Just so we are clear, the scope of this book is only the US, the rest of the world will have to figure its own way to abundance, though we might learn a few tricks from this. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wonder why, for all its enormous wealth and technological capability, the US cannot address the fundamental human problems of hunger, homelessness, life-threatening diseases, and fuel an equitable world with clean energy.
Indeed, the introductory chapter ‘Beyond scarcity’ does imagine an utopian world really well. And it’s clear that it isn’t technology that is stopping us. Sigh.
Through the analysis of political, economic and cultural ethos across decades, they trace the ‘how we got here’ to a scarcity-driven politics, not from the conservative right that likes to keep the government out of most things, but from the so-called progressives on the left. They identify a decades-long shift beginning in the 1970s – when American liberals became more concerned with process than outcomes, enforcing strict zoning codes, environmental regulations, and costly infrastructure mandates that, in real life, put the brakes on growth.
I remember reading this point of view in Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay, where he says “there is too much law and too much ‘democracy’ relative to the American state capacity”. That it has now become a vetocracy, with economically powerful special interest groups and the judicial arm having hijacked the system and preventing reforms. Of course, given his leaning, it probably came from a different sentiment.
A central theme is the critique of process and proceduralism. The book argues that when the Democratic-leaning coalition ties itself to onerous permitting processes, it inadvertently bolsters housing shortages, dilapidated transit systems, and underinvested public utilities – a supply problem across all infrastructure, leading to people at lower rungs being gated out. This can be seen now as a regulatory impasse in many liberal jurisdictions, where well-meaning (in isolation) rules and community objections prioritise preventing ‘bad’ development over enabling ‘good’ development.
Klein and Thompson present their solution into an ‘Abundance Agenda,’ a Third Way framework aimed at rebalancing social goals and regulatory safeguards. This agenda aspires to dismantle needless barriers while preserving essential protections and build economic dynamism without sacrificing equity. A middle ground to a progressive movement fearful of change and a conservative movement allergic to any government action.
While I liked the synthesis idea, the ‘how’ is not even a thought beyond a few small examplesof when such an approach has worked. Clearly, the challenges at higher scale would be massively different. These are diverse problems- housing, climate change, research , innovation, and mass deployment of this ‘abundance. I also wonder how capitalism would react to it. Elite capture of every resource has been a recurrent phenomenon, what is their take on an abundant life for everyone? Can humans really live without classes and status?
Having said that, this is a very accessible and thought-through book. It provides an excellent systematic flow through the five chapters – each, with its own narrative of what is happening with examples, why it is happening seen through the lens of historical, economical and cultural contexts, and what can be done (directionally) to remedy it.
Quotes & Notes from Abundance
1. The fascinating story of Katalin KarikĂł and mRNA in ‘Invent’ (p 129) 2. Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is one of the best examples of solving at scale. The creation and distribution of Covid vaccines in ‘Deploy’ (p 184) 3. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again.” Paul Sabin
Kannur was only a vague plan for some other time, until Theyyam became a bucket list item for D. Then we got hold of a schedule and a guide and landed in Kannur. Well, actually our Kannur flight got canceled, and we landed in Calicut, but that was a minor inconvenience. Passing by many places we only knew by name was a nice experience too.
Where to stay in Kannur
We had originally booked a place called Anansa Boutique Hotel but they canceled us a couple of months before the trip. Ah well. That got us to Sunfun. Our room was on the top floor, and only just ok, but the rooms on the first floor looked a lot better.
They don’t have a restaurant, but Kishore can help you with a simple breakfast. Alternately you could walk to Anansa’s restaurant, about 10 minutes away.
There are a couple of other new hotels closer to the town centre.
What to see/do in Kannur
The good part about Sunfun and Anansa is that you simply cross the road and you’re on Payyambalam Beach. It’s quite serene, but also has maddening traffic on weekends.
Kannur (St. Angelo) fort did remind us of the one in the neighbouring district – Bekal, but the latter was prettier.
This one does have its share of good views though.
The Arakkal Museum wasn’t in the plan, but we saw the signboard and I remembered them mentioned as unique in a Manu S Pillai book. I looked it up and it turned out that the matrilineal system meant they also had female rulers. That meant D had to see it.
I wished I could take all these home!
The weavers cooperatives were a big pillar in Kannur’s community, but over the years, modernisation and the younger generation’s lack of interest in this work has meant there are not many around.
Lokanath Weavers continue to be around and their products too are in demand, but their heydays are probably behind them.
The Cliff Walkway near the Lighthouse is another place for splendid views.
The Chirakkal Folklore Museum is a good place to visit if you’re interested in Theyyam origin stories. You will need a guide though. During the trip, our guide explained how Theyyam origin stories of two kinds – one connected to hindu puranas and avatars and the other deeply grounded in local history.
There are about 400+ kinds of theyyams, but only around 100 are performed. There is amazing scope for storytelling and showcasing, but judging by what I saw, I have doubts on whether that will happen. And that’s sad.
From what I understand, Theyyam began as a tribal ritual to remind and transmit the relationship of man with nature. As humans moved out of the forests, it was assimilated into the Hindu pantheon and larger society when consolidation began.
What is happening now is another level of consolidation as money pours in – traditions are thrown to the side, and there are communal forces trying to sanitise Hinduism into a culture that can be manipulated by Hindutva at will.
We spent an entire morning watching different kinds of Theyyams.
As you can see from the costume, this one is related to the harvest.
We also made a 2AM trip for the night version, an hour or so away.
There was a huge crowd already there but we managed to get seats.
But seeing the fire walk was a struggle thanks to the ballooning crowd.
What and where to eat in Kannur
We only had a breakfast at (New) Pulari, but I loved the ambience and the Appam + Egg Roast. We would have happily eaten here again but there were just too many places to try!
This was a place we did repeat, but for tea, and the fantastic view when you’re sitting upstairs.
There are a ton of tea options, but we kept it simple.
The Lebanese Chicken with hummus we tried out once for dinner wasn’t too bad.
MRA was our lunch spot in Pazhayangadi after our morning Theyyam visit.
Biriyani (as we spell it out in Keral Pradesh) is always a good idea, and this one had a very different rice. The burning issue here though, and one we argued with our guide, was that the chicken biryani did not have a boiled egg. As we told him, we felt cheated because the Malabar Chicken Biryani is supposed to have resolved the chicken or egg in the biryani context!
Beef is also always a good idea, and so is a fish fry. They also have a branch in Kannur, but the ratings don’t seem great.
Hotel Karthika took the honours for our favourite meal during the trip.
To begin with, they had the Chatti Choru, which was practically an aquarium with some four kinds of fishes, squid and prawn for the princely sum of Rs.220! Yes, unlimited rice, sambar etc too. And the women serving staff have a very motherly ‘eat more’ attitude to them. Absolutely charming!
We also asked for Kallumakkaya (mussels, which was D’s go-to food here) The food was just fabulous, but the chatti choru gets over fast, so be there by 12.30.
Since we wanted fewer carbs for dinner, we went to Naura Bistro, which though has only a handful of tables, from ambience and quality of food could easily have been Bangalore.
The Chicken Sliders were delish. In the background, you can see people waiting for a table. That was common!
Steamed Mussels, of course. This had a nice Thai broth that added great flavour.
The Vietnamese Beef Noodle spoiled the party though. Not because it wasn’t tasty, but they made us wait for an hour!
Wild Cafe is another pretty place for dinner. Again, very cosmo vibes.
The Indi Chicken soup is amazingly spicy. Highly recommended.
South Indi Seer fish for mains – Indian spices, spicy butter sauce and mashed potatoes aren’t the most common combo, but they really make it work.
This is Kallumakkaya Nirachathu, which you can find on the roadside stalls very near Sunfun. Mussels, ground rice and spice, fried.
Kannur Cocktail was a revelation. I absolutely disliked the ingredients – papaya, carrot – but boy, this was thick and yum!
The kids were drooling around Sign Laban, so we decided to figure this out.
Desserts from Egypt, turns out. We finally settled on the Umm Ali, and it was fantastically heavy, even when shared by two people!
Though our guide pooh-poohed it as more Calicut than Kannur, I had to try Banana Avil Milk. Mouzy was our best shot.
I absolutely loved it, practically a meal in itself.
Kannur did cheat us out of the last minutes of every sunset, thanks to clouds, but we did enjoy them, especially on weekdays when you have the place practically all to yourself.
Our perception of Kannur was dated – political violence and hartals. I found it to be quite a lovely town now. Fantastic community vibes, because it is not really very large. People jogging, cycling along the beach on a Sunday! The guide told us that after that they go to Pulari for breakfast, and sure enough, I saw one person whom I had spotted earlier walking on the beach.
I think the people are well represented by three auto rides we took there. The first refused to take more than Rs.30 from us. When he showed three fingers, my Bangalore mind talked me into taking out 300. Both of us looked at each other as though we had lost it!
The second charged us double rate, the guide said 9PM was the cut-off, and before we got in, he was arguing with the person in front of us on exactly that.
The last auto was arranged by Kishore (he is fantastic) and he was late. He apologised, and during the ride we began chatting about his daughter, who was a nursing student in Bangalore. He told us about his visit, and how he loved the pace of Bangalore when compared to Kannur. We were both seeing green grass on each others’ sides. He also told us how he had now started taking tourists around. When we said we had come to watch Theyyam, he said that he had visited Paravur (Cochin), and there he saw ‘our people’ (upper caste) doing a version.
I think, as travellers, we managed to get quite a flavour of the place. And loved it. To the point, where D and I even discussed living there on rent for a year to see how much we would like it as residents. 🙂
As someone who has worked with founders in the startup space for over a decade and a half, the megalomania, the lack of empathy, and the moral bankruptcy in Careless People all seemed familiar. But Sarah Wynn-Williams’s first person account is about arguably the biggest phenomenon that has hit culture in the last decade and a half – social media, and specifically, the biggest player in it – Meta (then Facebook). She worked at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017, the time when Facebook went from infancy to a full-blown global power base.
The book is a summary of moral bankruptcy and ethical failings in the company on two counts – one, the internal culture and decision-making process, and the other – the recklessness and callousness that powers its growth-at-all-costs approach, impacting the lives of millions of people through the ways in which the platform is used by bad actors.
On the first count, toxic behaviour, rampant and blatant sexual harassment by her own boss Joel Kaplan as well as Sheryl Sandberg (who allegedly said “You should have got into the bed” from a chapter titled ‘Lean in and Lie back’), and injustice in general. On the second, everything from helping China in surveilling its own citizens (and lying about it to the US lawmakers) to making politicians addicted to advertising so they be influenced on policies, to the Trump election, to targeting teens when they’re depressed, to the subterfuge in Intenet.org, to the apathy in the Myanmar genocide. As the book’s subtitle says, power, greed, madness.
The book begins with a hilarious incident at the 2015 Summit of the Americas, one of her early attempts to get Zuck to interact with politicians, and then goes right back to the time she decided Facebook is where she wanted to work at. I am still figuring out if the early part of the first chapter (her encounter with a shark) is a metaphor – for swimming with sharks later, or being a survivor.
In a way, Careless People is also like a biography of Facebook itself- the kind of problems it faced in its early days – from poop emojis to ISIS beheadings to Kony and breastfeeding protests! There really was no playbook for creating policies for these things!
The book is full of anecdotes – from the early idealistic days to connect humanity to the cold, inhuman approach that one is now familiar with. Catching Hillary Clinton on a dance floor in Columbia, Sheryl un-walking a lot of the talk from Lean In when it came to her own employees, and lying about narrowly missing a plane crash, Zuck’s failed attempts at courting Xi (anything to get a handshake, Xi refusing Zuck’s request to name his unborn child), how one low-ranking official in TRAI unwittingly scuttled Facebook’s populist move to get Free Basics running in India by opting out of all emails from Facebook, Obama telling Zuck in a private meeting that Facebook is playing a destructive role globally and so on. And peppered with her own encounters with non-human organisms – sharks, wasps, (almost) Zika virus at its place of origin and so on.
1. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face ~ John Updike 2. WEF has weaponised the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the .001 per cent. (about Davos) 3. The spyware Onavo showed Zuck which apps to buy by giving him confidential usage data 4. Sheryl once explained the cycle of wealth to me as she saw it I was complaining that someone I really admired had retired from Facebook at a very young age. I couldn’t understand why they’d do that. What would they do instead that would be so interesting? She said matter-of-factly that they would probably follow the cycle of wealth she’d observed at Google and Facebook: exotic travel for a year or more before becoming bored of that, then transitioning to getting very fit or some other personal goal. After achieving that goal, buying a boat or some other extravagant hobby purchase, and then finally getting divorced or going through some other personal crisis. If they come back from that, maybe they attempt their own start-up or fund or, most likely, philanthropy. 5. Uber weaponizes their drivers and riders, creating strikes, protests, and transportation chaos, forcing authorities to the table. They’re sponsoring the football teams of the children of key Brazilian senators responsible for decisions that impact their business, insisting on having UBER plastered across their kids’ uniforms. They propose compiling opposition research on journalists. 6. Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima. Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”
Andrea’s Brasserie happened because sometime in August we figured that Bangalore was done with the rains and we could safely visit Phoenix Mall of Asia without carrying swimming trunks. There are quite a few other options there, but many of them were also present in our suburb Phoenix, and we weren’t in the mood for Asian. (though my nieces had Bubble Tea and Korean snacks to prepare their appetites!)
The place is fairly compact, but I liked what they did with it – the peppiness of the decor and the comfortable seating made it seem more expansive than it was. We chose a cosy, corner.
Ironically, once we were seated, we craved Asian. The menu helped! The Chicken in Chilli Oil dim sum was the favourite, mostly because of the spicy sauce. Andrea’s Sushi roll had spicy tuna, salmon, avocado, jalapenos and a ponzu sauce as dressing. Overall, excellent texture and flavours. Of the lot, the Chicken & Chives dim sum was the least preferred, but that probably was just fatigue.
We weren’t drinking, so the Drunken Noodles was my consolation prize. Spicy flat rice noodles with chilli, garlic and basil. The Kimchi Fried Rice with chicken and egg was the spicy star though. Sticky jasmine rice with Kimchi, Korean Chilli paste and Edamame (though that last thing isn’t a favourite). And finally, Chilli Udon Chicken – udon noodles with a soy touch.
The bill came to a ~ Rs.3500 for four and a half and a half of us. The service is friendly and prompt. If they do manage to open in Whitefield, we’ll probably visit, because the menu has quite a few items I’d like to try.
Andrea’s Brasserie, First Floor, Phoenix Mall of Asia Ph: 085888 23878
There is a choice we make when we use the word ‘mankind’ when we should be using humankind, or even better, humanity. ‘Eve’ is a good reminder, and the sub-heading – How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution – is exactly what the book is about. Cat Bohannon gives us a lot of insights into the pivotal role of the female body in the evolutionary story, in a sweeping and provocative narrative that questions the ‘male bias’ in science and medicine at large, and offers the story of human evolution as told through the female body.
The book is structured chronologically across 200 million years, and drives the story through the story of specific body parts, processes, and mechanisms. ‘Eve traces the evolution of women’s bodies, from tits to toes, and how that evolution shapes our lives today.’ In that process, we get insights on why women live longer, why they menstruate, are female brains different, and the very interesting question of whether sexism is useful for evolution.
