Markets and Match Making

Alvin Roth (2015), Who Gets What and Why, William Collins, London, pp. 260

For anyone who is interested in the implications of market failure, this book opens a new road. In a breezily delightful work, Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth, illustrates the challenging field of market design and match making that comes into play when ordinary markets fail to trade certain goods and services. The main highlight of the book is how Roth accomplishes to convey a complex economic problem in an engaging manner by taking a conversational tone that makes reading this work a joy ride!

To begin with, markets fail to capture information of demand and supply through prices when it ventures to trade in certain types of goods and services. In such cases, non-market values crowd out market principles. Take the example of trading in organs like kidney or school admissions in public education system. The act of buying and selling these ‘commodities’ lead to undesirable outcomes for the society because of value preference that makes such trade repugnant or inefficient. Then, the efficient way to allocate resources becomes the task of a very different type of exchange- that of match making.

Match making markets are different from regular commodities markets not just in their provenance. Match making markets have interested parties on the demand and supply side who wish to be allocated with efficient outcomes without the help of price signals. To accomplish this, both sides provide an ordered list of their preference and a central agency allocates optimum matches.

Match making and market design has been successfully used to solve optimization problems in organ transplantation, school allocation, employment offers and much more. This book lucidly illustrates the illuminating problems on which Roth worked on.

This is an introductory work that is meant to get students and lay readers get hooked to the idea of designing markets. Like always, more math in store for those who want to progress further. What is a bit of game theory when you get to solve interesting puzzles like these? I say, go for it!

Bring Back the Lost World!

Torill Kornfeldt (2016), The Re-origin of Species, Cntxt, pp. 236

Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt introduces the idea of ‘de-extinction’, a process by which biological research attempts to re-introduce a version of extinct species as a method of conservation. Using preserved genetic material, there are scientific communities in different parts of the world that are trying to ‘rewild’ and ‘repopulate’ the lost species. This nostalgia for the lost world is associated with a vision of the future that raises ethical, moral, philosophical and scientific questions peculiar to the epoch we live in - the Anthropocene.

Fundamentally, rewilding changes the relationship between humans and nature. The species that get picked to have another go in this planet are the charismatic species that humans adore (beginning with Dinosaurs!). Furthermore, repopulation should happen in large numbers for species to thrive. The new species must be morphologically similar and perform the same ecological function. There is also the question of suffering of the animals who are being experimented upon as part of a concerted human vision. Of course, these questions come up only after we have successfully overcome the technical difficulties in genetic engineering.

Even though it appears as a story straight from scientific fiction, it was fascinating to understand the conviction and the decades of effort some of these projects have gone through. The age of the Anthropocene throws up many challenges and mass extinction is one of them. There are many ecological movements and genetic engineering technology that have come about to defend the planet. The de-extinction project - edgy, extreme and emotionally charged - is one of them.

This book is an English translation of the original Swedish version and there are a few bumps in editing. However, that does not really deter you from the flow of the story-telling. Kornfeldt uses the lively first-person narrative to bring out these stories and that is a great delight! Go for it!

Reborn

Nadia Murad (2017), The Last Girl, Virago, pp. 306

This is the inspiring story of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi girl born in rural Iraq, her extra-ordinary escape from sexual slavery by the Islamic State (IS) and her ongoing battle against sexual violence in war-torn regions as a Nobel laureate and an Ambassador of Peace. Born in the village of Kojo in Iraq, Murad led the ordinary life of Yazidi women with dreams and hopes for a peaceful future even as the rumblings of war and ethnic cleansing was all around. Gradually, what was commonplace - a family outing, harvest in the village field, pilgrimage to a holy shrine and communal celebration become more and more difficult as a minority community in a country increasingly defined by a narrow definition of nationalism.

As friends turn unreliable and strangers surround their lives, everything Murad and her family knew as a way of life comes to a standstill. She loses most of her family and her village overnight in a mass massacre and young girls and women are abducted as sex slaves and sold through an unbreakable chain of buyers and tormentors by the IS. In a first-person account, Murad details the harrowing sexual, mental and spiritual abuse as a woman and minority citizen as she is held captive and exchanged for money all across IS-held Iraq.

Throughout this inhuman and terrifying ordeal, Murad clings to the comforts of a happy past spent among her people and that of a gritty future she is determined to make for herself. She has to grieve for her lost self even as she mourns the loss of others. She has to define the meaning and purpose of her life from the searing pain of her past. She has to make home in a new country and fight for the rights of others like her. The strongest motivation to do so is the determination that she should be the last girl to go through such gruesome struggle for dignity and self.

I read and re-read this overwhelming story over a period of many days. The journey with her is filled with deep darkness and absolute light as she emerges alive and takes on the mantle of a survivor. It is baptism by fire that we all need to understand the kind of torture women and children go through amidst war and conflict.

The Era of Xi

François Bougnon (2018), Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping, Cntxt, pp. 181

The rise of the Chinese President Xi Jinping is also about the rise of China and what it stands for today. The era of Xi (named after the fashion of giving generational titles to Chinese political leaders such as Mao and Deng) is remarkable for its unique combination of the old and the new.  Harnessing Mao’s teaching and a thousand-year old traditional culture, Xi’s ‘neoauthoritarianism’ is a school of thought shaping contemporary China with its emphasis on a strong state, the plank of anti-corruption and relaxed confidence in the ‘Chinese dream’.

Building a Chinese Dream

Xi has been able to articulate a vision of market economy with socialistic characteristics for China. This image of economic development encompasses attaining material needs for a better life along with pride in one’s country and culture. A careful pantheon of historical ideas has been chosen to represent this ideal. For example, legalism, a belief that advocates the use of law, governance and authority to modify the behaviour of people is widely admired for its efficiency as an institutional approach. Additionally, the rising inequality in China also requires a discourse that includes all classes in the Chinese dream. This is done by controlling the domestic media through party discipline while harnessing foreign media to propagate narratives about China to a wider audience. Furthermore, the celebration of Chinese grown technology firms such as Ali Baba, Xiaomi, Baidu and Huawei stand for pride in the Chinese capacity to find alternatives suitable for its own needs and temperament.

Along with the political transformation, Xi is also leaving behind an impressive personal legacy. After Mao, he is the only leader to have his name added in the Chinese Constitution. More recently, he gave himself an unlimited Presidential term. Although he writes a great deal about his thoughts on China, he rarely gives interview to the Western media, managing a persona of enigma.

To me, this book stands out for many reasons. First, it is concise and succinct in its analysis. Bougnon, the former Le Monde correspondent in Beijing, uses his journalistic experience to provide a well-researched background story and generously archives Francophile scholarly research on China. This is a valuable addition to the recent works published by writers working predominantly in English. An engaging political read for our times!

The Hawking Effect

Stephen Hawking (2018), Brief Answers to the Big Questions, John Murray, pp. 220

“Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions.'

                     Kip S. Thorne, Memorial Service of Stephen Hawking

One year ago, to this day, on International Pi Day and Albert Einstein’s birthday, Stephen Hawking, internationally renowned cosmologist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University passed away. Arguably, the most celebrated and well-known living scientist of his time, Hawking broke frontiers in our understanding of the universe while blazing personal triumphs against a degenerative disorder. This volume of brief answers to the big questions is drawn from Hawking’s enormous and meticulously kept personal archives with a foreword by his on-screen alter ego Eddie Redmayne, introduction to his life and work by his long-term collaborator Kip Thorne of Caltech (US) and an afterword by his daughter Lucy. It is a volume celebrating his life, work and the inspiring person that Stephen Hawking was.

Questions and Answers

During his lifetime, Hawking was constantly queried by experts, world leaders, fellow scientists, business people and lay folk alike on everything from religion to science and the future of our planet. This book brings together ten such very big questions and Hawking’s responses to them. True to the eclectic nature of this exchange, only two out of the ten questions directly concern his discipline, cosmology. The rest include the stuff of science fiction like time travel and extra-terrestrial life to the future of humankind including prospects of colonizing space and being outsmarted by artificial intelligence. Stephen’s responses are detailed and scientific, his vision bold and daring, his spirit courageous and optimistic, his tone witty and self-deprecating. It also shows a remarkable openness to ideas, a child-like curiosity and a sense of wonder at everything around, profound respect and regard for the work of peers and intellectual forefathers, a constant awareness to privilege women (with his consistent use of the feminine pronoun throughout the book to refer to humankind), and silent pride in the achievements of humans over the last three centuries aided by science.

I went to the same college in Cambridge, Gonville & Caius, where Hawking was a fellow. I was at the King’s Parade (the iconic centre-town of Cambridge) with fellow Caians and people from all over the world as Cambridge bid adieu to its beloved professor. As to Caius and the rest of the world, his absence is not easily overcome. But we can take strength from his example and continue on the magnificent vision he shared with us.

Towards a Fellowship of Faith

Shashi Tharoor (2018), Why I am a Hindu?, Aleph, pp. 297

Works of polemic beginning with ‘Why I am (not) something’ makes for interesting reading because of the focus on a single side of the debate and the force of  arguments. The first of these and arguably the most well-known is Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, a speech delivered for the National Secular Society, London which was later published as a pamphlet. So, I was much intrigued when the latest book of Indian Parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor came out last year, considering his brand of secularist Hinduism is increasingly portrayed to be irrelevant in contemporary India.

Tharoor makes his central argument in three parts. In the first, he sketches his personal version of Hinduism with its eclectic mix of beliefs and cosmopolitan view of the world. On the one hand, Tharoor questions several Hindu cultural traditions such as caste system and superstitions that have entrenched inequality among the Hindus over the centuries. He then explains his personal need to be a Hindu, with its emphasis on self-realisation rather than collective advancement, its doctrinal openness and flexibility of practice.

Political Hinduism

In the second part, Tharoor focuses on political Hinduism, which has endangered his personal HInduism. By tracing the ideology of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism through the doctrines of its proponents, the author demonstrates how the liberal and pluralistic ethos of Hinduism as a way of life is incompatible with the cultural nationalist version.

In the third and the last part, the author presents his arguments on how to take Hinduism back to its liberal fold. He argues that reclaiming the intellectual heterodoxy of Hinduism is the key to this project. Hindus were essentially henotheists, i.e., people who worshiped their gods whilst not denying the existence of other gods. For example, Hindus did not have dogma, prescriptive texts or even the need to believe in god to be accepted under its umbrella. This is why Hinduism is sometimes described as a ‘federation of philosophies’ or ‘fellowship of faith’. Reclaiming that version of Hinduism is not only relevant for liberal Hindus but also for inter-religious peace in a country such as India with immense religious diversity. Reform movement within religion may be an important strategy to retrieve other ways of thinking, of which textual work like this, may be the first step.

This book is well researched and duly annotated, catering to lay readers as well as individuals who are familiar with the religion. What makes it a compelling read is Tharoor’s personal conviction of his arguments and his plea to bring back freedom of thought and belief that enables Hindus and non-Hindus to live in peace. A timely intervention in these troubled times!

Future Gazing with Harari

Yuval Noah Harari (2018), 21 lessons for the 21^st century,  

Jonathan Cape, pp. 352

Yuval Noah Harari is an Oxford-educated historian to watch out for! Through his three books Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21^st century, Harari makes sense of what this century is all about, with historical and contemporary evidence on the biggest forces sweeping our times. The merging of biotech with infotech, the global dimensions of our personal lives and inequality resulting from institutional complicity are the scenarios he examines the most through his work. He speaks of our times as one in which ‘the old stories have collapsed and new stories have not taken over’ and his attempt is to bring light to this liminal space.

The limits of the liberal story

At the heart of his argument is the perceived limit of the liberal story that dominated the political and economic ideologies of the twentieth century. As we shift authority from humans to algorithms, we are shifting the battle from one against exploitation to that against irrelevance. In this battle, ideas about ‘free will’ and freedom go for a toss and the common enemy becomes flawlessly rational and empirical evidence more compelling. An example is the nature of discrimination that we have historically fought (group prejudice that is based on social attitudes against minority groups which is malleable) to one that we might fight against algorithms (personal prejudice based on empirical evidence of incompetence that is not easily mutable). How is the protection and rights of the majority of us to be conceived in this unfolding age? And who is to lead us in thoughts and value models in the age of flux? Harari ominously warns that historically corporations were never ideal vehicles to launch social and political revolutions because of their focus on wealth maximization. The pre-eminence of corporate solutions to human problems has to be evaluated afresh and the resurgence of public-funded institutions such as universities is the need of the hour.  

The secular ideal

The resurrection of extreme ideologies such as the rise of the religious right and the extreme left is to be seen in this context. The path that Harari pursues is re-examining our commitment to what he refers to as the ‘secular ideal’. He charts out the tenets of this ideal based on commitment to truth based on evidence, compassion based on appreciation of suffering, equality based on suspicion of a priori hierarchies, freedom to think, investigate and experiment and courage to fight biases and oppression. This might seem like an idealist’s dream, but the author warns us with a grounded pragmatism that human history is not one long story blessed with a continuous evolving meaning. It is made up of disparate strands of episodes each with its own illuminating inferences. To think through our times is the first step of appropriating agency.

A superb companion to the new year!

Gene Machine

Venkataraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan (2018). Gene Machine, HarperCollins India, pp. 272

A great way to begin your book journey this year would be with this highly accessible memoir of a journey in science by the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Cambridge Molecular Biologist Venki Ramakrishnan who uncovered the structure of ribosome. Arguably, the greatest discovery in structural biology since Watson and Crick decoded the double helix of DNA, unearthing the structure of ribosome had two important effects on research in biology. The first was to bring back to research focus the evolutionary link that RNA is and the second to point to the future where proteins dominate gene action.

This book is about Ramakrishnan’s personal journey from being a graduate student in Physics in the 1970s USA, who switched disciplines (Physics to Biology) and continents (US to the UK) and how it made him the dark horse in the race to uncover the central dogma of life. This book reads like a racy thriller at times bringing to light how scientific communities work through collaboration and competition through the generosity of strangers and animosity of colleagues to piece together a complex puzzle amidst the business and politics of science as it is done today.

Ramakrishnan writes with self-deprecating wry humour and acknowledges the importance of a number of teams of people who helped in solving the puzzle one clear insight at a time. This generous acknowledgement of people (often with photographs) make the work tender and human despite the dark sides of human ambition (including his own) that he portrays vividly and honestly. In the process, he raises some larger questions that is worth pondering about.

The first of these is about how conservative and conformist the prizes in science are today, behaving like clubs, acknowledging some types of ideas (and therefore people) over others, institutionalizing elitism that penalizes outsiders and young researchers. This discussion highlights how assumptions are made about the worthiness of a scientific contribution, the arbitrary rules that supports these assumptions, how science progresses through ‘fashionable ideas and big funding’ over small and meaningful group collaboration.

The second insight is about how scientific discovery essentially works in today’s world- with the old-school long and hard work, the role of luck, the cost of errors and the strength of genuine human solidarity beyond the acrimonious race to the finish.

This is a book that is intensely personal and immensely impersonal at the same time, written after critical reflection and with honesty and deep concern by a gifted scientist and writer. What better way to kick start a new year than the story of human suffering and success, personal victory and historic glory, private curiosity leading up to human quest to know beauty and truth? Happy 2019!

India through 50 Lives

Sunil Khilnani (2016), Incarnations, Allen Lane, pp. 636

This book is an excellent introduction to the history of India through the lives of 50 individuals who shaped its destiny. Based on the BBC Radio 4 Series, the book traces the period from ancient to modern India, from Buddha and Ashoka to Raj Kapoor and Dhirubhai Ambani to understand the transformation that the subcontinent has gone through and the ideas it offered the world. This is considering that biography as a modern genre is not popular or prolific in Asian history.

The great thing about such a portfolio view of history is that it goes for rich and rare details of the protagonists and puts a human face to the historical incidents. The prose is lively and you turn the page quite naturally to finish large chunks of the tome at one go.  The photos that accompany each piece is equally captivating from classic portraits and paintings to contemporary stills populating the album.

I found a couple of things not adding up for me. For instance, although 50 portraits are taken, the reason for selection is not explicitly mentioned. As a result, you do end up with an eclectic mix of the very celebrated figures like Gandhi and Buddha, the relatively unknown ones such as eighteenth-century artist Nainsukh and nineteenth-century photographer Deen Dayal with the very problematic individuals V.K. Krishna Menon, English Sanskritist William Jones and Ethiopian slave turned strategist Malik Ambar. I did not understand the justification of such inclusion at the expense of some other equally influential individuals. Second, although fields as varied as science, politics, cinema and business find place in the book, the absence of sports stars is inexplicable. And finally, nearly all the ‘experts’ who comment on each of the historic characters are based out of Western universities. This is particularly jarring because some of the best classicists and art historians are to be found within the country, although they may not be proficient in English. Considering the scale and financial scope of the project, such selectivity is not easily excused.

Even then, the book calls for a fascinating read to both Indophiles and neophytes attempting to understand the history and heritage of India. I’d finish the year off with a giant book (at 600+ pages) like this!

Beauty and the Universe

Frank Wilczek (2018), A Beautiful Question, Penguin Allen Lane, New Delhi, pp. 436

Does the world embody beautiful ideas? Is the world a work of art? Is the creator primarily an artist? These are the fundamental questions that Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek asks in his book A Beautiful Question. In this tour de force of physics’ quest to understand the creative principle of the universe, Wilczek takes us from Pythagoras to quantum mechanics to understand the fundamental concepts that explain the origin and existing conditions of the universe and the aesthetic appeal inherent in these ideas.

From Pythagoras to Quantum Physics

This book picks out some of the most important arguments from historical figures to support its basic thesis. In this journey, we cover geometry, physics, music and the arts in a veritable tour of renaissance. We begin with Pythagoras and his idea that ‘all things are numbers’, a principle that connects mind, matter and beauty. Then, we move to Platonic solids and the idea of symmetry as a principle of beauty. Brunelleschi and his projective geometry help us through to Newton and his novel method of scientific analysis. Here, we encounter dynamic laws of change as opposed to the statist ideals of Plato and Pythagoras. The tension between the ideal and the real is a constant theme that runs through the book. From Newton, we move to Maxwell (who is portrayed with a great deal of creative empathy) and his unification theory to culminate in quantum fulfilment. At the end of this rewarding journey, we do emphatically arrive at the conclusion that beauty is a fundamental principle in the forces that created and run the universe. The last chapter is a sober reminder that it is in this beautiful universe that all the pain and suffering exist too.

Wilczek helpfully simplifies the more complex portion of his arguments especially in the last part of the book that describes quantum physics and its evolution. I found it coming rather rapidly at me as compared to the more languorous description of Pythagoras and Plato in the beginning (caveat: I did science in college!). What worked for me was that I could come back to those parts along with their insightful illustrations and work it out till I understood the basic argument. Let me add that the illustrations are so integrally woven with the intellectual fabric of the book that it adds a touch of humanness to the historical figures and explains complex scientific experiments through interesting visual portrayal. I was particularly fascinated by a page from Issac Newton’s notebook reproducing the conjectures about his experiments in his own hand and young Maxwell ruminating with his colour top. Both in terms of its fundamental thesis and its production values, this is an exhaustive introduction to the aficionado. To the skeptical lay person, I’d say, go for it with an open mind with the confidence that this question is too interesting to give it a miss!