Management as religion

As you may perhaps have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with the title of the blog – in the belated realisation that "Balkan and Carpathian musings" may not be a phrase that people often punch into their search engine! "Better government" has the sort of technocratic note which is perhaps needed and does reflect some of the content. But what about the phrase I used yesterday - "in the public interest"? Another possible title could be "A Common Reader – since I do try to give references and excerpts from my extensive reading. On the other hand, I have always liked the metaphor of striving and exploring – indeed the designation on my new business card is "explorer and aesthete"(I actually wanted to put "epicurean" but desisted since it has contradictory meanings). My first little book (way back in the mid 1970s) was called "The Search for Democracy". Two titles of recent papers of mine reflect some of what I write about – "Just Words" and "Thoughts for Posterity" – but again have no resonance for those hitting the search engines. I need someone to explain to me the relative importance of (a) the name of the blog; (b) the title of the particular post; and (c) labels and keywords.
What frustrates me is that I have no real idea who the 40-50 people are who hit my various posts each day – nor whether they actually read the posts. Apart from the (rising) numbers each day, all I know is the location of the readers (in the past week the top 6 countries are, in descending order, Germany, Russia and central Asia, USA, South Korea, Bulgaria, Romania and UK). I don’t know how many of them actually return (eg there was a spike of 80 German page viewings last night).

Curious that I should buy at the weekend and start to read a book which announces (for the 4th or so time in my lifetime) the end of the power structures as we know them and the power which ordinary people now have – when the global demonstrations against finance capitalism demonstrate the scale of political impotence people all over the world feel. The book is one I had been recommended - What would Google Do? and I have discovered that it can be read for free in its entirety here.
It was first published in 2009 and, as far as I can understand, tries to demonstrate that the google way of doing business is the way of the future – for the public as well as the private sector – giving us all new power (though networks etc). You will get a good sense of it from this review.
From what I have read so far, I do not expect to have my sense of corporate power shattered – although I do hope to learn a bit more about how Google and internet companies operate.

But the book seems to me another example of how we seem to have lost our social memory.
I remember reading, in the early 1970s, books by prominent management theorists (such as Warren Bennis) and others (such as Toffler – Future Shock) which promised the end of bureaucracy.

The early 1990s saw breathless books (by people such as Tom Peters) which promised the same. Forty years on, what do we have – stronger bureaucracy (now called contracting, procurement and regulatory bodies) than ever - and more autocratic and pyschotic leadership and management!
And I find it significant that – as far as Google Scholar goes – Warren Bennis hardly existed.

For me, it is very strange how difficult it is to get hold of serious books which critique the whole management religion. I know that a lot of sociologists have in fact conducted such critiques but two factors make it difficult for the interested citizen (another possible title for my blog??) to access this stream of work. First the language in which (and the narrow audience for which) they write - in expensive, specialist academic journals.
And, secondly, the control exerted by (large) publishing companies who have a very special interest in NOT demystifying management since they make so much money from management books – whether textbooks or airport lounge pickups.
 All credit therefore to Sage Publications for giving Chris Grey the opportunity to publish A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations (2009 2nd edition) which, for me, contains more incendiary material than Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Al-Quada rolled together. It is written by an academic who can actually write clearly - and who sees it as his job to interpret for us the significant parts of academic work.

Public Interest - how innocent we were

One of the really difficult things for people of my generation is to come to terms with is how venal our legislative and legal systems have become (the bankers are simply part of a complex equation). The post-war generation to which I belong was brought up with the tenets of liberal democracy - some of which you will find set out at page 6 of this paper of mine. We believed that government was responsive to public concerns; that our civic input (in whatever form - letters; political membership; political involvement and argument - not least as local councillors) would ensure the system operated in the public interest. The evidence we have seen in the last decade has, however, has forced us to the reluctant conclusion that laws are created generally to protect the rich and powerful; and that the judiciary (despite or perhaps because of its claims of impartiality) is in fact not blindfold but highly susceptible to the interests of the rich and powerful. I leave open the question of whether this is a new phenomenon - or simply one which less deferential a more educated and connected society has become aware of.
The examples I quote are first from a bastion of social democratic values (Canada) and then the better-known practitioner of venality and hypocrisy which happens to be its southern neighbour.The first article identifies the huge inequities in how banks are treated – compared with the rest of us.

They are often protected (from foreign competition); subsidized (for example, in the way capital gains tax worked), and bailed out when needed. But what do banks actually do, in return for all that money? What is their actual economic function?
Let’s cut through the mystification of high finance, and ask that simple question: What do banks do? What do bankers actually produce?
The practical answer, in concrete terms, is simple: nothing. They produce nothing.
In that, the banks are different from the real economy, where hard-working people like you and I produce actual, concrete goods and services that are useful.
Banks, and the financial sector more generally, don’t produce goods and services that are useful in their own right. They produce paper. And then they buy and sell paper, for a profit.
Here’s a little economic lesson. You can’t live off paper. You need food, clothing, and shelter to survive – not paper. And since we are human beings, not animals, we need more: we need education, and culture, and recreation, and entertainment, and security, and meaning. Those are the fundamentals of economic life. Not paper.
What is paper actually good for? You can wallpaper your house with it. You can line your birdcage with it. In a pinch, you can wipe your butt with it.
But other than that, paper is just paper. It is not concretely useful in its own right.
How do banks create that paper? Let me put it bluntly again: They create it out of thin air.
It is not an economic exaggeration to state that the private banking system has the power to create money out of thin air.
Not cash. Not currency. Only the government can produce that.
But most money in our economy – over 95% of money in our economy – is not currency. Most money consists of entries in electronic accounts. Savings accounts. Chequing accounts. Lines of credit. Credit card balances. Investment accounts.
In that electronic system, new money is created, not by printing currency, but through creating credit. Every time a bank issues someone a new loan, they are creating new money.
It’s like a big magic machine, creating money out of thin air. And it’s called the private credit system.
One of my favourite economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it this way: “The process by which private banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
How do they do it? They start out with some capital. Let’s say a billion dollars. Then they lend it out. Then they lend it out again. And again. And again and again, 10 or 20 or 50 times over.
Each new loan, is new money. The economy needs that money, let’s be clear. Without new money, we wouldn’t be able to pay for the stuff we make. So we’d stop making it, and we’d be in a depression.
So the creation of new money (or credit) is as essential function for the whole economy. It’s like a utility. But we’ve outsourced that crucial task to private banks. We’ve given them a legal license to print money – and the freedom and power to do it on their own terms.
Their goal is not providing the economy with a sensible, sustainable supply of the credit we need. Their goal is using their unique power to create money out of thin air, to maximize the profits of the banks, and the wealth of the shareholders.

The second article I owe to a site - Byliner - which offers simply good writing. Out of curiousity I hit this piece which tracks how the American judicial system treated someone outraged with the secretive and iniquitous way heritage land was being sold to commercial gangsters.

WHEN DECHRISTOPHER’S CASE finally went to court last March, 2,000 protesters showed up. So did the Salt Lake police department, federal marshals, and Homeland Security agents. The trial lasted three days, with Judge Benson making a few things clear up front. First, DeChristopher’s attorneys wouldn’t be allowed to use a necessity defense—the argument that he had to disrupt the auction because of his beliefs about climate change (he had successfully bid for about 12 lots of land with no intention of paying). Second, the defense couldn’t bring up the fact that DeChristopher had actually raised money to buy the land; the court’s view was that, by then, the fraud had been committed. Finally, the defense could not inform the jury that past bidders had not been able to pay for their parcels either. Shea and DeChristopher’s other attorney, Ronald Yengich, were left to argue that their client had acted on impulse and hadn’t intended to disrupt the auction. The prosecution didn’t have much trouble refuting this, given DeChristopher’s public statements, and it came as little surprise when, on March 4, DeChristopher was convicted

You can imagine the behind-the-scene discussions which went on to fix that!

Culture corner
And, after these photos of reality, let's have a fix of something more worthwhile in these latest paintings from Its about Time

Comic insights

"We are where we are" was a great phrase I heard for the first time a some 7 years ago – from a very understanding European Commission desk officer. I had expected some swearwords about the cock-up we were facing – instead of which I got this very wise response. You might think that the German “man ist was man isst” (to which I have referred before) is a variant – but, if you do, go back to square one! The German phrase suggests that our behaviour is determined by our diet. I disagree – they are determined to a huge extent by the words we use. "Words", as a left-wing political elder once severely but memorably told the cabinet of which I was a young member, "are important". I didn’t need the reminder – since George Orwell was then (and remains) one of my favourite writers.
All of this is by way of preface to a couple of very funny glossaries I came across yesterday. The first about civil service jargon on a site which contains some great articles tracing the development of the British civil service through its different stages and putting it all into historical context.
The second glossary is a good contribution to the sort of ridicule which we urgently need to start slinging at economists (and bankers). It’s from the website of one of the contrarian economists whose critique of economics has been at last proven so correct - Steve Keen. Curiously, his blog was down all Monday!!
This article from the very readable US Chronicle of Higher Education puts his work in a larger context.

At the start of the year I tried to pull together my various thoughts (and references) about the words which modern technocrats have used in the past 4-5 decades to protect their power and disarm any possible threat from the unwashed masses. It's in what I consider one of the best papers I have ever written - Just Words - a sceptic's glossary?
I realise as I write this that I have always targeted the technocrats (the courtiers) rather than the all-powerful commercial and other elites. Is this simple because I knew them better? Or is it because they supplied the ammunition to allow the real perverts to exploit us all?

As a party piece, this is a good expose of the phrases we Brits use; how our European partners generally understand them; and what the Brits really mean by them. For example - when we say "very interesting", foreigners think we are impressed. What we are actually thinking is that it's a lot of nonsense! Similarly, when we say "with the greatest respect", we are actually thinking "the man's an idiot" whereas the non-English speaker assumes that he is being listened to."Incidentally, by the way" actually means "this is the primary purpose of the discussion" - whereas the foreigner that the issue is of no significance. For those who deal with Brits, the table is useful prepartion and, who knows, sharing it with them might open up new friendships!
Poets are supposed to be the great explorers of verbal nuance – but I’m beginning to suspect it is actually comedians who deserve this accolade. I’ve referred recently to Tommy Cooper and Chic Murray. One of Germany's greatest - Loriot - died recently and occasioned this tribute. One of the most delightful films for me is - A Fish called Wanda – and I was pleased to find a couple of clips - first when Jamie Lee Curtis is overwhelmed by the Russian phrases of John Cleese (co-producer)
and then a clip which contrasts English styles of bedding with (those of!) the Italian.

To round off this treatment of words and phrases, who better to turn to than one of Britain's best writers - Chris Hitchens - who gives here a great treatment of the Ten Commandments

Fiddling in Cannes (and Sofia) while Europe is burning

OK - I agree that fiddling while Athens is burning is not a good way to go down in history (the musical references in my last post). But perhaps, as Europe burns, the only resort is to celebrate what it has at least given in culture. Indeed I realised only yesterday that perhaps why I have, over the past decade, discovered and celebrated (beautiful) paintings is that they represent individual striving for excellence when that is so difficuly to achieve in the field I chose for myself all of 50 years ago when I made the fatal decision, in the middle of my university studies, to forsake the study of French and German and to choose instead the upcoming fields of Economics and Politics. When the shit hits the fan, another coping mechanism is humour and I was happy to come across these wry puns from a great British comic which actually remind me a bit of the vastly underrated Chic Murray from my own hometown.

However two leftists are redeeming my chosen field – today’s post from Cannes (where G20 countries are meeting) by Paul Mason blows my mind away as the most incisive comment on that is currently happening. And another old leftist - Stuart Holland whom I met in the mountain eyre of Erice (Sicily) in the mid 1970s at an (anarchist) Free University seminar – has an excellent paper which coherently spells out the path which European leaders should be taking – if they had any leadership skills.

I haven’t had time to read this article from Nouriel Roubini – but is seems worthwhile amongst all the dross from the usual business and economic commentators who are now exposed ar the brown-nosed charlatans they were.
The painting is a recent purchase of mine here - by Vladimir Dmitrov - which seems appropriately apocalytpic.

Part VIII - All you need to know about capacity development and administrative reform in 5 easy stages

My initial feeling after yesterday’s attempt to summarise the previous week’s thoughts about training in this part of the world was one of quiet satisfaction. I felt I had made a coherent and reasonable summary – all the better for having started, I felt, with the short (and memorable?) statement about “wrong focus and theory"; "context"; and "leadership”. I had made the link not only with the capacity development literature but also with the (very different and more academic) literature which has been following administrative reform in ex-communist countries. I had given a practical example which had come to me as I was wrestling with the question of how one was supposed to make any progress in regimes I had designated, in my paper at this year’s NISPAcee Conference, “impervious regimes” (impervious, that is, to public opinion). And I ended with a word of advice to those who head the various Training Institutes for public servants in the Region – effectively “courage, mon vieux, think big and reach out” – but had also recognised how difficult such cooperation is in the Region. My next step, I felt, was to look at examples of how individuals have achieved in the face of such difficulties and write an inspiring piece around that – drawing on the burgeoning literature of social innovation.

But I hadn’t quite finished with capacity development – after all this was the basic framework which, I had argued, all interventions to improve public services in the Region should have. True, Bulgaria and Romania are exceptional in having Administrative capacity as one of the strands for their Structural Funds – but most new member states would readily agree they have a long way to go before their state bodies are operating as well as they might wish. What, I wondered, does the capacity development literature say about the process of building administrative capacity? Is it different from what the literature of public management (with which I am more familiar) has been saying?

It is at this point that alarm bells started to ring in my head. One of the important points in my NISPAcee paper was that we have a lot of different disciplines looking at the same issues from different perspectives (which is fine), with different names (eg state-building; fragile states; administrative reform; anti-corruption; capacity development; democracy assistance) and each apparently oblivious to and/or careless about the other disciplines(which is not fine). Was this perhaps simply an example of different people coming to the same conclusion using different words? Was it all verbal gymnastics? I began to think so when I stumbled across a free download Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and fuzzwords which was published in 2010 by Oxfam and which makes a nice complement to my Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary
But, as I puzzled over the two approaches, I began to see some interesting differences. Bear with me as I try to explore some of them.

Those who have been writing about capacity development for the past 2 decades (but particularly in the last 5 years since OECD got into the act) seem to be in the development field and working in NGOs, International bodies or development think tanks. They draw from (and try to contribute to) field experiences. I discovered a good history about capacity development only this morning – written as far back as 1997. Its concerns and focus seem to have been social - rather than institutional - development. Peter Morgan is the most coherent writer on the subject and has an excellent paper here on it. There is an excellent learning network for capacity development which published in January a very useful paper which spells out in details what the approach means in practice . I get the sense that it is change management for social development people. That is to say, they emphasise context and process - the HOW and say llittle about the WHAT.

Those who write about administrative reform focus, on the other hand and by definition, on state bodies rather than social groups (although the anti-corruption literature considers social groups critical); are usually from academia; draw on the classic literature of public administration, management and (to a lesser extent) public choice theory. They are (with the exception of the latter school) more voyeurs than actors. One of the top names is Chris Pollitt whose recent paper Thirty Years of Public Management reform – has there been a pattern? gives an excellent flavour of the topic.
An obvious question then is - If the key writers are voyeurs, who has been behind the explosion of adminisitrative reform of the past 30 years which Pollitt is writing about? The answer would seem to be practitioners, government units and consultancy companies – some of whom have subsequently written up good experiences as models of good practice. The key books are generally American eg the one which started it all off in 1992 - Reinventing Government (see also here for update on its influence in UK) - but also Mark Moore’s Public value. However the main proselytiser of change over the past 20 years has been the OECD Secretariat based in Paris – as Professor Leslie Pal has well described in this paper; a sequel he presented to this year’s NISPAcee Conference; and chapter three of this book. The significance of this is that there is, perhaps, underneath the technical words, an ideological agenda – shrinking the state. Certainly one writer suggests today there is.
At a practical level, the European Institute of Public Administration published an interesting overview of reform efforts recently - Taking the pulse of European Public Administration

So far, so good…..Give me time to look at these various references in more detail and come back to you on the question of the relationship between the two bodies of work. Clearly the latter body of work focuses more on the WHAT than the HOW - and is indeed as guilty as management generally of fads and fashions. At the moment the capacity development stream seems to be the more thoughtful…..

Culture cornerFor those who think I have been neglecting my cultural activities, let me assure that I have not been. On Tuesday I paid an interesting visit to the imposing edifice which houses the National Bank of Bulgaria – to see whether I could access their painting collection. I knew they had one because the Classica Gallery I had visited last week had a beautiful catalogue from the bank which had celebrated its 130 years with 130 superb reproductions from its collection of Bulgarian painters. You ascend a formidable flight of stairs, passing a guard and entering what I could only designate as an alternative cathedral – a design on a scale calculated to put you in awe of those who manage money! Ironically, there seemed to be an exhibition about the euro! I was met with some bemusement by the staff – but, after a wait, I was rewarded with a complementary copy of the catalogue but told that the paintings regretfully were not on public display.

The It’s About Time blog continues to delight - with its rediscoveries of (to us) unknown European (women) painters from the early part of the last century generally – for example a Finn/Belge Helene Schjerbeck and Lotte Laserstein.
And BBC’s Through the Night continues to excel – for example the Romania Radio Concert Orchestra playing Sarasate, Pablo de [1844-1908] Zigeunerweisen for violin and orchestra (Op.20) (you have to move the timing to 4 hours 20 minutes to get the piece – and only for another 5 days!)
For those intrigued by the title (changed from this morning's rather negative one), I am experimenting since I see that I have not so many hits today - and yet it is, for my money, one of the most useful posts for some time (with all these references). I still don't understand what we need to do to get more hits - people tell me I should twitter - but I don't have a good voice. So I'm now trying a more positive title - with some key words.
And the painting is heavily symbolic - Moutafov's "Rescue at Sea" from the National Bank's collection - and chosen with cunning reference to British political philospher Michael Oakeshott's famous metaphor of politics/government as a sea journey. The rescuers are, of course, the consultants. You certainly get your money's worth on this station!

Leadership central europe - part VII

Reflecting further on the 5 posts, my concerns about the effectiveness of training programmes in transition countries can perhaps best be summarised in 4 words – "wrong focus" and "wrong theory"! And the way ahead can be summarised in two words – "context" and "leadership".

Wrong Focus
• The EC has funded (in Technical Assistance) and continues to fund (under Structural Funds) too many training projects in transition countries with insufficient focus on building a training capacity. Indeed it undermines national training institutes by the resources its projects gives to private trainers and companies under its procurement rules.
• these programmes have, in addition, concentrated on the supply side (training individual trainers; drafting course material; and funding course) to the almost total exclusion of the demand side (helping organisational managers define their real needs and building stronger inderstanding of and pressure for quality training)
• they focus on lower rather than higher levels of organisations. (It’s the easy option – senior management will rarely admit its deficiencies and need to learn).
• And the programmes assume knowledge rather than skill needs. (It’s easier to provide – through traditional rote learning).

Wrong theory
Most of the training programmes I’ve seen implicitly assume that the performance of state bodies (insofar as it measured in transition countries) can be improved by better knowledge of junior staff. This may be true of the sort of training project I’m currently involved with – aimed at those municipal staff who handle bids for EC funds and manage such projects – but is not true of the general management course which National Training Institutes run. And the mission of such Institutes is surely to help improve the performance of state bodies.
Poor organisational performance is generally due to a mix of poor management systems, lack of strategic leadership and political interference. And Improving them is more a matter of skills and attitude than knowledge!

I am not alone in questioning the effectiveness of the programmes to train public officials.. I was very encouraged a few months back by the publication of a paper - Training and Beyond; seeking better practices for capacity development by Jenny Pearson - which, in a much more referenced (but sometimes turgid) way, expresses the same concerns and indicates the number of people who now seem to share them in what, in the last decade has become the up-and-coming field of capacity development.

Context, context, context
All interventions should therefore start from proper contextual analysis of existing administrative capacity – and constraints. The focus then should be on organisational change – not training - to ensure that proper consideration is given to the full range of possible interventions, of which training is only a small part (see pages 33-37 of the Pearson paper for a good overview). Of course this is not easy – but, if this is not the starting point, then people will fail to pose the correct questions; to learn the required skills; and therefore to waste a lot of money.
Official documents have begun to recognise this in recent years. The EC’s Backbone Strategy admits that its projects need to be better grounded in the context; in its "drivers of change" work, the UK's ODI has pioneered ways of identifying power constraints; and the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions is written around the sorts of questions which have given my work as a consultant its real edge-

1. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
2. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
3. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

The paper I wrote earlier in the year for the Varna Conference (Time for the long game - not the logframe) drew attention to the crumbling of key building blocks of administrative reform in many of the EC’s new member states in the last few years. Francis Cardona’s Can Civil Service Reforms Last? The European Union’s 5th Enlargement and Future Policy Orientation – published in early 2010 - is just the latest evidence. It shows how appointments are becoming politicised again. In 2007 Tony Verheijen had published a paper for the World Bank entitled Administrative capacity in the new member states – the limits of innovation which painted a fairly bleak picture. So in 2009, did Meyer-Sahling’s paper for SIGMA - Sustainability of civil service reforms in central and eastern Europe five years after accession. Sorin Ionitsa and Tom Gallagher have painted a vivid picture of the fate of administrative reform in one of these countries – Romania – and offered different levels of explanation for it.

If that is the context, how does one get around it? Clearly politicians in these countries need to grow up and stop behaving like petulant and thieving magpies. But how does that happen?
Manning and Ionitsa emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures (civil society) to try to get politicians to act more seriously.
Verheijen and Cardona talk more idealistically of the need to establish structures which bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus. It happened, certainly, in the Baltic states – but there are always dangers in holding up one country as an example. When things go wrong, as they generally do, the corrupt and incompetent use this to damn reform. And one of the difficulties so many transition countries have is the inability of its elites to work cooperatively.

I have to wonder whether there is not a place now for the sort of initiative which impressed me when I visited Pittsburgh more than 20 years ago. As an old industrial city, it was experiencing social and economic dislocation – and someone started a quiet movement which brought the potential leaders of tomorrow in its various sectors (commerce, political, administrative, trade union, religious etc) into a regular academic setting to confront the city’s problems. Leadership Pittsburgh has been replicated across other cities and has had 2 profound effects – it forged crucial personal links of respect and understanding; and it made most of those who attended think about their wider responsibilities and the needs of the city.

Going back to the Director of the Training Institute - my advice to him would therefore be - Think Big! Reach out! Have passion!

Benefits of nomadism

Glorious autumn weather here in Sofia – although the ground floor garden flat is getting ever more icy cold every night and morning. Time to move somewhere warmer!
I started the morning with a long article which touches on one of the most fundamental issues for us all (apart from food and accommodation) – companionship. It’s about the trend (which I’ve noticed here in Europe) for women to choose to remain single. Men are simply not worth the bother! The article in The Atlantic journal starts perhaps in a rather self-centred way but soon proved to a worthy read about contemporary values – backed up with perspectives from forays to other lands, cultures and times. I recommend it.

A trip to the nearest Knigomania bookshop a few minutes round the corner in Vassil Levski St gave a good haul –
• Modernism – the lure of heresy by Peter Gay (2007) – a wonderful-looking 600 page treatment of all art forms of this genre by an historian who escaped with his family from Berlin in 1933 when he was a young boy; one review is here and a more critical and historical one here
• the classic Zen and Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance – an inquiry into values (1977) – which I have from internet but whose electronic format does not invite me in. I need to touch!
• a novel by the highly rated John Cheever from 1957 - The Wapshot Chronicle
• Langenscheidt’s Grosswoerterbuch Deutsch als Fremdensprache – to help me with my reading of the Spiegel magazine which I have taken to buying here. Langenscheidt I remember with some veneration from my father’s study (when he had the voluminous but silky weekly edition of Die Zeit paper dispatched from Germany in the late 1950s and 1960s during his post-war pastoral "reconciliation" twinning with a church in Heligenkirchen near Detmold). With its 1312 German pages at 16 euros, it offered 10 times the value of almost similarly-priced and much smaller dictionaries (half of whose contents are taken with English-German for which I have no use)

This is the great thing about the bookshops here. You are not press-ganged by marketing into buying latest releases. You never know what gem from the past you will find – even if the editions are fairly recent.
Talking of Der Spiegel, it had an incredible story yesterday about the Germans finding a 55 billion mistake in their national accounts because one bank added up wrongly – giving the system now a windfall to that extent!!
When I started this nomadic life of mine all of 21 years ago, I noticed one immediate advantage. I was no longer exposed to British newspapers and the relentless noise of television reporting. This not only released time for other pursuits; it also created greater serenity. I could hear myself thinking – and was more able to choose my own agenda. Television has not been allowed into my Carpathian house – and I have no temptation to open the television set here since it offers only Bulgarian programmes. Of course, I am hit with news headlines when I go onto the yahoo site for my mail – and I do then always check the Guardian website after that – but rarely find myself spending longer than 10 minutes on its articles. The BBC has become my great consolation – particularly the Through the Night programme – which are constantly introducing me to new pleasures eg in the past week Telemann’s Suite for strings and continuo (TWV.55:Es3) in E flat major; Taneyev, Sergey Ivanovich (1856-1915) Symphony No.4 in C minor (Op.12); and Respighi, Ottorino (1879-1936) Rossiniana. I even find myself listening to opera – eg the haunting tones at the moment of the final section of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony which can be heard for the next 5 days.
The BBC’s economic bloggers are always worthwhile – particularly Paul Mason and Stephanie Flanders and I was impressed with the radio series she has started recently which figures key figures (such as George Soros).

I mentioned JK Galbraith recently. His son, James Galbraith, is also a renowned economist who has been highly critical of mainstream economics and has a useful piece on those economists who were warning years ago of the bursting of the bubble and how they were marginalised within the profession. For me this is not a left-right issue – it is about hubris and the need constantly to challenge (in the phrase coined by Galbraith Senior) the “conventional wisdom” .
Finally a good article about the "We are the 99%" protestors

Update - the British School of Government axed! (part VI)

The UK’s National School of Government – which I indicated (in my recent table about such national Institutes) had been reprieved from closure last year – will now be closed next March. According to a Ministerial statement in Parliament in June, it delivered 809 events to a domestic audience for the 12 month period from 1 June 2010 to 31 May 2011. These events were attended by 33,254 UK government officials. But last week its closure was announced (again) with a bland statement that "The new "Civil Service Learning" will focus on work-based approaches, including e-learning, and will directly involve managers in the training process" says the official statement. Previously called the Civil Service College, the facility runs training, development and consultancy courses for Whitehall mandarins. It employs 232 staff and is based at Sunningdale Park in Berkshire, with an annual budget of £31 million.
Quoted on the school's website earlier in the year, the Head of the Civil Service said: "It is clear that the public sector will be confronted with some serious challenges in the future. The National School of Government is a vital tool to help us meet them. The learning and development it provides must be part of our solution." But the Minister (Mr Maude) has claimed a shake-up of training will "improve the quality and impact of training". In his recent Parliamentary statement, he added: "It will also create greater flexibility by sourcing much of the training from external providers, including small and medium-sized enterprises."

I would have to say that the School was always vulnerable to such treatment. For example, it never produced anything that was available publicly. My source of inspiration when I was a young reforming politician in local government was the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at Birmingam University which was built entirely around the passion of one man John Stewart; which produced a bi-monthly journal; Discussion papers; and books. And to whose seminars one could easily access as a local government person. The revenue came from its local government pmarket - which is politically diverse.
Warwick University has also been home to another such Institute - the Local Government Centre built around one man John Bennington.
The School of Government was more elitist - and political. And therefore vulnerable. So one lesson is not to be too dependent on one market. The recent trend for amalgamating training of local and central government has a lot to be said for it - not least that people from these 2 sectors get to rub shoulders with one another.
There are lessons there - that a sustainable centre needs independence!