Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, My Therapist & The Global Economy

My therapist lives on a remote, nameless island with surprisingly good connectivity near Chile or Peru or somewhere. That’s all I’ve gleaned. We only talk via Skype audio so the truth is maybe he’s still living nearby in the Barbican. He says he needs space.

What he didn’t know until last month was that thanks to the wonders of the global economy (of the dark web variety) I’d persuaded the Fancy Bears to build me a program that allows me to *force* call him in times of emergency.

If he’s on another call, or even if the computer is turned off and sealed in a drawer under his desk I can force a Skype call to happen.

Eventually he answered.

“Doc, it’s Richard Scarry all over again”, I explained.

I had loved Richard Scarry books. But eventually, I’d had to face the incontestable truths: I’d never seen a pilot of an aeroplane who was a dog; Never seen a worm driving an apple-shaped car; Never seen a hippo on roller skates. It had taken me years to come to terms with the dull conformity of humans doing everything. I even tried to embrace identity politics to muster some interest in the variety of humans doing things. But I wasn’t THAT immature.

In any event it had dawned on me, during my recovery, that in our strident, divisive, ideological and identitarian times the world needs a new type of picture book; Not like treacherous Scarry but an honest one. If I permit myself to dream I would want one that contains no false promises (cf police cats); just facts and figures and nuanced explanations of the way things are. In fact in a perfect world I would want something written by a calm, measured, unflappable German economist.

And then, as if by magic, I’d heard a thud and found a review copy of a giant picture book for grown ups called The Global Economy As You’ve Never Seen It by Herr Thomas Ramge.

I’ve told a lie. It wasn’t a thud. It was a ping. I had received an html link to a giant PDF of the book.

The downside of a picture book as a PDF is that the words are so small on my little iPad that to read the dense wording you have to zoom right in but to see the shape of the many complex flow diagrams you have to zoom right out. All the zooming, scanning, shrinking was quite a workout. Like playing Rachmaninov.

The good side is that you can draw fat, red electronic lines across chunks of the book with my exhausted, cramping fingers.

Alas, the first thing I drew a red line through was the entire first page which introduced the giant, complex, nuanced global economy by describing employment patterns by gender and race with sub-sections on ‘inequality’ and ‘the gender pay gap’. These are emotive and disputed data points being presented with no context …on page 1. This is the scene setter.

Now, you’re a smart business magazine reader so you know that the gender pay gap arises from measurement of aggregate earnings over a lifetime rather than different pay for the same job (which is illegal). What accounts for that is worth diving into and is at least as complex as, say, the gender gap in mortality at work or homelessness and you wouldn’t kick off the book with either of those. It’s a great subject for starting a debate but it’s not the neutral delivery of clearly understood and undisputed data which I had been hoping for in my post-Scarry traumatised state. I was on guard for the rest of the book.

I generally didn’t need to be. The combination of detailed graphics and explanatory text dealt comfortably with wide ranging subjects; From a flow chart showing how a Volkswagen car is made to a section comparing economic theorists via charts showing the globalisation of the jeans business …and ending with the promise of fully automated luxury communism.

I can attest that it is, as the publicists claim, unlike anything else I have seen before or at least since I started my therapy.

And yet as a recommendable book, why was I feeling that sense of dread and panic? Why had I had force-called my therapist at 5am in Ushuaia ?

The answer was in the electronic red highlighted lines I’d drawn. They were everywhere.

Doc, I sobbed. This is worse than Busy Town’s false promises. The Global Economy book explains where and how everyone works. It shows a world where globalisation and free trade and AI will solve everything. But my red highlighter struck wherever jobs would be automated out of existence and there isn’t much left after that. Not even humans driving apple-shaped cars.

I can’t wait, he said and hung up.

Leadership Beyond The Flatulence Question

The silver haired Senator for Rhode Island raised his head from the document in front of him and stared hard, Columbo style, at the subject of his merciless interrogation. His questioning had been forensic, the attention to detail relentless. His eyes narrowed. The sniper line of his gaze bisected the small gap between the top of his reading glasses and the flop of his fallen quiff.  At the receiving end,  the subject of his blistering inquiry shifted in the cross hairs. The committee room was hushed, electric. Unable to evade the question any longer, the accused leaned toward the microphone and spoke.

The Genius of Termite Fungus

People with ponds are not to be envied. Sometimes, walking barefoot in the lush grass, on those hot and balmy nights of our record-setting Summer just gone, they accidentally trod on eels.  Yes! Eels!!

I’d overheard a traumatic conversation about it in a coffee shop (traumatic for me anyway) so I looked it up and it’s true. It’s another reason to thank God I live on the third floor of a polluted central London back street.

Pond-dwelling yellow eels, once they have matured after 20 years or so, get bored of living and decide to breed and die. So they  jump out of the pond and slither across land until they find a river, stream or sewer. Provided they don’t get squished underfoot they then turn silver , dissolve their stomachs, their eyes grow big and  they swim downstream to the sea, cross the Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea (near Bermuda),  breed and die.

This nature trek of the mind was exhilarating; A blessed escape from reading about start ups,  entrepreneurialism or my sci-fi-ish paranoia about robots (which isn’t paranoia because I’m right).

No sooner did I develop this appetite for respite than a book about Termites landed on my desk and, dear reader,  it is so good that it came within a whisker of achieving the full weight of a maximum 9.8 Newtons.

Eels, are nothing. For over a week I thought they were a big deal but they are no more than a gramophone record  compared to the Spotify that is the mighty termite.

In my ignorance I had thought that termites were merely a strain of cockroachy-anty type insect that built those enormous nine foot high earth mounds. You’ve noticed them. They’re the ones that Attenborough glances at when he’s scouring  the world’s deserts for creatures which are more showbiz.

I was so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. Consider this: Termites survive on wood and grass and dung. A lot of it, in fact so much that in parts of Australia 80% of the trees are hollow. Turning wood, grass and excrement into an energy source is alchemy and like turning lead into gold it is beyond our reach. If we could do it at scale a whole lot of other problems would be solved. So governments and businesses  (and the military) have invested a lot of money into termite investigations. Following the twists and turns of the eccentric scientists is the path taken by this excellent book.

Here’s another thing: There are lower termites and higher termites. Higher termites cannot themselves process the cellulose in wood. Their trick is to maintain  a zoo of tiny creatures called protists in their guts who do possess the secret. The termites forage and swallow the grass and then protists digest it and excrete sugars. The termites are dependent on the protists and vice-versa. It’s a symbiotic relationship that goes back tens of millions of years. But like the chicken and the egg no-one knows which came first.

Lower termites don’t have such an internal gut zoo so they do their digestion on the outside. They farm fungus at the bottom of their termite mounds.  The fungus feeds on the grass and wood brought by the termites. In return the fungus breaks down the cellulose and makes it digestible by the termites. The termites depend on the fungus and the fungus in turn depends on the termites.

Which is why scientists long ago asked themselves whether the creature they are studying is not the termite, or the fungus, or the protist but actually a super-organism which is made of everything. Consider this: An average fungus-powered mound which contains 11 pounds of termites eats as much dead grass as a 900 pound cow.

So why not the full 9.8? Well, it’s my robot paranoia from which even a book about termites could not provide a break. To understand how millions of termites with no central planning department could be the architects and project managers of very complex mounds with hundreds of precise passageways scientists decided to build robot termites. These became the prototypes for swarms of tiny airborne drones . The defence industry is both terrified of the implications of this and enraptured. A cloud of insect sized drones would be almost impossible to intercept and could carry all sorts of death and havoc in their robo-claws. The growing fear is that these are becoming weapons of war more deadly than nuclear bombs.

So in studying how termites can perform such wonders as making clean energy and turning the desert fertile we may have unlocked another means of Armageddon. So, not 9.8.

I read: Underbug

by

Lisa Margonelli

Work is Play and Play is Work …allegedly

We inched forward in a surreptitious phalanx. Every time the teacher turned her back to write on the blackboard we advanced. At the noise of a hundred desk legs scraping on the class room floor she suddenly spun around and glared. We were mesmerised (it was half the reason we did it ) because she’d be staring not at us but …at the ceiling.  In her rich Welsh preacher’s voice she’d intone: “I knooow you’re up to something boys… so STOP IT!”

Huey The God Of Surf

Huey the God of Surf was right where we had left it. The rusted paintwork, which we’d plastered in Hot Tuna and Quicksilver stickers, was a bit dustier but the surfboard was still on the roof and, most importantly, the boot hadn’t been jimmied open. We couldn’t recall how this old car, a Valiant Regal,  got the name but being 21 and far away from home it seemed funny at the time.

Our aboriginal guide came round the back and when he saw what was inside the cavernous boot his eyes lit up and he roared with laughter. We did the deal.

For three days he had guided us around a national park and told us about the termite mounds, the kangaroos, the snakes and crocodiles, the stories of the Dreamtime and the value of the walkabout. In turn I spent three days persuading him that rather than cash maybe he would consider payment in the form of board shorts.  I had a lot of them. Two thousand pairs.

In fact I had cornered the board shorts market in Bali and brought all the shorts from every store on the island to Australia. It was a stroke of business genius or so I thought. After three years in the Manchester rain I had lain on the hot Balinese beaches and marvelled at just how cheap their shorts were. That was when I had the brainwave.

Before setting off  to travel the world I’d watched the 1980s hit film, Trading Places. At the end of the caper Eddie Murphy, playing the rags to riches hero, outwits the scheming blue-blooded bankers by cornering the market for Florida orange juice.

The sunset and I re-drew my plans. Rather than working my way round Oz I would buy all the absurdly cheap shorts I could afford on my emergency credit card and sell them in Sydney for a mind-boggling profit.  It was hot in Australia wasn’t it? Millions of Australians needed shorts ergo I would be rich and travel in style; Hotels not hostels. Business is a cinch.

A few weeks later a customs and excise officer introduced me to customs duties and the crushing of my own dreamtime. It took four months to negotiate the taxes down to a non-critical level. The trick was bringing them into the following year’s quota (and lots of pleading).

Then came the rain. It wasn’t always sunny in Australia and my background research recalling episodes of Neighbours had been sub-optimal.

I re-re-drew my plans. I would barter my way around this wretched not-always sunny island with its heavy-handed customs duties. I bartered sailing trips around the Whitsunday Islands,  diving lessons in the Great Barrier Reef, campsites in Byron Bay, underground hostels in Coober Pedy, kayaking in the Katharine River and guided walks in the outback. Huey left each one with a push start and a cloud of dust and when it settled the locals were dressed in fluoro board shorts. It was like a backpacker verison of Mr. Ben.

Through some mysterious black magic the volume of boot space occupied by the shorts never seemed to diminish and after circling the country and returning to Sydney, Huey was still heavy with the loot.

I revised my opinion about entrepreneurship and resolved to learn more. Item one: Don’t take business advice from Hollywood comedies but it take it from someone who has been there and done that.

Which brings me finally to Julian Richer. In this book he wants to move the needle of capitalism significantly away from the inequality of todayto achieve a more even distribution of wealth. The system is broken not bust and his book is a manifesto for rectifying the imbalances of wealth and income before they become so savage that it cannot be fixed. Throughout he names and shames (a tactic he encourages) countless companies that have transgressed the ethical behaviour he espouses. No matter what particular issue vexes him on any page he summons with ease a househald name that has repeated that sin. So widespread is the demonstrated malaise that it is no wonder that he has to start the book by stating he is a staunch defender of capitalism. This book is is about getting it back on track and at the heart of this are two steps:  Better regulation and, more critically, a different set of values at the heart of business than today’s selfish approach.

Unlike, say an academic or an international arbitrager of board shorts, Richer has been very successful for decades. Consequently the text is flecked with real life examples of how Richer Sounds has been ever more ethical in its operations and the consequences of this on the business, its customers and suppliers. It is this which makes the book a strong recommendation for those tryingto reconcile businesses and ethics.

Incidentally,  if any readers are interested, I have the key to a lockup Sydney and can do a very good price on some vintage board shorts.

I read:

The Ethical Capitalist

by: Julian Richer

A Bowl of Eyeballs

On a steam train in China I was required to eat a bowl of eyeballs . Afterwards everyone cheered and laughed, including me. Then I was sick.