tim's experiment

Hong Kong universities are surprisingly traditional places. I suspect this is largely down to lack of self-confidence. Even the most prestigious local establishments suspect that they are too small, or too young, to be taken seriously. So they try to copy overseas examples, usually American. The problem with this is that we are clinging to a model which is dying.

Simplifying furiously we can say that there are two models of what being a university student involves. One has the students attending lecturers, the other has him or her attending tutorials on a one-to-one basis, or something close to it. Lectures, it seems, are now undergoing the process which killed a lot of live music when the gramophone was invented. In the old days the student could  only attend the lectures at his own university. The lecturer, consequently, did not really face any competition. He was stuck with his students, and they were stuck with him. This is no longer the case. MIT has put all its lectures on the web. Whole on-line universities have sprung up offering numerous courses, often free (you pay to take the exam). Our lecturer now faces hundreds of competitors for student attention. Indeed, like an opera singer, he now has to compete with people who are dead but recorded. Somewhere in the BBC archives are many hours of AJP Taylor lecturing on history. Where will we find such wit and learning today?

Exploring this issue the other week, The Economist’s correspondent noted with some surprise that the two oldest English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, both expressed complete indifference to the ominous trend. But they would, wouldn’t they, because they do not depend on the lecture system. No amount of technical agility will allow a teacher to have a face-to-face conversation with 100 students simultaneously. The essence of such a conversation is that there are two of you in the same room, breathing the same air, making eye contact and so on. The person giving a lecture can, like a stud bull, use technical help to sow his seeds broadly. A tutorial by technology ceases to be a tutorial. When I was a student (at Oxford) it was clearly understood that lectures were optional. You attended courses which were particularly interesting to you. Attendances, especially after the first week or two when many customers came to sample the goods on offer, were low. This did not bother anyone. Quality was of more interest: people who were doing ground-breaking work not available elsewhere would attract a discerning crowd, often including graduate students and fellow teachers. People who were merely reading the textbook they had published two years ago addressed a largely empty room.

In local universities we do not have this system. Attendance at lectures is generally compulsory. Well you can make attendance compulsory, but not attention. Students doze, send text messages, listen to iPods, read the book which has all the information in it which you are painfully presenting through a piece of mediaeval technology … This is not entirely surprising because speaking to a large crowd requires either consummate natural talent or extended training, and most academics have neither. Their research-besotted value system, which requires them to spend as much time as they can on research and as little as they can get away with on teaching, leaves little hope of improvement. Most lectures, actually, are crap. The system is overdue for the scrapheap.

The usual reason given for persevering with it is that the alternative is so expensive. This is a legend carefully fostered by the old-fashioned collegiate universities because it gives them an excuse for extracting more money from their government or their students. Actually it is not true. I heard it so often that I believed it, until I stumbled across a way of working out the consequences of abandoning lectures and having tutorials instead. The problem was that the university in which I was working published a staff-student ratio, but it was obvious to all of us that this was not actually the average size of the classes we were teaching. So I was looking for a way of connecting the number of staff and students in three departments with an actual average class size. Rather surprisingly this came down to a quite simple formula, in which the decisive ingredients were the number of contact hours required of students a week, and the  number of teaching hours required of staff. Just for fun I tried replacing the then customary 18 class hours a week with one, to represent a single tutorial. Assuming the average number of people in a tutorial was two – quite reasonable in my experience – we could have managed this with a staff workload of 12 tutorials a week. Most people would be quite happy to swap 12 hours of leisurely personal encounters for xix hours of mass teaching with its attendant preparation and grading. And many of us were teaching 12 hours a week anyway.

So actually we could have any system that we want. But I do not expect anything to change. Academics are disappointingly routine thinkers outside their own subject areas (and sometimes inside them as well). Extended deliberation on reform usually comes to the conclusion that we should offer what the most senior administrator present got when he was an undergraduate. So tradition marches on. As the late Chairman Mao said in one of his rare lucid moments, conservative things do not fall over unless they are pushed.

Read Full Post »

Since I last visited the CY Leung affair there has been some progress. Everyone except the incurably partisan or dumb now recognises that the problem is not whether we can tolerate a Chief Executive with a legal trellis, but whether we can tolerate a Chief Executive who cannot give a straight answer to a straight question. Most of us, after all, would have been quite happy if when the matter first came up, candidate Leung had said “Yes I have illegal structures. Doesn’t everybody?” After months of wriggling, evasions and lies Mr Leung has migrated from the George Washington end of the spectrum to the Richard Nixon one, and some people who are neither instinctive rebels not committed enemies of the government now think that he should follow Mr Nixon’s example in choosing an early retirement.

Other people, including some writers for whom I have the greatest respect, now say that this will not and cannot happen. Mr Leung has Beijing’s blessing and our colonial masters will never allow their man to be unseated by popular opposition. Obvious bad precedent, from their point of view. Therefor people should stop calling for a replacement and should instead try to work with Mr Leung for constructive purposes. After all he is at least not a property developer. One writer went so far as to suggest that it would be statesmanlike for a democrat to reach out by going to Beijing. I presume this was a fancy metaphor because most of the democracts are barred from entering the mainland. They cannot even visit Shenzhen. Still I hesitate to dismiss this view as wrong. We cannot know what will work and we can only try one of the choices available so we will never know what would have been best. On the other hand it seems the statesmen inspiring this approach include Metternich, if not Macchiavelli.

It is odd to find yourself revisiting your youth after 60 years but the first political event to attract the attention of people in my age group was the Profumo affair. Profumo was a Minister of Defence who had an affair with a lady of sociable instincts who was also apparently sharing the bed of the Defence Attache at the Soviet Embassy. He denied having met the lady in a statement to the House of Commons and had to resign when the truth emerged shortly afterwards. Quite a lot of people sympathised with Mr P. There was no suggestion that secrets had been leaked. He had been a good MP and a respectable Minister. Mrs Profumo was no doubt used to the occasional infidelity. Few politicians seem to be able to resist the odd fling. The contrary view was that this was, in the end, a moral issue. We cannot stop people doing wrong but when we catch them at it we can and should drum them out of any office of prestige and power which they hold. Any gentleman could have an affair but if he lied about it afterwards he was no gentleman.

Now it is argued on behalf of Mr Leung that many successful politicians were not plaster saints, or indeed saints of any kind.  Mr Clinton, widely regarded as a successful politician, shared his cigars and much else with Monica Lewinski. John Kennedy was a surreptitious philanderer on a large scale, and so on. Indeed there is something in this. Every King of France after Louis IX (who was canonised – for refraining presumably) kept mistresses. Frederick the Great treated his wife appallingly, Catherine the Great had at least 14 lovers, Mary Queen of Scots probably murdered her first husband and Edward VIII was a notorious rake before he inherited the throne. The elected types are no better: anyone for “bunga bunga parties”? Modern writers now look with a certain suspicion on Gladstone’s attempts to rescue prostitutes from a life of sin, and Asquith’s infatuation with a lady young enough to be his granddaughter. Loyd George was known as “the goat” to his underlings, Julius Caesar as “the bald whore-monger” to his soldiers.

These things perhaps do no harm as long as they are not known. I doubt, for example, whether John Kennedy would have remained the idol of many admirers if his serial infidelities had emerged in his own lifetime. When they do emerge, though, we have to ask whether this sort of thing is acceptable in our leaders. After all the Chief Executive may be pretty small beer as a holder of political power — despite his grotesquely inflated salary — but he is still someone up to whom people look. It seems in many European countries sexual peccadilloes are not regarded as a problem. A mistress, so what?  I am not sure that I prefer the traditional Anglo-Saxon approach, which is more puritanical about such things.

But our local problem is rather different. Mr Leung, is, as far as we know, a paragon in many ways. As an example to aspirant young people, though, he has a spectacular disadvantage. He only got the job because he cheated. No doubt Henry’s extensive illegal basement was larger both in size and more flagrant in the principles involved than Mr Leung’s illicit adornments. But Mr Leung allowed and encouraged us to believe that he had no such things at all. So the question is not whether Mr Leung is disqualified from his job because he is a liar. Many political leaders have worse faults, I accept. The question is having been conned into giving him the job do we now let him keep it?  Hong Kong is not short of examples of unscrupulous behaviour. But to have such a spectacular display of successful duplicity at the top is going to undo an awful lot of well-meaning moral education.

I conclude with some surprise (I did not take this view about Mr Profumo) that this is a moral issue and the ethical thing for Mr Leung to do would be to resign.  There is no point in agitating about it. If he doesn’t see this himself he is either dim or dirty. In either case, I think asking people to cherish Mr Leung in the name of realism and diplomacy is asking a lot. Too much? It is not for me to say. But a lot, certainly.

Read Full Post »

Had a small ailment the other day, and went down the hill to our local GP, from whom as is customary I received three days worth of assorted pills. These worked eventually and the problem cleared up.

When you think about it, this is actually rather miraculous. I weigh something in the region of 200 pounds. Most of this is water. The insertion of a pill, active ingredients scarcely bigger than a grain of rice, should make no impression at all. Yet a tiny pill can make a big difference, sometimes remarkably quickly. In my experience, for example, a couple of aspirins will dissipate a standard hang-over headache in about 30 minutes. Clearly our bodies, while in some ways remarkably robust, are in other ways very sensitive. A very small quantity of a strange chemical can produce drastic changes.

You would think, under these circumstances, that we would be more careful. But we aren’t. In fact industrialised societies produce huge quantities of chemicals which do not occurr in nature – and against which in consequence our bodies have no defences. If these chemicals are not actually poisonous they may cause dangerous confusion in our internal signalling system by mimicking some unsuspecting hormone. And of course they all get into the environment eventually.

I suppose something along these lines explains the prevalence of problems which were virtually or totally non-existent 50 years ago. When I was a kid I went through the entire educational process and encountered two people who had asthma. This was obvious because they were excused compulsory games. Nobody was allergic to nuts and none of us had the faintest idea what gluten was.

Times have changed. There was an interesting letter in the paper the other day from someone who had eaten something to which he was allergic in a local luxury hotel, despite asking the waiter about the ingredients. I think he asked about nuts but some sesame paste had sneaked in somewhere, so this may have been a rather simple misunderstanding. The writer, though, was quite offended, and asserted a right to be informed about the ingredients wherever he was eating. He had obviously had an unpleasant experience. But he seemed to be asking a lot. In food selling enterprises the person who brings the fodder to your table has very little to do with its production. And the range of things to which sensitive individuals might take exception is quite wide and in some areas rather technical. Yet the number of people with problems of this kind seems to have increased enormously. I realise there are other theories to account for this but it seems at least plausible that we are poisoning ourselves.

We are certainly poisoning me. Any visit to the urban area is enough to provoke my nose to bitter complaints these days. I suppose it’s the traffic fumes, a problem which Hong Kong seems to be quite unable to solve, or even meaningfully to confront. I was bemused to read the other day that the Police do not take action against people whose engines are left illegally idling, because the relevant ordinance designates the Food and Hygiene people as the enforcement authority. Come on, Force, this is too timid. If a policeman sees a crime being committed he is perfectly entitled to arrest the miscreant whether another department is officially in charge of the matter or not. This would be a more worthy use of your time than issuing meaningless parking tickets.

Read Full Post »

RTHK’s City Forum is a venerable local institution. When I lived in Causeway Bay (1984-6) and occasionally popped out on Sunday mornings to see it live the set already looked tatty. No doubt they have replaced it since then. The show consists of a row of talking heads discussing some topic of the day. It is assiduously reported by the local media because nothing else of a newsworthy character happens on Sunday mornings.

And so we were treated on Monday to words of wisdom from one Stanley Lau Chin-ho, who sits on the Labour Advisory Board on behalf of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries. Why he sits on the LAB in this capacity is an interesting question. Hong Kong does not actually have industry any more. The Federation’s own study found years ago that “many Hong Kong manufacturers have moved their production facilities to the PRD to take advantage of abundant land and labour supply.” Consequently  “it has transformed Hong Kong from a manufacturing-based economy into one engaged heavily in servicing Hong Kong manufacturers that have moved their operations across the border to the PRD.”

So the federation comprises a band of bigshots who have moved all their employing operations over the border except for a few offices. Why these people should be regarded as having a right to be consulted about employment in Hong Kong is an interesting mystery. No doubt it remains unexplored because it would lead to the even more interesting mystery of why our non-existent industrial sector still has two seats on Legco.

Anyway, there is Mr Lau, our local representative of “the fat man, the very fat man, that waters the workers’ beer”, as the old song has it. What has he to say for himself?

Well I’m afraid the word “bullshit” springs to mind at this point. Mr Lau thinks having a standard working week qualifies as “Hong Kong to unreservedly introduce Western systems.” Now, he went on “many Western governments want to change their systems. Just trying to raise the standard working hours from 35 to 37 hours has caused riots and unrest in some countries. So we are very worried that if we legislate towards standard working hours, Hong Kong could be heading towards Western models like Greece and Spain.”

Mr Lau curiously failed to mention the possibility that some of his members might be very worried that legislation on standard working hours would cost them money. Harping on “Western” is presumably an attempt to tickle local prejudices. Actually there is nothing particularly Western about standard working hours. Consider the following figures for 1995, lifted from an ILO study of the subject:

Countries with no statutory standard hours: Australia, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Nigeria, Seychelles, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Romania.

Countries with a 35-9 hour standard: France

Countries with a 40-hour standard: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United States, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo, China, Indonesia, Latvia, Russian Federation, Ecuador.

Countries with a 41-46 hour standard: Portugal, Switzerland (workers in industrial enterprises, offices, technical posts and sales staff in large commercial enterprises) Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, Singapore, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Belize, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Uruguay (commerce), Venezuela

Countries with a 48-hour limit: Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Morocco, Mozambique, Tunisia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand (industry), Viet Nam, Bahamas, Haiti, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay (industry) Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon

Limit over 49 hours: Kenya, and those Thai and Swiss workers not already covered.

Clearly this is not a particularly Western idea. Some Western coutries had no limit. Many other countries had limits. It is also difficult to see any pattern suggesting that having a limit sets you on the slippery slope to national bankruptcy. Many countries seem to do very well with a 40-hour norm, including China, where most of Mr Lau’s happy band of brothers do their employing and manufacturing. Spain was in the 40-hour category, but so were ostentationsly successful countries like Norway and New Zealand. Comparing the figures ten years later the UK had developed a 48-hour over-all limit (including overtime) Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, lots of East European countries and Mongolia had moved to the 40-hour category. There were still only three countries – France, Belgium and Chad – in the 35-39 hour category, so the riots point seems rather dishonest. Many Western countries may be trying to increase standard working hours but those trying to increase them from under 40 cannot number more than two.

Where is Greece in all this? Not slacking, apparently. According to a report by the European Working Conditions Observatory published in 2009 “Based on available date, the picture of actual weekly working hours has not varied with the passage of time. On the contrary, Greece has kept actual working time at very high levels compared to the other EU member states. This has brought annual working time in Greece calculated on a yearly basis (including the number of days of annual leave and time off) to equally high levels (1800 hours).”

So there you have it. Saying that having standard working hours would make us like Greece and Spain makes no more sense than saying having more saunas would make us more like Finland. Mr Lau would do us all a service if he stopped spouting spurious international comparisons and told us frankly that his members are against anything which might cost them money.

Read Full Post »

One of the advantages of “one country two systems” is that we are not required to follow the Mainland system under which the truth is whatever is currently politically convenient. Or at least we weren’t until recently. Now it seems Mr C.Y.Leung’s efforts to encourage greater integration have extended to this unlovely convention.

There was a poignant coincidence on Wednesday. On the letters page of the SCMP (Soon China’s Mouth Piece?) came the first salvo from the “our leaders are wonderful in all circumstances” brigade. Entertainingly they contradicted each other. Julia Fung from Central thought Mr Leung had been elected (I must have missed that) because Hong Kong people wanted something and he should be given a chance to deliver it. Peter Kwei, on the other hand, cited Mr Leung’s achievements as evidence for the idea that “people at the grass-roots level” now thought Mr Leung was wonderful. Meanwhile on page A3 readers who were still dubious could find a convenient little guide to Mr Leung’s “twists and turns”, going back to May 2011 when he told reporters that he had “no illegal structures at his home.”

Well I have rather lost track of the updates on this point but it seems that at that time the number of illegal structures Chez Leung was somewhere between seven and ten. Some of the explanations do not hold water either. Mr Leung claims to be inexperienced in matter of removing illegal structures. Oops, another whopper. He removed one from his house in Stanley in 2000.

The only question remaining is whether it is acceptable to have a bare-faced liar as Chief Executive. I do not mind the man having illegal structures. Most people who own houses in Hong Kong have such things. But after so many twists and turns what is the point of him speaking in public about anything? There is no reason to believe a word he says.

Of course we should not really be surprised. Mr Leung’s status as a senior trusty in Basic Law matters clearly indicated that our mainland brothers thought he could be trusted to assert fearlessly that black was  white and two plus two made three, if the political circumstances demanded it. We can, perhaps, draw some useful conclusions for future Chief Executive races. The less the liaison office has to do with this matter the better. Their criteria are not our criteria.

May I in closing offer a warm welcome to my new reader from the blog-monitoring team at the Central Policy Unit. You can classify this one as “hostile”.

Read Full Post »

The Court of Appeal is continuing its custom, I understand, of sentencing appellants whose cases have no merit in their Lordships’ view to a further three months in the clink. This is justified on the basis that it discourages hopeless appeals, and consquently leaves their Lordships’ valuable time for other matters. There are reasons for supposing that this hope is entirely baseless, which we will come to in a minute.

First, a couple of distressing features about this arrangement. One is that lawyers are exquisitely polite to each other. Consequently punishable levels of frivolity are never found in appeals presented by a member of the legal fraternity. Or to put it another way, if you can afford your own legal landshark you don’t have to worry about this at all. Defenders of the scheme might argue that no lawyer would hire himself out to present an appeal without merit, and I might then roll around the floor laughing. The second is that consequent on this first feature, the victims of the bonus three months are all lay people who are not really in any position to judge the merits of their own appeals. They are being punished for ignorance and poverty.

Now let us consider the argument that this arrangement is a useful deterrent, and our prisons are full of people who decided not to bother with an appeal because it might arouse their Lordships’ ire. Actually this is not very likely. Consider a small experiment, which you can conduct on your friends – it is harmless and the result is quite predictable. If you offer someone a choice between a definite $900,000 and a 90 per cent chance of winning $1 million, then the vast majority of them will go for the sure thing. This is an affront to conventional economic theory because both choices are actually worth the same. But now let us suppose we change the plus signs to minus. Ask your friend if he would prefer a certain loss of $900,000 or a 90 per cent chance of losing $1 million and a ten per cent chance of losing nothing. Under these circumstances people overwhelmingly go for the gamble. Economics again wilts. The discoverers of this interesting effect (which can be found lucidly summarised in Kahneman: Thinking, fast, and slow, at chapter 31) sum it up as follows: people are risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses.  Or to put it another way, when both the outcomes on offer are unacceptable people will accept very poor odds and a large penalty to have a small chance of a satisfactory outcome. Once you have this idea in your head it explains a lot of things, from Napoleon’s choices in the closing stages of the Battle of Waterloo to the willingness of litigants with very poor cases to fight to the end.

Now let us put ourselves in the position of the man in the Stanley prison cell. The Court of First Instance has sentenced him to ten years in prison. The choices before him are to stay where he is and serve the ten years, or to appeal, and have a very small chance of being released and a very large chance of being sentenced to an extra three months. Which would you go for? Actually, leaving human irrationality in these matters aside, someone with a sentence that long would be justified in pursuing a very faint hope of acquittal. Ten years is 120 months. So the extra three months is a 2.5 per cent increase. Even if the guy is guilty he only has to believe the Court of Appeal makes mistakes in one of every 40 cases for the gamble to make sense.

Actually of course the Court of Appeal is over-ruled by the next court up in far more than one out of every 40 cases. On the other hand the fly in this ointment from the point of view of our Stanley inmate is that the chance of their Lordships making an error in favour of a convicted felon with no lawyer are virtually non-existent. But this is beside the point. Potential appellants are in no position to assess the statistics and are unlikely to be swayed by economic theory, traditional or otherwise. They will follow the instinctive path, which is to take the gamble. however hopeless.

I infer from this that the belief that people are deterred from hopeless appeals by the custom of penalising them is a mere superstition. The habit gratifies judges, no doubt, at some considerable expense to the taxpayer, who has to pay for the extra three months of room and board. But I do not expect this to change. Judges, like academics but perhaps with more excuse, are impervious to research about the effects of their activities.

Read Full Post »

Well I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or throw up. We’ve seen some rum stuff in the Post lately but the piece of the front page of the City section today plumbed new depths. Our top politicians must take a break to stay on track, said the headline. “All work and no play” lifestyle of government’s two top jobholders are a cause for concern, said the second deck.

The only new piece of information in this story was that Carrie Lam has lost weight. Ms Lam has “revealed”, we were told, that the weight loss stemmed from lack of sleep. This is scientifically rather unlikely and Ms Lam is not a doctor. But we did not linger over this, “The number two in this busy city, Lam has been seen almost everywhere of late”, burbled author Tammy Tam, carelessly implying that working in a busy city makes you busier, which is also rather unlikely.

We then got a list of Ms Lam’s more public obligations since July: national education row, plastic pellet disaster (sic), Kai Tak sports complex non-cancellation and negotiating with school principals over class sizes. This does not seem excessive for five months. But Ms Lam has also “made public appearances almost every weekend”.

People close to Ms Lam now appear, suggesting that earlier quotes from this source were second hand. They told the South China Morning Post, apparently, that Ms Lam had lost 9kg by not sleeping. This does not add up. You lose weight by not eating. Not sleeping produces madness, not thinness. Ms Lam needs to start eating and sleeping.

But wait, there was more tearjerking stuff to come. Ms Lam was sometimes (another secondhand quote, attributerd to students) lonely in her mansion on the Peak. Goodness. Only the resident servants to talk to. Her husband and son are in the UK. Well Ms Lam’s domestic arrangements are her own business but I do not recall having your husband exiled was a condition of the job. Many Hong Kong people endure this sort of separation. Including me. Skype helps.

Having wrung our withers with the plight of Ms Lam, we were now treated to the even more heartbreaking circumstances of the Chief Executive, whose “routine of non-stop work is more or less similar to Lam’s”. Mr Leung apparently started working seven days a week even before he was elected. He had five days off in August, a factlet which runs over three paragraphs. Then he was “Back to the super-hot kitchen of his government headquarters” where he is immersing himself and luckless officials in “deep-rooted” problems such as housing and poverty.

Our scribe then provides some healthy advice, including the observation that Ms Lam, who will be visiting the UK this week, should spend some time with her family. Gosh, I bet that never crossed her mind.

The piece closes with a rather ominous paragraph suggesting that the overworked twosome will have to “get the pulse of the latest Hong Kong policy from Beijing’s new leadership to prepare the city for a smoother implementation of the one country two systems”. Not sure what that means. Actually I am not sure what the whole piece means. It reads like Barbara Cartland crossed with Han Suyin. Leung is a many-splendoured thing.

Let us, however, add a few small details to this heartrending picture of overwork and lack of sleep. First of all, nobody is forced to take these jobs. Lam and Leung were not hustled onto a plane like the gentleman who was sent to Libya with his family to help the local secret police with their inquiries. Mr Leung tried particularly hard to get his new job — a bit too hard for some of us. One of those magical moments in Hong Kong’s legal history came when a judge commented that Leung’s criticism of Henry Tang’s basement would not be taken by other people to mean that he had no illegal structures of his own. Sorry your Lordship, but that is exactly what people would take it to mean. They would suppose that someone who criticised other people for any defect would himself be free from the same defect. Otherwise he would be a hypocrite, and if his own defect was obvious either a brazen liar or terminally stupid. Those of us who thought Mr Leung was quite bright and honest for a man of his background are entitled to be disappointed.

Secondly, people in jobs of this kind are supposed to be able to organise their workload properly. Before you can make good decisions you need to be able to prioritise, delegate and make sensible use of your time. It is a necessary part of the job to be available for public functions at weekends. Take time off on weekdays.

Thirdly, being what is effectively the mayor and deputy mayor of a “busy city” is not the most onerous job in the world. Our leaders do not have to worry about the deficit which we don’t have, or the bond markets which we don’t need, or riots against the austerity measures which we don’t need either, or Islamic terrorism, or earthquakes, or religious strife, or Iran getting the bomb, or the oil running out, or a military coup, or a Russian invasion, or protesters setting themselves on fire, or lady singers engaging in sacrilegious protests, or paedophile popstars, or plagues of locusts, swarms of venomous toads, etc, etc.  Yet they are much better paid than the people who do have to worry about some or all of these things. Mr Barack Obama, who merely leads the Free World, gets a fraction of their salaries.

And this means that, fourthly, these people are not irreplaceable. Any time the burden feels too onerous, feel free to put it down.

Read Full Post »

I see Alex Lo has got a nice demagogic thing going with the suggestion that complaints about the shortage of international school places should be ignored and expat kids should go to local schools. This is a result of not understanding the problem.

The business people who complain about the shortage of international school places are not concerned about long-term foreign residents, or their children. Actually most foreigners whose kids are born in Hong Kong are quite happy to experiment with the local system and sincerely hope their kids will be bilingual. This does not usually end in complete success but that is another story.

The scenario which bothers the business people goes like this. Master of Universe George Greed is employed by an international company in New York. He is American; his kids are American. Until his employer decided it wanted his services in Hong Kong he had no connection with the place. Nobody in the family speaks Chinese and the kids are in the New York school system. Mr Greed’s posting in Hong Kong is initially for two years. Afterwards — he will not be told until much later — the family may return to New York, or be sent somewhere else in the world.  Mrs Greed is not consulted about any of this. She will continue to call New York home and loyally follow her husband whereever he goes, nurturing the profound hope that the next stop on the itinerary will not be Somalia or Syria. The kids — there is an extensive academic literature on this — are going to grow up a bit confused.

This family’s educational requirements cannot be met by telling them that they are free to use Hong Kong’s excellent public school system. Even if it has one. What they require is a school which operates the American curriculum, or one close to it, so that the kids will not be behind when they start here and will not be behind again when they get back home. If Mr Greed were British he would require a different school, one which operated the British system. And so on. This is why we have international schools in a variety of different flavours.

This is the problem which bothers the Chamber of Commerce people. Hong Kong has plenty of international schools, but they are full of locals. As a result Mr Greed and his counterparts from other countries are deterred from coming here because they must either leave the kids behind or let them drop out of education altogether while they wait for a suitable place. Local schools intended for local residents do not cater successfully for members of ethnic minorities who speak Cantonese but do not write Chinese. They do not want and could not handle an influx of gwai-jais with entirely foreign educational backgrounds.

So what is to be done? Clearly there will be bitter complaints if we try to make it harder for local students to attend international schools. The ESF is already routinely accused of racism because of its policy of giving priority to people who can be educated in English. Encouraging more international schools is a hard sell. There are no easy answers.

One of the reasons why there are no easy answers is because this topic attracts demagogues peddling populist solutions based on a misunderstanding of the problem.

A few drops of the milk of human kindness would also not come amiss. I quote Mr Lo: “The American Chamber of Commerce has reported that the shortage is most acute on Hong Kong Island. Well try Kowloon or the New Territories!” Has Mr Lo no children? However rich a kid’s parents may be, do we really want to sentence it to a return trip from – say – Repulse Bay to Shatin every day to go to school? Would you wish that on a seven-year-old: two hours, three tunnels, pollution, tedium? Of course as she gets older she will have plenty of time to read pieces in the South China Morning Post explaining that the shortage of international school places is an illusion…

Read Full Post »

Between the time when I escaped from the UK’s university system and the time I came to Hong Kong I worked, mainly in journalism but also in sundry bars and Bingo halls, for about eight years. This, I discovered as retirement loomed, entitled me to a pension from the UK government. This can be collected wherever you are, though if you live overseas you don’t get cost of living increases. It is regarded as an owned entitlement, because it is the product of the compulsory payments made into the National Insurance fund by you and your employer when you were working. Accordingly, how much you get depends on how much was paid in. As the payments in my case only lasted for eight years the entitlement is quite small, though still welcome. As my 65th birthday approached I Skyped a nice lady in the UK Pensions office, which for some reason is in Newcastle, and she sent me the necessary forms. The money appears in my bank account every month. If your entitlement is very small you can ask them to send it less often.

The amount, as I said, is nothing to write home about. It covers, by coincidence, our monthly management fees with a little to spare. It is, however, more than twice as much as the amount our generous government, with much heaving and straining, is proposing to distribute to the deserving poor under the latest proposals. These involve a means-tested monthly payment of $2,000 or so. Our leaders have bravely announced that they will not consider any proposed changes to this plan, and less bravely also announced that if it is not approved in the original form the distribution of largesse will be delayed.

This has not so far inhibited the opposition, some of which has come from unexpected quarters. There is a recurring problem here. If proposals require legislators’ approval then legislators will be tempted to tweak them. Officials will be tempted to say that tweaking will not be tolerated. But if it is not tolerated then members feel they are being treated like a rubber stamp. Or the National People’s Congress. This is of course resented. I notice that even the DAB has been slower than usual to discover, as it always does, that a proposal which it initially opposed has redeeming features so the DAB will support the government. Surprise!

The substantive question presented by the government’s proposal is one which dogs all welfare systems. If the benefit is distributed to everyone then some of it will go to people who do not need it. I am, for example, the happy owner of a ticket which allows me to go anywhere on the MTR for $2. I also own a car. If the benefit is means-tested then many of the people for whom it is intended will not get it. They will be unable or unwilling to fill in the required forms, or they will reject as a matter of pride a benefit associated with poverty.  The argument is not about fairness to millionaires. It is about whether the way the benefit is offered will get it to the people who need it.

Clearly there is no final solution to this dilemma. If there were it would have been found by now. People have been struggling with the question since the days of Bismark. However a partial solution, at least, is available. That is to make the collection of the benefit sufficiently inconvenient to put off those who don’t really need it. Let us, for example, replace the $2,000 a month with $500 a week, to be collected in cash at a stated time and place in your neighbourhood. This is not difficult. It is the way UK pensions used to be distributed. You collected your weekly dollop from the nearest Post Office. Perhaps the nearest 7-11 would be more convenient in Hong Kong. Well off retirees are not going to make a weekly trip and quene up with a load of peasants for $500. It is not worth their time. For those who really need it, on the other hand, a short weekly walk is a trivial requirement. Many of them neither have nor need bank accounts. They would prefer cash.

How a person is expected to survive in Hong Kong on $500 a week is another matter. Look at it whichever way you want I do not see how this figure can be described as generous. Is there anyone on Exco who does not own fleets of flats, droves of directorships, shedloads of shares, or pairs of detached Peak houses festooned with dubiously legal additions? I thought not.

Read Full Post »

Much discussion lately about the Mandatory Provident Fund, because of the Consumer Council’s rather unsurprising discovery that many funds charge high management fees. The basic reason for this, say some, is that the funds are chosen by the employers, not the people whose money is at stake. So the choice is done rather badly, and may be influenced by factors like the desire to get a discount on other services from the same bank. Other suggestions are that the fund managers have ways of boosting their take surreptitiously, or that in the absence of real competition they do not try very hard. The council suggested putting a cap on fees. The fund management industry queried this as an impediment to market forces and a blot on Hong Kong’s (totally undeserved) reputation as a place where such forces roam unchecked. They also suggested, hilariously, that some fundees might wish to pay more for a higher quality service.

The point totally ignored in all this is that the fund management industry is a con. Repeated experiments have proven beyond the slightest doubt that investment pickers of this kind have no actual expertise at all. You can do just as well, on average, using a pin. I am amazed that nobody seems to have noticed this small point. After all you hear occasional mutterings about chiropractic, or Chinese medicine. But customers of these cures do at least feel better. This may be entirely due to the placebo effect but at least they are getting something for their money. The fund management guys are not even making you feel good. This has been known in social science circles for some time. Some of the experiments were rather entertaining. They pitted professional stock pickers against monkeys using a pin on the Business Section, or toddlers dropping darts from the top of a step ladder. Others simply compared the results of the fund or funds with what you could have got from mimicking your local index. The result was the same. On average these people add no extra value to your investments at all, and if they trade actively – as many do – they are depleting your savings with trading costs.

That is not to say that a fund cannot beat the market. The problem is that doing this is achieved through luck, not science. The easy way to have a market-beating fund is to start 32 of them. At the end of the first year 16 of them will have beaten the average. The losers are closed. At the end of the second year you will have eight winners and at the end of the third four funds will have beaten the market three years running. No skill is required to achieve this – it is simply the law of averages. These funds can now be marketed as having an impressive track record. As they should, on average, equal the index in subsequent years their flying start should make them look an attractive prospect as long as you start you assessment of the results with the first three years.  At the end of the first five years one of your funds will have beaten the average five years running. The person running this fund will be hailed as an advisor of great sagacity and forsight. He will be showered with bonuses and interviewed in the business press. The following year his chances are exactly the same as everyone else’s.

Another way of looking at the question of skill is to consider whether in fact some people do get better results than others. This can be tested qite simply by comparing the results from one year with the results in the next, and repeating this for a large number of years and people. Do some poeple consistently get better rankings, as they do in, say, golf or poker? No they do not. At all.

Investors should also be warned that the pretence that some funds are riskier than others is based on a flawed model which understates the risk in both categories. Modern portfolio theory was more or less invented by a bunch of economists who founded Long Term Capital Management to show everyone how it should be done. The company achieved one of the most spectacular bankruptcies in financial history. People are free to overlook the obvious implications of this episode, but do you want them in charge of your money?

So what is to be done? People with money in the MPF do not need a range of funds to choose from. They would be better off if the money was all just put in the Tracker Fund, or – politics permitting – in a group of similar funds including overseas ones. The fees for running index funds are commonly a fraction of those for fancier investments and the returns, on average, are the same or better. The MPF, as originally designed, was just another of those lucrative gifts from the last government to its business friends. People do not need the assistance of fund managers if they wish to lose money. Those who wish to do that can go to Macau and at least have fun in the process. The rest of us should not be delivered up bound hand and foot to a bunch of legalised financial vampires.

Read Full Post »