In Hoc Anno Domini

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus, the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression—for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in diverse places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Roysterand has been published annually since.

A version of this article appeared Dec. 24, 2012, on page A12 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In Hoc Anno Domini.

Today’s challenges go beyond Keynes

For more than 30 years, from the mid-1970s to 2008, Keynesian demand management was in intellectual eclipse. Yet it returned with the financial crisis to dominate the thinking of the Obama administration and much of the UK Labour party. It is time to reconsider the revival.

The rebound of Keynesianism, led in the US by Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Paul Krugman, the economist-columnist, and the US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, came with the belief that short-term fiscal and monetary expansion was needed to offset the collapse of the housing market.

The US policy choice has been four years of structural (cyclically adjusted) budget deficits of general government of 7 per cent of gross domestic product or more; interest rates near zero; another call by the White House for stimulus in 2013; and the Fed’s new policy to keep rates near zero until unemployment returns to 6.5 per cent. Since 2010, no European country has followed the US’s fiscal lead. However, the European Central Bank and Bank of England are not far behind the Fed on the monetary front.

We can’t know how successful (or otherwise) these policies have been because of the lack of convincing counterfactuals. But we should have serious doubts. The promised jobs recovery has not arrived. Growth has remained sluggish. The US debt-GDP ratio has almost doubled from about 36 per cent in 2007 to 72 per cent this year.

The crisis in southern Europe is often claimed by Keynesians to be the consequence of fiscal austerity, yet its primary cause is the countries’ and eurozone’s unresolved banking crises. And the UK’s slowdown has more to do with the eurozone crisis, declining North Sea oil and the inevitable contraction of the banking sector, than multiyear moves towards budget balance.

There are three more reasons to doubt the Keynesian view. First, the fiscal expansion has been mostly in the form of temporary tax cuts and transfer payments. Much of these were probably saved, not spent.

Second, the zero interest rate policy has a risk not acknowledged by the Fed: the creation of another bubble. The Fed has failed to appreciate that the 2008 bubble was partly caused by its own easy liquidity policies in the preceding six years. Friedrich Hayek was prescient: a surge of excessive liquidity can misdirect investments that lead to boom followed by bust.

Third, our real challenge was not a great depression, as the Keynesians argued, but deep structural change. Keynesians persuaded Washington it was stimulus or bust. This was questionable. There was indeed a brief depression risk in late 2008 and early 2009, but it resulted from the panic after the abrupt and maladroit closure of Lehman Brothers.

There is no going back to the pre-crisis economy, with or without stimulus. Unlike the Keynesian model that assumes a stable growth path hit by temporary shocks, our real challenge is that the growth path itself needs to be very different from even the recent past.

The American labour market is not recovering as Keynesians hoped. Indeed, most high-income economies continue to shed low-skilled jobs, either to automation or to offshoring. And while US employment is rising for those with college degrees, it is falling for those with no more than a high school education.

The infrastructure sector is a second case in point. Other than a much-hyped boom in gas fracking, investments in infrastructure are mostly paralysed. Every country needs to move to a low-carbon energy system. What is the US plan? There isn’t one. What is the plan for modernised transport? There isn’t one. What is the plan for protecting the coastlines from more frequent and costly flooding? There isn’t one.

Trillions of dollars of public and private investments are held up for lack of a strategy. The Keynesian approach is ill-suited to this kind of sustained economic management, which needs to be on a timescale of 10-20 years, involving co-operation between public and private investments, and national and local governments.

Our world is not amenable to mechanistic rules, whether they are Keynesian multipliers, or ratios of budget cuts to tax increases. The UK, for example, needs increased infrastructure and education investments, backed by taxes and public tariffs. Therefore, spending cuts should not form the bulk of deficit reduction as George Osborne, UK chancellor, desires. Economics needs to focus on the government’s role not over a year or business cycle, but over an “investment cycle”.

When the world is changing rapidly and consequentially, as it is today, it is misguided to expect a “general theory”. As Hayek once recommended to Keynes, we instead need a tract for our times; one that responds to the new challenges posed by globalisation, climate change and information technology.

The writer is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University

Toasts of the town

Clockwise from top left: Screwpull Wine Funnel, £35; Screwpull Champagne Star, from about £14; The Corkcicle, £19.99; The Durand, £125; Zalto’s Denk’Art Bordeaux wine glass, £30; Zebag, £50; Pourvin Light, from £50

What to give a wine lover? It can be difficult to choose a bottle for a fanatic. How can an outsider judge a connoisseur’s taste or identify the holes in their cellar? I can say, however, that for wine insiders, bottles of deluxe champagne are the gift currency of choice. Krug Grande Cuvée or Dom Pérignon are standard issue, but if you would rather favour a family-owned enterprise then consider Roederer Cristal, Bollinger Grande Année or one of Selosse’s winey champagnes.

Those shopping in London could take advantage of the special offer in Selfridges’ wine department on Fridays and Saturdays up to Christmas Eve. You can buy Moët’s new, drier, considerably improved, standard non-vintage blend (called Brut Impérial; the old White Star bottling that used to be sold in the US is no more) in bottles, magnums (containing the equivalent of two bottles), jeroboams (four bottles’ worth) or methusalehs (eight) and have them “personalised with a festive illustration and message written in gold calligraphy and accented with Swarovski crystals”.

But you may wish to give something more durable than a bottle of wine, however sparkling its accent. The new toy of the season for serious wine collectors is a Pourvin Light (pourvin.com), a battery-powered gadget designed by an Australian couple that you hang round a bottle neck to provide a strong light under the bottle to highlight the sediment during the decanting process. (Or, you could buy them a candle, and save yourself £50 for the silicone version and £130 for the stainless steel model, though this is unlikely to satisfy the gadget lover.)

If all that decanting malarkey seems just too 19th century, there’s a neutral stainless steel filter from the corkscrew specialists Screwpull (stocked widely in the UK) that will simply filter out the sediment. Be warned though that if it’s anything like the earlier model I have, the mesh can rapidly become blocked so you need to pour very slowly.

I’m distinctly vieux jeu myself, so what would make my heart beat faster would be yet another antique decanter to add to my collection. (I have never forgotten the entirely correct advice that the ideal present for someone with a dozen chess sets is a 13th.) Those specialising in such things include Susan Antiques of Portobello Market, Jeanette Hayhurst in Tetbury, Laurie Leigh in Stow-on-the-Wold and Delomosne near Devizes.

An alternative would be to buy a well-designed modern decanter. I have always liked Berry Bros’ (bbr.com) simple bottle (£43) and, especially, magnum (£53) decanters with handsome flat stoppers (shipped to UK only). These seem rather better value than their new The Wine Merchant’s range of glasses (also UK only) – attractive, but at about £50 a pair and designed for hand washing (but dishwasher safe), I find myself preferring Zalto’s Denk’Art Bordeaux ones, even at £30 each, partly because they are so explicitly dishwasher-friendly as well as exceptionally thin.

You could personalise a decanter by having it engraved. Tracey Sheppard of Winchester is a very highly regarded Fellow of the Guild of Glass Engravers and might just be able to engrave a fine initial or two in time for Christmas. The problem with decanters though is that they do not identify the wine inside them. You can always scrawl something on them with felt-tip pen but it is hardly an elegant solution. Some arch traditionalists like to hang the relevant cork round the decanter neck, skewering it on prongs on the end of a chain, typically decorated with vine leaves. You can order such a thing from London’s specialist store for wine accoutrements, Around Wine (aroundwine.co.uk), and the various models cost between £20 and £30 each.

Design devotees would probably prefer ZeBag (zebag.fr), a carrier for six bottles on their side with a smart aluminium handle. This thoroughly 21st-century item folds flat when empty and is a sort of Conran-esque alternative to the more cumbersome, and potentially tights-snagging, six-bottle wicker basket. But, at £50, ZeBag is dearer than most of its wicker counterparts.

Much more reasonable at about £20, and just the right shape for a stocking filler, is the brand new, cleverly designed and cunningly marketed Corkcicle (corkcicle.com). It looks like an icicle attached to a cork in a range of designs and apparently, via the freeze gel inside the plastic icicle, cools your wine – either keeping a white cool or chilling a red that is a little too warm (a cardinal sin). It’s certainly more compact than those jackets you also prepare by putting in the deep freeze, and much less messy than an ice bucket. And it’s a novelty that the whole family can play with. It was one of Oprah’s “Favorite Things” of 2012. Need I say more?

Corkscrews are some of the most popular wine hardware gifts. Screwpull was the prototype model for those looking for something that would reliably extract a series of corks with minimal effort. (The oil engineer who designed them meant them to be of use to us feeble women.) The standard model costs about £50, the fancy one closer to £130, and they come with a guarantee – which is just as well for those who pull as many corks as I do. I should point out however that the lever action of the Screwpull can be too forceful for very old corks, for which I usually revert to a simple antique corkscrew with a hollow helix and a particularly sharp point.

An alternative recently designed expressly for old corks however, which may easily crumble or be too damp for a more vigorous instrument, is The Durand at a cool £125 (www.durand.com). This is a combination of a classic screw with, at right angles to it, the two-pronged instrument commonly known in the US as an Ah So or butler’s friend, which you insert either side of a cork and wiggle it out without piercing it at all.

The one bit of equipment that can on occasion seem absolutely vital is Screwpull’s champagne star (also from Around Wine), a strong, simple four-pronged twister that fits into the grooves of a recalcitrant champagne cork. It can spell all the difference between frustration and celebration.

www.jancisrobinson.com

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Useful addresses

Around Wine

57 Chiltern Street, London W1U 6ND

020 7935 4679, www.aroundwine.co.uk

. . .

Susan Antiques

117 Portobello Road, London W11 2DY

www.portobelloglass.com

. . .

Jeanette Hayhurst

Long Street Antiques, 14 Long Street, Tetbury

07831 209814

. . .

Laurie Leigh

Church Street, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire

01451 833693 www.laurieleighantiques.com

. . .

Tim Osborne

Court Close, North Wraxall, Chippenham, Wiltshire

01225 891505, www.delomosne.co.uk

. . .

Tracey Sheppard

Winchester

01962 860024, www.traceysheppard.co.uk

Pick a pocket square or two

Clockwise from top left: handkerchiefs by Gucci, £90, mrporter.com; Liberty London Collection, £35, liberty.co.uk; Drake’s, £60, drakeslondon.com; Etro, £60, harveynichols.com; Richard James, £42, mrporter.com

There may be some debate raging in the menswear world over James Bond and whether or not his Tom Ford body-conscious suits are too snug for true elegance (an issue Jack Reacher, the fictional detective whose wardrobe creator Lee Child explains would never have), but in one area, at least, there is consensus: pocket squares make a difference, elevating the super-spy into a new level of swashbuckling sartorialism. Certainly, they help set him apart from “establishment” figure Gareth Mallory, played by Ralph Fiennes, whose right jacket pocket is noticeably bare. And Bond is not the only one to embrace the accessory.

©Getty

Tom Ford

“It’s a look that says I’m a guy who knows how to dress,” says Michael Hill, creative director at Drake’s, London’s largest independent tie maker, who traces the trend back to inveterate pocket-square-wearers such as Italian dandy and tailor Luca Rubinacci and Nickelson “Nick” Wooster, most recently appointed vice-president of brand, trend and design at JC Penney, who are regularly held up as style icons on blogs such as fashionbeans.com and The Sartorialist.

Mr Porter’s Jeremy Langmead, whose site features an extensive selection of both British and international names including Drake’s, Turnbull & Asser, Richard James, Gucci, and Lanvin (and where sales of pocket squares are up 124 per cent on last year) agrees that the trend originated on the street and was “accentuated by the rise of social media and blogs where real men were photographed as they went about their day”.

Hill believes young men, in particular, have helped boost the trend for “pocket squares”, the American term, or “pochettes” as they’re known in mainland Europe, or “hanks” as Hill calls them – a contention supported by Federico Quitadarno, a twenty-something junior executive at a private equity company in Milan, who says two out of the five partners in his office wear “pochettes”.

“When you work in tax, it definitely livens things up a bit,” says Timothy Golby, head of group tax at Bird & Bird, who has worn silk handkerchiefs by Eton Shirts on a daily basis for the past three years. And even though his three-fronded fleur-de-lys shape puts him in the minority, he believes it’s definitely a way of dressing that’s becoming more widespread.

©Xposure

David Beckham

Acoris Andipa, who runs the Andipa Gallery on Walton Street, Knightsbridge, says he’s been wearing what he calls “pocket chiefs” by Etro for more than 20 years. Generally, there are two ways of wearing pocket squares: sleek and folded, as in Mad Men; or in the style of the bon viveur, where a cacophony of silk overflows the pocket. Dej Mahoney, an entertainment lawyer at London-based AOB, says he goes for the bon vivant flourish, but only in a black tie setting would he ever choose folded. “I’m slightly overdressed for my sector,” he says. “So I wouldn’t wear both a pocket square and a tie. I’d feel like I was trying too hard – a couple of steps down from wearing a bowler hat.”

According to Chris Sedgwick of Jermyn Street shirt maker Hilditch & Key, paisley, polka dot and print with an average retail price of £39.99 and in a variety of colours like royal blue, crimson and bottle greens, and in silk, are current pocket square bestsellers. New York-based Alexander Olch, by comparison, has updated the classic shape and developed a pocket circle instead. Popular on Mr Porter, his plaid woven wool pocket “rounds” retail for £50.

©Alpha Press

George Lamb

And in Paris, at Charvet, which offers silk pochettes with hand-rolled edges in hundreds of options that retail from £50, director Anne-Marie Colban says: “There are more and more young men who want to buy pochettes.” She believes the attraction lies in the way a pocket square can formalise otherwise casual attire, such as T-shirt and jacket, but in a softer way.

However, Colban cautions that there are some rules to pocket-square-wearing. “It is not appropriate to wear cotton or linen handkerchiefs in the same way as a silk pochette – the latter is best worn naturally in a jacket pocket, so it looks like you haven’t tried,” she says. Also the tie and pochette combo best worn by French actor Philippe Noiret, who “embodied French elegance’, should “never be of the same design.”

Langmead agrees. “A pocket square should not match your tie, although there may be some correspondence between the colours,” he notes, adding that when it comes to pocket squares, there is only really one inviolable law: “It’s not meant to look like a bunch of flowers bursting from your chest.”

www.ft.com/stylestockists

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www.charvet.com

www.drakes-london.com

www.etonshirts.co.uk

www.gucci.com

www.hilditchandkey.co.uk

www.jcpenney.com

www.lanvin.com

www.mrporter.com

www.olch.com

www.richardjames.co.uk

www.turnbullandasser.co.uk

Workplace Distractions: Here's Why You Won't Finish This Article

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

In the few minutes it takes to read this article, chances are you'll pause to check your phone, answer a text, switch to your desktop to read an email from the boss's assistant, or glance at the Facebook FB -1.43% or Twitter messages popping up in the corner of your screen. Off-screen, in your open-plan office, crosstalk about a colleague's preschooler might lure you away, or a co-worker may stop by your desk for a quick question.

And bosses wonder why it is tough to get any work done.

Distraction at the office is hardly new, but as screens multiply and managers push frazzled workers to do more with less, companies say the problem is worsening and is affecting business.

While some firms make noises about workers wasting time on the Web, companies are realizing the problem is partly their own fault.

Even though digital technology has led to significant productivity increases, the modern workday seems custom-built to destroy individual focus. Open-plan offices and an emphasis on collaborative work leave workers with little insulation from colleagues' chatter. A ceaseless tide of meetings and internal emails means that workers increasingly scramble to get their "real work" done on the margins, early in the morning or late in the evening. And the tempting lure of social-networking streams and status updates make it easy for workers to interrupt themselves.

Associated Press

Open-plan offices provide many distractions. Above, Zynga employees working in San Francisco in 2011.

"It is an epidemic," says Lacy Roberson, a director of learning and organizational development at eBay Inc. EBAY -0.25% At most companies, it's a struggle "to get work done on a daily basis, with all these things coming at you," she says.

Office workers are interrupted—or self-interrupt—roughly every three minutes, academic studies have found, with numerous distractions coming in both digital and human forms. Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies digital distraction.

Companies are experimenting with strategies to keep workers focused. Some are limiting internal emails—with one company moving to ban them entirely—while others are reducing the number of projects workers can tackle at a time.

Last year, Jamey Jacobs, a divisional vice president at Abbott Vascular, a unit of health-care company Abbott Laboratories, ABT -0.24% learned that his 200 employees had grown stressed trying to squeeze in more heads-down, focused work amid the daily thrum of email and meetings.

"It became personally frustrating that they were not getting the things they wanted to get done," he says. At meetings, attendees were often checking email, trying to multitask and in the process obliterating their focus.

Part of the solution for Mr. Jacobs's team was that oft-forgotten piece of office technology: the telephone.

Mr. Jacobs and productivity consultant Daniel Markovitz found that employees communicated almost entirely over email, whether the matter was mundane, such as cake in the break room, or urgent, like an equipment issue.

The pair instructed workers to let the importance and complexity of their message dictate whether to use cellphones, office phones or email. Truly urgent messages and complex issues merited phone calls or in-person conversations, while email was reserved for messages that could wait.

Workers now pick up the phone more, logging fewer internal emails and say they've got clarity on what's urgent and what's not, although Mr. Jacobs says staff still have to stay current with emails from clients or co-workers outside the group.

Ms. Roberson of eBay recently instituted a no-device policy during some team meetings, a change that she says has made gatherings more efficient.

Not all workplace distractions harm productivity. Dr. Mark found that people tended to work faster when they anticipate interruptions, squeezing tasks into shorter intervals of time. Workers' accuracy suffered little amid frequent interruptions, but their stress rose significantly.

Other studies have found that occasional, undemanding distractions, such as surfing the Web, can help increase creativity and reduce workplace monotony, which may help boost alertness.

Within Intel Corp.'s INTC +0.10% 14,000-person Software and Services group, workers were concerned that they weren't getting time to think deeply about problems because they spent much of their time keeping up with day-to-day tasks. So earlier this fall, managers decided to pilot a program allowing employees to block out several hours a week for heads-down work.

During four weekly hours of "think time"—tracked via group calendar and spreadsheet—workers aren't expected to respond to emails or attend meetings, unless it's urgent, or if they're working on collaborative projects.

Already, at least one employee has developed a patent application in those hours, while others have caught up on the work they're unable to get to during frenetic workdays, says Linda April, a manager in the group.

Dozens of software firms have developed products to tame worker inboxes, ranging from task-management software to programs that screen and sort email, but their effectiveness is limited without organizational change.

Perhaps no company has taken on the email problem with as much relish as Atos, a global IT services company based outside of Paris, with 74,000 employees.

After an internal study found that workers spent some two hours a day managing their inboxes, the company vowed to phase out internal email entirely.

Workers can still use email with outside customers, but managers have directed workers to communicate with colleagues via an internal social network, which the company began installing earlier this fall, says Robert Shaw, global program director for the "Zero Email" initiative.

Atos says it's too early to say whether the experiment is a success, but in an anti-email manifesto posted on the company's website, CEO Thierry Breton compares his company's efforts to reduce digital clutter to "measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."

Office workers aren't the only ones struggling to stay on-task.

At Robins Air Force Base, in Georgia, fewer than half of planes were being repaired on time by the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex because employees were working on too many planes at once and toggling between too many tasks on each.

The base worked with Realization, a San Jose, Calif., project-management consulting and software firm, to reduce the number of aircraft in work in the maintenance docks. For example, with one type of aircraft, they reduced the average number in work to six from 11.

Fewer projects led to better focus and more on-time results. A year after changing workflow, 97% of the aircraft are now repaired on time, says Doug Keene, vice director of the air-logistics complex.

Businesses have praised workers for multitasking, "but that isn't necessarily a good thing," says Mr. Keene. "When you are focused on just a few things, you tend to solve problems faster. You can't disguise the problem by looking like you're really busy."

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared Dec. 11, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Here's Why You Won't Finish This Article.