Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe

Title: Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2021 (First)
ISBN: 9780241501764
Pages: 472

In their evolutionary history, mankind has had many brushes with disaster in which a portion of the society perished; the surviving others recovered from the shock and the damages to technology and culture were repaired. Earthquakes, pandemics, volcanic eruptions, storms and wars are the disasters that confront human societies every now and then. Covid 19 was the latest in the list of disasters that afflicted us. This book is a general history of catastrophe from the geological (earthquakes) to the geopolitical (wars), from the biological (pandemics) to the technological (nuclear accidents). This book was written in late-2020 when Covid was raging across the world. Niall Ferguson is a prominent British-American historian who needs no introduction. Several of his books were reviewed earlier here. The seeds of this work were probably sown during the lockdowns enforced to contain the spread of the Covid virus which restrained most people to a virtual house-arrest that was unaccustomed and uncomfortable. Many people used this time of compulsory leisure to good advantage and this book is a testament to it.

The first part of the book provides a primer on the mechanics of a disaster and how human groups cope with it. All societies live under uncertainty and disasters have profound economic, cultural and political consequences. What we have to fear about is not the end of the world, but big disasters that most of us survive. The resilience of societies to pull back from a catastrophe and regain its earlier technological level is not actually tested yet in an interconnected world, but this is a graver threat than outright annihilation of the species. Even then, people does not seem to be too much concerned with living near places where disaster has struck previously and where there is a greater chance to repeat it. A map of the world with the locations of the biggest earthquakes since 1500 CE plotted reveals that the biggest cities were built on or close to fault lines. This illustrates the fatal interplay between the infrequency of disasters and the shortness of human memory. Humans nearly always return to the scene of a disaster, no matter how vast it may be. In spite of occasional eruptions of Vesuvius, Naples grew to be one of Italy’s largest cities.

Most often, what affects men more is not how a disaster occurred but rather how its effects were percolated across networks – both human and natural. The most important feature of a disaster is whether there is some way of propagating the initial shock through the biological networks of life or the social networks of humanity. This book includes a useful primer on network science. A disaster consists of multiple smaller versions of itself which is a microcosm of the larger unit. This is called the fractal geometry of disaster. Unfortunately, the author does not elaborate on or give examples for this claim. Most disasters occur when a complex system goes critical, usually as a result of some small perturbation. The extent to which the exogenous shock causes a disaster is generally a function of the social network structure that comes under stress. The point of failure is more likely to be in the middle layer of the hierarchy of people than at the top of the organisation chart. Ferguson introduces ‘groupthink’ also to be a reason for causing errors that lead to disaster. It’s a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically apprise alternative courses of action. The author also points to the gradual improvement of public health even before the scientific principles behind them became apparent. Scientists took much credit for the general improvement of public health which had produced an unprecedented increase in life expectancy in the space of a century into the early-twentieth. Beginning in the Renaissance period, men worked out the efficacy of quarantines, social distancing and other measures now referred to as non-pharmaceutical interventions, long before they properly understood the true nature of the diseases they sought to conquer. It was enough to disrupt the social networks of the time to slow down the spread of the still unknown and unguessed-at microbes.

Ferguson being a British and I being an Indian, some narratives in the book that describe events in the colonial era rattle my nerves. The author presents a sense of inevitability for some colonial mishandlings that led to the death of a considerable number of Indians. Nationalists accuse the British of insensitivity to native suffering which has some substance in it, but this book argues that there was nothing more they could have done at that time. The 1918 influenza killed 18 million Indians which was 240 times the fatality figure of the British. It shattered the myth that Britain led the world in public health. In fact, a ministry of health was constituted in India only a year later. This book is professed to have been written with the aim of enabling the reader to compare the different forms doom take, rather than treating all disasters as the same. It then plays down Indian deaths and argues that ‘what was a catastrophic famine for some parts of Bengal in 1943 is altogether smaller if the death toll is expressed as a percentage of the entire population’ (p.41) which is another way of saying that ‘you should be grateful that the death toll was not higher’! He further concludes that ‘those who call the nineteenth century famines in India ‘Victorian holocausts’ are debasing historical terminology’ (p.37). Ferguson also notes the improvement in Indian health but ascribes the wrong reasons to it. The Indian mortality rate declined steeply between the 1920s and 1940s, as did the death toll attributable to famines (p.186). This is only partially true. Indian life expectancy began to surge after 1947 and there were no famines post-independence even though the monsoon had failed in many years. The author’s attempt to deny British culpability is in vain.

Ferguson analyses several pandemics and disasters occurred since World War II and suggests lessons to be learned from them. He also hints at the disproportionately harsh response measures towards Covid 19 in some countries such as the US which actually performed much worse than some other countries that responded to the disease with much milder plans. The 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic was similar in threat to Covid, but the US played it down, by not imposing lockdowns, social distancing or forcing people to wear masks. Soon herd immunity developed, along with vaccines. The reason for this subdued response may also have been due to the cold war which was at its peak. It posed such an unprecedented threat of disaster that the traditional threats posed by microbes somewhat receded in popular consciousness. Between 1957 and 2020, the world faced only one historically significant pandemic: AIDS. The policy response to it was dismal at first because the disease was mostly sexually transmitted. If polio-stricken children in leg-braces had gripped the American imagination in the 1950s, gay men with a sexually transmitted disease had the opposite effect in the 1980s. It took fifteen years to find a therapy that could prevent HIV-infected people from developing AIDS, which had killed 32 million people worldwide. The other recent disasters that are handled in the book are the Challenger space shuttle explosion and Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster that occurred within a span of three months in 1986. In both the events, the middle management is arraigned as the culprit. However, the US society accused its president of incompetence while the Soviets blamed the Chernobyl workers.

The lockdown and social distancing measures enforced by an unimaginative bureaucracy and overzealous policemen caused more harm than good during Covid. The author notes that instead of economic lockdowns, a more rational strategy would have been to keep that share of the working population employed that could not work from home while mandating social distancing, enforcing mask-wearing and isolating older and vulnerable people. Ferguson rightly prophesies that the economic consequences of lockdowns were historically unprecedented and may have exceeded the public health benefits. The monetary and fiscal measures would decouple asset prices from economic reality and would lead to financial instability and inflation. This was written in Sep 2020 and came true soon. We have not yet become free from the effects of that Covid-induced inflation. Had the Chinese authorities acted with speed and candour, the disaster might have been averted and millions of human lives could have been saved. The book also exposes the hypocrisy of American liberal media which accused President Donald Trump of not doing enough to curtail the spread of Covid. However, even the limited measures he initiated in Jan 2020 to close down American airspace to incoming traffic from China were condemned by much of the media as racist. At the same time, the author points out with concern the countries such as Taiwan and South Korea which excelled in containing the disease. This feat was achieved using surveillance of smart phones used by the public which infringed on civil rights and privacy. These nations could pull this off under the Asian dictum that an individual’s rights are subservient to the welfare of the society. This runs counter to western ideals which put the individual before anything else. The leeway such technologies afford to autocratic regimes is another serious issue.

Ferguson’s writing is profound and well-researched. This book is not a page-turner, but it will reward you for the time spent in assimilating the several nuances to every proposition presented diligently by the author. There is indeed a palpable link between the text to cultural icons such as paintings, literature and music, indicating the author’s intimate familiarity to these areas. This book includes a scathing criticism of China in the epilogue accusing it of being autocratic and illiberal. This is a welcome change from the behaviour of international organisations such as WHO which faithfully toed the Chinese narrative on Covid. The WHO’s spineless incompetence was exposed even in innocuous issues like naming the variants of virus mutations which was done according to the Greek alphabet. After variant ‘mu’ was named, the next in line were the letters ‘nu’ and ‘xi’. WHO was worried that the name ‘xi’ would upset the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. So they dropped it as well as the earlier letter ‘nu’ and selected ‘omicron’, which succeeds ‘xi’. Considering this in mind, Ferguson’s tirade against China is well directed. There is a long chapter on the economic consequences of Covid. Having been written in Aug-Sep 2020 when the progress of the disease was still uncertain, this chapter lacks depth and meaningful analysis. This appears too much US-centric. The arguments look premature and do not raise above discussing American politics and how its bureaucracy bungled the response measures. The whole chapter looks pointless when viewed in light of the book’s grand title.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Evergreen Legends of Kerala

Title: The Evergreen Legends of Kerala
Author: Sreekumari Ramachandran
Publisher: Vintage, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780143470144
Pages: 455

Anyone who has visited or at least seen pictures of Kerala need no prompting to realize that the region is incredibly beautiful physically. Kerala is tightly integrated to India’s national economy and even to international business on many levels from export of spices to extremely well-trained manpower. The impressive point to note amid this seamless connectivity with external partners is the cultural distinctness Kerala had always maintained. Its unique dance forms, artistic expressions, and inimitable festival pageantry make Kerala into a class of its own. Besides these, the people of Kerala nurtures a lot of legends, folk tales and ballads that are carried from one generation to the next. This book offers a glimpse into the rich lore and legends of Kerala where heritage and culture are not just remembered, but lived. The author promises at the outset that the book would not disappoint the reader. And she has kept the promise. Sreekumari Ramachandran is a bilingual writer in Malayalam and English. She has authored forty books including short stories, novels and biographies. Her English translation of the iconic Malayalam work Aithihyamala earned her intellectual recognition as a translator. She resides in Kochi.

Considering the antiquity of Malayalam literature, it may come as a surprise to many to learn that an anthology of legendary stories of the language was published only in the early-twentieth century. That task was undertaken by Kottarathil Shankunni, a school teacher and editor of Malayala Manorama’s poetry section. Aithihyamala (a string of legends) compiled in eight volumes, was the first of its kind and still serves as the standard interpretation of many folk tales that are in vogue. This book introduces some new stories not found in the Aithihyamala. The legend of Attukal Bhagavathy of Thiruvananthapuram is included along with the annual Pongala festival which holds the Guinness world record for the largest congregation of women. This seems to be a personal choice of the author as she extolls the experience of taking part in the festival as extremely unique which ‘must be soaked in first-hand to understand its magnificence’. This festival has gained huge popularity in the last two decades and has metamorphosed lately into a collective outing of women in so-called ‘she trips’ that helps to empower them. This book includes a section on the revered elephants of Kerala, which is the state animal. These giants hold a special place in the hearts of the people, and their significance extends far beyond the wild. Elephants are deeply woven into the fabric of the region’s culture. Their presence in festivals lend an air of grandeur and auspiciousness to the celebration. This section gets added relevance in the wake of nefarious efforts on the part of some activist judges to do away with this age-old custom through a court indictment. The author has greatly embellished the elephantine legends with fact and fiction and should be considered by the readers only as a fable. Almost all of the stories refer to a period in Kerala’s history when the caste hierarchy ruled supreme and stifled individual initiative and enterprise. However, there are some tales which exemplify the oneness of man and the futility of the caste system in demarcating people of talent. The twelve siblings born to a Pariah woman in her wedlock with Vararuchi, a Brahmin, is a case in point. The legend of Puliyambilly Nambudiri who was a Brahmin tantric but consumed liquor and meat is an extreme example. Even then, he humbled other Brahmins with his magical powers. The morale of the story is that true wisdom lies not in worldly knowledge, but in humility and open-mindedness. But Puliyambilly was not entirely above his times. His faculty to view the goddess Shakti in her corporeal form was taken away when he complained about the goddess accepting devotion from a low-caste person. This also serves as a lesson to thinkers and scholars.

Kottarathil Shankunni was a resident of Travancore and most of the stories of Aithihyamala were concerned with the legends circulating in the Travancore-Kochi region. This book makes up for the earlier tome’s omissions and includes an entire section of theyyams with eleven chapters so as to represent this unique cultural dance form of Malabar in a book professed to showcase the legends of the entire Kerala landmass. Kerala is famous not only for its breath-taking landscapes and serene backwaters but also for its mesmerizing kaleidoscope of festivals that embody the harmonious fusion of history, culture and spirituality. This book also includes a collection of the must-see festival events in Kerala.

The book is excellent for light reading and is a fine accessory as a travel companion. Pleasantness is the only experience it imparts to the reader. Several hand-drawn illustrations are included which add depth to the narrative. Each chapter is unrelated to the others but is grouped according to broader themes like famous temples, elephants, theyyams and so on. They can be read sequentially or randomly without any diminution of interest. A good thing about the narrative is that the author does not reinterpret the tales according to her worldview and in that sense does not draw upon much from artistic license. She faithfully follows the logic (or lack of it) of the original tale and takes some care to iron out the wrinkles to smoothen the reading experience for young, new readers. The author could have included a note on the criteria used for selection of topics because this is not an exclusive translation of Aithihyamala.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Nehru Development Model

Title: The Nehru Development Model – History and its Lasting Impact
Author: Arvind Panagariya
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780143466567
Pages: 519

At the time of her independence in 1947, India was ripe for an all-out change covering all sectors touching upon the lives of the people. It was like a lump of moistened clay waiting to be kneaded by a master sculptor into a masterpiece of art. Jawaharlal Nehru was bestowed that honour by destiny to craft a modern society. His efforts fell into two broad categories of political and the economic. He was immensely successful in the first in that the political model made by him stands unchallenged even now. Despite more than a hundred amendments to the Constitution, the essential foundations of Indian democracy have remained unshaken. This was not the case of his economic policy that proved to be an abject failure. In contrast to the political, Nehru’s economic policy framework has undergone a dramatic change in 1991. India turned away from an inward-looking and control-ridden economy into an outward-looking market economy. This book is a history of the development of Nehru’s policy and is divided into three parts. The first part establishes that the economic model India adopted was almost entirely due to Nehru. The next part explains in detail the policy regime, its implementation and the economic outcomes during the Nehru era. The final part develops the theme that by the time Nehru passed away, the socialist policy regime and thought had become sufficiently entrenched that a retreat from them in the foreseeable future was unlikely. Aravind Panagariya was the chairman of the Sixteenth Finance Commission holding the rank of a Union cabinet minister. He is also a professor of economics at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and was the first vice chairman of NITI Aayog. He has authored over twenty books.

The book describes the pathways Nehruvian economics followed in its quest for ideological nirvana rather than building up the country’s economy on sound and practical financial policies. Nehru was enamoured by socialism and favoured heavy industries to be installed first, which he fancied would make the nation self-sufficient. He then wanted to meticulously plan everything and to restrict the private industry to certain fields. He regulated the private sector through extensive licensing to keep large manufacturers away from products the small-scale industry was mandated to manufacture. Political ideology permeated the top echelons of decision making and the obsequious professionals engaged by the government based on their political opinion competed among themselves to be more loyal than the king. The panel of economists who evaluated the draft framework of the Second Five-Year plan formulated by Mahalanobis came out fully in support of it. They had no faith in the concept of prices and markets which was a sine qua non of economists and firmly believed that the government had to control and regulate every aspect of economic activity. They were out to outdo the socialists in socialism and planners at planning. Several foreign statisticians and economists who were consulted to finalise the second five-year plan were predominantly left-leaning and often admirers of the Soviet model. This went well as long as India enjoyed healthy foreign exchange reserves which she had built up through trade surplus during World War II. The surplus in foreign exchange (sterling balance) ran out in 1957-58 and the government adopted strict foreign exchange control. Even then, it frowned upon devaluation of the rupee to bolster exports.

Panagariya clearly elucidates his argument that Nehru singlehandedly moulded India’s policies and shall bear the blame for its dismal performance on the economic front. In his writings, Nehru described international trade as an instrument of imperialism and sought self-sufficiency for India. In an instance of sheer folly, Nehru discouraged exports by imposing an export tax on many items. While India had export controls on jute, Pakistan subsidized it and captured a good share of the world market. Even after the sterling balance ran out, government efforts to boost exports were lukewarm for five more years. India’s share of total world exports in 1947 was 2.5%. It fell to 2.1% in 1951, 1.4% in 1956, 1.2% in 1961 and to a measly 0.9% in 1966. This was Nehru’s track record! The presence of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel ensured that the 1948 Industrial Policy Resolution (IPR) provided a larger space for domestic and foreign capital. Nehru’s dominance after Patel’s death in 1950 found expression in the 1956 IPR which expanded the areas of public sector monopoly. India was unique in placing the social revolution ahead of the economic revolution through its high protection of industrial labour in the organized sector. Furthermore, the government controlled distribution and fixed prices for several commodities such as cement and automobiles like scooters and cars. Only those few who obtained allocations could purchase them when stocks were replenished. This led to widespread corruption. A used scooter commanded a higher price than a new one because a new one could be obtained only after years of waiting. An entrepreneur needed to obtain a license to start an industry. Applications for such licenses were evaluated in terms of their technical feasibility but not economic efficiency. Aggressive applicants with superior knowledge of the system got their applications quickly approved while more efficient producers who were late in making their requests were denied a license.

The author shines a torch into the darkness surrounding Nehru’s policies and brings to light the shortcomings which are so glaring as to make us wonder why the top-notch economists and professionals of that time failed to notice them. Agriculture was subject to benign neglect during the Nehru era. Food grain production failed to keep pace with demand. Any unexpected increase in output may be attributed to an increase in the cultivated area. This curse was lifted only after the arrival of Lal Bahadur Shastri as the prime minister who initiated steps towards Green Revolution and Indira Gandhi sustained his efforts with equal vigour. The book provides a brief look at India’s import policies from the British period onwards and how Nehru continued to hold on to a war-time arrangement even long after the end of the war. India’s import policy was comparatively free and liberal from 1882 onwards with some protection for domestic industry allowed in tariffs during World War I. The Second World War brought with it foreign exchange control and systematic direct import controls for the first time. This was relaxed towards the end of the war, but the Balance of Payments crisis in 1957 made the regime to revert to more or less war-time severity for two more decades. Some piecemeal liberalization was seen in the 1980s, but the system was genuinely dismantled only in 1991. The 1957 crisis was also due to poor management of the economy. India had accumulated a decent foreign exchange reserve (sterling balance) due to trade surplus accumulated during World War II. In the early 1950s, higher inflation in India than abroad caused by huge deficit financing for infrastructure projects combined with a fixed nominal exchange rate rendered the domestic product progressively less competitive. This led to a steady rise in import demand and stagnation in export revenue. Sterling balance was near zero in 1957 and the government scurried to control imports. Devaluation of the currency was the best option but Nehru was dead against it. Even though the author does not mention it, this might have been because the measure would have adversely affected the British staying back in India after independence. In 1966, when Indira Gandhi devalued the rupee by 57 per cent in one stroke, all the British returned to their homeland.

The book also analyses the path India had chosen to move forward in economic planning after Nehru passed away. It is obvious from the discussion that greater damage to the national economy was inflicted during the time of Indira Gandhi. Nehru and Indira’s economic policies led them to nationalize partially or wholly several sectors and enterprises and subject private sector economic activity to strict government control. The result was low growth for many more decades that condemned India to continued high poverty levels for nearly half a century. The Nehru legacy was faithfully followed by Shastri and Indira. The years 1969 to 1976 saw India rapidly swerve to the political left. Banks were nationalized in 1969 and insurance in 1971. Corporations with Rs. 20 crore or more assets were categorized as monopoly and harassed through the MRTP Act of 1969. Foreign exchange transactions were tightened by FERA in 1973. Foreign equity share was capped at 40 per cent in enterprises. The modified Industrial Disputes Act made it impossible in 1976 to lay off workers in industries with a head count greater than 300. Urban land ceiling was enacted in 1976. Constitution itself was amended to include the new words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ in the same year during Emergency. Personal income tax brackets touched 90 per cent. Rajiv Gandhi was the first prime minister without a socialist baggage. He introduced a few piecemeal reforms but developed cold feet after two years. It was Narasimha Rao’s stellar achievement to scrap Nehru for good. Even after Rao liberalized the economy, the business community was not overly enthusiastic. They only wanted to be freed of the shackles of investment licensing but did not want the competition from abroad through liberalization of trade and foreign investment. Even the export-oriented enterprises from India did not care to support negotiations that led to greater scope for entry of foreign entities. Vajpayee carried forward the reform process at a brisk pace. The power behind the Manmohan Singh regime (2004-14) was Sonia Gandhi and she had none of the liberalizing instincts of her husband. The reform process came to a standstill in this period. Matters got much worse in the time of UPA 2. Modi continued the reforms steadily but his stress on import-substitution industrialization is a fall-back to the old ‘self-sufficient’ thinking.

When Modi scrapped the Planning Commission, its demise was little lamented because this institution had outlived its utility. The author argues that the Commission was riddled with short-sightedness and incompetence right from the early years because Nehru had stuffed the Planning Commission with academic stooges and only those economists who shared his political vision. The Commission earnestly believed that the root cause of food crisis ripping the country apart was hoarding by a few vendors and not the poor farm output. This made them suggest price controls and monopoly trading by the state. The food ministry was, however, right on their contrary finding. They stressed on the incentives for farmers to grow more food. Planning Commission again opposed this saying that this would increase the disparities between commercial farmers and the masses of subsistence cultivators and deprive the industry of much-needed investment. It was the stubbornness of the food ministry that led to the Green Revolution. After the 1991 reforms, entrepreneurial decisions rather than licensing authorities determined sectoral allocations and little rationale remained for formulating five-year plans. The Commission continued its purposeless existence for two more decades until Modi disbanded it in 2014. The 12th Five Year Plan was the final one India had and it ended in 2016-17. Panagariya affirms that Narasimha Rao spearheaded the 1991 liberalisation program by his own conviction that India needed to be guided to the right track of progress and not through any compulsion exerted by the IMF as claimed by some scholars. However, it's a fact that Rao never claimed credit for the 1991 reforms which were so profound in nature. The book also makes a crucial reference to the doubtful quality of economic thought being produced in our academic institutions. Left or left-leaning faculty in economics uniformly dominate Indian academia of higher education, whether they be public or private (p.381). Even though the academicians and the budding talents trained by them have been slower to shed socialist era economic thought, reform-minded economist-bureaucrats are overwhelmingly found in government.

Coming from an economist who had adorned the topmost positions in Indian macro finance, this book presents facts quite authentically and substantiated by immense research. It seems the author has perused all relevant reports of the period under consideration which were in any way connected with economic policy administration. Several charts and graphs are included and are very informative. However, they do not have the visual appeal in monochrome print because the lines and bars are created in different colours. The book provides the reasons for the 1957 BoP crisis in considerable detail, but the causes of the 1991 foreign exchange crisis which compelled Indian politicians to change course are not elucidated. This is a minor shortcoming of the book. In the final part, the book considers the hypothetical case of what would have happened had Sardar Patel became the prime minister and outlived Nehru, instead of the other way round. He concludes that in such a scenario, India would have followed the right path in the 1950s itself and would have eliminated poverty many decades earlier.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star