Work-family balance: one front where Manmohan Singh has it easier than Barack Obama

Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.

Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families. 

I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.

How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72.  Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.

  

Socrates. On beauty and victory

“Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.”

 These are the last words in Football Philosophy, a book by the Brazilian legend Socrates. I was doubly bereft as I read these words. First, because I read them in this obituary for Socrates, who died prematurely aged just 57. Second, because the great Brazilian disagrees with me.

Socrates seems to be saying that to abandon beauty for the sake of mere victory would be sacrilege. Yet, I posted earlier this year about the joy of "winning ugly". Where did I go wrong? At the time, I was writing about India winning at cricket during the World Cup. Was I sliding ingloriously into patriotism, that last refuge of scoundrels?

I could try to rebut the argument. I could wade into how players are characters in a larger drama, whose role is to do what it takes to win, not to step out of character seeking elusive beauty. But it somehow feels wrong, un-beautiful, to debate with someone who scored a goal like this in a World Cup:

 

 Adieu Socrates. Long may your tribe of thoughtful sportsmen thrive.

The Universal Soldier. In Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is not going that well. It is not clear what exactly the fighting is for. Young soldiers are getting killed. There is no end in sight.

Yet, Sam Kiley, a British journalist who just brought out this book on touring with the paratroopers of the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand province, reports that the troops are committed and motivated.

Why? In part, says Mr Kiley, it comes from “a basic male instinct” to prove yourself. In part it is about fighting for your friends and, when they are killed, about avenging them. Above all, it is about sheer thrill. As one Para quoted by Mr Kiley says during a battle: “Living the fucking dream mate.”

Without having read the book, my instinct is that Mr Kiley is telling it like it is, no spin. The Para living the dream is a Universal Soldier.

He's five foot two, he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears,
He's all of thirty one, he is only seventeen,
He's been a soldier for a thousand years.

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain
He's a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew,
He knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend, and me for you.

He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA
He's fighting for Russia, he's fighting for Japan...

The Universal Soldier is an archetype; vigourous, integral, eternal. He can pack more life into two days of intense experience than most mortals can in entire lifetimes (refer E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Yet, this is almost certainly not what Donovan meant when he sang this song in the sixties. Donovan was the guy who replaced Bob Dylan in the Joan Baez sets at the Newport Folk festival, when Bobby quit being political and broke up with Joanie. Donovan had picked this piece up from a Canadian songwriter called Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was a sixties anti-war protester, a pacifist pointing an accusing finger at the Universal Soldier:

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put an end to war.

Fighting a fighting archetype, huh? Who would've thought...

Video game or adventure?

"Bosses complain that...Net Geners demand...an over-precise set of objectives on the path to promotion (rather like the missions that must be completed in a video game)." Thus spake the Economist about Net Geners, or Generation Y, those born in the 80s.

The Economist is, as usual, not untrue but a bit harsh. Many people born in previous decades, including me, have thought in terms of "mission accomplished, so I'm entitled to a promotion". But the metaphor, career as a video game, is apt.

In today's economy, the video game no longer works as advertised. Missions accomplished are being quickly replaced by even more arduous missions to accomplish. But the promotions and bonuses to sweeten the journey, which were a part of the deal, are no longer happening. This heightens the angst in the zeitgiest, we all feel like smashing our broken Nintendos.

So, it was refreshing to hear a different metaphor on Radio 4 last week.

Sean B Carroll describes the careers of biologists following in Darwin's footsteps; these careers were not games but adventures, defined by both spirit and deed. Carroll picked this phrase, adventure being defined by both spirit and deed, from CW Ceram, who wrote about "archaeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship".

This spirit of adventure - with its acknowledgment that every career is a journey into the vast unknown, where the familiar rules no longer apply, where one will make fast friends and combat appalling evil, where there is the possiblity of both spectacular success and awful tragedy, a journey which is essentially a journey of the spirit in which the greatest challenge is to find truth and integrity - this spirit of adventure is sadly missing in corporate life.

Can this spirit be introduced? Individually, yes. A lot of this spirit probably does exist, in private. But institutionally? Maybe...though I'm not about to ask the HR staff to inject the spirit of adventure into my workplace.

Rules that are meant to be broken, and Broken Windows

I had gone with my children and their cousins for a swim at the Madras Club. My 14 month old nephew was swimming for the first time. I was glad that this rite of passage happened at the Madras Club. My generation of cousins have spent many hours swimming here, accompanied by my father or grandfather. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, and took a few pictures to remember the occasion by.

By some obscure club by-law taking photos at the poolside is not allowed. I knew about the rule; it’s not a bad rule per se in the age of the internet. I ignored the rule. Nobody objected. A sense of proportion, common sense, prevailed over rigid bureaucracy. Good call.

Except...I have long been a fan of the broken windows theory. This theory maintains that small rule-breaks send out a signal that nobody is in charge, and lead to progressively more severe rule-breaks. For instance, if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken. A building with many broken windows left unrepaired will soon be looted, and so on. I was delighted to read about experimental evidence confirming this theory.

A sense of proportion and broken windows, do the two thoughts sit together? Apart from the profound truth that rules are great as long as they don’t inconvenience this blogger.

Maybe context matters. My (self-indulgent) interpretation is that in small, personal, closed homogenous groups, when the shadow of the future is a real force, when the stakes are low, broken windows is overkill. At an extreme, broken windows within a family would be pathological. At the other extreme, a sense of proportion is not going to manage millions of fleeting, anonymous interactions on the streets of a city, or in any marketplace. Simple, explicit, rigidly enforced rules are necessary in this context. A private privileged member’s club in my hometown is a lot closer to the family end of that scale.

Bodyline is still so resonant in cricket because that was the point at which the balance tipped. Before bodyline, cricket defined, and was defined by, an implicit gentleman’s code. Douglas Jardine was the man who declared that the game was now too big to be contained within a gentleman’s code.

There is a specter haunting Eurpoe

Here is another surprisingly simple reason why property prices in the UK are unreasonably high.

A price fixing building cartel with more than a 100 members. I'm surprised that the cartel manaegd to hold.

There is a specter haunting Europe

Here is why I am very happy being a renter

The last of the Eyak

Words are probably the wrong medium to express what this means

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10640514&CFID=10936602&CFTOKEN=e5314cade73cf83b-6D129736-B27C-BB00-012B1E18390442D7

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7206411.stm

Homo Sapiens evolved to be fair?

Another fraught moral question. Does distribution matter? Is it really OK if the winners win really big if the losers are also a little bit better off.

Both evolotionart biology and behavioural experiments suggest that this does matter. People consistently refuse deals which feels unfair, even if they are obviously better off taking the unfair deal. This is a very well established result in behavioural economics. It's called the ultimatum game.

The surprising new learning is that chimps will accept unfair deals. This notion of fairness seems to be unique to our species. We probably evolved with this sense. It probably plays a key role in our success as a species, in making possible more complex social organization.

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9898270