March 18, 2008 by Sanjay.

The tenor of much of the vituperation (see this, this or this for particularly fine examples) following Senator Obama’s “race speech” reflects a particularly pathetic status quo-ist obduracy. For the first time in a very long time along comes an American politician who might represent something other than the usual elementary schoolyard political dialectic. And because he represents a threat to their self-interest, these folks - whether dogmatic Republicans or Democratic machine apparatchiks - deliberately blind themselves to the huge potential upside for American society as a whole. The risk, apparently, isn’t worth taking. The optimism that was the hallmark of American spirit is a thing of the past. Scared is the new black.

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic prints a reader’s email that reflects some of my own puzzlement and dismay at this reflexive and willfully cynical anti-Obama-ism:

---

I’ll state right away that I am a McCain supporter. Still, I am very much drawn to Obama. It’s not a silly, unthinking attraction. It has nothing to do with his race, and I have very little love for the Democratic party. I am also aware that he, in many ways, is just another politician. In other ways, he is anything but another politician.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), I was at my bank when Obama began his speech. I sat down with a group of people (all white, male and female) and watched. The collective groans coming from the group surprised me. Even when Obama was reaching out, saying things I felt were absolutely true, sincere and conciliatory, he was met with derision.

A couple people felt the need to talk back to the television as if Obama could hear them (as if their opinions were appropriate at that moment). This was done in public, in the midwest. A fairly moderate town overall. Maybe I’m out of touch, but what has happened over the past 16 years to my country?

Then I left, got in my car, turned on the radio and already Laura Ingram was taking soundbites of Obama’s speech and mocking them, dismissing them out of hand while her listeners chimed in, supporting their queen of talk. I hate this all so much. But then I remembered that Obama will still probably get the nomination and face McCain. One is already great man, the other, Obama, may have taken his first step on his way to greatness. I hope America was listening.

---

An “offense is the best defense” attitude would be frustrating if it weren’t so historically classic: which leader of consequence hasn’t engendered reactionary backlash? Needless to say, historical appreciation doesn’t necessarily provide succor.

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

March 4, 2008 by Sanjay.

As a sort of a last-minute save, I recently agreed to give a talk on “practice development” at an upcoming INFORMS conference. After some discussion, the primary organizer agreed to extend my submission deadline by five days. The slides for the printed conference proceedings are now due four days hence. After some late night work, I have was able to pull out a title and a generic-enough abstract. But fleshing out a talk from the ideas fluttering around one’s brain - all the while not contradicting either the title or abstract - is a challenge. There is not a lot of time.

To promote authorial peristalsis, I took tough steps! I flew to Davis to discuss my presentation plan with my colleague and friend, Professor Hemant Bhargava of the University of Calfornia at Davis. Unfortunately, we spent most of the time discussing Hemant’s fascinating new research on complex pricing, e.g., multi-attribute pricing as used by mobile phone providers. On most cell phone plans, you pay a flat monthly fee f, for which you get a quota of q minutes, and if you exceed your quota, you pay p cents per additional minute. This triple-attribute pricing can be labeled “fqp pricing”. In contrast, airline pricing is single-attribute: you pay a flat fee. Airlines exploit the price elasticity curve by offering multiple options, like items on a menu, at different price-points. Hemant can show that done right, multi-attribute pricing allows a vendor to drastically reduce the number of items on a service menu. It is, in an economic sense, much more efficient.

I did get the chance to get Hemant’s views on “what is to be done” in OR practice. This discussion during a lovely, if short, hike around Lake Beryessa convinced me that I have something new to say about the state and trajectory of the art. No progress on the talk itself, though!

My “concrete step” today focused on reading Sociological theory on what defines a practice. Using scholar.google.com as my primary “library”, I read up on the historical development of professions. (Did you, for instance, know that medicine, the law, and divinity are the original “status” professions?) Sadly, my all-too-necessary investigation, by some non-replicable clickstream, deposited me at an article by Professor Amartya Sen, titled Imperial Illusions. At that point I abandoned all hope of progress on my talk and began reading the long article sans fig leaf.

In the essay, originally published in The National Review, Sen purports to use the British imperial adventure in India to illuminate today’s American empire-except-in-name:

---

It has been suggested that the annals of the British empire are relevant to significant policy issues in the world today. The British empire is invoked persistently these days to discuss the demands of successful global governance. It is used to persuade the United States to acknowledge its new role as the unique imperial power today,… “Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”

---

To release the cat up-front: Sen does nothing of the sort. Instead, he digresses, most enjoyably I confess, into describing the susage-making of eigtheenth century colonialism. For instance, here is his description of the endemic corruption spawned by the East India Company:

---

If Americans are to be inspired by the disciplined regularity of early British rule in India, they would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, particularly Smith’s discussion of the abuse of state power by a “mercantile company that oppresses and domineers in the East Indies. ” While most of the loot accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation in all this by the political and business leadership in Britain. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the members of Parliament in London owned stock in the East India Company in the 1760s, the decade that followed Plassey (as Robert Travers discusses in his illuminating book Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal). The commercial interests at the beginning of the empire in India reached far into the British establishment.

---

(Italics mine.) Hm… Halliburton, anyone?

Sen underlines (for the primarily American audience of TNR) the rapaciousness of British colonial policy. In the process, he applies his formidable intellect to the rather workmanlike task of illuminating the received dialectic of British rule in the West: at its core, the British empire was moral. (And the corollary, that “British morality” was the key factor in Gandhi’s success with non-violence.)

History, they say, is written by the victors. Post-WWII Britain emerged from losing the jewel in its crown with remarkably clean skirts. And due to the subsequent ascendence of its cultural progeny - the USA - the “essentially moral-hearted colonizer” narrative is distressingly alive in the Western public discourse on colonialism. It’s good to have someone of Sen’s stature helping re-assemble history.

None of this helps me prepare my talk. Nevertheless, it’s good to read the original argumentative Indian.

Posted in Analysis, Politics | No Comments »