A New Start

FT: Making the world of work child’s play

June 23, 2011 11:25 pm

Making the world of work child’s play

By John Paul Rathbone

Royal Canin-branded care at KidZania Tokyo

Gemma, an 11-year-old dentist, has scrubbed up with Procter & Gamble soap and is inspecting back teeth. Jaime, a toddler firefighter, is spraying water next to a sign advertising home insurance. Meanwhile, little Carlos is landing an American Airlines jet while a gaggle of 12-year-old couriers passes through his cabin, wearing TNT livery.

Welcome to KidZania, perhaps the only place in the world where child labour is actively encouraged. The idea was born in Mexico just over a decade ago when Xavier López Anconca was approached by a friend to co-invest in a day care centre where children would play at working and businesses.

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That was when the 47-year-old former private equity whizz, who once managed bottling companies for GE Capital, had a revelation. “It was the first spark,” remembers Mr Lopez, now KidZania’s chief executive. “Nobody owns role-playing.”

Now they do, and KidZania has gone global with it. The first KidZania role-playing theme park for four- to 14-year-olds opened in a Mexico City shopping mall in 1999. “We were expecting 400,000 visits in the first year; we got twice that,” says Mr López. The second KidZania opened seven years later in Tokyo.

It has since been franchised to six other centres, including Dubai, with a dozen more under way in cities as far-flung as Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Istanbul, Moscow, São Paulo and Santiago. By the time they open, Mr López expects KidZania’s parks to attract 13m visits a year – about the same number as are drawn to Disneyland annually.

Although KidZania’s beginnings may have been happenstance, the model for Mr López’s edutainment empire has evolved into a well-honed strategy. First, identify a dense urban centre where relatively prosperous young parents will pay repeatedly for their children to play safely indoors. That mostly means the expanding middle classes who live in the megalopolises of emerging markets such as Mexico. “It’s why we only have one centre in Europe; it doesn’t offer the urban density we need,” says Mr López.

Second, ensure the city is home to a slew of corporate headquarters – especially companies with large social responsibility budgets that will pay KidZania to build its branded mini-cities: as much as 40 per cent of each centre’s construction costs are met by sponsors.

That is also why entrance tickets to the Mexico City centre are boarding passes given at an American Airlines check-in counter, and why children build houses using Cemex-branded materials, call each other on mobile phones provided by Telcel and bottle fizzy drinks in a facsimile of a bottling plant. In other jurisdictions, local brands are used: Emirates is the airline in Dubai; Sony runs the Tokyo photographic studio.

To be sure, KidZania can be seen as a grim training ground for the next generation of consumers. But Mr López counters “we are only copying the real world”. Besides, he adds, children learn valuable social skills, including the value of money. “The ATM ceases being a magic machine where money miraculously appears,” he says. “Here kids learn, experientially, that you have to earn it; nobody teaches that at school.” About a third of KidZania visits in Mexico are from schools.

The fantasy has become highly elaborate. Every KidZania centre has a “government”. Children are paid in “KidZos”, which they can redeem for sweets or stash in their bank account. They are also addressed with an adult “Mr” or “Ms”, and the greeting is always “Good night”, never “Good day” because, as one teenage KidZania supervisor explains, it is at night that children’s dreams come true.

Mr López’s next step is to roll out 12 centres across the US, in conjunction with a yet to be determined strategic partner. “It’s the biggest but also the most competitive market,” he says. “You don’t get a second chance at the US.” And beyond that, an initial public offering perhaps? “Of course,” he says, with no trace of the fantastical.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

FT: Book Review - Love

 

Love

Review by Julian Baggini

Simon May argues that the idea of devotion has changed over time

Love: A History, by Simon May, Yale University Press, RRP£18.99, 304 pages

The philosopher Simon May has hit upon a novel and fruitful solution to the problem of how to address a subject about which everything that could be said has been said: say all the best bits again, but better. There may not be a single original thought in Love: A History, but May could just have achieved the seemingly impossible and produced a truly original philosophy of love.

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To call it a history is far too modest, and curious, since there is a sense in which love has always been the same. That is why the poetry of Ovid speaks as lucidly to us today as it did in ancient Rome. But May argues that the idea of love has changed over time, and that the way we think about it shapes the way we seek, practise and despair of it. By examining these changes, May is able to draw out what is true in each age’s perception of love, discard what is misleading, and synthesise the result into the most persuasive account of love’s nature I have ever read.

The historical progression May identifies consists of four transformations, beginning with Deuteronomy and still playing out today. First, love is made the supreme value, identified with God. Second, by divine gift, human beings are given the power to achieve the highest love. Then love comes even further down to earth, as people and nature become as worthy objects of love as the deity. Finally, love becomes the means by which the lover realises her fullest and most authentic nature.

Suspicion at the neatness of this historical narrative may well be warranted, but it works as a device for identifying the key aspects of love that have fed into the way we understand it now. In particular, May is keen to stress the enduring extent to which love has been identified with the divine. Indeed, what we now practise, he argues, is nothing less than a religion of love. Otherwise scientific, secular people still find in love “a taste of the absolute and the eternal that they rigorously deny to any other realm of life”, assenting to Larkin’s line that “What survives of us is love”.

The immortality of love is not the only false accretion of its history May identifies. We also suffer from two other prevalent illusions: that it is unconditional and selfless. The potency of these myths can be explained by the fact that love is an expression of a feeling of “ontological rootedness”. What May means by this unwieldy phrase is that we love what grounds us; that which makes us feel at home with ourselves and the world. When we find such people or things, we believe we love them unconditionally, eternally and selflessly, but in fact, we only love them for as long as they continue to provide this grounding for our existence.

I doubt whether any definition of love can capture its multifaceted nature, but May’s conception is both specific enough to be useful and wide enough to encompass the varieties of forms and objects of love that otherwise seem so disparate, from passion for a football team, through the very different forms of devotion shown to life-partners and children. It also explains why we can love things that otherwise inspire loathing in us, and perhaps, although May does not explore this, why badly matched couples can nonetheless be bound by a kind of pathological love, having got so used to each other’s company that they can no longer imagine life apart.

Whether or not you agree with where it ends up, the trip alone merits the ride. May has a remarkable ability to bring out what is most true and interesting in his sources. He is the only person I have read who has invoked Schopenhauer and made him sound insightful and prescient, rather than absurd and grandiloquent. Perhaps that simply reflects May’s claim that to love well requires skill and tutoring, and the fact that this book is itself a work of love: one which looks for what is best in its subject and, thanks to the wisdom of the lover, finds it.

Julian Baggini is author of ‘The Ego Trick’ (Granta)

Copyright

FT: Book Review - Free Radicals

some of the biggest breakthroughs have comes from ruthless rogues

 

July 8, 2011 10:07 pm

Free Radicals

Review by Clive Cookson

Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, by Michael Brooks, Profile, RRP£12.99, 312 pages

Fraud and data manipulation, suppression of rivals’ research, huge egos, intensive PR campaigns, drug-induced inspiration ... The world of science described by Michael Brooks is far from the image of sober, sedate rectitude long promoted by the scientific establishment.

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Free Radicals is fun to read. Brooks, a professional science writer, capers through the exploits of scores of brilliant and often ruthless rogues – some living, many long dead – who have won Nobel prizes or otherwise pushed science forward. Some of its biggest names turn out to be the dirtiest players.

Albert Einstein, whose name is synonymous with genius, crops up in several chapters – “a perfect example of the character that will produce great science and think nothing of the misdemeanours that such breakthroughs demand,” as Brooks puts it.

The author starts by reminding us of Einstein’s unappealing personal life – among other things making passes at his mistress’s daughter, breaking his promise to give all his Nobel prize money to his wife Mileva, evading tax and abandoning his schizophrenic son to die a “third-class” patient in a mental institution.

Then the book analyses the many “shady moments” in Einstein’s professional life: cherry-picking data to support his theories, appropriating advances made by others and, once he had made his name, using fame shamelessly for further self-advancement.

The equation most closely associated with Einstein, E=mc2, did not come as a surprise to those in the know when he first proposed it in 1905, Brooks claims. And Einstein failed in eight attempts to prove E=mc2 during the next 41 years, though others succeeded – yet he had appropriated the equation as his own and he dismissed attempts to set the record straight, with aggressive assertions of his “priority”.

Although Brooks denies doing his own cherry-picking by focusing on a series of celebrated scientists who blatantly cut corners and promoted their own careers, I do not accept his assertion that such behaviour runs through the whole of science. There may, indeed, be extensive low-level cheating among the scientific grassroots, as Brooks maintains, but to compare this with what happens at the top is like equating the fiddling of expenses among junior commercial staff with serious disregard for business ethics by senior executives.

All we can really conclude, if we accept the accuracy of the stories in Free Radicals, is that brilliance alone is not sufficient to shine in science, any more than in other fields. In science, just as in business, politics, sport and the arts, you also need ambition and self-promotion. It’s very rare to win honours and gain recognition if you’re spending decades quietly in the scientific wilderness.

Charm and charisma help, too. So do persistence and hard work. Honesty is more important in the more open and transparent, and I would say more moral, scientific world of today than it was in the past, though even now really clever deception can get you a long way.

Brooks believes that scientists must let their “secret anarchy” come into the open if research is to advance at the pace society needs to solve an overwhelming set of problems during the 21st century.

He is right to some extent. Scientists have been too quiet for half a century, complying with Winston Churchill’s famous observation that they “should be on tap but not on top”. They need to mobilise, agitate and kick up more of a stink on important issues, as Brooks says.

But encouraging selfish determination to succeed at any price, as exhibited by Newton, Einstein and some other great names of the past, will not help the cause of science, or society.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Book Review - Everything is Obvious

 

The result is a profound confusion in our judgments of where we can predict the future and where we cannot. To most people, brain surgery seems unfathomably complex, while social or business problems seem relatively straightforward; such things are not rocket science, after all. But, as Watts calmly points out, rocket science itself is a perfect case of a relatively easy task: machines the size of small cars are reliably landed on distant planets, while supposedly tractable problems – such as unemployment or crime – prove persistently tricky.

==

July 8, 2011 10:07 pm

Everything is Obvious

Review by James Crabtree

Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails , by Duncan J Watts, Atlantic, RRP£18.99, 352 pages

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao looked supremely confident during his visit to Europe late last month. And so he should. While the west struggles to escape the clutches of the financial crisis, China’s rise has become a byword for quiet efficiency and global ambition. Whether the focus is on plans to lay 30,000km of new railway, build 45 airports or divert 6,000bn gallons of water to the country’s parched north, western leaders can only look on enviously as China’s ruling cadre of engineers cement their reputation as the world’s new master planners.

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• Tretower to Clyro

Yet, for all that, might China’s grand schemes still end in disaster? Duncan Watts thinks so, and has written a fascinating attack on the perils of grandiose planning in both business and politics. Watts is a research scientist at Yahoo and a pioneer of “experimental sociology”, a developing field that uses large online experiments to pick apart complex social phenomena. In Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails, he argues convincingly that our overconfidence in the power of human reasoning in general leads all too often to catastrophic and avoidable errors.

Watts begins by noting the way in which individuals use common sense to fill in the gaps of a baffling world. That this is problematic seems odd initially: common sense is useful, and those who lack it seem hapless. But that, Watts thinks, is just the problem: “bad things happen not because we forget to use our common sense, but because the incredible effectiveness of common sense in solving the problems of everyday life causes us to put more faith in it than it can bear”.

This is partly because we are unaware of the myriad hidden biases that shape our decision-making. Experiments show that shoppers are more likely to buy German wine if German music is playing in the background, for instance. We process data in equally skewed ways: information that supports existing views is welcomed, while that which does not is rejected – a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. More generally, the human mind is adept at thinking up explanations for what it observes, and in turn convincing itself that these explanations must be correct.

These problems grow greater in the world of complex social and economic systems – meaning those whose outcomes are unpredictable and non-linear, and which “emerge” from the interplay of their parts. The snag is that almost everything that matters – from firms and families to political parties and whole economies – turns out to be part of just such a complex system. And it is this that leads Watts to be so deeply pessimistic about the ability of experts to predict the future, and to develop plans accordingly.

The result is a profound confusion in our judgments of where we can predict the future and where we cannot. To most people, brain surgery seems unfathomably complex, while social or business problems seem relatively straightforward; such things are not rocket science, after all. But, as Watts calmly points out, rocket science itself is a perfect case of a relatively easy task: machines the size of small cars are reliably landed on distant planets, while supposedly tractable problems – such as unemployment or crime – prove persistently tricky.

Even so, most experts and analysts (and perhaps even a few journalists) soldier on, content in the delusion that they can understand the complex chains of causality that lead to a pop song becoming a hit, or a government policy flopping or flying. In turn, it is this feeling that breeds the overconfidence that results in what Watts calls “extreme planning failures”, ranging from disastrous public housing programmes to catastrophic corporate mergers – and which could yet see China’s engineers also head towards hubris and disaster.

Everything is Obvious is engagingly written and sparkles with counter-intuitive insights. Its modesty about what can and cannot be known also compares favourably with other “big idea” books. But it is his message about planning that is especially chastening, given that the greatest challenges of the global era – from the growth of China to climate change – call more than ever for grand plans.

Watts doesn’t avoid this entirely, and has intriguing thoughts on the potential of what he calls “measure and react” strategies. The high street fashion chain Zara is one example: here managers cheerfully admit that they have little idea what customers will buy. Instead they carefully monitor sales, and use speedy supply chains to react accordingly. Drawing on his sociological background and his day job at Yahoo, Watts is also excited by the potential of internet experiments to road-test policies.

Even so, Watts’ views on the poverty of planning remain excessively fatalistic, mostly because he fails to weigh up the relative risks of action and inaction. China’s leaders will make mistakes, some of which will turn into disasters. Yet given the scale of the challenges they face, such grim outcomes are probably more likely if they sit on their hands. A better path would be to adopt the experimental techniques Watts promotes, and the modest attitude his book embodies, to lessen the risk of failure for those large-scale planning tasks that cannot be avoided. Supremely confident though he might be, it is a lesson even Wen would do well to take on board.

James Crabtree is the FT’s comment editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

ST: Oh, for the good old days of sex and passion

Think

Home > Think > Story

Jul 17, 2011

Oh, for the good old days of sex and passion

By Erica Jong

Lost piquancy

Everywhere, there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom.

Is sex less piquant when it is not forbidden? Sex itself might not be dead, but it seems sexual passion is on life support.

 

What could be more eternal than sexuality? The fog of longing, the obsession with the loved one's voice, smell, touch. Sex is discombobulating and distracting; it makes you immune to money, politics and family. And sometimes, I think the younger generation wants to give it up.

People always ask me what happened to sex since Fear Of Flying. While editing an anthology of women's sexual writing called Sugar In My Bowl last year, I was fascinated to see, among younger women, a nostalgia for 1950s-era attitudes towards sexuality. The older writers in my anthology are raunchier than the younger ones. The younger writers are obsessed with motherhood and monogamy.

It makes sense. Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called They Had Sex So I Didn't Have To. Her friend Julie Klam wrote Let's Not Talk About Sex.

Novelist Elisa Albert said: 'Sex is over-exposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.'

Meg Wolitzer, who wrote The Uncoupling, a fictional retelling of Lysistrata, described 'a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex'.

Lee Min Jin, a contributor to the anthology, suggested that 'for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective'.

Generalising about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere, there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom. Is sex less piquant when it is not forbidden? Sex itself might not be dead, but it seems sexual passion is on life support.

The Internet obliges by offering simulated sex without intimacy, without identity and without fear of infection. Risky behaviour can be devoid of risk - unless of course you use your real name and you are an elected official.

Not only did we fail to corrupt our daughters, we gave them a sterile way to have sex, electronically. Clearly, the lure of Internet sex is the lack of involvement. We want to keep the chaos of sex trapped in a device we think we can control.

Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter's seems to be control. Is this just a predictable swing of the pendulum or a new passion for order in an ever more chaotic world? A little of both. We idealised open marriage; our daughters are back to idealising monogamy. We were unable to extinguish the lust for propriety.

Punishing the sexual woman is a hoary, antique meme found from Jane Eyre to The Scarlet Letter to Sex And The City, where the lustiest woman ended up with breast cancer. Sex for women is dangerous. Sex for women leads to madness in attics, cancer and death by fire. Better to soul cycle and write cookbooks. Better to give up men and sleep with one's children. Better to wear one's baby in a man-distancing sling and breast-feed at all hours so your mate knows your breasts don't belong to him.

Does this mean there are no sexual taboos left? Not really. Sex between older people is the new unmentionable - the thing that makes our kids yell out: 'Ewww - gross!' You won't find many movies or television shows about 70-year-olds falling in love, though they might be doing it in real life.

The backlash against sex has lasted longer than the sexual revolution itself. Both birth control and abortion are under attack in many states. Women's health care is considered expendable in budgetary negotiations. And the right wing only wants to champion unborn children. (Those already born are presumed able to fend for themselves.)

Lust for control fuels our current obsession with the deficit, our rejection of passion, our undoing of women's rights. How far will we go in destroying women's equality before a new generation of feminists wakes up? This time, we hope that the feminists will be of both genders and that men will understand how much equality benefits them.

Different though we are, men and women were designed to be allies, to fill out each other's limitations, to raise children together and give them different models of adulthood. We have often botched attempts to do this, but there is valour in trying to get it right, to heal the world and the rift between the sexes, to pursue the healing of home and by extension the healing of the earth.

Physical pleasure binds two people together and lets them endure the inevitable pains and losses of being human. When sex becomes boring, something deeper is usually the problem - resentment or envy or lack of honesty. So I worry about the sudden craze for Lysistrata's solution. Why reject honey for vinegar? Don't we all deserve sugar in our bowls?

New York Times

Erica Jong is the author of 22 books, including Fear Of Flying, and edited the new anthology Sugar In My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex.

ST: 'Man, pay more attention to women'

Think

Home > Think > Story

Jul 17, 2011

'Man, pay more attention to women'

Retired gynaecologist wants more done for women and puts her money where her mouth is

By Wong Kim Hoh, Senior Writer

Women's woman

'In this society, everything is men, men, men. So I come along and say, 'Pay more attention to women.' I'm a woman, I would like to have more done for women. It's as simple as that.'

Dr Oon Chiew Seng

Dr Oon has pledged a generous gift to NUS, which used it to set up a medical fellowship in her name to fund research in women's health and ageing science. -- ST PHOTO: SAMUEL HE

 

Dr Oon Chiew Seng is 95, has a brisk gait and reads without glasses.

She is also sharp as a tack, and does not shy from calling a spade a spade. Then again, one would not have expected anything less of a gutsy trailblazer.

She was the first gynaecologist to go into private practice, in 1959. She founded and ran Singapore's first nursing home for dementia patients, the Apex Harmony Lodge, in 1995.

And earlier this year, she pledged a generous gift to the National University of Singapore which used it to set up a medical fellowship in her name at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. The Oon Chiew Seng Fellowship will fund research in women's health and ageing science.

'In this society, everything is men, men, men. So I come along and say, 'Pay more attention to women',' says the straight-talking nonagenarian in an interview at NUS.

'I'm a woman, I would like to have more done for women. It's as simple as that.'

The way she sees it, 'with medicine, plenty more can and needs to be done'.

'There's plenty that we do not know, so resources should be constantly channelled towards that,' says the retired gynaecologist who hopes the fellowship will not only yield new research, but also train medical professionals whose work will have a positive influence on the environment.

The fellowship is especially significant in the light of Singapore's ageing population. By 2030, 19 per cent of the little red dot's population will be aged 65 and above, up from around 9 per cent last year.

The elderly are also more susceptible to dementia, which currently afflicts around 20,000 Singaporeans, a number which is predicted to grow to 45,000 a decade from now.

The first Oon fellow is Dr Reshma Merchant, NUS' Head of Division of General Medicine, who is researching the relationship between dementia and diabetes.

The fellowship is not Dr Oon's first gift to NUS. Over the years, she has - in keeping with her belief in the importance of medical research and education - made regular contributions to the institution.

The youngest of 10 children of a Penang-born rice and pepper trader, she studied medicine at her elder brother's insistence.

'I was already doing nursing then but he wouldn't have it. He wanted me to be a doctor because it had better prospects,' says Dr Oon whose father died when she was only 13.

'But I think it was because he also wanted to be a doctor himself too. But my father had cabinets of books on Chinese medicine and he wouldn't have any of his children studying Western medicine.'

She adds humorously: 'My brother also couldn't be a lawyer because lawyers tell lies, you see. So he studied engineering; he was a Queen's scholar.'

So Dr Oon redid her Senior Cambridge examinations and studied Latin - 'very stupid, you know, because there are very few Latin words in medicine' - to qualify for a place at the Medical College of Singapore.

World War II, however, broke out soon after, and in 1941, her brother packed her off to India where her tenacity steered her through a lack of money and other obstacles to complete her medical studies. She returned to Singapore in 1946, and two years later, graduated with a Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery from the Medical College.

She cut her teeth as a houseman in Kandang Kerbau Hospital, and soon made her mark as an outstanding gynaecologist, sometimes doing as many as 10 caesarean sections in a day.

She recalls an occasion when she did not sleep for 48 hours when a patient developed complications.

'She started bleeding after delivery, and the blood would not clot. Luckily I remembered her husband worked in the Royal Malayan Navy.'

Dr Oon told him to round up scores of his colleagues to donate blood. They did.

'The woman walked out of the hospital alive. It's simple things like saving a life which make what you do worthwhile.'

Feisty and confident, the independent spirit - who used to raise eyebrows by keeping racehorses in the 1960s and 1970s - has never let her gender get in the way of what she wants to do.

As a young doctor, she never 'allowed any male doctors to bully me'.

'If I'm capable, why should I let them bully me? I believe in fighting for my rights,' she says simply.

'I don't make it a point to remember, but I've gone against the system many times.'

This includes becoming the first gynaecologist to go into private practice when she could not see eye to eye with her boss at the hospital.

She ran it for more than 30 years and retired in 1991, when she was already 75.

But not one to rest on her laurels, the good doctor - who was the chairman of the building fund and a member of the medical committee at the Sree Narayana Mission Home for the Aged - decided to focus her energies on helping the elderly.

She went on a fact-finding mission in Australia after a talk with the Ministry of Health informed her that there was a need for a home for elderly dementia patients.

She opened the Apex Harmony Lodge in Pasir Ris in 1995, and was actively involved in its operations until she stepped down as chairman earlier this year.

The outspoken woman speaks fondly of the patients at the home but is less enamoured of their families.

'Sometimes you have to beg them to visit the patients. The trouble is people don't care about the elderly. They are too engrossed in themselves. If they cared more about the elderly and spent more time with them, they won't end up in Apex.'

Asked if she worries about falling victim to dementia herself, Dr Oon - who had boyfriends in her youth but never got married - scoffs and replies: 'Fortunately for me, I never worry about the future. I don't think about miserable things. Why think about things which may not happen?

'And if they happen, just deal with them lah. What else do you do, sit down and cry?'

She would rather spend her time on more worthwhile pursuits.

Like organising an annual gathering for members of the Oon clan who are scattered all over the globe, taking daily walks at the Botanic Gardens and playing mahjong with friends a few times a week.

'I think it's good to gamble, you know,' she pronounces.

'Nobody likes to lose when they gamble. You want to win and that creates a positive attitude.'

Dr Oon's sterling work ethic and unwavering commitment to community service have won her a slew of accolades, including the Public Service Medal, the NUS Distinguished Alumni Service Award, as well as this year's Her World Woman Of the Year special award.

Her nephew, Dr Oon Chong Hau, 64, and an internal medicine specialist, says: 'Her belief in ethical values, in conducting one's life correctly and in helping people is an example to others.'

At the Her World Woman Of the Year dinner earlier this year, Dr Oon told the audience when she accepted her award: 'People have asked me whether I have arrived and am satisfied with my achievements.

'I asked them, 'Arrive where?' Life is not a race, to me there is no finishing line. It is a journey which I will complete in my own time, and at my own pace.'

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

FT: India’s men see skincare as fair game

ironies of life - dark wanna get fair; fair wanna get dark

==

June 26, 2011 5:44 pm

India’s men see skincare as fair game

By Amy Kazmin in New Delhi

Young Indian men are paying more attention to how they look, moving away from a traditional emphasis on brains over brawn

It is not an uncommon formula for an Indian television commercial: a popular Bollywood star endorsing a cream that promises to lighten olive-toned Indian skin – except the star is muscled hunk John Abraham and the fairness cream he’s touting, Garnier PowerLight, targets not women but young Indian men.

India’s traditional ideals of beauty have long placed high value on fair skin, which has fuelled a $466m a year business in creams such as Unilever’s market leader Fair & Lovely which ostensibly help women lighten their skin. From childhood, Indian women are bombarded with the message that fairer skin can bring a desirable husband and the job of their dreams.

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But now, Garnier, part of the French beauty products group L’Oréal , and rivals including Unilever; Germany’s Beiersdorf, the maker of Nivea; and India’s own Emami are trying to persuade Indian men that their skin tone also matters – and can be lightened with special fairness creams designed just for them.

It is part of a widening campaign to promote male personal care and grooming products as young Indian men pay ever more attention to how they look, moving away from a traditional emphasis on brains over brawn.

Dheeraj Sinha, chief strategy officer at Bates 141, the Asia-based marketing and branding company says in the past, “when it came to marriage, if you were a boy of a certain caste or creed, and you had a sexy job in the government, you would be picked up, no matter how you looked”.

But now, “with marriages that are love-based rather than arranged, men need a woman’s approval, so the need to look good has gone up in a big way,”.

India’s market for male personal care and grooming products is still small relative to the women’s beauty market and those for men’s products in more affluent Asian countries such as China or Thailand. Euromonitor puts sales in India of dedicated men’s grooming products at just $500m a year, of which two-thirds is razors, blades and shaving foams and the rest specialised deodorants, hair care and skin care products.

Experts estimate that India’s overall male personal grooming products market is growing at about 15 per cent a year. Sales of men’s fairness cream are just $44m a year – a tiny fraction of the size of the women’s market – but their sales are growing faster than any other product category, at a blistering 40 per cent annually.

“Fairness has become a cultural ideal of ‘good-looking’” both for women and men, says Mr Sinha.

Suggestive ads earn conservatives’ ire

Getting the message right for male grooming products in India can be a minefield.

Multinational Unilever, homegrown pharmaceutical and personal care company Paras, and Calcutta-based McNroe have all aroused the ire of India’s conservative political establishment with highly sexualised television commercials for their men’s deodorants.

Authorities say the advertisements – which all convey the message of “use our product, get the girl (in bed)” – have crossed the boundaries of good taste and decency by “tickling male libidinous instincts”. The ministry of information and broadcasting has made clear its desire to see such ads off the air.

But while the self-regulating Advertising Standards Council of India admits the ads have generated many complaints, it says it has found that many of them are “not objectionable”, and that most air late at night, “outside family viewing”.

Deodorant use among Indian men is among the lowest in Asia, with product penetration at less than 10 per cent. With such a vast potential market, deodorant manufacturers and sellers look likely to be tickling men’s libidinous instincts for the foreseeable future.

In their desire for a fairer skin tone, Indian men are part of a pan-Asia trend. “It’s not an Indian phenomenon alone,” says Raghav Gupta, a principal at Booz & Co in New Delhi, noting that in China, Thailand and Malaysia the men’s fairness markets are “very large”.

In China, the men’s skincare market is estimated at $311m annually – about seven times the size of India’s. L’Oréal says sales in China of its Men Expert product line now exceed sales in western Europe and are growing at three times those of women’s products in China.

“Chinese guys have no taboo,” says Alexis Perakis-Valat, chief executive of L’Oréal in China. “They are pragmatic and clear that looking good perhaps boosts your self-esteem and helps you in your everyday life, so why not take advantage?”

While products specific to them are relatively new, Indian men’s pursuit of fairness is not. Analysts reckon about 20 per cent of Unilever’s Fair & Lovely cream has always been used by men borrowing from sisters or wives.

In 2005, Calcutta-based Emami broke new ground with a fairness cream targeting men, enlisting Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan as brand ambassador. Today, Fair & Handsome retains a commanding 70 per cent share of the Indian men’s fairness cream market.

Unilever struck back with Fair & Lovely Menz Active and its Vaseline Men’s skin whitening cream, face wash and scrub, while Nivea has also introduced an array of men’s whitening products.

Analysts expect the sector to remain highly competitive as rising incomes allow more men to splurge on such purchases. “The aspiration to look better has been there,” says Mr Gupta. “Now the ability is catching up.”

Additional reporting by Louise Lucas

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Letters - Economists Have Never Heard of Sex

 

Economists have never heard of sex

From Mr Philip Wood.

Sir, One question posed by Alan Beattie is whether lawyers or economists actually rule the world (“Take a deep breath, economists, it’s time for the lawyers”, June 18). The real question is, who should rule the world? I think economists have a lot going for them. But there are some crucial things missing.

First, although economists have vaguely heard of the rule of law, they are not quite sure how it fits into the metrics. They are primarily interested in function, efficiency and the weighing of costs and benefits.

Second, lawyers from ancient times have been close to emotions and how they should be tamed. As to economists, when John Maynard Keynes referred to “animal spirits” or Alan Greenspan to “irrational exuberance”, these were considered flashes of rare profundity. Rational economists adhere to the notion that we are not stupid, never panic and never do anything out of rage, envy, lust or greed. Economists have never heard of sex.

You can see these contrasts symbolised in the works of the titans of the two disciplines. Compare, for example, the limited scope of the code of conduct enunciated by one of the great heroes of economists, Adam Smith, with the code of one of the first major lawyers, the man with his 10 bullet points on the top of a mountain.

So, as regards the rightful rulers of the world, my money is on the lawyers.

Philip Wood,

Shere, Surrey, UK

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

FT: Mumbai - vertical challenge

Vertical challenge

By JDH Reddy

The Dharavi slum in Mumbai

Everyone in Mumbai can point out billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s 27-story residential skyscraper in the heart of the city, and even the poor look upon it with something like pride. With its helipads, palatial reception rooms and private car-servicing facility neatly stacked into the sky, it reflects the key dynamic driving property development in Mumbai today: in the world’s most crowded city, with an average population density of 20,038 per sq km, verticality is seen as both a necessity and a virtue.

While the rich love high-rises for their glamour and views, the more than 8m people who live in Mumbai’s slums are being forced into vertical living, as powerful property developers seek profits amid the city’s desperate shortage of land. Although in principle the redevelopment of slums offers residents better living conditions, it has become intensely controversial as many are left homeless and corruption runs rampant.

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Mumbai’s slums have existed for decades. Most dwellings are built with cement blocks and have electricity and running water. What residents lack is title to the land beneath their homes – and proper sewers. As the city has mushroomed in recent decades, the slums have spread and become denser, and many occupy potentially prime locations. In April, a newspaper estimated the value of the land covered by Mumbai’s slums at nearly $24bn, which begs the question – why can’t market forces make the slums disappear?

More than half of Mumbai’s population of 12.4m are slum-dwellers. They are working poor and lower-middle class, by no means destitute, but unable to afford Mumbai’s sky-high rents. Although they are poor relative to buyers of luxury high-rises, they have something else that counts: the slums are known locally as “vote banks”, since whoever wins the slums has a hefty block of the electorate in the bank.

The tremendous density of slums is the result of a bargain: residents accept intense crowding in exchange for affordability and the all-important factor of being close to their jobs. In slums, every inch of space is used. No space is devoted to roads or parking, only footpaths, and some workshops double as bunkhouses at night.

“There is no way to rebuild the slums and attain the same density, because in a planned development you have to build roads,” says Matias Echanove of the Institute for Urbanology, an NGO in Mumbai’s biggest slum. Many slum residents walk to work, and indeed work in the slums themselves. “If slum-dwellers were rehoused elsewhere and they had to commute, public transport would collapse,” Echanove says. “Slums are pedestrian zones and place very little load on public infrastructure.”

Dhobi Ghat, where laundrymen handwash clothes in the open air

India saw a wave of slum demolitions in the 1970s during the Emergency period, and the political backlash was strong enough to prevent them for nearly 20 years. Then, vote-bank logic combined with pressure on city land, moved the government of Maharashtra state in 1995 to establish the principle that, if a slum were “rehabilitated” – ie razed and replaced with high-rises – every person who could prove residence would get a 269 sq ft flat with its own bathroom in a new building on the site.

Things have not turned out as planned. “Slum-dwellers want to move into flats, but the redevelopment needs to be done with community involvement,” says Chandrashekhar Prabhu, an architect who has been involved with several slum rehabilitation schemes. Since 1996, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) has approved more than 1,000 projects. Yet the number of court cases challenging slum rehabilitation nearly equals the number of projects.

“Every week there is a new judgment handed down, and they all go against slum-dwellers,” says Mihir Desai, a senior advocate before the Mumbai High Court who has taken many housing rights cases. Earlier this year Mumbai newspapers carried stories of residents of the Golibar slum, home to more than 100,000 people, facing down bulldozers that had come to demolish their houses. Hordes of police with riot gear protected the bulldozers. A growing social protest movement, the National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements, argues that slum rehabilitation is equivalent to forced displacement by dams and Special Economic Zones.

The problem is that the interests of the parties don’t coincide as neatly as assumed. Most slums are on public land. The SRA scheme permits private developers as well as slum residents to benefit from its privatisation. More apartments than are needed to resettle slum-dwellers are built, which are then sold on the open market. Typically, these are on the same plot as the “rehab” flats but have no windows on the side of their less affluent neighbours.

The Price of Progress

Slum solutions

For a time, the World Bank advocated “rehabilitation in situ” of slums: existing slums should be retrofitted with proper plumbing and electricity. However, this is expensive and does not generate profit, so funds have to come from government or donors.

The Maharashtra state SRA scheme promises rehousing on the same site for those in continuous residence since 1995. This restriction may sink the scheme now that only a minority is eligible, but it is popular with developers and government because the sale of extra flats covers the costs and leaves a profit.

India’s national urban development plan proposes a new scheme: construction of a new dwelling for every one destroyed. This is popular with housing activists because it recognises the state’s duty to rehouse people made homeless by redevelopment.But there is no promise that the new houses will be on the same site as those being replaced, and the details of financing are unclear.

Potential profits are high enough to attract international investors, along with a predictable mix of unscrupulous builders, corrupt politicians and local mafias. To win SRA approval for projects, developers have to get the consent of 70 per cent of those eligible for rehousing. This has led to a blizzard of court cases in which residents of the slums accuse developers of bribery, forgery and extortion in getting their consent. The developer of the Golibar slum, for example, is facing charges of forgery.

Another hitch is that not all residents are eligible for new flats, only those who can prove continuous residence since 1995. Eligibility divides the slum-dwellers into two groups: those who stand to gain from redevelopment, and those who lose. The eligible are a minority that grows smaller every year. Ineligible residents may resist redevelopment by any means possible to save the homes they have. If they lose this struggle, they are banished to other slums or distant, jobless suburbs.

In the policy discussions about slum redevelopment, historical experience is overlooked. Many of Britain’s post-second world war high-rises quickly became ghettos. There, the problem was architects and politicians who overlooked social context, creating neighbourhoods cut off from the rest of the city and devoid of jobs, shops or appealing public spaces. A similar dynamic of architectural idealism failing to take account of economic needs occurred in Paris: Le Corbusier’s modernist vision of replacing the chaos and squalor of working-class neighbourhoods with giant blocks of flats found expression in the banlieues – but, isolated from the rest of Paris and devoid of employment, many banlieues intended as middle-class housing are now warehouses for immigrants and incubators of riots. In Robert Moses’s New York, liberal use of the term “slum” and muscular eminent domain laws led to the destruction of thousands of low-rise residential buildings to make way for expressways and multi-storey public housing, both of which depress the property values in their vicinity.

In today’s Mumbai, the new multi-storey housing is on the same sites as the old and is supposed to accommodate businesses. But maintenance costs – for example, fees to cover the operation of lifts – can mean those resettled can’t afford to live in their “free” flats. There are no specifications for quality, aside from the size of each flat.

Finding a solution is not easy. The new chief minister of Maharashtra met with housing activists in April and promised to do away with “eligibility” for rehabilitation and to inaugurate a policy of constructing a residence for every dwelling destroyed.

At least one part of the government bureaucracy did not get the message. In May, bulldozers returned to the Golibar slum, demolishing 20 houses and prompting Gandhian activist Medha Patkar to go on hunger strike. After eight days, the government once again promised implementation of a “house for a house” scheme. It now appears to have gone back on that promise.

Such confusion reflects how the Maharashtra government is caught between the massive votes of the slum-dwellers and the massive capital of the developers. Prabhu’s architecture office is located in a slum redevelopment project that was completed without social unrest or litigation. “It works if you put the community in charge, not a developer,” he says. “But developers bribe community decision-makers, who then oppose community-led redevelopment.” The power of capital, like the slums themselves, cannot be ignored.

JDH Reddy is an anti-discrimination lawyer specialising in international law

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

FT: IEA makes bold move to lower oil prices

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IEA makes bold move to lower oil prices

By FT reporters

For three months, dozens of senior oil officials from the US, South Korea, Germany and Japan worked secretly to execute what was one of the most daring moves by the International Energy Agency since its creation in 1974.

The mission was, on the surface, relatively simple: to replace the loss of production from Libya with oil from western countries’ emergency petroleum reserves.

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Click to enlarge

“The key question was the loss of Libya’s high quality, light, sweet oil,” says a senior European industry official involved in the conversations.

In reality, however, the task was a tricky and bold move – one only executed twice before. It required delicate diplomatic manoeuvring. Washington, for example, needed to be sure that Saudi Arabia and others such as Kuwait would not not respond by tightening supply to push prices back up again.

The White House masterminded the plan, officials said, but others rapidly joined as plus-$100 a barrel oil prices hurt the global economy and pushed up inflation across the world. The European Central Bank, for example, raised interest rates in April, citing higher inflation – a point which will not have been lost on European governments.

The International Energy Agency had been tracking the precarious situation in the oil market since February, as Libyan oil production had collapsed from a pre-crisis level of 1.6m barrels a day, to just 200,000 b/d by early April.

Washington took the initiative later that month after senior White House officials convinced President Barack Obama that a partial release of the country’s strategic petroleum reserves was necessary. Officials argued that the shortfall caused by the civil war in Libya was hurting the global economy. Other countries largely agreed.

“The situation in Libya wasn’t causing huge supply problems, but was driving up the oil price,” a government official from a European country says. “And the macro-economic arguments about the danger of this trend made sense to us.”

Former and current officials said that the US, Japan and the European countries slowly convinced themselves that the situation ticked all the necessary boxes to justify a release of oil from the reserves: there was a large disruption in supply, no prospect of an increase in output by Opec, demand was set to increase over the summer and the economy was hurting.

Libya produces one of the most sought after crude oils in the world due to its low-sulphur content. This makes it cheaper to refine into petrol and diesel. Even if Saudi Arabia moved to increase its output, the kingdom could not match the quality gap.

As early as May 11, Mr Obama telephoned King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to “discuss bilateral issues”, according to the Saudi press agency.

The president was intensely involved in the discussions about the impact of the Middle East turmoil. Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council, headed eight separate cabinet-level meetings on the issue during the last four months, taking their assessments to the president on multiple occasions.

In early May, Mr Obama dispatched a team of senior advisers to the region, including Michael Froman, White House deputy national security adviser, Daniel Poneman, deputy energy secretary, and Neal Wolin, deputy treasury secretary, for talks with Riyadh, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

Washington found the Saudis willing to ensure adequate supply.

The IEA nonetheless decided to send a clear message to the market that it was ready to act. On 19 May, at the conclusion of a regular meeting of its board of governors in Paris, the agency said: “We are prepared to consider using all tools that are at the disposal of IEA member countries.” The statement was interpreted as a clear message about the release of the oil reserves. It added, in a direct plea to Opec, that there was a “clear and urgent need” for additional supplies of oil.

On 26 May, the G8 leading economies met in Deauville, France, and President Obama put the issue on the table and lobbied the group. Yet most countries were confident that, at the last minute, Saudi Arabia would convince its fellow Opec members to increase production and resolve the problem. A key concern was political: western nations wanted to avoid a confrontation with Opec and also the perception they were acting for pure economic – and electoral – reasons.

The hope, however, turned into despair as Algeria, Iran, Venezuela and others rejected a Saudi-backed plan for an increase in Opec’s oil output at a meeting on 8 June.

The collapse of the Opec meeting set in train a marathon round of multilateral meetings and bilateral contacts that culminated on Tuesday when the US, Japan, the UK and South Korea requested the IEA to release the reserves.

Nobuo Tanaka, the IEA chief, issued a formal petition on Tuesday, giving 48 hours to the 28 members countries to decide whether to release the stocks. The green light arrived by the 1pm deadline on Thursday. Two hours later, the agency made public it would release 60m barrels of oil during the following 30 days. Seconds later, oil prices plunged.

Reporting by By Javier Blas and Sylvia Pfeifer in London, Anna Fifield in Washington, Peggy Hollinger in Paris, Gerrit Wiesmann in Berlin, Ralph Atkins in Frankfurt, Abeer Allam in Riyadh, Mure Dickie in Tokyo and Leslie Hook in Beijing

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools