Untouchable: An Indian Classic

I was in the Indian City of New Delhi sometime last week for a formal meeting and because I arrived before the conference commenced, I made my way round the book stores on Janpath Road. I entered into a very small book store which had what I considered far too many workers for the size. While browsing from one side of the very small store to the other, I asked one of the attendants to point me to books that would teach something about India.  With minimum hesitation, he turned around to the opposite side of the store and grabbed the book that forms the title of my review here. He handed to me Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand and added with confidence, "This is an Indian classic".

To start with, I have known for a while that India has a very highly developed publishing industry and has one of the lowest costs for publications among developing countries. Still, the degree of knowledge about titles that the store assistant showed is rare because I would certainly have left that store none the wiser if my attention had not been directed towards that book.

The book addresses the social and economic construction of stratification in Indian society in pre-independent India. In reading the book, I see the duality in the fight that this society faced in designated classes of people as untouchable and unclean. Contact with the low caste people known as sweepers would make one contaminated and require ritual baths to restore cleanliness. This novel is based on the life of the youthful Bakha whose family have been sweepers for time immemorial and who are condemned to living apart from higher caste Indians. Their isolation is aggravated by the fact that they have an exploitative relationship which requires the sweepers to take care of cleaning up toilets.

One cannot miss the contradiction that comes from the fact that the caste system in India as in other places, created bogus distinctions  that endured. At the same time that the priestly and warrior classes enjoyed superior status and avoided the contamination of sweepers, they depended greatly on these oppressed to accept their inferior station and thereby provide cheap labour for performance of the most unpleasant tasks in that society.

Bakha wonders through the day and is human in the fact that he gets hungry and angered, playful and serious and somehow wonders why his family must forever accept their inferior classification. He has three encounters that could provide a solution from three different people and the most convincing one for me is the technology solution. tThe author integrates history in this work of fiction by exploring the role of the Christian church, Gandhian philosophy and suggestions from educated Indians.  In an interesting twist, Bakha returns home in the evening convinced that Gandhi's call for Hindu compassion is part of the solution and wondering whether a flush system would complete lower caste emancipation.

For a book written in the 1930s, it describes from the eyes of an Indian, how injustice can endure when it is justified through religion and culture on the one hand together with an unmentioned but real economic basis.  It also reveals the quest for status that makes other lower caste groups such as washers and leather workers to act with derision towards the sweepers.  I recommend this reading for any person with an interest in the evolution of societies and to Llibertarians with interest in booting cultures that justify subjugation. Putting myself in the shoes (rare among sweepers) of Bakha, it may be debatable which was the more evil system between colonialism or the caste system. Just wondering!

Book cover Image from Amazon.com

Academics and Despots II

In musing about the significance of the series of political events in the Middle east and North Africa over the last few weeks, I posted a piece on an article by Dani Rodrik. And as the post states, it seemed that Dani Rodrik was the only prominent scholar that I had read who addressed himself to the difficult issue of what posture intellectuals should adopt in interaction with despotic regimes. Dani talks about a follow up interview here.

An intellectual from Egypt has now added a different voice to that debate. Nawaz El Saadawi writes with contemptuous regard for Egypt's elite. In the author's view, the intellectuals among Egypt's elite seem to know on which side their bread is buttered. As a consequence, they deploy their ability to communicate to a wide audience by applauding the young revolutionaries while also tacitly trying to prevent full trial of Mubarak. As the article states, they are not driven by the need to stop vengeance "per se", but are merely defending a regime that they have applauded for decades.

On my part, the advise is the same. Keep away from regimes that have no respect for life or dignity at a minimum. Any association with despots rarely turns out well. And I mention this with full knowledge that despots are often very determined for acclamation and the refusal of one academic merely means that there are twenty more who would gladly take that position. 

Luck Comes in Threes for Irish Bettor

Niall Smyth, a part time poker player has shown a remarkably lucky streak by taking small bets successively to convert an initial bet  of €10  into € 550,000. Needless to mention, the odds of betting on a horse race, then taking the prize into a qualifying game for an elite tournament before beating the filed of 614 poker players is very slim. As reported in this article by the Irish Times, this represents an interesting mix of luck and capability on the part of the player that a statistician would claim should happen very rarely. 

Turkey: Another Emerging Economy?

Following a visit three years ago, I have maintained an interest in Turkey's economic growth and political development. I have wondered often whether in spite of all their acclamation, each of the BRICs will of necessity have more successful outcomes than Turkey. From my own assessment then , Turkey had very good prospects for economic expansion on account of its geographical position, diversified economy and secular constitutional order. it is clear hat turkey's political development today is not necessarily guaranteed to result in a more open and stable political foundation on account of the changes in the constitution and an emerging intolerance for diverse views among the prime minister and his party's main adherents.

That aside, one must reckon with the fact that for a populous country, economic growth rates together with consumer demand have been quite impressive. Landon Thomas Jr. of the NYT reports here that there are early signs of excessive issuance of credit may be showing in the economy. Increased consumption of luxury items may be consistent with a rising middle class generated by growth and yet the easy terms of advancing credit may generate massive losses that could stagger that economy. I applaud the innovative ways through which the decisions on credit are made but the central laws of banking and lending remain the same. Banks must guard against issuing unsecured credit to individuals as no economy is immune form dangers of imprudent lending and expenditures.       

Academics and Despots

Few people today would listen to a conversation in which a defence of Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddaffi was offered. Instead, a good number of scholars and leaders both in and outside the continent of Africa have suffered serious embarrassment for their associations with that regime. What is clear is that in  a moment of crisis, the extreme despotism of Muammar Gaddafi and the intolerance of his sons has come fully to the fore. In spite of his record of ruthlessness and intolerance for dissent.

With that in mind, I find Dani Rodrik's frontal confrontation of this delicate matter totally impressive and sincere. As he says, there are moral ambiguities related to interaction in person or through emissaries of despots and leaders who have no meaningful democratic credentials.  And in spite of my full appreciation of the desire to do good that may inform the choice to offer professional advise to despots, one must draw the line where the said leader has previously exhibited unabashed contempt for human life and dignity. As a result, any scholar worth his salt should realize that more often than not, these despots seek  amity with high profile academics in order to create a favourable name as a person who is curious about ideas. And any leader who does not appreciate the central idea of personal freedom probably cannot appreciate many other which flow from that essential one. 

Heritage Health Using Prizes to Cut Costs

I believe that in spite of imperfect human thinking, there are simple devices that can be utilized to achieve a variety of business or public policy solutions. One of those that i would like to see used more often is the use of cash prizes to generate new ideas and solutions to problems. Years ago, Netflix put out a prize of US$ 1 million to provide an incentive to teams to assist it to improve by at least 10%, the predictive power of the algorithm that it uses to recommend movies to clients. This blog argued here and here that this approach was superior in many respects provided it was well designed. 

Slate Magazine's Annie Lowrie records how Heritage Health of the US has gone a notch higher by announcing a US$ 3 million prize for a predictive algorithm on identifying the likelihood of patients to seek hospitalization. It has released its data to registered teams to assist it to identify such patients with the intention to utilize that information to reduce costs. It is laudable that a growing number of private sector initiatives have began to use public competitions to provide solutions to business challenges.

 The main gap remains n the reluctance of the public sector to use similar methods. Instead, public sector approaches its recognized problems by inviting high powered research teams working in secret to deliver a document for implementation. In my view, the secrecy that surrounds government operations and interactions with consultancy firms in many countries is also responsible for the wastage of public resources. One advantage of the public competition method is that it payment is made against real results as opposed to firms that take their money in advance and does not share the risks for proposing a bad idea. 

Irrational Fear of Nuclear Energy

While it is true that the human being is a supremely intelligent creature, it is also clear that we make systematic and very basic errors in reasoning. More recently, the errors that one could point come from the radioactive leakage at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant following  the massive earthquake in Japan weeks ago. In addition to the many deaths that this event precipitated, it also led to the failure of safety systems for Japan's nuclear power plants with a couple of reactors suffering structural damage and causing radiation levels to rise above levels that are considered safe.  

One could easily have anticipated the flurry of activity around countries with nuclear energy plants about the levels of safety. To my mind, the damage caused to the reactors were on account of the intensity of the earth quake. In spite of the clear lesson about the fact that overall, the structures were fine save that an earthquake of that severity is of low probability, calls for a halt on all nuclear energy production work were heard from all over.  It is gratifying however that while this has been going on and those who support commercial development of nuclear energy have been on the defensive, some rare support has come from George Monbiot of the Guardian. 

That article by a convert is worthy of reading because it splits apart the claims of the anti-nuclear lobby at a time when the nuclear industry needed friends in influential media. Lobbies tend to be poor listeners but here s some good advise from a convert.  

Language As Economic Infrastructure

I was recently witness to a debate about which language will dominate commerce and scientific publication in the next century. This discussion arose from the fact that Chinese and Indian economies have grown substantially and are possessed of a large population that could insist on using alternatives to English in commerce and scientific endeavour.

In the talk above, Patricia Ryan, a teacher of English in one of the nations in the Persian Gulf presents an interesting view about the need to accommodate a variety of languages in interactions. Stopping short of saying that the dominance of English imposes costs on growth of knowledge from diverse sources, she argues convincingly that the mass of publications in English stifles the ability of other alternatives from arising. It is true that to equate intelligence or capability with the knowledge of English is not proper.

In her eloquently delivered talk, she mentions that a language goes extinct every two weeks and with this trend, humanity may find that the diversity of languages shrink from 6000 to 600 in short order.  I am unaware of the accuracy of her estimates and the certainty of her figures but her assertion leads to an interesting question. It is clear that there is an enormous advantage to approaching problems of science and communication through diverse languages. What I find interesting is whether there may be an optimal number of languages in the world. I ask this because the distribution of speakers across the 6000 languages would probably show a Power Law, with English spoken by a disproportionate number and other smaller languages spoken by a few hundred at the most. For that reason alone, it is an onerous task to try to interpret every available publication into each language.