Sunday 25 February 2018
Saturday 24 February 2018
Imran Khan on his third marriage
Im The Dim in The Friday Times
From hat on head, to dupatta on brow, to naqab on face, I have been through several lives and several wives. I have finally reached the pineapple of nirvana because I have seen the light. I might however see a few more lights, now and then. But for the moment, I am delighted to announce my wedding, which took place on January 1, er sorry I meant February whatever, witnessed by my closest comrades, whose names escape me. And Pinky’s mum and five kids, whose names escape me.
Unlike my previous marriages, this is an everlasting bond, not bondage. Henceforward, kinks will be replaced by Pinks. And good times will be replaced by Godly times. Above all, Pink is the new Black.
Back to politics: the best thing Nawaz Sharif can now do is to leave Pakistan for another decade or so. He should leave governance to me. I have some very creative ideas on how to tackle the budget deficit. I will get hefty sponsorships for everything, especially great state institutions. Hence forward, it will be Sunsilk General Headquarters, Bahria National Assembly, Rose Petal Pakistan Navy, Coca Cola National Accountability Bureau, Masterfoam Supreme Court, Pepsi Election Commission and so on. There will be a huge influx of money from these sponsorships and the deficit will go up in a puff of smoke, unlike me who’s stopped puffing and smoking and am in the Pink of health as a result.
I’ve now gone so thoroughly native that I’ve dropped all my old friends in London. The editor of Tatler, Lady Patricia Pitbull-Terrier called to interview me about my new marriage but I didn’t take her call. Then she got her secretary Eliza Dolittle to ring, no response from me. Then she got her hairdresser Vidal Sassoon to call, no response from me. Then she got her photographer the late Cecil Beaton to call me, still no response. Finally, she got my old friend Mick Jagger to call me and try and make conversation by asking what I thought of Teresa May’s new Abortion Bill, “Oh for God’s sake, Mick, just pay it!”
From hat on head, to dupatta on brow, to naqab on face, I have been through several lives and several wives. I have finally reached the pineapple of nirvana because I have seen the light. I might however see a few more lights, now and then. But for the moment, I am delighted to announce my wedding, which took place on January 1, er sorry I meant February whatever, witnessed by my closest comrades, whose names escape me. And Pinky’s mum and five kids, whose names escape me.
Unlike my previous marriages, this is an everlasting bond, not bondage. Henceforward, kinks will be replaced by Pinks. And good times will be replaced by Godly times. Above all, Pink is the new Black.
Back to politics: the best thing Nawaz Sharif can now do is to leave Pakistan for another decade or so. He should leave governance to me. I have some very creative ideas on how to tackle the budget deficit. I will get hefty sponsorships for everything, especially great state institutions. Hence forward, it will be Sunsilk General Headquarters, Bahria National Assembly, Rose Petal Pakistan Navy, Coca Cola National Accountability Bureau, Masterfoam Supreme Court, Pepsi Election Commission and so on. There will be a huge influx of money from these sponsorships and the deficit will go up in a puff of smoke, unlike me who’s stopped puffing and smoking and am in the Pink of health as a result.
I’ve now gone so thoroughly native that I’ve dropped all my old friends in London. The editor of Tatler, Lady Patricia Pitbull-Terrier called to interview me about my new marriage but I didn’t take her call. Then she got her secretary Eliza Dolittle to ring, no response from me. Then she got her hairdresser Vidal Sassoon to call, no response from me. Then she got her photographer the late Cecil Beaton to call me, still no response. Finally, she got my old friend Mick Jagger to call me and try and make conversation by asking what I thought of Teresa May’s new Abortion Bill, “Oh for God’s sake, Mick, just pay it!”
Friday 23 February 2018
Zombie companies walk among us
Tim Harford in The Financial Times
For vampires, the weakness is garlic. For werewolves, it’s a silver bullet. And for zombies? Perhaps a rise in interest rates will do the trick.
For vampires, the weakness is garlic. For werewolves, it’s a silver bullet. And for zombies? Perhaps a rise in interest rates will do the trick.
Economists have worried about “zombie companies” for decades. Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, has followed a trail of references back to 1989, noting sightings of these zombies in Japan from the 1990s, and more recently in China. The fundamental concern is that there are companies which should be dead, yet continue to lumber on, ruining things for everyone.
It’s a vivid metaphor — perhaps a little too vivid — and it is likely to be tested over the months and years to come if, as almost everyone expects, central banks continue to raise interest rates back to what veterans might describe as “normal”.
Claudio Borio of the Bank for International Settlements recently gave a speech in which he worried about the tendency of low interest rates to sustain zombie companies. Mr Borio has consistently been concerned about the distorting effects of low interest rates, but the zombie element of his argument adds a new twist.
Researchers at both the BIS and the OECD, the club of wealthy nations, have found evidence that low interest rates seem conducive to the existence of zombies, which they define as older companies that don’t make enough money to service their debts. As interest rates have fallen around the world, such zombies have become more prevalent and have also shown more endurance.
On average, across the US, Japan, Australia and western Europe, the proportion of firms that are zombies has risen fivefold since 1987, from 2 to 10 per cent. The zombies walk among us.
Why should we worry? One obvious answer is that zombies absorb resources. If a zombie retailer occupies a space on the high street, that makes it harder and more expensive for a start-up or a successful competitor to move in. The same goes for any resource from advertising space to electricity, and of course it goes for staff, too.
We would usually expect a thriving company to be able to outbid the walking dead for anything necessary, from a finance director to a unit in an industrial estate. But the status quo always has a certain power, and in some cases, the zombie might be at an unfair advantage.
Consider a zombie bank, propped up by a government guarantee but basically insolvent. Gambling on resurrection, it tries to expand by offering high rates to depositors and cheap loans to creditors. In the late 1980s, Joseph Stiglitz — later to win a Nobel memorial prize in economics — proposed a “Gresham’s law” of savings-and-loan associations based on this tendency: bad associations crowd out good ones.
More recently, the collapse of Carillion, a large British outsourcing and construction firm, showed a similar dynamic. The more Carillion struggled, the more desperate it became to win new business — which meant aggressive bids in competitive auctions, dooming Carillion while starving competitors of business.
Having written an entire book about the importance of failure, I am naturally sympathetic to Mr Borio’s argument. Modern economies have a low failure rate — probably too low. Still, one should not be too cavalier about this point. To ordinary ears, bankruptcy sounds unambiguously bad. If you spend too much time thinking about zombie firms and economic dynamism, bankruptcy starts to sound unambiguously good.
Cut down those zombies and let highly productive new firms grow in the rich soil, fertilised by those zombie corpses, sounds like — forgive the play on words — a no-brainer. But should we really be so pleased that so many of the UK’s coal mines, or the auto suppliers of Detroit, have been successfully killed off? If nothing has replaced them, there is nothing to celebrate.
One of the lessons of recent economic research by economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson has been that productive new firms do not necessarily spring up as we might have hoped. Mr Autor and his colleagues have, in a series of influential papers, tracked local areas subject to the sudden shock of competition from imported Chinese products. Their conclusion: recovery is neither quick nor automatic.
Nor is it always easy for laid-off workers to stroll into fresh jobs: if you have worked for several years stitching soft toys, then the obvious next step when the toy factory lays you off is to start stitching shirts or trousers instead. Unfortunately, that is also the obvious next move for the importers, or the robots.
We can make a long list of policies that might help new productive firms to get started and expand: education, infrastructure, flexible regulations, small-business finance and so on. There is some evidence in favour of these policies, but no checklist can guarantee results.
Still, that is where to focus our attention as the zombies start to expire. The easier it is to start a new idea, the more hard-nosed we can be about killing off the old ones. It is necessary that the zombies must die, but that cannot be where the story ends.
Thursday 22 February 2018
How to stop Brexit
Simon Kuper in The Financial Times
I’m not a natural activist, because I’m too pessimistic, but the other evening I helped gather some stop-Brexit people in a room in London. Much as I love them, they looked like a Daily Mail cartoon of the cosmopolitan elite. Going home on the bus afterwards, I read The Daily Telegraph’s story that the whole event had been funded by international investor George Soros (obviously no offshore plutocrats backed Leave). In fact, though, Stoppers come in several mutually suspicious groups, only one of which is financed by Soros. Most Stoppers are highly self-motivated. One man told me: “I want to be able to tell my children later that at least I tried to block it.”
You’d think Stoppers have no chance. Flawed though the Brexit referendum was, everyone agreed its rules in advance. After Leave’s victory, most Britons almost instantly switched off. Since July 2016, Google searches for Manchester United (or for Chelsea or Arsenal football clubs) have always outnumbered those for Brexit. Yet Stoppers finally feel they can win, perhaps this autumn. I think their best chance will be in 2020.
This autumn, parliament will vote on the government’s “withdrawal agreement” with Europe. MPs won’t vote the bill down. Most think they lack the legitimacy to stop Brexit, since “the people” have spoken. However, MPs might just vote for a second referendum that gives voters final approval over the terms of withdrawal. Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn is a Brexiter, but he knows his party is now overwhelmingly Remain. “Crablike, he’s moving in that direction,” says Andrew Adonis, a chief Stopper and former Labour minister. If Labour and 20 Conservative MPs vote for a referendum, that’s probably enough. The EU would give Britain time to hold one, because it’s committed to letting each state follow its democratic processes before enacting a treaty.
Meanwhile, Stoppers are trying to shift public opinion through mostly youth-led campaigns. Already, polls since last summer show a consistent if slight lead for Remain over Leave. Now Stoppers need to persuade voters they aren’t simply the liberal elite, says Adonis. That means promising radical policies to help left-behinds.
The problem is that a narrow win for Stop in a second referendum would hardly put the Brexit issue to bed. Anyway, the EU probably wouldn’t halt Brexit to readmit a divided UK.
But even if the withdrawal bill passes parliament, the fight continues. The key point is that the bill will be almost content-free. The government cannot say what kind of Brexit it wants, because then it would split. So the bill, after its thrilling front page (“The UK will leave the EU on March 29 2019”), will be just another fudge. It will say something like: “After a two-year transition, we will leave the single market (though possibly not the customs union), having negotiated new arrangements giving us full access to European markets.”
But everyone knows Britain can only have full access by staying in the single market. So the bill will simply delay to 2021 the unanswerable question: what kind of Brexit does Britain want? The issues will be the same as today: a hard Brexit would cause economic pain, and could be vetoed by the Irish Republic. A soft Brexit would anger hard Brexiters.
From March 2019 through 2021, the UK will have officially left the EU, but won’t have chosen its future status. Meanwhile, during the transition, it will remain in the single market and customs union, and keep paying into the EU budget, only without any say in European decisions.
Nobody will like that. So, in 2020, Stoppers can say: “You’ve been negotiating Brexit for four years and got nowhere. Meanwhile, demographic change means the electorate is now clearly Remain. How about a second referendum on whether to jump off the cliff?”
Reversing Brexit in 2020 would be logistically doable given that the UK would never have abandoned European rules. Northern European states — led by Ireland and the Netherlands — would press for Britain’s readmission. The EU would demand guarantees that Britons wouldn’t try Brexit again for a generation. It could then trumpet Brexit’s failure as proof that there’s no life outside the EU.
There’s a third, more painful scenario in which the Stoppers ultimately win. This entails the UK achieving a genuine Brexit. The day Brexit happens, the British political argument changes. For now, all the country’s problems are blamed on Brussels and immigrants. After Brexit, all problems will be blamed on Brexit, even if they have nothing to do with it. The Stoppers — by then Reversers — will ask every day: “Where are the sunny uplands that the Brexiters promised?”
Rejoining the EU should be feasible given that the EU is already reluctantly starting to accept that it’s not a union but several coalitions of states, each moving at different speeds. The divides between countries such as Finland, Hungary and Italy are simply too big to permit unity. A returning UK could rejoin the northern ring of anti-federalist states, stay outside the Schengen passport-free zone and the euro, and finally try tackling its real problems.
I’m not a natural activist, because I’m too pessimistic, but the other evening I helped gather some stop-Brexit people in a room in London. Much as I love them, they looked like a Daily Mail cartoon of the cosmopolitan elite. Going home on the bus afterwards, I read The Daily Telegraph’s story that the whole event had been funded by international investor George Soros (obviously no offshore plutocrats backed Leave). In fact, though, Stoppers come in several mutually suspicious groups, only one of which is financed by Soros. Most Stoppers are highly self-motivated. One man told me: “I want to be able to tell my children later that at least I tried to block it.”
You’d think Stoppers have no chance. Flawed though the Brexit referendum was, everyone agreed its rules in advance. After Leave’s victory, most Britons almost instantly switched off. Since July 2016, Google searches for Manchester United (or for Chelsea or Arsenal football clubs) have always outnumbered those for Brexit. Yet Stoppers finally feel they can win, perhaps this autumn. I think their best chance will be in 2020.
This autumn, parliament will vote on the government’s “withdrawal agreement” with Europe. MPs won’t vote the bill down. Most think they lack the legitimacy to stop Brexit, since “the people” have spoken. However, MPs might just vote for a second referendum that gives voters final approval over the terms of withdrawal. Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn is a Brexiter, but he knows his party is now overwhelmingly Remain. “Crablike, he’s moving in that direction,” says Andrew Adonis, a chief Stopper and former Labour minister. If Labour and 20 Conservative MPs vote for a referendum, that’s probably enough. The EU would give Britain time to hold one, because it’s committed to letting each state follow its democratic processes before enacting a treaty.
Meanwhile, Stoppers are trying to shift public opinion through mostly youth-led campaigns. Already, polls since last summer show a consistent if slight lead for Remain over Leave. Now Stoppers need to persuade voters they aren’t simply the liberal elite, says Adonis. That means promising radical policies to help left-behinds.
The problem is that a narrow win for Stop in a second referendum would hardly put the Brexit issue to bed. Anyway, the EU probably wouldn’t halt Brexit to readmit a divided UK.
But even if the withdrawal bill passes parliament, the fight continues. The key point is that the bill will be almost content-free. The government cannot say what kind of Brexit it wants, because then it would split. So the bill, after its thrilling front page (“The UK will leave the EU on March 29 2019”), will be just another fudge. It will say something like: “After a two-year transition, we will leave the single market (though possibly not the customs union), having negotiated new arrangements giving us full access to European markets.”
But everyone knows Britain can only have full access by staying in the single market. So the bill will simply delay to 2021 the unanswerable question: what kind of Brexit does Britain want? The issues will be the same as today: a hard Brexit would cause economic pain, and could be vetoed by the Irish Republic. A soft Brexit would anger hard Brexiters.
From March 2019 through 2021, the UK will have officially left the EU, but won’t have chosen its future status. Meanwhile, during the transition, it will remain in the single market and customs union, and keep paying into the EU budget, only without any say in European decisions.
Nobody will like that. So, in 2020, Stoppers can say: “You’ve been negotiating Brexit for four years and got nowhere. Meanwhile, demographic change means the electorate is now clearly Remain. How about a second referendum on whether to jump off the cliff?”
Reversing Brexit in 2020 would be logistically doable given that the UK would never have abandoned European rules. Northern European states — led by Ireland and the Netherlands — would press for Britain’s readmission. The EU would demand guarantees that Britons wouldn’t try Brexit again for a generation. It could then trumpet Brexit’s failure as proof that there’s no life outside the EU.
There’s a third, more painful scenario in which the Stoppers ultimately win. This entails the UK achieving a genuine Brexit. The day Brexit happens, the British political argument changes. For now, all the country’s problems are blamed on Brussels and immigrants. After Brexit, all problems will be blamed on Brexit, even if they have nothing to do with it. The Stoppers — by then Reversers — will ask every day: “Where are the sunny uplands that the Brexiters promised?”
Rejoining the EU should be feasible given that the EU is already reluctantly starting to accept that it’s not a union but several coalitions of states, each moving at different speeds. The divides between countries such as Finland, Hungary and Italy are simply too big to permit unity. A returning UK could rejoin the northern ring of anti-federalist states, stay outside the Schengen passport-free zone and the euro, and finally try tackling its real problems.
Monday 19 February 2018
Sunday 18 February 2018
Robots + Capital - The redundancy of human beings
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
Human beings are being made redundant by something they created. This is not a humanoid, robot, or computer but money as capital
We have all read stories, or seen films, about robots taking over. How, some time in the future, human beings will be marginalised, effectively replaced by machines, real or virtual. Common to these stories is the trope of the world taken over by something constructed of inert material, something mechanical and ‘heartless’. Also common to these stories is the idea that this will happen in the future.
What if I tell you that it has already happened? The future is here!
The culprit that humans created
In fact, the future has been building up for some decades. Roughly from the 1970s onwards, human beings have been increasingly made redundant by something they created, and that was once of use to them. Except that this ‘something’ is not a humanoid, robot, or even a computer; it is money. Or, more precisely, it is money as capital.
It was precipitated in 1973, when floating exchange rates were introduced. As economist Samir Amin notes, this was the logical result of the “concomitance of the U.S. deficit (leading to an excess of dollars available on the market) and the crisis of productive investment” which had produced “a mass of floating capital with no place to go.” With floating exchange rates, this excess of dollars could be plunged into sheer financial speculation across national borders. Financial speculation had always been a part of capitalism, but floating exchange rates dissolved the ties between capital, goods (trade and production) and labour. Financial speculation gradually floated free of human labour and even of money, as a medium of exchange. If I were a theorist of capitalism of the Adam Smith variety, I would say that capitalism, as we knew it (and still, erroneously, imagine it), started dying in 1973.
Amin goes on to stress the consequences of this: The ratio between hedging operations on the one side and production and international trading on the other rose to 28:1 by 2002 — “a disproportion that has been constantly growing for about the last twenty years and which has never been witnessed in the entire history of capitalism.” In other words, while world trade was valued at $2 billion around 2005, international capital movements were estimated at $50 billion.
How can there be capital movements in such excess of trade? Adam Smith would have failed to understand it. Karl Marx, who feared something like this, would have failed to imagine its scale.
This is what has happened: capital, which was always the abstract logic of money, has riven free of money as a medium of exchange. It no longer needs anything to exchange — and, hence, anyone to produce — in order to grow. (I am exaggerating, but only a bit.)
Theorists have argued that money is a social relation and a medium of exchange. That is not true of most capital today, which need not be ploughed back into any kind of production, trade, labour or even services. It can just be moved around as numbers. This is what day traders do. They do not look at company balance sheets or supply-demand statistics; they simply look at numbers on the computer screen.
This is what explains the dichotomy — most obvious in Donald Trump’s U.S., but not absent in places like the U.K., France or India — between the rhetoric of politicians and their actual actions. Politicians might come to power by promising to ‘drain the swamp’, but what they do, once assured of political power, is to partake in the monopoly of finance capital. This abstract capital is the ‘robot’ — call it Robital — that has marginalised human beings.
I am not making a Marxist point about capital under classical capitalism: despite its tendency towards exploitation, this was still largely invested in human labour. This is not the case any longer. Finance capital does not really need humans — apart from the 1% that own most of it, and another 30% or so of necessary service providers, including IT ones, whose numbers should be expected to steadily shrink.
Robotisation has already taken place: it is only its physical enactment (actual robots) that is still building up. Robots, as replacements for human beings, are the consequence of the abstract nature of finance capital. Robotised agriculture and office robots are a consequence of this. If most humans are redundant and most capital is in the hands of a 1% superclass, it is inevitable that this capital will be invested in creating machines that can make the elite even less dependent on other human beings.
The underlying cause
My American friends wonder about the blindness of Republican politicians who refuse to provide medical support to ordinary Americans and even dismantle the few supports that exist. My British friends talk of the slow spread of homelessness in the U.K. My Indian friends worry about matters such as thousands of farmer suicides. The working middle class crumbles in most countries.
Here is the underlying cause of all of this: the redundancy of human beings, because capital can now replicate itself, endlessly, without being forced back into human labour and trade. We are entering an age where visible genocides — as in Syria or Yemen — might be matched by invisible ones, such as the unremarked deaths of the homeless, the deprived and the marginal.
Robital is here.
Human beings are being made redundant by something they created. This is not a humanoid, robot, or computer but money as capital
We have all read stories, or seen films, about robots taking over. How, some time in the future, human beings will be marginalised, effectively replaced by machines, real or virtual. Common to these stories is the trope of the world taken over by something constructed of inert material, something mechanical and ‘heartless’. Also common to these stories is the idea that this will happen in the future.
What if I tell you that it has already happened? The future is here!
The culprit that humans created
In fact, the future has been building up for some decades. Roughly from the 1970s onwards, human beings have been increasingly made redundant by something they created, and that was once of use to them. Except that this ‘something’ is not a humanoid, robot, or even a computer; it is money. Or, more precisely, it is money as capital.
It was precipitated in 1973, when floating exchange rates were introduced. As economist Samir Amin notes, this was the logical result of the “concomitance of the U.S. deficit (leading to an excess of dollars available on the market) and the crisis of productive investment” which had produced “a mass of floating capital with no place to go.” With floating exchange rates, this excess of dollars could be plunged into sheer financial speculation across national borders. Financial speculation had always been a part of capitalism, but floating exchange rates dissolved the ties between capital, goods (trade and production) and labour. Financial speculation gradually floated free of human labour and even of money, as a medium of exchange. If I were a theorist of capitalism of the Adam Smith variety, I would say that capitalism, as we knew it (and still, erroneously, imagine it), started dying in 1973.
Amin goes on to stress the consequences of this: The ratio between hedging operations on the one side and production and international trading on the other rose to 28:1 by 2002 — “a disproportion that has been constantly growing for about the last twenty years and which has never been witnessed in the entire history of capitalism.” In other words, while world trade was valued at $2 billion around 2005, international capital movements were estimated at $50 billion.
How can there be capital movements in such excess of trade? Adam Smith would have failed to understand it. Karl Marx, who feared something like this, would have failed to imagine its scale.
This is what has happened: capital, which was always the abstract logic of money, has riven free of money as a medium of exchange. It no longer needs anything to exchange — and, hence, anyone to produce — in order to grow. (I am exaggerating, but only a bit.)
Theorists have argued that money is a social relation and a medium of exchange. That is not true of most capital today, which need not be ploughed back into any kind of production, trade, labour or even services. It can just be moved around as numbers. This is what day traders do. They do not look at company balance sheets or supply-demand statistics; they simply look at numbers on the computer screen.
This is what explains the dichotomy — most obvious in Donald Trump’s U.S., but not absent in places like the U.K., France or India — between the rhetoric of politicians and their actual actions. Politicians might come to power by promising to ‘drain the swamp’, but what they do, once assured of political power, is to partake in the monopoly of finance capital. This abstract capital is the ‘robot’ — call it Robital — that has marginalised human beings.
I am not making a Marxist point about capital under classical capitalism: despite its tendency towards exploitation, this was still largely invested in human labour. This is not the case any longer. Finance capital does not really need humans — apart from the 1% that own most of it, and another 30% or so of necessary service providers, including IT ones, whose numbers should be expected to steadily shrink.
Robotisation has already taken place: it is only its physical enactment (actual robots) that is still building up. Robots, as replacements for human beings, are the consequence of the abstract nature of finance capital. Robotised agriculture and office robots are a consequence of this. If most humans are redundant and most capital is in the hands of a 1% superclass, it is inevitable that this capital will be invested in creating machines that can make the elite even less dependent on other human beings.
The underlying cause
My American friends wonder about the blindness of Republican politicians who refuse to provide medical support to ordinary Americans and even dismantle the few supports that exist. My British friends talk of the slow spread of homelessness in the U.K. My Indian friends worry about matters such as thousands of farmer suicides. The working middle class crumbles in most countries.
Here is the underlying cause of all of this: the redundancy of human beings, because capital can now replicate itself, endlessly, without being forced back into human labour and trade. We are entering an age where visible genocides — as in Syria or Yemen — might be matched by invisible ones, such as the unremarked deaths of the homeless, the deprived and the marginal.
Robital is here.
Ramanujan and Salam — what inspired them?
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
SRINIVISAN Ramanujan (1887-1920) and Muhammad Abdus Salam (1926-1996), two intellectual giants of the 20th century, were born in the same corner of the world. Of humble origin and educated in local schools, they nevertheless rose to dizzying heights in the arcane world of theoretical science. Few others on the subcontinent enjoy their iconic status.
What I shall address below is that both attributed their works to some divine agency. Some of their devotees see this in validating their own respective belief system. With the rise of Hindutva in India, and the violent persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan, these claims assume considerable importance. Hence a careful, impartial examination is called for.
No mathematician has a story more romantic than Ramanujan’s. Many books, plays, and movies — such as The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) — dwell upon this enigmatic figure. Drawing upon deep intuition, Ramanujan created new concepts in the theory of numbers, elliptic functions and infinite series. Even full-blown mathematicians take years to grasp his complex ideas.
Exceptional genes plus fortunate circumstances is why some become maths-science superstars.
Born in Madras to a low-level clerk, this young Brahmin boy was steeped in tradition, sang religious songs, attended temple pujas, and was a strict vegetarian. But by age 12, he was inventing sophisticated theorems and unwittingly duplicating some results of European mathematicians of the previous century. He flunked college twice for lack of interest in anything but mathematics — in which he excelled. His awestruck teachers could not decide whether he was a genius or fraud.
At 16, encouraged by one of his teachers, Ramanujan sent off a letter to the renowned pure mathematician G.W. Hardy at Cambridge University. It was accompanied by theorems densely packed into nine pages. Hardy was stunned and arranged for him to travel to England. Ramanujan duly obtained permission from the family goddess Namagiri, consulting appropriate astrological data before his voyage overseas.
At age 32, Ramanujan was dead. He had returned to Madras exhausted, half-famished and fed up with English winters. But even on his deathbed, his pen scrawled out profound results. A century later these still intrigue the brainiest of mathematicians and string theorists. He attributed his exceptional qualities to the psychic visitations of Namagiri who would whisper equations to him. Sometimes, he said, “she wrote on my tongue”. He told colleagues, “An equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God.”
This was how Ramanujan saw it. But how does one explain that Euler, Bernoulli, Gauss, Cantor, Hilbert and Gödel were non-Brahmin mathematicians who stood still taller? The edifice of modern mathematics owes largely to them, not to Ramanujan. Some were ardent Christians, others agnostic or atheistic. Nobody knows how to explain their feats.
Curiously, Abdus Salam, then a 19-year-old student at Government College Lahore, wrote his very first paper proposing a simpler solution to an intriguing mathematical problem posed about 20 years earlier by Ramanujan. He ended his paper by triumphantly declaring: “His [Ramanujan’s] solution is much more laborious”.
This was Salam’s debut into the world of high mathematics. Born into a conservative religious environment in Jhang — then a village-town — this child prodigy rapidly outpaced his teachers. Fortunately they bore him no grudge and helped him move on to Lahore. The next stop was Cambridge, where he excelled. By the early 1960s, he was one of the world’s top particle physicists, ultimately winning 20 international prizes and honours including the Nobel Prize in 1979.
In his later years, Salam gave numerous public lectures and interviews, recorded on camera and in print, locating his source of inspiration in his religious belief. In particular he said the concept of unity of God powered his quest for the unification of nature’s fundamental forces as well as his search for ever fewer numbers of elementary particles.
For me, to engage on a sensitive matter with one so senior and superior was not easy. But sometime in 1986 I picked up the courage to ask Salam the obvious question: both he, who thought himself a believer, and Steven Weinberg, an avowed atheist, had worked independently on unifying two of nature’s four fundamental forces and yet had arrived at precisely the same conclusions. How?
Salam gave his answer in the preface he wrote for my book on Islam and science (1990), where he stated: “I can confirm that he [Hoodbhoy] is right…”, and then went on to explicitly clarify that any bias towards the unification paradigm in his thinking was only unconsciously motivated by his religious background.
There is not the slightest doubt that Salam used exactly the same tools as Weinberg did — principally quantum mechanics and relativity theory — and did physics exactly as other physicists do (but better than most). His political and religious views were irrelevant to his work. Let’s note that although they are giants of physics, Salam and Weinberg stood on the shoulders of still greater giants — Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Wheeler, and Feynman — whose personal philosophies of life vastly differed from each other.
Salam sourced his inspiration to his religious beliefs, while Ramanujan claimed direct transmission from his gods. These claims cannot ever be proved or disproved. It is also irrelevant here that Salam thought of himself as a Muslim whereas, by Pakistani law, he is not.
How can prodigious talent blossom in the absence of rigorous scientific training? Two factors explain Ramanujan’s and Salam’s successes. First, nature sometimes gifts an individual with exceptional innate mathematical ability. This is associated with brain circuits in the parietal lobe and acquired through genetic transmission. Second, by good fortune, Ramanujan and Salam managed to escape into a scholarly environment — Cambridge University — where their genius could flower. Had either stayed back home he would be unheard of today.
It is usual to take pride in the geniuses belonging to one’s own tribe. The ancient civilisations of China, India, Greece, Arabia, and modern European civilisation all claim superiority over others because of the creations of their most brilliant minds. But in fact an individual’s exceptional genes and fortunate circumstances — not some supreme transcendence — are the real reasons. While sources of inspiration do differ, empirically and logically deduced results don’t. Science and its heroes belong to all humankind, not to any one tribe.
SRINIVISAN Ramanujan (1887-1920) and Muhammad Abdus Salam (1926-1996), two intellectual giants of the 20th century, were born in the same corner of the world. Of humble origin and educated in local schools, they nevertheless rose to dizzying heights in the arcane world of theoretical science. Few others on the subcontinent enjoy their iconic status.
What I shall address below is that both attributed their works to some divine agency. Some of their devotees see this in validating their own respective belief system. With the rise of Hindutva in India, and the violent persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan, these claims assume considerable importance. Hence a careful, impartial examination is called for.
No mathematician has a story more romantic than Ramanujan’s. Many books, plays, and movies — such as The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) — dwell upon this enigmatic figure. Drawing upon deep intuition, Ramanujan created new concepts in the theory of numbers, elliptic functions and infinite series. Even full-blown mathematicians take years to grasp his complex ideas.
Exceptional genes plus fortunate circumstances is why some become maths-science superstars.
Born in Madras to a low-level clerk, this young Brahmin boy was steeped in tradition, sang religious songs, attended temple pujas, and was a strict vegetarian. But by age 12, he was inventing sophisticated theorems and unwittingly duplicating some results of European mathematicians of the previous century. He flunked college twice for lack of interest in anything but mathematics — in which he excelled. His awestruck teachers could not decide whether he was a genius or fraud.
At 16, encouraged by one of his teachers, Ramanujan sent off a letter to the renowned pure mathematician G.W. Hardy at Cambridge University. It was accompanied by theorems densely packed into nine pages. Hardy was stunned and arranged for him to travel to England. Ramanujan duly obtained permission from the family goddess Namagiri, consulting appropriate astrological data before his voyage overseas.
At age 32, Ramanujan was dead. He had returned to Madras exhausted, half-famished and fed up with English winters. But even on his deathbed, his pen scrawled out profound results. A century later these still intrigue the brainiest of mathematicians and string theorists. He attributed his exceptional qualities to the psychic visitations of Namagiri who would whisper equations to him. Sometimes, he said, “she wrote on my tongue”. He told colleagues, “An equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God.”
This was how Ramanujan saw it. But how does one explain that Euler, Bernoulli, Gauss, Cantor, Hilbert and Gödel were non-Brahmin mathematicians who stood still taller? The edifice of modern mathematics owes largely to them, not to Ramanujan. Some were ardent Christians, others agnostic or atheistic. Nobody knows how to explain their feats.
Curiously, Abdus Salam, then a 19-year-old student at Government College Lahore, wrote his very first paper proposing a simpler solution to an intriguing mathematical problem posed about 20 years earlier by Ramanujan. He ended his paper by triumphantly declaring: “His [Ramanujan’s] solution is much more laborious”.
This was Salam’s debut into the world of high mathematics. Born into a conservative religious environment in Jhang — then a village-town — this child prodigy rapidly outpaced his teachers. Fortunately they bore him no grudge and helped him move on to Lahore. The next stop was Cambridge, where he excelled. By the early 1960s, he was one of the world’s top particle physicists, ultimately winning 20 international prizes and honours including the Nobel Prize in 1979.
In his later years, Salam gave numerous public lectures and interviews, recorded on camera and in print, locating his source of inspiration in his religious belief. In particular he said the concept of unity of God powered his quest for the unification of nature’s fundamental forces as well as his search for ever fewer numbers of elementary particles.
For me, to engage on a sensitive matter with one so senior and superior was not easy. But sometime in 1986 I picked up the courage to ask Salam the obvious question: both he, who thought himself a believer, and Steven Weinberg, an avowed atheist, had worked independently on unifying two of nature’s four fundamental forces and yet had arrived at precisely the same conclusions. How?
Salam gave his answer in the preface he wrote for my book on Islam and science (1990), where he stated: “I can confirm that he [Hoodbhoy] is right…”, and then went on to explicitly clarify that any bias towards the unification paradigm in his thinking was only unconsciously motivated by his religious background.
There is not the slightest doubt that Salam used exactly the same tools as Weinberg did — principally quantum mechanics and relativity theory — and did physics exactly as other physicists do (but better than most). His political and religious views were irrelevant to his work. Let’s note that although they are giants of physics, Salam and Weinberg stood on the shoulders of still greater giants — Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Wheeler, and Feynman — whose personal philosophies of life vastly differed from each other.
Salam sourced his inspiration to his religious beliefs, while Ramanujan claimed direct transmission from his gods. These claims cannot ever be proved or disproved. It is also irrelevant here that Salam thought of himself as a Muslim whereas, by Pakistani law, he is not.
How can prodigious talent blossom in the absence of rigorous scientific training? Two factors explain Ramanujan’s and Salam’s successes. First, nature sometimes gifts an individual with exceptional innate mathematical ability. This is associated with brain circuits in the parietal lobe and acquired through genetic transmission. Second, by good fortune, Ramanujan and Salam managed to escape into a scholarly environment — Cambridge University — where their genius could flower. Had either stayed back home he would be unheard of today.
It is usual to take pride in the geniuses belonging to one’s own tribe. The ancient civilisations of China, India, Greece, Arabia, and modern European civilisation all claim superiority over others because of the creations of their most brilliant minds. But in fact an individual’s exceptional genes and fortunate circumstances — not some supreme transcendence — are the real reasons. While sources of inspiration do differ, empirically and logically deduced results don’t. Science and its heroes belong to all humankind, not to any one tribe.
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