Marbury

sex, power, risk and bankers

Andre Penner/AP

I have a piece in the Guardian today on the psychology of the Barclays banking scandal. It was provoked by those revealing emails: 

Like lovers who embark on an affair because of, as well as despite, its wrongness, the erring bankers clearly took a special pleasure in crossing boundaries. Here is a Barclays trader explaining the rules of the game to a nervous novice: "This is the way you pull off deals like this Chicken, don't talk about it too much … this is between you and me, but really don't tell ANYBODY." In those capital letters alone you can the smell the fevered pleasure of taking part in a conspiracy, knowing that they might get caught out.

But then, as with any affair, there is always the prospect of time together alone, of stolen moments free from the possibility of prying eyes: "Dude. I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I'm opening a bottle of Bollinger."

This, then, is what brings down banks and distorts economies: sexting with pound signs, followed, at the end of the day, by a Bollinger ejaculation.

It need hardly be said that bankers, particularly on trading floors, are overwhelmingly male. This matters. There is much that is comic about the sexualised nature of this male-on-male banter, but it points to a deeper truth about the psychology of organisations. Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks, and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam.

Full piece here.

what the SCOTUS decision does and doesn't mean

• Obama will be very, very relieved. This is a crisis averted, rather than a triumph achieved. It's like finding out you don't have a terminal illness. But it is, obviously, very good news indeed. If the decision had gone the other way, the biggest problem for Obama wouldn't have been the healthcare mess itself. It's that he would have looked like a loser. Given that the economy is still in the doldrums, Romney would have been able to portray the president as a man in office but not in power. Presidents can survive many things, but the impression that they are impotent is not one of them.
• Romney will be mildly disappointed. But the contest stands at the same place it was last week: close. 
• It doesn't mean Obamacare is popular.
• Columnists who assumed they knew what the decision was going to be and published angry opinion pieces in advance- of which there were many - look quite silly now. One of the features of the digital era is that instant opinion isn't enough any more: people must have opinions before anything actually happens.
• Certain news organisations also look pretty silly. 
• This is a blow for the wisdom of crowds. The prediction market In-Trade had repeal at 75%.
• John Roberts (pictured) will now be seen differently, by his critics and his supporters. Republicans will regard him as another in a long line of pretend conservatives who betray the "movement" the moment they reach the highest bench. Democrats just won't know what to think.
• Biden has cracked a cold one or two. This was a big fucking deal.

how to change your mind

Rather than extracting a paragraph from this New York Times piece about gay marriage by the American conservative thinker David Blankenhorn, I urge you to read the whole thing. In it, he explains that after long opposition to gay marriage, he has come round to supporting it, albeit with caveats. In the acrimonious stand-off that American politics has become, such side-switching is very unusual. You don't have to agree with every point Blankenhorn makes - or indeed any - to admire the clarity of his prose, and, above all, the spirit in which he writes.

There's hardly anything I respect more than someone struggling honestly to come to terms with a way of seeing the world that is very different from their own. The volte-face achieved through the hard work of reason is very rare indeed. We all pretend to be open to different points of view. But in reality, most of us stick to a narrow spectrum of opinions shared by our friends and peers, one which yokes different issues together simply because they're part of the same cultural gestalt (there's no fundamental reason that being pro-European should align with being pro-choice, for instance, or indeed - to take two more obviously related issues - to oppose abortion and support the death penalty).

We also tend to stick doggedly to our own view, come what may. While pretending to be open to evidence, we will go to amazing lengths to fit new evidence to pre-existing beliefs, rather than the other way around. I stopped taking Tony Blair's antagonists in the media seriously (well OK, perhaps I never did) after seeing them build Lord Hutton up as an incorruptible man of granite who would finally impale that slippery Blair on the rusty sword of truth - and then, following the publication of his report, which inconveniently exonerated Blair and his government from any wrongdoing, immediately denounce him as an establishment dupe. Blair's donation of his entire book proceeds to charity somehow reinforced rather than undermined the view of the same people that the former PM was money-grabbing and cynical.

A more general example is the response of avid pro-Europeans - including Blair, incidentally - to the Eurozone crisis. Rather than conceding that their consistent advocacy of Britain's entry to the Eurozone would have led to disaster, and that the Eurosceptics were right to warn of its inherent instability, Blair, Heseltine, Clegg and others have been blithely pretending that the current crisis is just a spot of bother, a mere diversion from the great river of European integration. It doesn't appear to have occurred to them to ask themselves whether and why they got things so wrong.

People change their mind for social reasons - when their peers and wider social group do so - or for political reasons: when it might benefit them to do so. The rarity of honestly reasoned changes of mind appears to support a slightly depressing idea recently proposed by French social scientists, called the "argumentative theory of reasoning". The gist of it is that reason and rationality evolved not to serve truth, but to win arguments. We are wired to care much more about being on the right side of an argument - and being seen to be on the right side - than about being right. In the words of one of the theory's authors, reason is "a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.”

Of course, even if reason evolved for that purpose, that doesn't mean we have to use it that way. David Blankenhorn's article is a small reminder of the higher purposes to which our capacities for self-reflection and hard thinking can be put.

a pirlo postscript

I hadn't really thought about the psychological effects of Pirlo's penalty on the dynamic of the shoot-out until I read this interesting take on it from former England player Graeme Le Saux:

But the shootout started well for us against Italy, at least until Andrea Pirlo stepped up. He was the difference between the teams all night, and showed how much England need a technician who can control the tempo and the pattern of a game.

But if England had somehow survived despite his superiority in open play, what he did in the shootout destroyed us. There was so much self-belief in his penalty, so much confidence, and that will have filtered through to his team-mates. At the same time some of England's players, particularly Joe Hart – who had to watch the ball floating over his shoulder – would have found it demoralising. You've got to admire Pirlo's bravado but England's players probably felt that he had been humiliating and disrespectful. They must have been tempted to go straight over and give him a slap. Following that was very difficult and we couldn't – we didn't score another penalty.

Full piece here.

pirlo's lesson

(Picture via Forza.)

Pirlo's penalty against England last night was a work of art. Like art, its beauty was entirely surplus to requirements. This was the quarter final of the European Championships, after extra time; Pirlo was the lynchpin and talisman of the team; it was quite possibly his last international championship. Had he missed, he would have been humiliated, his teammates devastated, his country closer to being knocked out, and by a far inferior opposition. Yet instead of ramming the ball home into one of the corners, he chose to float it delicately into the middle of the goal, over the goalkeeper's prostrate body.

It took superhuman nerve it took to do this. It also took a perverse determination to make something extraordinary; to achieve beauty as well as victory. Like any masterpiece in a great tradition it drew on antecedents: Pirlo was making an allusion to an earlier work, Panenka's legendary penalty in the 1976 European Championship final.

Apart from a lesson in the art of football, Pirlo was also teaching us about politics and human nature. I recently wrote about the imperative for politicians to be seen as "strong and wrong" rather than "weak and right". Although any politician who aspires to exercise power must recognise this rule, it's an unfortunate one for society generally. After all, it does by definition lead to mistakes, like wars and unnecessary austerity programmes. What this rule is really about is the appearance of action - being seen to be doing something, even when doing nothing is the sensible course of action.

Joe Hart could have saved Pirlo's penalty easily if he had done nothing instead of something: if, instead of diving, he'd just stood his ground. There was no force to Pirlo's shot: Hart could have taken a swig of water and let the ball bounce off his chest. In fact, standing still would have been quite a rational strategy for Hart to adopt, as a group of economists demonstrated in a recent study of penalties:

Ofer Azar and colleagues in Israel watched hours of archival footage and noticed that goalkeepers save substantially more penalty kicks when they stay in the centre of goal than when they jump to the left or right. Yet paradoxically, in 93.7 per cent of penalty situations, keepers chose to jump rather than stay in the centre. In fact, analysis of 286 penalty kicks taken in elite matches around the world showed that keepers saved 33.3 per cent of penalties when they stayed in the centre, compared with just 12.6 per cent of kicks when they jumped right and 14.2 per cent when they jumped left.

But goalkeepers hardly ever stay in the centre, and the reason is that they have a particular horror of what will happen if they do so and the goal is scored. Dive to one of the corners and at least they will look like they tried to do something, even if the ball goes into the net. If they stay in the centre and the ball flies past them for a goal, it will be very tough to explain to their teammates that, statistically, they followed the rational course of action. In other words there's a conflict between doing the right thing, and doing the thing that will make them popular with their teammates in the event of it not working out. It's a dilemma that politicians know all too well.

Pirlo was offering us a lesson in the dark ironies of governing in a crisis. Doing nothing is sometimes better than doing something - and yet, of course, if Hart had done nothing, Pirlo might have humiliated him another way. There are no easy answers. That, at least, will have Europe's leaders nodding along, as they go through the agonising process of deciding which way to dive.

BPS Research Digest report on penalty study here.

More on penalties and game theory from Tim Harford here.

UPDATE: Pirlo has tried this before. But that time it didn't work: the goalkeeper (Pinto) did nothing, and saved it (which makes it all the more extraordinary that Pirlo tried it again).

UPDATE II: I was on BBC Radio 4 discussing this today; if you missed it and you're interested, it's on iPlayer, starting 53.00.

hell: the enforcer

A sign on an Indian wall.

There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that religious belief generally makes people a little more cooperative - at least, within the tribe, - self-controlled and law-abiding (though globally the evidence is mixed on the latter point).

The really interesting question is why. Is it because religion instils moral codes, making people more virtuous? Or because it instils fears of divine punishment for misdeeds?

A new study suggests the latter. It found that a widespread belief in hell leads to a lower crime rate - while a strong belief in heaven predicts a higher crime rate. Here's the abstract:

Though religion has been shown to have generally positive effects on normative ‘prosocial’ behavior, recent laboratory research suggests that these effects may be driven primarily by supernatural punishment. Supernatural benevolence, on the other hand, may actually be associated with less prosocial behavior. Here, we investigate these effects at the societal level, showing that the proportion of people who believe in hell negatively predicts national crime rates whereas belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates. These effects remain after accounting for a host of covariates, and ultimately prove stronger predictors of national crime rates than economic variables such as GDP and income inequality.

Perhaps when we read about the latest example of some awful crime we should complain by saying, "This country is going to heaven."

in his life

This Boy was 70 years old Yesterday

Happy Birthday to you, Paul.

POTUS interruptus

 

The Rose Garden heckler turned out to be Neil Munro of the right-wing website Daily Caller. I somehow doubt he'll get his press pass back.

the dangers of being weak and right

Obama getting asked-for advice, June 08,2012. Pete Souza/White House.

Obama is getting a lot of unasked-for advice at the moment from critics. After a period earlier in the year when he seemed to be on course for victory in November, he is stuck in the political doldrums again. His poll ratings are dipping, he's making gaffes, and - crucially - the economic recovery appears to have stalled. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is raising money than expected.

One argument made by Obama's critics is that his campaign is making a mistake by demonising Romney as a ruthless, job-killing capitalist, based on his record as a businessman at Bain Capital. I agree. So does Bill Clinton (quote from Politico):

Clinton’s point is that Romney’s conservative policy vision should be a rich enough target without Obama having to sully himself through more personal attacks. “My instinct, you know me, I don’t think I should have to say bad things about Gov. Romney personally to disagree with him politically,” Clinton said in a recent CNN interview.

Clinton doesn’t say this just because he thinks civility is a good thing. He also believes that swing voters in particular hate what they see as mindless combat and will reward people they believe are dealing in good faith.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell — a vocal critic of the Obama camp’s attacks on Romney’s business background — echoed Clinton’s argument in a recent interview. “Calling Romney a vampire [in a campaign ad about Bain Capital] was way over the top,” Rendell said.

But other Democrats — including influential voices in Obama’s camp — believe this approach is naïve. Republicans, in this view, have long prospered by being willing to play rough, and tear down opponents by any means possible.

The Democrats who say this want to sound all hard-nosed and unsentimental. In fact, I think they betray their own naivety.

It's a common mistake of those on the left to over-estimate the extent to which voters form their opinions about politicians on moral grounds - and to under-estimate the extent to which voters are drawn to perceived effectiveness. It's what Clinton was getting at when he famously remarked that, in politics, it's better to be "strong and wrong than weak and right". Whether consciously or subconsciously, voters want to feel, almost before anything else, that the people in charge are in control.

The problem with portraying your opponent as a ruthless bastard is that in hard times, many people think, "a ruthless bastard is exactly what we need right now." Voters may not warm to Romney - and most of them still like Obama personally - but if they perceive him to be amoral yet effective, they'll vote for him.

I think Obama would be better off portraying Romney as weak - as a flip-flopper who isn't up to taking tough decisions - in contrast to this president. In other words, a 2004 rerun, with Obama playing Bush.

In Britain, the choice for the Labour Party is similar. Miliband has to decide: is Cameron heartless or hapless, arrogant or weak? (He should remember that most people don't give politics enough brainspace to absorb both messages.)

Given the Coalition's record of U-turns and screw-ups the answer should be obvious. Call Cameron 'arrogant' and you risk making him look bigger, more confident and more in control than he actually is.

Yet Miliband is drawn to the 'arrogant/heartless' strategy because, like most Labour leaders, he instinctively believes that voters choose between politicians on moral grounds. Mostly, they vote on who can do the job.

the other bush

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

If he has any idea who he is, Jeb Bush might have felt a twinge of empathy for David Miliband when Miliband lost out to his younger brother for the leadership of the Labour Party.

Jeb experienced something similar in the late 1990s when his brother George - older in years but younger in political maturity - overtook him in the race to become the second Bush in the White House. George then went on to do his level best to ensure that he was the last. It is frequently said that if Jeb didn't share a last name with his brother, he'd be president by now, or on his way.

This isn't just a pity for Jeb, but for all of us: of the two, Jeb is far more impressive, thoughtful and capable. Now that he is no longer Governor of Florida, he floats in a kind of young-elder-statesman limbo. But he still cares, and one of the things he cares about is the degeneration of his party. In a recent interview he did something almost no major GOP figure is prepared to do: castigate his own side for its ideological rigidity. He spoke almost contemptuously about the party that is constantly claiming the mantle of Reagan but doesn't do compromise:

"Ronald Reagan would have … a hard time if you define the Republican Party—and I don’t—as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground," Bush said, adding that he views the partisan sclerosis as "temporary. Back to my dad’s time and Ronald Reagan’s time—they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support," he said. Today Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did."

He's hardly a liberal, mind you (although he would be counted as one by his colleagues on immigration and social issues) and he has harsh words for Obama. But rather than indulging in poisonous Gingrich-style attacks on the president's character, he mounts a powerful critique of his strategic failings:

President Obama's big failing, says Bush, was his refusal to embrace the Simpson-Bowles commission he set up to find a way to reduce budget deficits. It was a failure of leadership, says Bush, who argues that had the president fought for the plan and lost, he would not have suffered politically. "Presidents matter, and this president lost his chance to be a transcendent figure."  Leadership, he argues, would have been the president's own political reward. "Had he tried with sincerity and tried hard, he could make a compelling case ‘Conservatives are against me, they're not for advancing the broader interests of this country.’ "

More on the interview here.

a lover not a fighter

Photo: Ben Solomon/New York Times

ITV's coverage of the French Open has been excellent. The commentators are thoughtful and informed, and Jim Courier is a really first-rate analyst, a fund of insight who hardly ever resorts to banality (tennis pundits are often really good - why isn't this the case in football?).

Watching Federer-Djokovic this afternoon, it was interesting to hear Courier muse on the psychological qualities of the top three players in the world today: Djokovic, Nadal, Federer. Courier said he once asked Leyton Hewitt, who has played them all many times, who he thought was mentally toughest (Hewitt, while far from the most physically talented player on the circuit, is celebrated for the strength of his will to win). Hewitt wouldn't give him a straight answer, so Courier asked it another way: if you had to pick someone to play for your life, who would you pick? "Nadal," said Hewitt. "No question." Nadal, said Courier, is almost in a different league, psychologically. His demeanour on court is one of utter implacability, his aggression punishingly relentless.

Courier went on to say that he thought Federer was the most mentally vulnerable of the three. As a rough and ready index, we can use Federer's record in five-setters, in which mental toughness counts for so much: won 19, lost 16. Given the superior quality of his game, you might you think he'd do better than that (Djokovic is 17-5). "I'm not sure Federer really enjoys confrontation," said Courier, whereas Nadal, and to a lesser extent Djokovic, thrive on it. "Federer is more of an artist than a warrior."

I think that's part of the reason Federer still inspires so much devotion among his fans, including me. His genius is more fragile and therefore more human than that of his two younger rivals. When he's playing Nadal you almost feel like you're watching an athletic version of Kasparov vs Big Blue, willing on humanity in its struggle to keep up with the machines.

UPDATE: I wish he'd had a bit more fight in him today. He folded rather meekly against a Djokovic who wasn't even in top form.

the cock-up theory of jfk's assassination

It has now been definitively established, at least among serious people, that there was no conspiracy behind the murder of President Kennedy. To the disappointment and continuing disbelief of thousands of amateur sleuths, it turns out that the man responsible really was Lee Harvey Oswald, acting on his own initiative.

But there is a credible theory of how JFK was killed that attributes the fatal wounding not to one of the bullets from LHO's rifle, but to 'friendly fire' from a member of JFK's own security detail. I was reminded of this when reading an entertaining email exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons, editor of the sports magazine Grantland (the discussion is mostly about sports but free-wheels across other topics). Here's Gladwell, referring to a book called Popular Crime, by Bill James:

James loves the Kennedy book Mortal Error by Bonar Menninger, which is based on the work of a Baltimore ballistics expert named Howard Donahue. Donahue's focus is on the mysterious third bullet that hit Kennedy — and that ended up killing him. It didn't behave like the first two bullets. It disintegrated inside Kennedy's skull, for instance, which a bullet fired from Oswald's rifle should not have done. And from where Oswald was situated it is hard to see how the bullet could really have traveled in the trajectory that it did. The questions surrounding the third bullet are a big part of the reason so many people believe in a conspiracy. So what was Donahue's explanation? There was a second gunman. But it wasn't an assassin. It was a Secret Service man named George Hickey who heard the first two shots, panicked, and let off a shot that hit the president in the head. It was all a tragic accident. Hickey's AR-15 rifle matches the ballistics and trajectory of the fatal bullet perfectly. And numerous eyewitnesses reported seeing him grab his weapon and wave it about. I could go on. James describes in brilliant detail just how convincing this particular explanation is.

But, as Gladwell goes on to say, this will never be a popular explanation. When it comes to narrative magnetism, cock-ups are no match for conspiracies.

Gladwell/Simmons here.

team of loyalists?

In the 2008 campaign, Obama presented himself as a kind of 21st century Abraham Lincoln. Launching his candidacy outside the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln had made his "House divided" speech, Obama referred self-consciously to the “tall, gangly, self-made lawyer” in whose steps he followed. When it came time to appoint a cabinet, he was photographed carrying a copy of Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which tells the story of how Lincoln appointed to his cabinet his three main competitors for the presidency in the 1860 election, despite their open enmity towards him, because he thought it was the only way to hold the Union together during the Civil War. During the 2008 transition period, Obama let it be known he was of the same mind, telling Time magazine, “I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.” The biggest manifestation of this approach was, of course, his appointment of Hillary Clinton to State.

Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum argues that the reality of Obama's cabinet has been rather different, and that with the important exceptions of Hillary Clinton, Tim Geithner, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Obama has surrounded himself with a cabinet of loyalists and non-entities. I'm not sure this is fair, particularly once you get beyond the cabinet itself. If you add the first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel (not a shrinking violet), Joe Biden, who has been allowed to play an influential, free-ranging role in the administration, and Larry Summers - not in the cabinet but in a powerful position and hardly a quiescent figure - then that's a pretty long list of exceptions. On two of the toughest decisions of a presidency that has been filled with them - the early economic crisis, and Afghanistan withdrawal - Obama allowed and encouraged a genuine internal debate (indeed, you might argue that on these issues and healthcare, he didn't exert his own point of view early and forcefully enough).

There is some truth in the suggestion that Obama doesn't particularly like being outside of his comfort zone, however, despite his protestation. Every insider account of his administration has made the point that he doesn't often seek out views beyond his inner circle of advisers (most of them from the campaign) and that he is unusually self-contained (a former adviser tells Purdum, “He’s a total introvert. He doesn’t need people.”) When he appointed an independent-minded outsider, Bill Daley, to be his second chief of staff, the result was disastrous, and Daley was replaced by a 2008 veteran. So although Obama can handle big personalities being in the room, he retreats to his loyal core, or simply to himself, when it comes to decision-time.

To return to Hillary - well, to her credit, she turned out not to be interested in being a rival at all, but merely in doing a good job as Secretary of State, which, although good for the country, won't make very juicy material for a future historian.

anna helps out

The Obama campaign's latest attempt to show that the president understands the concerns of everyday Americans better than Mitt Romney features, uh...

It would be easy to laugh at this video, so why not?

Whoever wrote the script ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Unintentional Satire:

"I'm so lucky in my work that I get to meet some of the most incredible women in the world. Women like Sarah Jessica Parker..."

Also, I love the delivery: despite a game attempt at enthusiasm, La Wintour cannot help but ooze condescension. Not just any old condescension, of course, but a cultivated, languid, many-layered condescension which has the complexity and savour of a vintage Bordeaux. It includes a faint hint of quizzical bemusement at having been asked to address the masses in the first place, and an ironising subtext:

"We're saving the two best seats in the house for you."

(Implicitly) "...They're situated conveniently near the toilets. And a long way from me."

the prayer of nick clegg

'Merciful? Give me a break.'