The Immigration Conundrum - Part II

Why Closed Borders Don't Work?

In the 1970s and 80s most Indian movies used to depict the villain as one who smuggles gold into India. Growing up watching those movies, we all used to think the villains are all unpatriotic goons that are out for themselves. In those decades India had a huge license raj that used to strangle businesses by issuing quotas and licenses for most economic activities, impose huge tariffs on foreign goods (e.g. 150% import duty on foreign cars to protect the local Government owned car industry) in order to centrally manage the entire country's economy. The Indian Rupee used to be propped up by the central bank throughout the 80's and so the exchange rate used to be less than 10 Rupees per US Dollar. Since this wasn't realistic but an artificially maintained value, there was hardly any US dollars available for travelers. I remember how I had to jump through hoops to get my graduate school fee converted into US $ from INR when I came to US for grad school in 1989. In the 90's when India was close to defaulting on loans as it was not able to service interest payments, there was a round of economic liberalization that eliminated these rules and moved to a much more market based economy. All the limits were thrown out and the current floating rate hovers around INR 65 for 1 US Dollar. It seems to be steadily falling or holding steady over the years depending upon whether you factor in high Indian inflation rate or not. However there is no difficulty anymore in converting one currency to the other for whatever needs you may have. This floating of the INR has more or less killed off the black market for conversion. Same notion applies to gold now. You can import what you want after paying some reasonable tax (e.g. 10% when you take in up to a Kg of gold). We no longer see the clichéd gold smuggling villains in movies! 

All over the world, for several decades in the last century building large dams used to be portrayed as visionary projects that will allow the national governments to better manage water. This notion started fading away in the 90's. Though we still have dams, people realized that it is better to let the water flow the way it wants and manage it lightly. Forcing it to go somewhere where it doesn't want to usually have lot of negative consequences that tend to outweigh the benefits foreseen in the long run. 

Human beings wanting to relocate or goods and services that try to meet existing/growing demands are all equivalent to flowing rivers. You can try to arrest and manage the flow. It may work in short term and perhaps in smaller scales. But they find ways to outsmart the managers pretty quickly on larger scales with severe consequences. This doesn't mean that we never ever manage the flow of water or people or goods & services. But letting water flow as it wants and people do what they want as long as it is not harming anyone will be a good principle of management. It will keep the costs of management really low and still let things flourish. 

Radiolab did a three part podcast titled Border Trilogy. You can find them here: part-1, part-2, and part-3. Listening to all three parts will cost you three hours but may give you a lot of insight into why desperate immigrants flee their native countries despite horrendous difficulties they are bound to encounter on their way to safer havens. It circles around the U.S.-Mexico border south of Texas. El Paso is a border city in the state of Texas on the southern end. It is juxtaposed to a city called Juarez on the northern end of Mexico. If you look it up on Google maps you will see how continuous the two cities look with an artificially drawn U.S.-Mexico border line. Ground reality is that it is one continuous habitat that allowed people to freely move across the border for decades.

Hundreds of Mexican workers will cross the border to enter U.S., work during the day in El Paso and return in the evening back to Juarez. Americans will go into Juarez for cheap food and liquor and return back. Because U.S. side is richer than the Mexican side, this used to result in petty thefts often on the El Paso side. Border patrol agents that had the duty to protect the border were largely outnumbered and so they routinely used to stop and question Hispanic looking high school kids in El Paso though they were perfectly legal U.S. citizens.

In the early 90’s a Hispanic border patrol chief named Silvestre Reyes posted in El Paso, implemented what he called Operation Blockade in which he placed a large number of border patrol agents permanently on the sides of the Rio-Grande river that Mexicans used to cross to come to the U.S. side. It initially created some opposition from the Mexican migrant workers as well as President Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, who complained that this is harsh and inhumane treatment while the administration is trying to pass NAFTA. But when she visited El Paso and spoke to the local residents who supported the operation fully as it reduced petty thefts considerably, she changed her mind and reported back to President Clinton that this Reyes model works well. In an interesting twist, Clinton then used this approach of using a large number of border patrol agents to block Mexican migrants coming into U.S. in California’s southern border as a peace offering to NAFTA opponents to show that while we strengthen trade with Mexico and Canada, we can simultaneously secure our borders as well. This helped pass NAFTA. This hardening of the border is hailed as ‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ and is still being practiced. But this approach has pushed the Mexican migrants to try to cross the border via the Arizona desert, which is much more dangerous for human survival. Since this model went into effect, border patrol has reported that per year they see about 150 dead bodies of migrants who died trying to cross the border through the desert.

Researchers curious about what happens to people when they die in the harsh merciless desert weather did some research. Anthropologist Jason de León took two freshly killed pig carcasses and dressed them up with clothing, shoes & cap resembling typical migrants. With motion sensing cameras planted from multiple directions, his team placed one in a shady area and one in the open sun. Their expectation was to watch the bodies of these two dead pigs for one or two years to see how they deteriorate. They were stunned when the cameras got triggered within an hour to show the carcasses getting attacked and eaten by vultures! While the details are fairly gruesome, they found that in about a day or two, most of the flesh was consumed and within a span of about seven days the skeleton remains were being taken apart bone by bone by vultures that flew away with individual pieces and picked them clean. Thus, all it would take is just one week for a person who dies in the desert to be erased completely without any evidence of their bodies ever lying around in the desert sand. This goes to show that probably a lot more than 150 people (whose bodies are being found) die in the desert each year, perhaps in the thousands.

A 30 year old woman named Maricela is one such migrant who died in the desert trying to cross the border to come to the U.S. despite her brother in law who lives in the U.S. dissuading her from taking up the journey. Before vultures took care of her remains, Jason De León’s team found her deteriorating body in the desert and traced who she was and why she took up that journey as explained in part-3 of the podcast series. Understanding her story may provide a personal insight with emotional connections as to what kind of circumstances force such migrants to take up that journey enduring such unfathomable misery. Looking at abstract numbers and tables will make it easy to detest all those “illegal aliens” swarming in to take over what don’t belong to them. Learning about people like Maricela will make it a lot more difficult.

No one wants to investigate this phenomenon carefully to find the exact number people getting killed since “Out of Sight – Out of Mind” mode will leave the authorities feeling better! We can call such a hardened boundary a secure border. But if we step back, we will realize this is inhumane and is not really working as advertised/understood.

Alternately see this article or listen to just the first part of this podcast episode that talks about people who are doing the legally right thing in a refugee camp in Kenya. They are forced to make a choice where both options available to them are bad.

The article and podcast talk about a 44 year old refugee named Khairo Hassan who lives in the Kenyan refugee camp and is deep in debt since she can’t find work or aid available to her to feed her kids. She was forced to flee Somalia in 2010, after an Islamist group named al-Shabab had taken over her town, Dinsor. Her husband was shot dead in the street. After living in this camp for more than seven years, her only option to get out of the debt is to accept an UN offer to repatriate her back to Somalia. You may know very well that it is a war torn country in the horn of Africa with no government. If she agrees to go back, UN will give $150 each for her and her two daughters.

There used to be one very small escape hatch for such refugees. It is to go through a multi yearlong vetting process to get selected to be relocated to the U.S. That route is a hard one since only couple of hundred refugees used to get selected each year while there are several thousand such refugees in that one Kenyan refugee camp itself. But even that trickle has come to a full stop as the Trump administration has cancelled that program. It is not much better with other countries around the world either since no one is keen on helping these refugees resettle in their countries. Perhaps Kenya is the most generous country in this picture since it at least allows this refugee camp to exist!

She is about $400 in debt, money she borrowed from a store in the camp run by another refugee to feed her kids. So, she takes the offer, gets the $450, and promptly pays the $400 within 30 seconds of receiving the money to that lender. She does board the raggedy military plane back to Mogadishu. Another woman who went back just like her few months back died recently in a bomb blast there. So, Khairo Hassan leaves not knowing how she can eke out a living in Somalia since it is in tatters or can even survive the violence for the forthcoming years with her daughters. But she knows fully well that it will not be possible for her to get the refugee status back now that she has given that up voluntarily. Even the store owner that takes the $400 from her is not a villainous thug but a young Somalian guy, who is also in debt and is thinking he might have to do the same thing in the next month or two since he can’t see a path forward for himself in Kenya. They are all still doing all they can to take the legal route. What would you and I do under such circumstances?

Take a look at this 3 part documentary by BBC called India’s Frontier Railways available for free on YouTube. It might change your views on borders in few other ways totally different from the podcasts and articles mentioned above.

(Continue to Part III)

The Immigration Conundrum

(Image credit: Npr.org.)

A Tamil poet named Bharathiyaar that lived in the 20th century is famous for these two lines he wrote in addition to many more pieces found in his oeuvre:

தனியொரு மனிதனுக்கு உணவில்லையெனில்

ஜகத்தினை அழித்திடுவோம்.

That couplet translates to, “if an individual human being cannot find food and has to go hungry, let us destroy the world”. Though it may sound radical on the surface, it is easy to see that the sentiment expressed is to support & preserve individual rights without which the world is not worth living. I have been thinking as to how this notion applies to both sides of the immigration debate in progress all over the world. It is a pretty complex topic. Thanks to the U.S. President Trump, it is right at the forefront of public debate in US as well as in other parts of the world. Since people either support or oppose immigration and don't dig deeper to understand the complexities, debates often tend to be superficial focused on just one aspect of the big picture. But since I have been reading articles/books pertinent to this topic, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries and talking to people, felt I should put my thoughts on paper for my own understanding. I am trying to do it in three parts. In the first part I intend to explore the views and perspectives of nationalists that support impervious borders. In the second part I look at how well borders work and in the third and concluding part provide solutions that will dovetail the first two parts and thus hopefully will make logical sense to everyone. I would urge interested readers to explore all the links sprinkled throughout the write-up. The articles, podcasts and videos listed will certainly enrich the experience and comprehension. I have mentioned the links inline to make sure the context is easy to understand, while they are all listed at the end under references so that readers who prefer not to get distracted while reading the main article can chose to explore them all in sequence separately. If you agree/disagree with the details, send in your thoughts. It will help me tweak & polish my understanding and perhaps help me write something better in the future. 

Why Do Closed Borders Make Sense?

A while back I read an article that explained as to why it is not possible for us to treat people on the other side of the planet the same way as we treat our own countrymen/women. When we push the lens further in and look at a family level, it is easy to see that however good at heart one may be, it is not possible for anyone to treat their neighbors as one’s own family members living under the same roof. It may be possible to do it during short spans of time, say when a neighbor is going through some hardship and you are helping out. But permanently sharing all your wealth, space, time with the neighbor's family and children as you do with your spouse/children is not possible. Our societies themselves are not structured to support such behavior as indicated by the way we earn money, spend on our family's needs, how we file taxes, and so on. A similar but a bit more diluted argument can be extended to the whole nation as it is more cohesive compared to the entire world. It is not possible to express the same level of empathy to people in other countries as we do with our fellow citizens. Having a sense of cohesion is mandatory for lot of things to work. Hence we will always worry more about a single finger lost from our body than 1000 people killed on the other side of the planet. If that sense is diluted to make us equally egalitarian in our approach to everyone in the world, it doesn't seem to work at all and turns into apathy. It also eliminates the feeling of us belonging to a tight knit group making us feeling special. 

While reading up on why open borders won't work, I saw lot of arguments like this one: Switzerland is a small, beautiful, wealthy country that has less than 9 Million people. India has 1.2 Billion people and everyone in India would love to live in Switzerland. If there are no restrictions, all the Indians will move to Switzerland and then there will be no Switzerland! If we agree with these conclusions, then closed borders and strong national identities will start to make a lot of sense. National anthems, waving flags and talks of patriotism instill a lot of pride in people. They certainly serve emotional needs and form cohesive societies.

About one year back I was listening to a podcast that featured a coal miner from the state of West Virginia in the U.S. The person who spoke was a third generation coal miner since his father and grandfather also worked in the same mine decades past. It is not easy work. It is labor intensive while being fraught with physical dangers of the mine collapsing, catching fire, and emitting noxious gases. You can look up black lung which is a common lung disease miners fall victim to as they breathe in coal dust day in and day out while working in the mines. This particular miner also suffered from it and was forced to retire early due to ill health. Despite all these issues, he fondly recalled talking to another reporter few years earlier. At that time as he was giving a tour of the mine, the visiting reporter remarked how his miner job is similar to an astronaut’s since like an astronaut the miner is also exploring new spaces where no human being has ever set foot in the past! You can sense the respect he felt by that reporter’s observation so long back.

In the years past such jobs provided decent salary in the U.S. to lead a respectful middleclass life. These workers usually had high school level education and with the salary they earned were able to buy a car, own a house and put food on the table. They rightly considered themselves part of an honest and successful workforce that helped the country thrive. You can hear the pride in his voice and the meaning he derived from his work as he felt the coal they were mining was powering the whole nation. This profile will apply to a large number of blue collar workers that enjoyed good societal standing in the years past as they were putting in decades of work in steady jobs with excellent work ethics and raised good families. His son took up the same job as a fourth generation miner, only to be laid off since coal mines are on the decline as power plants have been switching to natural gas which is cheaper as well as cleaner, making it environmentally friendly while making the business more profitable. This is a rare combinatoric unicorn to come by. There was a famous line in the 2012 presidential debate where Barack Obama pushed back his rival Mitt Romney saying, "You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed.” This applies to coal mining jobs as well as several manufacturing jobs that have evaporated from the U.S. due to reasons like the arrival of natural gas or globalization that has made manufacturing goods anywhere in the world and transporting them where they are needed in large shipping container more economical than manufacturing them where they are needed. This is all well and good as it improves the quality of life on the whole for the whole planet. But what should the fourth generation miner that got laid off do now? Saying he should quickly learn to code and start working for cloud computing companies is highly impractical.

Just miles from where I live/work, there used to be a famous steel plant called Bethlehem Steel that was a proud symbol of American manufacturing prowess, as it delivered steel all over the country and world for more than 100 years. It also had a ship building business that served the world during WWII. In the late 90’s, not be able to compete with companies like Mittal Steel of India (currently a multinational conglomerate called ArcelorMittal), it started going down and went bankrupt in 2003. While people all over the world feel that American multinationals come in and destroy their national icons, the demise of Bethlehem Steel and similar destruction of U.S. manufacturing jobs by non-U.S. multinationals indicates that it cuts both ways. While Bethlehem Steel or coal mining jobs may not mean much for my kids born in the last two decades, it resonates well with people I personally know. Many of them feel that we have had too much of globalization and so it is time for some rebalancing as the decades past were much better in these rust belt regions with ample middle class jobs that are nowhere to be found now.

Zooming in and listening/interacting with individuals of this kind will crystalize the issues at an emotional level, which is very different from logical high level analysis of abstract numbers of jobs lost/created and so on. For this base with declining quality of life compared to their grandparents, politicians that tell them that their suffering is all caused by faceless people in other countries and providing solutions that promise the return of the glory days obviating the need for them to relearn anything or relocate to anywhere else appeal at the gut level.

This worry of outsiders taking over what we genuinely feel belongs to us is not new or limited to the U.S. alone. More than thirty years back, as a freshly minted Electronics & Instrumentation engineer, I joined a company called HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) in Bangalore, India. We were involved in designing the ALH (Advanced Light Helicopter) in that central government owned/run company. Since it is a large public sector institution, new employees were recruited via a nationwide entrance exam and interview, thus attracting engineers from all over the country. I got that job through that same selection process. But while I was working there, heard the state natives often complaining about us ‘outsiders’ who come in from other states and take up well paying Government jobs that should have been given to the people of Karnataka, the state where Bangalore is located. I am not playing victim since I wasn’t affected by such comments in any way. Neither was I a hero that addressed such concerns and resolved issues. I don’t know what I could have done to change anyone’s mind as I was a young engineer fresh out of college with not much knowledge about any such policy issue. Western readers may know that India is sort of like EU since each Indian state has its own language, food, culture, movies and so on. Though I grew up in the state adjacent to the state where Bangalore is located, I can't read one line of text written in the local state language of Bangalore called Kannada. It is not even equivalent to a German visiting France where one would at least recognize the alphabets. The Tamil & Kannada language alphabets look as different as Japanese and Russian. So, I did understand their point of view but thought it was ok for me to work there since the company I was working for is a government owned national company that could very well have been setup in the state where I was born and raised.

I worked there only for nine months before switching over to yet another public sector company called ONGC (Oil & Natural Gas Commission) where I was an Instrumentation maintenance engineer in an offshore oil platform for two more years before heading to the U.S. for grad school. I had a fantastic time in that oil platform job as a bachelor working through a 14 days on/off duty cycle that allowed me to return to my parents’ place during the off fortnight that also helped me prepare and apply for grad school. Since not a lot of older engineers with family wanted to work in an offshore platform for 14 days as it took them away from family for long stretches of time, I didn’t hear a lot of complaints about outsiders stealing jobs that should have gone to Maharashtra state residents. The fact that the offshore platform was located 100 miles inside the Arabian sea also helped. We interacted only with fellow employees on a daily basis and so the platform didn’t feel like part of the closest onshore city Bombay. But I have heard of such complaints amongst employees working in on-shore plants in that state as well as it is one of the richer states in India.

Even before we hit singularity (when Artificial Intelligence starts to go past human intelligence), imagine a world where an anarchist has managed to render all silicon CPUs in computers non-functional. Even if the world comes up with a biological computer that substitutes well for all the computing power that would have gone away, millions of highly trained computer engineers (both hardware and software) will quickly lose their jobs to be replaced by this new breed of biological engineers. In such a world, if a Trump equivalent stands up and says, “I will isolate our country with real and virtual border walls and bring back the internet and the IT jobs, while simultaneously destroying the anarchists and their countries”, I am pretty sure lot of highly educated computer engineers will vote for him!

Even if we ignore jobs and economic worries, we can see arguments for borders and boundaries arising out of concerns in other domains. Look through all the countries in the world and pick the top ten that are doing very well providing excellent quality of life to its citizens sans social unrest and in-fighting. Countries like Norway, Sweden, Japan may all come to your mind. It is easy to notice that these are all very small countries with an extremely homogeneous population. So, it is possible that when there is not a lot of diversity in the population and the country is small, people don’t mind the taxes they pay being used to support someone else that look like themselves. Of course there are lot of other countries that are small with homogeneous population that are still in dire straits. It is usually because a small group that runs the country is corrupt and tends to have an iron grip on available natural resources. But those negative examples apart, these well to do small societies point to a successful state model with strong national boundaries that binds the citizens well. On the other hand when the country is large and diverse, we are often suspicious of people that don’t look like us since we don’t understand them added to the fact that the size of the country makes it hard to understand where the funds go to support whom, thus making the whole governing structure suspect.

Borders can also be justified from religion, values, culture, safety points of view. Religions are innately structured to make the followers feel special. But irrespective of the size of a religious group in a given country or society, it is easy to feel threatened by competing religious groups as there is enough historical evidence to justify such fears. Christians that form a substantial majority in the U.S. feel that their rights and values are under perpetual threat, while Hindus that form 80% of the 1.2 Billion population in India feel that they are under attack and so need to stand up and protect themselves. Same goes to Jews or Muslims in different parts of the world even if they are the majority in the country they live in. Even the Buddhists that are supposed to be known for peace and tranquility their religion preaches are attacking people of other religions out of fear that they are going to get overrun. Not to be left out, atheists feel that they are ostracized as social outcasts and it is easier to “come out” as gay than as an atheist due to strong societal backlash.

It is easy to keep writing along similar lines about how citizens of a country may feel their values, culture and safety gets diluted when outsiders invade what they consider as their agreeable societies. So whether we look at the issues on hand from economic, religious, cultural values, country size, management ease or safety perspectives, it seems to make good sense to have strong borders and cohesive societies.

(Continue to Part II)

Book Reviews: The Innovator's Dilemma & Jugaad

May 02, 2015

Few weeks back when we went on a week long vacation, I packed "Jugaad Innovation - A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century" by N. Radjou, J. Prabhu & S. Ahuja as a possible lite read. When we were leaving for the airport from my SIL's home after a bit of repacking, I couldn't locate the book. Since I figured it didn't make sense to head out without any reading material, grabbed "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" by Clayton Christensen from my SIL's home book shelf. By the time we boarded the plane, located the first book as well. This turned to be a blessing in disguise since both books were of the lite variety and were quite related to each other in their content. So, before the vacation was over, I could read the older Innovator's Dilemma (ID) first and then finish more than half of the Jugaad book that dove tailed into the first one nicely. Whenever I saw book reviews on The Economist magazine that often discussed two books together, I used to wonder how they found two different books that came out around the same time that are so closely related. Used to brush that thought aside thinking that topic must be the current fad inspiring multiple people to write books. Though these two books were published more than 10 years apart, serendipity had me reading them back to back in the same week. So, here I am talking about them together.

The ID book is more than 17 years old and is sort of a classic since the thoughts put forth in the book were new in the late 90's. By now the ideas are part of the common business wisdom. But are still plausible threats to existing large businesses. Main ideas presented can be summed up in these three bullets:

- Often when disruptive new ideas or technologies bring in new products to market, customers using older products won't know what to do with the new products (since they may not match their present needs nicely). But the other advantages such as cost, portability, ease of use may help other customers pick it up. Once the market grows, the cheaper, newer alternative can eat into the main market.

- Established companies who pay all the attention to existing customers taking care of all their needs with evolutionary products may miss this change in the market place and may end up on the side lines while new companies move in and start eating their lunch.

- Established companies should not try to manage this dilemma by trying to do both old and new products with one set of development & marketing teams since the messages/market may be contradicting each other. Instead, they should establish a subsidiary or a standalone group with its own development, marketing teams and P&L center. If the idea succeeds, it can eventually be mainlined.

 

About one fourth of the book talks about hard drive development by famous tech companies in the 60's to 90's and how despite having the right new product that is quite different from the current crop of products, those companies repeatedly failed to capture the market losing out to new comers. This is due to the fact that the new products are of no interest to their existing customers. For example, a much smaller and cheaper drive that is is slightly slower may not be of interest to the top end computer maker. So, the drive maker puts this product on the shelf and goes back to making incremental improvements to their existing form factor drives to suit the needs of the their customers, as they were taught to in the business school. But a new company starts selling the smaller, cheaper, slower drives to a totally new market such as game consoles. As their sales volume increases, they manage to make the drives faster and thus eat into the high end market due to lower price and smaller form factor. 

Author spends so many pages and charts to convey this idea. While all the charts and tables are important for his analysis, I am not sure it contributes a lot to the book's message. A good editor could have trimmed it down considerably. He then moves on to point out similar slips occurring in very different industries such as earth moving equipment manufacturers. Overall idea is certainly quite important for large enterprises. I was quite amused to see the last chapter where the author discusses how automobile manufacturers should handle the vexing problem of developing and marketing an electric car. Based on all the ideas discussed in the book, the author suggests developing a cheap car, and finding a market that can use a slow car that will drive only about 100 miles between recharging which may take hours. But in the last ten years, Tesla Motors has been doing very well by designing high performance electric cars that drive 300+ miles between charges and are extremely expensive! 

That takes me to the Jugaad book. A friend of mine bought this book as a present to my son when we were in India one year back. It came out only in 2013 when the idea of Jugaad had been raising rapidly becoming a course in Harvard Business School, being talked about as Frugal Engineering by characters like Carlos Ghosn (Nissan CEO) and so forth. In Hindi, the term means improvising something cheap to take care of the local need. 

The three authors have provided a large number of examples and case studies illustrating how R&D conducted in economically poorer societies to develop products and services to meet the local needs have been making tremendous progress in bringing costs down despite being high quality products. These products are then sold back to affluent societies as well! This is very different from last century's model of taking an expensive product with bells & whistles developed for richer societies and then stripping it down to make a cheaper version for poor countries. Often such stripped down versions don't even work well in the targeted markets since the atmospheric conditions, usage models are all quite different compared to the original markets. 

In general most well known consumer products (cars, phones, food items, medicines, appliances) or even industrial products (heavy equipment, MRI machines) & services (banking, manufacturing) that we usually hear about  seems to be coming out of the US or Western Europe companies. So, one might be easily lead to think that other nations such as India don't seem to do much of innovation. This books dispels that myth pointing out to all the new products and services that are being developed and sold in countries like India, Brazil and China at often less than one tenth of the price making them affordable to not only local communities but also to poorer countries around the world first and then to US and Western Europe's affluent societies next. Examples range from an infant baby warmer (a simpler model developed by a woman pediatrician in India that costs <$100 vs. $3000 model sold by GE) to selling solar panels not as a product but more as a service in Brazil. Authors have tried to break down the Jugaad idea into 6 steps, such as 

- Seek opportunity in adversity: e.g. http://www.mitticool.in/ that is selling refrigerators that work without electricity.

- Do more with less: e.g. An Argentina farmer that invented the idea of asset light farming to overcome difficulties in owning land, equipment, labor needed for farming and is able to scale this model up now.

- Include the margins, meaning bring in the resource poor consumers who still need various products and services by making them extremely affordable, easily available using existing infrastructure.

- Think and act flexibly, meaning get early models out in the open and be ready to change the product/business model if the first idea fails. Doing this early/quickly limits losses.

- Keep it simple

- Follow your heart, since strict focus group study and ivory tower R&D may not be always right. Innovators living in the actual society/atmosphere where the product is going to be used may have a better understanding of the actual need.

Apparently Western companies such as Phillips, Ericsson, Pepsi, GE, Nissan, etc. are all learning these ideas and implementing them successfully. You can search YouTube with the term Jugaad and can see literally 100s of Jugaad examples. Most of those may look funny and sad at the same time making us realize how people around the world get by with so little so cheerfully. Still, the ideas can be extended to big and complicated projects as well. I remember reading how ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) just dug a one foot deep trench with a 1KM radius around the launching pad that turned out to be a simple solution to route lot of cables easily while protecting them from the heat of the launching pad. When the Prime Minister of India quipped last year that the Mars probe they launched successfully cost less than what was spent to produce the movie Gravity, I was able to make that connection. :-)

Naturally, variations of this concept is in practice in various societies. (If you haven't heard of a Liter or Light, see this site: http://literoflight.org/#/) But this book particularly being centered on India, with all the numbers listed in Crores (i.e. Indian equivalent of 10 Million) and money in Indian Rupees (instead of US dollars), sounded quite different since I am so used to US being the center of the universe all the time! :-)

In the last chapter, they have managed to cover themselves saying Jugaad is not the next great thing after sliced bread that will eliminate hunger and bring world peace but is a complimentary model for R&D that should be part of an organization's overall MO. Authors have setup a website that is supposed to bring all the related material together and is promoted in the book quite a bit. But I found the site quite disappointing when I visited. I also found the innumerable subsection titles that appear once every two paragraph a bit annoying. Still, this book as well as the ID book, both are easy reads and should be worthy of your time if you choose to pick them up.

-sundar.

Book Review: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Couple of recent business trips gave me some plane time to read this book. As the full title "Being Mortal - Medicine and What Matters in the End" clearly indicates, book material deals with how we should be treated when our time in this planet nears its end. Though depressing, certainly it is a book we all should read since the subject warrants a lot of social discussion and individual level understanding. Atul Gawande is a surgeon by profession who has made a name for himself in the last decade as a writer through his books such as The Checklist Manifesto, Complications, etc. Being a person of Indian descent, he starts off the book narrating at length how his grandfather (father's father) lived out his old age as a rich self-made landowner in India. There was a large extended family that supported him as age was catching up slowly disabling him. But since the family was well off and there were a large number of people available to take care of him, adjustments could be made to help him continue his life style. For example, going around all the agricultural land he owned each day was part of his routine. When he couldn't walk around the land briskly anymore, family got him a horse so that he can still go on his rounds. When his ability to even sit on the horse came into question, a servant followed him as he made his daily rounds and so on. 

Atul's father, who himself is a physician, had seen firsthand how his father lived out his last years. So, as a practicing physician in the US, he found how American society treated its own elderly totally objectionable. For a multitude of reasons, American families don't continue to function as large support network to ensure the quality of life for their family's elderly are retained come what may. It doesn’t feel practical in our current setup. Instead the elderly tend to live by themselves as long as they could. They don't feel comfortable living with their children as they feel that it is an unnecessary interference in their children's lives and a loss of independence for themselves. When they can't take care of themselves, assisted living and nursing homes start to show up in the picture. Most of these facilities are designed to make sure the elderly they care for are safe. Whether they enjoy their life is of secondary importance though given a choice most seniors will chose to prioritize their quality of life over safety. 

Since families are not closely involved in the day-to-day operations of the elderly, what kind of end of life care each one wants does not get discussed at the right time. Sons & daughters confront those questions all of a sudden when the elderly are not able to make those decisions themselves oneday. This also leads to the convention of "doing everything we can" to save the life of the elderly. But this is done  at the expense of their quality of life is not well understood, thus putting the elderly through a wringer making them suffer enormously though that is not what they would have wanted. This also has the downside of spiking the cost with no real return. 

While these problems may appear intractable and hard to solve, author points out specific towns in US that have adopted the practice of doctors talking to patients during their routine visits (like annual physicals) about DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), Living Will, what kind of care they'd like to receive when they are terminally ill. This practice has transformed those localities. Since the discussion is pervasive, it is not making people uncomfortable. As the discussions have taken place around kitchen tables and doctor offices earlier, even if there is no written documentation, relatives and physicians have a very good sense of what the patients want when they are not able to make the decisions for themselves. This provides a lot of hope for turning the system around despite all the 'death panel' scare tactics politicians and irresponsible media use for temporary gains. 

In the end it boils down to moving from "put a patient through hell temporarily for long term gains" approach used in medicine when patients are young, to "do all you can to help patient maintain quality of life and happiness" approach as they grow old. This transition has to be made routine even if it brings in some risks or can shorten their lives a little. Being comatose under a vegetative state for months may be technically prolonging one's life. But that is no way to "live".

Since the intended audience is general public, book is written like a series of stories with lot of detailed anecdotes (how the weather was, what she was eating, what clothes patient was wearing, how did he feel, etc.) that at times makes it feel like a lot of fluff. I couldn't help feeling that the content of the whole book could have been conveyed in a 15 page article. But I understand only when things are personalized this way in easy to read prose, the intended messages will get through, particularly when the audience is general public interested in light reading. 

On a related note, I have been pushing all my friends to write out their Last Will and Living Will for the past 5+ years. It doesn't matter how young you are or how uncomfortable it may make you feel to think about your own mortality, you owe it to your family to document your wishes. I hear excuses such as “My family/setup is so simple, it doesn’t require a Will” or “I don’t have a lot of property and so why do I need to write a Will?”. But trust me, if you pass away unexpectedly without a Will, you will put your family through a lot of trouble. I have offered to provide my Will as a template where you can just change name and few personal details and sign it in half an hour to hold a legally valid Will of your own. Some friends took me up on the offer but not as many as I had hoped. Since it is a closely tied topic to this book, would like to make that offer again. If you'd like to get a copy of the template I used, just send me an email. Next ten days might be a good time to complete such tasks as things slow down during the holiday season.

Happy holidays and a wonderful new year to you and yours!
-sundar.

Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Few years back a friend of mine said he saw a Bollywood movie star's picture with this book in his hand and so out of curiosity he picked it up to read. :-) Thus, I had heard of this book but never bothered to purchase a copy. It eventually landed in my lap when another friend gave it to me as a present. So, finally picked it up to read.

Harari names the book Sapiens, but then in the subtitle itself limits the scope to Homosapierns alone. In its breadth of coverage, book does span pretty much the entire human history starting from paleolithic age to 2015 where bionic body parts are getting attached to human beings and man/machine meld cyborgs are on the horizon. Towards the end it worries about singularity, what entity will replace human beings and so on. Author does seem to think he is writing a major piece of work that is important and relevant as indicated by the tone of the book and the aspects of human lives he is trying to touch upon. But as I was racing through the chapters, it left me a bit unsatisfied as there is no comprehensive thesis or idea that is new. It covers material most readers of my age might have already read about from high school history to simple books on anthropology. When I read a book by Jared Diamond (whose name appears on the cover with a quote from him to promote the book), I used to notice a similar breadth of human civilization coverage that used to be impressive since it will push another new idea in parallel. For example, his Guns, Germs and Steel pushed the idea of how those three things shaped human civilization as it stands today. Similarly his Collapse argued as to how civilizations that lasted several centuries or ones intended to last a millennium, collapse precipitously when they reach a tipping point. The discussions and stories covering human history will form the scaffoldings needed to understand the overall thesis of the book. I didn't find any such overarching thesis in this book. It seems to just narrate history at great length covering a large span of time and pretty much stops at that. 

There are certainly interesting tit bits sprinkled around. In Chapter 7, when the author is discussing the evolution of writing, he nicely describes how in its initial form, Sumerian writing circa 3500 BC on clay tablets helped record property/land details for tax purposes. Basically their writing combined two elements. One is a representation of numbers. They used rudimentary versions of base 6 as well as 10. (Their base 6 usage still has its fingerprints today in the 360 degrees of a circle.) Second element is a representation of things such as merchandise, animals, land, and people. This allowed them to store lot more information than what any human being can remember and recall. Thus, first writings in human history probably belonged to an accountant rather than a poet or a prophet. The pre-Columbian Andes used a totally different system to record details that some would argue should not even be considered as writing. Instead of trying to write on clay tablets, they used knots made on colourful cords called quipus. A quipu may contain several cotton or woolen cords. By tying thousands of knots on different places in a string of hundreds of cords, they could use one quipu to store possibly an entire town's transaction details. It reminded me of the Blockchain technology currently being promoted to record land details so that they can't be easily tampered with. 

Some other sections made me wince. For example in Chapter 18, he is making valid arguments about how violence has been coming down as centuries pass. But in a subsection titled Imperial Retirement, he says that by the time India was asking for its freedom in the 1940's, British empire was too ready to give up power through a peaceful transition! To quote him verbatim, "At least some of the praise usually heaped on Mahatma Gandhi for his non-violent creed is actually owed to the British Empire". I fully understand that when colonial powers like Britain invaded and took over India centuries back, that was the world norm and in fact centuries before several other invaders have taken over Britain as well. So we can't judge that history using today's values. But when fighting occupiers violently with every means you got is the world norm, Gandhi's non-violent freedom fighting movement in India that eventually succeeded deserves all the praise you can heap on it. Though you can compare some other violent era in history and argue that the amount of violence unleashed in India is comparatively less, taking away credit from Gandhi and giving it to the British empire portraying it as a benign power that was walking away on its own is totally disingenuous and a rewriting of history. Beyond Mandela & MLK, too bad Gandhi's model didn't become the norm in the world and we still continue to throw bombs at people to resolve conflicts even in the 21st century.

Overall Harari comes across as knowledgeable, capable of covering vast periods of history. But once you finish and put down the book, you may not remember very many interesting things you learned that you didn't know before. 

I am out on vacation this week and the next. So, packing Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Book by Richard Thaler in the carry-on suitcase. Let me see how it turns out. 

-sundar.

Book Review: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler

It is good to have friends who not only point you towards interesting books but actually mail order the book and get it delivered to you. This one landed in my doorstep thusly. :-) 

Book chronicles the birth and development of the field of behavioral economics via interesting stories, anecdotes, experiments and personal experiences. Richard Thaler, who is the author of the book was awarded a Nobel in Economics in 2017 for his contributions to the development of this field. It is amusing to hear the story from his perspective since he and few other economists noticed faults in the traditional economic models and proposed alternate models decades back just to prove their points. It has since evolved into this huge field now. Book's language and contents are very accessible as there is nothing too technical or complicated. 

As you may know, in the traditional school of economics, individuals are always seen as very rational entities that are not swayed even an iota by emotions, pressures, or social/environmental influences. The falsity of this notion is illustrated by a simple example. Let us say you go to a departmental store to buy a toaster that costs $20. If the store clerk says there is a sale starting tomorrow and so if you come back tomorrow and buy the same toaster, it will cost you only $10, most of us will skip the purchase that day, return the next day and pick it up for half the price thus saving $10. But if you are in the store to buy a $1000 TV, and the store clerk tells you that if you come back and buy the same TV tomorrow, it will cost you only $990, most people just shrug and buy the TV that day itself. This is because the human mind while working with a price tag of $20 finds a $10 discount a big one (50%!) that justifies going home empty handed and making the trip next day to buy it for $10 less. But while working with the $1000 price tag, same $10 discount doesn't look that important to make another trip to the store the next day. 

While this thought process may be easy to understand from a normal human behavior point of view, traditional economics uses models of human beings that will consistently make the second trip to save $10 or always ignore it and go for the purchase the same day, irrespective of the price of the item. Logically this is the correct behavior since whether a second trip to the store is worth $10 or not should not be influenced by other Supposedly Irrelevant Factors (SIFs) like the price of the item you are trying to buy. But we are all not Spock from Star Trek and so easily get influenced by SIFs. This is basically the bone of contention. Traditional economists refused to take this into considerations and kept pushing back with anyone of the following arguments:

- This observed odd behavior will all iron out when the stakes are really high.

- When all individual behaviors are added up to compute the big picture, it will even out.

- Even individuals will behave very rationally and consistently across all the activities if you look broadly on all their activities. So focusing on one behavior to find fault is not right and so on. 

People like Thaler and even Daniel Kahneman have proven this notion wrong time and again. Book is organized chronologically and so starts off with the 1970-80's related experiments in this domain. So, notions like endowment effect and mere ownership paradigm make their first appearances. Then he talks about the conceptualization of acquisition and transaction utilities. Acquisition utility is the value you derive from a purchase. Let us say you buy a bottle of cold water for $2. If you are really thirsty, you think it is worth the price. This is all the standard economic model considers. But in reality human beings also associate a transaction utility, because of which they feel great about buying that bottle of water for $2 if they got it from an expensive resort or restaurant since they expect to pay more for it. But if the same bottle (brand, temperature, quantity) of water was purchased from roadside, it feels like a rip-off since people expect to pay less than a dollar for it on the road side. While it is irrational, this is how the world works. In the following chapters we encounter sunk costs, mental accounting (where money that we rationally know is fungible is treated as not fungible), marshmallow experiments and quasi hyperbolic discounting. Each one of these terms are worth looking up as they are all good topics for party conversations. :-)

Second half of the book has several interesting real world case studies where these notions of behavioral economics are applied to improve business or people's behavior. For example, when credit cards were being introduced, gas stations wanted to charge customers using credit cards a surcharge to cover the fee they need to pay to credit card companies. Naturally CC companies hated this idea since it will make it look like their customers are being penalized for using the card and wanted the gas stations to include the fee as part of the standard gas price. After some consultation, gas stations (who did want the increase in sales CC will bring due to the ease of funds availability) decided to list the standard price with CC fee included and then give a "discount" for customers paying with cash. Mathematically & rationally there is absolutely no difference between surcharge and discount. But customers started viewing the discount as an advantage and were willing to go with "standard" price when they wanted to use the CC. Everyone was happy! There is a more elaborate example of how using such techniques Thaler helped turn a failing ski-resort business into a profitable one. There are also several negative examples like his interaction with NFL, GM and Uber that looked at his input but decided to discard them or didn't understand the importance to deploy the ideas to their own peril as per his recounting. He does list few academics by name, who fought against his ideas and lost as per his narration. I am sure those professors will remember the events differently. :-)

In the 90's the field had started getting traction with papers being published, conferences being organized and students starting to routinely working with him. In this phase there is also a large section that deals with finance and stock market that is quite interesting. There is an amusing complete chapter on how his colleagues who are all professors at the Booth School of Business in the University of Chicago went around picking offices in a new building they were moving into. Apparently it resulted in such a tense contest with emotions and competitiveness running quite high but in the end many missing important aspects of office selection (e.g. view) and focusing on aspects that turned out to be not so important (e.g. bigger office with ten more square foot space in the building plan that was hardly noticeable in the real office). Chapters on NFL player salary, TV game show analysis are all quite entertaining and help illustrate the span of domains where behavioral economics ideas will be applicable. 

Book wraps up with how these notions were applied to help improve employees save more in their retirement savings account (nudge them by making savings the default option instead of expecting employees to opt-in), and even working with Governments in other countries (U.K. for example) to promulgate these ideas to improve governance. 

Major complaints I had with the book fall into two categories. One is that in several chapters author is dropping too many names of colleagues, graduate students, professors he worked with to run experiments or write papers. It might be amusing or very nice for those individuals to see their names in the book. Thaler might be paying his dues to his collaborators in this manner as well. But when too many of these names appear in some sections, it feels like some irrelevant insider information that is too distracting. Second one is related to my own exposure to many of the studies, experiments and papers since they have been discussed in the mainstream media often over the years (e.g. how due to endowment effect, people will value a coffee mug they owned just for an hour more than what it is actually worth). So, while the prose is very light and easy to read, several sections didn't have a lot of new information for me. Still it was fun to go through the discussion again. Do give it read if you haven't already. 

-sundar.

Book Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel

In a very interesting coincidence I got both the English and Tamil versions of this book as gift from two different friends last December just days apart! The English version came in first from a friend that gives me books each time we meet. As you may know, this book has been made into a movie couple of years back. Since I had seen the movie (and so knew the main plot points), I had kept it in the "toRead" list a little further down the line. Few days later I met another friend who is the actual translator of the book into Tamil. Apparently it has been translated into multiple Indian languages as a "National Book Trust" project in India to commemorate Ramanujan's 130th year anniversary. The crispness of the Tamil translation's title (Ananthathai Arinthavan that precisely translates to The Man Who Knew Infinity in an elegant way) bowled me over. It’s been a while since I had read a serious book in Tamil. So, took it up immediately. Since I had both English and Tamil versions with me, went back and forth between the two versions almost chapter by chapter. It was a very interesting experience since I had never read a full book in two languages simultaneously ever before. :-) 

While Ramanujan's story is a really sad one, reading the book was a delight in several ways. I don't read a lot of biographies. But whenever I had read them in the past, they tended to be about Physicists/Mathematicians from Europe in the mid 20th century or books like Agony and the Ecstasy describing the life of Michelangelo and so on. At the time I read those books, I had not seen much of Europe and so had to imagine most of what was being described. But in this case, the small Tamilnadu towns where Ramanujan grew up, the kind of houses he lived in, names of the people who were part of his life, the schools and temples he frequented were all extremely familiar to me as I grew up in the same parts of India with similarly named relatives/friends in my childhood speaking the same language and eating the same food. This sense of familiarity added to the fun. If I had read the book only in English or only in Tamil, I wouldn't have had a chance to learn a slew of Tamil words for complex Math and Science terms (for example, Tamil term for String Theory is "Izhaiyooga Iyarppiyal”). Google translation is not showing the same term in Tamil. The rhyming poetic nature of such terms indicate that they were probably coined by the Tamil translator Prof. P. Vanchinathan, as he has a long track record of such cleverness. (He has developed a Python script that can verify whether a Tamil poem written to be of certain clause (called Venba) passes all the requirements!). He has nicely translated even the occasional English poems embedded in the English version of the book.

One disappointment I had with the book is that after reading it, I am not left with a lot more new information that I will carry forward. I did learn about the Wrangler, Senior Wrangler ranking in Cambridge, will remember the timeline of Ramanujan's story better, etc. But in the end I am left with the same details of what I had known before, Ramanujan's difficult days in India, his contact with G.H.Hardy, his miserable time in England while he published a lot with Hardy and his subsequent return to India followed by his demise. These broad strokes are what you are left with in the end. Compared to the movie, the book does get into lot more mathematical details to which I am grateful. Just to make sure I remember at least something brand new that I didn't know before, I went and read about Ramanujan’s Tau Function on the web.

Book talks a lot about how India hasn't changed much to be able to recognize such hidden gems that may be lurking around. While I do sympathize with this view, I am not very clear on what is a good solution that will prevent future Ramanujans being left undiscovered. He wasn't good at taking tests and acing them. So, he didn't finish college in India and as a result couldn't proceed through normal channels to get the recognition he deserved. While he had knocked the doors of dozens of potentials patrons to get support to continue his research, he eventually succeeded when Hardy read his letter and came forward to help him. It would have been very nice if the first person he contacted quickly recognized the immensity of his talent and work and gave him all the support he needed. But hind sight is 20/20. Today how can we separate real talent coming in through unorthodox means from fakes that claim superiority? Naturally we don't want to be fooled by charlatans or waste resources on those who may truly believe they are talented but in reality are not. Do you live in a country/society that has a means to recognize future Ramanujans who don't want to go through the regular academic channels? If so, let me know how the process works.

Book's author Robert Kanigel deserves a lot of credit/respect for the amount of research he has done, traveling through every part of rural/urban South India pertinent to Ramanujan's story (his description of the houses in small town India that I am familiar with stands out so vividly compared to Western homes that are architecturally/philosophically/functionally very different) as well as parts of England that Ramanujan spent time on, gathering a lot of details from first world war time archives and so on. Details in the book reflects his sincerity in trying to bring out a book that gives the readers a very close personal vivid record of Ramanujan's life, which was so very different from Hardy's. There are a lot of discussions about how scholars of Oxbridge lived in the early parts of 20th century. They were highly respected, well connected, all men, many of whom remained bachelors, wrote papers, attended conferences across Europe, had servant maids to cook & clean and so wouldn't have known how to make a simple meal. Contrast that life style with Ramanujan's who was displaced from his familiar surroundings, being a strict Tamil Brahmin couldn't eat non-vegetarian food and so had to cook for himself, was often depressed, wasn't comfortable with his fellow colleagues/neighbors but had an amazing ability to churn out paper after paper on higher order mathematics that stunned his English colleagues!

Even though I wish I could retain a lot more of Ramanujan's math, the book has lot more details compared to the movie. So, worth a read. BTW, while the movie was decent, I was puzzled by the way the actor portraying Ramanujan (actor Dev Patel) pronounced the name like an American rather than like a South Indian (who’d pronounce it as Raa-maa-nu-jan). Since the whole plot of the movie is describing how uncomfortable Ramanujan was in England not being able to give up his TamBram habits, the actor mispronouncing the protagonist’s name was awkward!

If you can read Tamil, please order the book from this National Book Trust link:
http://www.nbtindia.gov.in/books_detail__9__national-biography__2733__a-man-who-knew-infinity.nbt
Books of this kind are hard to come by particularly in languages like Tamil. So, we owe the team that brought it out our support via ordering a copy.