17 August/18 August 2019 ★ FT Weekend 7Opinion
3 Protests in Hong Kong show its future
now hangs by a thread
The territory is an obstacle to Xi’s vision of
a ‘great rejuvenation’, writesJamil AnderliniTop reads at FT.com/opinion
3 Merging with artificial intelligence would
be suicide for the human mind
In future, the brain may become so
diminished it dies, writesSusan SchneiderA vegetarian teetotaller, Mr Ambani
still carries an air of Dhirubhai’s rustic
piety, and is described as a relentless
taskmaster who can grill a chemical
engineer one day and a semiconductor
chip-designer the next. With the Saudi
Aramco deal in his sights, Mr Ambani is
using such foreign partnerships to trim
Reliance’s debt pile and amass technical
knowhow as he seeks to turn his com-
pany into a corporate behemoth for
21st-century India.
In 2017 he claimed “money means
nothing to me”, yet his lavish spending
has been a point of criticism in a country
where stark economic inequality has
prompted some billionaires to down-
play their wealth. A joke circulating on
Indian WhatsApp messaging groups
captures the zeitgeist: Mr Ambani rubs
a magic lamp and a genie appears, but it
is the tycoon granting the wishes. “What
do you want? Tell me,” he says.The writers are the FT’s Mumbai corre-
spondent and senior energy correspondentelite, and he peppers his speeches with
tributes. But Dhirubhai died in 2002
without leaving a will, plunging the fam-
ily into a high-profile corporate drama
as Mukesh and his younger brother,
Anil, fought for control.
When the empire was finally carved
up in a deal brokered by his mother,Mukesh inherited the oil refining busi-
ness while Anil took on its telecoms
business among other units. But the
price war after Jio’s rise eventually led to
Anil’s venture entering into bankruptcy
proceedings, and Mukesh this year
helped to pay off $77m that Anil owed to
Ericsson in order to keep his brother out
of prisonfor contempt of court.space as any of the Reliance business
areas. They want to be dominant,” says
Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti
Enterprises, which has a telecoms arm.
“[Mr Ambani] had bountiful confi-
dence, the talent, political nous and
wealth to do it,” he said of Jio’s success.
Mr Ambani did not always have such
advantages. He was born in Yemen
while his father, Dhirubhai, who was
from humble origins in an arid region of
the western Indian state of Gujarat,
worked at a trading firm. On returning
to India, the family lived in tenement
housing in Mumbai before ascending to
a life of luxury as Dhirubai built his
scrappy yarn-trading enterprise into
one of the country’s most powerful con-
glomerates, centred on manufacturing
polyester. Mr Ambani began studying at
Stanford before returning prematurely
to help run the firm in the early 1980s.
The eldest son still reveres Dhirubhai
as one of India’s first businessmen to
force his way into what had previously
been a closed colonial-era commercialM
onday was meant to be a
landmark day for Saudi
Aramco, as the state
energy giant released its
first-ever half-year earn-
ings reportahead of a planned flotation.
But, unexpectedly, the communications
strategy was dictated out of a rowdy
Mumbai auditorium.
To the delight of hundreds of fawning
shareholders, Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s
richest man, announceda yet to be com-
pleted dealfor Saudi Aramco to take a
20 per cent stake in his conglomerate
Reliance Industries’ refining and petro-
chemicals division, valuing it at $75bn.
The deal would be the largest in Reli-
ance’s history and one of the biggest for-
eign investments in India. The irre-
pressible chairman of the $120bn com-
pany announced that “the future of
India — and also the future of Reliance —
has never looked brighter”.
Saudi Aramco is the latest in a string
of businesses, fromoil and gas company
BPto luxury jeweller Tiffany, to tie its
fortunesto Mr Ambani, a man who
inspires both respect and fear among
peers and would-be competitors. Since
inheriting the oil and petrochemicals
business of his father’s conglomerate in
2005, the 62-year-old tycoon has built
perhaps the most ambitious corporate
empire in Indian history.
Reliance has one of the world’s most
sophisticated refineries, the country’s
largest retail chain and its digital ven-
ture, Jio, has upended India’s telecoms
sector, attracting 340m users — more
than the population of the US — with
cut-price mobile data. Jio’s rise has come
amid claims that it was aided by unfair
tactics and favourableregulatory deci-
sions, claims which Mr Ambani and
Reliance vehemently contest.
Mr Ambani’s long-term vision is to
turn the conglomerate into a digital con-
sumerbehemoth to compete with Ama-
zonand Google, providing everything
from phones and internet service to
online shopping and cloud computing.
“This sort of ambition has no precedent
in Indian corporate life,” says Saurabh
Mukherjea, founder of Marcellus
Investment Managers.
He has adopted a lifestyle to match
the scale of his ambition: he lives in a 27-
storey skyscraper named Antilia, after a
mythical island, and owns an Indian
Premier League cricket team. He threw
awedding of dizzying splendourfor his
daughter last year, featuring a global
who’s who from Beyoncé to Hillary Clin-
ton and Ban Ki-moon. A video from the
wedding leaked online showed the host
sharing a stage with Bollywood super-
star Shah Rukh Khan and dancing with
BP chief executive Bob Dudley.
But, for Mr Ambani, Reliance’s aspira-
tions are intertwined with those of the
country and its prime minister, Naren-
dra Modi, with whom he has an affinity,
couching every strategic move in the
language of making life better for ordi-
nary Indians. It is also a justification for
the single-minded pursuit of these
goals. Mr Ambani’s muscular approach
has gained him a reputation as a dis-
rupting force unperturbed by incum-
bents. “It is hard work to be in the samePerson in the news| Mukesh Ambani
India’s wish-granter
bags a rich prize
Saudi Aramco is the latest
in a string of companiesto tie its fortunes to the
tycoon, writeBenjaminParkinandAnjliRaval
‘It is hard work to be in the
same space as any of theReliance business areas.
They want to be dominant’
I
know a man who used to deal with
a stressful job, working 15-18 hour
days in a senior role, by slipping
away to a rented house near Rich-
mond Park in London.
There, he refused to be interrupted by
messages except during office hours,
spent time playing bridge well and golf
badly, and he ensured that the location
of the hideaway was a well-kept secret.
The few colleagues who did visit were
strictly banned from talking about
work. Yet despite his apparently laid-
back approach, this fellow got results.
To be clear, I know this person only by
reputation; Dwight Eisenhower died
before I was born. But this is how he
responded to the burdens of being
supreme allied forces commander dur-
ing the second world war. He found it
essential to take time off.
We would all like to feel that our work
is essential and our personal contribu-
tion irreplaceable. But, as Alex Soojung-
Kim Pang, author ofRest: Why You Get
More Done When You Work Less, notes,
we’re unlikely to be doing quite as essen-
tial a job as Eisenhower’s. If he benefited
from some down time, so might we.
But what sort of break is best? Should
we be thinking of long sabbaticals, or is
it enough to keep evenings and week-
ends free? Perhaps the ideal compro-
mise is Bridget Jones’s dream of a “full-
blown mini-break holiday weekend”?
The simple answer is all of the above.
There’s something fractal about rest: we
need it daily, weekly and yearly. That
said, my reading of the (slim) evidence
is that if you can bear the cumulative
expense and the travel time, frequent
short breaks beat the occasional elon-
gated vacation.
Reason one: holiday memories tend
to depend not on how long the holiday
was, but on the intensity of the experi-
ences. What matters is not how long you
went away, but just how exciting and
differentthe most exciting and different
moments were. The first day of a visit to
somewhere new will typically be more
memorable than the tenth.
Reason two: a change of activity can
be a spur to creativity. This need not be a
long holiday; even an engaging hobby
will do. Nobel Prize-winning scientists
aremuch more likelyto have serious
arts and crafts hobbies than other scien-
tists, who are in turn more likely to have
serious hobbies than the rest of us.
Still, a holiday can help. Lin-Manuel
Miranda was taking his first vacation
for several years, at a resort in
Mexico, when he read Ron Chernow’s
biography of Alexander Hamilton,
and was inspired to start working
on what became the musical phen-
omenon, Hamilton. “The moment
my brain got a moment’s rest,
Hamiltonwalked into it,” he explained.Intriguingly,Hamiltonis, among other
things, a musical about the importance
of taking proper holidays.
“Take a break,” sings Hamilton’s wife,
Eliza to her workaholic husband. “Run
away with us for the summer, let’s go
upstate.” Hamilton decides he needs to
keep working instead and then makes
sleep-deprived errors that led to his
downfall.
Eisenhower’s aim in relaxing in his
hideaway seems to have been to main-
tain his energy and good judgment. In
short, he rested so that he could be a bet-
ter general when he was working.
That leads us to reason three for tak-
ing a short break: if we need rest to pre-
vent exhaustion, a single, long vacation
won’t do the trick. Jessica de Bloom of
the University of Groningenhas found
that the recuperative effects of a vaca-
tion tend to wear off in just a few weeks.
You can’t store up the benefits of a long
holiday any more than you can sleep for
24 hours then stay awake and sharp for
the rest of the week.
All this raises another question,
though: what should we do while we’re
taking a break? According to Mr Soo-
jung-Kim Pang’s survey of the available
research, the ideal break offers relaxa-
tion, control, mastery and mental
detachment.
By relaxation he simply means some-
thing that requires little conscious effort
— from a walk to watching television.
Control means autonomy over how you
spend your time. Mastery refers to
immersion in a challenging and absorb-ing task. An active holiday of skiing,
sailing or rock climbing might do the
trick — but so might a weekend of home
improvements, assuming you’re better
at putting up shelves than I am.
Finally there’s mental detachment —
disconnecting from the responsibilities
of the office. Such disconnection is
harder than ever these days but it can
help, even when the break is otherwise
anything but relaxing. Business trips
can be exhausting yet even they have
been found to reduce burnout and
stress, because they provide a break
from day-to-day responsibilities.
And one 1998 study—by Professors
Dalia Etzion, Dov Eden and Yael Lapidot
— discovered that men called up for
active reserve duty in the Israeli army
found that the experience provided the
same relief from burnout and stress in
their normal lives that a holiday would
have done.
It’s not that serving in the army is
relaxing but that it provides a sense of
distance from the day job. Unless, of
course, your day job is in the army. In
that case I recommend that you emulate
Ike and enjoy a game of golf or bridge.[email protected]The unsung benefits
of the mini-break
Should we be dreaming
of long sabbaticals, or is it
enough to keep evenings
and weekends free?Tim
HarfordThe undercover
economistF
or an economy as export-de-
pendent as Germany’s, trade
wars are the ultimate night-
mare: they throw sand into the
wheels of global value chains,
create uncertainty about future trade
and reduce investment.
The current spat between China and
the US hastaken its tollon the German
economy: in the second quarter of 2019,
it shrank as a result of declining exports
and car production, and the data cur-
rently available for the third quarter
suggest things willbecome worse.
Most Germans remain fairly relaxed
about theeconomic downturn. After all,
Germany is near full employment; wage
growth has been solid, if not stellar, at
about 3 per cent a yearfor a decade; and
the public purse is so full that its fast-ageing society can afford a debate about
which pensions to increase first.
Such complacency may be ill-advised.
There are three warning signs it would
be dangerous to ignore. First, while Ger-
man manufacturers are still highly com-
petitive and the envy of the world, they
are not investing enough in the future.
Productivity growth is markedly
slower than it had been before the finan-
cial crisis; only the car manufacturers
have so far bucked that trend. Private
investment has only recently picked up
after a long lull, leaving Germany’s net
capital stock per worker roughly at the
same levelas it had been in 2002.
The stock of “knowledge capital” such
as software and organisational expertise
is growing more slowly than in the US or
France, according to DIW Berlin,a
think-tank. As a result, German tech-
nology is at risk of going of out date, with
the diesel engine only the most promi-
nent example. Germany also lags
behind in innovation. The OECD notes
that sectors in which the number of pat-
ents are growing fast (such as informa-tion technology security or semicon-
ductors) are dominated by the US,
China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
The second sign of complacency is in
the poor state of Germany’s infrastruc-
ture. Its physical infrastructureis in dire
need of repair, after two decades of
under-investment. One in eight of its
40,000 bridges along major roads and
highways is no longer in adequate con-
dition, according to official assess-
ments; some key bridges across the
Rhine had to be closed to heavy trafficas
a result, causing expensive delays.
Germany’s rail services fall a long way
short of international clichésabout
their quality and punctuality. Fast fibre
broadband is a niche product. And
while other countries are rolling out 5G
mobile networks, there are large swaths
of Germany in which citizens are lucky
to connect to a 4G signal.
The third sign is in the labour market.
There are already more than 1m job
vacancies, and the workforce is bound
to shrinkby up to 6m over the coming 15
years, net migration notwithstanding.What is more, the flow of migration
from eastern Europe, Germany’s pre-
ferred pool of additional workers, is
slowly drying up. As a result, there is a
growing list of professions for which the
country is seeking qualified migrants
from outside Europe.
The improved quality of education in
the past 15 years isrunning into a seri-ous shortage of teachers. At the same
time, there is untapped domestic poten-
tial such as women working only part-
time jobs, retirees willing to take part-
time work and low-paid workers want-
ing to upgrade their qualifications.
These challenges have something in
common: they arose because of a lack of
political ambition, creative reforms andsufficient investment when times were
good. They also allprovide Germany
with unique opportunities: the down-
turn focuses minds and the low interest
rates that come with it provide the ideal
backdrop for bold investments.
Some good ideas are already in the
making, such as helping workers with
additional training; modernising and
extending rail tracks; putting together a
climate investment package; and help-
ing indebted municipalities so they can
invest. But these are the low-hanging
fruit. The tough nuts to crack will be
changes to the tax code to give married
women stronger incentives to work
more; initiatives to improve early child-
hood education and childcare; and
stronger integration efforts to bring for-
eign-born women into the workforce.
Germany also needs to change busi-
ness tax codes to provide incentives for
private research and development,
equity funding and to help start-ups find
investment. Most importantly, it needs
to put together a credible, long-term
and sizeable investment plan so thatChristian
OdendahlA lack of political ambition,
reform and investmentwhen times were good have
hobbled the country
private companies, in turn, invest in
their own capacities. Ideally thiswould
happen alongside the rest of the EU, to
meet challenges such as climate change,
and to master the technologiesin which
the US and China currently lead.
What is missing, as so often, is the
political will. The German centre-right
need to let go of their obsession with bal-
anced books, which is economically illit-
erate and harmful to the future genera-
tions it is meant to protect. They won’t.
The Social Democrats would need to
focus on investment and private busi-
nesses, not redistribution and the public
sector alone. But they lack direction and
leadership.
As chancellor, Angela Merkel failed to
prepare the economy for the future, and
her grand coalition does not currently
have the numbers for another term. The
best political hope are the Greens, the
party mostwilling to challenge Ger-
many’s dogmas.The writer is chief economist at the Centre
for European ReformDogma and complacency put the German economy at risk
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