Thoughts On Being The Son Of A Capitalist Running Dog

Not long after Ronald Reagan said it was “Morning in America” and Margaret Thatcher said “Labour Isn’t Working” and then, thanks in part to their catchy slogans but also due to their radical economic policies, each came to power I caught a train from London to Manchester and learned all I needed to know about economics. Or at least I learned enough to survive this heavy doorstop of a book.

Manchester was supposed to be a grim northern town in decline. Instead it was bursting into music-driven world-leading fashionability. Lesson 1: The markets do not possess perfect information.

At my first economics tutorial we fresh students were asked to introduce ourselves. “I’m from Pontefract and me dad’s on strike. Up the miners!” growled a gravelly-voiced giant on my right .

The chap on his right was also the son of a miner from a fabled mining colliery: “Down with Thatcher!” The next was the daughter of a striking miner as well: “Smash the fascists!” The pattern was set. It turned out that almost everyone in my tutorial was the child of a striking miner. This was either an interesting matter for my statistical analysis class or one for the behavioural economists. Lesson 2: Don’t trust surveys.

In any event one thing was clear; This was a sub-optimal manner of making friends for the son of a financial PR man from Weybridge, Surrey. When my turn came I jumped up and raised my first: “My father is a capitalist running dog. Shame on him. Viva la Revolucion!”

Later that year I took some classes on moral philosophy.

The economics lectures were turgid. Worse yet, each time you applied yourself to understanding one economic theory the following week you’d be told it was no good and so you’d learn another one. We advanced from one economic theory to another and none of them worked. Lesson 3: Economics is not a science.

I switched to politics because there was less pretence that it was a science and thereafter I left economics alone. And then this lump turns up on my desk.

Jospeh Stiglitz is a much-lauded economist. He has won a Nobel Prize as you can see on the dust jacket. But he’s an economist and by my reckoning that means sometimes he might be right and other times and certainly in the long run he won’t. Please let it be at least a fun read, I silently prayed as I opened the book.

On page one the author explains that while he grew up in the golden age of capitalism it was upon reflection rubbish but since then things have got worse. Much worse. That sets the tone folks. If you’re looking for something less dark to read on the beach this Summer I hear there’s a mind—bogglingly gruesome new book out by the author of Hannibal Lecter.

Anyway we plough on. “Trump doesn’t have a plan to help the country; he has a plan to continue the robbery of the majority by those at the top”. There’s a lot of Trump Derangement Syndrome in here. And if you like that sort of thing then this might be for you: You’ll get a little hit of dopamine every time Mr. Stiglitz says something mean about Trump and by the end of each chapter you’ll be high as a kite despite the bleak message therein.

It’s not just Trump, though. It’s not even the Republican Party but it’s anyone to the political right of the author that gets him foaming: “In pursuit of their naked self-interest, the super-rich have thus formulated a three-part strategy: deception, disenfranchisement, and disempowerment.”

An evil strategy? Well, up to a point. That big firms and the rich are turning their wealth into political power to pursue tax cuts and deregulation and economic protection is evident. Are the rich conspiring to disenfranchise left-wing voters ? Is it a plutocrat stitch-up? Personally I don’t buy it but I err on the side of the cockup theory over the conspiracy theory. However, like everything else involved here: it’s a matter of opinion. You can read about the super-rich’s evil plan in the book but you’ll do so knowing by now that the author is very political and thus warned you can take the analysis and his prescription with the pinch of salt you find appropriate. Ah, yes the prescription. What is it?

This is the part I was most interested in because although I found the one-sided analysis unconvincing (in short: the political left in America is above reproach and everything else is malign) the target of his objective focus is not. Namely: how do we fix the growing problem of inequality, the absence of meaning, and the need for self-determination in this fast changing techno-driven economy.

It won’t surprise you that the answer is government intervention and more regulation. The problem began with Reagan and Thatcher’s prioritising of the free market, he says. The answer is to prune it right back. “Progressive capitalism” will increase taxes, spend more, protect the environment through carbon taxes and scale back the influence of the banks

But as I learned in Manchester, economic theories each have their time. And after that time each one is, in the end, found wanting. In the meantime, as Mick Hucknell of the then unfamous Simply Red used to sing as he cycled back and forth past the university student union, “the money’s too tight to mention”.

I read: People, Power and Profits

By: Jospeh Stiglitz

Modern Book Reviews Need No Words

“The Visual MBA”…

…What a promise! Here is a book that takes the achingly time-consuming and hideously expensive business of studying a two year MBA and  condenses the whole thing into a picture book.

Here it is.

This is not to say that all this theory is not useful because that is not my argument at all. In fact if I may be slightly nuanced about things, I think it is invaluable but it is not the whole story and for many a shortcut to the rudiments of MBA content may be all that’s necessary. And for that task then the book you need is this one. The author skilfully steers a path between baffling the reader by assuming too much prior knowledge of MBA abbreviations and being patronising by treating the reader like a dummy. Much of its charm and the effectiveness derive from the sketches and indeed I already find that as I seek to recall ideas from the book it is these that my memory calls on. This is not surprising since, as the blurb tells us, brains process pictures 60,000 times faster than text….👍

Clark’s Commandos And Wayfinders

Each month the editor offers up a handful of books. With the passage of time even business books are getting more “woke” and my black heart sinks lower. Fortunately the titles are a dead give away. I plead not  to review books titled something like “The Chief Executive of Feelings: Leadership without Privileging Facts”, “Problematic! The Endless Oppression of Business Plans”,   or “9-5: One Giant Microaggression”

“That sounds good”, I said.

It was called “Paws”

I used to want to be an army tracker. With my robust, hard as teak, leather school shoes you would get, in addition to a compass in the heel of the shoe, a little booklet that told you, well, it told you how to be a six-year old explorer. You had hand signals for silently communicating “gather round”, “go that way”  and “stop”. Basic stuff but I loved it.

There were illustrations of the secret signs you could make – arrows made of pebbles. A cross made of sticks that would tell your imaginary team of die hards not to go down this route because it led to a volcano or dinosaurs.

And you learned how to do tracking. You could tell, theoretically, from the indentations of a footprint whether someone was walking forward or backwards, running or tiptoeing.

And then, best of all, there were paw prints. This one was a wolf, this was a tiger, this an otter, and that one a red squirrel. I checked the flowerbeds. I circumnavigated the woods, scoured the local park and, free from wolves, sat on the roundabout and monitored the ground as I slowly spun. Nothing. It was fruitless. The odd Quality Street wrapper and a few fag ends and that was about it. Either there were no hedgehogs, goats or hippos or they were, by some cunning animal magic, not leaving footprints.

But I was in the flow and time evaporated. Or maybe it stopped. In any event its passing was invisible. As for the tracking, the embers never died. So I looked forward to this book.

Alack and alas, etc. As you can see, I had the phonetics right but the spelling wrong.

This is a book about not doing anything and frankly there isn’t much you can teach any writer about that. It’s 90% of your job. Nevertheless I was intrigued because here was a writer who had been given the task of writing about 35,000 words on how to do nothing. Take away the words and that would be a dream job. How would he tackle it? How could he even get out of bed with such monstrous levels of invention to perform?

Well it’s like this. Step 1. Define the concept of Pause as widely as possible and in that way encompass the entire world of inaction – from hesitating before angrily responding on twitter, to counting to three before entering a room, to having a sabbatical to listening to John Cage’s 4’33” or taking a Bill Gates’ style “Think Week” each year,

Step 2. Having argued that half the world of things you could possibly write about are relevant to the idea of “the Pause”, you then  create a plausible structure that encompasses it all and write about all the different forms.

That’s the formula.

And it works very well.

The author holds a reading retreat in a remote mountain village in the middle of Spain every year. It sounds fabulous. People have to be forced to go because they’re convinced they’re too busy. However once they eventually find time to go they get as committed as Born Again Reformed Smoker. After that they make it a linchpin part of their life. That’s all it takes, having forced themselves just once to take a pause from the hurly burly of freneticism they discover they can indeed put a value on mere nothing and it is so valuable it must be repeated. It just a few days to realise the value of “pausing” is incalculable. Here I should warn readers that inaction, while it is of incalculable value, does not pay very well if you make it the maypole of your career.

Here’s the rub, though. If you don’t buy into the possibility that there is something valuable in taking time-outs, sabbaticals or days off then this book will drive you bananas. If on the other hand you “get it” but need pushing over the edge; some advice on how to fit a pause into your life or even how to justify it to yourself or someone else, then this book is your first injection of pause-heroin.

So beware because it is addictive; I’m still hunting for heffalumps.

I read: Do Pause: You Are Not A To-do List

By: Robert Poynton

The World Champion of Sleep Has a Fear

Gorging myself on books as a teenager there was one title I could never commit to: The Bible. What if it made me pious just as life was becoming fun in so many impious ways? It just wasn’t worth the risk.

The same fear gripped me when this book landed on my Proustian bed-desk-sofa. What if becoming aware of the problems other people have with sleeping turned me insomniac?

I have no trouble sleeping whatsoever unless my mean-spirited physical trainer has made me do squats and jumping about in the gym. On such occasions, in the middle of the night, my legs become possessed by the spirit of the roadrunner and I churn the sheets and pillows all about the room like a Nutribullet. Even so, I am not really woken by the festival of activity. When at noon, I hit the 43rd snooze button of the day and finally open my eyes I am upside down, lamps have been smashed to the floor, and my digital watch tells me I have completely my steps for the day …and yet I feel fully rested.

Being such an accomplished sleeper I had a lot to risk. Yet, I have always been intrigued by sleep. My young sister used to cackle in her sleep; Cast iron admission of guilt for all her brazen criminality. “Darling, it doesn’t prove she broke your Lego castle”, my mum would say in her naivety.

My even younger brother once sleep-walked into my bedroom, opened a draw and relieved himself in it. When he walked out he was sleep-smirking.

Let me cut to the chase. I have read the book and so far I am still enjoying the sleep of a fairytale princess. The book has helped, in fact. For while it is short it is dense and casts a sceptical academic-philosophical eye over everything you have ever heard about REM, mattresses, dreams, narcolepsy, Freud, sleep and depression, biphasic sleep patterns, sleep debt and guilt-driven insomnia. And the more you learn the more you realise that we know everything and nothing about sleep. This is fascinating and depressing. But it appears to be the case.

Consider Rapid Eye Movement. It was once thought to mirror the gaze of the subject in the dream. Thus if a sleeper dreamed of watching a table tennis match their closed eyes dart left and right as if they were watching the game in real life.

But that theory was abandoned. Something else is going on.

REM and Non-REM sleep appear in pairs. For an adult REM sleep follows NREM and in very simplistic terms the cycle repeats four times. REM was long considered to be the period of sleep during which memories were stored, cells repaired and ideas formed. Unlike adults babies begin sleep in a state of REM.   So do people suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. So REM could be a way of creating systems for dealing with difficult or confusing memories. Babies need to create storage and language systems and PTSD sufferers need to create a new system from scratch.

REM was commonly thought to be the period during which the sleeper dreamed while NREM was dreamless. But later analysis found that the deepest sleep, the fourth wave of NREM was as abundant with dreams as any REM phase.  NREM4 for example is the period during which children have night terrors. Further experiment suggests that REM is the phase during which the mind encrypts scary ideas and memories into less disturbing idiosyncratic subconscious symbolism. In that case dreams during REM, because they are disguised by symbolism are less scary than dreams during the NREM deep sleep. The deeper you sleep, the less encrypted and symbolic the dreams become. Consequently REM sleep may be less fraught and thus mentally quieter sleep than deep sleep. This seemingly endless fractal breakdown of each element of sleep is characteristic of the book. There are no answers.

Except these:

My brother was awake and my sister broke the Lego.

And for giving me license to claim this is absolutely so because I now know more about sleep than 90% of everyone else this book gets the thumbs up.

I read: Why Can’t We Sleep?

by: Darian Leader

The Secret of Burning Celluloid and Getting Rich

In the 1970s I had an idea, or an insight as marketeers like to say, that would later become Snapchat.

The Utter Misery and Horribleness of Hurt Feelings

“Look at that beast!”,  guffawed  a personal trainer across the gym floor as he strode past the rowing machines and bikes while pointing at me.  I plodded over, heavily, my New Year’s eve hangover still  echoing around my head two days after the the year had begun.

I read: No Hard Feelings

by: Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy