Institutions Matter

Why is it that some countries continue to be poor despite being blessed with abundant natural resources, human capital and technology transfer from developed countries?  Many resource-rich African countries mired in poverty and bloody civil wars come to mind. Even India, despite its much lauded economic growth of recent years, can be added to the list of these underachievers. 

According to Tim Harford in The Undercover Economist (2006), the answer lies in the poor nations' institutions or lack thereof.  As he puts it succinctly, "institutions matter".

Most resource-rich poor countries lack institutions capable of holding executive power in check and making them accountable to the people. As a result, the ruling cliques and their cronies can cream off the proceeds from the resources with impunity and become obscenely rich while the vast majority of their compatriots sink deeper into poverty.

"Institutions matter".  This phrase popped into my mind again when reading about the 1843 British annexation of Sindh (Punjab) in John Keay's India: A History (2000). One of the last so-called princely states to be bullied into Pax Britannica, Sindh had been able to keep the British at bay with diplomacy and a modern military under the inspired rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

On the eve of the First British Afghan War in which the British Raj suffered one of its most disastrous losses, Ranjit Singh, the Bonaparte of Sindh, the Lion of Punjab, died, in 1839.   

Keay writes: "A philander of many wives and more women, he was not without potential successors. Yet so personal had been his rule and so absolute his authority that the institutions of sovereignty and government through which a successor might establish himself scarcely existed."

The result was predictable. In the midst of the succession crisis that engulfed Sindh, the British, in the words of the victorious British general, pulled off a "very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality."

'Rascality' actually sums up the Indian, or perhaps any human, history.

Keay opens his narrative with the ancient Indian concept of Matsya-Nyaya or 'fish law' according to which big fish devour small fish. The subsequent laundry list of dynasties great and small that subjugate various parts of the Indian sub-continent through the millennia appears like a rogue’s gallery of history.

When the various dynasties are not oppressing their wretched subjects by imposing extortionate taxes to finance their ego-boosting monumental extravagances, they are at each others' throats, pillaging the defeated kingdoms’  treasuries and polluting their women.

This gives lie to the myth of a golden age, the so-called ‘Ram Rajya’, to which many people of certain persuasion look back with great nostalgia in the Indian sub-continent.  

Keay has a slippery grasp of Sanskrit words and phrases but he, nevertheless, convincingly demolishes many cherished mytho-historical sacred cows of India. For example, he cogently argues that the epic Mahabharata predates Ramayana, a startling proposition only an outsider like Keay could perhaps make.

After reading about the umpteenth petty cutthroat performing a ritual digvijaya or world conquest and assuming the title of Maharajadhiraja ,  one starts to contemplate the august personages of surviving Maharajadhirajas with fresh eyes.

The Mythical Man-Month: Project Management Insights

Frederick Brooks, Jr’s software project management classic, The Mythical Man-Month (The MM-M), continues to be read, debated and entrenched in undergraduate reading lists thirty-five years after its publication. This is surprising in a field where 20 percent of current knowledge is estimated to become obsolete every 12 to 18 months.

To put things in perspective, when the book was first published, computer memory rented at USD12.00 per kilobyte per month. At that rate, the 32GB SD card in my Samsung Galaxy S would have cost over 400 million dollars per month.

One of the reasons behind the enduring popularity of The MM-M is the author’s premise that “managing a software project is more like other management than most ... initially believe”. Brooks, who earned his stripes as the Project Manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and its software, advances “propositions” that would be applicable in almost any non-trivial project, repeatedly hammering the point that project management is about people and teams, not technology.

He buttresses his propositions with war stories drawn from his IBM experience and other contemporary projects. Little wonder, then, that The MM-M continues to attract a motley readership comprising doctors, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers as well as IT professionals.

What are Brooks’ project management insights that have withstood the test of time and continue to be relevant in the new century? Here are some randomly selected teasers from the book, in quotes when copied verbatim, with my own comments in square brackets:

• The Biblical Tower of Babel project failed due to communication issues


• “... the essential problem [in project management] is communication”


• “The crucial task is to get the product defined. Many, many failures concern exactly those aspects that were never quite specified.”


•  “... adding manpower to a late software project makes the project later”


•  “... conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design” [or project]


•  “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”


• “The [project] manager will be continually amazed that policies he [sic] took for common knowledge are totally unknown by some member of his team”


• “The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly, this cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More users find more bugs.”


• “The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another”


• “Many poor systems come from an attempt to salvage a bad basic design and patch it with all kinds of cosmetic relief.”


• “How does a project get to be a year late? ... One day at a time” 


• “When one hears of disastrous schedule slippage in a project, he images that a series of major calamities must have befallen it. Usually, however, the disaster is due to termites, not tornadoes ... ” [As the saying goes, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost]


• “I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.” [author’s emphasis. He means coding by ‘representing’. The author contends that fidelity to specification is pointless if the specification itself is flawed]


• “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build ... For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want ... So ... it is necessary to allow for extensive iteration between the client and the designer as part of the system definition.”


• “In my experience most of the complexities which are encountered in systems work are symptoms of organizational malfunction. Trying to model this reality with equally complex programs is actually to conserve the mess instead of solving problems”


• “Chemical engineers have learnt not to take a process from the lab bench to the factory in one step, but to build a pilot plant to give experience in scaling quantities up and operating in non-protective environments.” [author’s emphasis]


• “The second [project] is the most dangerous system a person ever designs; the general tendency is to overdesign it ... using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.”


• “My rule of thumb is 1/3 of the schedule for design, 1/6 for coding, 1/4 for component testing, and 1/4 for system testing” [This means testing should be assigned half the schedule time. Coding gets the least amount of time]


•  “Schedule disaster, functional misfit, and system bugs all arise because the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Teams drift apart in assumptions.”

Memoir of a Long Distance Runner

In his former life, Haruki Murakami used to be a  jazz club owner in Tokyo who smoked 60 cigarettes a day. In his current avatar, he is a passionate long distance runner who quit smoking when he started running. By his own confession, he runs 10k everyday, and a half marathon and a marathon every year. From New York City to Boston Marathon, he has done it all. Many times. And he once ran a soul-sapping 100k ultramarathon.

In 1982, he ran his first unofficial marathon, in the original marathon course in Greece in sweltering summer heat, from Athens to the eponymous village of Marathon. It was near this small village that a small army of Athenians defeated the invading Persian force of Darius in 490 BC (British author Tom Holland's 2005 book Persian Fire re-tells the story of this battle in a colorful style although his barely disguised contempt for orientals might put off some readers). On the busy straight highway that links Athens to Marathon, Murakami kept the count of roadkill: three dogs and eleven cats flattened against the bitumen.

Murakami also happens to be a world famous writer. Everyday, before hitting the road for his daily 10k run, he sits at his desk for four hours,  applying the same intensity, focus and perseverance to writing that he cultivates during long solitary runs. In fact, Murakami claims that he learned everything about writing from long distance running. These two key preoccupations of his life, writing and running, furnish the subject matter of his slim memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running published by Vintage in 2008.

I bought Murakami's memoir to seek inspiration and concrete advice on training, strategy, race-day tactics, etc, in order to rekindle my own flagging running motivation. On these counts, the book was a bit disappointing. Sure, Murakami takes readers through his elaborate preparations for 2005 New York City Marathon and triathlons held in Japan and Hawaii, and how he fared in them. However, they come between extended meditations on aging and its corrosive effects on creativity and physical abilities. After a certain age, just as the wellspring of creativity starts to dry up, so does distance running increasingly become an exercise in diminishing returns.

This is not to say that the book was not a pleasure to read. It is just that it dwells less on the mundane details of distance running and more on its metaphysics. If you are after a distance running training manual, you have to look somewhere else.

Reading Best Australian Essays: An Annual Rite

Reading Black Inc. anthology of best Australian essays of the year has become something of an annual rite for my readerly self. Edited by a well-known published writer, the anthology showcases essays that meet three criteria.

Firstly, the essays have to satisfy the standards set by the editor, which could include parameters such as currency and relevance to contemporary debates and issues, literary and aesthetic merits, and whatever else the particular  idiosyncrasies of the editor dictates. Secondly, the writers have to be Australians and/or the essays have to engage Australian topics. Lastly, the essays have to have been published in the previous calendar year.

Having found last year's offering, The Best Australian Essays 2008, which was edited by David Marr, a bit disappointing, I bought this year's collection with a degree of reservations. I need not have worried. So far, the essays, which range far and wide just as Black Inc. promises, have succeeded to 'entertain, inspire and provoke'.

I have been reading the essays in random order (surely, an oxymoron), and two essays that have so far stood out are Richard Castles' Death Duties and Robert Dessaix's The Grand Illusion. In the former, Castles recounts the year when he worked in the grandiosely named Transfer Response Unit but which the author liked to think of as a 'taxi service for the already departed'. In unadorned terms, the job involved collecting dead bodies or body parts from homes, hospitals, nursing homes and crash sites whenever the coroner wanted to examine the bodies.

Castles observes that 'death could be beautiful', especially when old folks died in nursing homes. However, "Like all things in life, death can be done in a variety of bizarre and often messy ways". And, yes, people die during sex, he informs helpfully from his macabre experience.

The writer describes his first body pick-up memorably. A gung-ho homicide detective greets him and has a dig at him for his inexperience. He writes: "I simply told him that he was right, that this was my first time. As I walked through the door, I caught first glimpse of the body in situ. I never got used to the jolt of those moments. A dead body is always out of place: an interruption in the picture; a spectre; a mistake."

In a culture where death is sanitized, where most people have never seen a dead body, Castles' essay confronts readers with the pervasiveness of death, its finality and  implacability, the stark reality that it is always lurking nearby in the shadows, just below our consciousness.

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignright" width="105" caption="Robyn Davidson, editor of The Best Australian Essays 2009. Picture Courtesy of Black Inc."][/caption]

Dessaix's essay The Grand Illusion sifts through the travel industry hype and hyperbole to re-define the notion of a perfect getaway, in itself a quaint Victorian notion that became a 20th century mass consumer craze just like MacDonald's thanks to the swelling of the middle class rank in the developed countries.

For Dessaix, who, among others, authored Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004), the perfect holiday destination is not tourist-infested Bali but the "grubby little Tozeur on the edge of the Sahara in Tunisia's south, however, where there's nothing to see and nothing ever happens" but where "I feel dense with wakefulness".

"In Tozeur, in the labyrinth of the old town, lost amongst the endless palms, or just loitering with intent outside a carpet shop at night, when the town springs to life, I find myself very interesting indeed."

The central contention of this essay is that modern travel is a form of escape from our own bored, satiated selves to places where we find ourselves interesting again. This may not necessarily happen in luxury hotels and resorts where we end up drinking the same cocktails and watching the same silly sitcoms as at home.

"The antidote to boredom lies not in excitement, amazement, unparalleled vistas or repose in paradise, but in being woken up to our own inner complexity, our density, and befriending it," Dessaix writes. He cheekily suggests that such inner awakenings could take place even in, wait for it, Dubai, the new Mecca of conspicuous consumerism, for "Good travelling depends not on the travel, but on the traveller."

The Makings of Obama

The life story of President Barack Obama is too well-known to repeat here.  However, having just read his acclaimed memoir Dreams From My Father (1995), I just had to add my two cents' worth to the growing discipline of Obamalogy.

[caption id="attachment_303" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Young Obama with his (from left) grand father, mother and half-sister Maya in Hawaii early 1970s. Picture sourced from wikipedia"][/caption]

Written after becoming the first African American president of Harvard Law Review and years before he ran for his first political office, the book strikes readers with the honesty and poignancy of the voice of a young African American man searching for his place in the world.

Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, the young Obama feels trapped between two worlds, and groans under the unbearable burden of the 'unique and universal' history of his people in the US.  He recounts the angst and sense of helplessness felt by himself and his black college friends in a world in which they feel the rules of the game have been written by somebody else and even their perceived identity foisted on them by others.

The search for his identity takes Obama to the ancestral land of his forefathers in a remote village in Kenya.  There, he learns the full story of his own absent father, who, despite being a brilliant Harvard scholar, died a broken man thanks to a combination of his naive idealism, incurable character flaws and ancient tribal grudges.

Obama largely won his presidency in 2008 on the back of his sublime oratory reminiscent of Abe Lincoln. His simple, direct prose is equally a joy to read.

Towards the end of the book, a female African history professor that Obama meets in Kenya tells him, "In the end, I'm less interested in a daughter who's authentically African than one who is authentically herself." I think there is a priceless lesson for all of us in this beautiful thought.

The Joy of Running

My tongue-in-cheek remark to a friend after reading Christopher McDougall's Born To Run was this: "Marathons are for wimps". Now, I have yet to run a marathon and I have no illusions about the dedication, hard work, toughness and tenacity required to complete a marathon but after reading about 'ultra freaks' running up and down the 10,000+ feet high Colorado mountains for 100 miles, or plodding 135 miles across the floor of the Death Valley in California in 135 degrees heat, one can be forgiven for thinking that marathons are a stroll in the park.

Born To Run opens with an all too familiar story. A beefy former war correspondent who is built like someone that nature intended 'to take a bullet for the President' rather than pound down the pavement, Mcdougall is doing the rounds of sports shrinks to treat his dodgy feet. In the winter of 2003, he is in Mexico chasing a missing pop star for The New York Times Magazine when he stumbles across a picture of a Jesus like figure running down a rockslide. Welcome to the secret world of Tarahumara Indians, the greatest ultra runners the world has never heard about.

Living like invisible ghosts in the shadowy recesses of the Copper Canyons of Mexico, the peaceful Tarahumara tribes have for centuries outrun their Indian and European tormentors alike just to survive. What is the secret behind their superhuman prowess that enables them to run for hundreds of miles without rest? This is the question that persuades Mcdougall to abandon his celebrity hunt and start another type of hunt, the hunt for a mythical gringo named Caballo Blanco, the 'white horse' who lives with the Tarahumara and runs like one.

Before the book finishes, there is a gripping duel over 100 miles of punishing Colorado trails between a Community College teacher named Ann Tracy and top Tarahumara runners who have been coaxed to participate in the Leadville 100 ultramarathon with promises of corn bags for their villages. I felt the description of this race alone gave all the bang for my bucks.

The book climaxes with a 50 mile foot race in the treacherous Tarahumara territory between the cream of the Tarahumara tribe and the superstars of the North American - which is to say, the world's - ultramarathon scene.

And the secret to the Tarahumara success? In a sentence or three, it is this: All humans are hardwired to run. As kids, all of us run with joyful abandon. As we grow up, we lose this sense of playfulness and sheer joy in running. The Tarahumara keep this playful spirit alive into adulthood, and they have over the millenia woven the art of running into rituals that govern their daily lives. Also, they do not buy expensive, gel-filled Nike running shoes that seem to do more harm than good.