New York University professor Nouriel Roubini was bound to be a hit with the predominately pale male suits attending the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit held at the Sandton Convention Centre on Wednesday.
The economist, famous for predicting both the housing market collapse in the United States and the 2008 global recession did, after all, make encouraging noises to the country’s executives about the strength and potential of emerging markets like South Africa.
All of this with the usual caveats, obviously, that investors still consider advanced economies safer havens for their money and that growth is still dependent on the financial pragmatism pervasive in lean times.
While generally gloomy in his analysis of current economic trends, Roubini talked up the “pace of [technological] innovation” in South Africa, China and India, commended governments of developing countries for being equipped with “more policy bullets to counter a recession” and predicted a 3.5% potential growth rate for South Africa.
But, as executives networked over lunch, it appeared they would have been most appreciative of Roubini’s taste in art.
The man dubbed “Dr Doom” for his gloomy economic predictions is a serious collector. His New York loft apartment, noted the Gawker website, “used to feature vulva-shaped protuberances sculpted by the artist Analia Segal”. Much like mounted springbok heads, these are the kind of installations the rugger-bugger old boys network clearly still running South Africa’s economy “gets”.
But the ratio of women of all kinds to melanin-deprived men was relatively low. Unsurprising, really. The Commission for Employment Equity’s 2011 report found that 71% of South Africa’s top management is white and only 19% female. Even that 19% has to assimilate: Over-chewy salmon and cream-cheese bagels — in these frugal times a R6 555 ticket to the summit buys only a packed school lunch, it seems — a female banking executive was gushing about Graça Machel’s appearance earlier that morning.
“She was so gracious, so lovely and open,” noted the banker between mouthfuls. “Of course I did the ‘chick thing’ and took lots of notes.” The former Mozambican minister of education and culture had warned that South Africa’s democracy was increasingly driven by personality politics and there was a need to “shed the syndrome of the ‘big boy'” in our politics.
Horseman of an encroaching apocalypse
A requirement in the private sector, too, perhaps. Roubini, with former United States vice-president Al Gore and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson, were easy to imagine as some sort of horsemen of an encroaching apocalypse.
Despite running through a litany of floods, droughts and natural catastrophes endured this year alone to underline that “the climate crisis and its consequences … [are] being felt today”, Gore appears reticent to write up his “The End is Nigh” placard and wander off to Oxford Road for the final farewell party.
Criticising the dominant trend of investor “short-termism” rather than a more “human-centric” approach to investing in companies over longer periods, Gore suggested that this was one of the reasons it was taking longer for countries to emerge from recessions. He said that in the post-World War II environment, when stocks were being held for up to seven years on average, it took countries only about six months to recover from a recession. Presently, he said, recovery was stretched out over two years or longer because investors retain stocks for less than a year.
“The increasing short-term focus for investment decisions and business planning has been [harmful] to creating sustainable value,” said Gore. However, the “economic crisis is a tremendous opportunity, if dealt with properly, to help us deal with the climate challenge”.
Noting that an ideal response for countries stuck in the economic doldrums was to “get people working” Gore, as an example, said there are “millions of jobs that can be made available by retro-fitting buildings to make them more energy efficient”.
He felt that greening, much like technology, would become less expensive as increased “research and development spending [in the green economy] would drive the costs down”.
Gore used the example of former US president John F Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to his country’s congress to get a man on the moon before the end of that decade — and it being achieved eight years and two months later — as a rallying call for the suits gathered to “transcend our limitations and constraints and achieve whatever we imagine” of a greener world.
In South Africa limited imagination is much less of a challenge than limited bandwidth. This is something Wired’s Anderson should, perhaps, have turned into when, during his Q&A, there were more questions being asked through the conventional method of raising one’s hand and waiting for the microphone than through tweets or emails to the master of ceremonies’s iPad.
Gloriously free-market approach
Anderson’s gloriously free-market approach to the democratisation of technology didn’t quite gel with a country where the communications sector is anything but competitive.
Nevertheless, “with computers taken out of the glass box and into people’s lives”, he punted “free” as a business model — especially for marketing products.
The present, according to Anderson, is “Freemium” — where online content ranges from free limited access up to premium, paid-for access — for everything from Kindle books to celebrity-chef-lookalike porn star dwarves in action.
This trend, according to Anderson, won’t necessarily herald the death of books, newspapers and other physical media. As fewer people consume physical media it will improve, attaining “artefactal luxury” status, becoming more ornate and designed — “the Fabergé egg of the experience”. How much for a diamond-encrusted Mail & Guardian?