This may not be helpful, but the only sure example I have where I responded independently to a piece of music was Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.  I really did not like his music in the period up to 1983 for very particular reasons: Off the Wall had been played in our house for several years till it drove me up the wall.

From what may have been the very first UK airplay of Billie Jean, I immediately went out and ordered the 12″ version, making the record an outlier in an LP collection of otherwise orthodox neurotic-boy-outsider (NBO) teenage angst music. That’s if you exclude the bootleg Buddy Guy album that found its way to small-town Lincolnshire by some miracle or another.  Much is made of the revolutionary impact the accompanying video had on the success of Billie Jean, and that may all be true, but I know that did not influence me.

It didn’t stop there.  Soon after, and in a similar fashion, I heard the roughly contemporaneous Walk Right Now, penned and performed by Jackson and brothers.

Walk Right Now certainly does illustrate my early experiences of social proof in action.  I upset and embarrassed a good many of my adolescent chums with this one, particularly one who was a dyed-in-the-wool Joy Division and Morrissey fan. He loathed it, until his big brother (whom he worshipped) returned from Cambridge porting it in his own diminutive singles collection.  Things were crossing over fast in 1983 for those of us with parochial musical tastes and where the only good record shop occupied the tiniest of former corner stores.  Within a few months of Billie Jean’s release, my friend found his erstwhile NBOs, New Order, going all techno-dance on him, creating a yet more legendary 12-inch.

It seems impossible to know the truth about Michael Jackson.  Maybe, with Billie Jean, he flew too close to the sun.  I understand New Order, meanwhile, retired and went yachting.

And here, as promised, we cross over from maudlin to up-tempo.

Related posts:

1. everything is jumpin’
2. how to sing bach
3. bovine scatology

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It’s perhaps time to end this maudlin phase on the blog, but before we go up-tempo, here’s an excuse to post another picture of ’80s Soviet rock icon Viktor Tsoi.  Nearly forgotten him had you? Newbies can start an excursion here to learn more about my chance encounter with Tsoi nearly a quarter century ago.

I may be wrong but I believe this photo was taken on Kodachrome transparency film.  I know I used a bit of Ektachrome in those days too, but I suspect this was 200 ASA, out of the red packet. Tuesday saw the demise of this much loved film brand.

On a happier note, I was recently reunited with my long lost Nikon FM, with which the above photo was taken.

Related posts:

1. the two tails of fame
2. crowdsourcing my telecaster
3. as close as it gets (Tsoi version)

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

There is now a cloud appreciation society.  You may have heard about it on the radio a few weeks ago.  They have named a new cloud — undulus asperatus — from the Latin, which roughly translates as “agitated waves“.  And the roughness is what matters.  They are highly disturbed, heralding a storm, and yet tend to disperse without one.  The pictures above are nothing of the sort: just cumulus or perhaps nearer cumulonimbus.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, and it is true what they say: that some clouds do have a silver lining, though I’m hesitant to agree yet that every one does. More research is needed.

It was sports day when these photos were taken earlier this week, and for the first time in a while it was not rained off, not even just the once.  So these clouds were silver-lined if you were the harassed head teacher.  But the sun did not shine for the Smaller Chip off the Hack, who came away with no honours.  Last year, if memory serves correctly, he won the egg and spoon race.  This year, although the video evidence is incomplete, it does look like he finished the course without dropping the egg once, compared with his fellow competitors who all seemed to have at least one upset.  Had the eggs been real, this would have been a feat in itself, but that day it was not the one being measured. Shall I add that the spoons were not institutional dessert spoons of yore, but wooden spoons with barely any dish?  Ah well.  He is his father’s son.

Related posts:

1. friday fractal iv
2. friday fractal vi
3. friday fractal II

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Unfortunately, I’ve had that question put to me. Several years ago, by dint of having the two words “managing” and “editor” next to one another on my CV, Trinity Mirror called me in to see them in the possibly mistaken belief that I could help dig them out of a very big hole indeed.  I was pretty sure I could help in some way, but I think we had a different view of what type of hole they were dealing with. Given Piers Morgan’s inexorable rise on two continents as the mean-spirited arbiter of folksy talent, might I humbly propose that this is the mother of all interview posers?  Top it if you can.

To be sure, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, as usual. There was a small coda to this interview conversation which involved another legendary Fleet Street figure: an experience that finally persuaded me it was time to steer a reciprocal course to the one Fleet Street was headed down and, boat-hook in hand, retrieve my bedraggled dignity.  As tabloid journalists allegedly say in potentially compromising situations: “I made my excuses and left.”

Rightly or wrongly, and with rare exceptions, my approach to news management had been unusually low-key; a function of personality, combined with the demands of real-time, I think.  I was always more interested in process than result.  That’s what I offered in that interview, and I suspect that it was mistaken for weakness and (worse still) inexperience, whereas for them it should have represented a diverse perspective. My interviewer, I could tell, was not convinced. Mercifully, one of us escaped, and I think it was probably me. Though maybe it was Piers.

So in a sotto voce way, this is the Knackered Hack finally taking a hyper-linked opportunity to stand up to Piers Morgan: something that in real life only a handful of people seem ever to have done, and the Fates denied me the opportunity to chance my arm at.

Morgan was honoured this week with a slot on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs: the longest-running music programme in the history of radio. It is the mama of all mixtapes: you get to choose the records that define your experience and broadcast them to the nation. Although Bob Geldof famously said that it is only a radio show, I reckon an invitation to appear is greeted by most of its guests in the same way as being tapped by Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s birthday honours.

Piers Morgan’s life is a catalogue of rather ghastly errors, none of which seems to have been a setback to his advances to fame and fortune: a modern day Bel Ami, perhaps?  So it seems like a category error for our public service broadcaster to accord him such high-quality attention. But hey, there goes the neighbourhood. For those who want to see if theirs is a match for his musical taste, this link should do it. Me, I’m averting my eyes.

In at least one of those counter-factual universes of infinite mathematical possibility, the Knackered Hack has himself been granted the honour of discussing his own desert island discs before an eager nation.  In this same universe, Piers Morgan blogs and no-one reads.

Here’s a small taste of what my list contains. Until a few weeks ago, Haydn would not have been on my modest mixtape.  For undisclosable reasons, he has now hopped in.  The words, courtesy of the ChoralWiki, are below.  And for those who read me for stuff on decision-making, Haydn seems to have been on to heuristics and biases long before any of us.  You may have to think about this one a little bit.

Insanae et vanae curae invadunt mentes nostras,
saepe furore replent corda, privata spe,
Quid prodest O mortalis conari pro mundanis,
si coelos negligas,
Sunt fausta tibi cuncta, si Deus est pro te.

Vain and raging cares invade our minds,
Madness often fills the heart, robbed of hope,
O mortal man, what does it profit to endeavour at worldly things,
if you should neglect the heavens?
If God is for you, all things are favorable for you.

Related posts:

1. bovine scatology
2. public disservice broadcasting
3. safe to like america again

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’m old enough to remember it as a somewhat run-down labyrinth haunted by the last remaining hacks, before Fleet St was repopulated by accountants and bankers.  The Cheese was refurbished.  After that it was a principal hang-out for Goldman Sachs, whose European headquarters stands more or less next door.  Don’t get me wrong: I still liked it.

But my fondest memory of the Cheese is the first time I drank a porter beer: Samuel Smiths’ Taddy Porter, if I recall correctly, though it could easily have been their Imperial Stout. Just a half, mind you, with the Knackered Hackette, near the roaring fire in the quiet snug bar on the right, within sight of Dr Johnson’s favoured seat. We were on our way to see Jane Campion’s film The Piano.  It must have been 1993 when I was Knight-Ridder’s much-too-young London bureau chief. It was a dark winter’s evening, and somehow the beer, the pub, the piano, the days of print: everything was a kind of black and white.

Michael Nyman may not please everyone, but I liked the music to that film.  I have been flipping past the CD for the best part of 20 years until 12 months ago, when I started to listen to it again, and with enthusiasm.

Yesterday, courtesy of the independent journalism site Frontline via Twitter, I came across the following short film at the composer’s homepage.  Nyman is offering film-makers free music to accompany their creative efforts as part of a competition being run by Shooting People.  The prize is £750 of video training with Frontline.

The title of the film — We Are What We Lost – struck me hard; how better to define the process of delivery that is grief? When young, if we are lucky, we tend to think we are defined by our accomplishments or their symbols; when older, if we are lucky, we will eventually be disabused of such notions.

It’s an affecting film, so perhaps something really for home viewing, not the office.

The filmmaker, Srdjan Mitrovic, describes it thus:-

This short film is moving reconstruction of a specific personal experience within a given tradition to remind us of the constant interconnection between life, food and death.

Cheese sign photo credit teamaskins

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I was with a very senior colleague who was plying me with the black stuff; I think he’d been asked to keep an eye on me and my rank-breaking entrepreneurship.  I said to him that I thought part of the problem for even highly specialized subscription content businesses, like the one we were proposing to launch out of the bankruptcy, was that so much generic news was then free on the internet. This factor perhaps had already tipped investor sentiment away from the concept of proprietary news content. I suggested that one of the principal reasons for this may have been the example set by our competitor, the news agency Reuters, in selling its news feed to search engine/portal Yahoo!, without obvious limitations on what could be published.

“Oh, I did that deal!” said the executive.  Imagine the Knackered Hack coughing into his artisan-poured pint, spraying his “mentor” with white foam.  [For sure, that's not what happened exactly, but I'm not a factual journalist any more; I don't carry an NUJ card these days, and even my poetic licence is only provisional.]

Some of us had known for a long while that the value proposition of unbundled real-time news was not what it once was.  It wasn’t a good time to be giving so much of it away. Reuters seem to have wised up a couple of years ago, because they no longer operate that Yahoo! deal.

But I still wonder, in my counter-factual way, if such a vast organization like Reuters had not taken that fork in the road so prominently, would other news media have felt so compelled to provide so much stuff for free?  And thence GoogleNews. Would a viable subscription model not have been built by now to get the more innovative news organizations [oxymoron warning] cleanly out of the ink-on-dead-trees business? Perhaps not. Just askin’.

There may be more lessons from the real-time news industry of the ’80s and ’90s for today’s media to illustrate the tragedy/farce heuristic. Anyone interested in another chapter on that soon?

Photo credit tricky

Related posts:

1. the 11th chapter of napoleonic hubris
2. it was 20 years ago today…
3. the maverick’s story

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

At the start of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a book which I probably have read in its entirety (but don’t quote me), the bearded one says this:-

Hegel remarks somewhere^[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Chevy Tahoe, first a gas-guzzler, then a hybrid?

I risk getting into even deeper water with the mathematicians for suggesting there is something of the self-similar in Marx’s statement, and then with historians for invoking the idea that history repeats itself.  Perhaps I’d be safe with Yogi Berra: “It’s like déjà vu all over again”.

Yesterday General Motors announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  This is on a grand, publicly-listed, credit-fuelled scale (GMs’ annual revenue was $149 billion last year, and it’s lost more than $80 billion in the past four years, its market capitalization collapsing from a surprising $26 billion in October 2007, when the credit crisis was well underway, to next to nothing.)  The German and US governments have intervened to save jobs.

My own experience of Chapter 11 in 2001 was a less remarked upon affair (less than $1billion in revenue).  But at their respective times, within their respective universes, the two Chapter 11 incidents share significance: the words “too big to fail” were uttered in both instances.

There is no shortage of animal spirits evident in either, some interesting uses of expenses, and for those observing closely (perhaps that’s just me in my Chief Brody hat ;-)) the one may have heralded the other. Did the one in fact scale into the other?  GM is now perhaps the most iconic victim of the credit crunch, which through my long-path-dependent-tinted spectacles was hinted at way back when, in the perennial struggle between debt and equity.

The Chapter 11 that dissolved the news organization I worked for merited very little press comment; ironic  given that 600 global journalism jobs disappeared more or less overnight. Almost without exception those jobs were engaged in purely factual reporting: the scrutinizing of financial markets, banking and economic and monetary policy.  Instructive perhaps, given the current collapse of news businesses the world over, that they were entirely online, publishing by corporate subscription, and over internet protocol for several years already.  They could not be saved because the consensus then was that this market was already oversupplied.  News was a commodity, and only so much was necessary to lubricate the inner workings of global financial markets.

I’ve long since given up the conceit that the factual information output of my professional career met some fundamental human need (except the feeding of my family).  This was a way that I used to comfort myself: as a journalistic form, economic and financial newswire reporting could legitimately claim a fourth-estate function of representing important facts about the world, even if it was bounded in its day-to-day ability to call policy-makers and financiers fully to account.  It was not the sharpest instrument, but it was probably a lot sharper than print journalism which in effect fed off some of its by-products.

I’ve already described how, in my own attempts to refinance this organization — as I moulted my middle-management plumage and temporarily tried on the peacock feathers of the imagined future CEO — I submitted with my colleagues a restructuring that would focus news reporting resources on the growing and mostly under-reported market in credit derivatives.  That market was the one that made sense to my diverse rescue task force: whether their personal focus was Whitehall, currencies, commodities or companies, Essex-boy, anarchist or Etonian.  In retrospect, it is clear that transparency and scrutiny of those complex markets would have been useful in the post-9/11 world.  But in the summer of 2001, investors came there none.  The lesson, as ever, seems to be: if you’re going to fail, fail big. Don’t pin your hopes for rescue on a knackered hack, but a newly minted Barack.

This takes us back to Robert Shiller and George Akerlof’s qualification of capitalism: “It does not automatically produce what people really need; it produces what they think they need, and are willing to pay for.”  Since 2001, it is clear that a great many people, and at the same time too few, thought they needed GM’s Chevy Tahoe SUV.  President Obama agrees that they need more.  Me? I’m not so sure.

Photo credit Chevy Tahoe: anthonares

Related posts:

1. pure genius?
2. no dice
3. it was 20 years ago today…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

When you are thinking about something that you don’t understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called ‘confusion’. It’s a very difficult and unhappy business.  So, most of the time you are rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion.  You can’t penetrate this thing.  Now, is the confusion… is it because we are all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this? Trying to figure out to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can’t quite make it? …the idea ? And I get that feeling all the time: that I am an ape trying to put two sticks together.  So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, everything — the sticks — go together on me and I reach the banana.”

Last Journey of a Genius

When it came to deciding on a business card for the blog, there must have been some spooky action operating at a distance, for this is what we came up with.

Long-time readers will remember my own grappling with bananas only to find that, as usual, I was thwarted. Parce que…

banana photo credit -eko-

Related posts:

1. something to read when the sport is on
2. reasons to cheer the underdog
3. nothing compares

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism(US edition),

I’ve more or less finished Animal Spirits, and the purpose of my Monday trip to The Policy Exchange was to hear Shiller discuss the book and his new pamphlet for the hosts: a proposal that the UK adopt an inflation-indexed unit of account, like Chile’s Unidad de Fomento, as a means to cure the population of money illusion.  I felt blessed to be invited.

Animal Spirits is surely essential reading for any student of our broken times. And The Case for a Basket, which you can download for free, has a good chance of becoming government policy. When I last saw Shiller in London in the autumn, he’d been in to see Gordon Brown, Alastair Darling and Lord Mandelson, if I recall correctly.  Meanwhile, as the leading centre-right think-tank, I understand that The Policy Exchange will be  leading source of ideas for any future Tory administration, assuming they can keep their moats clean, as it were.

But I could not help wondering if Shiller’s audience was taking all this behavioural economics stuff in, or whether he was just another speaker on the Westminster agenda to be consumed: knowledge of his ideas being a necessary source of signalling to others in polite conversation.  Shiller’s argument that our animal spirits have been dangerously discounted by economic thinking surely makes him a heretic in this milieu; the reformation he foretells has barely started.  There are a lot of PPE graduates out there, and a greater concentration within 100 yards of Parliament.  Would they not need to go back to school, or be reprogrammed?

But I digress.

To imagine how the “basket” would work, you have to understand it is a unit of account, a measurement of  value that would not alter with inflation. Or deflation, for that matter.  If you had your house to sell, and wanted to make sure you got what you paid for it a year later, you would offer it at the same basket level.  You would avoid having to perform a complex accounting calculation that, on a day-to-day basis, is beyond most of us, including our elected representatives.  We prefer to think in nominal prices, rather than real terms.  So we get easily persuaded houses are a sure winner, when we should all know there ain’t no thing as sure winners. Shiller shows US house prices actually closely track inflation over the longest time.

A basket system would be especially useful for fixing ongoing contracts, like legal fees or alimony payments; the “basket” ensures that a figure agreed today will buy the same amount of goods and services in the future for the recipient.

Shiller maintains that the Chilean system — introduced in Chile in 1967, but only really taking off in the 1980s — has worked successfully, despite local complaints about its long-term viability, and could prove just as useful in low-inflation economies like the UK and US.

What I find attractive about it is that it is a simple solution to a complex set of pernicious social behaviours.  According to Shiller, all the government needs to do is supply its institutional credibility to a calculation and then create a website.  Electronic payments systems would enable any number of assets and commodities to be listed in baskets and payment settled via a real-time currency calculation.  In effect, it stops you being defrauded by history.

The idea of Animal Spirits, meanwhile, is not new.  Shiller points out that the phrase was used by John Maynard Keynes.  But in their book, Shiller and Akerlof seek to increase the emphasis on non-rational factors that modern economics has tended to ignore; money Illusion plays a key role.  But they also emphasise issues like trust, bad faith, and corruption.  And there is a wonderful qualification of the power of capitalism, with perhaps more than a gentle poke at our more optimistic libertarian friends:

…the bounty of capitalism has at least one downside.  It does not automatically produce what people really need; it produces what they think they need, and are willing to pay for.  If they are willing to pay for real medicine, it will produce real medicine. But if they are willing to pay for snake oil, it will produce snake oil.

Shiller is a curious student indeed.  He reads old newspapers in his quest to understand mood and capture the narratives that transmit bad economic ideas.  In Monday’s talk he regaled us with a newspaper column from the 1880s deploring the a collapsed property boom in Los Angeles.  The columnist boldly asserted never again would people be so stupid. To be fair, for nearly a century that was correct.

So how do these animal spirits get going?  This is what he and Akerlof say:-

Why do new kinds of corrupt or bad-faith behavior arise from time to time? Part of the answer is that there are variations through time in the perceived penalties for such behavior.  Memories of major government crackdowns against corruption fade over time.  In a time of widespread corrupt activity, many people may get the impression that it is easy to get away with it.  Everyone else is doing it, it seems to them, and no one seems to be getting punished.  To some extent, lowering one’s adherence to principles at such times is a perfectly rational thing to do.  Lower principles at certain times may also reflect a social osmosis, as information about the probability of punishment for certain kinds of crimes spreads through a net of personal acquaintances, as Raaj Sah has documented.  Such a process may be part of the confidence multiplier, as corruption feeds back into more corruption.

The variation through time in the extent of corruption of bad faith is also to some extent a reflection of the fresh opportunities that arise as new financial inventions of one sort or another appear, or as financial regulations allow innovations to be implemented.  These innovations may not be understood initially by the public.  This variation occurs because of cultural changes unrelated to fear of punishment or to changes in technology.  These changes are clearly within the realm of pure animal spirits.  Culture changes over time to facilitate or hinder aggressively competitive or predatory activities.  Because these cultural changes are difficult to quantify, and fall outside the field of economics, they are rarely connected by economists to economic fluctuations.  They should be.”

Shiller and Akerlof continue with examples of how widespread flouting of 1920s US prohibition led to a more generalized disrespect for the rule of law.  Then in the depression years things shifted again.  By 1941,  bridge was the most popular card game in America; encouraging, as it does, cooperation, while also not being played for money.  By contrast, the early years of this century have been characterised by the rise of Texas hold’em, bluffing, and the poker face, both literally and metaphorically.

You don’t have to look far for these animal spirits. If Shiller is now more likely to be the first voice the Tories turn to on matters to do with housing markets, this will be an improvement on a previous foray which enlisted the Honorable Kirstie Allsopp, presenter of property porn TV programme Location, Location, Location.   I’ve often wondered why the kindling of animal spirits by one of our public service broadcasters had not long ago been scrutinized by a House of Commons select committee or two.  But recent evidence shows the same spirits had taken hold there too.

Now if it were real animal spirits we needed to calm, Louis Armstrong would be your man.  In the 1938 film Going Places, Armstrong plays Gabe, whose music is the only thing that will settle the unrideable horse Jeepers Creepers.  Yes, you know where this is heading.  Tell me I’m wrong, but it sounds like he too is asking “where did you get those PPEers?” My, how they hypnotize…!

And did you Twitterers note how Duke upbraids Maxie thus?

“Why don’t you stop thinkin’ up snappy sayings and start concentrating on business…”

Related posts:

1. another fine mess
2. the 11th chapter of napoleonic hubris
3. a generational write-off

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The standard biographical narrative of Shaw was that his performing career — which experienced some of the highest peaks in 20th century commercial musical achievement — was punctuated by periods of creative and physical exhaustion, including revulsion toward his popular success.  So, not many similarities to the Knackered Hack’s experience, except the downside elements, I admit.

In one of his later periods of retreat, it seems that Shaw was preoccupied with studying high-level mathematics.  I wonder if his creativity could perhaps be defined by the concept of Lévy flights?  Now, if you think I’m talking Jackson Pollocks here, you might indeed be right. For the distribution of paint by the very same may have been following some form of fractal pattern:-

There are two revolutionary aspects to Pollock’s application of paint and both have potential to introduce chaos. The first is his motion around the canvas. In contrast to traditional brush-canvas contact techniques, where the artist’s motions are limited to hand and arm movements, Pollock used his whole body to introduce a wide range of length scales into his painting motion. In doing so, Pollock’s dashes around the canvas possibly followed Levy flights: a special distribution of movements, first investigated by Paul Levy in 1936, which has recently been used to describe the statistics of chaotic systems.

I understand there is a risk of seeing heavy-tailed distributions everywhere, particularly to my untrained eye.  But with the creative arts — the clustering of success — it does seem to follow.

I wonder too if it explains, at a very banal level, the frequency of my blog posting, about which I know a few of you are concerned.  To illustrate the two extremes of recent Knackered Hack experience, some Artie Shaw to entertain you.  In the meantime, I will be trying to produce a cluster of posts.  Shaw fans can correct me, but the first piece below reflected the essence of the man, while the second was what people liked him for.  The titles will amuse Mandelbrotian students of markets.  And Shaw’s exuberant swing music flourished in the depression.

At the end of this one, Artie Shaw and sidekicks explore bounded rationality and sum up the perennial challenge for all businesses.

Related posts:

1. Artie Shaw, the need to retreat from success, and keeping the customer satisfied
2. something to read when the sport is on
3. horns of a dilemma

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.