Repeat performance: India’s election

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke was a hard-living, larger-than-life figure at home. But further afield, he spread his belief that Australia was no backwater but deserved a place on the world stage. We look back on his life and how he made Australians believe that too. And having exhausted just about every way they can optimize their days, Silicon Valley types are now obsessing about the particulars of their sleep. We take a look at the increasingly precision-engineered business of getting some shut-eye. But first, in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi looks set for a commanding victory in the country's election. If early results are confirmed, his ruling party looks likely to once again have enough seats to form a government on its own. The election was a massive undertaking. Supporters of Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Junta Party were among campaigners of all stripes trying to capture India's 900 million registered voters. After 6 weeks of staggered voting across the country, Mr. Modi himself went on a meditation retreat, apparently with lots of supporters in tow. He posted pictures and videos on social media from a temple in the Himalayas. Now he looks set to rejoin the noisy fray of Indian politics with a renewed mandate.

Well, the results are clear enough that Narendra Modi and his BJP, the party, have won an enormous victory today, a victory to match his victory of 5 years ago.

Alex Trevelli is India correspondent for The Economist based in Delhi.

With uncanny similarity in terms of the net numbers. The actual results are different. He lost support in some places, but he gained it back in equal measure in other places. It means that he's just won a reelection, a single-party reelection of a kind that no one has won in India before. There's a tremendous amount of political power at his disposal now.

And if those results are confirmed, should we view that as a sort of stamp of approval on Mr. Modi's first term?

You know, you could take this as a stamp of approval on Mr. Modi as a leader. There's no doubt about that. It's harder to call it a judgment on the first term since what he campaigned on in the run-up to this voting was quite radically different than what he campaigned on in 2014 and indeed than what he delivered during his 5 years in office. But whatever the content of the statement, you can say a great many Indian voters are happy to trust the future of the government to Mr. Modi.

[Speaker:STEVE] So what do you mean by that? What did he campaign on and what did he instead deliver?

Well, it's interesting. The first time round, if you look at all of the slogans in 2014, it was mainly about development. There was an undertone of Hindu pride, but for the most part it was about cleaning up government, removing corruption of the kind that had plagued the previous government's last 2 years in office, and building, building, building. There was a sort of unspoken idea that India could grow like China has grown. And the slogan that was heard most often on the day of that victory was, "Good times are coming." It meant economic good times. Now, the past 5 years have brought far less good, happy economic news than Indians would want, in particular in areas like manufacturing and jobs that Modi had really staked that earlier campaign on. So this time around in 2019, there was almost no discussion of that. There were vague bromides about development, but for the most part, Mr. Modi and his surrogates chose not to talk about what the economy might do or has done, instead to talk about who they are and who their enemies are. And very, very pure red meat, so to speak, nationalism seems to have been the winning ticket for this campaign.

You mentioned nationalism. I mean, Hindu nationalism has played a huge part in this election, right? I mean, how much do you see that playing into the government with this new mandate?

[Speaker:GHION_AI] It's an interesting question. There's still some space between the concepts of nationalism and Hindu nationalism, let's suppose. Nationalism means flag waving, identifying the leader with the armed forces, being proud to be an Indian. Hindu nationalism means asserting this specific sectarian character over all the offices of government. It's a more controversial approach, and Mr. Modi has used it sparingly, usually putting it to his deputies to insist that India is more Hindu than Muslim or belonging to any other minority. And it's played very well in some quarters, whereas for the national press and his own personal prestige, Mr. Modi prefers to stick to India-first nationalism.

Well, what about more widely in the region? How will Bangladesh and Pakistan, two predominantly Muslim countries, respond to this victory?

I have no doubt that the leaders of these countries will phone in their congratulations to Mr. Modi. It's hard to know what they might have wished as an outcome for this election, but there's some comfort in doing business with the same government in New Delhi. But it's notable where relations in particular with both Pakistan and Bangladesh are concerned that a lot of the Hindu nationalist themes that Mr. Modi has raised on the campaign trail, nationalist and Hindu nationalist, end up taking quite sharp pointy aim at those neighbors. On the one hand, using a series of aerial skirmishes with Pakistan as a calling card for his strongman credentials. And on the other hand, there's a very, very major citizenship issue unfurling in the eastern part of India where the idea that Bangladeshi infiltrators, the government calls them, are screwing up the demographics, making them less Hindu in particular. Has become a sticking point in a lot of those precincts. That's something that is actually quite difficult for the Indian government to talk to the Bangladeshi government about.

And what about India's opposition parties? I mean, will everyone feel chastened? What will they do?

Now, the Congress Party, if you measure it against its 2014 results, which were incredibly dismal, has done a little bit less badly. Still done terribly. BJP, it's— done almost exactly the same, which is to say, magnificently well. And some third parties have fared better, others have fared worse. One question people are asking is, how does the Congress react to this? Does it collapse in shame? Does its leadership change? There are various problems imagining any of those outcomes. But at this point, it's really anybody's guess how the Congress in particular reacts.

And what about the markets and investors? How will they take this BJP victory?

Well, the markets are uniformly happy about this, and they have been since Sunday night's exit polls were made public. They were pretty cheerful before that even. And today, the most watched market index hit a new record. The Sensex is now above 40,000 points for the first time. And in Mumbai, where the traders sit, it's happy. Not so much at this point because people expect real structural reforms from a Modi government, It's very unclear whether they're even interested in delivering those, but because there's an assurance that we know what the government is like going forward. It won't be fractured. It won't be surprising. The worst it can be is what we just had for the past 5 years.

Alex, thank you very much for joining us.

Oh, thank you, Jason. Glad to be here.

Last week, another prime minister retained his hold on power, though unexpectedly so.

I have always believed in miracles.

And tonight we've been delivered another one.

The Australian people voted Scott Morrison's Liberal Party-led coalition back into office. That defied years of polls that had predicted a Labor Party win. Two days before the election, there had been another significant moment in Australian politics: the death of Bob Hawke, the charismatic former prime minister governed the country between 1983 and 1991. He was known for his love of beer and cricket, endearing himself to a nation that viewed him as a true man of the people. But he's also credited with modernizing Australia's economy and thrusting the country onto the world stage.

I think the moment when Bob Hawke really impressed himself on the minds of Australians was when Australia won the America's Cup in 1983.

Anne Rowe is our obituaries editor.

He'd just become prime minister actually had a meteoric rise into that role. And there he was in a white jacket with the word Australia stamped all over it at the Royal Perth Yacht Club.

No one would want to work today anyway, would they? They'd been up all night. So too had the Prime Minister. They'd also been—

And he was simply reveling in the whole episode, the whole occasion, and brought the crowd with him. And he cried out a line that was to become very famous.

I'll tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up to die in the bunk. Oh, Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, you'll come a-waltzing Matilda.

He always felt he was going to be something. And he was much encouraged in this by his mother. And when she lost her elder son, at the age of 18 to meningitis, she poured all her energy into her younger son, who was Bob. He was generally the apple of her eye and did indeed win scholarship after scholarship and thought that he was bound for glory. Well, the response of Australians to Bob Hawke was as enthusiastic as his for them. They treated him like a rock star, and this had happened earlier on in his career because he'd made a name for himself by being an advocate for the trade unions with the Wage Fixing Commission and managed to get a higher basic wage. This had made him a popular hero. And so they began to adore him, frankly, and to hope that he would be Prime Minister. And apparently when he eventually became Prime Minister, there were women weeping in the street and people just wanting to touch him because he absolutely had that feeling that he was a regular Australian like them. And he was really going to help the country.

The adventure with the Australian people was just 1 hour old. At midnight, Bob Hawke had claimed victory. The Labor Party's majority in the new House of Representatives was stretching to a stunning 23 seats. The atmosphere in the National Tally Room—

He did a great deal for Australia to open it up. This was what he felt it needed. When he got into the prime ministership in 1983, the economy was in shambles. There were high tariff walls. It was a very protectionist country. There were exchange controls. And also it was an isolated place. It was cut off from the rest of the world really. It was by itself at the end of the world, if you like. And he utterly changed that. First of all, by deregulating the economy, so he got rid of exchange controls, he floated the currency. He then took down the tariff walls, so opened up Australia to trade. And then he began to forge new relationships with the neighboring countries in Asia, because as he said when he came in, Australians were still thinking of those countries as the Far East. Of course, they're not the Far East from Australia, they're just the countries to the north. Well, he embodied the Australian persona in a couple of particular ways. One was his complete obsession with sports, but cricket particularly. He said there were never enough hours in the day to play cricket.

I believe it's an insult to yourself and to your opponent not to go out there and give your very damnedest and to try and win.

The other way in which he embodied it was he was a pretty formidable drinker. When he was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he drank a yard of ale in 11 seconds when the time limit was actually 25 seconds to do this. So that got him into the Guinness World Records. And his party trick was to take a pint of beer and just down it in one. Well, you might have thought with all this drinking and enjoying himself, he was not going to show his emotions. He was going to be a sort of tough guy. It was not like that. He was pretty emotional. He wasn't afraid to cry in public. He wept particularly when he had to explain that he discovered that his daughter Roslyn was a heroin addict.

You don't cease to be a husband, you know, you don't cease to be a father. And my children and my wife have a right to be protected in this matter.

He also cried when he embraced a Chinese refugee after Tiananmen, and that was particularly held to his credit. I think that he was very keen that Australia was welcoming to immigrants, because of course in recent years it's become the reverse. Well, his years in office were characterized by all these economic reforms, and in fact, the brain behind a lot of those reforms was the Treasurer Paul Keating, his number two. They liked each other up to a point. I think in the early years they liked each other quite a bit, but it was a very fraught relationship and it got more and more so. Keating didn't feel he got the credit for things. And Hawke was only too glad to take all the credit himself. So gradually, things got more and more tense. And then by 1990, it was certainly very clear that Keating wanted Hawke's job.

The end for Bob Hawke came just 30 minutes after he entered the party room. The first sign of the outcome—

So he was never voted out by the Australian people, which was very important to him. But he was booted out by his own party.

I think he died Australian. I hope that— That's the way they'll think of me.

I think Bob Hawke's biggest legacy to Australia is self-confidence. He had self-confidence himself in spades and he passed it on to his country. He opened up Australia to the world so that it became really a citizen of that world, and that is the biggest legacy you can give your country.

Anne Rowe on Bob Hawke, who's died aged 89.

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For a lot of people, going to sleep is as simple as shutting the curtains and fluffing the pillow. Others take it more seriously. Much, much more seriously.

So first you close your blackout blinds, you've got to have complete blackout in your bedroom.

Tom Standage is The Economist's deputy editor.

You have your dinner at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and you have nothing to eat or drink after 6 PM, and at 8 o'clock you put on your special light-blocking glasses that block blue light, and you set your bedroom temperature to 67 degrees Fahrenheit, and your electric blanket to 69.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Then you turn on your white noise machine and you meditate for 10 minutes. You put on your Oura sleep tracking ring, and then you're finally ready to go to bed at about 9 o'clock.

This sounds hugely involved, Tom. Who's doing this?

So this is the sleep routine published by Bryan Johnson, who is a tech industry CEO. He built a company called Braintree a few years ago, which is a payments company, and he sold it to eBay for $800 million.

How's that sleep regime working out for Mr. Johnson?

Well, he says it's made him much more productive. So he says that the amount of deep sleep that he's getting, and this is measured by the app that goes with the smart ring, has gone up by 157%. Oh, that's awesome.

Sounds very precise.

Yeah, that sounds great. He does say that it's decimated his social life and he's now sleeping in a different bedroom from his partner. But like a lot of people in the tech industry, he's very, very interested in sleep and how you can maximise the amount of it you get and the effectiveness of your sleep.

So why, why is Silicon Valley obsessed with sleep?

Believers in all of this stuff say it's a really good way to maintain mental health, to boost your cognition, improve your productivity. You know, these are the sorts of things that you're thrusting CEOs want to do.

And it sounds like it comes with, you know, a battery of new kit you need to buy.

Yes, this does also involve lots of technology. So it's not just the Oura sleep tracking ring, which is a ring that you wear and it has lots of sensors in it and it can measure, you know, your heart rate and your temperature and how much you're moving around. So you could use it as a fitness tracker, but it has become the sort of preferred sleep tracker. But yeah, there's a whole load of other technology as well. So you've got the mattress heaters and chillers, you've got the sound machines, you've got smart pillows. Apparently the market for all of this gear is gonna be worth $81 billion by next year. So this is a big business, it would seem.

Forgive my cynicism, but I mean, how much of this is, is, is bunkum?

It has to be said that when people have looked at this scientifically, they haven't found a great deal of evidence that it really helps. So there was a study done in 2015 by a a couple of US medical schools which found that sleep tracking devices could not actually measure whether people were asleep or not terribly accurately. There was another study, it was done in 2017 by researchers at two medical schools in Chicago, and they found that there was a sort of danger of something they called orthosomnia, which is the perfectionist quest for the ideal sleep. And the problem they say is that if you've got these technologies that actually aren't doing what they're supposed to, aren't terribly reliable scientifically, people could misdiagnose themselves with sleep disorders that they don't actually have. And the other thing is that they get so worried about whether they're sleeping properly and whether they're getting enough sleep and whether the CEO next door is getting more sleep and is going to beat them, that this actually stops them from falling asleep. So this obsession with trying to get to sleep could actually stop you getting to sleep.

Well, it seems to align with the Silicon Valley push towards not only sort of perfectionism and maximizing, but quantifying, I guess, you know, always with tech.

Absolutely. If you work in the tech industry, everything is driven by metrics and by numbers and you measure things and you test things. And so this fits naturally into that. If you're testing everything that you do during the day at work to to work out the best way to do it. Why wouldn't you apply that in your personal life? I think that's one of the reasons this is happening, but I don't think it's the only reason. This fits in with the kind of existing cult of productivity and sort of the quest for life hacks. There's a big dose of that as well, that there's this sort of pressure to improve your productivity. And previously that was something you could only do while you were awake, but this gives you the opportunity to be improving your productivity even while you're asleep. So it's just like the whole time you could be working on making yourself a more effective CEO. And then the other thing is that it fits in with the whole mentality of Silicon Valley that Everything, if you are in a startup, is secondary to succeeding at work. Nothing else matters. You know, a consequence of that is working very long hours and actually not getting enough sleep.

It seems like it's representative of this trend we see out of Silicon Valley in particular, where problems that arise because of technology are then vigorously assaulted with more technology.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Technology causes a problem, so let's fix it with even more technology. So yeah, your smartphone's too addictive. It's all right, there's an app on your smartphone that can measure how much you're using it. Oh yeah, that'll fix it. Well, the streets fill up with Ubers, there's too much traffic. Well, never mind, have an electric scooter. So it's very easy to laugh at all of this, but what I would point out is that sleep tracking is where fitness tracking was a decade ago. And back then it was quite geeky, but now it's quite normal for people to have fitness trackers that, you know, measure people's heart rates and how far they've run and so on. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility that 10 years from now, all of this sleep tech will be perhaps entirely normal, but I'm not having dinner at 4 o'clock.

Tom, thanks very much for coming in and sleep well.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.

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Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning.

Whew.

And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage, or experience, Schwab has everything you need all in one place so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more.