ludicrous conspiracies or religious cults than about anything that might improve the lives of citizens. Speaking to Americans, a culture of complacent insularity still pertains, full of claims of superiority and a lack of curiosity about other societies that might have something to teach.

 

On the many days when this depressing picture comes to the fore in my mind, I conclude that it is time for me to move back to Europe. But that feels like running away and as an insult to the many Americans striving to make lives better, including mine. Furthermore, one of our children has chosen to build a life here. So I try to counteract despair and an urge to flee with feelings of hope. Luckily, these are always possible to find, and usually by looking to the young.

 

Last week I attended a pair of graduations. The US does this type of ceremony very well, replete with English and Scottish music and plenty of pomp. But my overriding impression of the occasion came from the young people who were graduating. They were incredibly diverse, yet fully respectful of each other, society and even the planet. They were humble, curious, and full of smart ideas. Then on Saturday I performed with the group I call my Broadway choir, full of energy and youth as well as social awareness.

 

Now I am keenly aware that these privileged subsets do not represent the full picture. But they fill me with hope, nonetheless. Surely that generation will find ways through the political impasse and use its diversity to reduce the damaging insularity that pervades America. The sooner the baton is passed to these people, the better for all of us.

 

And here is an even more hopeful thought. The youth of the USA, albeit the elite youth, have become an impressive generation despite the many societal failings holding them back. So what about the youth of the EU, who have surely benefited from the many positive improvements that are so evident to me. How impressive will I find these young people be, once I have a chance to interact with more of them after next year?  

The Economist Leader Game

 I have always been blessed with the ability to sleep. I rarely toss and turn and somehow relish my time asleep. Nowadays I do often wake during the night owing to the need to pee, and sometimes find that I don’t feel ready to go straight back to sleep afterwards. Then I get up, make myself a cup of hot water, and spend half an hour reading The Economist, after which I am invariably able to get back to sleep quickly.

 

This is how I often end up reading the six leaders in an Economist issue in one sitting, along with the news in brief and briefing sections. The leaders are always insightful, tightly argued, courageous and balanced. I find that The Economist journalism just gets better and better, in contrast to almost everything else that crosses my path.

 

I find it especially valuable now in the time of war, where emotion and sentiment tend to drown cold logic. We are quick to condemn the propaganda of the other side, but we should be especially alert at these times to groupthink and propaganda from our own side. Some of it may indeed be state sponsored, but even where it is not, journalists can become emotional and pander to the need to give their readers what they yearn to hear. So we are fed a constant diet of blather about plucky Ukrainians and evil Russians and we can easily lose our sense of balance and the bigger picture. There is no doubt of the primary blame for this war, but real life is always more complex than a marvel movie.

 

The Economist rises above this in war, and that reminds me that its same logical approach avoids similar traps over less fraught topics too. The magazine does have its blind spots. It is written by intelligent, educated, globally aware journalists who mix in circles or similar people. Most of these are somewhat wealthy and anxious to protect their advantages and pass some of them to their children. So maintaining legal rights and relative stability of capital and property always ranks number one among the values of the magazine. That leads to a strong bias towards free markets and by extension to the established Western model of democracy. That devotion can drift into tribalism at times, and I also believe that there is a secret deal with MI5 that leads to occasional articles that are little more than NATO propaganda.

 

Sometimes I play a game with myself after reading the six Economist leaders. In that game I take the six articles as a group and seek connections and inconsistencies. This technique is documented as effective in business innovation and in culture: you take two or three seemingly unconnected topics at random and force yourself to merge them somehow. That is a great way to create breakthroughs.

 

I played my game this week. The six leader articles were generally excellent, and as usual they covered economics, politics and social issues and many regions of the world.

 

The first leader was about saving the US Supreme Court, and that was also the topic of the briefing that followed. It was a depressing read. The key argument is that Congress broke several decades ago, and that is the root cause of the presidency, the Supreme Court and even aspects of civil society starting to break in turn. The problem is that, while plentiful solutions are evident, none is remotely likely to happen. Indeed, the disease seems almost certain to worsen and to spread. The best The Economist could offer as something useful to advocate for that might conceivably happen is an improved code of ethics for judges.

 

Next came a lovely optimistic leader about wearables, also the topic of the Technology Quarterly later in the issue. Technology has reached a tipping point whereby personalised medicine can become ubiquitous and life-changing, thanks in part to devices we can keep on our bodies providing constant data. Much of this innovation is being led in the US, and slowly the inertia of the medical profession is being overcome, and such devices are moving from the hipster fringes into truly useful areas. So far I have avoided devices that tell me that I am anxious because my sleep patterns are unhealthy, thereby making it harder to sleep and adding anxiety. Perhaps it is time to be rather less cynical.

 

The third leader was an Economist classic about short-term global economic prospects. It continued the gloomy recent drumbeat of such articles and predicted more trouble ahead, with the Ukraine war, covid in China and overheating in the US as factors indicating pessimism. The mindset of this article was clearly one of an investor with existing assets to protect. Implications for inequality, climate change or anything else were nowhere to be seen.

 

The fourth leader was the weakest, and MI5 may have had a hand in it. The topic was how the West should react to China’s policy of developing coastal military bases around the world. To be fair, there was some credence given to China’s opinions on the topic, but the dominant attitude was one of controlling China rather than envisioning a world where China would not need to be controlled. The grudging conclusion was that little could be done beyond the ugly policy of bribing (or blackmailing) nations to favour the West. Surely that leads us straight into a new cold war?

 

The fifth leader was about the precipitous decline of journalistic freedom around the globe. Powerfully, it started by asking if the war in Ukraine could have started if Russia had an effective free press, and whether Covid could have been stifled at its onset if China had one. This was an excellent article, but I found a flaw. Autocratic and faux democratic regimes do indeed do enormous damage by manipulating the press, but for me the press is stifled in democracies too when moneyed interests come to dominate. Mention of Rupert Murdoch (or the spectre of Elon Musk owning Twitter) would have improved the leader.

 

The final leader was about Russian wealth in London, how it was cynically welcomed and has become difficult to escape from. It argued for increasing budgets and profile of monitoring agencies and for regulating law firms more stringently, correctly asserting that such measures would probably be too little and too late.

 

So where are the connections within this disparate set of articles? I think the starting point is an accommodation between the West and China. Leader four shows where blind ideological confrontation leads, while leader three shows how painful a full economic decoupling would be. We should accept that there are strengths in both the Western and the Chinese models. In conflict, both will end up restricting press freedom (leader five) on their own ways, and leader six demonstrates clearly that the West has no monopoly on laudable values. We like to claim that the sort of innovation highlighted in leader two, innovation which indeed is the key to driving humanity forward, is more likely in the Western system, but that claim is starting to wear rather hollow, and I suspect that the execution of value from wearables for all citizens may occur more quickly in China, and that as America polarises and stagnates politically (leader one) it will lead in fewer and fewer fields.

 

If the West had a working accommodation with China, then power could be transferred safely to international institutions both militarily (leader four) and economically (leader three), and everything could benefit, including open dialogue (leader five) and innovation (leader two). Excluded rogue states would be treated as they warrant rather than hypocritically (leader one).

 

Sadly, this intellectual flight of fancy finishes exactly where it starts, with leader one. A stymied America has no chance whatsoever of reaching such an accommodation, even as it progressively loses battle after battle in the new cold war it has so foolishly declared. Is there a way out of the maze? I fear the solution is only available to America, and I am not holding my breath.    

The Failure of Homelessness

Visible homelessness is on the rise in New York City, and I see it every evening on the subway on my journey home from choir rehearsal. It is crushingly sad to see, and an indictment of all of us.

 

The proximate cause of visible homelessness is a failure of the emergency response of the city. It appears that there are homeless shelters available (despite every neighbourhood trying to push them elsewhere), but the homeless people resist them for some reason.

 

The next level of failure is within the housing market. Plainly there are not enough homes available at low rents and where desperate people can rebuild their lives without constant threat of eviction or incarceration or sinking deeper into debt. The pandemic went some way to cover up these problems for a time, with temporary bans on eviction and plentiful handouts. Now, as these provisions unwind, it is no surprise that a crisis has exploded in ways we can all witness.

 

As Matthew Desmond researched in the brilliant book Eviction, there are a series of failures with how US cities regulate housing and how they execute those regulations. Notably, budgets to support struggling families are woefully underfunded, an imbalance that is long standing and well-known to officials at all levels, yet never addressed, probably because politically it is too risky.

 

It is not necessary to copy the impressive policies of Northern European countries, where a lot of taxpayer money is spent on upgrading and growing public housing stock, though that does seem to be a good use of public funds, considering the likely spin off benefits. More imaginative fixes may be available, perhaps including starting to nudge those families away from subsidised accommodation after a few years.

 

None of this is likely to be popular. I saw an interview with a Democrat running for state governor yesterday. He represents moderately wealthy areas with the space to grow a housing stock, but he campaigns against it to please his constituents, who of course want to retain their low-rise leafy feel and perhaps to keep poorer people away from their schools. His argument was that such matters should remain local: if there is one problem where that is sure to fail, then housing must surely be it.

 

Housing policy can surely improve, but there must also be deeper causes of mass homelessness. It is hard to imagine the depths of despair that these people must have reached. They must surely have passed through so much anger and rejection and pride and shame and hopelessness on their depressing journeys that end in the indignity of subway carriages. How can this become the awful fate of so many people?

 

One place to start looking is within families. Years ago, kids or even adults who were struggling made their way back to their parents or to others within communities where they were brought up. If that became untenable because of mental illness, many people were locked up in institutions. It many parts of the world such formal and informal arrangements still prevail. We should not wish for society to back to this way of functioning. The institutions were cruel and few managed to be healed. Families became insular rather than face the stigma of mental illness. And some family members, almost invariably women, became full time carers at the expense of their own development.

 

Even if we desired such an outcome, greater mobility would make it tough to replicate nowadays. Young people flood to cities while their parents stay in the suburbs or rural parts. When those young people face struggles, the parents may not notice until it is too late, and the kids will be too prideful to be able to ask for help or return home.

 

Even so, it is hard to imagine that there are not opportunities to break the negative cycle. Parents will surely try to intervene. Most people are generally kind and generous, and there is plenty of goodwill available. Churches all have help groups and volunteers are ready to help. In the case of somebody sinking as far as homelessness, all of this must have failed along the way. Why?

 

Addiction must lay at the heart of the challenge. Once somebody has an addiction, it becomes difficult for them to recover, for many reasons. By its nature, addiction requires a massive effort to escape from. People who are addicts are very hard to help, quite unlike the saccharine picture painted by Hollywood. And on the road to recovery, an addict will have many legacy issues to deal with, including broken relationships and stubborn debt. The road to addiction is full of temptations, but the road out is tough indeed. Twelve-step programs remain the bedrock of most interventions, yet these feel somehow old-fashioned and have a mixed track record. I spent a year in a twelve-step program myself, witnessing both the wonderful humanity of the people involved and the uphill struggle faced by addicts.

 

Given the appalling human and economic cost of homelessness, it follows that a smart society would invest in two areas regarding addiction. The first is to try to provide better means of escape. In the case of opioid addiction, there is emerging good practice is the area of medication. Surely this warrants much more research and programs to enable earlier intervention. There are implications in areas of community structures, incentives for addicts and their families, education to spot warning signs earlier, developing effective pharmaceuticals, treatment programs and campaigns to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness and addiction. When I see Eric Adams focusing effort and resources to these areas, I’ll have more confidence in him.

 

But the second opportunity must be to reduce the odds of people becoming addicts in the first place. In the US, it sometimes feels as though society conspires to drive people to addiction. We are all told, by Hollywood and elsewhere, that we can be whatever we want to be. Our social media feeds are full of smiling, successful faces, generally exaggerated. Yet in truth we cannot all become NBA stars or millionaire influencers, and many take reckless gambles trying to succeed along highly risky paths, with addiction becoming a likely outcome after failure, especially for those with less education or family support. 

 

Then there are the excesses of capitalism. The consumer business model of banks in the US is explicitly to drive us into debt so great that we struggle to service it. Alcohol is scarcely regulated despite its dominant role in creating addicts. The incentives in the medical world often point in the wrong direction. And I cringe every time I see an advert encourage people to gamble recklessly (despite the unreadable small print at the bottom of the screen). I do a lot of cringing: during sports broadcasts nowadays, such ads seem to constitute 50% or more of the material.

 

Homeless is a failure of all of us. Each time we are inconvenienced by a lingering odour of urine in the subway or by feeling less safe, we should remind ourselves of the many root causes, and of how a humane society would be able to address many of them.  

On Homelessness

 There is a lot of talk in New York City these days about rising crime. Last week we had a random shooter in subway, and headlines every day express the fears of many New Yorkers. I not convinced that serious crime is much worse than it ever has been. Statistics are thrown around, but many of them are comparing 2022 with the pandemic years that came before and are more likely to reflect the unusual situation we are emerging from than a crisis today. It suits the narrative of the Murdoch owned papers and Fox News to spread fear of crime, and it is also a part of the narrative that helped Eric Adams to become mayor job. We should be cautious before we join the baying chorus.

 

What I do see with my own eyes is evidence of a rise in homelessness across the city. I often ride the E train, and one of its features is that it is the only line that never emerges into the open air. That is a mixed blessing. In winter our service is less affected by snowstorms than the other lines. But the relative warmth means that the E has always been popular to sleep in. One terminus is in the deprived area of Jamaica, and that probably adds to the number of folk using the line for shelter too.

 

There are certainly more homeless people riding the subway this year than I have ever seen before. After nine in the evening, it is rare to find a subway car without some rough sleepers in it, on the E line or any of the other lines I frequent. It is a sad sight to behold, and the dirt and smell can be very unpleasant. I can also understand how people can feel threatened, despite plenty of evidence that homeless people are often victims of crime and rarely perpetrators. Still, desperate people can do desperate things and I do try to avoid being the only passenger to share a car with a homeless person.

 

Recently the new mayor has started a campaign to evict homeless people from the subway system and to dismantle some informal camps where groups of homeless people gather overnight. While that will surely improve the optics of the situation, and perceptions do matter, it is hard to see how this campaign can solve anything. Where are these people supposed to go? A common theme is that few seem to be persuadable to sleep in the shelters the city provides, so in practice they wander around trying to escape the NYPD, becoming more vulnerable and desperate and even sicker as a result. I expect soon Adams will start playing the cynical game in which he tries to nudge the homeless out of his jurisdiction. Newark and other New Jersey neighbourhoods have been playing this game for many years. Obviously that solves nothing either.

 

The first level of root cause about homelessness must be an imbalance of suitable homes. When I lived in Holland, one of my bus routes to work took me through a series of poorer parts of The Hague. One memory is of how these districts were constantly being renovated and improved. Sometimes it seemed a thankless task, because the areas suffered from vandalism and clearly had social problems. But authorities persisted in a series of projects focused on homes, demolishing some, upgrading others and adding some new ones. These were never flashy but always functional, designed for occupants to enjoy a life of simple decency. During the ten years that I witnessed this, these areas were transformed, and it was clear that there were large spin off benefits socially. I do not know what the financial models for these upgrades was. No doubt there was some combination of municipal investment, developer subsidy and favourable rental conditions. Whichever of these options were involved, it felt to me like an excellent use of public funds.

 

Living in New York, I witness nothing like this. There are plenty of cranes and development projects about, but they are concentrated in areas which are already wealthy or rapidly gentrifying. The poor areas become gradually more and more run down. There is substantial public housing in the city, and no doubt it costs taxpayers a lot to maintain, but budgets are clearly very tight. There are also a lot of rent stabilised apartments in the city, initially designed so that people doing ordinary jobs could afford to live near their work. Finally, all new developments seem to be forced to include an element of what is called affordable housing.

 

These schemes are clearly not enough, evidenced by the mounting homelessness problem. Perhaps they even make matters worse. Once ensconced in a NYCHA or rent stabilised apartment, tenants have every incentive to stay there: trying to earn more would jeopardise means-tested based tenancy and involve a potentially massive leap in housing cost. A two-tiered system may have developed, with existing tenants blocking opportunities for others.

 

Margaret Thatcher’s most brilliant idea politically was to encourage public tenants to buy their own homes. This created an incentive for families to escape their situations and whole neighbourhoods improved as a result, while also reducing public expenditure. What Thatcher failed to do was to replace any of the sold-off homes, so newly arriving or newly challenged families still had a problem to access affordable places to live. There was plenty of homelessness in London in the 1990’s as a result.

 

I wonder if there would be scope for a scheme in which public tenants (or people in rent stabilised accommodation) could be incentivised to move into other private homes. There could be a carrot of a reduced rents for a period, but also a stick in that existing arrangements start to time out after several years. Potentially everyone can benefit: the moving families can upgrade their circumstances, the municipality can save money and encourage economic development, and, most important, a supply of existing dwellings would become available to those in need of them.

 

Much else can be done. Zoning and Nimbyism restricts supply of new homes. Progressive councils tend to make this worse not better by joining bandwagons against developers and gentrification and by distorting the market with rent stabilisation. Conservative areas let development rip, but that also leads to sprawling cities that harm the environment and entrench inequality further.

 

Then there are the eviction challenges, so wonderfully explained in one of my favourite non-fiction books, Evicted by Matthew Desmond. The housing support system is broken in much of the USA, and poor families end up in trailer parks or at constant risk of losing their home. It may well be that the proximate cause of the current visible rise in homelessness is the winding down of bans on eviction during the pandemic. These helped desperate people, but, without structural programs, will have obscured a growing problem that had to emerge into the open one day.

 

A laudable goal for developed societies would be to consider decent housing as a human right. I suspect that may be the starting point for programs like that in The Hague. In the US it is a goal that would be hard to make meaningful at a federal level, but instead could become part of state and local level progressive platforms. I suspect that only a stated brave goal can lead to the sort of wholesale change to housing policy that would be required to fix the chronic imbalances in US cities.

 

Beyond housing, there is a further level of root cause analysis that can be explored to understand homelessness and how to reduce it. That starts not with houses but with individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless. That will be for another day.