In praise of inefficiencies

Paying homage to Russell's famous essay titled, "In praise of idleness", thought will write down some thoughts related to what we shun as inefficiency that actually brings value in times of crisis like the current one.

In the decades past and still in many parts of the world, there was/is a lot of wastage in how resources are consumed and value is derived out of work human beings do. This has lead to relentless efficiency improvements and Just In Time solutions to keep RoI (Return on Investment) high. Compared to how things were a century back, this move to make things more efficient is desirable. But in capitalistic societies, this idea is on overdrive widely applied to any and every domain. Thus, the total number of hospital beds available in the USA has come down from 1.5 million in 1975 to 900K now, while the population has increased from 220 million to 330 million! In other words, there were about 8 beds per 1000 people in the 1970's. That number has been reduced to less than 3 per 1000 now! While this makes the system very efficient, keeping the occupancy rates very high making full use of all the available hospital beds, when we have a pandemic, there is hardly any surplus capacity to serve the need. 

This is not limited to hospital beds alone. We keep seeing news clips these days that show farmers ploughing away their own crop destroying millions of tons of potatoes and tomatoes, pouring down milk into the drain, etc. while there are long lines of starving people in front of food banks. This jarring disconnect is a result of highly efficient farming model that produces vegetables/milk matched to the needs of their specific buyers and so has only equipment & packaging material to ship the product to that specific type of clientele. Thus, a potato farmer selling his potatoes to restaurants has only 100 lb bagging machines. Now that the restaurants are closed and people need to eat at home, he should be able to package them in 5 or 10 lb bags to ship to grocery stores and food banks for consumption by small families. But equipment or even the needed packing material is no longer available! 

Of course I fully understand that under normal working conditions, if the farmer maintains multiple packing equipment/material or if the hospitals keep a large number of beds in reserve for that rare pandemic, their capital/operational expenses will go up, putting them at a disadvantage with their competition. The overhead will probably even put them out of business. But before we brush this off as "nothing can be done", let us look at it from another angle.

In the "Due Diligence" book about microlending, the author David Roodman points out that the economically poor view the notion of  insurance very apprehensively. To them, buying insurance policies appears like throwing away good money into a product that most probably will never give you back anything of value. Of course we all understand the value of insurance since we carry, life, automobile, property and other types of insurances. But you get the idea since most of the years go by without us filing any claims. In situations where the poor could have used the safety net provided by insurance, they get totally wiped out. If we can understand the value of insurance, we should be able to understand the value of some fat being left in the system as well. 

While we have been drinking the efficiency cool aid for decades (and reaping its benefits under normal conditions), it is interesting to note that extremely robust systems that exist in nature tend to be extremely inefficient, giving us a clue for complex system designs. Consider this fact: the human DNA when laid out in a straight line can stretch from US to Europe. If you fly over this line in a plane, clusters of genes may be found like small islands seen as pin pricks in the ocean! Collecting all the pin prick land masses, at the most you may be able to  form something like Tokyo's metro train line equivalent. This mental picture helps you easily understand the sparseness with which genes are distributed in the DNA structure. We can point to many such examples in nature. Think of Fermi's paradoxical question of "Where is everybody?" that indicates the way our entire universe is structured sparsely. 

We do have the responsibility of feeding everyone in the planet, continuously improving the quality of life for everyone and so on where improved efficiency in whatever we do helps. But if there is another global crisis where efficiency pushed to the limit results in a lot of causalities, that is not good either. Hopefully we will learn our lessons this time around to internalize the idea that being hyper efficient is not always necessary or good. Relaxing a bit, be it in personal, societal, national or international level, allowing some fat to remain in the system may help us in lean times. A recent study said people of Denmark are happier overall, since the Danish society prefers and encourages the middle class lifestyle and looks down upon hyper competitive, hyper driven silicon valley types that are out to dominate the world. May be there are some lessons in that culture & lifestyle to lower our stress levels and build more sustainable societies. 

Next time around you ate a bit more or didn't get a promotion or bought something that you don't absolutely need, rather than feeling bad, perhaps you should think that you are helping the world add on some fat for lean times.  Not only that it may be good for you, you might even be doing the world a favor by being a bit mediocre & inefficient. :-)

PLMK your thoughts on how you will design a society that encourages moderation and is happy to maintain enough reserves for unexpected emergencies. Giving out incentives? Govt maintaining the reserves?

Book Review: Our Bodies, Our Data by Adam Tanner

As a part of an office project, we were researching data mismanagement in various corporate sectors. During that process a long time colleague of mine came across this book titled "Our Bodies, Our Data - How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records" by Adam Tanner, read it and gave it to me. Tanner is a long time journalist/academic and has done a lot of research to write this easy to read book. Without any hyperbole in his language, he manages to get our blood to boil! First line of the first chapter (Introduction) starts with, "Soon after you tell your doctor about an intimate medical problem, data about your condition are sold commercially to companies that have nothing to do with your treatment or billing." 

Initial chapters talk about how in the 60's and 70's pharmaceutical industry tried to get an idea of the prescriptions being filled in each pharmacy by sending their reps to individual pharmacies. They paid some money to the small pharmacy store owners to reveal the details of the prescriptions being filled at their stores. With the introduction of computers, the process became easier/faster in the late 70's. In the 80's and 90's Cardinal Health started doing this analysis on a massive scale and found itself on the Fortune 500 list at the 145th spot. It then created a new company called ArcLight and competed with IMS Health, a veteran in this realm, by making pharmacies ArcLight partners in business, sharing profits (rather than just paying them a fee like IMS did) and soon was processing about 60% of the US pharmacy records. Eventually with IMS buying off or managing to kill off competition, now a days each Pharma company pays $10 to $40 million per year to IMS to get access to their data. Doctors who were irritated by the extent of tracking IMS does about their prescription practices, got the US states of New Hampshire and Vermont to pass laws against it. But IMS fought it all the way to the US Supreme Court and won the right to track/sell individual doctor identified prescription patterns/numbers. Book even quotes a gentleman named Larry Weed, one of the founders of EMR (Electronic Medical Records) saying, "The Doctor shouldn't be making a judgement of anything." 

What initially started as a good attempt by drug companies to do market research, mushroomed into a huge privacy problem, Clinton administration passed HIPAA (Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act) in 1996, proclaiming that patients have privacy rights. This law is still held up as a paragon of patient rights/privacy protection statute even today. My US friends/colleagues who work in healthcare themselves incorrectly believe that HIPAA provides lot more protection than it actually does. But in reality, this seems to be a joke since it is riddled with so many holes. For example, while doctors, nurses, insurance companies type providers are governed by HIPAA, companies like IMS Health (now part of IQVIA.com), that don't get classified as care providers are not covered by HIPAA and so can do whatever they want! Even the covered entities can legally sell the data as long as they de-identify the data by removing individually identifiable information (like name, SSN). But using today's data crunching techniques, it is so easy to re-identify all this data with a simple home computer and publicly available information. This has has been proven by multiple researchers. As an example, you can go to the website aboutmyinfo.org and enter your DoB, gender and Zip code to see how close it comes to individually identifying you. If it is not unique already, any additional information related to the patient can lead today's data tracking systems to easily re-identify the individual in question. 

Now this has moved far beyond pharma companies, and covers hospitals, insurance companies, drug trial companies and so on. Whenever companies that deal with medical data are approached with questions by journalists about their business model, they either dodge (as it may bring in more regulations restricting what they can legally do) or provide some vague explanation/PR statement of how wonderful it is when things work perfectly. But in reality things never work as professed. For example, when a person is hit by a car and taken to the hospital in unconscious state, if the doctor in the emergency room can look up the person's medical history, understand the victim's past, any allergies, Living Will/DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) preferences, before starting the treatment, it would be fantastic. But till date this is not possible in the US due to multiple incompatible systems in which patient data is stored without providing any universal easy to access data model. Such systems do exists in other countries but is blocked by multiple lobby groups that prevent such a system being developed in US. Author claims that whenever he tried to ask executives or company reps that tout the advantages of digitized medical data, they always talk about some vague potential synergy but when pushed to give specific examples, back off and run away. Author had traveled around the world to Korea, Japan, China, European countries to assess the extent of this problem. While Europe is a little better, issue exists allover the world. There is hardly any discussion or laws on these topics in many parts of the world allowing the same data miners to extend their reach internationally.

In the Chapter 11, Tanner talks about President Obama's initiative to get EMR deployed widely, spending about $31 Billion dollars to subsidize the migration effort to hospitals and smaller practices. That effort has made billionaires out of companies like Epic, Cerner that are massive EMR service providers. But since the law didn't require that the EMR systems should inter-operate, each company intentionally created its own silo, locked in its customers and made sure competitors can not access the patient data they manage. Just couple of months back when Trump administration started pushing for more patient rights that will allow patients to access their own records, Epic campaigned against it vigorously saying it will compromise patient privacy! Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic claims in an interview with the author that standardization is like asking iPhone developers to use Blackberry technology because we think that is the only way iPhone and Blackberry users can talk to each other! Since I come from the tech world, that analogy doesn't make any sense to me. It is more like Yahoo mail and Gmail can't send/receive information to each other since they use different technologies. This should be easy to solve. Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon like companies are all for opening up and standardizing the patient record databases but are so far struggling to make headway and have shuttered several initiatives since the domain is fraught with emotions, dominant players worried about losing their market share, common public not understanding how better things could be, etc. as discussed in the book.

Few years back Intel's Ex-CEO Craig Barrett, had a heart attack while visiting his ranch in Montana and had a very tough time getting his own medical records to the hospital treating him. Trying to solve the problem, he started a company to help individual patients get access to their full record. The initiative didn't go anywhere. Currently in US, we are in a paradox were individual patients cannot access their own lifetime medical record in any comprehensive way, while a for-profit data miner can compile the dossier legally and sell it.

If rational solutions are needed, they are easy to develop as discussed in the last chapter. More transparency, more consent, and more control. Book closes out proposing a series of simple solutions related to more open information sharing with patients, compatible patient record systems and EMRs designed more to facilitate better patient care instead of being focused on billing and lawsuit prevention (by making doctors spend an enormous amount of time documenting each visit for CYA). Even this New Yorker article by the popular writer Atul Gawande attests to these same issues.

On a related note, please listen to this podcast where EconTalk host Russ Roberts discusses the price of cancer drugs in the US with Dr. Vinay Prasad: https://www.econtalk.org/vinay-prasad-on-cancer-drugs-medical-ethics-and-malignant/ I look forward to hearing my pharma research friends' feedback. 

 Regards.

-sundar.

P.S. Have you bought the Thought Experiments book yet? Help me get to the "1000 copies sold" mark. I am barely at 100 now. :-)

Google: https://tinyurl.com/TESVGoogle 

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/TESVAmazon

Thought Experiments - An Inexpensive Tour of the Entire Universe

Is there a connection between the COVID-19 pandemic, four students who skipped a class to watch a movie, Greek philosopher Socrates, and a clock tower in Switzerland? Yes, these are all involved in various thought experiments floating around in this universe. A new book titled "Thought Experiments - An Inexpensive Tour of the Entire Universe" captures them all touching a wide range of topics such as economics, ethics, physics, mathematics, medicine, democracy, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Carrying about three years' worth of my work, written in simple language, the ideas discussed in this book may serve as material for family discussions during this lock down, party conversations with friends or intriguing classroom debates. Once you get the book, a virtual tour of the entire universe will be on your fingertips. Consider jumping on board to support the cause. 

You can buy the e-book from Google: https://tinyurl.com/TESVGoogle or from Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/TESVAmazon

Amazon has a paperback edition also available. Whichever version you buy, please provide feedback to me and write reviews on those sites to help improve/promote the book. 

As I have promised in the preface, 100% of the generated profit from this book sales will be donated to Solvanam, a non-profit web magazine run by volunteers spending their time and money to help improve the discourse in Tamil, publishing high quality articles, discussions, reviews and literature covering all the topics this book touches upon. I published many of the chapters in this book as individual Solvanam magazine articles in the years past, that vouches for their support to discussions related to STEM type topics. 

After Google and Amazon take their service fee, I will hardly receive $1 per book. I am hoping to sell 1000 copies so that I can raise $1000 to donate. I know 1000 copies is a really big target to reach. Please help out by buying a copy for yourself and 10 more to give to your friends & family. Ask your extend circle to buy. Hopefully they will all thank you along with me. :-)

-sundar.

Book Reviews to take your mind off of the big topic! :-)

Enjoyed reading couple of short & simple books. There is a Credit Union (US parlance for a small bank type institution that is non-profit and member owned) in the town where we live in. I serve as a Supervisory Committee volunteer. This is similar to being on the board, monitoring the functioning of the organization as an outsider (i.e. not part of the paid management chain) to ensure that it is run well. The CEO of the CU selects a book each year during the annual retreat and gives a copy of the book to all the employees. Thus, ended up with a copy of "Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust" by Edgar H. Schein & Peter A. Schein. I found the title appealing and so picked it up to read. They seemed to have created an industry out of this idea, writing multiple books, starting a consultancy business, etc. all connected with the "Humble" notion. 

Basic thesis of the book is this: In the Western hemisphere, relationships, interactions and even how people are managed, all tend to be too transactional. This is not good in the long run as it becomes difficult to develop trust with people you work with but don't really know well. So getting to know the other side a little better will be beneficial in the long run. 

I have noticed this overall trend in US over the last three decades since many of my colleagues often know next to nothing about their other colleagues or their managers. Even simple personal details like is someone married or have kids might not be known as many think those are personal details we don't need to know or divulge. The authors call this Level 1 relationship, where there is a not a lot of context to interactions. What is being said could be taken at face value without any underlying meaning. Book encourages everyone to get to Level 2 relationships where you know the person you are dealing with a bit better, understand their background, family, social/political/business views so that you are able to understand what they are saying/committing to a lot better. Trust can be high when you know the person you are interacting with very well. Authors then talk about Level 3 relationships where you know the other person extremely well, almost like a close family member. While it may be a desirable state, cultivating such close relationship with everyone is very difficult as it involves a lot of time and effort. So, the authors advice the readers to focus on getting to Level 2 at the least, with all those you work with regularly. They go on to cite examples of how this mode of working will be better in hospital, military, business and other settings. 

This is all very different from the Eastern culture, where the pendulum tends to swing to the other extreme. Among Indian colleagues, it is a very common practice to invite all the office colleagues for their sons/daughter's weddings or other family functions. In Asian cultures what is being said often need to be contextualized based on who says it, what are the circumstances, etc. While I understand the authors' p.o.v., since I have been on both sides, I do think both sides have advantages/disadvantages and so we need to find a balance. I like the low context models where a commitment is a simple promise that will be kept & delivered without any need for context/interpretation. Of course the authors are careful to point out that they don't mean letting people slide or not take responsibilities for the commitments they make. I came away thinking that while there is certainly value in what they are prescribing to the Western hemisphere, the East can benefit from a flipped version of the prescription. :-)

On a totally different area, read a small book called "IKIGAI - The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life" by Héctor García and Frances Miralles (translated into English by Heather Cleary) based on a pointer my brother gave me. Authors have done a lot of research in areas defined as Blue Zones on the planet that have a very high density of centenarians. Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Loma Linda, CA in USA, The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica and Ikaria in Greece are these blue zones. Digging through the life styles of the residents of these five places, authors derive simple conclusions that can potentially keep us all happy and healthy living long lives. The Japanese word Ikigai, symbolizes this whole life style and roughly means "the joy of being busy". People in these places are not extraordinarily wealthy or has accomplished some great career success or any such thing by which society may be measuring each other. But they all have a continuing purpose to get out of bed each day, never retire (even when they are 90+), form close knit communities they consistently hangout with, help each other, each simple meals to fill only up to 80% of their stomach and in the end develop the needed physical and psychological resilience to lead a long and happy life. The Ikigai notion (similar to raison d’etre in French) while practiced in the other four blue zones as well, its integration into daily lives is a cultural part in Japan and hence the title of the book. Authors point out a lady who works in a paint brush manufacturing plant and an owner of a sushi restaurant, who all seems to have found an inner peace in doing a perfect version of their what appears to be a simple job for years. They are respected by their peers for achieving this zen quality in their work though it may not have resulted in a lot of material wealth for them. For example the sushi restaurant owner never bothers to franchise their business or even make their one restaurant much larger but continue to focus on the quality for so many decades while still shutting down the restaurant once their purchased stock has been consumed. There is a chapter dedicated to discussing Logotherapy invented by Viktor Frankl (whose thin book Man's Search For Meaning is another great read) and mapping it to this domain. While we continue to live in world bombarding us relentlessly with Western individualism and material wealth & success, this book's prescription of a simple life with everything in moderation that is possible for anyone to follow is quite a welcome message as we grow into our old age.

Regards.

-sundar.

Book Review: Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry Into Microfinance by David Roodman

More than 10 years back I came to know about the micro lending organization Kiva.org designed to connect lenders and borrowers allover the world. You can signup getting an account, deposit some money, view a catalog of loan applications and lend as little as $25 at a time to people located in different countries to help them start really small businesses. A typical loan application could be from a woman in Azerbaijan or Nicaragua trying to buy a cow to start a milk vending business asking for $400. When a bunch of lenders like us loan small amounts (say $25 or $50 each) meeting the total loan amount, she gets the funds, runs the business and pays it back over ~6 months. When you get your money back, you can lend it again. The Kiva.org website provides a catalog of loan applicants with pictures/small write-ups to help you make a connection with the borrowers. I loved the idea and so placed few hundred dollars there and used the interface to get my kids exposed to notions like what kind of money can make which type of businesses possible around the world. My son/daughter will read through the requests and enthusiastically say let's lend $25 to this lady trying to start a business selling seeds in Vietnam. It was fun, educational and fulfilling. We have given out 100 loans now recycling the few hundred dollars into more than $4000 worth of loans. Once in a blue moon we lose some funds when loans default. But that is really rare since it happened only once or twice in the last ten+ years. We don't get any interest but do get recurring requests to donate to Kiva that can be ignored/obliged as you see fit. 

I describe this Kiva.org model to friends now and then to get them interested. When I told about it to an Intel colleague, he got quite excited and so went and looked it up to sign up as a lender. But after reading up enough, he came back and told me that Kiva often charges interest rate as high as 40% and wondered aloud as to whether I am still sure that this is helpful to poor borrowers. Kiva itself has responded to such criticisms saying since they work with risky borrowers, and do need to support NGOs that do all the field work in the impoverished countries & societies they work, such high rates are justified. One thing that I pride myself is that I am not emotionally attached to any of my ideas. If/when convincing contrary evidence is presented, I rationally think about it and change my positions based on the evidence. So, taking the cue from my Intel colleague's nudge, I decided to do some serious reading to assess the efficacy of micro lending and ordered this book called Due Diligence by David Roodman. He is seen as a sincere, balanced critic that has put out unbiased reports and articles evaluating the MFIs (Micro Finance Institutions) allover the world.

Book starts off with an anecdote (promoted by MFI) pointing out how a poor woman used micro credits to dig her way out of poverty and gained self-esteem and respect from her family. It then pairs it off with the story of another woman who faced with real life difficulties that prevents her from paying back her monthly installments, ends up losing her house and cattle to pay her dues as she was forced to do so by her peers in the borrowing community. She swears never to borrow money for the rest of her life since it ruined her family. Such stories are powerful on both ends when selectively highlighted and so he steps back and starts off discussing various forms of credits/savings, groups that are formed to guarantee each other's debts, co-operative societies that help each other and many such phenomenons found throughout thousands of years of history all around the world. Subsequent chapters analyze dozens and dozens of micro lending institutions located in multiple continents (including many like Spandana, BASIX in India) in extensive details to conclude that there is no clear evidence that microlending has eliminated poverty. Author does say repeatedly that microlending certainly has value, just like regular lending, in the society. But it is not all that it is hyped up to be. 

Roodman points out that when people are said to be living under $2 per day, their income varies widely day-to-day and so mechanisms that will even out the flow of money is valuable, including micro lending. But achieving that end via micro savings and even better via micro insurance programs will be far better. Normally it is hard for poor people to pay money to buy insurance since most of the time it will not give you anything back. So, they tend to look at it suspiciously. There are very nuanced discussions in the book about how being part of even a borrowing group can raise the status of a woman in her family as well as how it can suck up several hours of her time each week as she has to attend weekly meetings to remain part of the group to be able to avail the loans when needed. He goes to a lot of length to shine spotlights on Grameen-II that Muhammad Yunus (of Nobel fame) has developed that embraces savings as well as lending evolving as a better model, Indonesia's Government funded MFI that refused international aid since they wanted to maintain their own discipline of relying on members' savings to make lending possible (rather than lazily depending on foreign donors) and other varying models that work better (like allowing people to "top off" their loan by borrowing the money they paid off before fully paying back their loan (treating it more like a line of credit) that helps even out financial ups & downs and so on.

In the last chapter he concludes by saying that while we are still struggling to make well known bank like services work for the poor by making it micro & efficient, programs like M-PESA, implemented in Kenya by Safaricom telephone company that successfully handles more financial transactions than Western Union may actually provide the kind of inexpensive but very efficient solutions poor people really need. I am getting convinced that while it makes me feel good, lending via Kiva is not really helping people get out of poverty. Many Kiva loans are actually given first, even before their stories get posted on the website asking you to lend, which while being the correct/efficient process, is not truth in advertising. I am planning to pull out my remaining money and perhaps donate it more directly via GiveDirectly.org type organizations. PLMK your thoughts/views on microlending. If you are seriously interested in this topic, this book is certainly a good read.

Book Review: Energy and Civilization A History by Vaclav Smil

Borrowed this book from my cousin. It read more like an almanac containing tons and tons of energy related data sliced and diced in different ways than an interesting book that tells a story. Smil is an academic with a head that is overflowing with numbers. I think it would be interesting if I can do a mind meld to visit the insides of his brain to see how much and what kind of data are stored, how his thinking process works, and how he perceives the world through those numbers. 

In some way this book is equivalent to books like Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, as it provides a panoramic view, tracing the evolution of human civilization through one lens that spans several thousand years. But the GG&S book had an underlying thesis that comes out as a coherent story backed by the data & evidence presented. This book on the other hand doesn't reflect any new thesis or creative thinking but simply documents the impact of energy on civilization like a flat research report presenting every available number. That leaves the reader a bit unsatisfied in the end. In this aspect, this book is more like the Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari that also simply stated history and just left it at that.  

Book starts with the close relationship between energy and the society's development. This is followed by more or less a chronological narration of the role of energy in prehistory, traditional farming, preindustrial prime movers and farming, fossil fuels, electricity, renewables, and so on. Book concludes with a chapter titled energy in world history, which doesn't bother to tie it all together but just states how many aspects of world history is affected by energy while many other aspects are not impacted by energy. You feel like you finished reading a text book. No major insights or hitherto unknown view points. But the author has indeed put in enormous amount of thought into drilling down the available data. For example, when he is simply talking about human beings walking/running on the land, he analyzes the data this way: Running requires power outputs mostly between 700 and 1,400 MW equivalent to 10-20 times the basal metabolic rate. The energy cost of running for humans is relatively high, but people have a unique capability of virtually uncoupling this cost from speed. Body weight support and forward propulsion account for about 80% of the total cost of running; leg swinging claims about 7%; and maintaining lateral balance about 2%-but arm swinging cuts the overall cost by about 3%. Smil quotes his own research and a whole bunch of papers and articles to support his claims.

I am not a huge sports fan. I do understand the good values sports inculcates in people (e.g. how to take wins and losses equally well, work as a team). What turns me off is the amount of fraud & cheating that is prevalent pretty much in all the spectator sports. As a result, none of the records or numbers look true or meaningful to me. Perhaps Smil shares my sentiments and so I was amused to see these lines in the book: Does not the label of wasteful energy diversions apply much more readily to the extravagant, and mostly uninspiring, structures we build to watch modern gladiators kicking, throwing, or hitting assorted balls?  Elegant dissing of most spectator sports in the world. :-)

There is enough material o compensate such levity. There is a box titled "An Inquiry into the conditions of the women who carry coals under ground in scotland, known by the name of BEARERS" that describes the physical labor young children (starting from as young a age as 7) performed with their mothers for years carrying coal on their heads that is certainly emotionally disturbing by our standards today. 

The mother descends the pit with her older daughters, when each, having a basket of suitable form, lays it down, and into it the large coals are rolled; and such is the weight carried, that it frequently takes two men to lift the burden upon their backs The mother sets out first, carrying a lighted candle in her teeth; the girls follow. with weary steps and slow, ascend the stairs, halting occasionally to draw breath.It is not uncommon thing to see them, when ascending the pit, weeping most bitterly, from the excessive severity of labor. The execution of work performed in this way is beyond conception. The weight of coals thus brought to the pit top by a woman in a day, amounts to 4080 pounds and there have been frequent instances of two tons being carried. 

Subsequent paragraphs goes on to compute the energy numbers for this work performed as a lady weighing 60Kg, lifting 1.5t of coal from a depth of 35m will need about 1 MJ and so on. 

Some of the details in the book are elegant & impressive. For example, we know Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine. But the book talks about how he didn't invent an engine just to make himself rich but saw it as a tool to build a more egalitarian society. In the late 1800's, prime movers like water wheels or steam engines were large and were very difficult to move around. So, those prime movers will be the center pieces of the rest the structures like a factory. Diesel set out to invent a sewing machine size cheap engine that could be bought by individuals to setup their own shops. He wanted worker cooperatives built around this invention that will make it very easy to setup manufacturing systems anywhere needed for little money. He envisioned this worker run factories in the countryside leading to an age of honesty, justice, peace, compassion and love. A book he wrote to promote this eco system apparently sold only 300 copies. Still he thought and claimed that he had solved a huge social problem. Society didn't organize itself around worker cooperatives and the diesel engine were used more in heavy machinery and locomotives. Still it was nice to know that the thought process was bigger than the invention itself. 

There is no complicated math anywhere in the book. But Smil does analyze the available data in many different ways, for example, in terms of "energy output to mass" ratio when evaluating prime movers, instead of looking at simple energy output numbers alone. This teases out the efficiency of engines from their weight point of view. He also takes pains to contrast the 1900 great plains former who would struggle to muster about 5kW of power by pulling together six horses to his great granddaughter who could sit inside the air conditioned cubicle on a large diesel powered combine that puts 250kW at her finger tips. He makes similar comparison between a train engineer in 1900 who'd have utmost about 1 MW of power when the steam engine is running at maximum capacity pulling the train at about 100 km/h speed to a Boeing 747 pilot in 2000 that has about 120 MW of power from four gas turbine engines at his disposal flying 11 km above earth at a speed of 900 km/h. While being quite impressed by the amount of data he could wrangle throughout the book, I did notice how in one page he is talking about a precise number (756 kwh) that morphs into something a bit vague in another page (more than 700 kwh) indicating that he is mortal and is probably referring to datasheets and databases to get his numbers and doesn't remember everything in his mind. Phew.. Though I am not trying to compete with anyone, I don't need to feel too bad about my memory's limitations. :-)

You can give it a read if you like comprehensive description of history from one specific viewing lens (energy), though there is no overarching thesis or new idea being promoted.  

Book Review: Cool It by Bjørn Lomborg

EconTalk is one of the podcasts I regularly listen to during walk/jog sessions. Though the podcast is supposed to be focused on economics, host Russ Roberts routinely interviews authors/professors from various disciplines who have made an interesting contribution that can be viewed from an economics angle. When I heard him talk to Lomborg about his book titled Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, my curiosity was piqued enough to order the book and read it. Bjørn Lomborg  is a Danish author/professor who is also running a think tank called the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Do check out the site.

In this short, easy to read ten year old book, Lomborg argues that approaches like the Kyoto Protocol trying to address climate change by drastically trying to reduce carbon emission are total non-sense. Before readers start to look at him with disgust, he clearly states that there is absolutely no question that the planet is getting warmer due to human beings and the resulting effects need to be addressed. Having repeated this statement multiple times, he then veers off as to how the effect should be addressed.

Current common wisdom is that the carbon emission that gets into the atmosphere is warming the planet and so we need to drastically curtail the emission to reverse its effect. Though this is the politically correct statement to make these days, even the ardent supporters of this notion concede that the extent to which this one knob needs to be turned back to correct all the ill effects of global warming makes it exceedingly difficult to pull it off. Still most argue that since doing x amount of carbon reduction will be inadequate, the solution is to move ahead with 2x, 3x or 10x reduction, costs be damned. But we all know this is not going to work since even x amount of reduction is hard to achieve in reality.

Instead of that approach, Lomborg goes about methodically listing out what are the bad effects that we need to address and then looks for other means of addressing those effects at about 1/100th of the cost. Here are some of the ill effects of global warming he considers with proposed solutions:

- Polar bear population is dwindling: If we really dig into the numbers, actual polar bear deaths due to global warming is apparently in the dozens while about 800 polar bears get killed by hunters each year. So, simply reducing the number of hunting permits given to shoot polar bears will do lot more to revive the population.

- There will be major floods & hurricanes: He points out that Haiti & Dominican Republic that are right next to each other in the island of Hispaniola and experience the same hurricanes come out looking strikingly different each time. Haiti is an impoverished, poorly managed country, while DR is comparatively better off. So, in one year when DR that has better hurricane shelters and evacuation procedures in place came out with 10 hurricane related deaths, its next door neighbor Haiti saw a death toll of 2000. Investing in better hurricane management infrastructure in Haiti will be much faster/cheaper/effective than hoping to turn the carbon dial down worldwide to save those 2000 lives. Same idea applies to floods, and so for example, simply by avoiding development in flood prone areas you can save lot more lives and property.

- Famines/Starvation: The dire projections presume people/countries don't react to changes and simply continue living exactly as they did before. In reality, how many people go hungry will depend a lot more on demography, income, and specific locations on the planet. Since production of food in the planet is continue to increase for several decades, managing and distributing it well will easily feed lot more people lot more efficiently. 

After similarly considering water stress, poverty, diseases, he takes up things such as HIV/AIDS epidemic, micronutrients that are not considered part of the climate change equation but can be effectively addressed and argues that we will get much better bang for the buck solving those problems the world over if we want to improve the quality of life for the planet's inhabitants. I took a picture of one simple table found in the book (see attached) that compares feel good initiatives vs. effective solutions. He does repeatedly say that in an ideal world, we'd like to do everything found on both columns of the table. But in the real world where resources are not infinite, we need to do things that will actually address the problems on hand. He really goes after Al Gore in the book, dissecting many of his "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation points and arguing as to how Gore's data is either not complete (e.g. Gore's presentation saying penguin population is dwindling shows reduction in just one island while population is increasing in other islands) or how the carbon reduction solutions won't make a big impact. He also criticizes Gore for brushing aside anyone with differing ideas as stooges of the fossil fuel industry. Lomborg also points out as to how politicians like Tony Blair that are ostentatiously supporting carbon reduction initiatives, signed on to goals that his successors have to meet decades later, while he gets the credit now and simultaneously pushed back on any annual goals that his administration has to meet right away as it will have a negative impact on the British economy under his watch. :-)

Being the skeptic, I didn't want to buy Lomborg's arguments in the book without some fact checking. So, looked around and found pages like this one that pushes back his writings. http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/bjorn-lomborgs-lukewarmer-misinformation-about-climate-change-and-poverty/. But beyond generally complaining that Lomborg is aiding climate deniers and making exaggerated claims, I didn't find any clear explanation as to why he is totally wrong. So, I came away thinking that instead of endlessly saying we should reduce carbon emission and then not really doing much, approaching individual issues separately to find the most efficient solution will be far better and will actually work. We should continue to move towards less dependence on fossil fuel, technologies that will reduce our impact on climate change, etc. But unless we make the needed changes economically attractive, needle won't move much despite everyone making noises or doing small things to make themselves feel better while letting the problems grow endlessly. Though not mentioned in the book, I personally find the "Save the Planet" arguments implying we are doing something good and helping the planet earth very amusing. The planet or universe doesn't really care whether we live or perish. So, if we are fixing things, it is to help human civilization, not really to help the planet. However we address or not address global warming, it will be there humming along long after we are gone. :-)

Do check out the book, author's talks/videos on YouTube and/or the EconTalk interview in which he covers the same material. Let me know what you think and where you stand.