Letters to the editor

The anti-social network

Not content with running Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is stepping up the battle of the technology giants by announcing plans to connect people in poorer countries via internet signals from solar-powered drones (“Imperial ambitions”, April 9th). Facebook craves more users and more data, but at what cost? Regardless of the technology, the fear is that Mr Zuckerberg’s latest venture could backfire in this age of transparency and declining consumer trust. This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer featured the “inversion of influence”, whereby decisions made at the top are the least trusted. A recent survey by Prophet, a consultancy, had Facebook ranked 200th in terms of consumer trust.

In an age where technology is increasingly about anticipating future need as well as meeting current need and a more personalised service is linked to surveillance, the repercussions of this space odyssey will be wide-ranging and complex. Mr Zuckerberg’s sheer determination does not necessarily guarantee success—and it will make the likes of Microsoft and Google even more competitive. I would urge the ambitious Mr Zuckerberg to heed the story of Icarus; Google will clip his wings for starters.

ROB HUNTER
Managing director
Hunterlodge Advertising
Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

You portrayed Mr Zuckerberg magnificently as the divine Augustus, signifying the tech giant’s imperial reach. A more telling analogy might have been a large poster of Mr Zuckerberg’s face, with the slogan “Facebook is watching you”. Your concerns about Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policy were placed in the context of risks to its reputation and possible regulatory clashes. But you passed over the implications of this “universal passport” for personal freedom and choice. Facebook holds our entire lives in its servers: our expressed feelings, our political views, the identities of our friends and lovers, with photographs of all. Our preferences and locations are tracked, our data mined. Closing an account is no straightforward matter—try it. Luckily for “the spirit of Man”, as Winston Smith called it in “1984”, you identify Facebook’s great and single weak spot: it needs to be “liked”.

DAVID JOHN
London

You underestimate the disruption that will be caused by virtual reality (VR). Unlike augmented reality, which projects ancillary information onto the real world, VR creates entirely parallel worlds, unconstrained by mundane inconveniences. Thanks to the rapid development of processing power, these virtual worlds will eventually be indistinguishable from real life.

Within 10-20 years we should expect to spend more time in VR than in the real world: the impact on the job economy, education and entertainment will be dramatic. It is for that reason Facebook and others are investing so heavily in virtual reality. It will literally be a whole new world.

TORSTEN REIL
Chief executive
NaturalMotion
Oxford

Joel Stern on SVM

There were some shortcomings in your otherwise fascinating discussion of shareholder value management and policy (SVM) (“Analyse this”, April 2nd). You were correct that the original thinking on the subject was developed by Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller in their 1958 and 1961 papers on the theory of valuation. But the fact is that the ideas presented in McKinsey’s book, “Valuation”, now in its sixth edition, were found for the first time in my book, “Analytical Methods in Financial Planning”, first published in 1972. Almost all of the ideas in my book were covered in 96 articles I wrote for the Financial Times, each of which was designed to provide a specific lesson in both the theory and policy of corporate finance: “how to” as opposed to “what’s going on”. They deal with a much broader range of subjects including, for example, “Why people believe capital markets are inefficient.”

There are other contributors to SVM, including Eugene Fama, from the University of Chicago, Stephen Ross of MIT and Richard Roll of UCLA. Valuation involves both selecting an appropriate measure of corporate performance and also a required rate of return for risk in achieving that corporate performance. My contribution was recognising that “discounted cashflow” as a process and “net present value” as a measure do not provide a way to solve the corporate-governance problem, such as designing incentives on pay for senior management down through middle management and even to the shop floor.

In order to accomplish the latter on corporate governance and remuneration, it was essential to develop a new concept called “economic value added”, which provides a way of measuring performance year-by-year contemporaneously, so that rewards can be paid in the current year based on actual performance.

JOEL STERN
Chairman
Stern Value Management
New York

All about Czechia

I was a little disappointed when reading your article about the move to introduce Czechia as the Czech Republic’s short name (“Metamorphosis”, April 23rd). Czechia is the literal translation of Česko. You wrote that in the 1920s, the writer Karel Capek said Česko was “not musical” and that “it even sounds a little facetious” to foreigners. But he never wrote that about Česko/Czechia; he was referring, in an article from 1922 co-written with his brother, Josef, to the word Československo/Czechoslovakia.

You also say that the “Cz” spelling used in English “comes from Polish, not Czech. It may have been adopted as a result of the influx of Jews from Poland to the Anglophone world in the 19th century”. However, the spelling comes from the Czech itself. From the Middle Ages until the orthographic reform of 1842 (when it was changed into Čech/Čechy), the name of the people and the country were spelled Cžech/Cžechy. The first use of the English term Czechia comes from 1841, in an encyclopedia written by two English churchmen who used Czech sources, continuing the already long-established tradition of the use of that word in Latin. There is no Polish or Jewish intermediary documented anywhere in this process; that is pure speculation based on a superficial comparison of the English and Polish orthography.

JIRI SITLER
Historian and diplomat
Stockholm

Trust the trusts

I think you are wrong to support the public dissemination of beneficial ownership in an impetuous effort to combat offshore tax evaders (“The lesson of the Panama papers”, April 9th). This is a reckless violation of personal privacy and stands to put in physical danger law-abiding individuals and their relatives around the world. The vast majority of offshore strategies are used legally, for a variety of business and privacy purposes. In fact, your position goes beyond the current scope of the OECD’s noxious “common reporting standard”. This will gather and automatically exchange individual names, addresses, tax-identification numbers, and financial-account balances with the governments of countries such as Azerbaijan, Cameroon, China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uganda. Where the information might go from there, no one knows.

Shaming kleptocrats with a public database will not bring an end to the shadow financial system. What it will do is make many honest people and their families more vulnerable to extortion and kidnapping.

GREGORY CRAWFORD
President
Alliance Trust Company of Nevada
Reno, Nevada

A hesitant divorce

You say that many people who are unsure how to vote in Britain’s referendum on whether to stay or exit the European Union will decide on the basis of whether Brexit is likely to make them better or worse off (“The economic consequences”, April 9th). Most divorces leave both parties worse off and the future uncertain. But these days, that is rarely a reason for a couple who have fallen out of love to wait until death to part. Provided both sides have an equal say in the matter, those who are unsure how to vote won’t do so.

GINA ANTCZAK
Lymington, Hampshire

Boris Johnson, London’s mayor and a leading Brexiteer, scurrilously suggested that the “half-Kenyan” Barack Obama’s reason for wanting Britain to remain in the EU was based on an old resentment of the British empire. Since one of Mr Johnson’s forebears was Turkish, are we to dismiss his antipathy to the EU as being motivated by the fact that he is “part-Turkish”? That would be unworthy, which is why Mr Johnson was ill-advised to try to raise the president’s family background.

With only two months to go, I am left wondering how much further into the political gutter Mr Johnson will try to take the debate.

ANDREW HALPER
London

Employing brain power

“Beautiful minds, wasted” (April 16th) was a welcome attempt to tackle the stigma associated with autism, emphasising how various features of parts of the spectrum, increased focus, reliability and honesty, could benefit employers. But autism is not alone among psychological differences in representing possible opportunities to bosses. Recent research has begun to uncover a positive association between worry, rumination and some anxiety disorders, with higher intelligence. Perhaps a more “emotionally intelligent” workplace might learn to embrace a wider spectrum of people with different outlooks on life, for mutual benefit.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in “The Crack Up”, an essay first published in Esquire in 1936, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Does this increasingly look like the demands of a modern-day office?

RAJ PERSAUD
Consultant psychiatrist
SIR SIMON WESSELY
President
Royal College of Psychiatrists
London

Most funding on autism clings to the old view of “genetics-first/brain-wiring” paradigm. As the father of an autistic child and as a professional experienced in the biomedical industry, the current approach to tackling the condition frustrated me to the point where I founded the N of One: Autism Research Foundation. This organisation takes a “venture capital” approach to seeding potential breakthroughs in our understanding of the biology of autism by funding research that lies outside the conventional, but largely unproductive, consensus view.

Although I appreciate the attention to autism that The Economist brought to tackling autism’s challenges and agree that more medical research should be a top priority, I believe the greatest returns to society will come when we expand our medical-research focus beyond a paradigm that has failed to produce treatments and answers.

JOHN RODAKIS
Founder
N of One: Autism Research Foundation
Dallas, Texas

Peru’s election

“A dangerous farce” (April 9th) misconstrued Peru’s electoral process. The electoral authority did not “subvert democracy and the rule of law”. It ruled in strict accordance with election law. The European Union Observation Mission was one of a dozen impartial witnesses. It suggested improvements that could be made for the future but acknowledged the election was democratic and certified its transparency. The chief observer from the OAS shared that assessment. Moreover, no observer has questioned the integrity of the authorities, nor the legitimacy of the whole process or its results.

Millions of Peruvians went to the polling stations to elect a new government for the next five years, and to decide which candidates will proceed to the second round. As stated by the EU High Representative, the elections proved Peru’s commitment to democracy.

CLAUDIO DE LA PUENTE
Ambassador of Peru
London

University of the People

*With regards to your article about University of the People, (“Cheap MBAs: Costly for some”, April 21st). I respect and value journalistic freedom and the right of any news media and journalist to write whatever they wish. For what it’s worth, however, I only wish you would have researched more thoroughly and more accurately before shooting down UoPeople’s groundbreaking MBA programme before it’s even launched, and without fair reason.

For starters, “Cheap MBAs: Costly for some” is not a level-handed title. It implies that UoPeople’s affordable (note: not “cheap”) MBA degree doesn’t pay off, even though the programme is yet to start. Second, to set the record straight, we are not UoP (which is University of Phoenix), we are “UoPeople.”

In addition, you suggest a shortcoming of UoPeople not having industry accreditation for its MBA. The standard is that a university usually cannot begin to even apply for industry accreditation until a few years into its programme and only after graduating cohorts of graduates. This vital piece of information is missing from the article, implying to readers that UoPeople simply isn’t good enough to be ranked.

Finally, you express doubts over who would hire our students. Since UoPeople already has graduates with bachelor’s degrees in business administration, you could have easily verified this by simply asking to be put in touch with graduates, or better yet, with employers of our graduates (of which, there are many, including the likes of IBM, Amazon, World Bank, the UN and more).
For future articles, UoPeople is more than happy to provide interviewees and necessary information (including information about our highly qualified instructors), in order to facilitate accurate reporting and avoid damaging, erroneous assumptions.

SHAI RESHEF
President
University of the People
Pasadena, California

Zap!

Aircraft do not only face the threat of bird strikes when taking off or landing at airports (“Sonic scarecrow”, April 16th). Birds in transit, such as migratory formations, are also a danger. I have for some time wondered if laser technology could be used to deal with this hazard, but thought it would be too bulky, require too much power and be slow to aim at the offending birds.

However, your preceding article on space travel, “Starchip enterprise”, suggests the feasibility of such an initiative. The laser beams would only have to focus on a fairly small short-range cone that would destroy the bird prior to entering the engine. As the technology of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing, the operation of the laser could be automatic rather than requiring pilot intervention.

The dust and ashes of a lasered bird would probably not be a sufficient problem to cause serious engine malfunction; inspection after a safe landing would confirm if any maintenance work was necessary.

JOHN CHURCHILL
Former air-traffic controller and senior manager in the RAF
Christchurch, Dorset

Tongue and groovy

Schumpeter noted Boston Consulting Group’s calculation that “less than 15% of firms have developed a business strategy focused on the elderly” (April 9th). I have been fortunate enough to work for astute companies that sell to older folks, including my present task of marketing a deluxe range of designer tongue-scrapers. At first we targeted the product to the young date-conscious and their bad-breath anxieties, but we quickly refocused on wine drinkers with declining palates and geriatrics with fading appetite.

A swift tongue-scrape removes the debris that blocks taste-bud efficacy.

MANO MANOHARAN
London

* Letters appear online only

Correction: Due to a technical error this article wrongly spelled the Czech word for Czechia as “Èesko”, not “Česko”. This has been corrected