Probably everyone has read Thaler and Sunstein's book Nudge by now. Their thesis is simple: we are overwhelmed and often paralysed by choice, and public policy should do more to 'nudge' us in the direction of better choices where possible. Influencing 'choice architecture' doesn't remove our free-will, but it makes it easier for us to choose a better path, like opting out of organ donation, rather than in. The Cabinet Office now has a 'Nudge Unit', and I am very keen on this route as a subtle and more effective way to improve the market, rather than just coming up with more red tape. Here are my favourite Top 10 Nudges, some because they are admirable, and some just because they are so clever.

1. Free peanuts on the bar: uses salt to boost beer sales

2. 'Rinse. And Repeat': doubles shampoo sales

3. Mirrors in lifts: uses vanity to reduce graffiti

4. 17 mph speed limit: makes drivers focus harder on their speed

5. Ubiquitous alcohol gel in hospitals: has reduced MRSA by 40% in a year

6. UCLA's crowdsourcing games: uses hobby time to help diagnose malaria in Africa

7. Planting trees in housing estates: reduces property and violent crime

8. Paying benefits weekly rather than monthly: helps with household budgeting and to avoid loan sharks

9. The Archers: written to encourage farmers to try new techniques as a productivity drive after WWII

10. God (when state-sponsored): belief correlates with better levels of adherence to the law.

Tags: 17mph, benefits, choice, choice architecture, god, mirrors, mrsa, nudge, peanuts, shampoo, the archers, trees, ucla

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not being funny, some of my best friends are introverts you know. But it would be odd, in the face of all these articles on how fabulous and under-appreciated they are, if an extrovert didn't wade in just to remind you all of 10 reasons why extroverts are also rather fabulous. But by all means, introverts, please re-read the articles first – I know you like to be on top of the data (Harvard; Susan Cain on TED and in The Guardian; Psychology Today).
But back to us extroverts – those 10 reasons:
1  you can always hear what an extrovert is thinking
2  they make the day go quicker by organising lots of meetings
3  they distract the boss a lot with all their talking and body language
4  they make you introverts look terribly wise and thoughtful
5  they don't tend to mind being interrupted
6  they break the ice for you in awkward social situations
7  they tend to pay more attention to their appearance and so are often more decorative
8  you can free-ride on their fight for reward and recognition
9  their love of brainstorming generates lots of material for introverts to research and ultimately scoff at
10  with extraverts, you can generally get away with poor listening, as long as you tune in at the end of their stream of consciousness.

Tags: extravert, introvert, mbti, myers briggs, susan cain

Of course it is the prerogative of the current age to be arrogant about everything that has gone before. But the seemingly minor and snap decision to drop the existing barriers on Sunday trading needs more thought, particularly as no-one seems to believe the line that this is only a temporary arrangement. The argument to 'keep Sunday special' isn't particularly about Christianity, it's about humanity. In his book The Dignity of Difference, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, explains that the world's great philosophies and religions emerged from a pivotal context in human flourishing, as the people of the world moved from a scattered and nomadic existence towards a more consciously societal one, that needed frameworks for organisation. Over time, because of their supernatural content, the religions in particular have remained 'sticky' as ways of explaining humanity to itself, and of encoding ways of living that, in the main, have served communities well for over four thousand years. And while modernity has rightly developed a degree of scepticism about the suitability of some of this guidance, given the way the world has changed, the world's wisdom traditions still have much to teach us. One feature of the monotheistic religions in particular is the idea of a day of rest. Because of its Christian heritage, in the UK this day falls on a Sunday, but the Sabbath for Jews lasts from Friday sundown to 'the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night', and for Muslims it is Friday prayer and rest. Indeed, rest-days appear in most religious traditions, for 'cleansing the mind' or just to make time for the contemplation of the meaning of life within a given tradition. The notion also crops up in academia and in some other walks of life as the less frequent but all-important 'sabbatical', which aims to structure in periods of enforced reflection to improve a person's professional practice. The idea of a day of rest for the whole community is a concept worth protecting, even if we can't row back to where we once were. Having just one day that feels a bit different protects family time and creates space for leisure and reflection – or just time to read the Sunday papers - whether or not it includes any sort of religious observance, and Saturday has long-since ceased to have this flavour. Jesus himself said that 'the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath' but I don't think this was meant as an encouragement for Dave to be quite so cavalier with it. I for one am rather fed up with the relentless parade of policies of late that seem only to be in the interests of commercial gain rather than human flourishing. And maybe choosing the Olympics as the time to experiment facilitates the 'taxing' of our visitors. But looking at it as a more general change, wasn't it too much 'retail' that got us into this mess in the first place? When credit was cheap and shops started opening for longer and in more enticing formats, shopping became leisure, and the consumer borrowed up to the hilt to finance this new national hobby. I thought what we needed at the moment was for consumers to save their cash, preferably to help re-capitalise the banks, or to invest in enterprises that struggle to get bank credit. So why are we stimulating retail again at this particular moment in time? Maybe it is to boost jobs. If so, I'd like to see the argument for that, and how it has been reconciled with Cameron's promise to make the UK the most family-friendly county in Europe. As Albert Schweitzer once said: 'do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.'

Tags: albert schweitzer, chief rabbi, jonathan sacks, rest, sabbath, soul, sunday, wisdom

Of course, if neuroscience were to 'prove' that we have no such thing as free will, we'd need to re-think our entire legal system. So on Valentine's night I took my husband on a hot date to LSE to hear about neuroscience, responsibility and the law. Because in its modern incarnation it is such a new and disputed discipline, the verdict from the excellent panel seemed to be that, like advances in DNA testing, neuroscience would most probably be used to support the legal process rather than to replace it, e.g., in determining brain development in young offenders or assessing pain in damages claims.

But given the claims being made in some quarters, they did cover some very interesting ground about the nature of the criminal justice system in particular. If justice tends partly to be retributive, partly restorative and partly distributive, a lack of genuine moral agency leaves only the latter two kinds of justice standing. Society would have a legitimate interest in these, but would find it hard to 'judge' in cases that would normally attract a retributive sentence, if neuroscience could be used to show that a person had no real choice over their actions (this 'competence' defence is already used in some cases). We can't 'blame' people if they are not morally responsible. The panel again were very interesting on this point, suggesting that this would not so much affect verdicts as sentencing. As happens at present, a person might be found guilty of harming someone else, but if there were mitigating circumstances, the sentence they would receive would reflect a degree of leniency. These mitigating circumstances could be social, psychological or environmental, as well as biological, and neurobiology would be just one of several being considered.

I think the debate is likely to settle somewhere in between the idea of the hand you're dealt and the way you play it – our DNA and brain structure may very well pre-dispose us to all kinds of behaviours, good and bad. But whether or not tests show our 'meat' reacting faster than our 'mind', these responses have been learned over time. So I suspect a complicated causal interplay between the meat and the mind, and would agree with the panel last night that, whether one precedes the other, as long as they both happen, we can still take the mind into account and therefore hold it responsible. So there may well be more appeals on the basis of a lack of mens rea or intent (diminished responsibility), but society will continue to have to hold individuals to account for unhelpful behaviour, irrespective of how it is motivated, to maintain public order. As Prof Roger Brownsword put it, the law might become more about managing risk than assigning blame, but it would still be required, and neurobiology might instead be used more to prevent criminal behaviour than to prosecute it.

Tags: criminal justice, criminal responsibility, free will, law, lse, mens rea, moral responsibility, neurobiology, valentine

When I was at college, much of the discussion about careers was whether you wanted to go for the 'ks' or the 'k' – a job that paid a lot of money, or a job where you would reap the rewards of public service. Fred Goodwin chose a path that gave him both sorts of k. While he has famously hung on to quite a lot of money, last week he rather publicly lost his Honour. The media are divided. Is this a triumph of justice, or a vindictive personal attack? Will it teach bankers a lesson, or will it scare off foreign investors and impoverish the UK? I would argue that this was the right thing to do. Honours are not supposed to be like bonuses, which have become so sticky that an executive now seems to be able to claim one by right whether or not performance improves. They are supposed to be a special recognition, a national thank-you for a contribution above and beyond the call of duty. Now, every Honours list inspires headlines about probity, particularly when party donors appear on it. But for an Honour to mean anything, there has also to be dis-Honour. Whether or not Fred Goodwin deserved his honour in the first place, his judgement as Chief Executive brought his bank so low that the nation had to step in and bail it out. What once looked like genius, time has shown to be hubris. To protect the integrity of the Honours system, perhaps more honours should be taken away when hindsight shows that the original award was misplaced. And will this and the Hester bonus story ruin the UK's reputation for business? Shame on the commentators for saying bankers – and senior managers in general - are only motivated by money. Even without the likes of Paul Sykes saying publicly that his millions are worth nothing without his happiness, data from the most recent Ashridge Management Index shows that job motivation is largely the same across the private and the public sectors, and is much more about challenge, autonomy, impact, respect and learning than about material reward. While a high basic salary enters the list at number 7 for the private sector, incentive schemes and performance-related pay trail at number 13. Of course financial reward is an index for value, but so is public recognition. It was not the government who made it difficult for Hester to accept his bonus, it was public opinion. And it was this public opinion that tried Fred Goodwin and found him wanting. They are our honours and it is right that we withdrew this one.

Tags: ashridge, ashridge management index, bonus, fred goodwin, honour, knighthood, motivation, stephen hester

Tags: beati quorum via, charles villiers stanford, neurobiology, portsmouth cathedral, walking in the law

You may recall that a chapter on Corporate Psychopaths was included in the 2010 book I co-edited on Ethical Leadership. Its primary author, Clive Boddy, has been attracting some recent press attention on the subject, following publication of an extended version of the chapter in the Journal of Business Ethics. One of my longstanding worries about this very useful identification of a potential boardroom problem is whether the said psychopaths could then use this diagnosis to plead diminished responsibility for any perceived wrongdoing. So I was doubly interested to see that LSE is shortly to hold a seminar to discuss neuroscience, responsibility and the law, given recent developments in neurobiology that suggest free will is in fact illusory (see for example the recent piece by Prof Jerry Coyne in USA Today). While the notion of corporate psychopathy thrusts a spoke in the wheels of business ethics, the idea that we don't have free will at all is far more devastating, because it attacks our very notion of what it means to be a person. Today I was at a very interesting seminar at Westminster Abbey on 'transformational theology' delivered by Professor Oliver Davies of King's College London. Apart from a difference of opinion about the merits of its necessarily empirical and subjective approach, my main concern with his theology is his belief that an incarnationally 'ethnographic' approach is the best way for theology as a discipline to reply to recent advances in technology and science - specifically those in the field of neuroscience. But if neuroscience is arguing that there is nothing other than matter, or at least - in mind/brain theory terms - that causality is firmly from the material to the 'mental' and not vice versa, how could such a theological approach rescue God? If we are as programmed as the neurobiologists suggest, surely asking subjects to reflect on their personal experiences of revelation and discipleship can at best net idle post-hoc speculation about motivations and decisions, which may or may not link to an underlying material reality? Surely this would merely play into the hands of those who argue that religion is essentially fantasy? Now, I don't yet want to concede the debate on free will, but the challenge it presents requires a more fundamental theological response than an approach which colludes with social science's current methodological preoccupation with subjectivity. It needs to address the issue this poses for belief in a God who has made us free to opt in or out of revelation and discipleship in the first place, before these become legitimate grounds for inquiry.

Tags: corporate psychopaths, free will, god, jerry coyne, neurobiology, neuroscience, oliver davies, transformational theology

You've probably all seen the Daniel Goleman Emotional intelligence grid. This trusty management 2x2 is deceptively simple. For a start, as it's usually drawn, there is just a thin black line between the sections labelled 'self-awareness' and 'self-management'. In my world, this looks more like a colossal wall, with very few toe-holds. Who doesn't like wallowing in it a bit when the car won't start and it's raining and someone cuts you up and you're late and the first person you meet on the way in is somebody ghastly...? So if we're in the market for some New Year Resolutioneering, here is my contribution to help you scale that wall.

First, list all your Dementors - those things that are absolutely guaranteed to drain your battery. IT breakdowns, call centre staff, being nagged, being fat, stupid meetings, stupid people, criticism, well-meaning advice....anything at all that you know renders you incoherent with rage or that irrevocably punctures your mood. Lots of these are not in your gift, but many of them appear predictably throughout the day, week in, week out.

Next, list all of those things that are your equivalent of Julie Andrews' whiskers on kittens - anything that makes you smile, restores your balance, cheers you up, or calms you down. Music, doughnuts, your best friend, candle-lit baths, giggling children or a favourite pint. These again may not always be in your gift, but many of them can be contrived, and they will act as an immediate antidote to your Dementors.

Finally, look at your diary and be realistic about which days in the weeks to come are most likely to feature high levels of Dementor activity and, rather than giving into fate, plan now which items from your whiskers on kittens list you'll mobilise in your own defence. A draining day of sales calls? Book in a call to your mate half-way through, or reward yourself at the end with a takeaway and a good film. It's only human nature to relish digging the pit even deeper – "I've had such an awful day I might as well punish myself further by staying up late finishing off DIY projects" – but life needn't be so gloomy if you're prepared to be a bit more mechanical about rescuing yourself.

Tags: daniel goleman, dementors, emotional intelligence, mood, new year resolutions, whiskers on kittens

[courtesy of the Lovely Ange, so you can start 2012 properly addressed]

Soap Opera name = middle name plus current street (e.g., Eve Ellington)

Detective name = favouite colour plus favourite animal (e.g., Purple Otter)

Star Trek name = 1st 3 letters of surname, 1st 2 letters of middle name, 1st 2 letters of first name, plus last 3 letters of surname (e.g., Perevcaval)

Superhero name = the colour of your top plus 1st item on your right plus 'man/woman' (e.g., Black Pepperpot Woman)

Goth name = 'Black' plus name of one of your pets (e.g., Black Midnight)

Porn star name = name of first pet plus mother's maiden name (can't give you that one in case you rob my bank...)

Tags: alias, goth, star trek, superhero

Talk given to the parish of St Luke and Christ Church, Chelsea, 8 November 2011.

What is money?

I wonder whether you have given much thought to what money really is? Before we invented it, we bartered goods and produce, and possibly services. But it soon became apparent that some kind of secondary system would make this primary market more efficient – what if I want rice today but only have the corn to swap for it tomorrow? So different cultures used different 'stores of value' – cocoa beans, glass beads, camels, metal discs – anything that that community felt had the right sort of intrinsic value to represent the price of the materials being traded. Over time, coins became the most common tools used in market transactions, and originally were worth, in the amount of precious metal they contained, exactly the same amount as the amount stamped on them. But once this system was established, it became clear that people didn't feel the need to melt their coins down to extract their absolute value all the time, and were happy to use them as tokens. Modern coins now have very little intrinsic material value, and coins soon gave way to notes, as a more convenient way of transporting buying power. These promissory notes were often banknotes (I promise to pay the bearer on demand...), but could also be any kind of IOU – a cheque, a certificate, a plastic disc, or any token that both parties agreed held validity as a deposit or guarantee of ultimate payment.

In parallel, the banking system changed. Instead of banks literally holding the entire value of the deposits made to them, they realised that they could lend quite a lot of this out, given that people didn't seem to want access to their deposits every day. So fractional reserve banking was born, and banks ever since have played the odds on lending out as much as they can while retaining just enough hard cash in their vaults to pay back anyone who wants to reclaim their deposits. Nowadays, the idea that you can lend out – or borrow against - assets that are not actually yours has reached monumentally sophisticated proportions in the secondary markets, with everyone hoping that when the music stops they won't be the one left without a chair.

Credit – the idea that you can delay payment - will have been used even when we bartered: I promise to give you corn tomorrow if you give me rice today 'on tick'. Nowadays credit is treated as a currency in its own right with the advent of the ubiquitous credit card. So what is money, now? Well, modern 'money' is information about relative value, and about supply and demand. That I can buy a Mulberry handbag for £4,000 doesn't mean the bag 'costs' £4,000, but that there are enough people with serious amounts of disposable income out there who would like to pay this amount to own something that other people cannot afford to buy. Similarly, footballer or Chief Executive salaries are no longer about what a person is 'worth' but about what the market is prepared to pay for exclusivity. And it is this market in information about relative values that drives the 'casino capitalism' that you hear so much about – 'positions' being taken on where supply and demand will move across a huge range of asset classes, as well as positions on those positions, and positions on the positions of those positions, and so on. This hedging or insuring of 'real' assets through secondary and tertiary mechanisms is called securitization and, while it is designed to protect the original asset, nowadays separate markets have developed to trade these positions in their own right. And the sophistication of computing means that multiple transactions can be executed in fractions of seconds to take advantage of infinitesimal changes in prices. For example, the average time for which a share is now held is something like 6 seconds.

What this means in the marketplace is that increasing amounts of trust have become a condition of operating at each stage of this evolution. In the original markets, I could physically examine your carrots, in the same way you could check that I hadn't hidden weights in my sack of corn. But coins rely on a stable administration, and IOUs require us to trust a debtor to come good. Now we need to trust our banks that they will actually be able to give us our money back when we need it, and it is when this trust breaks down that you see queues outside Northern Rock, or calls for the banks to 'recapitalise' in order to reassure us that they actually own at least a percentage of what they owe. And the 'credit crunch' of 2008 was because the banks stopped trusting each other about the statements they were making about their exposure to bad debt. So if money, and market transactions, are now essentially about trust, the tents in Wall Street and outside St Paul's should be making the bankers and politicians an awful lot more worried than they seem to be.

What does the Bible say about money and the markets?

We're going to work through these passages together, so what we come up with tonight will be far richer than anything I can contribute on my own, but here are some key passages about money and markets from the New Testament, and some notes about the questions they raise.

Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30)

Possibly the most referenced passage by business people is the Parable of the Talents, probably because it seems to recommend trading and even investment for profit, which is unusual given the standard line on usury. One of the things this passage makes me think about is actually about the play on words: what talents has God given you, and how are you investing in their development? But reading the passage more literally, there seems to be positive endorsement about taking risk and rewarding enterprise, and negative treatment of too narrow an interpretation of what 'entrusting means' – the servant who buried his talent is punished, even though he was only doing exactly what he was asked to do in safeguarding it. And in this we perhaps see echoes of Jesus' frustration with those who would follow the letter and not the spirit of the law. The modern corporate addiction to shareholder value might be an example of this, as might St Paul's Cathedral's unfortunate enthusiasm for Health and Safety legislation.

The Rich Young Man (Matthew 19:16-26)

This passage has often been a difficult one for Christians with money, as it suggests that the true disciple would give it all away. Modern interpretations have glossed it into being about the willingness to give it up, which would indicate the sort of detachment from it that indicates a healthy soul (see I Timothy 6:10 - For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs).

God and Mammon (Matthew 6:19-24)

Again, this passage challenges those whose master is money. The hard saying that you cannot serve both God and money is for me interpreted by the line: 'for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.' It is not so much that no-one should work in the City, but that, if you do, you need to be crystal clear about your primary allegiance to God, because wealth carries the signal temptation that it can make you think that you do not need God.

The Labourers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16)

This rather puzzling passage seems to approve exactly the sorts of inequity that make office secretaries hate temps, full-timers resent contractors, and unions go out on strike to get equal pay for equal work. I think it is a very hard passage, and it is a bit like the Prodigal Son in its central message. In business as in life, comparing yourself to others is not the best route to happiness. There will be all sorts of reasons why there is inequality in the world, and often you will not get what you feel you deserve. Indeed, if you get what was agreed, you can't really complain. What is hard is that a simplistic reading of this passage in isolation would in my view encourage too much acceptance of injustice. The trick is to figure out on whose behalf are you fighting. If it is in solidarity with the weak, even though you too will benefit, your cause is just. If your motivation is self-justification, with the benefit for others being a rather secondary concern, your priorities are wrong.

The Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1-13)

Luke's version of the 'God and Mammon' passage, this one seems to encourage some very sharp practice indeed, but note that while the unjust steward is congratulated by his boss, he does not get his job back. One way to read this passage is to think about using mammon and the marketplace as a tool to build your ladder towards God, thus making them God's servant and not the other way around. The message still seems to be a confusing one, but perhaps while the master appreciates the shrewdness of his steward, the key message is still that the way you manage money and behave in the marketplace tells God all he needs to know about your true character.

Conclusions

I'm going to leave you to draw your own conclusions from the complexity of what we have considered, in the light of another passage, this time from Genesis: And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob's thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." And he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then he said, "Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Tell me, I pray, your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peni'el, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." (Genesis 32:24-30)

Repairing the markets - my 7 Theses

1. In a globalized world, capitalism reaches communities more quickly than diplomacy or aid does, and brings more money into the community
2. Trade is more universally agreed than any other ideology so may well be the quickest way to address the green crisis
3. A market run by angels would be perfect, so it is we who need changing, not the market
4. At the moment, rich people’s ‘votes’ are prevailing, but the magic of a complex system is that it is susceptible to individual nudges
5. In evolutionary biology and in game theory, co-operative strategies out-perform competitive ones, and convert them over time…
6. Businesses stay in business if they keep their customers happy, so:
7. We need to vote our cash to re-shape the global marketplace, so that the resulting ‘economy’ (which stems from the Greek word for housekeeping) is genuinely one which benefits the whole household and not just those living in the penthouse.

Those of you who heard my 'voices from the congregation' talk in Lent will know what I think about Christians in the marketplace. There are lots of us, and we have a huge amount of financial muscle. Given that the market is just the sum total of messages about supply and demand, we can transform it overnight through our transactions. That's what created the market for fairtrade goods, and we can do it again, by supporting enterprises we like and removing our support from the ones we don't. We can badger those who invest our savings or our pensions on our behalf about their ethical investment policies, and we can exercise our rights over any shares that we own directly. The human right movements started in America with one woman sitting down on a bus. The redemption of the markets starts the next time you hand over your card to pay for something – does your purchase send a good signal into the market, or a bad one?

Tags: bible, chelsea, christ church, fairtrade, god, markets, money, st luke