Jared Diamond is a Professor of geography whose books I have really enjoyed.  He previously won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and he writes a lot about how societies rise and fall and what leads to the growth of populations.  His latest book is extremely interesting and covers a wide variety of topics, including the war between Finland and Russia, Chilli, Australia and Germany, but what I found particularly interesting was that he thinks one of the big dangers in many countries is the way that people are getting on.  He says that to a large extent that is because of how much TV people watch and how they no longer communicate in person by electronic devices.  He says because we no longer experience each other as live people and just see each other as digital messages on a screen, we don’t have the normal human tendency to not be terribly rude to somebody who is directly in front of you.  As he says, “… but we lose those inhibitions when people are reduced to words on a screen.  It is much easier to be rude and dismissive towards words on a screen than towards a live person looking you in the face.  Once we’ve thus got accustomed to being abusive at a distance, it is an easier next step to being abusive also to a live person.” 

My favourite financial publication for the last 10 years has been Barrons.  It is a highly regarded financial newspaper that comes out every Saturday in America which I have read on my Kindle for years.  They boast that their readership has more millionaires and more CEO’s than any other financial newspaper and I would imagine that is true because it is on a far more serious and technical level than for example local magazines like the Financial Mail which would be a far simpler read than Barrons. 

Barrons recently had an article that was quite sceptical about South Africa’s future, but the part that interests me is that they said a number of things that needed to change in South Africa, if South Africa is to succeed economically.  The one thing was, and I don’t see the ANC getting rid of this, was removing black economic empowerment saying that that is stopping the economy developing as much as it could.  The other thing, and they indicated that the ANC would not like to change this either, is something that I have written about extensively and they said the labour laws in South Africa simply have to change before South Africa can succeed economically. 

I am not going to give my whole normal speech on that, but it was just nice to read that that was the opinion of the leading economic analysts they spoke to saying on the one hand, while it gives protection to those who already have jobs, it makes the economy so much worse and what people forget, those who have jobs anyway, is that when we are talking about a worsening economy we are talking about more unemployed people – we are  talking about the person that breaks into your apartment, we are talking about the person who steals your car, we are talking about all of the people who choose crime because there are no jobs in South Africa, particularly for those who suffer from a poor education.  In other words, on one hand one might feel that those laws help you, but you pay for them in so many other ways including the Rand declining against the Dollar, and you having to pay more money every time you put petrol in your car.  Nothing comes for free and that is one of the big costs that you pay, when you have laws in South Africa that chase away international businesses because very few other countries, and certainly no developing countries, go so out of their way to favour the employee over the employer and international companies and business people can choose where they are going to grow and develop their business.  They simply don’t make the choice to go and put their business in a country where they are going to waste all their time and money at the CCMA with all sorts of nonsense including people who stage resignations in order to secure a higher salary and when their bluff is called, then claim they were constructively dismissed!  

It has been sad, especially for me who has advertised heavily on TV for more than one decade, to have watched the decline of live television. Apart from a few sports events, and even those show declining audiences, by and large people watch less and less live TV.  That means even if they want to watch a specific program they either watch it online or record it later when they zip through the adverts or without the adverts.  Advertising on TV has become less and less effective over the years and I, in particular, can see it in our call statistics and the new cases we take on from television advertising over the last three years.  The decline during that period in particular, which obviously also coincides with increasing internet speeds and it being cheaper and more cost-effective for people to have options such as Netflix, have really seen those calls dramatically reduced.

Business magazines talk about the generation of “cable cutters” and while they don’t literally mean actually cutting the cables, a lot of today’s younger generation, with the exception perhaps of Game of Thrones, simply don’t watch anything live on TV other than maybe a major cricket game, rugby match or soccer tournament when of course the advert break is the time to get up, stretch your legs, go to the bathroom or go and help yourself to a beer from the fridge.  What has been surprising though is how television companies have not really reduced the rates they charge for advertising during that time – perhaps the media buyers at the bigger firms – and I am talking about the major companies in South Africa – don’t seem to notice as much or they are too happy with all the special events they get invited to as a result of placing their firm’s media with those companies, but TV audiences, while not totally down, are certainly declining. 

In my industry of course most people would not advertise in the first place because the vast majority of attorneys simply unethically tout for business.  They pay touts up to R25,000 a case to bring them serious injury cases and that, from a cost-effective point of view, it is far cheaper than what it would cost to advertise for those same clients.  It is unethical, but I cannot think of when last an attorney was struck off for touting and even in the cases where we have laid complaints where attorneys have touted cases away from us precious little seems to have been done to them by the then Law Society and now the Legal Practice Council.

This is one of those topics I have always felt very passionate about.  My grandfather, on my mother’s side was a school principal in Amanzimtoti and my grandmother, Helen Wilson, was a school teacher.  She went to University at a time when very few women did and was a very talented women who entered one of the few professions open to women at that time.  In those days, being the principal of a school was an important position to hold and would have made you, not quite equal to the Mayor of Amanzimtoti, but certainly to be one of the more prominent people in town and the job was much better paid, relative to other jobs at that time, than it is now. 

Teachers around the world are getting paid less and less with the result that the field is attracting the worst students – quite often, and statistics in some countries bear this out, those who take on teaching jobs come in the bottom one-third of the results at their University or College.  The countries that are taking education serious and paying quite generously are actually famous for a far better system of education and that would include South Korea, Finland and Germany. 

If you want to attract a top talented teacher you have to pay more and you should want to attract the top talented teacher because do you want your children to be taught by the most talentless, bottom of the class people?  Teachers should not be at the bottom of the pile when it comes to salaries and as it is we lost a fortune of our top teachers to the UK about 10 to 15 years ago, including one of my good friends, simply because he could earn so much more money in London and be living in an international city as well, than he could in South Africa. 

We lost our nurses to Dubai, our dentists to Canada, our doctors to London and all for similar reasons, but I would say really there are few people that are paid less than our nurses and our teachers and both of them are critical. Ask yourself why there has been such an explosion of personal injury and medical negligence cases in South Africa? The best nurses left and we lost a lot of teachers and continue to do so.  This however, is not a problem that just South Africa has – too many countries think that they can underpay teachers and that somehow underpaid teachers will produce a new crop of geniuses.  If you want the best, you need to pay the best and things get worse when people know that the private schools will pay better salaries to the teachers than in public schools and so of course, the children of middle to wealthy parents pay more so that their children can get a better education and a better teacher than the person sitting in a village in Mpumalanga.  The problem is if you don’t educate the person sitting in a village in Mpumalanga properly, there is every chance that he is going to either do something bad to you and your family, because he gets into crime or he is never going to be a valuable member of society. 

People always ask me when will South Africa resolve its problems and I always say to them that it will be a number of years after we get the education system right and we have not got it even close to right yet.