Statistical Revolution in the 20th Century

David Salsburg (2001), The Lady Tasting Tea. Henry Holt Paperbacks, New York, pp. 340

This book is a tour de force of the statistical revolution in the twentieth century that transformed science from a deterministic branch of inquiry into something more probabilistic as we know it today. In the introductory chapter, Salsburg paints a picture of nineteenth century science that introduced a ‘clock-work’ universe in which a small number of mathematical laws were used to describe reality and predict future events using a set of formulas and their associated measurements. This ‘god-less universe’ was a fundamental disruption from the earlier conceptions of creationism and shook popular culture into understanding and accepting its temperament. Gradually, into this new universe, ‘error functions’ were introduced when reality deviated from the predicted models or when human mistakes crept in. The addition of error function and probabilistic thinking about the world around us was the major contribution of ‘statistical’ thinking in science that later led to major developments including the development of computers on the one hand, and public policy tools such as census on the other.

Lives and Works of Statisticians

This book tells the story of how statistics transformed the philosophical foundations of science in the last century, through the lives and works of major statisticians. On the criterion of selecting the scholars described in the book, Salsburg confesses that he chose major contributors of mathematical statistics who are accessible non-mathematically to a lay audience. In 29 chapters, the author has given a bird’s-eye view of pioneers such as Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Gosset and Neyman, sympathetic portrayal of extraordinary lives of geniuses and polymaths in the likes of Kolmogorov and Tukey and unearthed the stories of quiet but significant contributions of Samuel Wilks, Isidore Good and FN David. An entire chapter deals with the contribution of women statisticians in addition to their stewardship that comes through many chapters throughout the book.

The book builds up anticipation through its riveting narrative of the most well-known figures in history. We begin in Galton’s laboratory and see him at work in regression and skew distribution followed by Karl Pearson as he expands and sets up great institutions such as Biometrika and an entire school of philosophical thought. Then, enter Gosset and his ‘student’s T-test’ till the imitable Fisher comes in to break old orthodoxies and liberate many strands of inquiry. The gentle giant Neyman and the extra-ordinary foresight of Kolmogorov, especially his philosophical questions, are dealt with sensitivity and understanding. One thing I found missing was a last chapter that could have shown the way ahead in terms of exciting new work done by young scholars and the directions that the discipline in taking in the 21^st century.

The book is at once a collection of brief biographical sketches of statisticians, broad-brush history of institutions and a short reference guide to important academic work in modern statistics. Written with sympathy and erudition, Salsburg’s work is a warm introduction to both the science-history buff as well as to anyone about to embark on a serious academic journey in statistics.

Adieu, Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth wrote an impressively long list of savagely funny novels and stories during his lifetime including the stunning American Trilogy written in his sixties. He was awarded a number of prestigious literary awards including National Book Award and The Presidential medal for the Humanities during his lifetime. When he died on 22 May, we lost a voice that relentlessly pilloried our absurdities and exposed our fragility. What does Philip Roth mean in a world where Philip Roth does not physically exist anymore?

Guilt as Comedy

Roth followed in the tradition of engaging with guilt-ridden characters after the tradition of Shakespeare’s Othello, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Rodion Raskolnikov, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Kafka’s Josef K. But he treated guilt as a comical idea by means of characters who were cut off from their moorings and lived beyond their moral means. His outlandish protagonists were not paradigms of conflicting selves but individuals whose spiritual and sensual ambitions were so inextricably interlinked that they had to find a personalized way of salvation. Their problem was not that they were fragmented and deluded, but that they were whole and undeluded. This often brought them into tension with moral authority and social restraints from the outside. A Rothsian character had moral sovereignty, personal commandments, ethical convictions, personal inhibitions and fear. Her comic recklessness to rebel against taboos brought her pain, rage and a sense of loss and nostalgia as much as honoring social expectations did. Alex in Portnoy’s Complaint and Lucy in When She was Good, rebelling against their parents find their rage inadequate to salvage their pain.

Guilt as comedy was the central preoccupation of Roth as he attempted to portray the vicissitudes of being American and being Jewish. On writing American novels, he described that to understand, describe and make credible the American reality of the twentieth century was a formidable challenge to any writer. He remarked that the American reality ‘stupefies, sickens, infuriates and then embarrasses’ the quintessential American writer because actuality outdoes imagination and life emerges as a substitute for fiction. We experience the outlandishness of this reality in his political satires especially The Great American Novel and Our Gang. The creation of counter history and counter mythology of a nation begins with inane acts of separating the power-holder from power. Roth savagely attacked this discrepancy between official piety and unpleasant truths.

When he started out describing Jewish characters in stories such as Epstein, he was initially described as a self-hating Jew. Quite characteristically, he reacted with ‘to ask a satirist to be in good taste is like asking a love poet to be less personal’. Roth explained that he was trying to not depict a stereotype of the Jew but point out when a Jew acted like the stereotype. He was responding to the Jewish predicament of the need to act out Jewishness in highly differentiated ways which was traumatic and inescapable after having gone through specific kinds of historical persecution and humiliation. His unique position as a Jewish man gave him the freedom to refuse ennobling even the persecuted, with the explanation that the lack of will and grace is found in all of us.

The Final Literary Act

It was this continuing distrust of ‘positions of authority’ including his own that motivated him to write the way he did. He described his writing as a literary act not a political one and his retribution was parodic justice. On this issue, he followed the dictum of the Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky, whose last statement in his trial by an authoritarian regime was that ‘the most rudimentary thing about literature…is that words are not deeds’.

Roth never wrote for an audience. His deep mistrust of external authority of any kind and validated positions meant that he would not have cared about his legacy as a writer. But he would have cared about being read. It would have mattered to him if his books began conversations between partially realized narratives that we all are, drawing energy from one another. In that sense he has left us a world to continue those conversations. Roth once spoke about the legacy of the writers he admired thus, ‘the trick apparently is to turn yourself from a proper noun to an adjective and the best way to accomplish this is to die’. Now that he is gone, his final literary act has been to gift us this adjective- enter the Rothsian!

A Study in Statistics

Stephen Jay Gould (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. Penguin London, pp. 446

‘Art is limitation. The essence of every picture is the frame’.

G.K. Chesterton

Stephen Gould is a rare species in the literary world- a scientist with a flair for essay-writing! Through his monthly column in the Natural History magazine, Gould crossed disciplinary boundaries from evolutionary theory to science history and used diverse tools such as statistics and common sense to drive home his arguments. To a student of biology, he is known for his punctuated equilibrium theory among other things and to the philosopher, for his argument that science and religion were two distinct domains with non-overlapping authorities. It is to the non-specialist, that Gould was at his delightful best, exposing the dangers of applying faulty logic and ‘evidence’ from science to justify social projects of domination and discrimination.

Ranking Intelligence

In this book, Gould examines one specific form of quantifying claim about ranking human beings as an illustration of the larger malady. He discusses the belief that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number and graded in a linear scale to denote the intrinsic and unalterable worth of a person. He examines this question from three vantage points- that of the philosophical error of the assumption, social impact of its implementation and the epistemological underpinning of ‘nature versus nurture’ that it evokes.

Characteristic to his method, he goes about dismantling this argument by systematically tracing its historical antecedents. He revisits each scholar as he sets about his experiments and draws his inferences, walking with them through their intellectual journey and exposing where the fault-lines of their logic lay.  He takes us back to the time of feverishly measuring cranium and bodies of corpses in the hope of measuring intelligence and later, tinkering with genes and environment with the faith that the truth about our abilities can be abstracted and distilled in a meaningful way. He demonstrates how even the best intended scholars can be blinded to their own fallacies in methods and measurement and how our implicit beliefs often colour our inferences. By doing this exercise with exacting rigour and immense patience, he shows us how, women, people of colour and people with differential abilities come out on their own, liberated from the burden of historical accusations of intellectual inferiority that was unfair, untruthful and dangerous.

This book is a study in history as much as it is in statistics. The parts of the book where Gould marshals evidence from research methodology (especially on factor analysis) is so lucid that I cannot but recommend it to students beginning their research work using statistical methods. I believe that the greatest contribution of the book is the perspective it gives us regarding what scientific enquiry is all about. Like the message in Chesterton’s quote in the beginning of this essay, science like art, is limited by its frame of reference. It is in acknowledging the limits of enquiry that we can hope to be truthful about our inference.

The Wandering Poet of Edo

Lucien Stryk (Translation) (1985), On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London: Penguin Books, pp.92

‘Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.’

                                                      -Basho

This is the kind of poetry book that feels like treasure. It has verses in translation that is accessible without draining away too much across languages, a form of poetry that is short and unique, beautiful Taiga paintings as you move from one set of verses to another and an excellent introductory essay and reader-friendly notes at the end. Even though you are new to this form, you will not be lost here except in the Haiku themselves.

Philosophy of Haiku

Haiku, in its traditional seventeen syllable form, has two parts. The first part is often the depiction of a condition as found in nature and the second part is a feeling of sudden perception. These two parts are divided abruptly by a cutting-phrase in Japanese called kireji, rendered in the English translation as an emphatic punctuation like the hyphen. The philosophy behind Haiku was that a moment that was taken from a context, devoid of antecedence (past time, memory) or consequences (future time or anticipation) is capable of attaining transcendental unity. Haiku significantly differed from other forms of poetry by demanding active audience participation for the completion of its rendition. Every Haiku begins in the poet’s mind and ends in the reader’s.

Basho’s legacy

Matsuo Kinsake was the greatest Japanese Haiku poet of the Tokugawa period of the seventeenth century Japan. He wrote under the name Basho, in honour of the broad-leaved banana tree (originally called Basho in Japanese) that one of his disciples gifted him. He revolutionalized traditional Haiku that was originally practiced by scholarly poets, freeing it from the rigid orthodoxy of rules. He infused lightness (karumi), solitude (sabi) and sparseness (wabi) of Zen in his signature Shofu-style Haiku. In his lifetime, he is thought to have written at least 1000 Haikus, often tucked away in his much-loved travel sketches written in haibun style (haiku followed by prose). The central concern in his poetry is the appreciation and elevation of the mundane and the commonplace.

To capture Basho’s haiku in other languages is a daunting task and Lucien Stryk has done an amazing job rendering it in English. Some of his poems are poignant and some self-deprecatingly funny, but all of them leave you with lingering poignancy. Most of his poetry dwells on the movement of time, the cycle of seasons and the evolution of mind with the natural flow of life. His love for Edo (modern Tokyo), mountain Fuji, cherry blossoms and the landscape of Japan is equally matched by his friendship with fellow poets and philosophers and love for enigmatic women. He loves, lives, celebrates, complains and grieves, seventeen syllables at a time.

Reading this volume is having the privilege to roam around freely with him. Though separated in time and place, across language and form, Basho talks to you and thinks with you. He belongs to all of us and to all time and ages. In his own words,

House of fancy-

Dozing there, it

Was all mine.

And now, it is all ours too!

Hidden Fractures, Global Eruptions

Raghuram Rajan (2010). Fault Lines, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, pp. 279

Raghuram Rajan has essayed many diverse roles with panache- as a distinguished professor of monetary economics at the University of Chicago, Chief Economist at the IMF and the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, to name a few. He has been at different vantage points of conceptual analysis as an academic, policy maker and independent regulatory authority. In this book, he examines the financial crisis of 2007 and the role of different agents in building up the crisis. The core argument of the book is that not only was the financial crisis a result of problems of regulation and management, it was also the result of failure of neoclassical economic theory to understand the real-life enactment of its principles. For instance, even when individual agents behaved rationally in a given situation, the aggregate impact was often sub-optimal. What flows from this argument is that while short-term policies aim at quick recovery by reaffirming the status quo, in the long-term the structural fault lines that underpins the economic system needs to be re-examined.

Three fault lines

Using a geological metaphor to illuminate the hidden fundamental forces that are evolving, Rajan identifies three different types of ‘fault lines’ that the global economic system has to contend with. The first is the hidden fractures of politics that deals with regulation of economic systems around the world. Providing illustrations from various contexts, Rajan points out how political considerations trump rational economic policies because of short-term and domestic concerns. For example, many developed economies have grown on the strength of globally competitive manufacturing market while retaining domestically inefficient markets in retail, banking, construction and restaurant-chains. This creates monopolistic or cartel-like industries that are inefficient and productive competitive industries not just in the same economic system but in the same political jurisdiction.

The second fault line lies in the trade imbalances that different type of economies has with each other. Ideas about growth trajectory, role of the state, priorities of investment and regulatory architecture is determined politically across countries. There are forces of tension that arise out of different types of rationale as well as between the cohort of developed and developing countries.

The third fault line is observed when different economic systems are allowed to interact with each other. There are economies with an ‘arms-length’ regulatory system of state intervention with a relatively high degree of transparency in information available to investors. Compared to this, there are other types of publicly regulated economies in which information is mediated through networks. When these types of systems come into contact with each other for investment, there is a lot of asymmetric information and inability to effectively regulate the system.

The importance of understanding the idea of fault line is that it is not easily observable, is fundamental to the entire system and leaves deleterious effects on every one involved in terms of a crisis. Going beyond speculation, creation of bubbles and role of different sectors, Rajan argues for a more fundamental redesigning of risk distribution in the system. His policy prescriptions include stronger social security nets, increasing access to opportunity for different segments within a country as well as different countries and reforming how banking and finance is enacted in the real world. In an era, when the dissonance between theoretical assumptions and actual decisions are increasingly apparent, Rajan illustrates how theory can enlighten itself from practice and how getting the fundamentals rights might be the key to the future.

The Cambridge Women

Rita Tullberg (1996). Women at Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, pp. 230

The University of Cambridge has many firsts to its illustrious intellectual and political history, pioneering legacies and confronting entrenched practices over nine centuries of its existence. However, in the practice of gender inclusion in its educational fold, the university has been found rather wanting.  Cambridge was the last university in the British Isles to give women full membership and same degrees as men. Its relative position vis-à-vis London University or Oxford is inferior in this respect. Full membership was opened to women in Cambridge only as late as in 1948 (Oxford had given this right in 1919 to its women) and it was late 1960s when the first Cambridge college opened its gates to female students. This has been the historical circumstance despite the struggle to include women in higher education in Cambridge that began in mid- nineteenth century and the outstanding performance of its first female students. Philippa Fawcett was ranked above the first wrangler in mathematics tripos in late 1800s while Ellen McArthur equaled the history tripos wrangler. The tripos was and continues to be the honours bachelor degree in Cambridge and the wrangler list enumerates the relative performance of the examinees in a given year.

There have been a few remarkable books that have attempted to tell women’s history, appearance and participation in Cambridge University. Barbara Stephen’s Emily Davies and Girton College, Mary Agnes Hamilton’s Newnham: An Informal Biography and Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker’s (eds) work Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits, remain indispensable in this line of scholarship. This book under review is an important successor in this lineage, drawing on exhaustive archival material from Girton and Newnham, the first two women’s colleges in Cambridge. Tullberg traces the cause of Cambridge women’s education with respect to the internal policies of governance, pedagogy and curriculum, the social underpinning provided by morality and religion, the economics of women’s employment and the political environment in which suffragette movement was taking place.

The battle of the sexes

Today, Cambridge is the only university in the UK to have women-only colleges- Newnham, Lucy Cavendish and Murray Edwards. Recently, Newnham college created history by changing their admission policy to openly admit individuals of transgender identity. These are small and significant strides, but the old battle for women’s admission was frayed with obstacles on different fronts. On the one hand was the question of examining body, curriculum and award of degree, and on the other, issues of membership and governing position of women and access to collegiate life and social experience that are integral to a Cambridge life. The university was at first only an examining body for its female pupils, who privately took tuitions and learned in an atmosphere of limited access to library, lectures, labs and funding. Even when women managed to cross this frontier and pass the examination, they were not awarded an equal degree as men because they were private individuals and not members of the university. Formal teaching position or independent research was denied to them and their education did not help their cause when it was time to marry. Since women’s role were strictly defined within the parameters of family and motherhood in Victorian times, educated women were spinsters (often not by choice), underemployed and financially insecure.

In this context, there were two distinct movements within Cambridge that supported women’s education. The first one was led by the inimitable Emily Davies who started the Girton college for women a few miles off Cambridge city centre. Davies was consistent in her religious position (she was a conservative) and expected women to conform to the roles or at least refrain from creating trouble. She was also willing to negotiate on the examination system of helping the girls appear for the previous examination (or the ‘Little Go’ as it is locally called). The Little Go is the pre-university exam to Cambridge where students are tested whether they were individually suited to be educated in the university. The third problem was the quality of pass degree as opposed to the tripos in the undergraduate level. This was a burning issue in late nineteenth century because there was a movement within the university to do away with the pass degree since its quality was sufficiently lower than the tripos. Davies would not publicly include this demand within her gender movement.

Her consistency in these positions, were to pit her against the formidable Henry Sidgewick, a Cambridge tutor and founder of the other women’s college, Newnham. Sidgewick was a liberal and believed in secular education for women, wanted to overcome the little go, as it was disadvantageous to women. Most importantly, he wanted the issues of pedagogy and curriculum reformation to be included in the gender campaign. While the women’s movement were exclusive and oppositional, prejudice against women’s intellectual ability and questions of endurance, employability, social roles and chivalry competed with the claims for equality and competition. Unfortunately, some of the intellectual giants of the time like Alfred Marshall (one of the founders of modern economics) was publicly opposed to women’s higher education because he believed that women were intellectually deficient. But, others like Rutherford (Nobel Laureate in chemistry and father of nuclear physics) was a belligerent supporter of women, especially in science.

Hope for the future

More than fifty years after Cambridge finally opened its door to women, this book remains relevant and important to carry on not only the gender debate but also the issues of decolonialization of the curriculum that Cambridge is intensely grappling with in the last few years. Historical battles mirror contemporary reality and the value of debate, participation, openness and inclusivity continues to be extremely important for Cambridge, if it were to continue its primacy in the field of education and culture, that it has done over the last millennium. As a Cambridge woman, I do hope, dear old Cambridge leans towards the disadvantaged prospective students so that it enlarges the universe in which it thrives. Their voices and perspectives matter and can only add on to the richness and depth of what it means to partake of this tradition. May the best of Cambridge spirit survive!

The Age of Rhizomatic Revolutions

Manuel Castells (2015). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Second Edition). Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 316.

Manuel Castells is an eminent sociologist who has revolutionized the way we understand communication in societies, especially through his study of social movements. An emeritus professor with the University of California Berkeley and a visiting professor with Oxford, Cambridge and MIT, he has penned over 25 books, the most celebrated of which are The Information Age and Communication Power. In this refreshing work on new social movements, originally a product of the CRASSH lecture series of Cambridge, Castells dwells on the eruption of Arab uprisings, indignadas of Spain, occupy movements of the US, and the social protests in eastern Europe and Turkey that have shaken the world in recent times. He attempts to understand what these movements imply, in the context of our nebulous times.

Castells examines the nature and scope of these social movements and asks whether the qualification ‘new’ is apposite. He brings out the common characteristics of these seemingly unrelated events. He argues that these movements initiated new trends by ignoring political parties, often going beyond the hype of ideologies. They also distrusted the traditional media and rejected formal organization. These uprisings eschewed traditional leadership and relied on the internet and local assemblies for collective debate and decision making. In short, these social movements, according to Castells, used ‘autonomous networks of communication’ that differentiated them from traditional social movements that were embedded in societies.

Counter Power and Communication

Castells, then goes on to delineate the power of ‘occupation’ that the new social movements have consistently used. He argues that physical occupation of a town square or a street, that was the central symbolic act of these movements, were also symbols of invasion of state or financial power of institutions and an affirmation of right to public and collective use of these spaces. Drawing historic parallels between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Glasgow strikes of 1915, he demonstrates how the new social movements derive strength in solidarity and togetherness as a weapon against risk, uncertainty, fear and exploitation. Castells’ core argument is that although there are structural causes of institutions and individual causes of emotion that makes social movements possible, the new movements are a prescient sign of passionate politics and not a traditional type of political program and strategy.

The implications of Castell’s arguments are two-fold- (i) that the new social movements are a product of a ‘networked’ society, and that (ii) these are symbols of ‘counter power’. By employing a grounded theory approach to new social movements, Castells demonstrates that the formation, dynamics, values, prospects and enquiry into the new social movements bring out the facets of a ‘networked’ society with different nodes of operation. Social communication in these networked societies has taken the form of ‘mass self-communication’, where an individual can program and switch on networks of power because of her/his reach through the new types of media. These communication strategies then emerge as a form of counter power, against the coercion, legitimization and communication of traditional power.

Whether the new social movements have resulted in victories and concessions, or armed repression and civil wars, they are rhizomatic (coming from the ground) and have a democratic and radical appeal. The framework of communication and examination of the power politics is an important and interesting lens with which to evaluate these new movements. An exciting way to begin the new year with a voice of our times!

The cuckoo’s egg in the Nobel nest

Avner Offer & Gabriel Söderberg (2016). The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy and the Market Turn. Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 323

Prizes and honours are not just acknowledgement of merit and excellence in a given field, they are rituals and symbols, as well.  The Nobel prize, annually given to outstanding work in various disciplines, has particularly acquired an aura and prestige that makes it an unrivalled realm of excellence. The four institutes of authority who select the winners of the Nobel prizes are the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, Karolinska Institute and the Norwegian Parliament (for the peace prize). The Nobel memorial prize in Economics differs from the other prizes because it was constituted by the Swedish central bank in memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969, and was not one of the original prizes awarded since 1901. One of the earliest critiques of the economic prize was that economics was driven in the real world by politics. However, over the years, economists have brought in a particular use of ‘scientific method’ to economics and argue that economics remains closer to the physical sciences in methodology. This book looks at this argument and critiques it both with respect to methodology, and ideology that guides economics in practice. The authors argue that the construction of ‘merit’ of economics has been through calculated deliberation in a way that outcomes are increasingly difficult to predict. There is an assumption that there could be an objective criterion for ranking merit and the Nobel committee has a methodology to reach this calculus.

Model thinking and market turn

The authors begin their argument by invoking the historical thinking that placed economics as political management of economy or moral philosophy by Adam Smith and John Mill. This earlier tradition was opposed with the introduction of positivist thinking in the mid twentieth century. Milton Friedman’s article ‘The methodology of positivist economics’ published in 1953 is one such example.  The authors argue that ‘model thinking’ in economics began with this market turn. Formalist branches of economics use model, not as a plausible representation of the world, but as an instrument with internal consistency. The criteria of validation from the empirical world is not a necessity. As a result, models of economics not only diverge from real world situations, but predictions based on these models routinely fail.

The impact of formalist economics has been to vilify models that actually work on the ground. The authors give the example of welfare state. Social democratic forms of state offer two kinds of support structures against uncertainty and risk.  At an individual level, risk is reduced through state-supported housing, education and healthcare and at a collective level, life-cycle dependencies are met through welfare. This mechanism involves two types of transfers- transfer from present to the future in an individual life and lateral transfers across generations in a society. These support structures have been the bedrock of prosperous and equitable societies in many countries. The rational model thinking economics, by critiquing the inefficiency of this system, has pushed societies into market-centrism. This has resulted in an unprecedented vulnerability of many sections of society.

Decoding Nobel prize impact

Did the most visible prize in economics have a role to play in the way economics is envisaged today? Offer and Söderberg use an interesting methodology of correlating citation of prize winning academic papers, ideology implied in the arguments and economic prize winners to determine whether the prize had a definitive (ideological) market turn. Their empirical study over the period till 2005, show three interesting results. First, the economics prize has been awarded on a balance between ideologies of left and the right, formalists and empiricists, Chicago school and Keynesians with the exception of the period 1990-1997, when all winners were of the neoliberal argument. Second, there has been a decided shift from work that was predominantly theoretical to that which is empirical. For instance, in 1983, 57.6 per cent of the total articles published in the top three journals in economics were theoretical, where as it was 19.1 per cent in 2011. On the other hand, empirical articles jumped from 3.2 per cent in 1983 to 42.2 per cent (Offer and Söderberg, p. 56). Third, the authors argue that of all the prize-cited works of economists up to 2005, only 5 percent were based on the scientifically rigorous idea of falsification, 12 per cent were of less reliable verification criterion and 20 per cent of confirmation criterion that was not supported by the scientific method. In other words, going by the strict criteria of scientific method, only a few works in economics would comply with the rigour.

The ultimate argument of the book is that the mechanical balancing act of the selecting prize winners in economics belies the belief in scientific regularity and reasoning that is believed to be at the heart of the discipline.  Choices in economics is a matter of preference and not fact. Real choices are difficult to make within a situation of unknown future, risk and uncertainty. Rather than reason, discretion becomes a commitment device for individuals. Economic choices may be driven by non-economic factors like ethical and normative preferences in addition to seemingly irrational decisions taken as a result of cognitive limitations. The ‘merit’ of the Nobel winner then becomes a task of ‘construction’ that is driven by extraneous considerations like ideology. The Nobel memorial prize begins to look a lot like that of literature and peace than those of the sciences.

A ghost-love story

George Saunders (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo, Bloomsbury

‘These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy broth, but we then named them and loved them, and, in this way brought them forth. And now must lose them.’

        roger bevins in Lincoln in the Bardo

This is the Man Booker winning experimental debut novel from George Saunders. The story opens in the United States of mid nineteenth century, with President Lincoln’s son Willie fighting for his life, while the country is gripped in civil war. Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery in a marble crypt. His mother descends into grief and madness. The President is bent on returning to his son as he visits the crypt and talks to him lovingly. This agonizing love, guilt and longing reaches his son across the veil of death.

The Bardo- which in Tibetan language means ‘that place between life and death’- is populated with a bevy of rich characters, all in a state of oblivion. People of all sorts have carved out a space for themselves in this netherworld, the high and the low, god fearing and nihilists, with their friendships and subterfuge. Into this world, little Willie descends, expecting his father to come and visit him again. The entry of the little boy creates a new sensation among the inhabitants of the lively Bardo and they unite to help Willie ‘pass over’. For this plot to succeed, they must have an unlikely ally- the President himself. How Willie is transported on through the unlikely alliance of his father and the Bardo, forms the rest of the story.

The central theme that runs through the story is that of love and loss, the deep human ache to retrace lost tracks and reclaim our pasts. Saunders shows us a way of moving on after a devastating loss, not by forgetting, but by letting go, accepting, freeing ourselves from the burden of care for the loved one. He attacks the very idea of loving by living, by showing, by acting- our love for those who are dead should be a different kind of love. It cannot find meaning in the repetitive acts of expression through words and deeds, for this creates a tomb of the past, a never-ending mourning. A graceful way of loving the dead is to not act or talk but to think, to ache and hold. It is not a love that hinges on sharing, sympathy and reciprocity. It is a silent one-sided love, not prone to the tempest of action, time or space. That is how love for someone who is absent looks like.

The deep contrast to Lincoln’s throbbing aching love is the cohort in the Bardo, ebullient, devoid of all memory and sense of being. They are literally a ghost of their previous Saunders uses the oldest trick in the book to make the imaginary world real- by turning metaphors into their heads. They are accustomed to a charade, a clinging on to the most mundane that defined them when they were alive. Willie’s arrival infuses a human-like feeling in them for the first time- passion, purpose and fellow feeling.  Eventually helping Willie to freedom helps the Bardo to free itself.

This unusually poignant novel works because of its audacity- the narrative style, the imagination at one level, and the philosophy that is conveyed through polyphony that testifies to love, loss and what it takes to heal and be free.

The Master of Spare Elegance

Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). The Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber, pp. 258

With the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature coming to Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, the turf of literary feud (since the award was given to Bob Dylan last year) has calmed down. Ishiguro, a literary polymath, has written seven novels in addition to screenplays, short fiction and lyrics. It is a great time to revisit one of his much-loved novels and the winner of the Man Booker Prize 1989, ‘The Remains of the Day’.

This novel is about the short journey that Stevens, the butler of the now decrepit Darlington Hall, takes across west countryside of England. Stevens has tirelessly worked for the distinguished family of Darlington Hall during the inter-war years, and the second world war. His old master is dead and in his place an American comes along, retaining Stevens as part of the ‘package of an old English house’. Stevens struggles to fit in the ‘new world’ of careless banter and informality. He feels a little lost, bereft of older ideals and notions of honour.

It is when Stevens is struggling with change, that an unexpected holiday comes. An opportunity to leave Darlington Hall for a few days gives him a chance to reflect on his life and work. He stumbles upon the truth about his lost love and his old master’s fall from esteem in the eyes of the world. It is a poignant journey of epiphany, but the realization of truth is by slow and painful degrees with the glacial chipping away at the fog of illusion that holds the protagonist intact.

Reflections on the Past

Stevens look at the past begins as a fairly straightforward narrative, with his neat, organized and sparse mind that never regrets. He believes that staunch loyalty to work and ‘dignity’ of conduct above mere competence, are what makes a butler truly ‘great’. He is looking back at himself at a time when the world has little use for his virtues and his place in the order of things stand precipitous. Happy and non-oblivious to the mechanization of the larger world of affairs that he stands by waiting every day, and the smaller microcosm of his own life, he evaluates and validates his life.

His contentment and pride are shattered by revelations that take place throughout his holidays. Often poignantly told to him directly by others who love him, he becomes aware of what he has lost. With a few pages to spare in the novel, we witness Stevens understanding his life for not just what it was, but also for what it could have been. He sees the trade-off, the point where there was a choice and how he missed it completely. And what he decides from there, is the rest of the story.

The theme of an unassuming protagonist and his journey towards truth is recurrent in Ishiguro’s works. In his other novel, ‘The Artist of the Floating World’, truth is stubbornly refused by the artist even as it stares at him. The acceptance of truth and the awareness of loss that comes with it, are done only when it is inevitable. Ishiguro takes his readers through these small inner worlds of people with great austerity and sympathy. The epiphany is not of the Joycean artist as a young man so that it reveals a world of possibilities ahead. It is the lives of individuals nearing the end of their lives, and the thick fog of possibilities that could have been is heart breaking. How Ishiguro’s protagonists negotiate these bargains forms the enduring philosophy of his works.