Wokay!

My father has a poster on his office pinboard, which says “Love It, Leave It, or Change It.” If I have a failing, it is that I tend to leave it rather than change it or love it; but my personal failings are not a subject for this post; and perhaps not even for this blog. What I wanted to say is that I vaguely imagined Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to be a scholarly framing of this very sentiment; with Exit being “Leave It”, Voice being “Change It”, and Loyalty being “Love It”. A major problem with this is that I had never actually read the original Hirschman book, only seen lots of references to it, especially in all the Deirdre McCloskey books I had read last year. But I resolved to read it as soon as possible, only to encounter unexpected hurdles: first, there was no Kindle edition. Second, Amazon didn’t have it in stock in India and was demanding an import fee depost and proof of identity to ship it from the USA. Finally, grumbling, I imported it in August; and read it over August and September.

Now that I’ve read it, I can confidently say two things:

1. It’s a fantastic book, one that is short and yet very dense with insight
2. If Albert Hirschman ever intended his framework of exit and voice to be applied to families, he didn’t reveal it in this book. He was more concerned with how either business firms or organisations like political parties, committees, unions, or governments responded to exit or voice. His acknowledgement of families as a sort of organisation wasn’t non-existent, but it was tangential.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take Hirschman’s ideas and apply them to families. For many of us, our families are the first tiny dictatorships – or, if we’re lucky – semi-authoritarian but principled structures – that we encounter. And as such, they too will respond to exit or voice. And one sort of exit and voice keep cropping up in pop culture: young lovers whose getting together is ferociously opposed by one or both of their families.

In the twilight period between knowing about Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; and having actually read it, I remarked to the incomparable Chilli that we should categorise movies (and songs) into Exit, Voice, and Loyalty based on the decisions taken by the romancers with regards to their family. Yo Yo Honey Singh’s Desi Kalakar, with its exhortations to Billo to run away with everything from her passport to a packet of roti and bhindi¹, is very much on the exit side. The chorus of chhad de, chhad de, chhad de takes it to the pinnacle of exit as a strategy.

As a grimmer and darker votary of exit, Sairat starts off with exit, and closes with a message of what a mistake it is to choose voice or loyalty.

Practically at the opposite end from Sairat lies Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, which pushes loyalty to absurd levels. Hours of refusing to either run away or to do anything to persuade Amrish Puri to cancel the arranged marriage lead up to Amrish Puri magically changing his mind² Loyalty for its own sake and bearing the consequences is one thing, but loyalty getting you what you wanted all along is quite another.

And as for voice, there’s… well, that’s the thing. Indian pop culture isn’t very good at voice. There are bizarrely few movies where couples talk other people into seeing their point of view. Admittedly, an open and honest statement of positions, followed by negotiation, doesn’t make for very riveting movies if you’re used to chase scenes and fights, but there could still be negotiations that do make for good drama? Which brings us to another point that Exit, Voice, and Loyalty doesn’t go into great detail on: what does count as voice?

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty first tries to point out that sometime the point of deserting is not to kill a bad organisation; but a way of communicating that its quality is poor and needs to improve; and secondly, that because economists are obsessed with the possibility of switching from competitor to competitor, that they don’t consider the possibility that frustrated customers (or members) simply tell their supplier or organisation that the quality is lacking. His major insight is that telling somebody that the state of affairs is unsatisfactory, and asking for a change is also a valid strategy. But that’s where it ends; and it doesn’t break down the different types of asking for, or bringing about, change.

If voice is anything that doesn’t involve quitting or switching to a competitor; or accepting that you’re stuck with bad quality; then all of these count as voice:

• Polite requests and petitions, like the Indian National Congress’s early days
• A bargaining session filled with negotiation
• A flaming row (which usually get nowhere, so they would be followed by loyalty or exit)
• Or customer imposed quality audits and factory acceptance tests
• Civil disobedience movements
• Negotiation made under false pretexts (think of PG Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, where Sue Brown impersonates Myra Schoonmaker in order to be taken seriously, but honestly, think of most of Wodehouse)
• Negotiation that shades all the way into blackmail (Wodehouse again, and think of Aunt Dahlia threatening to cut Bertie Wooster off from Anatole’s dinners)
• Storming the Bastille and beheading Marie Antoinette
• Expelling or massacring anybody who happens to be inconveniently sitting over the crude oil that you want, as in Tintin in America

I am hesitant to place blackmail in the same category as a three month long drafting of a product specification document; and immensely queasy about placing violent revolution in the same category as an election campaign, but that’s what broad and simplifying categories get you. I wonder what would make the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty categorisation more useful – to separate out violence³ and deceit as separate categories; or to place them all on a spectrum of ethical and less ethical voice.

Let’s return to our frustrated lovers, and let’s also consider the spectrum of voice. On the spectrum, they could start with politely asking their parents to change their minds; move on to bargaining; move on to guile and trickery; and end with violence.

So when it comes to fiction, violence is a different kind of story. The dramatic possibilities of politely asking and getting what you want are highly limited. Thanks to PG Wodehouse, we have lots of stories centred around guile and trickery. Smooth talkers who negotiate a happy outcome for themselves without resorting to tricks, bluffs, or a hidden card up their sleeve can be interesting too; though the suitability for fiction goes down the less smooth a talker you are. And as fiction goes, it’s probably the most acquired taste, having none of the things that immediately appeal to our sense of drama.

Which is why it’s such a pleasure to come across fiction that does cards-down, no-trickery negotiation – and successsful negotiation – well. And there’s a shining example of it I came across recently – the Crazy Rich Asians movie. Note: spoilers for the movie follow, even if you’ve read the book, as the movie departs significantly from the book.

I am referring, of course, to the end of movie mahjongg parlour showdown between Eleanor Young and Rachel Chu. Up until that point, the couple – Nick Young and Rachel – have been trying honest and polite, but not very firm voice to win over Nick’s family; only to be rebuffed in ugly terms. So, finally, Rachel Chu meets Nick’s mother, Eleanor Young, for a final settlement of terms over mahjongg.

This is the major departure from the book, where things just sort of happen, and the main characters roll with events, culminating in Nick and Rachel walking out on his family in despair, or as Hirschman would put it, exiting. The movie, however, turns Rachel Chu into a stupendous badass⁴, who decides to sieze control of events instead of just going with them. So, over mahjongg, Rachel tells Eleanor that Eleanor has created a no-win situation for Nick, and that she, Rachel, refuses to be made to play this no-win game⁵; and is therefore deciding to leave, but on her own terms. And to reinforce how she’s doing this on her own terms, she passes a crucial mahjongg piece from her own winning hand to Eleanor, letting Eleanor win the game.

Good grief, what amazing writing that scene is. It was ostensibly exit, with Rachel deciding to walk out rather than be pulled into what her mother-in-law would make a miserable marriage; but instead of the simple, voiceless exit that Hirschman accuses his fellow economists of celebrating, it was exit combined with voice, or perhaps even voice masquerading as exit⁶, and it makes such an impact on Eleanor that the very next scene is Nick proposing to Rachel with his mother’s implicit blessing. All in all, the movie ends up being what Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge could have been if all its characters had been sane and reasonable human beings instead of complete idiots.

Of course, Crazy Rich Asians is a movie. The depressing thing about reality is that no matter how good your arguments, or how persuasive you personally are even if your arguments are terrible, you might always find yourself stuck in a situation where voice just isn’t getting you your happy ending; and having failed to change it, you have to love it or leave it. But, as I frequently have to remind myself, you don’t know if trying to change things will work or not until you try.

My reading had sort of collapsed in the recent past, especially from 2014 to 2016. The reason behind this was mostly extreme frugality, brought on by trying to pay for a house. So I was not buying books. What I was doing a lot of instead was:

• reading longform articles by sending them to my Kindle (which means not reading a lot of fiction)
• reading out of copyright books (which has the side effect of reading a lot of dead white people⁷
• rereading what I already had

and starting in late 2015 and throughout 2016:

• reading my wife’s collection of books

2017 saw a massive turnaround for three reasons:

1. The benevolent Masabi gave me the username and password to his account at the Brooklyn Public Library, which let me borrow ebooks from there to my American registered Kindle⁸
2. I joined Goodreads at the beginning of the year with a measure of skepticism about how useful it could be, but found that simply enrolling for a reading challenge made me competitive and determined to complete it – and so I ended up reading a lot instead of, say, listening to podcasts or wasting my time on Twitter
3. I finally paid off what I had to for house reconstruction, and the liberated cashflow meant that I could buy books to my heart’s content.

All this together has meant that I have read ninety one new books in 2017, apart from a lot of rereading. At the beginning of the year, when I enrolled in Goodreads, I set myself a target of fifty-two books, or was it fifty? I finished the fiftieth, fifty first, and fifty second books just before the end of June; and promptly revised my target to a hundred books for the year. In November, though, encountering a rough patch of great Russian novelists, I decided to slow down, enjoy rereads instead (more on that later), and not worry overmuch about hitting a hundred. And so, yesterday, I wrapped up at ninety one for the year. Here’s my Goodreads 2017 challenge page, which lays them out in an attractive grid.

I will save the highlights of the books themselves for later. But first, I will mention something else which using Goodreads prompted me to do – seeing how many books my women, and how many books by men I was reading⁹.

At the beginning of the year, I had not really set myself a target on reading men and women, and only wanted to monitor myself for implicit bias. By the end of January, I had realised that I was reading almost only men, and in mild embarrasment at the ratio, without having even set myself a target, set out to improve it. This took a long, long, time; because I was also working through my existing to-be-read pile, which at that point was almost all men.

By the end of January, my ratio of books by women to books by men was 1:3. At this point I tried to compensate, which meant going to the Brooklyn Public Library’s ebook catalogue, going through their history and science sections, and checking out as many interesting looking books by women as possible. By the beginning of May, the ratio had moved up to 12:19. It wasn’t until July 6, when I finished Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, that I had finally read one book by a woman for every book by a man.

However, even before hitting the comforting 1.0 ratio, I was begninning to wonder if a simple ratio of books was telling me enough about my sexism, if any. It was so easy to change the ratio by simply picking out books at the Brooklyn library, did the ratio convey any useful information at all? So I decided to take my self-monitoring one step further, and duplicated my Goodreads records in an Excel file. Then, with the power of pivot tables, I set out to see if I was rating books by women lower than I was rating books by men. In the Excel sheet, I recorded:

• The name of the book
• The name of the author (s)
• Whether it was fiction, nonfiction, or mythology
• Whether the authors were male, female, or the book had a mix of male and female creators
• The rating I had given the book

I now realise that I should have also recorded the date I finished the book, which would have allowed me to make cool graphs of how my books by women / books my men ratio changed over time. Alas, I didn’t, and can only promise to do it for 2018 records onwards. For what it’s worth, my Excel sheet is uploaded over here, so if you want to do your own pivot table analyses, please go ahead. But this is what my playing around has led me to conclude:

1. On the simplest measure – ratio of books – I finished at 48 books by women to 42 books by men.
2. However, because I was acutely aware of this ratio, I kept trying to improve it by reading more books by any woman author whose books I liked. So my ratio of authors is 37 women to 35 men.
3. Separating into nonfiction, fiction, and mythology reveals a massive mismatch: In fiction, I read 28 books by men to 23 by women; and in nonfiction I read 25 books by women compared to 12 by men. This is probably a reflection of how I tried to improve my raw ratio by browsing the nonfiction section of the library to find interesting books by women, but didn’t try that with the fiction section.
4. Breaking down into even smaller genres might reveal more such mismatches, but I haven’t tried that yet.
5. The reason I gamed my raw ratio with nonfiction but not fiction is that with nonfiction it seemed easier to judge a book by its cover. I felt that taking a chance on a book I had never heard about or been recommended already was easier with nonfiction books, where the cover and blurbs would tell me if at least the topic was interesting or not. With fiction, I wanted to stay with personal recommendations.
6. Taking a chance on nonfiction I had never heard of earlier really paid off with:
   1. Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Invention
   2. The Birth of the Pill
   3. Pandemic
   4. Meathooked
7. Coming finally to ratings. My average rating of books by female authors was 3.58, and for male authors it was 3.69. So I did rate books by men a little higher, but apparently not even by one standard deviation higher.
8. What if I break it down by category again? This falls two ways. In fiction, my average rating for books by men was 3.78 and for women it was 3.48; a much wider difference than in the overall average. In nonfiction, I rated books by men at 3.58, and books by women at 3.68. Again, the difference is less than one standard deviation in all categories.
9. I think the one thing in which I may be guilty of implicit bias is in how likely I am to give five star ratings. I gave the full five stars to 6 books by men (4 fiction and 2 nonfiction), but only 2 books by women (one each). So even though I rate women higher on average, I give exceptional ratings to women much less. Ed Yong’s Atlantic essay on how the science Nobel Prizes awarding rules end up making a few lucky scientists famous and lionised but excluding all their collaborators – especially the women – may be a relevant parallel.

Turning now from the numbers to the books themselves, these are the highlights from my 2017 reading:

• My wife introduced me to Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians series, which was probably the most fun I had this year with lowbrow but very funny fiction.
• Some years ago, I had asked for recommendations for climate fiction, and friend Sowmya Rao recommended about fifteen books (some not exactly climate fiction but generalised science fiction). What with the whole not-buying-books thing, I only got around to reading most of these in 2017. This meant that I was reading lots of apocalyptic science fiction for a stretch of almost four months, and may have scared myself into never having children. The apocalyptic note carried over to nonfiction in Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead. At the same time, though, the past two years of reading about Tesla left me slightly annoyed at some of these apocalypse scenarios, because I kept asking “Bloody, how is it that nobody installed solar panels before the apocalypse hit?” This was a question that arose particularly in Station Eleven and The Bone Clocks. Later in the year, I read All The Birds in the Sky, not on Sowmya’s recommendation, and while enjoying it thoroughly, was slightly exasperated at having stumbled into more apocalyptica; but at least this was apocalyptic science fiction that did not rely on a magical disappearance of photovoltaics.
• The books which friends had raved about and which I found deeply disappointing compared to the hype were Ghachar Ghochar and Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem and its sequels. While both were good, they were definitely not the “best books of the decade!” that friends were proclaiming them to be.
• Chasing the female-male ratio meant that after a gap of years, I read more books in the Mary Russel series, and more books by Sarah Waters, and I was very glad of this.
• In a lot of the fiction I read in 2017, I found myself loving the beauty of the writing, while being repelled at the characters or the underlying assumptions about human nature. This includes The Magicians, The Master and Margarita, This is How You Lose Her, and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
• Many years ago, I had read the citation for Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize, thought ‘Oh this sounds interesting’, and promptly wishlisted two of her books. I finally got around to reading them this year (that budget thing at play again), and realised that this had been a rash decision, as the books in question were intended for at least graduate students of economics or public choice, and not dilettantes such as myself. I persevered with the books, but it took ages, and after many years of peace I was reprimanding myself for not having had the discipline to go through with an Econ PhD. So it goes.
• In November, my reading queue included The Master and Margarita, another book by Elinor Ostrom, and the vast and expansive Bourgeois Equality. After the first half of The Master and Margarita fully justified Cuthbert Banks‘s gloom about the mantle of the great Russians, I looked at the queue, and decided not only to not bother with hitting my target of a hundred books, but to plunge into comfort rereading – and so I did a binge reread of the entire Discworld series (not including the Tiffany Aching books, though). Reading the series in one go, in such a short period of time, meant that I was able to see connections between the books that I hadn’t earlier; discovered that ten years on, I was still able to smile at new things and say ‘Oh so that’s what Terry Pratchett was going for’; developed new respect for Reaper Man, and formed some interesting thoughts on how to classify monsters, which deserve a blogpost to themselves.
• I found myself making connections between otherwise unrelated books. danah boyd’s It’s Complicated, Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead, and Ed Gleaser’s Triumph of the City all ended up cribbing about American suburbia, but each talked about a different bad outcome it was leading to. Pandemic connected both to the apocalyptic science fiction I was reading, and to Maryn McKenna’s fantastic Big Chicken. So did David Benatar’s “having children will only perpetuate the suffering of the human species” book Better Never to Have Been, which I am still thinking over, but finding hard to dismiss.
• Out of “new women science fiction writers”, I ended up not liking Nnedi Okarafor’s Binti, but eager to try her other books, and liking N K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy but also finding it a bit of a chore. Surprisingly, the easiest to read in this microgenre was Becky Chamber’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – which is a little short on plot and surprise twists, but which I found a very comforting read and charming in its worldbuilding and lack of pretentiousness. Perhaps if I had read any of these books in a different sequence, my opinion would be different. I think they are all worth rereading to find out.
• I finally finished the year with Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality. Like the other books in the trilogy, it’s expansive and maximalist, a style which I enjoy, and so it was a great book to close the year with. That maximalism meant that it also linked in interesting ways with lots of other books I’d read in 2017, which also made it a particularly appropriate book to close the year with. Some of those linkages were:
  • I loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, in which KSR goes ‘What if the Black Death had killed all of Europe instead of just a third?’, and then sketches an alternative history in which the Industrial Revolution happens in Central Asia instead of Europe (among other things). Bourgeois Equality though spends a lot of time talking about how the Industrial Revolution was a massive coincidence, and on all the reasons why it wouldn’t have arisen anywhere else, thus pouring cold water on The Years of Rice and Salt. So it goes.
  • The Discworld binge reread made me realise that McCloskey’s Bourgeois trilogy is the nonfiction exploration of all the same themes that Pratchett poured into fiction: the value of rhetoric and Vetinari’s opinions about politics, the awfulness of how aristocracy gathered violence through warmaking being reflected in Lord Rust’s suicidal charges, the disgust with aristocracy in general being reflected in Sam Vimes’s rage; and of course the Bourgeois Revaluation itself being taken up and explored in all the books from say, Feet of Clay onwards. Heck, there is even a bit in Bourgeois Equality which directly mimics the passage about Ankh Morpork tearing down its city walls.
  • Of course McCloskey references Elinor Ostrom’s work on how communication can overcome the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Please be aware that this is a gross oversimplification for the purposes of this blogpost).

What are my plans for next year’s reading? In no particular order:

• Continue to track my reading of women vs men, and particularly try to find fiction by women.
• Read all the source material Bourgeois Equality threw up, particularly The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
• Track my date of reading, source of book, and money spent or saved through cunning library utilisation along with everything else I’m tracking.
• Instead of chasing an impressive looking number of books, allow myself to take the time to slowly read in languages other than English. I am planning to read Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari and a German young adult time travel trilogy for sure.

That wraps it up for my review of 2017 reading. I look forward to reading about what you have read this year.