Big crises, big solutions

The lockdown has ensured that some of us have found the time to read a bit more. For me, that has meant oscillating between interesting business and economic volumes, and catching up with my favourite crime fiction authors.

Most of the non-fiction I read over the past month had one thing in common, though they were otherwise very different. All dealt with challenges, crises, and possible solutions.

A quick clarification: None of them had anything to do with dealing with a pandemic like Covid-19. How could they? We have not seen this kind of health, economic and social challenges thrown up in a hundred years. The closest parallel was the Spanish Flu of 1918 that infected an estimated 500 million people (roughly one third of the world’s population then) and killed 50 million. That world was a different place and the tools available were different.
 

But in entirely different ways, many of the books recounting past crises throw up interesting ideas. Sure, the crises were different and the solutions were specific to them, but some of the issues were common. None offer readymade solutions — just a clear examination of problems and potential solutions.

There were three volumes that I thought were particularly interesting. The first one is an old book by John Byrne called  The Whiz Kids  that recounts the story of Robert McNamara, Tex Thornton and eight other number crunchers who were recruited from Harvard Business School by the US Air Force during World War II. They later went on to fix Ford Motor Company before, mostly, moving on to even greater glory.

The second one is a more recent volume called The Economists’ Hour  by Binyamin Appelbaum. It is meant to be an indictment of free market economics, though its biggest value lies in the deep research by the author on how economic theory evolved and how it influenced government policy, mostly in the US but also in England and the rest of Europe. 

The third one is Raghuram Rajan’s The Third Pillar,  which calls for the strengthening of the community, which he thinks has weakened over the decades as governments and markets have accumulated more power.
 

The Whiz Kids should be read because it deals with how to use data properly to take decisions and solve problems. (It also deals with what happens when you use only data and ignore everything else).

 In a sense, Robert McNamara and his colleagues, who were part of a group called Statistical Control in the US Air Force, were the first set of people using big data analysis tools to solve logistical and other problems. Their biggest contribution was to ensure that the right spare parts and other supplies were matched with requirements and that they reached the correct place in the required numbers. 

This was necessary because of the sheer number of airbases, troop movements, aircraft and destinations in WWII that had been pressed into service. There were just too many variations and things were getting mixed up all the time. Before Statistical Control was formed, an airbase flying one kind of aircraft would often find spare parts of another aircraft landing up. Some people got more things than they needed and others got less. The group was formed as an experiment but it helped the US military immensely. Later, the number crunchers went on to reshape US business.

That there have been multiple mishaps in reaching the right goods to the right hands during this pandemic is well documented. The government may have enough PPEs but hospitals around the country have been crying that they haven’t been getting them when it is most needed. The government has not been able to deliver aid efficiently to the poorest of the poor despite having enough food grain and earmarking enough aid for them.

Data is supposedly the new oil and presumably, the data we have in hand is better than the ones that McNamara and Co had in WWII. We also have vastly better tools to harness large quantities of data than what that group used. But by all accounts, we have not managed to use the data as well.

Mr Appelbaum’s book is amazing because of the way it looks at the problems that each US president faced over the years, the economists they depended on and the theories that were proposed as solutions . The book analyses the good and the harm done by the theories and the policies. As the Indian government looks for ideas about how to get the economy going once again after the lockdown, The Economists’ Hour  would be  a very pertinent read.

Mr Rajan’s The Third Pillar  couldn’t have been timed better. Communities have stepped up as the government and market faltered in the current crisis. Consider the issue of how, when almost everything except food became unavailable, neighbours and friends stepped in to help out by sharing resources.  How small communities and neighbourhoods quickly joined hands to take care of elderly people whose children could not reach them because of travel restrictions. Books do not give you solutions that you can simply pick up and use. But they do throw up ideas that help you look at problems in a different way and consider different approaches and solutions than you had been doing. 

(Pandemic Perusing is an occasional freewheeling column on books and reading by our writers)

Datta is former editor of  Business Today and Businessworld magazines. He is founder and editor of www.prosaicview.com