Category: tank

Flight food and choice

The topic of outrage for the day on Twitter seems to be Air India’s decision to serve only vegetarian food on flights that last less than 90 minutes. Predictably, given the current government’s policies and track record so far, people are decrying this as some sort of a “brahminical conspiracy”. This was even quoted as  a reason to privatise Air India (while I don’t agree with this reason, I fully agree that there are several other reasons to privatise Air India).

While outragers will outrage (and they might have a pathological need to outrage), this decision of Air India actually has sound basis. I had touched upon this in an earlier  blog post about why I get irritated with Indigo’s in-flight service.

The problem is that the more the choice you give customers, the slower the overall service will be. While this may not affect people seated in rows where service begins, it can be an immense cause of frustration for passengers who are seated in rows that will be served last.

In longer duration flights, this matters less since people who are served last will have sufficient amount of time to finish their meals before the trays have to be cleared in time for the flight to land. On shorter flights, however, the time available for meal service is so short that it is possible that trays might have to be cleared barely after a section of the passengers have started eating.

Eliminating choice significantly speeds up the meal delivery process (refer to my post on Indigo’s food for more on this), and ensures that people who have been served last have sufficient time to finish their meals before trays have to be cleared. While it may not take much time for the steward to ask the customer her choice, considering the total cycle time (along with passengers asking details of the menu, etc.) and the number of passengers to be served, cutting choice is a sound decision indeed.

As for the vegetarian option, when there is no choice offered, it is natural to go with the option that satisfies the maximum number of people. Considering that Indians don’t eat much meat (while only a small proportion of Indians are vegetarian, overall meat consumption is very low), it is a rather obvious choice that only vegetarian food will be served.

This is a commendable decision by Air India and I hope they stick to it. I hope other airlines will also learn from this and cut choice in their inflight menus (Indigo, I’m looking at you) so that passengers can be served with the minimum uncertainty and minimum fuss.

Tailpiece The above linked NDTV Profit piece has a bizarre comment from an expert. Quoting:

However, according to travel industry expert Rajji Rai, the state-owned airline should have first carried out a passenger survey, which is an industry practice, before affecting any change in the menu.

“Airlines world over carry out customer surveys before taking such decisions. Unfortunately, Air India is very poor in such practices. This decision to discontinue non-vegetarian food on these non-metro flights is just one-sided,” he said.

Surveys are overrated in my opinion, and there is no reason Air India should have conducted a survey before making this decision – for they have access to significant amounts of actual customer preferences over a large number of schedules. The value of a survey in this case is at best marginal

Uber’s anchoring problem

The Karnataka transport department has come out with a proposal to regulate cab aggregators such as Uber and Ola. The proposal is hare-brained on most  counts, such as limiting drivers’ working hours, limiting the number of aggregators a driver can attach himself to and having a “digital meter”. The most bizarre regulation, however, states that the regulator will decide the fares and that dynamic pricing will not be permitted.

While these regulations have been proposed “in the interest of the customer” it is unlikely to fly as it will not bring much joy to the customers – apart from increasing the number of auto rickshaws and taxis in the city through the back door. I’m confident the aggregators will find a way to flout these regulations until a time they become more sensible.

Dynamic pricing is an integral aspect of the value that cab aggregators such as Uber or Ola add. By adjusting prices in a dynamic fashion, these aggregators push information to drivers and passengers regarding demand and supply. Passengers can use the surge price, for example, to know what the demand-supply pattern is (I’ve used Uber surge as a proxy to determine what is a fair price to pay for an auto rickshaw, for example).

Drivers get information on the surge pricing pattern, and are encouraged to move to areas of high demand, which will help clear markets more efficiently. Thus, surge pricing is not only a method to match demand and supply, but is also an important measure of information to a cab aggregator’s operations. Doing away with dynamic pricing will thus stem this flow of information, thus reducing the value that these aggregators can add. Hopefully the transport department will see greater sense and permit dynamic pricing (Disclosure: One of my lines of business is in helping companies implement dynamic pricing, so I have a vested interest here. I haven’t advised any cab aggregators though).

That said, Uber has a massive anchoring problem, because dynamic pricing works only in one way. Anchoring is a concept from behavioural economics where people’s expectations of something are defined by something similar they have seen (there is an excellent NED Talk on this topic (by Prithwiraj Mukherjee of IIMB) which I hope to upload in its entirety soon). There are certain associations that are wired in our heads thanks to past information, and these associations bias our view of the world.

A paper by economists at NorthEastern University on Uber’s surge pricing showed that demand for rides is highly elastic to price (a small increase in price leads to a large drop in demand), while the supply of rides (on behalf of drivers) is less elastic, which makes determination of the surge price hard. Based on anecdotal information (friends, family and self), elasticity of demand for Uber in India is likely to be much higher.

Uber’s anchoring problem stems from the fact that the “base prices” (prices when there is no surge) is anchored in people’s minds. Uber’s big break in India happened in late 2014 when they increased their discounts to a level where travelling by Uber became comparable in terms of cost to travelling by auto rickshaw (the then prevalent anchor for local for-hire public transport).

Over the last year, Uber’s base price (which is cheaper than an auto rickshaw fare for rides of a certain length) have become the new anchor in the minds of people, especially Uber regulars. Thus, whenever there is a demand-supply mismatch and there is a surge, comparison to the anchor price means that demand is likely to drop even if the new price is by itself fairly competitive (compared to other options at that point in time).

The way Uber has implemented its dynamic pricing is that it has set the “base price” at one end of the distribution, and moves price in only one direction (upwards). While there are several good reasons for doing this, the problem is that the resultant anchoring can lead to much higher elasticity than desired. Also, Uber’s pricing model (more on this in a book on Liquidity that I’m writing) relies upon a certain minimum proportion of rides taking place at a surge (the “base price” is to ensure minimum utilisation during off-peak hours), and anchoring-driven elasticity can’t do this model too much good.

A possible solution to this would be to keep the base fare marginally higher, and adjust prices both ways – this will mean that during off-peak hours a discount might be offered to maintain liquidity. The problem with this might be that the new higher base fare might be anchored in people’s minds, leading to diminished demand in off-peak hours (when a discount is offered). Another problem might be that drivers might be highly elastic to drop in fares killing the discounted market. Still, it is an idea worth exploring – in my opinion there’s a sweet spot in terms of the maximum possible discount (maybe as low as 10%, but I think it’s strictly greater than zero)  where the elasticities of drivers and passengers are balanced out, maximising overall revenues for the firm.

We are in for interesting days, as long as stupid regulation doesn’t get in the way, that is.

Inequality in income and consumption

My hypothesis is that while inequality in terms of income or wealth (measured in rupees/dollars) has been growing, consumption inequality is actually coming down. I hope to do a more detailed analysis using data, but I’ll stick to an anecdote for this this introductory blogpost.

The trigger for this thought came about a year back, at a meeting in one of the organisations I’m associated with. The meeting wasn’t terribly interesting, so I spent time checking out the guy sitting next to me, whose Net Worth I knew is at least a couple of orders of magnitude more than mine.

He was wearing a Louis Philippe shirt, and I have several shirts of that brand. He had a Parker pen, and I use a Parker too. He had a rather fancy watch whose brand I do not recall now, but my Seiko isn’t that bad in comparison. And he had an iPhone, which cost four times as much as the phone I used then (a Moto G), but not out of reach for me.

I can go on but the gist is that while our income and wealth levels were different by an order of magnitude, our consumption wasn’t all that far off. I must admit that I’m also a so-called “1-percenter” in terms of income (recall a study which said that 99th percentile of income in India is Rs. 12 lakh per annum), so I was also part of the power law tail, yet the marginal difference in consumption to income levels was strikingly low.

Since this is an introductory blog post on this topic, I posit that this is a more general trend and applies at many other levels. The thing with inequality is that income (and wealth) is usually distributed according to a Power Law (unless the state is extremely coercive and extractive), so as the economy grows, inequality as measured by measures such as the Gini coefficient is bound to increase (here’s a nice but hard-to-read paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on why the Gini coefficient is flawed for fat-tailed distributions such as the power law).

Yet, as the economy grows, more people are pushed beyond a “basic level” of income where they are able to afford “necessities” (and certain kinds of luxuries), so inequality as measured by consumption will actually be lower. The challenge is in measuring such inequality appropriately.

I’ll mention a couple of more anecdotes in support of this. One sector where inequality has fallen is in commute. Some rich old-time Bangaloreans look back in nostalgia at a time when there was no congestion on the streets of Bangalore, and how the city has since deteriorated. Yet, that congestion-free travel was then available only to the extremely wealthy (who could afford private vehicles) or lucky (my father waited for four years to get his first scooter because of limited supply). Public transport infrastructure was abysmal and buses infrequent.

Now, a larger proportion of the population can afford private vehicles and public transport has also improved (though not by much), making life better at the lower end of income/wealth levels. And the rich (who had exclusive access to roads in private cars earlier) are faced with higher congestion.

Another obvious example is the telephone. Very few people had them even twenty years back (we applied for ours in 1989, only to get “allotted” a phone in 1995), and now pretty much everyone has a basic mobile phone now (and with cheaper smart phones, even some relatively poor people own smart phones).

This is a theory worth pursuing. Need to analyse how to collect data and measure inequality, but I think there’s something to this hypothesis. Any thoughts will be welcome!

Charging for parking

In a potentially interesting move, the Delhi government has declared that starting from 2016, only half the stock of Delhi’s cars will be allowed on the road each day, based on the parity of the number plate.

While in theory it might work, the dependence of Delhi people on cars, ownership of multiple cars and possible number-trading might render it moot. Also, given that not everyone uses their car every single day, a simple car swap arrangement (like Zipcar; but we need to figure out liability properly) might defeat this regulation.

The more sure-fire way to reduce the number of cars on the road is to impose a congestion surcharge but it it is not an easy regulation to implement – given that you’ll need electronic modes to collect tolls, devices in cars, etc (not that it hasn’t been done, but given India’s scale it’s considerable effort).

A better way to implement congestion surcharge is to charge economic rates for parking. In most cities in India nowadays, parking is highly subsidised (in terms of money) which results in more people taking their cars out, not being able to park them, and creating further congestion by driving around looking for a place to park (Brigade Road in Bangalore is a good example of parking-led congestion thanks to slow-moving cars looking for a place to park).

The question is what an economic rate for parking must be, and that can be determined by looking at the prevailing real estate rates in that area. In the area I live in Bangalore, for example, the “guidance value” (rate used by the municipal corporation to determine the “fair value” of a property in order to tax sales) is about Rs. 8000 per square foot.

Assuming a price to earnings ratio of 20, this translates to Rs. 400 per square foot per year, or little more than a rupee per square foot per day. A parking lot is about 9 feet wide and 18 feet long (based on US standards, assuming India is the same). Let us assume a 50% overhead for space needed to move the car in and out of the lot. Based on this, the “fair rent” for one car parking space in my area is 18 * 9 * 3/2 * 400 / 365 = ~Rs. 270 per day, or translates to around Rs. 11 per hour.

Notice that all the calculations above were either multiplications or divisions, and hence the per hour parking price is directly proportional to the guidance value of property in the area. Based on the numbers above, a good rule of thumb for “economic cost” of an hour parking space is 11 / 8000 or about 14 basis points (a basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point) of the per square foot guidance value.

Of course, there are transaction costs (of putting the car in and out) and demand varies by time of day (so we might have an element of “surge pricing”). Yet, what we have is a good rule of thumb to decide the per hour parking rates.

Politician salaries and corruption

Recently, Vijay Nair, CEO of OML Entertainment, which organises the popular NH7 Weekender music festivals, tweeted that the Weekender in Delhi last month was the first where he didn’t have to pay a single paisa of bribe.

Just before the event, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal gave a speech in which he stated that he had bought passes for the event by paying for them, and urged his ministers and other government officials to do the same rather than asking for freebies.

Yesterday the Delhi government increased salaries of its legislators and ministers by a factor of four (which the Economic Times incorrectly reported as a “400% increase” – it’s a 300% increase).

The basic monthly salary of Delhi MLAs and ministers is all set to go up by a whopping 400 per cent besides significant hike in a slew of allowances with the assembly today approving a bill to effect the increase considering rising cost of living.

The Delhi government will now send the bill to the Centre and if it is approved, then basic salaries of legislators will rise from current Rs 12,000 to Rs 50,000 …

The move to increase Delhi legislator salaries has been expectedly panned by opposition parties, but it is an important step in reducing corruption, the main plank on which the Delhi government came to power last year.

In order to better understand this, go back to Kejriwal’s statement before the Weekender urging officials to purchase their tickets and not ask for freebies. The on-ground price of a ticket for the Delhi Weekender was Rs. 3500.

As per existing salary structures, a Delhi MLA would have had to spend a quarter of his monthly basic salary for the event. If he were to buy tickets for his family of four, he would have to spend his entire monthly basic salary (I understand there are other components of compensation, too)! And this would have been good enough justification for him to ask for free tickets.

While a higher salary might still not prevent an MLA from demanding free tickets, his earlier moral justification for the demand doesn’t exist any more – since the new salary structure now makes the tickets affordable. This removal of moral justification is certain to have an impact on corruption at the margin.

More importantly, official salary levels have a massive impact on the kind of people the profession attracts. When you get paid a pittance as a politician, it repels people who are loathe to be corrupt – for it is next to impossible to make a decent living on such salaries. People will be loathe to leave well-paying jobs for politics, and the only people politics will attract are those that hope to make money on the side.

I hope the Centre approves the Delhi government’s proposal to increase salaries, and other states match this. Given the small number of legislators and ministers, fiscal impact will be marginal. But the impact it can have on corruption, in terms of removing the moral justification, and on the kind of people it will attract to politics will more than pay for this.

Blockchain and real estate

Based on the title of this blog post, you might assume this might be about Honduras, where there is a proposal to use the blockchain to store land records. The problem with Honduras is that there is no “trusted third party” – nobody even trusts the government, for example, so the best way to store land records is in a decentralised hard to tamper manner.

Over the last few days I’ve been reading up a bit on blockchain and bitcoin and how it works and so on. I haven’t yet got to the math – that it is described as “proof of work” irritates me no end (given that work should be evaluated on output rather than input).

So I see that what makes blockchain secure (apart from the miners having to agree on every transaction, and securing bunches of transactions using cryptographic hashes) is that every block contains within itself a hash of the previous blocks. In other words, the entire sequence of transactions is maintained.

The way “normal currency” (like cash) works is that only possession matters, not history. So the fact that there is a hundred rupee note in my pocket means that I can spend that money, and nobody has a track of how that hundred rupee note reached my pocket. This makes the system insecure since if a pickpocket picks this note, there is no proof (apart from possibly catching him in the act red-handed) that he picked it from my pocket.

With bitcoin, on the other hand, there is a record of how each bit of currency (no pun intended) ended up where it ended up. So even if someone were to magically “steal” my bitcoin, the historical records show that this legitimately belongs to me, and that makes it secure.

This reminds me of the paperwork involved when we bought our apartment in Bangalore last year. Normally you would imagine that a certificate indicating that the title currently rests with the current owner is enough to conduct a real estate transaction. but lawyers and bankers here are not satisfied with that.

The paperwork for the apartment I bought went back sixty odd years, when the land on which the building was built was first “allotted” by the City Improvement Trust Board. If I have to sell this apartment on, along with the certificate that I own this apartment I’ll have to furnish copies of this entire history going 60-70 years back. And the way property deals are done here, I don’t expect the system to change.

So this is what makes real estate such a prime candidate for using blockchain. Not only is a third party (such as the government department that stores land records) not trusted, it is a standard practice to include the entire history of every land or property going back several years. A sale transfers ownership, but in terms of paperwork, a layer gets added, not replaced.

This shows why real estate is such a prime candidate for moving to blockchain for storing transactions. It is ironical that a small and crime-ridden country such as Honduras is showing the way on this. It is time for countries like India to consider similar uses. But first, we will need to digitise existing records and make sure there is exactly one owner for each piece of property, and blockchain can’t help us with that challenge!

India as a Triangle Power

In the course of a “thinktanki” discussion at the Takshashila office on Monday, I came up with the concept of the “triangle power”. As it might be intuitive to guess, the concept stems from Indian cinema, which has championed the cause of the “love triangle” plot formula.

The trigger for this post is this post by Takshashila scholar Kabir Taneja on India’s management of relationships with Africa, and specifically about India’s investments in Sudan. They key line in Taneja’s piece is this:

Even after the carving out of South Sudan from Sudan, New Delhi has managed to keep close relations with both Juba and Khartoum, even though the near war conditions between the two states do keep India’s Foreign Ministry on its toes.

Sudan and South Sudan don’t particularly see eye to eye with each other, since the latter broke away from the former following a protracted struggle. Yet, India maintains good relations with both of them. This has its own troubles, as Taneja’s piece mentions – South Sudan is seeking India’s help to bypass Sudan, but India is not too willing since that might anger Sudan. Despite these irritants, being a triangle power there puts India in a unique position.

India, in fact, has had a rich history of being a triangle power. The most prominent example is its continued maintenance of excellent relations with most countries in West Asia, which have had a strong history of mutual bickering. If we look at the current geopolitical theatre in Central and West Asia, India has great diplomatic and economic relationships with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE, USA and Russia, to name a few. In other words, India helps complete many a triangle, with not too many other countries being in this position.

Yet, historically India has hesitated to use its position as a triangle power to further its national interest. For example, India was excellently placed to broker talks between the USA and Iran a few years ago, but that opportunity was passed on, and USA and Iran made up elsewhere (in Switzerland). India could also potentially help broker some inter-state conflicts in the gulf region, yet isn’t doing much on that front.

The great thing about India is that it has slowly and steadily built up a reputation of a triangle power in several theatres, but much needs to be done in order to utilise this to further national interest.

On people returning awards

So it seems to have become a fashion nowadays for writers to return any awards they’ve received from the government. It all started with Nayantara Sahgal, and it has set off a virtual procession. Maybe I don’t follow the right kind of people but one in twenty tweets or so on my timeline talks about someone who is rejecting some award or the other, all in protest against the “intolerance” of the government. There’s even a 16 year old who has returned some award.

I must admit I don’t read much fiction, but I must mention I haven’t heard of too many of the people who have returned an award. Maybe the first few returns in Sahgal’s wake were an attempt at cashing in on the free publicity this would get them, but now I think the marginal utility (in terms of publicity) of returning an award has fallen far enough to this to not be the primary reason for the return.

At a more fundamental level, I don’t know what gives these writers legitimacy in making a political statement. I mean everyone has the right to make any statement they want, but I don’t know why we should take these guys’ political views seriously only because they are writers.

While politics forms a significant portion of several novels (for example, my entire understanding of the Islamic Revolution in Iran comes from reading Marjané Satrapi’s Persepolis), that someone has written a political novel doesn’t make them an authority on politics.

As I mentioned on twitter the other day, the core competence of a writer is command over language and power of communication, and so whatever statements they might make they make powerfully. Yet, the fact that they communicate their stand well doesn’t necessarily mean that their stand is right, and give us any reason for trusting them more than we might trust a layperson with their political views.

And in this case, they are not even communicating in the means they have established competence in – what you might have expected from a writer when they are concerned about the social situation around them is to have written about it, and used their usual powers of verbal persuasion to make their case for spreading their agenda. Instead, what we have is a blatantly political message in terms of returning their awards.

I’m not saying they’re wrong to return their awards – they’re well within their rights to do so, and maybe they think it will have an impact. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t read much into this, and not given them credit for their political views.

Putting it another way, understanding of politics is uncorrelated with literary ability, so the latter should not be conflated with the former. I’m not denying that there are authors who have excellent political insight – all I’m saying is that the probability of an author having excellent political insight is no different from the probability of a non-author having such insight.

So for the purpose of crafting government policy in response to these protests, they should be given no greater weight than similar protests by the same number of laypeople. And looking at Arun Jaitley’s response, it seems like the government has internalised this, and it is a good thing.

On 2ab, Communal Harmony and Economic Growth

I’ve used the concept of “2ab” once before, a day after the Prime Minister used the term in a much lampooned remark, to explain why we need Net Neutrality. I turn to the same concept again to explain why communal harmony is necessary for economic growth.

Some 4-5 days back, a mob entered the house of one Muslim guy who was allegedly cooking beef, and lynched him to death. In response, rather than booking the mob, the police sent meat sample from the victim’s house to “test if he was actually cooking beef” – as if its confirmation as beef would justify the murder.

I’ve mostly been off social media (and hence not fully following the story) since then, but RSS leader Tarun Vijay hasmade some remarks about “lynching on suspicion being wrong“, and star Indian Express columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta has laid the blame at the Prime Minister’s feet. Mehta writes (HT: V Anantha Nageswaran):

The blame for this has to fall entirely on Modi. Those who spread this poison enjoy his patronage. This government has set a tone that is threatening, mean-spirited and inimical to freedom. Modi should have no doubt that he bears responsibility for the poison that is being spread by the likes of Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma and Vijay — whether through powerlessness or design is irrelevant. But we can be grateful to Vijay for reminding us that the threat to India’s soul emanates from the centre of power, almost nowhere else. It is for that centre, and Modi in particular, to persuade us otherwise.

Now there were two kinds of people Modi appealed to when he came to power in a resounding victory last year – bigots and aspirers. The former hoped that Modi would “teach a lesson to the Muslims”. The latter hoped that Modi would help accelerate economic growth, after a mostly useless and scam-ridden UPA2 government. And Modi might have thought that these two goals are compatible (else it would make no sense to court these two constituencies). Even in theory they are not.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whose growth rate is seen as a bellwether of the economy’s performance, is a measure of the amount of trade. Trade can be external (let’s set that aside for now) and internal. There are many factors that determine the extent of internal trade (trade between the people of the country), but at the margin, it is proportional to the number of possible pairs of people who can trade with each other.

In other words, trade is another of those quantities that follows Metcalfe’s Law, and depends on strong network effects. If the number of people in a place (region or country or state or city) is N, and if everyone can trade with one another, the number of possible trading relationships is N^2.

Despite the development of the rule of law and Contract Acts and court-brokered dispute settlements, people typically trade with other people they can trust. In the past, this meant that certain families or communities had a monopoly over trade. Over time, with the development of laws and contracts and courts, this has expanded. Yet, people still hesitate to trade with people they don’t trust.

So what happens when there is communal or caste disharmony? Then you will not trust someone who belongs to another caste or community or religion because of the person’s community (and notwithstanding the person’s personal characteristics). And if you don’t trust them, you don’t trade with them. And what does this mean for the total volume of trade?

It’s time to bring out our (a+b)^2 expansion. If you have two communities of sizes a and b, in the absence of trust between the communities, the total trade in the community is ceteris paribus proportional to a^2 + b^2. If the two communities live harmoniously and have enough mutual trust that communal differences have no bearing on trade, the total trade in the community is ceteris paribus proportional to (a+b)^2. The difference between the two? 2ab of course!

Communal distrust and the lack of communal harmony ends up restricting the number of possible trading partners for each person, and thus we lose out in terms of the correlation term. In other words, bigotry costs us in terms of GDP growth.

Lastly, even if the government of the day is concerned more about the welfare of one particular community over another, communal harmony makes sense. For by creating distrust, people belonging to the government’s favourite community are denied trade with people of the less favoured community. And this adversely impacts the more favoured community!

 

An unauthorised biography of an unauthorised biography

I just finished reading a book which was like a Telugu movie – the beginning promised much, as did the reviews. About a third into the book, I was sending excerpts from its chapters to friends. Two thirds in, I was rather engrossed. And then it all fell apart, going into polemic territory in the last third.

I’m talking about Felix Martin’s Money: The unauthorised biography. When I found the book on the shelves of Blossom Book House two weekends back, I immediately reached for my phone and checked for reviews. Largely positive reviews by The Guardian and The Economist meant that I was compelled to buy it. And the first two thirds of the book was pretty excellent.

There is one very strong idea in the book – that we should look at money not as a commodity but as a system of maintaining credit. Martin gives the example of the Fei in a Pacific Island called Yap to illustrate this, and makes a rather compelling case for not treating money as a commodity.

And he does this by giving examples from ancient and medieval history – the book is peppered with nice examples from Mesopotamia and Greece and the Warring States of China. In between he returns to modern times and talks about how Argentina in the 2000s and Ireland in the 1960s reacted to closure of banks – all of it lending further credence to his theory of money being a means of credit rather than a commodity.

He talks about the pyramidal structure of credit in medieval Italy and the fairs of Lyons. Considerable footage is given to the formation of the Bank of England and John Locke’s recommendations on debasement of the currency (these parts were easier for me to appreciate, having read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle) and John Law’s exploits in France.

And then, with the book nicely set up two thirds in, he turns it into a polemic against investment banks and what prompted the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Again, some of the stuff is impressive, like Walter Bagehot’s recommendations following a credit crisis in the 1860s, and Keynes’s recommendations after the First World War. But the last sixty pages or so are close to unreadable, especially for someone who’s fairly closely followed the 2008 crisis.

This is not the first time that a book on history falls away when it gets to modern history. Another example of this is Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which again begins extremely strongly in its description of prehistory and ancient history, but somehow falls away when it comes to the modern world (ending with a rather unreadable chapter on immortality and the Methuselah project). There are more examples that I can’t currently recall of books that do a great job of ancient history but fall apart when they come to modern times.

Money would have been a significantly better book had it stopped at around the 220th page or so, following the recommendations of Walter Bagehot – but maybe with some final recommendations. Till then it’s a fantastic book, but then there seems to be a compulsion to provide recommendations, where it falls away (this is again a common bugbear, where books fall apart when they try to provide recommendations). I’d recommend you read it, but not beyond page 220 (totally ~280 pages).

Oh, and for a change I read the physical copy of the book (since I found a copy at Blossom Book House), so that copy is available to be lent out.