thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Christmas is holiday time for many of us in the Southern hemisphere. Sun, sand, surf, swimming – you get the idea.

It also seems that when we get a chance to have more than a week away from our office and/or jobs a much higher percentage of us rethink our jobs.

Colleagues working in the recruitment sector tell me that this triggers a flurry of activity as people look for new jobs or look for changes to their work situation in some other ways.

I suspect changing jobs can bring with it a higher level of satisfaction on some parameters but the underlying dynamics will have more to do with personal awareness, as well as other conscious and unconscious choices we have made.

Many of us find that our intentions and our level of engagement are not always consistent with our work life. 

For myself I have days where I am totally “in the zone” or flow of my various projects and something about those times means that I am on exactly the right frequency or pitch to respond best to whatever the day brings. 

Other times it seems like I should really move to another project as it seems like there is no “flow”.  Luckily I work on multiple projects so I have more flexibility but that kind of switching doesn’t always improve the flow at all. 

Which suggests that it is not so much the content or subject but something about my approach to the task at hand that can transform “work” into something that energizes as part of the engagement process. 

As it happens two newly released  videos on TED visit some of these ideas in much greater depth and add alternative perspectives from the worlds of psychology and design.

Mihaly Czikszentmihaly presented on flow in 2004 but the video was only released in Oct ’08.

Mihaly  asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow”. His view is that  ”creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives”

And in a partner presentation (21 mins) Paula Scher talks through some of the creative cycle ideas from a different perspective. Her presentation comes from a May 2008 design conference on serious play.

I’d be interested to know what readers think about these topics after having watched both videos and or other insights that you may have. (Mihaly alt video link)
  

Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she’s done album covers, books, the Citibank logo …) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography. (Alternative Paula Scher video link )

It would be wonderful if we could all just switch jobs the moment they move from being serious fun to being solemn. So love the cycle idea but wondering how it might apply to most.

Also it does rather look like labelling stuff is a recurring theme in Paula’s work but there appears to be no self awareness or recognition of this at all which seems puzzling. That is  - I don’t think she is really changing too much about her content so it is not the subject matter that provides the “serious fun” but rather something else.

Mihaly’s and Paula’s presentations look like perfect companion pieces here. They use quite different approaches to talk about much of the same territory but (ahem) Mihaly would probably be the better dinner guest in my view.

One of my late grandmothers lived through the 1929 Depression in New Zealand and that stayed with her all her life.  She lived for 90+ years but the memories of those times were never far away and it always seemed like a pivotal moment which shaped a generation (or two.)

She used to remind us of this fairly often even though there were many other events we might have wanted to hear about  – 1929 was the biggie of them all.

Since then the world has had a series of smaller economic shocks like the 1973 Oil crisis, Black Friday in Oct 1987 and many other meltdown periods in between like 9/11/01

A few weeks back David Slack asked the question The lesson of the Great Depression is? The discussion seemed to get side-tracked but it is a useful question to ask.

Every time I look at the writing on 1929 there seems to be about 4 theories on what the lessons were depending on your taste in economics.

The causes of the Great Depression are still a matter of active debate among economists. For some ideas on the causes of the Great Depression here is a summary.

I like the debt deflation theory the best. perhaps one lesson is – there is no such thing as a free lunch / debt sucks.

It is also clear that governments of today are intervening much more actively to help manage the downside risks which hopefully showed we’ve learned something about macro economic management.

Lets hope so anyway. There was at one particularly helpful comment over there by WH

“There was a great chart at the Standard that is really worth checking out, if you haven’t already seen it: http://www.thestandard.org.nz/how-to-stimulate-the-economy/
I’ve been really impressed by Steve Pierson’s writing, fwiw.

It can be difficult to explain that the government spending multiplier can have a greater expansionary effect than tax cuts.”

I’d be interested in what you all think about tax cuts and other government interventions.

For an Australian view here is a snip I found yesterday from EFIC.

EFIC is Australia’s export credit agency, and provides specialist finance and insurance services to Australian companies exporting and investing overseas. In other words they are risk managers at the global end of world trade and their assessment is one that I like.

Back to the 1930s? Unlikely says EFIC’s Chief Economist, Roger Donnelly

There has been much talk recently that the world economy is ‘going back to the 1930s’. “How close are we to a 1929-like Financial Crash and 1930s-style Great Depression?” ask Donnelly. “Two points are worth noting.”

“It is difficult to exaggerate the severity of the recent panic and recent events certainly seem to have been on a scale resembling the 1930s.”

“But in the 1930s, central banks stood idly by as depositors rushed to withdraw their money and banks called in loans. The central banks mistakenly thought that this was a healthy ‘purge’ after the ‘binge’ of the Roaring Twenties.”

In fact, what happened was the stock of money and credit collapsed, and deflation set in, forcing highly geared borrowers to default in repeated waves (a virulent process economists call ‘debt deflation’).

Central banks and treasuries have learnt that to head off such a disaster they mustn’t be complacent. So this time, they are taking decisive steps to ensure money, credit – and aggregate demand – don’t collapse.

However, Donnelly warns: “There remains a risk that the panic doesn’t subside and central banks and treasuries finally ‘use up all of their ammunition’ – interest rate cuts, borrowing capacity etc – to fight it. In which case, the world economy could succumb to a Great Depression. But that still seems to be a small risk.”

“The bigger risk is that the world economy will now perform only sluggishly for a protracted period, as bank and non-bank firms alike continue to de-gear and recapitalise.”

“A synchronised G3 recession is in prospect, though growth could still hold up quite well in Asia and the Gulf. In these more difficult conditions, fragile and vulnerable entities, be they countries, governments, banks or companies, could collapse, though they may be rescued by the state if deemed Too Big or Too Important to fail.”

Here are some questions to think about

• What are your thoughts on recession / depression lessons?
• Have we learned from previous economic shocks before?
• Does history matter?
• Maybe even where do economists and idealogy get too tangled to be useful?

And if you would like to be part of the future answers for NZ have another look at the latest update on NZX by the Morrison & Co teams.

For another set of views see NEF Their tagline is “We believe in economics as if people and the planet mattered.” They mention

“the Green New Deal Group. It is a response to the credit crunch and wider energy, climate and food crises, and to the lack of comprehensive, joined-up action from politicians.”

I think it is important that we debate these ideas and encourage our governments to help fix structural disconnections.  I am concerned that the various debates will get polarised by right or left ideologies and miss being useful because of that.

Hopefully we can take into account some of the wider issues and make longer term decisions. Over to you.

Thanks to the reader who spotted this paper by  Bronwyn E. Howell which was presented at a conference in Rome, Italy, September 17-20, 2008.

Abstract:
Using an efficiency-based framework, this paper analyses the performance of New Zealand’s telecommunications sector under competition law-based sector governance (the period from 1987 to 2001) and under industry-specific regulation (2001 to 2007). The framework considers the productive, allocative and dynamic efficiency effects of each regime, and the nature of the strategic interaction of sector participants.

The analysis reveals that substantial gains in all forms of efficiency were achieved during the 1990s, both compared to historic New Zealand and contemporary OECD benchmarks.

Under industry-specific regulation, however, transfers to consumers appear to have reduced, transaction costs have increased and delays are being incurred in the deployment of new applications and technologies relative to the competition law regime as participants engage in strategic gaming with politicians and the regulator and respond predictably to the range of incentives offered under the regulatory regime.

The paper concludes that on balance in the New Zealand circumstances, the regime based predominantly upon competition law appears to have outperformed the industry-specific regulatory regime, albeit due in large part to sector participant interaction shaped by contractual obligations imposed by the government on the incumbent which have prevailed unchanged under both regimes.

Keywords: Competition, Regulation, Telecommunications, New Zealand, OECD, Performance, Efficiency

by Howell, Bronwyn E., From Competition to Regulation: New Zealand Telecommunications Sector Performance 1987-2007 (August 14, 2008).
at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1227862

Is it just me or are these academic papers long in execution and way too diplomatic in their language. (Based on reading a downloadable full copy.)

It is good that someone researches the area and tries to make sense of it but it does seem like a bit of  a sideshow when the policy is being decided elsewhere – most of the time – or am I wrong about that?

Right at the end the author notes

“Pursuit of efficiency, not pursuit of competition, must be the goal.”

Uhuh… still feeling slightly underwhelmed but maybe I’m being too partisan.