Blogger or banker?

Here's the theory on people who work for a bank and blog for fun. Do they think of themselves as bankers or bloggers?

It boils down to their Ginis. You see, some people have magic lamps inhabited by blue-suited banker Ginis, some people's magic lamps have sailor-suited Ginis... :)

Actually, a Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion, and is a standard measure of income inequality in a society. My take is that people from more unequal societies are more likely to define their identities in terms of who they are at work.

Why?

Imagine a relatively well-off person living in an obviously unequal country. He needs to make peace with the fact that he lives a comfortable life, but the people from the slum/ favela/ ghetto/ council estate/ inner city live obviously miserable, abysmal lives. The sheer presence of that abyss, the unspoken fear and guilt that that abyss evokes, pulls at the psyche of the comfortably-off like gravity. The psyche protects itself from that pull by believing that privilege and comfort are deserved, earned, by hard work, by education, by qualifications, by seriousness.

In this unequal context, it is hard to think of oneself in purely frivolous terms. It feels like being the surfer on the beach in Apocalypse Now. Its the reason why cricket in India or football in Mexico are not just silly games played for fun, they are about the redemption of national pride.

So what do I expect to observe in the data? I expect people from more unequal societies to wrap their identity ever more tightly around their professional selves.

Here are Ginis for some of the OECD-30. Their rankings are:

1. Mexico: .474
2. Turkey: .430
4. USA: .381
7. Great Britain: .335
8. New Zealand: .335
12. Canada: 0.317

The two most unequal OECD members are Mexico and Turkey. Fortunately, I have friends from Mexico and Turkey who tell me their compatriots unambiguously define who they are in terms of who they are at work.

Also, to my earlier observation, Britain's Gini is the same as New Zealand, and is a lot lower than the USA. Canada is even further away from the USA than is Britain. So if the theory holds, Canadians should be a less likely to derive their identity from work than either Americans or Britons, despite Canada's stereotypical cultural location somewhere in-between the USA and Britain.

India is not in the OECD. So I looked up the World Bank's Ginis metrics, which show that India is better (i.e. more equal) than the USA.

While that is flattering, and says something important about the world's only superpower, the World Bank might be systematically underestimating South Asian inequality. Pakistan looks really good on the same metrics, more equal than the Netherlands, Canada, France or Switzerland. That doesn't ring true. My hunch is that India really is in the mid - 40s pack, along with Mexico, China, Jamaica and Turkey.

A more classical theory, which involves no melodrama about the gravitational pull of the abyss, is the impact of marginal tax rates on labour supply. More equal societies have higher marginal tax rates. People therefore have less reason to work hard to earn money. They therefore invest more of their time, and identity, in leisure rather than labour.

I buy into the conventional theory, but it doesn't quite feel complete. Maybe that is because I remember an India with high marginal tax rates, in Indira Gandhi's time, when people still wrapped their identities around their work, even if they didn't work especially hard. The ways in which people construct their identities change more slowly than tax policy.

A first class map

Here's a cricketing puzzle that's got me stumped.

England has about 39 counties or shires, or maybe that should be 42, or maybe even 46, an interestingly vague number unlike the unimaginative precision of the 50 American states...but the English taste for vagueness is not what this post is about. However one chooses to count, 18 adds up to less then half the English counties. Yet, only 18 counties (the darker coloured counties on the map above) play first class cricket. How did this come to pass?

For instance, Shropshire, that fabled land where the Empress of Blandings covered herself with such glory, would surely have a deep rooted cricketing culture? Or consider Lincolnshire, a well-populated county wedged in between the cricketing powerhouses of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Surely Lincolnshire would be able to muster a decent county team? Club cricket is played in both Shropshire and Lincolnshire. But both seem content to remain Minor Counties, without objecting to the condescension loaded into that term.

Even more mysterious, Durham, the current champions, are the only Minor County to have been promoted to the first class level in 80+ years. This was a one time "historic" event. There is no mechanism by which the top Minor Counties get promoted to the first class level, and the weakest first class counties get relegated to the minors.

This instinctively feels odd to me, as an Indian cricket fan, because the growth of cricket outside India's traditional metropolitan centers is one of the most fascinating changes in Indian cricket over the last 25 years.

The fit and proper persons test

Should the England Cricket Board have ever been doing business with Mr Allen Stanford?

BBC's Radio 4, with a bit of help from Twenty20 hindsight, think not. The BBC have a point. There always was something just a little fishy about the Texan billionaire. The ECB should have applied a "fit and proper persons test", a general sniff test, to check if this Stanford guy was someone they want to do business with.

Or should they?

The trouble with sniff tests is that it is really hard even for well intentioned, honest and experienced people to know exactly what they're sniffing. A generation ago, any sniff test run by the ECB would have failed anybody who was not white, well-bred and Oxbridge educated. Would that have been good sniffing? Or prejudice? One of the great things about the anonymity of markets is that is harder for prejudice to prevail.

There must be an intelligent middle ground somewhere between prejudice and Stanford...but its never obvious how to be both fair and prudent.
_______________________________

An apology: a previous version of this post mentioned Mr Adam Sanford, a cricketer who played for the West Indies in eleven tests, instead of Mr Allen Stanford, the shady Texan financier. Apologies to Mr Adam Sanford

Boars, Bears and Core Competencies

Being an omnivore is a winning strategy for bears and boars. Does the same logic work for business corporations?

Most management thinkers like corporations to be specialists (like anteaters) rather than omnivores (like boars or bears). CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel, the Core Competency gurus, usually advise businesses to stick to their knitting, do what they do best, and buy the rest on the market. This is not an especially new idea. Think back to Adam Smith’s pin factory or David Ricardo exhorting Portugal to stick with making wine and buy English cloth. Specialization leads to efficiency, which raises productivity and therefore incomes.

But are specialists too fragile? If one wants to think about businesses as institutions which are meant to be resilient to the madness which sometimes infects markets, maybe boars and bears are better role models than anteaters, hummingbirds or cheetah.

Pigs Gone Wild

An American friend I was dining with last week was talking about her life in Mechanicsville, VA. Her neighbour is a wild hog hunter. Maybe he has a boring day job, like being a mechanic or something. But hunting wild hogs is what he really does.

That brought back to life this marvellous story. Wild hogs, feral swine, the offspring of escaped farm pigs which copulated with wild boar imported from Europe as game, are thriving across the vast American wilderness. And with them is thriving a culture of guys who hunt wild hogs, accompanied by packs of dogs, armed with knives, shotguns or even bows and arrows, with the Confederate flag emblazoned on everything they wear.

In America, people hunt hogs. In Britain, hogs hunt people.

Ms. Carla Edmonds, a landowner in Gloucestershire, first encountered wild boar when she and her two dogs were riding along a path in the Forest of Dean, about 100 yards or so from the main road. “I saw a group of 20 or more. I couldn’t make out quite what they were, but then I could see they looked like pigs.” Ms. Edmonds’ dogs started barking and her horse became agitated. The herd of boar gave chase. “I could see them charging at huge pace” she said. Her horse was seriously agitated by the experience, and took a long while to calm down, and a less experienced rider might even have been thrown off her horse.

Subsequently, the wild boar dug up about 100 square feet of the Edmonds’ grounds. But despite these intrusions, Ms. Edmonds and her partner think the boar are “brilliant” and that “it was amazing...would love to see them again”. She may well have an opportunity to do so. After having been hunted to extinction 300 years ago, wild boar have reintroduced themselves to Britain spontaneously and now also live in Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Devon.

What makes wild boar, Sus Scrofa, so successful? The same factor that makes Homo Sapiens so successful?

The thought was triggered by a book I read back in the 80s, Omnivore by Lyall Watson, a zoologist who observed that our evolutionary resilience owes a lot to our omnivorous diet. Boars (and bears) are omnivorous higher mammals, like us.

Setting Free the Bears

Here’s a heart-warming success story, at a time when good news is a bit thin on the ground.

I visited Wildlife SOS' Agra Bear Rescue Facility earlier this winter. This is part of a program to rescue dancing bears from captivity, and to rehabilitate both the bears and the kalandar families who once depended on dancing bears for their livelihood.

- The rescue facility is a very nice retirement home for the former dancing bears, on a reserve forest between Delhi and Agra

- The past these dancing bears have endured is terrible. Typically, young bears are captured by poachers after the parents have been murdered. They are sold to kalandars, who torture the bears their entire lives to make them perform

- The rescue program essentially buys bears back from the kalandars, and relocates them at this centre where they are well looked after by professional vets. I was especially impressed that the vets were thinking about the bear’s mental state, getting traumatized rescued bears to engage by playing with a ball or climbing a trestle

- Visitors are allowed in only by prior appointment, and are accompanied by wildlife professionals. Otherwise, visitors who have paid good money to see bears may expect to be “entertained” to get their money’s worth, which would create exactly the wrong environment for the bear’s rehabilitation

- There is no breeding program. The rescued bears are simply not in shape to sire a bloodline. The rescue facility is supported only by charity

- The main reason to believe the program will work, longer term, is that it is a buy back coupled with social services. Kalandars get a substantial lump sum, and are being supported in moving on to a new life. One family featured on the visitor centre video used this buy-back money to buy a second hand autorickshaw. Kalandar children are now sent to school, for the first time in over 500 years

- Dancing bears, and the attendant cruelty, have been around since medieval times across all of Eurasia. The Indian program is a part of a larger worldwide effort to rescue dancing bears. The last dancing bears in Europe were rescued as recently as 2007, in Bulgaria. Turkey rescued its last dancing bear in 1998

There is a tantalizing moral question hanging at the edge of this story. Why does this matter? Why is it worth ending the bears’ suffering? Is it because of the acuteness with which bears can experience suffering? I’d be less moved by the suffering of invertebrates. Is it because so little is at stake? I can see the argument for testing life saving drugs on higher mammals, but suffering for the sake of entertainment feels unambiguously wrong. Is it because the horrors we have inflicted on ourselves, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib, have taught us that to be human is to be humane? Or more plausibly, that to be civilized is to be humane? Does a society that experiences success in preventing suffering, of whatever sort, build momentum and commitment that serves the cause of preventing even more grievous suffering?

I’m not trying to answer these deeper questions here. I’m just happy that Ravi the bear can gambol down a forest path, keeping pace with my sprinting five year old nephew, just because he wants to.