This is how Thomas Friedman, columnist of the NY Times finished his article 'The Great Iceland Meltdown'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/opinion/19friedman.html?hp
One of the questions he addresses in this piece is why there are less police patrols in Surrey/England after icelandic banks were rescued by a government which is factually broke.
Globalization is such a complex phenomenon that investigating it reveals a lot of connections between seemingly unrelated things. What do you think links the war in Bosnia 13 years ago with the London bombings in 2005? Well according to Ed Husain's book 'The Islamist' the massacre where 8000 Bosnian muslims died made it easy for the militant, islamistic groups to recruit new 'soldiers'. They told the folks on the streets something like 'see people who were previously the neighbours of our muslim brothers killed them from one day to the next. This could happen in Britain too. Today the Whites are nice and tomorrow they slit your throat and rape your daughters'. Fear, as the last eight years of Bush regime have also taught us Westerners, is a powerful motivator.
This is one of many impacts of globalization. You can certainly think about others, for example by mentally tracing back where the t-shirt you're wearing came from.
This is intimidating because thinking about all these things shows us that anything seemingly trivial has consequences, most of which can't be anticipated because we simply don't have the mental capacity to consider the multitude of results which our behaviour might generate. What complicates the matter further is that we're not taught to think in systems. We study maths, geography, languages and history in separate units as if they had no relation to each other. But everything affects everything. This is frightening. But it means that you are important. What you do is important. Where you invest your money, how you vote, how you raise your children and what books you read are not trivial matters. They have consequences. Maybe someone got the confidence they needed from you today to carry out a difficult job. Maybe you're making an important difference and don't even know about it.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Ideas, Idiology and the Economy
I wasn't around in 1929 so I don't know if I shall believe the papers when they say it's the worst crisis since the Great Depression. But adjectives such as worse and worst are not going to help here. The economy is in trouble and after reading the papers for months the sentiments I gathered can be reduced to the following:
-'Banks get the profit and the tax payer bails them out.'
-'The main problem are the outrageous salaries and the greed of the managers'
and
-'This is the proof that capitalism and globalization have failed'
Undifferentiated and one-sided thinking like this caused the crisis in the first place. As a society we're trimmed to think that there's only a right and a wrong. The good and the bad guy. Conflicts and bad headlines sell papers, critical analysis does not. Just having an automated response (opinion or an idea about how to do something without working on a balanced assessment of the situation) is what is called a schema. Schemas make our day easier. These routines we've learnt happen, without having to think about them. Just imagine having to think hard how to exactly get out of bed, questioning whether there was a better way to use the shower or make your morning tea. You'd be exhausted before having started to work. So schemas are helpful. Schemas and habits (also thinking routines) are great but they have limits.
Schemas, habits and routines are not very helpful to solve complex problems. So let's look at some of the statements above:
Although there's undeniably a certain unfairness to the way some things are handled in a global company it's simply not true, that the common people don't profit from the banks or other corporations. Zurich is a good example. It's one of the richest cities in the world and it's going to have the first deficit for quite some time because the banks lost money and hence pay significantly less taxes. So without the banks our social security system, schools and other infrastructure would be in trouble. Pensions have been invested in bank shares so people have profited from the high return the banks generated without even knowing it.
Some salaries are indeed outrageous. But the companies concerned in this crisis are all financed by shareholders. Shareholders are people like you, your employer, your insurance, your parents etc. You have the right to not elect the board of directors, you can raise issues at the general assembly which have to be settled through a vote and you can sell your shares whenever you feel that the managers are not doing their job properly. But why would you become a shareholder in the first place? Maybe because of the return which the 'greedy bunch' generates? So if you don't approve of the company or its managers don't invest.
Is communism going to return? Capitalism has failed! Globalization has caused the crisis to spread! Those are the headlines now. Whoever wants a communist regime should do a bit of travelling. Go to Albania, go to Kuba, ask the Russians, Cechs or the Chinese who left their country why they did that. I'm not saying everything about it is bad. Apparantly a lot of Russian students are very well educated, same with Albanian fishermen. But did they have the freedom to study where they wanted to, read the books or have a shop without fraternising with the bureaucrats? And how about the brutality of all these regimes? How fair would it be to earn the same amount of money for sitting in a call center as you would while operating people and saving lives?
Without capitalism and globalization you would not be sitting in front of your computer right now. The countries with oil and other resources would be rich and all the others would be poor. How fair would that be?
This is not an ode to managers, capitalism and globalization. This is about taking responsibility for your investments, your voting record and about how important it is to study an issue in depth before making decisions. It's not about good or bad. It's about how to find solutions which work right now but are also sustainable.
-'Banks get the profit and the tax payer bails them out.'
-'The main problem are the outrageous salaries and the greed of the managers'
and
-'This is the proof that capitalism and globalization have failed'
Undifferentiated and one-sided thinking like this caused the crisis in the first place. As a society we're trimmed to think that there's only a right and a wrong. The good and the bad guy. Conflicts and bad headlines sell papers, critical analysis does not. Just having an automated response (opinion or an idea about how to do something without working on a balanced assessment of the situation) is what is called a schema. Schemas make our day easier. These routines we've learnt happen, without having to think about them. Just imagine having to think hard how to exactly get out of bed, questioning whether there was a better way to use the shower or make your morning tea. You'd be exhausted before having started to work. So schemas are helpful. Schemas and habits (also thinking routines) are great but they have limits.
Schemas, habits and routines are not very helpful to solve complex problems. So let's look at some of the statements above:
Although there's undeniably a certain unfairness to the way some things are handled in a global company it's simply not true, that the common people don't profit from the banks or other corporations. Zurich is a good example. It's one of the richest cities in the world and it's going to have the first deficit for quite some time because the banks lost money and hence pay significantly less taxes. So without the banks our social security system, schools and other infrastructure would be in trouble. Pensions have been invested in bank shares so people have profited from the high return the banks generated without even knowing it.
Some salaries are indeed outrageous. But the companies concerned in this crisis are all financed by shareholders. Shareholders are people like you, your employer, your insurance, your parents etc. You have the right to not elect the board of directors, you can raise issues at the general assembly which have to be settled through a vote and you can sell your shares whenever you feel that the managers are not doing their job properly. But why would you become a shareholder in the first place? Maybe because of the return which the 'greedy bunch' generates? So if you don't approve of the company or its managers don't invest.
Is communism going to return? Capitalism has failed! Globalization has caused the crisis to spread! Those are the headlines now. Whoever wants a communist regime should do a bit of travelling. Go to Albania, go to Kuba, ask the Russians, Cechs or the Chinese who left their country why they did that. I'm not saying everything about it is bad. Apparantly a lot of Russian students are very well educated, same with Albanian fishermen. But did they have the freedom to study where they wanted to, read the books or have a shop without fraternising with the bureaucrats? And how about the brutality of all these regimes? How fair would it be to earn the same amount of money for sitting in a call center as you would while operating people and saving lives?
Without capitalism and globalization you would not be sitting in front of your computer right now. The countries with oil and other resources would be rich and all the others would be poor. How fair would that be?
This is not an ode to managers, capitalism and globalization. This is about taking responsibility for your investments, your voting record and about how important it is to study an issue in depth before making decisions. It's not about good or bad. It's about how to find solutions which work right now but are also sustainable.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Gedichte
Das erste Gedicht das ich mich erinnere auswendig (oder teilweise) gelernt zu haben heisst 'Der Weltuntergang' und ist von Franz Hohler
http://www.purkersdorf-online.at/komm/_da.php?ar=6&num=01766-00000-00000-00000-00000
Es hat mich so fasziniert, dass ich die ersten zwei Strophen auch jetzt noch aufsagen kann (es ist immerhin 15 Jahre her). Vielleicht ist das der Grund, das die Poesie nie ganz aus meinem Leben verschwunden ist. Ich weiss es nicht, es ist auch nicht wichtig. Viel wichtiger ist, dass fast niemand den ich kenne, Gedichte noch liest.
Es gibt viele Gründe Gedichte zu lesen und ich werde ganz sicher nicht alle aufzählen, denn ich hoffe ihr werdet es selber entdecken. Ich werde immer mal wieder einige Gedichte hier aufschalten. Das Schöne an Gedichten ist, dass man sie geniessen kann, auch wenn der Kopf nicht alles versteht.
Mondnacht
Es war, als hätt' der Himmel
Die Erde still geküsst,
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nun träumen müsst.
Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis' die Wälder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.
Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flöge sie nach Haus.
Joseph von Eichendorff
Und wer lieber etwas Modernes lesen möchte und ein bisschen Englisch kann, bitteschön:
Planting a Sequoia
All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.
In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth–
An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.
But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.
We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.
And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.
from The Gods of Winter
© 1991 Dana Gioia
http://www.danagioia.net/poems/index.html
http://www.purkersdorf-online.at/komm/_da.php?ar=6&num=01766-00000-00000-00000-00000
Es hat mich so fasziniert, dass ich die ersten zwei Strophen auch jetzt noch aufsagen kann (es ist immerhin 15 Jahre her). Vielleicht ist das der Grund, das die Poesie nie ganz aus meinem Leben verschwunden ist. Ich weiss es nicht, es ist auch nicht wichtig. Viel wichtiger ist, dass fast niemand den ich kenne, Gedichte noch liest.
Es gibt viele Gründe Gedichte zu lesen und ich werde ganz sicher nicht alle aufzählen, denn ich hoffe ihr werdet es selber entdecken. Ich werde immer mal wieder einige Gedichte hier aufschalten. Das Schöne an Gedichten ist, dass man sie geniessen kann, auch wenn der Kopf nicht alles versteht.
Mondnacht
Es war, als hätt' der Himmel
Die Erde still geküsst,
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nun träumen müsst.
Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis' die Wälder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.
Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flöge sie nach Haus.
Joseph von Eichendorff
Und wer lieber etwas Modernes lesen möchte und ein bisschen Englisch kann, bitteschön:
Planting a Sequoia
All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.
In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth–
An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.
But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.
We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.
And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.
from The Gods of Winter
© 1991 Dana Gioia
http://www.danagioia.net/poems/index.html
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Clare
The seaweed on the beach
looks like neurons
maybe meant to
connect Clare's spine
with her hand
so that she could have squeezed
a hand of mine.
The guts from the sea
are lying around.
Some parts look like bones,
broken knees.
This beach,
a cemetry
full of body parts
not buried.
Seaweed and a shell entwined
get stuck in my toes.
I'll take the shell home
and call it Clare.
I'll fill it up
year after year
with birthdays and chocolate cake
graduation, the first car
and holidays at the beach.
looks like neurons
maybe meant to
connect Clare's spine
with her hand
so that she could have squeezed
a hand of mine.
The guts from the sea
are lying around.
Some parts look like bones,
broken knees.
This beach,
a cemetry
full of body parts
not buried.
Seaweed and a shell entwined
get stuck in my toes.
I'll take the shell home
and call it Clare.
I'll fill it up
year after year
with birthdays and chocolate cake
graduation, the first car
and holidays at the beach.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Subprime crisis and ethics
This financial crisis is a great opportunity to illustrate the importance of ethics and moral decisions. This may sound kind of uncool and patrionising but let's see if there's something to it. Money and ethics seem to be incompatible and everyone who demands that this dimension is taken into account is regarded as some left wing/idealist/bohemian/socialist whatever. The convenient thing about this kind of labelling is that the discussion never revolves around the actual topic. In this case the question would be 'are business and ethics related and if yes how'? Normally ethics is seen as something that spoils business opportunities. In terms of business the whole economy would have been better off now, had the dimension of ethics been part of the game. Without having any deeper knowledge about ethics I'm sure that most people would agree, that it's unethical to offer mortgages to people without income, jobs or any other assets. Playing up their hopes and than enslaving them so that they pay back the interest and the mortgage is wrong. If things go wrong (like they have now), the home owners end up being bankrupt and without any kind of housing. This is not difficult to understand. But it seems difficult not to take advantage of people. This has worked until now and people have been losing their houses ever since but since the banks could just sell the houses on a booming market this was never a newsworthy fact. Well now that not just some but a huge number of people can't pay their mortgages back and the banks are piling up losses or going bankrupt themselves it is suddenly very interesting.
Currently the banks are putting their efforts into developing better risk management strategies. While this might help it is not nearly as good as thinking over their strategies in the light of ethics. This is not about utopia, it's a very real necessity. Because shady deals can and do blow up in your face. People can't pay back, they sue you or a major damage in reputation can destroy the trust in a company. Mopping up the mess requires usually more money than critically examining a deal before sealing it. This is also something that shareholders have to learn. If you don't care how a company makes its profits as long as the shares rise, you're going to be the first to feel it, if these imbalances cause the bubble to burst. That's why values such as integrity came into existance in the first place.
Currently the banks are putting their efforts into developing better risk management strategies. While this might help it is not nearly as good as thinking over their strategies in the light of ethics. This is not about utopia, it's a very real necessity. Because shady deals can and do blow up in your face. People can't pay back, they sue you or a major damage in reputation can destroy the trust in a company. Mopping up the mess requires usually more money than critically examining a deal before sealing it. This is also something that shareholders have to learn. If you don't care how a company makes its profits as long as the shares rise, you're going to be the first to feel it, if these imbalances cause the bubble to burst. That's why values such as integrity came into existance in the first place.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Why I want Obama to win
I downloaded his audiobook "The Audacity of Hope" about one or two years ago. I didn't listen to it because I thought I might like this guy. And I didn't want to like someone who might not have a chance. So I started listening right after he won Iowa. Only a few months ago I had told a friend of mine why I had no intention of becoming politically involved. Sitting there praising like-minded people and blaming everyone who did not share my views for all the ills of the city, country or even the world just doesn't make sense to me. All of us need clean air to breathe. All of us want to go out on the weekend without being stabbed. All of us want a job without having to relocate to Poland or Asia. Holding on to an ideology and defending it, regardless of what happens in this world does not help anybody.
I belong to a generation which does not believe in revolutions (at least not in this part of the world). We know that just transferring power from one to another party will not change much. We are aware of all kinds of problems which might blow up in our faces at some time in the future.
Obama can't change all these things. He can't single-handedly fight global warming, terrorism, inequality and warfare. Nobody can.
People say he has not got enough experience. Even if that was true (I can't judge that) he could appoint brilliant people with more than enough political experience. Obama has another kind of experience: the experience of graduating from the best law school but not opting for astronomic wages at a top-firm. He decided to become a civil rights lawyer. He has the experience of what living without having a lot of money is like. He has experienced the life of troubled communities because he lived in them and later worked as an organizer while others were already housing in the suburbs. He respects other faiths and views not because liberal people have to but because he took the trouble to engage with the major religions before becoming a Christian. These things are all helpful in developing one important but mostly ignored quality: empathy.
Empathy is what holds you back if you want to interrupt your opponent. Empathy is what keeps you from being cruel, not because of other people but because it would hurt yourself. It doesn't mean that empathy can solve everything. But empathy can make the difference between walking out on someone or sticking around until you understand them. And that's what is needed: understanding. You need to understand the ones who need help. You have to understand the ones whose help you need. And you have to understand those who are fighting you in order to protect yourself and your country.
This is not, as some people want to make us believe a question of inspiration or action. It's about combining the two.
Even if he loses I'm grateful to have witnessed the events of the last two months. Hope doesn't put food on the table. True. But it might drive you to the polls, to school, to working hard, to volunteering and to the lingering thought that if he got that far without big money and but high hopes you might get that little extra courage needed to see where hope could lead you.
I belong to a generation which does not believe in revolutions (at least not in this part of the world). We know that just transferring power from one to another party will not change much. We are aware of all kinds of problems which might blow up in our faces at some time in the future.
Obama can't change all these things. He can't single-handedly fight global warming, terrorism, inequality and warfare. Nobody can.
People say he has not got enough experience. Even if that was true (I can't judge that) he could appoint brilliant people with more than enough political experience. Obama has another kind of experience: the experience of graduating from the best law school but not opting for astronomic wages at a top-firm. He decided to become a civil rights lawyer. He has the experience of what living without having a lot of money is like. He has experienced the life of troubled communities because he lived in them and later worked as an organizer while others were already housing in the suburbs. He respects other faiths and views not because liberal people have to but because he took the trouble to engage with the major religions before becoming a Christian. These things are all helpful in developing one important but mostly ignored quality: empathy.
Empathy is what holds you back if you want to interrupt your opponent. Empathy is what keeps you from being cruel, not because of other people but because it would hurt yourself. It doesn't mean that empathy can solve everything. But empathy can make the difference between walking out on someone or sticking around until you understand them. And that's what is needed: understanding. You need to understand the ones who need help. You have to understand the ones whose help you need. And you have to understand those who are fighting you in order to protect yourself and your country.
This is not, as some people want to make us believe a question of inspiration or action. It's about combining the two.
Even if he loses I'm grateful to have witnessed the events of the last two months. Hope doesn't put food on the table. True. But it might drive you to the polls, to school, to working hard, to volunteering and to the lingering thought that if he got that far without big money and but high hopes you might get that little extra courage needed to see where hope could lead you.
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