Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of nasty wars and bad politics, beginning with George W. Bush’s disputed election and ending with Gordon Brown’s disintegration before our very eyes. It was a decade of financial madness that began with the bursting of the dotcom bubble and ended with half our high-street banks under state control and our public finances in ruins. And yet it was also a decade of remarkable progress in so many aspects of our daily lives.
What would you pick as the greatest scientific or technological advance of the past decade? For some, the answer might be the text message, developed in the early 1990s but not adopted as a national habit until the turn of the millennium. For others it might be Viagra, which first became available by NHS prescription in 1999 — though if you’ve been popping the blue pills daily since then, you probably need a decade’s rest by now. And there are other new drugs which have worked wonders without provoking pensioner promiscuity: one such is Lucentis, first approved in the UK in 2007 as a treatment for advancing blindness caused by age-related macular degeneration.
As consumer gadget of the decade, many will cite the iPod, designed for Apple by Chingford-born Jonathan Ive and launched in 2001, though you might argue that it is merely an elegant improvement on the 30-year-old concept of the Sony Walkman; the multi-functional iPhone, about to celebrate its third birthday, is altogether more revolutionary.
In the realm of the internet, Facebook and Twitter have their advocates, but to me they are little more than the glorification of self-indulgent trivia, hence the cult of Stephen Fry. It’s possible to have too much communication, but we can never have too much knowledge, and in that respect the great leap was Google: I can date my first awestruck encounter with the mighty search engine to November 2000, at a conference in New Jersey.
Then there was the explosive growth of the no-frills airline sector, not in itself a technological advance but a great opening up of consumer choice (including the right to choose the size of your own carbon footprint) that depended on the efficiencies of the internet. EasyJet introduced online booking as long ago as 1997, but it is the Ryanair website that surely counts as an icon of the decade. The story of how it came into being is told in A Life in Full Flight, Alan Ruddock’s biography of cost-slashing Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary — who initially rejected the e-commerce concept. When he was finally persuaded that a website was essential, the first quote for its design came in at £3 million from some fancy consultants who O’Leary disliked on sight. So he gave the task to a 17-year-old Dublin schoolboy, John Beckett, and a dentistry student, Thomas Linehan, who proceeded to create a simple but workable site, with the characteristic Ryanair feature that it was almost impossible for the customer to contact the company if anything went wrong. The agreed fee for the task was £15,500, but when it was completed O’Leary tried to chisel them down to £12,000. That too was a harbinger of how all small-fry at the bottom of the business food-chain could expect to be treated at the penny-pinching fag-end of the decade.
Lost civilisation
The worst development affecting our daily lives in this decade has been the collapse of public civility: it has become acceptable to rage savagely at anyone providing inadequate service, or getting in your way, or restricting your freedom to behave in any way you want to; and service staff are now trained to respond with matching aggression, rather than helpfulness or sincere apology, towards dissatisfied customers. Yet this is, I observe, a peculiarly British problem. The Americans, the French, the Chinese, the Poles and Czechs who came and went during the decade, all preserve the courtesies and pride in service that we have somehow completely lost.
Regrets, I’ve had a few
If I have two investment regrets for the Noughties, it is that I didn’t buy any of the gold Gordon Brown was selling (as Christopher Fildes reminded us in the Christmas issue) at $275 an ounce at the start of the decade; and that I didn’t multiply our family holding in Barclays when its shares briefly hit an intra-day all-time low on 21 January this year of 47.3 pence, from which they have since bounced as high as £3.90. My late father’s lifetime bonus from Barclays, microscopic by today’s standards and after a 47-year career rise from junior clerk to deputy chairman, was a bundle of stock that might once — before the last two house-price booms — have been worth enough to buy a small cottage. On that January morning when the stock market thought no bank would survive until lunchtime, I could have traded them in for a secondhand Ford Focus. If I’d had the courage to follow my instinct and quadruple the holding, I’d be sitting on a six-figure profit. But being my father’s son, I’ve never been a bold risk-taker — and if his generation had still been in charge, the banks might never have got into all that trouble in the first place.
Gathering dust
So farewell, Paul Samuelson, Nobel-laureate author of the brick-sized economics textbook that has been head-achingly familiar to generations of students since it first appeared in 1948. Now in its 19th edition, it has sold more than four million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. My copy, I see, is an eighth-edition paperback of 1970, and its telltale unbroken spine reproaches me still from its dusty place on the bottom shelf of the bookcase: theoretical economics, with lots of charts and graphs, never really floated my boat. In fact I probably learned more — if many years too late — from Eat the Rich, P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious, graph-free 1998 treatise on how money works in the real world. In it, the great right-wing humourist took the ponderously even-handed old Keynesian Samuelson to task for saying that Karl Marx ‘was wrong about many things… but that does not diminish his stature as an important economist’. ‘Well, what would?’ stormed O’Rourke, ‘If Marx was wrong about many things and screwed the babysitter?’
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