i is aiming to appeal to readers who want a “concise, quality daily paper for just 20p”.
Know any?
[ 0 comments ]
From the monthly archives:
October 2010
Amid all the hoo-ha about biofuels – their impact on food prices, and implications for land-banking and deforestation – it’s worth remembering that biofuels actually have an important part to play in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and cutting carbon emissions. While early forms of biofuels have tended to be produced from corn, sugar cane, palm oil, and other edible crops, “next generation” fuels are already being produced from household and agricultural waste, and – most promisingly – algae.
I was writing about a company recently called TMO Renewables which has developed a process to produce ethanol from black bag rubbish. It has just signed a $500m deal to develop plants all over the US. The CEO said he had “given up on the UK” because it wouldn’t support the biofuel industry (after pressure from campaigners, and hysteria-making by journalists, the last government decided to go slow on the EU target). The US and China, by contrast, offer a far more supportive environment for biofuels.
Anti-biofuel campaigners aren’t wrong about today’s biofuels being a boondoggle for the farm lobby, or deleterious for the forests – but they might be short-sighted. It makes sense to invest in biofuels over the long-term, if it means reductions in gasoline use and CO2 emissions, and less waste going to landfill (thereby reducing methane emissions, and cutting household costs). It’s understandable that people want to rage against national biofuel targets – but they may be the best way to get the benefits we want down the line. The question is how we get the biofuels we want. At the moment, we are in danger of discrediting biofuels altogether.
[ 1 comment ]
As part of the continuing quest to understand what the hell happened to Tony Blair, Fareed Zakaria says he’s become the Old Labour ideologue he used to despise:
In a strange sense, Blair on terrorism recalls nothing so much as the Labour Party ideologues he used to make fun of as they loudly declaimed about the nationalization of industry, unilateral disarmament and workers’ communes. They were obsessed by an ideology, contemptuous of complicating facts on the ground, fed up with a public that didn’t see the light and supremely convinced that history, ultimately, would vindicate them. What do you know. Tony Blair has turned out to be Old Labour after all.
Via Andrew Sullivan.
[ 0 comments ]
Ray Fisman writes up two pieces of recent research looking at the impact of management practices in the developing world:
.. it remains murky to many of us what managers actually do and why we need them in the first place. A new World Bank-Stanford study titled “Does Management Matter?” provides an answer. Working in collaboration with the consulting firm Accenture, the researchers randomly selected a set of textile factories in India to receive a complimentary five-month management makeover and compared the profitability and efficiency of these revamped factories with a control group of factories that continued doing business as usual. It turns out management does matter: The consultants boosted productivity by around 10 percent by improving quality, managing inventory, and speeding up production.
And another, showing a correlation between management and national wealth:
In an earlier study, Bloom worked with a pair of London School of Economics researchers to conduct a worldwide survey of management practices, using metrics of management quality similar to those employed by Accenture. They hired MBA students to interview managers at corporations in 17 countries. India ranked third from the bottom—just behind Brazil and one position ahead of China. Together, these three terribly managed economies constitute nearly 40 percent of the world’s population.
I saw one of the authors of the first paper talk earlier this year at the LSE (MP3 / video). A few things struck me at the time:
1) that the question shouldn’t be “does management matter?” Of course it does. One look at any of the factories tells you how disorganised they were (see picture). It is not surprising that by focusing on things like inventory tracking and job responsibilities productivity improved. The better question is if we need to spend lots of money on consultants, academics, and MBAs to tell us basic things. The study itself cost a staggering $1.3m – of which $250,000 went to Accenture.
2) that a factory provides a convenient setting for a study about whether management “matters”. It is a place where inputs and outputs can be easily measured, and where practices can be straightforwardly introduced and assessed. Not every workplace is a factory, though. The inputs and outputs are much harder to define in other sorts of organisations, as is improving productivity. The study doesn’t mention this, as far as I can see.
3) would Accenture have wanted to be involved if the results were not so positive? It’s hard to imagine a consulting firm agreeing to participate if the research didn’t back up their main commercial claim. What assurances were given before they started? (I wanted to ask this in the Q&A but wimped out). Did Accenture have any choice about the factories they worked at? How representative were the factories identified?
I don’t disagree with Ezra Klein, Fisman, or the authors, who say the research points to the possible value of paying for business schools in places like India. This might provide better long-term economic gain than food hand-outs alone. Technical assistance and capacity building is a good idea. US management nous showed its use, for example, in post-war Europe and Japan.
What I disagree with is building up a large “management industry” to spread the gospel around the world. The trouble (or one trouble) with management consultants, business schools, and the like, is that, while they preach efficiency and productivity, they tend – pound-for-pound – to be horribly inefficient and unproductive themselves. There is also a tendency to try and take the simple lessons of the factory (see Taylorism) and apply them to all kinds of other organisations and processes – often with dubious results.
Finally, I have to wonder – despite generally seeing the value of management – what $1.3m could be used for, if it wasn’t for paying academics and consultants to conduct this sort of research. Food? Hospitals? Schools?
[ 0 comments ]
I bet you – as much as you like: Absolutely nothing happens to the FIFA officials alleged to have asked for money in return for their votes in the contest to host the 2018 World Cup. FIFA has a corruption record to rival any nation – West African ones included. The only losers will be England’s bid organisers.
See Andrew Jennings’ book “Foul: The Secret World of FIFA” for much more. First chapter (PDF) here.
[ 0 comments ]
You can see why the New Yorker chose to run a 9,600 word profile of Nick Denton, creator of Gawker. He is a controversial, complex personality. He’s gotten in the face of a lot of rich and famous people. And his multi-site blog network is one of the few online journalism models that actually makes money. Denton is good copy: he gives arresting quotes, he is at the centre of lots and lots of gossip (his sites are built on it), and nearly everyone who has worked with him (or met him) has an opinion about him:
“He’s not, like, a sociopath, but you kind of have to watch what you’re doing around him,” Ricky Van Veen, the C.E.O. of the Web site College Humor, told me.
“The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true,” A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, said. “It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.”
“He has fun when people say horrible things about him,” the blog guru Anil Dash said.
“I can’t lie to make him worse than he is, but he’s pretty bad,” Ian Spiegelman, a former Gawker writer, said.
“Other people’s emotions are alien to him,” Choire Sicha, another Gawker alumnus, said.
“He’s got a strong carapace of not really thinking other people’s opinions are that important,” John Gapper, a columnist at the Financial Times, said.
But how much do we care, really?
Denton has interesting things to say about journalism – for instance, that most reporters are commercially unaccountable (they write what they think people want to read, not what readers say they want). But is Gawker really the way forward for “serious news”? Is Denton’s model of paying writers small amounts per post (thus ensuring they keep cranking it out), plus a share of a bonus pool based on page views, how we want to pay journalists in the future? Is Gawker’s reporting-free zone something to emulate? Its endless snideness? Surely if you are going to write 9,600 words about someone, he ought to embody some significant trend, other than the debasing of an important public good.
And, surely, Gawker is less a model for the future, than an outgrowth of Denton’s personality: a reflection of his narcissism and need to be at the middle of things. As he admits, he’s not really interested in journalism; it was not enough for him. He used to be a reporter at the Telegraph and FT, until – he says – he got sick of writing about other people making money. He became an entrepreneur, starting with First Tuesday (a dot-com era networking club), then Moreover (a news “aggregator”), and, since 2002, Gawker. In New York, he has finally become a true player – certified now by the ultimate mark of success, a profile in the New Yorker.
At the end of the day, Gawker retails in vast amounts of stuff that doesn’t, objectively speaking, matter. If it weren’t for our insecurity about the future of the news, there would be little of interest here. Denton would be seen for what he is: a member of the gutter press, a relentless self-promoter, and a supreme networker. A phenomenon, yes – but not one we should take too seriously.
PS – i should have said: i met Nick Denton a few times in San Francisco. I found him much as he’s portrayed in the profile: an interesting person, very sociable, but slippery.
[ 0 comments ]
Following on from yesterday’s post, it turns out Democrats are already thinking about alternatives to carbon pricing. The new plan is to invest more heavily in clean energy to bring its cost down (rather than pricing out dirty energy through cap-and-trade). According to David Leonhardt:
To put it another way, the death of cap and trade doesn’t have to mean the death of climate policy. The alternative revolves around much more, and much better organized, financing for clean energy research. It’s an idea with a growing list of supporters, a list that even includes conservatives — most of whom opposed cap and trade.
On Wednesday, the reliably conservative American Enterprise Institute and the left-of-center Brookings Institution will release a joint proposal to increase federal spending on clean energy innovation to as much as $25 billion a year, from the currently planned $4 billion a year.
As Ezra Klein says, the “politics of that are much better”. It is something that left and right can support. It’s also an approach with a record: the US has funded a lot of good technology in the last few decades, from IT (the internet) to biotech.
Generally, I think spending on clean energy is an excellent public investment at the moment. It stimulates the economy at a time when we should be spending money. It creates jobs and wealth, including in isolated areas. Plus – creating energy industries and markets at home gives us a chance of keeping down energy costs, rather than being dependent on price hikes in Moscow.
Hopefully, the Coalition will see things this way when it announces its spending review next week. Clean energy should be a matter not only of energy and environmental policy but of industrial, economic and defence policy as well (ie the sort of “joined-up government” the UK tends to be bad at). The review should keep the current research grants and subsidies (not cut them), and properly fund the Green Investment Bank, which is key to bridging the so-called “equity gap” in new energy funding. The Tories’ commission had a lot of good ideas on this – the government should take its advice.
(Image: Tinsley Towers, in Yorkshire, recently demolished to make way for a £60m biomass plant. Lois Lindemann)
[ 0 comments ]
If, like me, you’re feeling poor at the moment, have a go at this. Enter your annual income in one of five currencies, and find out where that puts you in the global pecking order. Chances are, you’ll feel better afterwards. I did.
[ 0 comments ]
There’s been a lot of excitement recently about the non-violent resistance movement on the West Bank. Films like Budrus (see previous post) are seen as templates for further action, because they offer a way for groups, previously divided, to come together (women/men, Fatah/Hamas, Palestinian/Israeli). The thinking is that Israel will find it much harder to confront a Gandhi-type protest than a Hamas-style suicide attack. Well, maybe – given time. For the moment, Israel is not above flouting the law in order to send to prison people it doesn’t like – people such as Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a thoroughly non-violent activist, who’s just got 12 months. Matt Yglesias points out that prison was a necessary part of Gandhi, MLK, and Mandela’s struggle. But then that’s hardly conclusive evidence that non-violent protest works. Presumably there are lots of conflicts where the little guys sat in road and just got run over.. Anyway, here is a letter from Abu Rahmah from prison. Yglesias, who was just in Israel and the West Bank, wrote some good posts last week – eg here and here.
(image: PSCC)
[ 0 comments ]
It’s often been said that prettier political candidates do better than uglier ones. And now there’s research to back it up – namely a study by Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, Andy Baker, Michael Myers in the journal World Politics. From the abstract:
In this article, the authors investigate whether voters’ snap judgments of appearance travel across cultures and whether they influence elections in new democracies. They show unlabeled, black-and-white pictures of Mexican and Brazilian candidates’ faces to subjects living in America and India, asking them which candidates would be better elected officials. Despite cultural, ethnic, and racial differences, Americans and Indians agree about which candidates are superficially appealing (correlations ranging from .70 to .87). Moreover, these superficial judgments appear to have a profound influence on Mexican and Brazilian voters, as the American and Indian judgments predict actual election returns with surprising accuracy.
More here.
I’m trying to think of UK elections in my lifetime and whether the theory holds true (for me). Wilson over Heath (probably). Thatcher over Callaghan (definitely). Thatcher over Foot (no contest). Thatcher over Kinnock (he’s not my type). Major over Kinnock (not sure where to start). Blair over Major (yes, objectively speaking). Blair over Hague (Blair had hair). Blair over Howard (yes). Cameron over Brown (yes).
Seems like the theory holds true, as far as the last 36 years of British electoral politics. In every case, the more attractive candidate won. The only difficulty is deciding between John Major or Neil Kinnock. Anyone any thoughts? (see here for Major, and Kinnock at the time). Thinking back, I suppose Kinnock seemed more virile, but then revelations of Major’s affair with Edwina Currie have somewhat changed thoughts about him. What do you think?
[ 0 comments ]