Generation X - Not just a Punk band fronted by Billy Idol

In preparing something to write academically, one them that I wanted to explore was knowledge transmission, the role of 'generations', why certainly knowledge/theories is revived and becomes important (Power/Knowledge/Authority Mechanism) and why certain knowledge/theories are forgotten ('Generational Memory Loss').

I thought some of this might be original, but as you often find, many of the ideas had already been elaborated.

In researching, this I came across the term 'Generation X' which is often used these days in describing the generation which comes after the 'Baby Boom' generation.

I had wrongly assumed that I was a 'Baby Boomer'. FURTHER research showed that under the criteria used by people who dreamt up these terms that I wasn't I was the FIRST OF THE 'GENERATION Xers'.

THE 'OFFICIAL' CUT -OFF FOR DIVIDING 'BABY-BOOM' GENERATION FROM THE 'GENERATION X' GENERATION IS 1961....I WAS BORN IN 1962.

Many of the problems that I have experienced in my life (not to mention attitudes etc.) were exactly those described, in fact PREDICTED by those demographers/historians who set up these criteria.

I am relieved to say, that from an academic point of view, having read this stuff, there is still a lot that I can add....

...I am also aware that these sorts of classifications are an oversimplification which carries its own problems...

BUT NEVERTHELESS, THERE ARE STILL SOME VERY INTERESTING THINGS TO BE FOUND IIN THIS LITERATURE.



Early London Generation 'X'er - Preparing for a career in Investment Banking... and after an HR Outplacer suggested he consider 'Community Charity Work'.

No 'Clash!' there! No future...Destroy...Gob on you



______________________________________

Here is the Wikipedia article on 'Generation X':

Generation XGeneration X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western post-World War II baby boom ended. [1] While there is no universally agreed upon time frame, [2] the term generally includes people born in the 1960s and 70s, ending in the late 1970s to early 80s, usually not later than 1982.[3][4][5] The term had also been used in different times and places for various different subcultures or countercultures since the 1950s.[6]

Contents

1 Origin
2 Date range
3 The "13th Generation"
4 Generation X in the United States
5 Generation X in Canada
6 See also
7 Notes
8 External links

Origin

The term Generation X was coined by the Magnum photographer Robert Capa in the early 1950s. He would use it later as a title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately after the Second World War. The project first appeared in "Picture Post" (UK) and "Holiday" (USA) in 1953. Describing his intention, Capa said 'We named this unknown generation, The Generation X, and even in our first enthusiasm we realised that we had something far bigger than our talents and pockets could cope with'.[7] Author John Ulrich explains that, "Since then, "Generation X" has always signified a group of young people, seemingly without identity, who face an uncertain, ill-defined (and perhaps hostile) future. Subsequent appearances of the term in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s narrowed the referent for "Generation X" from Capa's global generation to specific sets of primarily white, male, working class British youth sub-cultures, from the spiffy mods and their rivals the rockers, to the more overtly negationist punk subculture." [6]
The term was used in a 1964 study of British youth by Jane Deverson. Deverson was asked by Woman's Own magazine to interview teenagers of the time. The study revealed a generation of teenagers who "sleep together before they are married, were not taught to believe in God as 'much', dislike the Queen, and don't respect parents." Because of these controversial findings, the piece was deemed unsuitable for the magazine. Deverson, in an attempt to save her research, worked with Hollywood correspondent Charles Hamblett to create a book about the study. Hamblett decided to name it Generation X.[8]

The term was popularized by Canadian author Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, concerning young adults during the late 1980s and their lifestyles. While Coupland's book helped to popularize the phrase "Generation X," in a 1989 magazine article[9] he erroneously attributed the term to English musician Billy Idol. In fact, Idol had been a member of the punk band Generation X from 1976–1981, which was named after Deverson and Hamblett's 1965 sociology book—a copy of which was owned by Idol's mother.[10]

In the U.S. Generation X was originally referred to as the "baby bust" generation because of the drop in the birth rate following the baby boom.[11]

Date range
The exact date range that constitutes Generation X is the subject of diverging opinions. Part of the variance comes from slightly differing definitions of what exactly Generation X is. Geography can also influence date ranges. Another problem stems from the difficulty in exactly defining a generation by birth year, as Fran Kick explains, "please understand that there are no hard and fast lines that occur between December 31st of one year and January 1st of the next. More often than not, it's as shift that occurs over three to five years, maybe more depending on who you ask." [12]Most sources cite birth years throughout the 1960s and 70s. Some sources cite a start toward the mid 1960s. Some cite an end date before the end of the 1970s. Others cite an end in the early 1980s; 1981 is a common end date, but some sources show slightly later end dates.[5]
The "13th Generation"

In the 1991 book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe call this generation the "13th Generation" and define the birth years as 1961 to 1981. 1970, the approximate mid-point of the "13th Generation", had the lowest birth rate of this period.

According to the authors, Generation X is "the 13th generation" to be familiar with the flag of the United States (counting back to the peers of Benjamin Franklin).[3] The label was also chosen because, according to their generational theory, it is considered a "Reactive" or "Nomad" generation, composed of those who were children during a spiritual awakening.

Older generations generally have negative perceptions of Reactive generations—whose members tend to be pragmatic and perceptive, savvy but amoral, more focused on money than on art[13] -- and the use of 13 is also intended to associate this perception with the negative connotations of that number.
The authors highlight this negative perception by noting the popularity of "devil-child" movies, wherein children are portrayed as malevolent protagonists (e.g. Rosemary's Baby[14]), released soon after the generation's first members were born.[15]

Generation X in the United States
Individuals considered to be within Generation X were born, and grew up during the later years of, and in the decade following the Vietnam War. They are most often linked to the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.[16] Coming of age after the Vietnam War had ended, their political experiences and cultural perspective were shaped by the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall, and a series of US economic calamities such as the 1973 oil crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the early 1980's recession, Black Monday (1987) and the savings and loan crisis - instilling a sense of economic uncertainty and a reduced expectation of long term fidelity between employers and employees.[citation needed] Growing up in a historical span of relative geopolitical peace for the US, this generation saw the inception of the home computer, the rise of videogames, cable television and the Internet as a tool for social and commercial purposes. Other attributes identified with this demographic are peaks in U.S. urban decay, the AIDS epidemic, the War on Drugs, the Dot-com bubble, the New York City blackout of 1977, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra Affair, Desert Storm, the rise and fall of disco, 1980s rock "hair bands" such as Motley Crue and Bon Jovi, new wave, techno and punk rock, gangsta rap, heavy metal, 1990s grunge/alternative rock bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and the hip hop culture. Along with early members of Generation Y, Generation Xers are sometimes referred to as the MTV Generation.[citation needed]

Compared with previous generations, Generation X represents a more heterogeneous generation, exhibiting great variety. They are diverse in such aspects as race, class, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.[17]

Often the children of divorced parents,[citation needed] change is more the rule for the people of Generation X than the exception.[citation needed] Unlike their parents who challenged leaders with an intent to replace them, Generation X tend to ignore leaders.[18]

The US Census Bureau cites Generation X as statistically holding the highest education levels when looking at age group (bloc): US Census Bureau, in their 2009 Statistical Abstract.[citation needed] (Also see Education Statistics Canada, 2001 Census.)[citation needed]

In economics, a study (done by Pew Charitable Trusts, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Urban Institute) challenged the notion that each generation will be better off than the one that preceded it.[19] The study, 'Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?" focuses on the income of males 30-39 in 2004 (those born April, 1964 – March, 1974) and is based on Census/BLS CPS March supplement data.[20] The study, which was released on May 25, 2007, emphasized that in real dollars, this generation's men made less (by 12%) than their fathers had at that same age in 1974, thus reversing a historical trend. The study also suggests that per year increases in the portion of father/son family household income generated by fathers/sons have slowed (from an average of 0.9% to 0.3%), barely keeping pace with inflation, though increases in overall father/son family household income are progressively higher each year because more women are entering the workplace, contributing to family household income.[21]

Generation X in Canada
Generation X in Canada has been defined by Canadian economist and demographer David Foot in his book Boom Bust & Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift as those born 1961-1966 [22]. Those born between the periods of 1947-1966 were the Baby Boomers, where in Canada they were the largest boom of the industrialized world (relative to population)[23]. This large boom complicated the job market for the upcoming generation, Generation X.[24]


See also
List of generations
Baby Boomers
Generation Y
Notes
1.^ Stephey, M.J. (2008-04-16). "Gen-X: The Ignored Generation?". Time. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1731528,00.html. Retrieved 2010-05-03.
2.^ Encyclopedia of Identity By Ronald L. Jackson, II
3.^ a b Strauss, William & Howe, Neil. Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. Perennial, 1992 (Reprint). ISBN 0-688-11912-3 p. 324
4.^
Shin, Annys (2008-01-03). "Non-Toxic Tots". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022903658_pf.html. Retrieved 2010-09-28.
5.^ a b Carlson, Elwood (2008-06-30). The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4020-8540-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=zUJgaHde6YUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT45&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false.
6.^ a b Ulrich, John. "Introduction: A (Sub)cultural Genealogy". In Andrea L. Harris. GenXegesis: essays on alternative youth. pp. 3. http://books.google.com/books?id=v10ZUR_Ca3EC&lpg=PA3&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false.
7.^ GenXegesis: essays on alternative youth (sub)culture By John McAllister Ulrich, Andrea L. Harris p. 5.
8.^ Asthana, Anushka & Thorpe, Vanessa. "Whatever happened to the original Generation X?". The Observer. January 23, 2005.
9.^ Coupland, Doug. "Generation X." Vista, 1989.
10.^ Generation X - A Punk History with Pictures
11.^ Encyclopedia of Identity By Ronald L. Jackson, II
12.^ Kick, Fran (2005). What makes kids kick:inspiring the millennial generation to kick it. Instruction & Design Concepts. pp. 33. http://books.google.be/books?id=FC2YMewhvdoC&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false.
13.^ Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 365
14.^ Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 30,
15.^ Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 337,
16.^ Robinson, Peter (1997-10-31). "GEN X FILES". Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. Hoover Institution. http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/3420651.html. Retrieved 2009-07-01.
17.^ Isaksen, Judy L. (2002). "Generation X". St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_tov/ai_2419100500/.
18.^ http://www.notterconsulting.com/Articles/generationaldive.html
19.^ http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/Economic_Mobility_in_America_Full.pdf
20.^ Economic Mobility Project
21.^ Ellis, David (2007-05-25). "Making less than dad did". CNN. http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/25/pf/mobility_study/index.htm?cnn=yes. Retrieved 2010-05-03.
22.^ Foot, David. Boom, Bust & Echo.Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1996. ISBN 0-921912-97-8. p.22(
23.^ Foot, David. Boom, Bust & Echo.Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1996. ISBN 0-921912-97-8. p.19(
24.^ http://archives.cbc.ca/society/youth/topics/1209-6689/
External links
[hide]v • d • eCultural Generations of Western Society

Lost Generation • Greatest Generation • Silent Generation • Baby Boom Generation • Generation X • Generation Y • Generation Z

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X"
Categories: Cultural generations | Demographics | Postmodernism | Postmodern terminology

Great Article on Bear Stearns Collapse that I read a couple of months ago in the New Yorker

Cocksure

Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence.

by Malcolm Gladwell 

As we grow older and more experienced, we overrate the accuracy of our judgments.

In 1996, an investor named Henry de Kwiatkowski sued Bear Stearns for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. De Kwiatkowski had made—and then lost—hundreds of millions of dollars by betting on the direction of the dollar, and he blamed his bankers for his reversals. The district court ruled in de Kwiatkowski’s favor, ultimately awarding him $164.5 million in damages. But Bear Stearns appealed—successfully—and in William D. Cohan’s engrossing account of the fall of Bear Stearns, “House of Cards,” the firm’s former chairman and C.E.O. Jimmy Cayne tells the story of what happened on the day of the hearing:

Their lead lawyer turned out to be about a 300-pound fag from Long Island . . . a really irritating guy who had cross-examined me and tried to kick the shit out of me in the lower court trial. Now when we walk into the courtroom for the appeal, they’re arguing another case and we have to wait until they’re finished. And I stopped this guy. I had to take a piss. I went into the bathroom to take a piss and came back and sat down. Then I see my blood enemy stand up and he’s going to the bathroom. So I wait till he passes and then I follow him in and it’s just he and I in the bathroom. And I said to him, “Today you’re going to get your ass kicked, big.” He ran out of the room. He thought I might have wanted to start it right there and then. 

At the time Cayne said this, Bear Stearns had spectacularly collapsed. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank, with its shiny new billion-dollar headquarters and its storied history, was swallowed whole by J. P. Morgan Chase. Cayne himself had lost close to a billion dollars. His reputation—forty years in the making—was in ruins, especially when it came out that, during Bear’s final, critical months, he’d spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course.

Did Cayne think long and hard about how he wanted to make his case to Cohan? He must have. Cayne understood selling; he started out as a photocopier salesman, working the nine-hundred-mile stretch between Boise and Salt Lake City, and ended up among the highest-paid executives in banking. He was known as one of the savviest men on the Street, a master tactician, a brilliant gamesman. “Jimmy had it all,” Bill Bamber, a former Bear senior managing director, writes in “Bear Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008” (a book co-written by Andrew Spencer). “The ability to read an opponent. The ability to objectively analyze his own strengths and weaknesses. . . . He knew how to exploit others’ weaknesses—and their strengths, for that matter—as a way to further his own gain. He knew when to take his losses and live to fight another day.”

....Cohan asked Cayne about the last days of Bear Stearns, in the spring of 2008. Wall Street had become so spooked by rumors about the firm’s financial status that investors withdrew their capital, and no one would lend Bear the money required for its day-to-day operations. The bank received some government money, via J. P. Morgan. But Timothy Geithner, then the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, didn’t open the Fed’s so-called “discount window” to investment banks until J. P. Morgan’s acquisition of Bear was under way. What did Cayne think of Geithner? Picture the scene. The journalist in one chair, Cayne in another. Between them, a tape recorder. And the savviest man on Wall Street sets out to salvage his good name:

The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan. Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hard-on, saying, “Raise the bridge.” This guy thinks he’s got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. 

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological

In “Military Misfortunes,” the historians Eliot Cohen and John Gooch offer, as a textbook example of this kind of failure, the British-led invasion of Gallipoli, in 1915. Gallipoli is a peninsula in southern Turkey, jutting out into the Aegean. The British hoped that by landing an army there they could make an end run around the stalemate on the Western Front, and give themselves a clear shot at the soft underbelly of Germany. It was a brilliant and daring strategy....But the invasion ended in disaster, and Cohen and Gooch find the roots of that disaster in the curious complacency displayed by the British....

Cohen and Gooch ascribe the disaster at Gallipoli to a failure to adapt—a failure to take into account how reality did not conform to their expectations. And behind that failure to adapt was a deeply psychological problem: the British simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that they might have to adapt....

...Hamilton was not a fool. Cohen and Gooch call him an experienced and “brilliant commander who was also a firstrate trainer of men and a good organizer.” Nor was he entirely wrong in his assessments. The British probably were a superior fighting force. Certainly they were more numerous, especially when they held that ten-to-one advantage at Sulva Bay. Hamilton, it seems clear, was simply overconfident—and one of the things that happen to us when we become overconfident is that we start to blur the line between the kinds of things that we can control and the kinds of things that we can’t. The psychologist Ellen Langer once had subjects engage in a betting game against either a self-assured, well-dressed opponent or a shy and badly dressed opponent (in Langer’s delightful phrasing, the “dapper” or the “schnook” condition), and she found that her subjects bet far more aggressively when they played against the schnook. They looked at their awkward opponent and thought, I’m better than he is. Yet the game was pure chance: all the players did was draw cards at random from a deck, and see who had the high hand. This is called the “illusion of control”: confidence spills over from areas where it may be warranted (“I’m savvier than that schnook”) to areas where it isn’t warranted at all (“and that means I’m going to draw higher cards”)...

...Several years ago, a team headed by the psychologist Mark Fenton-O’Creevy created a computer program that mimicked the ups and downs of an index like the Dow, and recruited, as subjects, members of a highly paid profession. As the line moved across the screen, Fenton-O’Creevy asked his subjects to press a series of buttons, which, they were told, might or might not affect the course of the line. At the end of the session, they were asked to rate their effectiveness in moving the line upward. The buttons had no effect at all on the line. But many of the players were convinced that their manipulation of the buttons made the index go up and up. The world these people inhabited was competitive and stressful and complex. They had been given every reason to be confident in their own judgments. If they sat down next to you, with a tape recorder, it wouldn’t take much for them to believe that they had you in the palm of their hand. They were traders at an investment bank.

The high-water mark for Bear Stearns was 2003. The dollar was falling. A wave of scandals had just swept through the financial industry. The stock market was in a swoon. But Bear Stearns was an exception. In the first quarter of that year, its earnings jumped fifty-five per cent. Its return on equity was the highest on Wall Street. The firm’s mortgage business was booming. Since Bear Stearns’s founding, in 1923, it had always been a kind of also-ran to its more blue-chip counterparts, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. But that year Fortune named it the best financial company to work for. “We are hitting on all 99 cylinders,’’ Jimmy Cayne told a reporter for the Times, in the spring of that year, “so you have to ask yourself, What can we do better? And I just can’t decide what that might be.’’ He went on, “Everyone says that when the markets turn around, we will suffer. But let me tell you, we are going to surprise some people this time around. Bear Stearns is a great place to be.’’

With the benefit of hindsight, Cayne’s words read like the purest hubris. But in 2003 they would have seemed banal. These are the kinds of things that bankers say. More precisely—and here is where psychological failure becomes more problematic still—these are the kinds of things that bankers are expected to say. Investment banks are able to borrow billions of dollars and make huge trades because, at the end of the day, their counterparties believe they are capable of making good on their promises. Wall Street is a confidence game, in the strictest sense of that phrase.

This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,” Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes. “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.” This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”

If you were a Wall Street C.E.O., there were two potential lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Bear Stearns. The first was that Jimmy Cayne was overconfident. The second was that Jimmy Cayne wasn’t overconfident enough. Bear Stearns did not collapse, after all, simply because it had made bad bets. Until very close to the end, the firm had a capital cushion of more than seventeen billion dollars. The problem was that when, in early 2008, Cayne and his colleagues stood up and said that Bear was a great place to be, the rest of Wall Street no longer believed them. Clients withdrew their money, and lenders withheld funding. As the run on Bear Stearns worsened, J. P. Morgan and the Fed threw the bank a lifeline—a multibillion-dollar line of credit. But confidence matters so much on Wall Street that the lifeline had the opposite of its intended effect. As Bamber writes:

This line-of-credit, the stop-gap measure that was supposed to solve the problem that hadn’t really existed in the first place had done nothing but worsen it. When we started the week, we had no liquidity issues. But because people had said that we did have problems with our capital, it became true, even though it wasn’t true when people started saying it. . . . So we were forced to find capital to offset the losses we’d sustained because somebody decided we didn’t have capital when we really did. So when we finally got more capital to replace the capital we’d lost, people took that as a bad sign and pointed to the fact that we’d had no capital and had to get a loan to cover it, even when we did have the capital they said we didn’t have. 

Of course, one reason that over-confidence is so difficult to eradicate from expert fields like finance is that, at least some of the time, it’s useful to be overconfident—or, more precisely, sometimes the only way to get out of the problems caused by overconfidence is to be even more overconfident.

From an individual perspective, it is hard to distinguish between the times when excessive optimism is good and the times when it isn’t. All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.” When one opponent bluffs, he can score an easy victory. But when everyone bluffs, Wrangham writes, rivals end up “escalating conflicts that only one can win and suffering higher costs than they should if assessment were accurate.” The British didn’t just think the Turks would lose in Gallipoli; they thought that Belgium would prove to be an obstacle to Germany’s advance, and that the Russians would crush the Germans in the east. The French, for their part, planned to be at the Rhine within six weeks of the start of the war, while the Germans predicted that by that point they would be on the outskirts of Paris. Every side in the First World War was bluffing, with the resolve and skill that only the deluded are capable of, and the results, of course, were catastrophic.

Jimmy Cayne grew up in Chicago, the son of a patent lawyer. He wanted to be a bookie, but he realized that it wasn’t quite respectable enough. He went to Purdue University to study mechanical engineering—and became hooked on bridge. His grades suffered, and he never graduated. He got married in 1956 and was divorced within four years. “At this time, he was one of the best bridge players in Chicago,” his ex-brother-in-law told Cohan. “In fact, that’s the reason for the divorce. There was no other woman or anything like that. The co-respondent in their divorce was bridge. He spent all of his time playing bridge—every night. He wasn’t home.” He was selling scrap metal in those days, and, Cohan says, he would fall asleep on the job, exhausted from playing cards. In 1964, he moved to New York to become a professional bridge player. It was bridge that led him to his second wife, and to a job interview with Alan (Ace) Greenberg, then a senior executive at Bear Stearns. When Cayne told Greenberg that he was a bridge player, Cayne tells Cohan, “you could see the electric light bulb.” Cayne goes on:

[Greenberg] says, “How well do you play?” I said, “I play well.” He said, “Like how well?” I said, “I play quite well.” He says, “You don’t understand.” I said, “Yeah, I do. I understand. Mr. Greenberg, if you study bridge the rest of your life, if you play with the best partners and you achieve your potential, you will never play bridge like I play bridge.” 

Right then and there, Cayne says, Greenberg offered him a job.

Twenty years later, the scene was repeated with Warren Spector, who went on to become a co-president of the firm. Spector had been a bridge champion as a student, and Cayne somehow heard about it. “Suddenly, out of nowhere there’s a bridge player at Bear Stearns on the bond desk,” Cayne recalls. Spector tells Cohan, “He called me up and said, ‘Are you a bridge player?’ I said, ‘I used to be.’ So bridge was something that he, Ace, and I all shared and talked about.” As reports circulated that two of Bear Stearns’s hedge funds were going under—a failure that started the bank on its long, downward spiral into collapse—Spector and Cayne were attending the Spingold K.O. bridge tournament, in Nashville. The Wall Street Journal reported that, of the twenty-one workdays that month, Cayne was out of the office for nearly half of them.

It makes sense that there should be an affinity between bridge and the business of Wall Street. Bridge is a contest between teams, each of which competes over a “contract”—how many tricks they think they can win in a given hand. Winning requires knowledge of the cards, an accurate sense of probabilities, steely nerves, and the ability to assess an opponent’s psychology. Bridge is Wall Street in miniature, and the reason the light bulb went on when Greenberg looked at Cayne, and Cayne looked at Spector, is surely that they assumed that bridge skills could be transferred to the trading floor—that being good at the game version of Wall Street was a reasonable proxy for being good at the real-life version of Wall Street.

It isn’t, however. In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias. That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.” It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all. Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms. “I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise, that every step taken toward mastery brings with it an increased risk of mastery’s curse. Cayne must have come back from the Spingold bridge tournament fortified in his belief in his own infallibility. And the striking thing about his conversations with Cohan is that nothing that had happened since seemed to have shaken that belief.

“When I left,” Cayne told Cohan, speaking of his final day at Bear Stearns, “I had three different meetings. The first was with the president’s advisory group, which was about eighty people. There wasn’t a dry eye. Standing ovation. I was crying.” Until the very end, he evidently saw the world that he wanted to see. “The second meeting was with the retail sales force on the Web,” he goes on. “Standing ovation. And the third was a partners’ meeting that night for me to tell them that I was stepping down. Standing ovation, of the whole auditorium.” 

This article can be found in full at::

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/07/27/090727fa_fact_gladwell

The Future ....Global Monoculture?

In between trying to get this 'Redbox' set up I have also been trying to settle my eldest daughter Elle into her new flat in 'Island Gardens', AKA the tip of the Isle of Dogs, AKA Millwall.

Last Thursday week I met Max Davey in the City after lunch with you. Similarly 'dazed and confused' on attempting to return to the City, Max suggested meeting at 'Simpson', a bar off Cornhill 'the only bar used to go to that is still there', said Max. I have to confess Max must have joined the City earlier than me, because it was the first time I had been to the Simpsons. When I had gone to meet you earlier to Jefferies, I had a taste of 'messy old England'-a bit of a cultural 'car crash' and I was very reminded of the shitty Britain of the 1970s/early 1980s. Barclays toadying up to Boris & Dave had installed their marvellous new 'rent a bike scheme' at the bottom of Queens Street - complete with cycle lanes which took you no more than a hundred yards in each direction. Their chief contribution seemed to be to block the traffic trying to cross Southwark bridge. I nearly got killed crossing a 'pedestrianized' section of Queens Street when the lights changed, and a stream of black cabs came storming through. I then took my life in my hands as I crossed Upper Thames Street, where the lights were out on the Pelican Crossing! When I got back to Simpsons, I found this quintessentially 'Old City' pub and pub, an unchanged fossil. There was not a single woman in the bar! And barely a man under forty!

I hung around Leadenhall Market while I waited for Elle to 'BBM' me on her Blackberry. To say she was ready. I have not yet got myself a Blackberry, and as I stood there realised why I can never get in touch with my friends anymore. Just about everyone in the pubs and bars of Leadenhall were standing next to there friends (old style) but were not chatting. Instead every few minutes they paused to send or receive a Blackberry message from someone far away. In some cases they didn't even bother talking to the person next to them at all. they just sat side by side typing. It was the quietest I have ever known a packed pub!

At Elle's summons (ie. BBM) I took the DLR to Canary Wharf and a couple of BBMs later we located each other as we would have without the benefit of these text messages because she was right in front of Canary Wharf Underground Exit anyway!  I thought Elle -being a fashion student not financial type - might look out of place in Canary Wharf, but far from it. At around 8-9pm Canary Wharf was filled with lots and lots of people, more or less her age given ten years or so, often dressed the same and similarly tapping into Blackberries or something similar.

There was one thing that was striking though-they were of many, many different nationalities - I recognised a lot as Hispanics, lots, often in smart suits were from the Indian sub-continent, a great many were Chinese or Japanese.

We had a Sushi meal, served to us by a guy who turned out to be Russian. He informed me much to my disappointment-as Elle was on the  look-out for a part-time job and has three years waitressing experience- that the hourly rate including tips was no more in - expensive-central London than -cheaper- Tonbridge. We then popped on the DLR down to her flat in 'Island Gardens'. The DLR on this stretch is even more filled with this multinational crowd of twenty-somethings, all very quiet and well-behaved all tapping into little machines. It was interesting to see Japanese students loving the DLR and taking pics of it and each other on it. No doubt it all seemed very like being at home in Tokyo! I had been concerned 'Island Gardens' being formerly known as Millwall might be a 'bit rough' for Elle, but descending at the DLR stop, a crowd of these eeriely quiet yound people quietly got off and quietly filtered off to various flats, happily texting as they went.

On three or four night-time trips to/from Island Gardens, including popping up to the 24 hour ASDA at Crossharbour for Elle, the same impression was reinforced time and again. This was 'Logan's Run'. No old people, or few to speak of. Everyone quiet. Everyone conveniently 'radio-tagged', all their conversations neatly written down, so should anyone wish to go over who, what and where they had said something to anyone else it could be looked up on some database somewhere. Their preferred source of entertainment is the internet, Facebook and Youtube, are of which log their preferences conveniently for advertisers. I saw even the 'outlaw' Youtube is now playing little ads at the start of each clip - mine spookily often is the little government advert telling me to go to 'Jobcentre Online'! Thanks for the hint 'Big Brother'!

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So what you might say?

Well I grew up in a little town called Gravesend, where by time I was ten 40% of the population were Asian.

I grew up with 'racial conflict' - Gravesend had the biggest NF vote in the country when I was there- but generally we ended up getting to know each other better - the kid four doors down was an NF organiser in his teens, but ended up marrying an Indian girl!

So then we had 'multi-cultural' Britain, getting to know and appreciate each others cultures and all that.

But this went far beyond this. This was a 'monoculture'. Everyone all the same, using the same technology, having the same values, largely blind to race or creed, and all being sold to by the same advertisers and big corporations.

A good thing or a bad thing...I'm not sure...but the future will certainly be a different place...