Red Plenty

I generally review books after I have read them, but I'm posting about Red Plenty when its still in my Amazon shopping basket. I heard about this book's premise on the radio, and the premise may turn out to be its most more interesting part.

Here is what the front flap says:

Once upon a time in the Soviet Union...

Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth century magic called "the planned economy", which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to an future of rich communists and envious capitalists...

This was the time between the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union looked and felt rich and successful. It felt like the Soviets had invented a wonderful new world, both morally and materially superior to the West. So...this was the illusion, the chimera, that lured Nehru's India into decades of socialism and stagnation.

Red Plenty's hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. He invented linear programming (among other things), and so helped create the impression that Soviet science could allocate resources more effeciently than capitalist markets. The book is a melding of fact and fiction about how that vision was, and was not, true.

The other book in my Amazon shopping basket is Michael Lewis' The Big Short. I've actually started reading this book, but I didn't finish my father-in-law's copy on our last trip to Madras. It feels like a nice counter-point to Red Plenty. It too takes us back to a far-away past, the time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and reminds us that capitalism can also fall into catastrophic science-induced hubris.

Tiger Mothers and OPEC

Amy Chua's fifteen minutes of fame are almost over. The Tiger Mother story has played itself out as a news item. Yet, after having read the Economist, Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, David Brooks in the NYT, Larry Summers in the WSJ, The Guardian, Slate and probably a dozen other stories about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I feel like the mainstream media are missing the central point, the reason why Tiger Mothers are both so heartening and so scary.

By now, most blog readers probably know the outlines of Ms Chua's story. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is supposedly a memoir about raising children on a strict regimen of no TV, no video games, no play dates and no sleepovers. The time that was freed up was reinvested in music practice and homework. Her regimen worked. Her daughters, now 18 and 15, grew into music prodigies with straight A grades.

Amy Chua spiced up this unsurprising story with the provocative claim that Chinese mothers are superior to Western ones; that her experience is evidence of this superiority. By mischievously framing the question in racial, or geopolitical, terms, she twanged a bunch of recessionary anxieties about Western decline and the rise of China. She has been rewarded for this cynicism with a firestorm of media commentary, and a place on both Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. The racial and geopolitical sub-text is so deliciously juicy that it has drawn most of the media attention.

However, to me, the Chinese angle is irrelevant. I grew up among the Tamil Brahmins of Mylapore, a culture which is chock-a-block with Tiger Mothers. This also kills the theory that Tiger Mothers are somehow products of the immigrant experience.

This isn't about Asian values either. Slackistan, a new movie I'm itching to watch, should illustrate this point. It is about the indolent lassitude of privileged young Pakistanis; Asian setting, no Tiger Moms in sight.

American Jews are pushy parents, according to stereotype. In this, they are no different from other Western families who want to provide well for their children. Spotting Western Tiger Parents from a wide range of cultures is as easy as watching tennis on TV. Venus and Serena Williams' dad Richard, or Andy Murray's mom Judy, or Martina Hingis' mom Melanie - Tiger Parents all. Every race, religion and ethnicity can and does embrace the Protestant work ethic, in the right circumstances.

Those right circumstances are defined by incentives. Tiger parenting happens when parents respond to incentives. If good grades open up a credible path to a better life, parents will push their children to get good grades. The bigger the gap between the parent's life and the promised life for the children, in terms of either tangible income or status, the harder the parent will push the children.

Slightly less obvious, the same dynamic works with parents further up the food chain. These are parents in high-status positions, who are not wealthy enough to pass the same status on to the next generation. Senior civil servants, army officers or tenured university professors like Amy Chua, who are rich in status but not in wealth, might push their children even harder than the aspiring middle class. One of the clearest results in behavioural economics is that the pain of losing something is far greater than the joy of gaining the same thing.

On the other hand, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and members of the Drones Club were so completely secure in their privilege that swotting to better one's life made no sense. Ditto for George W Bush. Ditto also for Jawaharlal Nehru, who was never more than an average student through his Harrow and Cambridge years. Similarly, coal miners who can only imagine that their sons will also be coalminers are unlikely to become Tiger Dads who push their sons to straight As.

Looked at this way, Tiger Parents, and the middle-class bourgeois values they reflect, are fundamentally good. They inhabit worlds with social mobility. They inject even more mobility these worlds with their energy, ambition and enterprise. They make democracy and capitalism possible; if this feels like an over-claim please read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom, a book I loved and wholeheartedly endorse.

So ambition and hard work are good. But how much is too much?

The scary thing about Amy Chua is not her ambition, or her Chinese-ness (she is a second generation American, married to a Jew, whose parents emigrated from the Philippines). Her problem is extent. No TV or video games until homework and music practice are done? Fine. No dinner unless the "The Little White Donkey" is played perfectly? No way. But that, apparently, is what Amy Chua does.

I find the most intuitive way to understand this is with another Econ 101 concept: cartels.

Consider OPEC, the cartel of twelve countries which controls most of the world's crude oil. It is in the best interests of the group as a whole to maintain a high price for crude oil. Their oil ministers meet, agree on production quotas, limit supply, and drive up crude oil prices to profit-maximizing levels. However, it is in the best interests of each individual country to renege on the agreement, and produce more than the agreed quota of crude. The higher the price of crude, the stronger the individual country's incentive to renege (especially if it is a democracy heading into an election year). As more countries renege on their production quotas, the price of crude drops, and ideally the cartel breaks down in a flurry of bitterness, finger-pointing and name calling.

Cartels can also do good. Everybody benefits from low trade barriers. Each country has an incentive to "cheat" and raise protectionist walls for local political gains. Supra-national arrangements, like the WTO or the EEC, are all about making it harder for individual countries to cheat, and therefore making everyone better off. In general, cartels work if they have fewer participants, if cheating is easy to spot, and if punishments for cheating are severe.

The supply of homework hours is analogous to the supply of crude oil. All families would be better off if there were limits on pushy parenting; say, children have at least an hour of unstructured time every day. The problem is with enforcing a cartel to limit the supply of homework time. Lots of suppliers, no way to monitor cheating, no punishments for being caught... this cartel would break down in a flash. Tiger parents will immediately turn that hour of free time to homework, to get ahead of the competition.

One of the few things I love about Amy Chua's story is that for fifteen years she never told her peers how hard she pushed her kids. She fabricated medical reasons why her daughters couldn't go on play dates or sleepovers. Her peers had no way to know she was "cheating", and couldn't punish her with social ostracism. A lot of the vitriol being directed at her now is the finger-pointing and name-calling that happens when a cartel breaks. I'm sure a lot of the finger-pointers and name-callers are secretly vowing to double-down and push their children even harder. I don't think there is a happy and harmonious resolution to having Tiger Mothers in our midst.

Sport as a metaphor for life might work here. A sportsman needs to focus, play hard, and play to win, even when the opponent isn't playing the right way. Say the umpire doesn't call a chucker at cricket. As a batsman, you just mark your guard again and bat on. Say your opponent is calling your shots long at a club tennis match. You stop going for the lines and find another way to win. Playing their game is not an option. Letting them win is also not an option. I guess that is one way to deal with Tiger Parents, because for better and for worse, they are here to stay.

The Sultan's Seal, en route to Istanbul

I was on a business trip to Istanbul recently. All I had time for was the airport, hotel, and conference center - annoying when visiting one of the world’s most fascinating cities. Fortunately, my hotel was Absolut Istanbul, on the grounds of the old Dolmabache Palace, overlooking the Bosphorus. Plus, I got another shot of Istanbullu from my in-flight reading. The Sultan's Seal, by an American anthropologist called Jenny White, successfully transported me to the Ottoman capital circa 1887.

I entered a world where the Ottoman sultan was very much in charge, but the glories of empire could no longer be taken for granted. The campfires of the Russian army were visible from Istanbul rooftops, as the Czar’s troops chipped away at the empire’s former Balkan heartland. The British resident was a big figure in Istanbul, since it was the British guarantee of protection that kept the Russians at bay. The resident’s sweet, pretty and idealistic daughter believes, in all sincerity, that the Ottoman empire becoming a British protectorate would be good for all concerned, as had been amply demonstrated in India and Africa.

At this time, the province of Syria, which included all of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and parts of modern Iraq, was an integral part of the Ottoman empire. Mecca and Medina were also a part of Ottoman Arabia, a natural part of the domain of the Sunni Caliph.

The term Turk referred to the unsophisticated peasants of Anatolia. The genteel upper classes of Istanbul were Ottomans, not Turks. Idealistic, romantic sons of this genteel class met in Parisian coffee houses and debated whether reform could restore the empire’s glory, or if revolution was necessary, and if talk of revolution constituted heresy since the Ottoman sultan was also the Caliph. The Jews of Istanbul's Galata ghetto, loyal subjects of the Caliph for over four hundred years since Catholic Queen Isabella kicked them out of Spain after the reconquista, were fighting to keep the liberal Ottoman Caliph in power.

This was a world where village boys, or even grown men, would never have seen a woman's face outside the immediate family. In genteel society, men and women would see and greet each other, but would converse in gender-segregated groups. Eunuchs from the Sultan's harem were a powerful and respected cadre in this Istanbul, where casual homosexual encounters at the hamam were unremarkable, but where full male nudity was shocking and strictly taboo.

In this world, a girl from a poor family could be sold to richer relatives to work in their home as a servant and companion. This girl would be educated and married in an honourable way, as a family member, but would sleep on the floor in separate quarters and eat her meals after the host family, as a servant. I was a little shocked at how easily I got the ambiguity and duplicity of that relationship.

Notionally, this book is a murder mystery, but the plot is too byzantine for a whodunit. By the time I got to the denouement in which the hero rescues the heroine from terrible danger, I had entirely lost track of which baddie wanted to bump which heroine off, and for what reason. I didn't mind.

I enjoyed the book for transporting me to a fully-realized world, one which is both familiar and strange, not for the cleverness of the detective's investigative work. I have a hunch that Jenny White wrote the book in much the same spirit. The whodunit never was anything more than a vehicle in which to package Jenny White's encyclopaedic knowledge of Ottoman society and politics. Regardless, it injected some local flavour into what might have been a sterile business trip, and illustrated a favourite old perverse-theory: that the point of tourism is to work up the enthusiasm to read the guidebook.

Cyborgs Creating Self

I just listened to a podcast by Amber Case, an anthropologist who studies how people use digital technology. She said something that really resonated with me:

What I'm really worried about is that people aren't taking time for mental reflection any more, and they aren't slowing down and stopping... And really, when you have no external input, that is the time when there is creation of self, when you can do long term planning, when you can figure out who you really are.

And once you figure out who you really are, you can present yourself in a legitimate way, instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in: oh, I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this...I am really worried today that kids are not going to have this downtime. They have this instantaneous button clicking culture, and that everything comes to them...

I'll say the important part again, to make the words mine: when you have no external input, that is the time when there is creation of self.

I value downtime, and the sense for who I really am that that gives me. I'd assumed that is because of my INTJ personality type, but maybe it is a more universal need. Most spiritual practice, or long distance running, or hip contemporary spa experiences seem to be about creating quiet spaces where self can be created.

I don't share Amber Case's worry that kids brought up with smart phones and facebook will lose their sense of self, any more than kids brought up with twenty four hour television, or in crowded joint-family homes, lost their sense of self. If the psyche needs quiet time, it will generally find a way to get that quiet time, in whatever context.

Also, this is excellent time management advice. Responding to email as it streams in all day long is exhausting. I try to keep specific blocks of calendar time for email, and to not respond at other times, even though my Blackberry makes it possible.

The Trouble With Being Swanny

Swanny’s Ashes video diaries are coming thick and fast now. Episode 7 came out on Jan 2, a mere 4 days after the Christmas special episode on Dec 29.

Interesting, then, that Swanny did not bring out an Ashes video diary for a sixteen day period between Dec 13 and Dec 29. Swanny did not do an episode after the Perth test, when England got walloped. He went straight from celebrating the Adelaide win with videos of England fans doing the sprinkler dance, to celebrating the Melbourne win with the England team doing the sprinkler dance on the hallowed MCG turf, to the eternal delight of the Barmy Army.

Swanny knows that jokey banter is great on a winning team. Jokes sour very quickly in a team that rarely wins. That equation, between joking and winning, cost him ten years of his career.

Graeme Swann was first called up for England duty as a gifted twenty year old, in 1999, when England were officially the worst team in the test world. Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher were tasked with giving that rabble, who had made a habit of losing, some grit and backbone. They had no time for a self-confessed “obnoxious loud-mouth”, who missed the team’s tour bus because he overslept. Swanny was dropped after bowling five overs in an ODI. Ashley Giles was their spinner of choice.

When Swanny finally made his test debut as a seasoned thirty year old, in Madras in Dec 08, England were a competitive team. Now, they had discipline, they had spunk. They needed inspiration and effervescence, which Swanny brought to the party. Critically, they won often enough to have self-belief. Their boats floated high enough in the water for Swanny’s juvenile jokes (about Alistair Cook’s resemblance to Woody from Toy Story, or Steve Finn’s bad haircut, or Tim Bresnan stealing all the chocolate bars) to raise a laugh rather than to grate. The same personality which made Swanny a non-option ten years ago now makes him the talismanic spirit of a winning team.

Is he a better bowler now than in 1999? Yes, of course. But I suspect he always was a better bowler than Ashley Giles, Shaun Udal, Jamie Dalrymple, Michael Yardy or even Monty Panesar, all of whom played for England. That feels unfair. But in my judgement, there are very few players who are so much better than the next best alternative that it is worth disrupting a team's spirit or ethos for that extra ability. Maybe I'd consider fitting in Brian Lara, KP or Shoaib Akthar...very rare.

Regardless, Swanny leading the England team in doing the sprinkler dance on the MCG has to be one of the great moments in cricket's history, precisely because it is so silly. It reminds us that cricket, like life itself, is just a game.

Pink Floyd on Education

We don't need no education,
We don't need no thought control,
No dark sarcasm in the classroom,
Teacher leave them kids alone,
Hey teacher! leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall,
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

I spent a chunk of my youth chanting along with this Pink Floyd rock anthem. So, I was intrigued to learn that one of the leading lights of the recent student riots in London was the Pink Floyd lead guitarist David Gilmour's son, Charlie Gilmour. The rioters were protesting the government's plans to raise university fees.

David Gilmour thinks education is worse than a waste of time. Yet, his son Charlie believes education is very important, and should be massively subsidized by the state. How did father and son wind up having such dramatically different views?

Or are their views really all that different? On reflection, I suspect not.

Neither father or son really has a point of view on the positive externalities created by subsidized, over-consumed higher education. They are not policy wonks. They are musicians. They are expressing an emotion. I think both father and son are expressing exactly the same emotion.

Jack Black captured this emotion precisely in School of Rock:

"The Man is everywhere. In the White House, down the hall, Mrs. Mullins (the head mistress), she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called rock ‘n’ roll."

I think that is what both father and son were doing. As young men, they were sticking it to The Man. Once upon a time The Man said "go to school". Now, The Man says "you can't go to school unless you pay for school". Regardless, rock 'n roll wants to stick it to The Man.

Admittedly, the son did get a little excessively carried away. But one lesson he will have learnt from his father, and his father's friends, is that sticking it to The Man does not preclude making it up with The Man at some later stage. For all David Gilmour's angst about education, he still sent his son to an expensive private school, and on to read history at Cambridge.

Mithras, Minerva and Murugan

This post is being published on December 25 to honour a deity whose birth is traditionally celebrated on this day: the sun god, Mithras.

I discovered Mithras (or Mitra) while exploring Rome this summer, at the Basilica di San Clemente. Entering at the street level, this Basilica is "one of the most richly decorated churches in Rome". Walk a couple of staircases down, and you're in the ruins of another great church, grand enough to have hosted papal councils, that was destroyed in the Norman sack of Rome in 1084. Another couple of staircases down - it's starting to get chilly now, and you can hear the rush of water from an aqueduct leading to the Tiber - is a cave with long stone benches running along the side. In the middle of the cave is a stone altar with a relief of a boy slaying a bull. This is what remains of the Mithraeum, the temple of Mithras, which was destroyed when the church was built.

Apparently, around 300 years after Christ, the cult of Mithras was one of the biggest of many foreign-inspired religious cults in the Roman empire. Mithras, which comes from the same root as Mitra, the Vedic sun god, was considered Persian. Other popular cults included the Greek-inspired cult of Demeter, the Egyptian-inspired cult of Isis, and the Palestinian cult of Christ. Mithraism was especially important because it was a for-men-only religion, and was popular with soldiers.

A few years later, Constantine converted to Christianity, and triggered Christianity's inexorable rise as the official religion of the world's most powerful Empire. But Constantine had emerged as Emperor after a bloody civil war between the Tetrarchs. He was looking to unite, not divide. He retained his status as Pontifex Maximus, as the symbolic head of the classical Olympian religion. He continued to support naturalist traditions, like worshipping the sun god Sol Invictus on Sundays. He made Christianity more appealing to the powerful Mithraic cult by accommodating its sacred symbols and myths within the Christian canon, including the legend of the three wise men and their gifts of gold, myrrh and frankincense, the taking of meat and blood as holy communion, and celebrating the deity's birthday on December 25.

Constantine issued an edict in 313 AD that declared December 25 to be the birthday of Jesus Christ. Previously Emperor Aurelian, a practicing Mithraist, had declared December 25 to be Mithras' birthday.

Constantine gave his name to his new capital city, Constantinople. But he cut his teeth at the other end of the Empire, in Britain. His approach of integrating elements of older folk religions into a powerful state religion may have been educated by what he observed in Britain, where the Romans successfully accommodated Celtic beliefs within the framework of their classical Olympian religion.

I saw this process beautifully showcased at the Temple of Sulis Minerva in Bath. The local Celtic people had long worshipped Sulis, the Goddess of Healing, at the mineral rich hot springs. When the Romans arrived on the scene, they gave this Celtic goddess a new hyphenated identity as Sulis-Minerva, and turned the hot spring into a thriving Roman Bath.

I believe a similar process also happened at home, in South India.

As Vedic Hinduism spread south through the sub-continent, it encountered a number of very sacred local deities, sites and practices of worship. This spread, for most part, was not orchestrated by empires, armies or a church. It happened through what would now be called "soft power".

This soft power was exercised by expanding the Hindu pantheon, and mythology, to give places of honour to these local deities, so new populations could reach into the philosophy of Hinduism without giving up their treasured local gods. 

So, for instance, Murugan, the peacock riding boy-god who resides on Palani hill, was consecrated as Shiva's exiled second son. Murugan gets married both to Valli, daughter of a local tribe's chieftain, and to Devyani, daughter of Indra, the king of the Vedic gods. 

Or Iyyappa, another revered hill-dwelling boy-god, is understood as Hariharaputra, the son of both Shiva and Vishnu, from when Vishnu was incarnate as the beautiful Mohini. He continued to live in his tropical rain forest home on Sabari Malai, instead of relocating to Mount Kailas in the snow covered Himalayas. Mythic win-win relationships.