Book Reviews: Early Indians & The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets

I have a regular book exchange program going on with couple of my friends for more than a decade. One among them keeps giving me two books each time we meet, while I give only one! When we met earlier this year, I received "Early Indians" by Tony Joseph, and "The Mathematical Secrets of The Simpsons" by Simon Singh. While I started reading Early Indians couple of months back, progress had been slow, since family & work kept me busy, and I was also watching way more TV shows than I should have been! Managed to finish both books during these holidays. 

Early Indians - The story of our ancestors and where we came from, is clearly written with Indian audience in mind, published in India and seems to be getting good traction there. Other books on anthropology (at least those I have read) tend to discuss human evolution and migration, out of Africa into various parts of the world, without focusing too much on the national boundaries. But this one tries to answer questions like who are genetically Indians? Where did their ancestors come from? What does the languages spoken in India tell us about the origins of Indians? Until few decades back, such questions are answered incompletely, in parts via archeological evidence. In the past couple of decades genetic research has helped close some of the gaps. Author spends a good chapter on mitochondrial DNA, how father side and mother side DNA can be traced back generations to establish descendance and elaborates the way it helps provide a fuller story. 

While the book is well researched, providing lot of references, author keeps jumping from DNA evidence to archeological evidence to language to references in Vedas back and forth too quickly too many times. It gives the book's flow a staccato quality. As I was wading through the pages, I was losing interest. While I certainly do understand why we need a lore and pride to bring cohesion amongst a nation's population to make a country run well, I am always looking for indications telling me that we are evolving beyond those simpler needs, as one civilization that spans the globe. This may not be realistic looking at current trend lines. But that outlook of mine, made reading about how Indian people are genetically, archeologically, and culturally distinct a bit boring. 

To the author's credit, he brought it all together in the end. He clearly states that all the people in the world share 99.9% of the genetic code and so the differences we are talking about are only about the 0.1% that is differentiates us from each other. Metaphorically he describes India as a pizza (a la melting pot, mosaic analogies used in the US). The pizza base is the "First Indians" that are descendants of the original Out of Africa migrants that reached India 65,000 years ago. They account for up to two thirds of the genetic commonality that exists among the Indian population today. Next the sauce is the Harappan civilization people that spread across North and South parts of current India, when that civilization fell apart about 5000 years back. He sees them as the glue that binds different parts of India together culturally & linguistically. Then comes the cheese part formed by the Aryans that came to India, that had more of an influence in the Northern parts than the South. Their significance is seen in the fact that about two-thirds of Indians speak a resulting language. Final round of varied toppings that completes the pizza metaphor are various others that migrated in, such as Greeks, Huns, that are not spread uniformly but are more visible in some parts of India than the others. 

His analysis on the caste system is that it wasn't anything brought in by any of the immigrants but a political development that had started only about 2000 years back. But interestingly, since the system encouraged endogamy, it created a large number of small populations that live close to each other in Indian cities and villages. Thus, neighbors within an Indian village living next to each other may have more distinguishing traits than say Northern and Southern Europeans. After digging through the details of academic papers, DNA analysis, linguistic and archeological evidence, his conclusions can be summarized this way. Political/communal forces may try to develop a narrative that Indian population/culture is something unchanging and unique that has lasted 5000+ years. But in reality, it is not true as it is always mixed, evolving, changing continuously. This conclusion does sound correct & complete, and simultaneously satisfying. While this book may not be of interest to all my friends (particularly non-Indian), it is good to see such works being published that analyze anthropological questions more methodically & rigorously rather than parroting out unsubstantiated national pride claims from echo chambers.

In between, while I was getting a little bored, switched books and picked up The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh. It was a breeze and a delight that I finished reading it within 24 hours (spanning 2 days)! I knew the author as I had enjoyed reading his earlier book Fermat's Last Theorem as well and so was aware of this decade old book. I have even read bits and pieces of it before, as I am a superfan of the TV show The Simpsons. In case if you haven't read it before, I'd request/urge you to read the article I wrote about  the show titled 27-Year-Old American Family as it also touches upon the math aspects of the show. 

As I wrote in that piece, this show provides at least three layers of entertainment. On the surface, the brightly drawn characters and the backdrop provides a Tom & Jerry type look & feel, even kids can enjoy. At the next level, it usually has two or three different stories running in parallel that nicely conflate to provide a neat climax that will be interesting for adults. On a deeper level, the show throws in so many arcane references, gags you can appreciate only if you freeze certain frames and spend few minutes to understand what is shown in the background. A specialty of the show is throwing in a lot of mathematical references that 99% of the audience will never get but the remaining 1% who gets them will cherish forever. This whole book is about that math aspect of the show. Among the writers of the show there are Math and Physics PhDs, and M.S. degree holders. While I knew all this before, learned from the book as to how the writers sincerely work to find places in the story where clever math puzzles, and factoids can be inserted. In addition, though I had known about Erdős number and Six degrees of Kevin Bacon before, didn't know about how low the combined Erdős–Bacon numbers are for some of the Simpsons writers! Just not to bore everyone, let me just provide a link to this Wikipedia page that lists remarkably low numbers for actors Colin Firth and Natalie Portman, and the lowest number for Bruce Reznick, a mathematician. Book discusses who, got to what number, how, in a very interesting chapter!

Since I had written about the math aspect with examples in the article I linked above, and have also talked about few topics discussed in this book in my Thought Experiments book (e.g. Hilbert & Cantor's work on infinity), I will restrain myself from repeating any of that stuff here. You don't need to be a math wizard to enjoy this book. 

When I realized the final chapter was about another TV show called Futurama, which was also created by the same Simpsons writing team, I thought Simon Singh was running out of math material solely derived from The Simpsons to fill the whole book. But to my surprise, that chapter turned out to be quite neat since it discussed a whole new mathematical theorem and proof derived from a Futurama episode storyline that has been published as a math journal paper! To someone like me, who used to be frustrated by the lack math or any technical depth in Indian cinema (of yester years) even when warranted, TV shows resulting in Math academic journal papers is naturally a pleasure to hear about! As David Cohen's (Writer for The Simpsons and co-creator of Futurama) blurb for the book states, "This book blows the lid off a decade-long conspiracy to secretly educate cartoon viewers". Certainly, read this book, my book and the article link above. You will laugh loud and live long! 

Happy New Year!

-sundar.

Simple Questions

The phrase or question, "What Would Jesus Do?" seems to have originated more than 100 years back, but was trending in the US zeitgeist during the 1990's. It was used as a shorthand to remind followers of Christianity that they should stick to their moral imperative consistently. There was even a wristband popularized at that time that had the letters WWJD. It was given to teenagers to wear, so that they will be nudged to make the "right" decisions whenever they get caught in a moral quandary. I liked the simplicity of the framing that is easy to remember and to analyze any given situation that requires a right or wrong decision. 

Along those lines, I try to come up with simple frameworks that will help me assess large and complex worldly situations so that I don't get hoodwinked into compelling arguments that may be narrow or use emotional troupes. Here are two examples:

Take this nice take on the conflict between Palestine & Israel by Trevor Noah: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZ4yXyzUG0 

As he points out, depending on which particular point in time you start your narration with, you can make one side or the other look like monsters/victims. Contrast this scenario with the discussions found in this old but delightful book called How to Lie with Statistics? that I was reviewing couple of years back. It shows how by selectively choosing data points (that are all technically true/correct but incomplete) you can paint different pictures out of the same scenario. This is of course made into a sellable art now, with the name "Spin Doctors" given to the practitioners of this trade! 

These points may remind us of the elementary school story where five blind people perceive different parts of an elephant and describe it in five different ways. Since the individual stories we are told in any given instance could be narrow, anecdotal, emotionally wrenching, one simple framing question I try to ask to orient myself is this: Is this complete? If we brush aside the latest/anecdotal/narrow stories that bother us, and ask this question to get the full picture of the situation from both time and space perspectives, perhaps it will help us understand the issue more holistically that may move us towards solutions that are comprehensive.  

For the second example, I am going somewhere else. My wife routinely puts herself through a lot of inconvenience to do that right thing. She will go to extraordinary lengths to take cloth bags to grocery stores so as not to add to the environmental pollution by using single use plastic bags (though in the state of Pennsylvania plastic bag usage is not outlawed). She supports CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), always insists on us buying organic produce, etc. My friend Sanjay spends most of his Sundays volunteering to mentor economically impoverished young school age girls. The organization he works for guides them through school, basic college and careers. These girls come from such low strata of the society that you won't find Hollywood ending with this mentoring, where they all become Doctors and highly paid software engineers in few years to happily live ever after. It is not practical. The organization guides them through the process to get a simple three-year degree and perhaps a bank teller type job. 

I admire both my wife and friend for the enormous amount of time and effort they put in to do the right thing. But if I step back and look at the big picture, things look different. I realize that the plastic industry has trained us to believe that it is the end users' responsibility to recycle plastic (or avoid single use plastic bags), absolving themselves completely. If you dig into the statistics, you will see how the recycle program is a big farce, and <10% of plastic and other artificial material produced were ever recycled. While CSA type programs may be very emotionally appealing, it boils down to subsistence farming type model that can't feed the entire world's population efficiently, as has been determined in the last century itself. Similarly, rather than spending years where Sanjay is donating all his Sundays to mentor a small number of girls to lift them up, perhaps going with what China did to improve its economy dramatically for 30 years will work better to bring lot more people out of poverty, lift them up to better careers much more quickly? 

Thus, while I have nothing but admiration for people trying to do the right thing at the local level, I try to ask, "Does this approach scale?". The word scale here is meant to ask if the proposed solution solve the problem at the world level? If not, should we spend our time and energy on improvements that will get big problems solved as a byproduct (like what economic growth does to solve so many problems related to malnutrition, living standards, career opportunities, exposure, etc.) rather than solving those problems individually, inefficiently? 

After reading this post, you may wonder, "Isn't this obvious? Does this require a page long write up?". So, I'd like to summarize the purpose of the post, so that the reader is not mislead to think that I am debating the areas discussed in the two examples. I am not. I am asking how do you distill complex scenarios? Do you use any such framing devices to distill or analyze problems in a simpler way? I am hoping to learn new models & frameworks through any interesting responses you provide.

Book Review: False Allies by Manu Pillai

I have been listening to this podcast called The Seen and the Unseen with Amit Verma, after it was introduced to me by my friend Sanjay Padubidri an year or two back. This is counter programming to twitter and WA, where each episode runs from 3 to 5 hours but never boring! In one of the recent episodes author Manu Pillai who has written this book titled False Allies: India's Maharajahs In The Age Of Ravi Varma was interviewed. Since I enjoyed the interview and haven't read anything substantial on India in a while, decided to pick it up. It was quite an interesting read.

Westerners may not know much about pre independence India. Even for those who grew up in India, the history taught in schools generally used to portray the the kings (and few queens) who ruled dozens of small kingdoms that together formed today's India, as these not so bright, lazy characters that didn't pay much attention to the welfare of their subjects but whiled away time, watching dancing girls smoking hookah, dressing themselves up in a lot of jewelry while the citizenry eked out a living toiling away in farmlands. The understanding was when India finally got its independence from the British in 1947, all these kings were kicked out of their palaces as they deserved forming the new Indian Union. Pillai argues that the reality is a lot more complex and nuanced. Britain in the 19th century was a super power, that colonized countries allover the world. Kings ruling small part of India didn't have the wherewithal to militarily oppose Britain militarily. So, they had to perform a delicate dance, appeasing their British overlords while maintaining their dignity among the people of their kingdom. Certainly there were some rulers who were inept as well and the author is not pulling any punches while talking about their shenanigans. But by and large, these were reasonable monarchs who did their best to retain their position, protect their own prestige and people while trying not to antagonize the crown. Pillai employs a very nice troupe to weave these stories of six different kingdoms together using Ravi Varma, the famous early 20th century Indian painter as a common thread. This works well as he has traveled among multiple capitals within India in those days, taking up commissions from one king to the next, painting their portraits, their queens, children, country scenes and so on.

Book covers the period of roughly 1880 to 1930, traveling through Travancore, Pudukkottai, Mysore kingdoms (called Samasthanam in the Indian parlance)  in Southern India and Baroda, Mewar kingdoms in Northern India, diving into a lot of details. Initial chapters talk about Asvati Tirunal, Uthram Tirunal and Swathi Tirunal of the throne of Travancore, where what sounds like the first name is the name of the star (one out of 27) that is associated with the king's birth and Tirunal (meaning auspicious day) referring to their birth, thus each king being referred to by the birth star. Next sections talks about a robber sect that elevated itself royals and ruled Pudukottai, struggled to manage finance and taxes and then pulled themselves up by employing good administrators that served with the title of Dewans. I had heard of the title Dewan during my school days as a sort of Minister. But through the book (re)learned the important role they played in the administration of the kingdoms from managing taxes/finances to communicating with the British and so on, like a home + finance minister of a country in this century. Some men who functioned in this role (Madhava Rao and A. Seshiah Sastri) in more than one kingdom during their lifetime have managed to turnaround the fortunes of poorly functioning administrations, while also serving as good or bad bridges between the kings and the Britishers. There is a long and interesting chapter about the Kerala territories that were matriarchically managed, where succession flows through the women's side. Last few chapters talk about Baroda and Mewar kingdoms, ending with the Rana of Mewar, who resisted and disliked the "progress" as promoted by the British and insisted on administering his land on his own terms. Thus, while not bothering to improve roads, trains but maintaining forts or patronizing artists well. Book ends saying how while this particular king was quite selfless and cared a lot about his subjects, his insistence on keeping his kingdom in the 19th century forever, eventually made him unpopular allowing the British to push him out, making him king in name only, while they took control of the whole kingdom.

Both the Indian rulers as well as the British empire had used every detail involved in visits, gift giving, protocols, paying tribute/taxes, sending reports, language used in reporting and so on to gain leverage. British had the practice of installing one Resident in the palace of each colonial kingdom, to monitor everything that is taking place. The kingdom was diplomatically but firmly forced to get clearance from the Resident for any new rule they wanted to promulgate, projects they wanted to fund, etc. Since kings had no capacity to throw these Residents out, they will oblige but won't meet with them often enough or invite them to the court and give them lavish gifts establishing who is superior. There are examples such as Lord Hastings touring India from Britain, avoiding Delhi since as per convention he would have to appear in front of the Mughal emperor and receive gifts, which is perceived as a mark of servitude. Similarly, Sayajirao, a famous Indian king, when he was forced to go to Delhi to meet British monarch, George V in 1911, stand in a line of kings from India, paying tribute to the British king one by one, refused first. When he was really forced to, he did. But the Resident who didn't like Sayajirao, exaggerated details like he didn't wear enough regal jewels & attire to show respect, didn't walk back 7 steps before turning his back to George V to make a huge issue calling it the Durbar Incident and managed to depose him completely. Though the level of racism exhibited by the British is mind boggling by today's standards, it is quite interesting to learn that even younger children of Indian kings weren't totally scared or look up to them. For example, an Indian princess getting English lessons from a British teacher once starts to cough badly. When the teacher asked her to drink some water, the princess says, as per her custom, since she is sitting down with a foreigner considered unclean, she has to finish the session, go take a bath to cleanse herself and only then can drink or eat anything. There are tons and tons of stories and incidences in the book.

While the book is 556 pages long, about 200 pages are full of extensive references. Ample material and pointers to those who are interested in any particular era, king to dive deep. There are sections of the book that delve deep into administrative practices, how the treasury was turned around in a kingdom, and so on that are not directly related to the thesis of the book. Those parts could have been trimmed down to make the work more crisp. But if you get into the flow (of the author's slightly different Indian prose compared to the Western style of writing one may be used to), the details are not uninteresting. 

Since the book wasn't available in US, I asked my brother Sarathy who lives in India to order the book for me to read while being in India on my sabbatical visit. He got me a Kindle copy that when I read on a tablet, allowed me to enjoy dozens of Ravi Varma paintings that are included in the book in glorious colors! This was indeed a treat as the paintings are so intricate and exquisite. Since I often complain about how most books I read don't include enough pictures (even graphs, photos where they could help immensely) due to costs & complexities involved, I could really appreciate these included paintings as they fit very well into the flow of the narration while being delightful to look at. Ravi Varma himself being a descendant of a royal family, had not only established the preeminence of Indian artists but had done a lot to make the Indian culture palatable to the Victorian era Britain as well. For example, in a painting he portrays a mother with child and a house dog, awaiting the arrival of the father. This portrayal is in line with the values of the Britain at that time where the man worked and the woman stayed home with the child & dog waiting for him to return. While this may have been true in some parts of the India at that time, in the part where Ravi Varma grew up, women ruled, didn't wait for their husbands to come home and considered animals like dogs dirty and so would not allow them inside their homes! He similarly reimagined even the Hindu goddesses and painted them in fairer skin color and high neck blouses and shiny silk sareers. Since he also managed to make these paintings available for mass consumption via lithographic printing, how these goddess are portrayed has remained the same in India till date! Thus, though one can argue that Ravi Varma is a loose thread to connect all these kingdoms and stories, it is an exquisite one nonetheless. 

As I am wrapping up my stay in India, also finished reading couple of Tamil novels my brother bought for me that were originally published circa 1930. Though some parts may not be PC by today's standard, I found the language, flow, stories all to be totally amusing and enjoyable. 

Regards.

-sundar.

Book Review: The Address Book by Deirdre Mask

While browsing books on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble, on a whim, picked up a paperback copy of The Address Book - What Street Addresses Reveal about Identify, Race, Wealth and Power by Deirdre Mask. Interesting light read. As an African American descendant and scholar (Law School followed by academic career in US & UK) the topic must have been quite important and intriguing to the author. She has put in an earnest effort, visiting multiple countries, offices, universities and personalities to gather the material and has put together the book in an entertaining flow. She seems to have thought of it as a vast, comprehensive work that covers history, geography, civilizations, continents and so on, but it comes across as a fun, light and fluffy work. 

Her opening line on the introductory chapter is catchy enough, "In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes." You'd never think so much of the NYC council time will be spent debating street names. This goes to show how emotionally connected these names are, as different groups seek to commemorate or fight against a given name. There are also parts of rural US (e.g. in the state of West Virginia) the local citizens, not used to having regular door number and street addresses, resist attempts to give them proper addresses, as they they it will lead to government surveillance. She then moves on to illustrate how slums in Kolkata, India that don't have addresses struggle to receive many government services (such as mail delivery or emergency medical care) and what an NGO (Non Government Org) called Addressing the Unaddressed is doing to create GPS coordinates based Go Codes that can be used to locate specific residences within the slum. Seeing the YouTube video I have linked might give an idea of how difficult giving regular street addresses to these houses could be. In the next chapter she has discussed the the famous Victorian era London Doctor John Snow's efforts to locate the source of a Cholera epidemic (it was a water pump) and how UN operations in Haiti resulted in their Cholera epidemic as recently as 2010 and the role of street addresses played in these root cause investigations. 

Subsequent chapters on Rome, London, Vienna, Philadelphia discuss how street addresses and house numbering was invented over the centuries and how it helped and hurt Governments and people (which delivery of services might be good, being able to identify all the Jewish homes during second world war is bad). She has taken the pains to travel many of these cities to get a personal account of the details for her story telling endeavor. There are lots of interesting factoids spread around the book. Japan uses a city block naming convention, treating (unnamed) streets as just empty spaces between those blocks, Korea gave street names to its streets moving away from the Japanese imposed conventions to modernize itself similar to western nations but has names that are often misleading (e.g. bunch of streets in an area named after precious stones may make you think that is where perhaps the jewelry stores are but has no such relevance), Iran, South Africa, Florida and other places struggling with racist pasts or using the street names to stick it to the countries/cultures they hate and so on. 

In New York city, you can actually buy pretty much any address you want. So, in order to make their property appear more posh, real estate developers like Trump pay the city and own prestigious sounding address (e.g. 1 Central Park West, while it should have been 15 Columbus Circle). Thus there are so many Park Avenue addresses that don't actually exist on Park Avenue! You can imagine the confusion such numbering/naming causes when an ambulance need to get to a dying patient fast! This is bizarre in a city like New York, compared to a slum in Kolkata, both struggling with addresses. 

Since I knew and have written about What3Words years back that is specifically works to provide a clean address to every point on the surface of the planet, I was hoping she wouldn't miss it while writing this book. To my satisfaction, she didn't and has visited there office to understand the technology and has written about it. But she is skeptical since this is a privately run business that will be interested in monetizing the solution they have developed while she believes being able to write down a regular address as your own, emotionally connecting to it, learning all the neighborhoods near it, all have lot more significance to human beings than the mere utilitarian values an address provides. A very easy read.

-sundar.

Book Review: Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama

Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama is volume 2 that follows the Origins of Political Order - From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution book (Volume 1) I was writing about almost one year back. For continuity's sake, I am keeping that previous book review email below. As I mentioned then, Neeran Karnik, an old friend of mine whom I have never met in person , recommended Volume 1. I liked that one so much that I ordered this second volume right away. I was reading some other books in between and this being another tome, it took an eon to read and digest. As the subtitle of the book states, chronologically, it covers developments From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, bringing us to the present day, thus completing the series. 

The consistent flow (though it may sound a bit academic to most readers), the panoramic views and the encyclopedic views Fukuyama brings to this work is quite satisfying similar to the first volume. First part of the book (The State) discusses different dimensions and models of political development, looking at Prussia, Greece, Italy, US for differing models that evolved over the centuries. Clientelism, patrimonialism, patronage all being typical early models, author discusses how the Spoils System (where victor gets the spoils) slowly gave way to impersonal, efficient systems that started appearing in parts of some nations (e.g. Forest Management, Railroads in the US). 

In part 2, we get to explore the effects of geography (related to Jarad Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel), availability of minerals/natural resources on state formation. When he explores how China evolved over the centuries, his discussions on the difference between Rule of Law (where the same set of laws applies to everyone consistently) Vs. Rule by Law (where a set of laws are used by the ruling class to rule over the rest of the population), how strong the Chinese state is (compared to other countries like US or India) were all quite insightful and engaging. It is worth bearing in mind that once we are used to one system, we will try to evaluate and understand all other systems using our system's prism. Thus, while to US scholars China may look like lacking a lot of rules/laws, he argues that the Confucian model of governance that is at the root of Chinese state, believes that it is impossible to write out clear rules for every situation that will pop-up anywhere in the country. Instead, that fa model expects all the involved parties (citizens, Govt officials) be setup with guiding principles they internalize and believe in, so that they can come to the correct decision under any scenario without a specific rule being there to guide them. Good to see such alternate models being discussed earnestly, without being looked down like an average Westerner may tend to do. 

Part 3 discussed why and how the idea of liberal democracy spread around the world. He skillfully covers every region in the world (Africa, Arab Spring, India, America, Nordic countries) as well as time periods. His conclusion is that despite what many in the West may believe, the liberal democracy as it understood today, is not a state every system is bound to reach as they evolve and mature. It certainly requires work, push/pull, guidance and leadership to get there and maintain it. In the final part 4, author discusses political decay, as in different parts within a country starting to deteriorate in the quality of services they provide, rules they try to follow and goals they try to achieve. While he takes pains to say that he is not arguing that a country like US is moving towards imminent collapse, he argues at length that it has become a vetocracy, where different segments of the country/Government can veto each other (as they routinely do now) preventing rational decision making to propel the country forward. One simple example of this decay could be seen in the 500+ reports (more than one per day) the US Department of Defense has to produce to satisfy various laws/rules that have been put in place with no coherence/streamlining, as different entities controlling the department works at cross purpose! 

Book reminded me of two business school analysis papers published over the decades. First one analyzed GE in the late 80's wondering how/why it has become so successful and concluded that it is because each VP in GE is given complete control of their division that they run. They run their division like an independent company, deciding what products to make, how to sell, what profit margin to maintain and so on. This level of independence was determined to be the cause of their success. Decades later, more recently, there was another paper that analyzed why Apple is so successful and concluded that it is because they are so well integrated that the products and services are able to provide such a smooth and seamless experience to end users. For example, the VP of the iTunes store is not allowed to even change the color of the iTunes website since it is managed for consistency by UI department! Since GE is no longer as successful a company as it was 40 years back compared to current Apple, does the old paper become nonsense? If we go back even further, in the early 70's there was a business analysis done on Sears to determine how/why they are so successful that concluded that all of its employees knew exactly what their role/duties are and they did it well, which is what seems to be their secret to success. But Sears is bankrupt now! Looking at all these three papers, I can't help thinking that whether it is a company or family or a whole country, you can't function in a vacuum and so need a reasonable framework. Any reasonable framework will work well, as long as you have bright, happy members that believe in the organization, its goals and work together well! With so much of   enjoyable analysis, this book says the same thing in different ways.

Fukuyama insists from the beginning that he will not prescribe any solutions to the problem of decay, as he is only trying to study the issue and present it in its entirety. In general, scholars or institutions trying to help a country improve, will provide a set of standard prescriptions in every scenario as a panacea, like improving transparency, moving towards stable democratic rule, having a clear set of strict rules that are consistently followed, spending resources in a way that doesn't benefit one small section of the population but the entire citizenry, etc. Instead, the author presents the graph below to give an overview of what needs to happen in a bit more nuanced fashion. As the graph shows, a country with all its institutions can range from a low-capacity state to a high-capacity state (Y-axis). Orthogonally how much autonomy is given to functionaries (X-axis) can be plotted. He then lists some of the big countries in various quadrants. 

Countries are not shown as points but ovals, since different parts of the same country may fall in different parts of the graph. While the general goal is to keep moving on the bidirectional arrow towards the top-right quadrant, depending upon where a country currently is, it actually might have to make its rules more strict/prescriptive at times, to improve the confidence citizenry has on the government and loosen them as the institutions in the country becomes more capable, mature and less corrupt. A country like Singapore found on the top-right of Fukuyama's chart may make it look like it has made it. So, I did look at this graph and other arguments he presents with skepticism and suspicious eyes. But while he talks repeatedly about the "Getting to Denmark" notion, he does point out the flaws in the Singaporean system, positive aspects of Indian institutions and so on, thus painting an unbiased big picture overall as a true scholar should. 

Just like the first volume, this will also take time to read & digest if you are not skimming pages. But if you are interested in this topic, I certainly do think it will be worth your time.

Regards.

-sundar.

Book Review: The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama

I know many of my friends hit delete, claiming TLDR when they see my long emails related to book reviews that may sound boring to most. But in addition to helping me retain at least some small percentage of what I read, sending out such reviews prompts one or two friends to reply with additional pointers that makes this practice of spamming worthwhile. I came to know about The Origins of Political Order - From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama through one such pointer from a friend of mine and I am grateful. Since the contents piqued my interest, ordered a physical copy. It took me a while to finish as it is a tome. I so thoroughly enjoyed the panoramic comprehensiveness of the material that I already ordered and received Vol 2 titled Political Order and Political Decay - From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy which is sitting on the book shelf. 

As the title of the book implies, the treatment flows chronologically starting from the times before the notion of a state existed (Part 1) and proceeds to the state building process across the globe (Part 2). In general, Western scholars writing such books tend to focus more on the European and American states as they usually don't know a lot about Asian or Middle Eastern history. Fukuyama delves deep into China and India as well as Middle Eastern states such as Turkey in addition to various European nation and city states. American as well as Russian, Japanese, South Korean, Indonesian histories get their fair share of treatment as well. Though countries like Nigeria are certainly in his radar, if we need to pick a region that has not been discussed that much in detail, perhaps it is the African continent. Part 3 discusses the evolution of the rule of law and how church and state played each other in various parts of history, trying to derive legitimacy for their existence from the other side. Even in contemporary states, he claims that outwardly visible tools or phrases (such as "Checks and Balances") are often mistaken for actual substance and implementation, pointing out US or India as examples, where courts and rule enforcement can be effectively used to grind many things to halt. Next part has a long treatment on the accountability of government with the concluding chapter discussing the theory of political development.

I am not a big fan of Whig history, not only when it comes to civilizations/anthropology but even when it comes to science. So, his approach where he is not claiming any one system/model is superior to everything else  resonated with me. Without much bias, he presents model after model and in the end tries to shake out a set of principles that are applicable to any society in the world. His assessment is that for a state entity to function well, it should be supported by three pillars:

- Strong Government: This is to ensure that it can discharge its duties well and be effective even when there is insubordination or opposition amongst its citizenry to policies it wants to implement

- Rule of Law: It is equally important to have clearly understood, rule of law that is seen as fair and one that does not allow anyone, including the heads of state or the governing class, to function outside its framework

- Accountability: This pillar ensures that the state remains accountable to its people and the citizenry has a very strong say in how the state behaves. 

Stated in these terms, this may sound obvious and nothing too insightful or controversial. But if we walk through the versions of governing models that existed through human evolution, this may not be so obvious. We should note subtle details like the concept of democracy is folded into the accountability clause. Considering the way world is being governed over the last few decades, Fukuyama claims that countries like China and Russia have only a strong government but do not have rule or law or accountability. India falls at the intersection of rule of law as well as accountability but doesn't have a strong government. In the current world order some of the Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland are the ones that will fall into the intersection of the all three circles in a Venn diagram that portrays the three factors as intersecting circles. 

While the book is academic in nature, and so is full of of terms such as primogeniture, patrimonialism, vassal states, Caesaropapism, agnatic lineage and so on, Fukuyama's prose flows nicely and is quite accessible. I was humbled by the consistency and ease with which he could describe systems and practices across time and space that were extremely different to each other. For example, he discusses Janissaries of the Ottoman empire in the 8th century where they forcibly removed male children from their family, imported them into the empire, made them slave soldiers while also making them ruling class. Since they were given power but were not tied to their original family, clan or tribe, this model ensured loyalty towards the state! Then switches over to Indian caste system, compares it to China and Europe showing how religion played (or did not play) a role in how the social governing structure in each of these regions came about. China never had any indigenous religion that coalesced into a nation wide phenomenon beyond ancestral worship. India and the Middle East had major religious innovations that served as powerful checks against the governing bodies, but still never became single centralized bureaucratic institution like the Catholic church. While Church played big roles in Europe and is even the main reason as to why women had lot of rights to property, the reason behind is not support for women or feminism but its eagerness to get access to their land. Childless widows who had land but not allowed by the church to marry again within the tribe will give the land to church. Compare that to men who will marry again to produce heir and leave the land to them rather than to the church! 

The chapter titled Rente Seekers is quite insightful from macro economics perspective. The ancien regime of France before the French Revolution used to look awe inspiring from the outside, with its stunning palaces, buildings and cities. But inside it was crumbling since the state had a hard time raising the money needed to conduct its wars. It was routinely selling offices that could be passed on from generation to generation to generate revenue. The inheritors, without adding any value to the system will simply try to increase the rent they were seeking for existing structures/systems, that will atrophy the economic development further. If the oligarchs couldn't be taxed further, the government tried to tax the poor that irritated the lower rungs of the population more, forming a vicious cycle. While abolishing the vassal state could have helped improve the economy, simultaneously satisfying the population and the king, the rent seekers hated it. All of this culminated in a revolution to correct the problem in the end. This is another example where strong rule of law that ends up preserving what is not right, lands the country in bad consequences. While the problem may have been solved via a revolution in France, a modified version of that economic model exported by Spain seems to be haunting Latin America even now!   

Through my own experiences, I have understood how difficult it is to include images in a book (in short, royalty fees are exorbitant). Still can't help complaining that books like these could use lot more figures, flow charts, images and pictures. Unlike many academics (e.g. Jared Diamond) that come across as left leaning liberals, Fukuyama was dyed in the wool conservative and a Reaganite in the decades past. Not sure if his stance has changed over the years. But in this work he comes across as quite balanced. If you have the patience and interest to read through these 500 pages, this book will certainly leave you with a panoramic view of the growth of human civilization spanning the globe. Planning to read a pop culture book or two before picking up that volume 2 sitting on the shelf. 

Book Reviews: How to lie with statistics & The Lives of a Cell

How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff is an old classic that has been sitting on my reading list for quite a while. Finally bought a copy. Despite my extremely slow reading speed, I could finish this little book within a day as it was a delight to read. Extremely accessible prose combined with several cartoon like illustrations by Irving Geis makes it suitable even for high school kids. This was originally published in 1954 and so the illustrations date themselves with everyone, including a baby, shown with a lit cigarette hanging from their mouth! Guess that was considered the normal state of human existence in those days. Introduction starts off with how anecdotal evidence can significantly bias people's perception, such as newspaper headlines filled with crime stories, leaving an impression on the general public that the city or that year is quite crime ridden, though statistics may not show any noticeable increase. This item being one of my pet peeves, I was hooked right away.

First chapter talks about biases built into the sample that is being analyzed. While there are several examples related to US Presidential elections themselves, an early one Huff points out dates back to 1936. At that time a magazine called Literary Digest conducted a telephone survey using their subscriber base, and predicted that the Republican candidate Alfred Landon will win the election handily. But in reality, Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt won the election in 46 states while Landon won only 2. This survey fiasco was attributed to the fact that in 1936, only rich Republicans could afford magazine subscriptions and telephones! While they resoundingly supported Landon, a vast majority of the voting population preferred the alternative. Though this sounds obvious now, we often fail to check whether the sample selection truly represents the larger population. Thus, while all the classmates who show up in your school/college  reunion may appear to be doing better than yourself, it is probably because the majority who are not doing well simply don't show up to such reunions. 

Second chapter discusses how reports often talk about "average" but choose mean or median or even mode that support their argument without explicitly stating the choice. Subsequent one talks about how most reports & advertisements that throw a number at you to make a point, leave out several other important numbers that are needed to set the full context. An example is a toothpaste advertisement saying "XYZ toothpaste users report 23% less cavities". On the surface it sounds great and may encourage us to by XYZ toothpaste, until we ask, "Compared to what?". If we compare XYZ toothpaste users to a population that doesn't use any kind of dental hygiene product, the claim may turn out to be true, but is not a big deal. Or perhaps other toothpaste users report lot more reduction in cavities, in which case, XYZ toothpaste is not the best? Or perhaps it is comparison between same XYZ toothpaste users between two successive years where the cavity reduction is due to fluoride being added to water? There is also a good bit of discussion about the size of the sample. If you used only two people in your sample, one person not reporting cavities this year can be reported as 50% reduction in cavities. In addition experiments can be repeated multiple times until favorable set of results are obtained, and then one can report just that one result leaving out all the other results that were unfavorable.

Then comes the analysis of various types of graphs used in reports that zoom in (i.e. Y axis doesn’t start from zero) to focus on small variations to make them look really big. In addition to actual graphs, there are ways to use pictures to give you the wrong impressions as well. For example when grain production doubles in one year, if we simply show a bar graph that is twice the height of the bar graph representing previous year, it is legit. Instead if we want to make it look much bigger, we can use bags of grain in the illustration showing current year bag as twice the size of last year's. While it may be twice the size in the picture, since it is supposed to represent a three dimensional image, our brains will see it as eight times more (2x2x2=8). Author also points out as to how reporters intentionally or unintentionally leave too many decimal places in the figures quoted giving you an impression that the figure is extremely precise. For example, if you took the arithmetic average of the salary of 147 people and it comes out to $73,425.76321, the five decimal places is a result of the division and is not a reflection of the precision of the average salary in a population of 147 people. To give the right perception of precision, it would be better to report it as just $73,426. But it may not appear very precise to the reader! The fact that "Correlation doesn't imply causation" is well known in academic circle and your statistics prof will try hard to beat it into your head. Thus, though there is a clear correlation between drowning deaths and amount of ice cream being eaten, one doesn't cause the other, but both tend to go up in summer months when more people go swimming. But it is easy to miss this point in more complicated datasets as the author points out. The saying, "Lies, Damn lies and Statistics" clearly gets etched in our mind as we go through the book.

After a series of these chapters, each one equally enjoyable and accessible, author finishes off the book with a final chapter that provides suggestions on how to identify these shenanigans. First question we should always as is "Who says so?" that will tease out the biases that may exist that we should be aware of. Second question is to ask, "How do they know?" (I am changing "How does he know?" used in the book to make it more contemporary. ), a question that will bring out the methods used to gather the data allowing us to assess the data reliability. Third question to ask is "What is missing?" that will let us know if uncomfortable or context setting part of the data are being left out to nudge us in a direction that is not supported by the whole dataset. "Did somebody change the subject?" is the next question that may reveal if somewhere along the lines of analysis, one set of data is incorrectly being used to report something else. Finally ask "Does it make sense?" as it will help identify and discredit a lot of nonsense reports.

This will be a good little book that we should ask all undergrad students to read so that they can internalize these notions. They will certainly help them throughout their lives when statistics is used to pull wool over their eyes. 

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Usually when I combine two book reviews in one email, the books tend to be talking about the same topic. But in this case, the second book The Lives of a Cell - Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas has nothing to do with the contents of the first one. A thin connection could be the fact that this also happens to be a thin volume.

A friend of mine was putting together a short list of best papers/articles he had read over the years, that he felt gave a solid foundation for non-experts to gain a good grasp of the fundamentals in the area each article covered. He had listed the eponymous essay as one among that list. Since I had not read the article, looked it up, found it to be a book, ordered it online. When it landed, I realized it is actually a collection of essays generally related to biology. First article I read, which forms the title of the book, didn't really hook me. Subsequent few also appeared to be meandering around, set in 1974 popular science article tone. But with my OCD tendencies kicking in, I couldn't toss it aside and so read the remaining article to get closure. Glad I did as subsequent articles slowly clued me into the rhythm and the outlook of the author. Though I wouldn't say this is one of the best books, I certainly enjoyed several essays found in the book, each only 5, 6 pages long. The last paragraph of the first article, that forms the title of the book, sums up the tone/take away of the essays: I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell. Author thus, tries to make observations related to biology that we may not have had on our own. 

This book was first published in 1974. With the advantage of an additional 46 years of time being on my side, some of the observations the author makes, sounding very smug as one who is presenting a brilliant insight that the readers would have never thought of on their own, didn't sound that brilliant to me. I hope I am not sounding too snobbish/smug myself making this remark. For example, there is one essay titled Your Very Good Health that discusses the introduction of HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) coming into vogue in the 70's. Author says that we are spending about $90B a year on healthcare in US (that is in the mid 70's while the figure is nearing $4T per year now!) and despite that much money being spent, HMOs can't deliver all they promise/expected to deliver while simultaneously reducing the cost, because we spend so much money to treat things that don’t require any treatment. May be  it was a great insight then. Now it doesn't sound like one. Even the 1970's prose that reads, "The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists' wives but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves." sounds anachronistic to me since my wife is a physician and I am not one!  There is a chapter titled Computers that talks about how computers can never become equal to human beings. Author talks about how computers gaining more and more power are able to compute more but are still too far away from mimicking one human brain. He says, perhaps through a highly improbable development, one day if all the computers in the world can be interconnected to harness their combined power, they may get smart enough to think like a human being. He then argues that them equaling what all human beings (that already communicate with each other forming their own network) in the planet are able to think/achieve, is an order of magnitude bigger in its complexity that will always remain elusive to computers. 

Certainly not all the essays in the book get caught in such pitfalls due to book's age. Many of the essays in second half are interesting as they talk about notions like the extremely complicated cities termites build together without any central control (see this link to read about a very recent discovery), conversion of basic science discoveries into medicine, characteristics of mythological creatures such as Chimera, Griffon, Sphinx, Ch'i-lin and even Ganesha that always tend to have biological features of different species that are mingled together but hardly ever sport features never seen on any biological creatures. Each essay being an independent one from the rest and lasting only half a dozen pages, makes it a fun read once you get into the groove.