Who Needs The Onion When You Have Your Eyes?

During my morning news scan, I came across this headline:

Bernanke to give update on the economy

I did a double-take, because I initially parsed it as:

Bernanke to give up on the economy

(It may be Freudian.)

I mentioned this to a colleague, whose said he too read it the same way.

(It must be Freudian.)

The Monuments of State

And now, to interject a rare political comment into this blog. I don't usually get my news from TV, and in general avoid the klieg lights of frenzied CNN coverage. Yet during winter break I was transfixed by the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. It may have been work-avoidance, but I think it was something more.

Sub-continentals of a certain age-mine-will remember the heady days of the mid-1980s, when two young technocrats came to power in India and Pakistan. Sure, they may have been scions of power, and this may have endowed them with a detached view of affairs. In India, we joked that we'd gotten the raw end of the deal: while their new leader had chaired the Oxford Debating Union (at a time when such things still meant something in the sub-continent), ours seemed to have spent his time at Oxbridge wooing a girl and not much else. But ours had then led a quiet life as a pilot, and nothing seemed a better metaphor for the flight to modernity that we were promised.

In the end, of course, it all came crashing down (if you'll pardon my sticking with the metaphor). Rajiv Gandhi was quickly mired in a major scandal; his modernizers ran into walls of orthodoxy and venality; and eventually, on the road back to power, he was the target of an early, high-profile suicide bomb. Benazir Bhutto, for her part, similarly mired in the muck of politics and corruption and lost, won, and lost again in dizzying succession. Exactly why Western powers had so much vested in her return is unclear; no political realist could have looked on her regency with much hope.

And yet, today, India at least is a booming economy; her considerable social troubles are at least slightly counterweighed by her achievement and hope in some arenas. And none of this growth has come in ways that Rajiv Gandhi imagined. His vision was ultimately still one of top-down, government-led development (and while he did listen to people smart enough to appreciate the need for telecoms infrastructure, it is unclear that that is the push that led to today's widespread mobile phone adoption in India). The companies that dominate the headlines today were shabby regional outfits at that time. Though they have attracted new sparks, to a considerable extent they are led by the same people as they were before: suggesting that the problem was not one of talent, but of freedom to innovate. (As The Economist put it recently, India's vast licensing regime was, fortunately, simply not attuned to software, so it got free before they could clamp their hands on it.)

And so, a chapter of sub-continental politics that began with so much hope in my youth, and had already sputtered to a halt a few years later, formally ended with Benazir's abrupt passing (which had an eerie parallel to Rajiv Gandhi's own end). With it, I hope, also died a chapter in the economics of development. While the centralized, top-down push for innovation that these leaders represented failed dismally, decentralized, bottom-up forces have used their freedom to forge a remarkable industry. The only hope now is that Pakistan will find in itself similar pockets of innovation to parallel India. And as for the world powers, as in technology, so in politics: instead of trying to find the leader who represents your views and promises to thrust it upon her people, work on empowering the people at the bottom.

Austan Power, or, Internationals Lacking Mystery

Many months ago, when Barack Obama began his presidential run, I was intrigued by his views. Finding relatively little that didn’t require much digging, I did what any sensible person should do in the first place: ignore the candidate and proceed straight to the advisors. After all, I expect most presidents of most countries (with the exception of those played on TV by TV Nobel Laureates...) couldn’t tell apart the GDP from the WTI from a CDO. It’s the bright sparks behind the scenes who make up the ideas and quietly let the leader shamelessly take credit for it (where else is such blatant lifting of ideas not only condoned but the outright norm?).

So I began to peek into Obama’s team. Imagine my surprise when the first two names I encountered were people whom I both respected immensely. The first, for foreign policy, was Samantha Power, the self-proclaimed “genocide chick”, better known as author of the moving and brilliant A Problem From Hell, her account of the genocides of the twentieth century. The second was Austan Goolsbee, an intriguing centrist (at Chicago!) economist who rose to prominence for his proposal to simplify tax reporting. That was enough for me.

Unfortunately, these people are fundamentally academics and think-tankers, not pols. It had to be only a matter of time before their instincts for truth-telling came to the fore...but how! In just a matter of weeks, the very two people who had so reassured me have now become household names in the most undesirable way: Power for calling Hillary Clinton a monster, and Goolsbee for secretly telling the Canadians that the posturing on NAFTA was simply that, a campaign tactic. Underneath the latter, especially, is a fundamental and reassuring truth, but unfortunately truth and politics mix poorly. And the result is that American foreign policy and economics will be the poorer for the distancing of these two talents.

Where's (Candidate) Waldo?

A few enterprising young folks, including (full disclosure) a graduate student at Brown CS, have created a map mashup to track the US election candidates, Map the Candidates. The time-travel feature is quite interesting, and will become more so as the primaries approach.

The site has much more potential. Every press pundit takes pride in predicting who will become a candidate one or two years hence (of course, we only remember their hits, not their misses). By tracking news articles a site like this could perform similar forecasts, and take the bloviators largely out of the mix.

Arresting Blackboards

One of my friends (who is knowledgeable about this incident, but whose identity I've withheld for evident reasons) recently brought to my attention a disturbing event. I cannot testify to the accuracy of the report seeing as my knowledge of Turkish politics is low and I cannot read any accounts in that language. However, I was able to confirm the facts from another Turkish person, so I have at least some corroboration.

Ali Nesin is the head of mathematics at Istanbul Bilgi University. He apparently produces a popular mathematics magazines that sells thousands of issues while retaining a very respectable level of the mathematics. Ali seems to really love mathematics in its many forms (including computer science). Ali also cobbles together scraps of funds to run an annual math summer school for students and teachers.

Sadly, Ali's summer school has been shut down and he has been charged with several crimes. Irrespective of the merits of the other charges, the one that we should take issue with is this one: “giving education without permission”.

Alexandre Borovik has set up a petition to protest this. His blog has multiple posts about the situation. Be sure to visit the blog and see the photographs of the cordoned-off blackboard (and check out the content on it).

I have heard that one of the principal reasons for persecuting Ali is that he is the son of a left-wing Turkish humorist, Aziz Nesin, and the recent rise of Islamist power in Turkey has given a fillip to forces arrayed against him. Reading the older Nesin's biography, it's easy to see why he might have offended these powers—not that that excuses what has happened. Anyway, I have reliable evidence that Ali Nesin is a good soul who means to spread his love for mathematics.

It's a sad blow against fundamental freedoms in Turkey. In addition, no country can prosper that shuts down volunteer schools that teach group theory.

The Giant Sucking Sound of Hot Air

Populists are romanticized at a distance, startling from nearby, and dangerous when contemporaries.

US Senators Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are working on a bill to overhaul the H1-B visa status to “give priority to American workers”. Now I admit I'm a biased party here, seeing as I'm a foreigner stealing a job from the hundreds of Americans who apply to the Brown computer science department for faculty positions every year.

Having stipulated to my bias, let's go on. Durbin says, “Some companies are so brazen, they say ‘no Americans need apply’ in their job advertisements”. I was rather surprised to read this; surely this is a direct violation of the law! Intrigued by who was posting such ads I scoured the Internet for a while, but these rascally companies have made sure Google cannot find them (a curious way to advertise, for sure, but maybe these ads are only visible outside the US—oh, those wily foreigners!). What I find is article upon article talking about the phenomenon, instead of the phenomenon itself.

Durbin is not done. His ire rising, he lambasts these people who would reduce the American programmer to a hewer of wood and drawer of water:

foreign workers come to this country for a few years of training, then return home “to populate businesses competing with the United States.”

Free clue for the dummy: that's because many of them are forced back home by your own policies. This man is making national policy? I hope some of his constituents are reading this.

Fairness and Balance: The Programmer's Guild offers a counterpoint to my views.

Aside: The banner image on their site as of this writing contains the obligatory code snippet...in Lisp. Okay, so maybe they're not such a bad lot after all.