Archive for February, 2007

Rising Tides and Sinking Boats

February 11, 2007 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Socio-Political Commentary, Uncategorized

The NY Times Business section ran a story on its front page yesterday headlined “India Finds Its Economy on the Verge of Overheating.” Apparently, the poorest of Indian children have not been made aware of what the NY Times called “the country’s climb in living standards.” Around half of all children under three are clinically underweight. Since weight is the most reliable measure of malnutrition, it seems the sizzling economy has somehow not managed to touch India’s youngest and most vulnerable. Although the economy has grown 6-8% per year the past seven years (with a projected growth of more than 9% this fiscal year), child malnutrition has remained where it was seven years ago.

Some more facts about India’s children: less than half of 1-2 year olds are fully immunized (NY Times); diarrhoea claims almost 1.5 million infants each year, about one every three minutes (Palagummi Sainath, “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”); about nineteen million children below the age of five contract acute respiratory infections (including pneumonia) every fourteen days (Sainath). Further, with the quantity of pulses and grains decreasing every year, with increased farmer suicides, with the prevalence of water-borne diseases, with the 40 percent of Indians living below the poverty line, with the low spending on health by the Indian government, with the privatization of resources that are crucial for the health and livelihood of India’s poorest, the situation looks ready to worsten. Further, the one piece of post-independence legislation that’s been passed to empower people against exploitation, namely the Right to Information Act, is under attack by the Central Information Commission. The CIC was set up to serve the RTI Act, but has been acting in violation of it by passing orders to maintain secrecy when openness is what the Act requires.*

The importance of the legislation cannot be underestimated. It has been crucial in facilitating the fight against corruption, ensuring people access to resources that are rightfully theirs. For example, it’s been used to guarantee access to food rations, which otherwise were being sold illegally on the “black market” for large profits (95% of food distribution was being sold off as such).  The RTI Act has also enabled local groups to help fight backroom water privatization schemes, which would have eliminated their control over their own water resources, with devastating consequences. Several examples of such empowerment have been carefully spelled out by Parivartan, an advocacy group devoted to spreading knowledge about the RTI Act and its potential democratization effects (see http://www.parivartan.com/).

Amartya Sen has famously observed that no democracy has ever experienced a famine. Much of this he attributes to the “fourth estate,” viz., the media. But the media only turn to such issues when they can no longer be ignored, when they cannot, in the daily course of events, remain invisible. The kind of malnutrtion that affects millions of India’s children can be safely ignored, because it’s not “in your face.” But its effects are crippling. One can avoid famine and still suffer the devastating consequences of poverty. But this slow, invisible suffering licenses the press to turn away, and to focus on matters of seemingly greater urgency, such as the growing obesity problems among India’s wealthy and elite, who somehow can’t manage to stop stuffing their faces with sweets and other fatty goodies. What merits the press’ attention is the new demand (and concomitant creation of supply) of slimming centres, “doctors” performing stomach shrinking operations, and other such “crises” facing the Indian population. P. Sainath put it perfectly: “So while thousands of Indians flocked to clinics to address the problems of excess weight, millions were hungrier than before. The first problem made the front pages, cover stories, and even prime time. The second, that of growing hunger, remained largely invisible. This despite the alarming reappearance of hunger-related deaths in some of the richest parts of the country. The irony of these contrasting situations invited no comment at all.” Even the NY Times ran a large story on 13 Sept 2006 about the rise of Type 2 diabetes among India’s elite, referring to the disease as “the rich man’s burden.” But there is no story dedicated to the findings of UNICEF’s annual “State of the World’s Children Report,” which year after year reveals the “burdens” facing millions of India’s youngest.  

And of course it continues. The NY Times just today wrote a headline story “In India, the Golden Age of Television is Now.” What is “golden” is that advertising spending on Indian TV has grown 21% per year in the decade from 1995-2005, up to $1.6B. This double digit growth is expected to continue for years, setting companies like the News Corporation, Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom into a state of ecstacy. All the while, the malnutrition, the poverty, the disease, all remain unfit to print.  

One often hears the saying that “Rising Tides Lift All Boats.” A picturesque saying, to be sure, but opening our eyes suggests it has nothing to do with the real world. Rising tides lift the boats of those that were already quite high, sinking the rest to oblivion. I leave the last word here again to P. Sainath, who describes (quite accurately) the “trickle down” theory as follows: “Take it away from the poor, give it to the rich, then watch with bated breath to see how much of it trickles down to the poor.” In the case of India’s “liberalization,” “what trickled up was money, what trickled down was malaria.”Unfortunately, we can’t count on the press to tell us that, who believe and report every fairy tale that suits those who pay their bills.

* To take action to help protect the RTI Act, you may write to:

The President of India <presidentofindia@rb.nic.in>: Request the president to order an inquiry into the conduct of the Central Information Commission under Section 14 of the Right to Information Act. Parivartan suggests that if found guilty, the CIC officers should be replaced by retired supreme court judges.

The Prime Minister and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi: Request them to urge the President to order the above mentioned inquiry (the president is the only one with the authority to take such an action): <pmosb@pmo.nic.in> and <soniagandhi@sansad.nic.in>.

Mr. Wajahat Habibullah, Chief Information Commisioner: Request him to ensure the RTI Act is observed and enforced at all times: <whabibullah@nic.in>.

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Professor on Hunger Strike to End Racism at MIT

February 7, 2007 at 4:07 pm · Filed under Socio-Political Commentary, Uncategorized

Professor James L. Sherley of the Division of Biological Engineering has undergone a hunger strike to protest the denial of his tenure and the handling of a formal complaint he filed two years ago. He has charged those involved with racism and with confilcts of interest. From the evidence available, it seems that there were indeed serious issues with the grievance process. A recent letter signed by various faculty members at MIT outlines several issues with the process, including (quoting from the letter): “conflict of interest in tenure review; various sorts of unfair treatment to Professor Sherley as a junior faculty member with respect to: space allocation, space-related impediments and misinformation during recruitment and hiring, problems related to mentorship and tenure review, failure to acknowledge achievements; mishandling of complaint of racial prejudice.” The letter appeared in both the Boston Globe and the MIT Tech, and can be found here:

http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/blog/2007/02/chomsky_calls_f.html

It was signed by MIT Professors Noam Chomsky, George M. Church, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Michel DeGraff, Junot Diaz, Sally Haslanger, Jonathan Alan King, Melvin H. King, Helen Elaine Lee, Ceasar L. McDowell, James Paradis, Chi-Sang Poon, Philip J. Thompson, James H. Williams Jr., and Elizabeth Wood.

Today, there will be a discussion session on MIT’s tenure process in the Stata Center, 32-155, from 5-7pm. Those who are interested in this issue are encouraged to attend.

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On Optimality and Efficiency

February 3, 2007 at 6:20 pm · Filed under General Science, Socio-Political Commentary, Uncategorized

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who works in the banking industry. We talked about wage distributions, (assuming, for the sake of discussion, that the existence of wages does not amount to a form of slavery), outsourcing, “globalization” (a highly misleading term), sweat shops, and many other issues. We disagreed on just about everything. Interestingly, his arguments often rested on the notion of economic “efficiency,” a rather superficial and interest-relative term, not only in a rhetorical sense, but in a strict, mathematical sense. Let’s begin by briefly discussing the concept of “efficiency,” or “optimality,” in the better understood sciences, such as physics or biology, to get a general sense of what the term does for us in our understanding of complex systems.

We often say that some system of the natural world is “optimal” in the sense that it is given some problem to solve, and the solution it has found is the best one for solving that problem, given some measure of goodness. Take, for instance, the problem of protein folding. Given some string of amino acids, under certain conditions (temperature etc), the linear string will fold into a determinate three-dimensional configuration, what is called a “protein.” The linear string determines the 3-D shape, which then determines the protein’s function. Much depends on understanding this 3-D configuration — if we could figure out how we get from the linear amino acid sequence to the protein shape, not only would we have come to understand something deep about biology, the medical applications would be endless. This puzzle, the puzzle of how a linear amino acid sequence determines a protein’s shape, is called “the protein folding problem.”

Under current understanding, one proposal suggests that what happens is that the structure attempts to minimize energy. The problem is: find some configuration that minimizes energy, and the solution is the one that leads to the proteins we find in nature. So, we have the following pair: <Problem, Solution>. That’s the basic picture of any optimization problem — one has an optimal solution only to the extent that there is some well-defined problem to which the solution is optimal. In the protein folding example, had the problem posed by nature been different, our proteins might well have had a different look than the one they have now.

For instance, under our abstract understanding of the mathematics of computation, the solution to the protein folding problem is “NP-Complete,” which means it’s computationally intractable in the worst case. But nature seems to not care — its problem is to minimize energy, not computational complexity. Had the problem been: find some shape using a procedure that is computationally efficient (in the strict mathematical sense of using an algorithm that runs in “polynomial time”), then the solution may have been something else entirely, and our biological makeup could have been drastically different from what it is now. Thus, the solution is what it is because of the problem it’s trying to solve. There is no “efficiency” or “optimality” in and of itself — we must always ask, efficient with respect to what purpose? What problem is being solved efficienctly?

Or take the theory of foraging. It is generally thought that foragers attempt to maximize caloric intake. Consider birds straying from their nest in search of food. If they take the first food item they come across, it may be so small as to not be worth the trip out and back. If they wait for large food items, they may be so rare and time consuming to find that the risk of starvation becomes too magnified to make it worth it. The optimal solution to this problem is to find larger than average food items, but not much larger than average.

It turns out that birds do not do this. They do search for larger than average food items, but not as large as that predicted by the optimal strategy produced above. It seems that the reason for this is that the problem we formulated above was the wrong problem — instead, what they’re optimizing is a balance between maximizing caloric intake and not being away from their nest for too long a time (so as to protect their nestlings). The birds’ foraging strategy is the optimal solution to something like the following problem: maximize caloric intake while minimizing time away from the nest. (See, for instance, Richard Lewontin’s 2000 “The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment,” Harvard University Press).

In general, optimization problems abound in nature. The key is often in determing the right problem, and it’s a safe bet that nature has found the best solution. Take even simple problems such as getting from A to B, any two points you like. In physics, of course, shortest path principles are robust. But take human action. If you inspect your own actions, you will find that you usually find something like the shortest path between A and B (out of all the paths known to you). Of course, you may sometimes take “the scenic route,” but that’s because something forces you to (such as wanting to take the scenic route). In the absence of any other motivating factors, you will find something like the shortest path to get to where you want to go. When you’re at an intersection, and want to cross the street, you never walk up one block, cross the street, and walk back down. Instead, you just cross the intersection in a more or less straight line. Or if you want to get from your bedroom to the kitchen, you never walk along the walls of each room you pass as you travel to your destination. Instead, you walk in what amounts to the shortest possible route from the point in your bedroom to the desired point in your kitchen. The problem is: get from A to B minimizing some cost function (energy, time, or whatever), and the path you take is more often than not the optimal (or near-optimal) one.

Now, in economic theory proper, we find all kinds of “optimality” solutions for problems of all sorts. Take the concept of “Pareto-Optimality,” or “Pareto-Efficiency,” for instance. An allocation of resources is said to be Pareto-Optimal (Pareto-Efficient) if there is no other allocation that makes anyone better off without making someone else worse off. The conclusion is that resource allocations should strive to be Pareto-Efficient. Now, the problem is, of course, that one can have a Pareto-Optimal resource allocation while having an outcome that offends our sensibilities. For instance, imagine a group of three people dividing $100 they find on the ground. Two of them get $45 each, while the third gets $10. Well, such an allocation is Pareto-Optimal, because the only way to improve anyone’s allocation is to take some money away from someone else. But that hardly counts as an “optimal” solution in some other sense, say, in the interests of fairness, or in terms of proper rewards, or other measures that need not be tied to value or justice.

Now, the crucial difference between the problem of allocating resources and protein folding is that we are not in a position to *do* anything about the latter. Nature has designed a set of optimization problems, and proteins, subject to the laws of physics, must obey them. And we have no say in the matter. In matters of social design, on the other hand, if “democracy” is to have any meaning, then we do have a say in the matter. The problem we formulate need not be one of maximizing shareholder profit only, while ignoring all other factors that motivate human action. This does not mean, by the way, that government intervention is needed to determine resource allocations. One can have market forces in a more or less decentralized fashion operating to determine resource allocations, but the problems that we’re trying to solve can be different (eg. minimize disparity in the distribution of resources, or maximize the capabilities of all agents to participate in the market, or maximize the freedom of individuals to live healthy, pollution-free lives, or maximize people’s potential to create and produce, or minimize children’s exposure to advertising, or minimize waste and destruction of natural resources, or minimize the existence of “prisoners’ dilemma” type games, and many others). It is up to us to decide the problems that are worth seeking solutions to.

Thus, appeal to the concept of “efficiency,” in economics as in the hard sciences, is always relative to some optimization problem. As such, any argument in the social sciences that rests on “efficiency” must justify the problem that the efficiency is an answer to. “Efficiency” in and of itself is vacuous, and since nature is not supplying all our social optimization problems, any proposed problem must be justified as a reasonable one for us to seek solutions to. And one finds that a system whose sole purpose is to maximize the capitalist’s capacity to exploit, both nature and other people, hardly qualifies as a foundation on which to rest the current socio-economic order.

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