Diwali from a bygone era..!

[English Translation of a Tamil article I published on the Solvanam.com site.]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
                                                                                – Arthur C. Clarke

Around the time of Diwali (written as Deepavali in Southern India), we usually end up receiving a message or an essay, nostalgically recalling how we used to celebrate it in the years past. What is being described as the bygone era will be about 40 to 50 years back. One forwarded message I received last year went along these lines: 

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Please don't think I am going to talk about some 1000 year old history. This post is about celebrations just about 40 years back. In those days even small families used to have four kids. With extended family members that include grandpa, grandma, uncles, and aunties thrown in, typical joint families hadabout a dozen members. Dad was the only one working in a government position. Mom, who grew up in Chennai, had relocated to a small town (Dharapuram) after her marriage to Dad and had gotten used to that living bringing us up in the same small town mode. 

We used to have a 20 liter boiler made of copper, which was the sole hot water making equipment in the house. It used to be fueled by coal, fire wood and coconut shells. As the eldest son, it used to be my duty to get the boiler going to generate enough hot water for the dozen family members to take baths on the day of Diwali as early as 4 or 5 am in the morning. In parallel, it used to be my elder sister's responsibility to get the dough ready for idlis, get chutney prepared to go with it. My sisters used to have long hair that will flow down to their knees. Since taking oil bath (i.e. applying oil to hair and body and then washing it off with herbs and hot water) is a major part of this festival, getting the Seekakkaai powder mixed in with fragrant herbs ready (to wash off the oil, as if it is powder version of shampoo) is also her responsibility. By the time my sisters get to the bathroom and go through this oil bath process, our younger brothers/cousins would have gone far ahead, finishing up their bath in a jiffy, eating a small portion of a weird tasting herbal medicine and running away to fire firecrackers in the street, wearing brand new clothes. Young boys always had a lot of advantages, with many elders hanging around to spoil them. Next event with be the big brunch around 10am, that will have mom serving rice, sambar, two vegetables, badam kheer, vada, papad, sweets and what not. With kids continuing to fire away small crackers for hours on end, throughout the day, things will start to slow down a bit around 3pm. Taking breaks in the late afternoon, we will gather around to enjoy snacks like mixture, sweets and coffee. By the time 90% of the fire crackers are done, it will be late evening, after which there will be a temple visit, many relatives visiting us and so on. In those middle class Diwali celebrations, there weren't a lot of expenses or showing off involved. But happiness and satisfaction remained plenty. People were affectionate. Neighbors hung out together without keeping up with the Jones comparisons or pressure. Will we ever return to those golden days?

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Posts of this kind and Ananda Vikatan (popular Tamil magazine) cartoon jokes like the one seen here (à la Norman Rockwell) were in circulation that day. Around the same time I was reading an article by Tim Urban on his waitbutwhy.com website. It was talking about artificial intelligence, singularity and so on. As per Tim, human brain is incapable of understanding the notion of exponential rise. We were not required to handle such notions in the millenniums past to survive and till date we have not mastered that idea intuitively. We only comprehend the idea of linear rise, as that was adequate for us to survive through evolution. If we are asked how will life be in another 40 years, we will think back as to how our life was 40 years back, assess the advancements that had taken place over the last four decades and then extrapolate a similar amount of advancements over the next 40 years, imagine how life will be at that point, and provide that assessment as our expectation of life 40 years in the future. But in reality the amount of changes could potentially be a lot more than that. If you ask why, we can answer it this way.

Let's presume by some miracle we have invented a time machine. Using that time machine we travel back to 1750 to study the way life was in the 18th century. Looking at their primitive lifestyle, we take pity on the 18^th century citizens and decide to bring just one scientist from that time to 2020. This scientist Sam is even sporting a French beard as all the scientists in Indian movies do. So there is no doubt that he was the biggest scientist around in the 18th century.

We can debate whether our intention for bringing him to 2020 is to educate him about our technological advancements and send him back to his time so that he can help them live better or for us to just show off and make him jealous is debatable.Since Sam lived in an era where even electricity was not in use and horses provided all the transportation possible, people traveling around in metal boxes called cars and flying in metal tubes call airplanes, everyone walking around with a small box like thing called Smartphone using which they are able to reach and talk to anyone anywhere on the planet, people being able to watch a cricket match taking place 1000 km away instantly, and even kids using a magic wand called remote control changing the television channels, fans able to listen to the great singer SPB's songs recorded decades back whenever they want despite the fact that he passed away couple of months back, everyone able to take and share pictures instantaneously, will all be stunning developments to him. These changes will look like shocking witchcraft and magic that is hard to believe. He might start wondering what is going on around him and whether his mind is playing tricks on him or were these some sort of God's gift to these people. If you then show him MRI machine, internet, international space station and so on, he might actually get a heart attack and die.

What is even more interesting is actually something else. After we show our world and the scientific developments to Sam, let's say we put him back in the time machine, bid him goodbye and send him back to his own time. Sam, when he lands back in 1750, wonders why should only the 21st century people enjoy this ability to show off and why can't he have the same type of fun. After thinking about it a while, using the same time machine he travels back another 250 years to A.D. 1500. He picks up the biggest scientist John from that time and brings him back to 1750 to give him a similar shock.

 

But it turns out to be quite disappointing to Sam. John, who traveled from 1500 to 1750, will certainly encounter several new developments that will surprise him. The world map would have changed a lot, Europe would be ruling most of the globe using a lot of force that might terrify and surprise him at the same time. But beyond that, the daily life he encounters in 1750 would be pretty much similar to what he was used to in 1500. John will not encounter anything that will give him a heart attack. Sam will slowly realize that if he wants to bring a John from the past to 1750 to impress him enough resulting in a heart attack, he has to actually travel back about 14,000 years and bring a John from 12,000 BC. Someone coming to 1750 AD from 12,000 BC would have belonged to an age where language communication through verbal and written skills would have been unknown and people would have been mostly practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Only for a John of that era, life in 1750, with large buildings, ocean going ships and well developed languages will all be a set of development to shock and stun. As long as the time machine can potentially travel through 14,000 years and return back, well and good. Sam may have a chance to impress someone. If it can span only 300 years, Sam could never find someone who would be surprised to see the living style of 1750.

Now imagine a person who came from 12,000 BC, takes the same time machine goes back to their time and then tries to go back another 14,000 years to 26,000 BC. Their idea was to bring someone to 12,000 BC to do a similar show off. Again, it won't work because the lifestyle would not have changed that much in those 14,000 years. To show a heart attack inducing amount of development you then have to go about hundred thousand years and bring someone from that era.

Thus, societal developments accelerating over time has been noticed by many. Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls it the Law of Accelerating Returns. Since this acceleration continues even in our lifetime, how will life really be in another 40 years? It won't be surprising if a blog post similar to the one below circulates around Diwali in the year 2060.

Diwali from a bygone era - A post from 2060 AD

Please don't think I'm going to talk about how Diwali was celebrated in the 20th century. This is only about life as we knew it just 40 years back around the year 2020 and how we celebrated Diwali then.

In those days each home used to have one or two children. We used to think that is the right size for a family. Child free families, as we know them now, used to be called childless in those days as if they had a flaw and people used to look down upon them. There was a general understanding that Diwali is mainly a celebration for kids.

Ever since nuclear fusion and quantum computing became a reality in the 2040s, these two things together had changed the world upside down. Since anyone is able to get any amount of power whenever they want now and since through quantum computing we are able to get anything we want created instantaneously, nowadays every home has a universal oven that generate whatever food we want in a minute for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We didn't have such facilities in those days. Mostly women at home used to plan for days and prepare food soaking rice and lentil in water, kneading dough in machines, baking stuff for days to make all the food items and snacks that we used to eat. There was no notion of entering the rejuvenation chamber just for few seconds to get all of our cells renewed at that time. Those are all biological sciences related technologies that have come up only in that last 10, 15 years. Instead of that, in those days, we used to have an electrical appliance called Geyser, using which we used to generate hot water, use the hot water to take a shower which was a big part of the Diwali festivities. Based on the historical notion of taking a bath in the river Ganges, we used to greet each other asking, “Did you have your Ganges bath yet?”

Since every home has a communication deck these days, we are able to see anyone, anytime we want around the world using VR technology. Since everyone has 3D transporters now, traveling to different locations in the planet has become easy and uninteresting. Forty years back, the best we could do was use a smartphone app called WhatsApp. Using that app we used to exchange Diwali greetings with our friends and relatives around the world. Using the three or four inch rectangular screens in our smartphones, we were able to see each other through video calls on WhatsApp. That made us feel that we have come so far in our lives, since simple phones were a rarity in the 20^th century.

Nowadays using NeuroSync we are able to learn any new information or a language in few seconds, directly uploading it into our brain. Since we didn't have such technology in 2020, each human being used to know only one or two languages. Since learning new languages used to take years, anyone who could speak three or four languages or those who had traveled to multiple countries where all looked up as highly intelligent, well exposed, worldly individuals. Since we did not understand the language, places or religions of other people in those days, there were a lot of wars that went on between different parts of the world, with each side claiming their language, religion or country is better than others. But because of that level of misunderstanding and lack of communication, every part of the planet had its own festivals and celebrations. How they were celebrated, what food we made and ate all used to differ dramatically from place to place. We were not able to presume that we can get those experiences by going to the simulation deck whenever we want. At the most kids used to say, I will learn how to do something when I need using YouTube. That was the level of sophistication when it came to simulations. For each festival are a celebration, we had to put in a lot of effort and physically conduct the event in the real world that gave so much of personal satisfaction. The work that we had to do yielded a sense of pride.

Using NeuroSync these days we are able to download our memories and back them up. There were no such capabilities in those days. So, as they got older, people used to forget a lot of things, losing their memory. Though it was very inconvenient in most of the situations, at times like Diwali, it helped bring families together, with elders forgetting old tiffs and enmities. This helped a lot in renewing your relationships and kept them longlasting. Since we are able to get back our memories perfectly now, without losing even a tiny teeny detail, we are also carrying a lot of bad memories that would be better discarded. Even though one could delete bad memories from the backup, nobody seems to be using that technology much. Instead we all carry old enmities and tiffs forever, brooding over them endlessly, which is indeed a sad situation. Even in the 20th century a Tamil poet wrote, “I asked God for two minds. To remember and feel sad I need a mind while I need another to forget and forgive and live.”Even in 2060, those lines remaining suitable and resonating to human life, is strange.

Carrying thousands of songs in pocket size smartphones had become commonplace even in 2020. But if you go another 20 to 30 years back towards the end of the 20th century, to listen to your favorite songs, you had to wait for the Chennai radio stations broadcast that came up Sunday evening at 4:00 p.m. for one hour. Fans used to diligently wait for that hour each week. The radio station used to broadcast special programs for Diwali type festivals. Now you can listen to,or rather feel, any song anytime using NeuroSync. But that advancement itself has reduced the value of the experience, decreasing the amount of time people listen to music or the enjoyment they derived from it. There is a type of fun in waiting and there is a kind of pleasure in making one wait were all song lyrics in those days. How do you explain such notions in this day and age? Perhaps you can say one can go to the simulation deck and experience the 2019 practice of doing a pilgrimage to see AththiVaradhar, standing in a line for so many hours. As you may know, that statue gets pulled out once every 40 years for a special month long festivities. It did come out last year in 2059. You may also know how the festivities and pilgrimages took place this time around!

When I explain these things, talk about 2020 Diwali fondly to my grandchildren they are all scratching their head giving me blank stares. Though poverty has been eliminated from the world, allowing everyone to live a comfortable life, since we grew up during the first decades of this century, the Diwali celebration we had 40 years back in the year 2020 is still so pleasant to recall and reminisce. Life in those simpler days indeed makes you feel nostalgic. 

Sundar Vedantham 

November 14, 2060.

Modern Monetary Theory

As you may know, among Economists there are two schools. The J.M.Keynes school thinks big stimulus, infrastructure programs, guidance by Govt are all good to manage and grow the economy. The F. A. Hayak followers believe that letting market do whatever it wants, running a laissez-faire system is the more robust approach to manage the economy. In case you haven't seen it, there is a pretty cool/humorous video on YouTube that explains these two schools of thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk. There is even a Round 2 video available now. 😀

From Keynes Vs. Hayak discussions, when you come down to nation level monetary policies, what is practiced/understood in the world now is the quantity theory of money where we watch & manage the actual amount of money that is in circulation. Since the focus is on the "quantity", economists and politicians often talk about the size of the nation's deficit. The general understanding in this picture is a nation is just like an individual that is earning and spending money. If the nation earns (i.e. gathered revenue through taxes) less than what it proposes to spend in its budget outlays, it runs a deficit. If it continues to run deficits year after year, the total national debt keeps increasing. Except for a handful of tiny nations, pretty much every country of some reasonable size runs annual deficit. With our cumulative deficit running around 36 trillion dollars, US is pretty much on top of the world in numbers (though there are other toppers when you normalize it to GDP). Since the world's thinking is shaped by this quantity theory of money, this sounds ominous and is nicely dramatized by websites like https://usdebtclock.org/. 

In the US, state governments are required to balance the annual budget and so if they want to spend money on some new program, they need to find the money (quantity) by either cutting down some other program or raising the revenue (usually through taxes/bonds). But the federal government is not bound by this rule and so it can keep spending whatever it wants as long as the congress and the president agree. There is this (jocular) US notion called national debt ceiling beyond which the federal govt supposedly can't increase the debt. But it is a ceiling set by the congress itself and so routinely that limit gets increased by whatever number needed, after politicians get to grandstand for a while giving speeches about how we are stealing from our children. Whichever party is running the government at any given time usually will not talk about the raising deficit since it will limit their ability to spend money on their pet projects. But the opposition party will keep talking about how irresponsible the governing party is to let the deficit climb so high under their watch. Once the parties switch shoes, they will switch their tunes as well. These grandstanding speeches and heads turning the other way can all be seen all over the world in other countries also. If a politician proposes any new program (say free child day care for all working parents), even journalists who consider themselves responsible will promptly ask them as to how they will pay for it. This is based on the quantity theory of money understanding. We understand that an individual can borrow money at times to some extent (to buy a home or to go to college) to improve their lives but need to pay it back and so can't keep borrowing year after year ruining their credit. Along the same line, we think a national government also can borrow money for a while but if it keeps running deficit perpetually, country will be ruined.

In the past few decades, a group of economists have been developing an alternative descriptive (not prescriptive) model called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This school claims that the deficit number in itself doesn't really matter as long as the economy is strong enough to handle it. They point out that a national government is not the same as an individual earning and spending money. The way I see it, MMT can be said to focus on three areas:

1. Whether a country has a sovereign currency or not: If a country is part of a monetary union (like the Euro Zone) or peg their currency against another currency like the US dollar, they can't print as much money as they want. 

2. Inflation rate: Even if the currency is sovereign, if the country recklessly prints money (referred to as quantitative easing), inflation may shoot up ruining the economy. Ridiculous examples of this scenario can be seen in countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, where inflation runs at several thousand or million percent making the currency just useless.

3. Capacity of the national economy to absorb new money coming in: In case of a recession or high unemployment scenario, the economy can absorb the stimulus. But if the economy is at full capacity (i.e. everyone who wants a good job has one and so production/consumption is already at its max), attempting to stimulate the economy with more money or public sector projects will not yield good results but will result in inflation.

There may be other factors. But I'd like to keep it simple with focus on these three areas. MMT proponents say that as long as these three areas are managed carefully, you can stimulate the economy as much as you want to grow a country. So, when someone proposes free healthcare or college education or childcare for the whole country, you shouldn't ask how will you pay for it because we may be paying for it already in an indirect way by not having enough healthy people or college graduates or worry-free parents working away. Presuming that the country has its own sovereign currency, we should instead ask what level of inflation this will lead us to, and is the system/population/economy big enough to absorb the stimulus to become more productive in the long run. 

In the US, traditional economists like Larry Summers think MMT is some fad voodoo economics that won't work. You can find interesting lectures by people like Stephanie Kelton on YouTube that describes the MMT idea. Since unlike QMT, where you can simply focus on one number, MMT needs to focus on inflation, interest rates, total effect on the economy, etc. its proponents so far don't want to call it prescriptive. But as the descriptive theory evolves, clear prescriptions may start rolling out. Recent run up in inflation may be worrisome. But MMT proponents saying that this is one out of the three items I listed above that just need to be managed and brought down. Now that it is close to 2% again, as per MMT, we can continue spending!

In the country where you live, is national debt and annual budgetary deficit discussed and understood by people in general or by your friends' circle? PLMK what you think.

(Minor clean up/update on 10/03/2024)

Yokai

Decades back when I was growing up in India, I don't remember seeing a lot of life-size mascots roaming around. Air-India used to have a mascot referred to as the Air-India Maharaja, and so we were used to seeing these dolls of Maharaja in various sizes. But I have never heard of anyone dressed in that costume dancing around in the airline ticket office or welcoming passengers at the airport. These days some of the IPL (Indian Premier League) cricket teams seem to employ team mascots. Occasionally I hear mascot sightings in front of clothing stores or a mall promoting a sale. Beyond that, even after all these years, this concept is not seems to be widely popular in India.

In the US, each Basketball, Football, Baseball team, housed in any little town will have a mascot. In addition to selling small doll replicas of the mascots in their gift shops, team managers hire a man or woman wearing that mascot costume to perform exaggerated acts during the game. They will be running around the field/stadium, do somersaults and other wacky tricks entertaining the crowd, inviting them to cheer for the team. In Allentown, PA where we live, we have a local minor league baseball team called Iron Pigs. Their mascots Ferrous and FeFe, seen in the picture, will be in the field entertaining the audience whenever Iron Pigs play. Since this area hosted the famed, but now defunct, Bethlehem Steel plant for most of the 20th century, and is known for a lot of steel mills and workers, the team name itself is derived as a play on words, flipping Pig Iron we used to produce. You might have noticed the mascot names having the chemical symbol/name connotation to iron.

Beyond the sports arena, Disney World employs a lot of such characters. Starting from Micky Mouse and Donald Duck, you can see life size versions of every Disney cartoon character walking around Disney parks all over the world. If you have been to the Times Square in New York city, you might have come across Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman and various other characters walking around in nice looking, full-size costumes. They invite unsuspecting tourists to come take photos with them and then pester them for tip money. While it adds cute imagery and color to the touristy Times Square area, at times their badgering tends to be excessive, leading to newspaper articles on how to avoid them (e.g. don't engage) and the city trying to regulate them and so on. 

While mascots are more common in US than in India, Japan has taken this idea to an extreme. There you can find a mascot for pretty much anything you can think of. Thus, going beyond sports teams or big companies, Japan tends to have a mascot for every town, prefecture, grocery store, dentist, train station, nuclear power plant and even for prisons. I am not exaggerating when I say there is even a contemplative poop mascot! 

This mascot called Kumamon looks sort of like a black bear. It is the mascot for the Kumamoto precinct in Japan. Mascots of this kind, promoting tourism are easy to understand. There is nothing unusual about Kumamon that looks cute, soft, cuddly and friendly, serving as a nice advertisement vehicle for a region.

But if you look at the Matagi no Momiji next, it looks a bit annoyed and seems to be carrying a rifle! Apparently, it is out to hunt hunters. 

Next one called Kan-chan that looks a bit like a pink colored penguin is actually the mascot for a drug company producing enema! When you start thinking that it is getting a little weird, we come across the Melon Kuma mascot from the Hokkaido region of Japan, which is known for bears and watermelon. So they have created this ambassador as a hybrid that looks like a bear that has a watermelon for its head! Doesn’t look very cuddly and cute but perhaps functions well as a memorable nightmare you can’t forget. 

There are a lot of ongoing discussions as to which one is nice, which one is cute which one is really ugly and so on. Since there are regular annual competitions held, votes tallied and prizes worth thousands of dollars given away in multiple categories, designing, promoting, maintaining mascots is indeed a big business in Japan! Since there are thousands of such creatures, we can keep introducing them one after the other endlessly. Instead, let me ask you to search the web and introduce yourself to all these mascots. Might feel similar to playing Pokémon Go where you chase imaginary characters around, while I veer off in another direction. 

This Shinjo-Kun mascot belongs to a town call Susaki. Once upon a time there was a kind of otter that was prevalent in the rivers found near Susaki. Shinjo-Kun mascot was designed to evoke the feel of that river otter. For some reason it is wearing a plate of noodles as it's hat, which may be a bit weird. But other than that, so far so good. Right? Without leaving Shinjo-Kun alone at this point, this same town has also adopted another otter named Chiitan. This is not a mascot but a real otter. The town designated it as its honorary goodwill ambassador. Chiitan had its own Twitter account and thousands of fans. After a while, in a moment of amusing enlightenment, the township thought the Chiitan needed its own mascot, despite the fact that there is already an otter inspired town mascot called Shinjo-Kun running around!

Since the Shinjo-Kun mascot was designed to look like an otter, the town wanted to make the second mascot look a little different. So, they gave Chiitan yellowish color and made it look like some sort of a child angel that has a turtle as its hat, making it oddly cute. But the team responsible for managing the image of Chiitan went rogue and started posting a lot of pictures on its Twitter account showing it as a crazed lunatic beating up a lot of other mascots, rolling cars (see the picture closely) in the streets and so on. If you do a simple search on the web for Chiitan, you will easily find many of these videos and pictures starring this villainous mascot. The Susaki town's elderly population was getting confused between Chiitan and Shinjo-Kun and started writing letters to the city mayor saying this is destroying the town's image. The city managers started scratching their head wondering what kind of trouble did they bring upon themselves. Pretty soon they called for a press conference and declared that the Chiitan mascot is retiring and so publishing pictures or videos of the mascot anymore would be considered a crime. Thus, Chiitan which was very popular, gaining a lot of media attention in 2018, suddenly got its Twitter account blocked putting it to sleep in 2019. But the fans of this rowdy mascot went to court arguing that the mayor has no right to block this mascot and won the case. Don't be surprised if Chiitan starts making its rounds destroying property and beating up other mascots this year. Is your head spinning yet? 

When we start wondering why are Japanese so crazy about mascots and start digging around, we come to know about the Yokai culture that is behind it. In the Japanese folklore, Yokai used to represent any good/bad demon or spirit that is not an ordinary human being. A Yokai could arise from an old grandma's tale or it could be a character created out of someone’s imagination. They will basically be a monster creature that cannot be easily understood. People who have researched various yokai that roam around Japan and have written books about them, argue that these are symbols of superstition and paranormal personalities used to explain naturally occurring phenomenon. In other words, these are supernatural personas given to anything the Japanese society could not understand easily in the centuries past. There are many such explanations abound spanning time, space and imagination. 

To give an example, this particular yokai call Tengu is supposed to have bright red skin, a large nose and wings. This demigod like creature is supposed to be an expert in martial arts. Whenever it wants, it can flap its wings to create huge cyclones. Though it tends to be saintly and normally minds its own business, if it finds souls that are really annoying, it can kick them so hard that they will land in some other galaxy. There are hundreds of such yokai that blend in the Japanese beliefs spanning centuries. It is not even a requirement that they should resemble human beings. Some Yokai are said to be capable of changing their form, possessing stupendous strength and energy while others could be more like little cute kittens giving us company. These have nothing to do with any religion but are manifestations of tradition, custom and culture in Japan. 

For more than 12 centuries, associating anything they came across with some spirit is part of the Japanese culture. Thus a tree or the sky or an Android smartphone will be associated with a spirit so that we can talk about it in terms of its nature, how it works/feels. Thousand years back, people and folklore described these spirits in every which way possible based on their imagination. Just about 200 years back, an author named Toriyama Sekien started collecting all these yokai folklore, drew pictures of each one in color, wrote about their characteristics and published the collection as a book, standardizing many of the yokai qualities. That book became a big hit, providing a permanent look and feel to many of the yokai characters. Of course the idea of spirits & demons as well as personifying various naturally occurring phenomenon are well-known allover the world. We can sight tons of examples from Greek Gods, Hindu religious practices, African cultural manifestations and so on. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, a Japanese scientist named Inoue Enryo felt that if Japan is stuck in this superstitious yokai culture, it can never pursue scientific advancements earnestly or rise to the levels of European countries. He went around documenting each Grandma’s tale associated with a given yokai, demolished those myths, gave lectures and wrote articles, thus relieving the Japanese society from the clutches of yokai methodically. As the age of science blossomed, explaining away most of the things that were occurring in nature, the need for yokai to step in as a proxy explaining how a natural phenomenon occurs had continued to recede. Still the Japanese society never allowed the yokai to completely vanish from their imagination. Thanks to that tradition and by remaining as convenient explanations to things unknown, several yokai manifestations continue to sustain themselves till now. 

Amabié is one such yokai. It has a bird like beak, long flowing blue hair, three legs and scaled skin that sort of makes it look like a morphed version of a baby mermaid. In the 19th century, Japan went through several rounds of Cholera infections. As the decease kept returning to decimate the population, in 1846 Amabié apparently came out of the ocean to save the Japanese people. After curing the whole country, it said if there ever is another pandemic, people should keep and post pictures of Amabié in their homes. Then it will come back to save the society. After making this promise Amabié went back into the sea. This story, captured even in the newspapers of that age, has established Amabié as the guardian angel of Japan against all kinds of infectious diseases. As the whole world was struggling to deal with the Corona pandemic this year, somebody in Japan reminded them about Amabié that promptly catapulted its popularity to the top. People started drawing pictures, baking cakes, creating sculptures, thus bringing Amabié back in the midst of their lives, making it a lucky charm or amulet for Japan. This is not surprising based on the culture that spanned centuries. 

What is really neat is how other Japanese mascots themselves have started reflecting that Amabié yokai belief. Remember the bear like mascot Kumamon we saw in the beginning? Here you can see the same Kumamon sporting a blue color hair wig, wearing clothing that mimics fish scales and standing around with the picture of Amabié in its hand. Moving quite far away from the simple idea of a human being wearing a mascot costume and jumping around to a mascot costume itself dressing up to mimic another costume is an amusing meta level expression in the strange Japanese culture. 

At times when the world is moving in directions totally out of our control and when we are not sure how we are going to manage the problems confronting us to bring back life to the normalcy we are used to, it is common for human mind to become worried, developing unusual fears. We find ourselves in one such situation now, where the villain Corona we need to face in a Herculean battle is not even visible to our eyes. Under these circumstance if there could be one more paranormal power that we don't fully understand that appears to be capable of dealing with this terrifying villain to save us, belief in such an entity can potentially provide a sense of peace to the human mind even in this 21st century. Until this human nature searching for comfort lingers on, Amabié like yokai and their modern representations in the guise of various mascots will continue to thrive in this planet.

--- o0o ---

Book Review: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

Try to understand this Neo-Melanesian advertisement for a department store:

Kam insait long stua bilong mipela stua bilong salim olgeta samting-mipela i-ken helpim yu long kisim wanem samting yu laikim bikpela na liklik long gutpela prais. I-gat gutpela kain kago long baim na igat strap long helpim yu na lukautim yu long taim yu kam insait long dispela stua.

If some of the words look strangely familiar but don't quite make sense, read the ad aloud to yourself, concentrate on the sounds and ignore the strange spelling. 

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I was quite intrigued by this snippet found in the book titled The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It is a 28 year old Jared Diamond classic that followed his Guns, Germs and Steel and is equally satisfying to read. If you have read his GGS and/or Collapse, you'd vividly recall the magnificent scope his books provide, analyzing a vast array of evidence to support his underlying thesis. This one does the same to claim that human beings are biologically so close to two different chimpanzee species (common and bonobo) that they can be considered the third chimpanzee variation. From 98.4% similarity in DNA to what/how we eat, what our social structures are, there is a lot of evidence to show that human beings are just another species in the continuum of animal spectrum. Then how did we come to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom to dominate the planet so profoundly? Initial chapters point out that the extremely crude stone tools that human beings used 2.5 million years ago starts to differentiate us from other animals. Bonobo (also called pygmy) chimpanzees and gorillas don't use tools. While the common chimpanzee occasionally uses some, it doesn't really depend on tools much for survival. Thus, tools usage is an initial differentiator. Over the next 1.5 million years, we slowly spread across warm parts of Africa and Asia but are still less widespread in the planet than many other animals, like lions. We didn't evolve much for another 900,000 years. About 100,000 years back we seem to have started using fire regularly, which is a big improvement but that's about it. An alien flying into earth and seeing Neanderthals, predecessors to human beings, 100K years back, would have considered them as yet another big mammal roaming around the earth. That's it.

Diamond thinks we took a great leap forward about 40,000 years ago, coinciding with the arrival of the anatomically modern Homo Sapiens. He guesses this spectacular jump to be the development of language. Since the 1.6% difference in DNA between us and chimps came in long before 40K years, author argues that this great leap forward cannot be attributed to genetic differences but just variations in the vocal chord construction that allowed us to create different sounds. The snippet at the top is part of the chapter deftly discussing the evolution of language. If we hadn't paid attention, we might think pidgin as a grammar less, poor quality means of communication uneducated people practice in a language they don't know well. Diamond explains nicely as to how pidgin is the first stage of two different language speakers communicating with each other using broken words and very short sentences that then evolves into creole, if and only if a new community of that pidgin language speakers continue to thrive bringing in the need for sophisticated grammar, and expressions of complicated thought. If not, neither side bothers to learn the language of the other side, leaving the pidgin usage where it is. The list of pidgin and creole used around the world, the kind of detective painstaking work linguists do to trace and time languages are all quite fascinating. For example, take a word like gun. Unlike sun or sea, gun didn't exist forever but was invented at a point in time. So, tracing the term for gun in various languages around the world gives fascinating insights into whether a set of languages had a common ancestor or not. Now look at the same two lines given above rewritten using English spelling to see if it makes better sense (another snippet from the book):

------------------------------ 

Come inside long store belong me-fellow-store belong sellim altogether something - me-fellow can helpim you long catchim what-name something you likeim, big-fellow na lik-lik, long good-fellow price. He-got  good-fellow kind cargo long buyim, na he-got staff long helpem you na lookoutim you long time you come inside long this-fellow store.

------------------------------ 

Although scientists and philosophers trying to glorify human beings will claim that we differ from other animals in having innate sense of ethics and other such noble traits, author thinks that human beings actually differ from other animals in two other notorious traits: our capacity to murder each other in really large numbers very efficiently and our capability to destroy the environment extremely quickly than any other species on the planet! He thinks if this capacity for self-destruction is a standard part of the evolution of any advanced civilization, it might explain Fermi's Paradox. About 10K years back we started occupying lot more parts of the planet, killing off many species into extinction around the globe, and invented agriculture. Of course the last 500 or so years have been detailed very well with written records available in many places. He thinks with the advent of modern technology & science, we might fall into a false complacency thinking that we are much more civilized and are all set to live and rule the planet forever. But under closer examination, many things look fragile, there are still genocide going on in different parts of the world, consumption of natural resources has been accelerating without any possibility of replenishment, and so on that may lead us towards a lot of pessimism. But Diamond is optimistic since the problem we face were created by us and so potentially they could be solved by us as well. 

To lead us to his conclusions author walks through a wide array of topics ranging from how survival of the fittest evolution could have brought about menopause in women, the science of adultery, Indonesian martial arts experts who drink kerosene once in a while to prove to themselves they remain strong, drug addiction, how perpetrators of genocide practice "blame the victims" to justify their acts (several pages of analysis on how Native Americans were killed of by the European settlers in US), etc. The GGS and Collapse book themes also show up in few pages that may feel a bit repetitive to those who have already read those books. Similarly while detailed slow moving discussion of various species carrying a burden as a display of its strength (e.g. peacock with a long plume) might feel like an argument seen in many other books (e.g. Richard Dawkins), if I had read this book 28 years back, I am sure it might have been new to me. Diamond also seems to have detractors who argue that many is his conclusions can't be proven and his claims are dubious. I am not an anthropologist. But he himself says that in his line of work, speculation is often involved since you can't go back thousands of years to see exactly how, what, when something happened. I wonder some of his critics make the criticism to ride his coat tails, with any publicity is good publicity attitude. To me, his easily accessible prose, varied discussion carrying an underlying directional motive are all nice signature characteristics of this book making it thoroughly enjoyable. 

Regards.

-sundar.

P.S. Have you bought the Thought Experiments book yet? :-)

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

or from Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/TESVAmazon

P.P.S. If you are wondering what does that Neo-Melanesian advertisement exactly mean, drop me a line. Will send you the precise translation with mapping details. :-)

Book Reviews: Innovation Nation by John Kao and Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma

This book titled "Innovation Nation - How America is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why it Matters, and What We Can Do to Get it Back" by John Kao is a little dated, since it was published in 2007, considering its topic/content is not as timeless as say "Origin of the Species". I remember reading it a while back but didn't finish it then thanks to some distraction that popped up to turn me away. Got the second book titled, "Breakout Nations - In Search of the Next Economic Miracle" by Ruchir Sharma published in 2012 as a gift few years back.Started reading promptly and again got distracted. Both books were lot more interesting to read now with dozen additional years of developmental perspective we all have gathered. While both books are focused on nation level innovation, Kao's book is more US focused comparing it to other countries that are keen on overtaking US in their own progress. Kao argues that while we love a national narrative of a good come-from-behind story and are generally confident that US will prevail, we tend to drift along in our current direction, which happens to be sideways! Since there is no national consensus about what US stands for as a country, there is no vital sense of purpose. This sounds all the more appropriate today in 2020 compared to 2007. His solution is to develop a national agenda around innovation that will bring in cohesion and propel the nation forward. But right off the bat he points to microlending as a major recent innovation, that has since been debunked by books like Due Diligence by David Roodman that said while it is useful, microlending is not all that it cracked up to be. I wouldn't have had that insight if I had read this book in 2007. :-)

In the initial chapters, Kao delves into national innovation agendas set forth by countries like China, how much each industrialized country spends on R&D, how they differ or appear more coordinated than what is going on in the US. In this non-fiction book, he has two sections where he had tried to be a story spinner. In the first story he paints a dystopian version of the future US where due to a lack of innovation, US has lost its preeminence and so an average Joe struggles to find work to support a decent family life.. In the second version, with a perfect agenda in place, US is leading the world and so Joe is doing swimmingly well. It is amusing to read these two story lines interspersed in a book rest of which is totally non-fiction. He is all praise for Singapore and Finland, claiming they got the formula right, countering them with Soviet Union's five year plans that didn't work very well. He doesn't think China's efforts & progress will amount to much, which is puzzling to read even with the 2007 mindset. 

His prescription for ailing US is to put together a Government initiated agenda to drive innovation with 20 innovation hubs spread across the country each designed to tackle one big, wicked problem, with a billion dollar funding for each hub. He asks those who may roll their eyes about another big bureaucratic government initiative to go back and evaluate how successful  were the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb during the second world war and the mission to the moon that put the first man on the moon in the late 60's. Both are huge government initiated projects that brought the nation together with a large cohesive vision and drove the country forward in multiple fronts. If $20B funding sounds too big to you, he counters pointing out the $800B US spends on military alone. Thus, $20B funding may not be a big deal and is needed to kick start the process. I am with him on these points since politicians who cry wolf on deficit spending are willing to push it up considerably when they want, with the recent $2T stimulus package being a good example. He does conclude the book saying we need to get out of the what is good for America is good for the world cockiness and get into the mindset of what is good for the world is good for America so that we can learn from other countries. 

While Kao is an academic, Ruchir Sharma is an investment manager. He claims that he spends a month or so each year in a different country to get a good view of how things work there. The Breakout Nations book is his attempt to talk about a dozen or so such countries he has spent time on. When I started reading the initial chapters that focused on China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and so on with one chapter dedicated to each country, I thought that the whole book may turn out to be a collection disconnected reports on various nations. I was getting ready to feel a bit disappointed. Still since the writing was lucid, kept going thinking that I'd imbibe ideas similar to the ones mutual funds prospects may provide on whether to invest in and travel to that country. :-) But I was pleasantly surprised to see Sharma tie them all together in the last couple of chapters providing a coherent narrative. 

In discussing each country, he throws around a lot of interesting nuggets based on his time there. For example with the roads so congested and traffic so chaotic, Brazilian cities like Sao Paulo, have a helicopter network used by corporate CEOs that jump from one roof top to another to get to their next appointment on time. In a totally different domain, China that wants to encourage capitalism, lets multi billionaires pop-up one by one. But it doesn't want anyone becoming way too rich as it may lead to social unrest brought in by income inequalities. So, once someone's net worth crosses ten billion, they are on the government's cross hair and are either forced to keep their net worth well below the $10B mark or be charged with some crime and thrown behind bars! Of course this is not true anymore since there are very notable exceptions now like Jack Ma, who is worth $45B.

I loved many lines of Sharma's second-order analysis that look at details beyond the first order factors like a countries GDP. There are several examples including the following few:

- Churn rate of the wealthiest people in a country (more churn indicates dynamism in the country's economy that allows newer individuals to come to the top, while no change for decades may indicate corruption, entrenched privileges for a few)

- Shifts in commodity prices yielding highly lopsided and skewed valuations projecting incorrect pictures (e.g. Brazilian oil giant Petrobas alone reaching a valuation of $300B, while the entire stock market of Turkey amounting only to $200B)

- South Africa having come out of apartheid thanks to ANC, not being in any hurry to improve the economy resulting in high income inequalities, since ANC can't be challenged 

- Which country in the world is the biggest market for armored cars, as it indicates lack of systemic security despite individuals being rich.

Each one of these bullets run into few pages of intriguing discussions. 

In Sharma's analysis Indonesia is rated high as one of the best run commodity economies. He is iffy on China. With my advantage of additional eight years of hindsight, neither one appears accurate. He does a nice comparison of Taiwan and South Korea, two tiger economies, saying Taiwan actually has the recommended set of ingredients, like welcoming immigrants, open corporate books, no family run conglomerates but is not doing as well as S. Korea which is on the opposite end of the spectrum but is thriving. He finds it counter-intuitive but accepts that the S. Korea model could work since it has been on the raise for decades now, establishing brands that are well recognized all over the world.

In the end he looks at countries that are potentially going to increase the per-capita income range substantially over the next decade (i.e. current decade coming to an end since the book is almost a decade old) as a mark of overall growth that points to a breakout nation. In the $20K to $25K range, he lists Czech Republic and South Korea. He places Turkey and Poland in the $10K to $15K range, and Thailand in the $5K to $10K range. Below that range, he places China hesitantly and lists India, Sri Lanka and Nigeria as other potential break outs. He places many of the countries where the data available are unreliable combined with a level of opaqueness due to corruption that makes objective analysis difficult in the "Fourth World" bucket. His assessment is that as they straighten out their act, any of them may suddenly turn out to be a great break out nation. Makes sense. 

It was nice to read two different books more or less simultaneously as they both covered overlapping domains by happenstance. Neither one is a difficult read. Material being a bit dated, instead of making them feel less useful, gave me the feeling of having an advantage over the authors that made the read more enjoyable. :-)

Regards.

-sundar.

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. :-)

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Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/TESVAmazon