CAN WE GET OFF FOSSIL FUELS AND LIVE ON RENEWABLES ALONE? DAVID MACKAY'S VIEWS ON ENERGY

It is undoubtedly true that there is a great deal of hype and misinformation surrounding renewable energy. Sir David J C MacKay, FRS, FInstP, FICE (1967-2016) sought to clear this situation in his much acclaimed book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (2009).

This book, described by Bill Gates as "one of the best books on energy that has been written" is a free book and can be downloaded here. For those who don't have time to read, a one-hour video version of the book can be accessed on YouTube here.

LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE - PROFESSOR VACLAV SMIL'S OUTLOOK ON ENERGY EVOLUTION

Dr Vaclav Smil, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, Canada and author of thirty interdisciplinary books and 500 papers is one of the big picture people and foremost thinkers on energy and environment. Bill Gates, in his blog GatesNotes, called Smil his favourite writer and this has led to his popularity among science aficionados.

Here I review a couple of books from his sprawling oeuvre: Energy Transition: History, Requirements, Prospects (2010) and Energy and Civilization: A History (2017).

HEALING DISEASES WITHOUT DRUGS OR SURGERY - A LOOK AT DEAN ORNISH'S BOOKS

Dean Ornish, M. D., is the founder and president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He received his medical training at Baylor College of Medicine, Harvard Medical College and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has published his work in eminent scientific and medical journals such as Journal of the American Medical Association, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Lancet, etc.

THE CAUSES OF INEQUALITY - REVIEW OF ACEMOGLU AND ROBINSON'S "WHY NATIONS FAIL"

Renowned economists, Daron Acemoglu (of MIT) and James A Robinson (now of University of Chicago) have written a sweeping account of world history for the general audience - Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2012). Their main objective is to answer the questions: Why is there inequality in the world? Why are some countries rich and some poor?

GETTING RICH THE SLOW AND SURE WAY – REVIEW OF MONIKA HALAN’S “LET’S TALK MONEY”

It was only in my late thirties that I got interested in my finances. Prior to that, especially in my PhD years, I was pretty lackadaisical about how much I was saving. One of my professors used to say: “Some people know how money works; some people know how ideas work.” That, pretty much, summed up my own opinions on money.

When I was thirty seven, I chanced upon the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad (1997) by Robert Kiyosaki. It proved to be a wake-up call for me. For one, it showed that money itself is just an idea and if we make up our mind we could do well in the money game as well.

TALE OF A SCIENTIFIC CONVERT - REVIEW OF MARK LYNAS'S "SEEDS OF SCIENCE"

This is the age of big questions: Will AI dominate the world? Will we find a suitable alternative to fossil fuels? Will Big Data make us lose our privacy? And will Genetic Engineering (GE) and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) give rise to Frankenstein-like chimeras?

These questions do not have simple answers. They require a modicum of scientific learning even to appreciate all the implications. A person who has been fully educated in the arts and humanities may find himself or herself flip-flopping on the issues.

THE VISION OF GLOBAL WARMING THROUGH THE EYES OF LOMBORG – A LOOK AT BJORN LOMBORG’S BOOKS

A decade ago I read the book Earth in the Balance (1992) written by former US Vice President Al Gore. It talks about how “industrial civilization as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system”

It details the gradual destruction of the world’s rainforests, of the ozone layer, of fertile agricultural land, of the climate balance and warns that things could only go worse. It left a significant imprint on my mind. What kind of world are we leaving our children, I thought to myself. This dismal mood continued until recently when I chanced upon Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001).

ROAD TO PERDITION - REVIEW OF TOM G PALMER'S "AFTER THE WELFARE STATE"

While the concept of "welfare state" is as old as Ashoka's reign, it is only in modern times that it has received renewed favour. In modern times many European countries such as Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Belgium etc. have been classified as welfare states. In these countries government looks after health care and education and takes steps to bring down inequality among the people as well as root out poverty and unemployment.

Surely, this is a laudable, kind-hearted thing to do? Tom G Palmer's edited book After the Welfare State (2012) points out that there are dangers and misconceptions lurking behind this idealistic vision.

THINKING ABOUT THE POOR II – REVIEW OF SHAH AND MANDAVA'S "LAW, LIBERTY AND LIVELIHOOD"

In a previous blog post, I had concluded based on the randomized control trials (RCTs) carried out by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and others (and summarized in Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics (2011)) that the "trickle-down" effect is probably not valid when we look at the very poor and that some paternalistic interventionism might be justified.

Here, in this article, which can be construed as a continuation of the earlier one, I wish to discuss further why the trickle-down effect fails to work. To do this we need to bring in a legal dimension that Banerjee and Duflo's work lacks. This dimension is well brought out in Parth J Shah and Naveen Mandava's edited book Law, Liberty and Livelihood: Making a Living on the Street (2005).

THINKING ABOUT THE POOR – REVIEW OF BANERJEE AND DUFLO’S “POOR ECONOMICS”

E M Forster once wrote, “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

While I am of the opinion that capitalism works well for most of society, can it really touch the very poor and destitute? To be sure, there are books like C K Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004) which discuss how firms and corporations can reach out to address the needs of the poor and reap profits for themselves but that didn’t seem to be the complete answer.

Here I wish to talk about a handful of people who have looked at the face of poverty unflinchingly and come up with answers to whether capitalism actually works at the lowest rungs of society.

GOING TOO FAST - REVIEW OF THOMAS L FRIEDMAN'S "THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE"

Towards the end of his book Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (2016) noted journalist Thomas L Friedman states: "I am a socially liberal, deeply patriotic, pluralism-loving, community-oriented, fiscally moderate, free-trade-inclined, innovation-obsessed environmentalist-capitalist." Now that is a statement after my own heart! This is a kind of human being I could aspire to be!

TWO BOOKS ON EDUCATION - REVIEW OF "DISRUPTING CLASS" AND "BLENDED"

Clayton M Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School, shot to prominence with his book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1997). In this book he first came up with the concept of "disruptive innovation" which has proved very influential in understanding business and technological trends.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and eventually disrupts an existing market displacing established firms in the process.

ECONOMICS FOR CHILDREN - REVIEW OF ROOPA PAI'S "SO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ECONOMICS"

A few days ago, I took my son to a children's book fair in his school. Amongst the colourful collection of Geronimo Stiltons, Captain Underpants, Wimpy Kids and Nancy Drews, one book caught my attention. It was titled So You Want to Know About Economics (2017) by an author I had not previously heard of, Roopa Pai.

THE RIGHT VIEW OF ECONOMICS - REVIEW OF SCHIFF AND SCHIFF'S "HOW AN ECONOMY GROWS AND WHY IT CRASHES"

About a couple of years ago, I saw a YouTube video entitled How the Economic Machine Works by billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio (see video here). Dalio's vision of the economy left me nonplussed. He seemed to be saying that spending drives the economy and that the central banks could effectively bring us out of recessions by manipulating interest rates.

AN INDICTMENT OF COMMUNISM - REVIEW OF ARCHIE BROWN'S "THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMUNISM"

Archie Brown, a British political scientist and historian and emeritus professor at University of Oxford had been studying Communism for forty five years before he started to write the massive The Rise and Fall of Communism (2010) which won the 2010 W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize for Best Political Science Book of the Year.

DISCOVERING THE NICHE MARKET - REVIEW OF CHRIS ANDERSON'S "THE LONG TAIL"

Chris Anderson was the editor of Wired Magazine until 2012. Now he is cofounder and CEO of 3D Robotics, a company producing drones. His book The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand (Updated and Expanded Edition, 2009) was shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

IDIOSYNCRATIC EXCELLENCE - REVIEW OF NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB'S "ANTIFRAGILE"

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) was, for me, an acquired taste. The first two times I attempted to read the book, I found it mildly unpalatable. But by my third attempt, I found myself agreeing with almost all that he was saying. It had to, sort of, grow on me.

MATHEMATICAL LOGIC IN COMICS - REVIEW OF DOXIADIS AND PAPADIMITRIOU'S "LOGICOMIX"

The graphic novel Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (2009) by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou is a unique attempt in literature: mathematical ideas transmitted through the medium of the comic book.

LOSS OF CERTAINTY - REVIEW OF SURI AND BAL'S "A CERTAIN AMBIGUITY"

Every thinking human being tries to build his or her worldview from the store of his or her own experiences or by drawing upon one's reasoning powers or by drinking from the fount of existing wisdom and knowledge. Every human being has a personal philosophy of life and existence even if it were not as sophisticated as that of, say, Bertrand Russell.

Shakespeare has memorably stated: "There are more things in heaven and Earth,..., than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There may come a time in one's life when this worldview gets shattered and one desperately clings to some beliefs, any beliefs. As they say, Nature abhors a vacuum. Some may become devoutly religious, some may become atheists or agnostics, some may find solace in, say, Spinoza's philosophy or Nietzsche's philosophy.

LETTERS ABOUT MATH - REVIEW OF STEVEN STROGATZ'S "THE CALCULUS OF FRIENDSHIP"

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, USA and a well known popularizer of mathematics (along the lines of another great mathematics teacher Ian Stewart). I loved Strogatz's book Sync (2003) which dealt with the topic of synchronization of complex systems in a very readable manner. His research focuses on chaos and complexity and he is famous for coauthoring a 1998 Nature paper on "small-world" networks.

In his book The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math (2009), Strogatz explores the thirty year correspondence he maintained with his high school math teacher Don Joffray.