Food for the world

Long back when I was in Business School, I put forward a simple hypothesis to some of my classmates about how world food prices are going to fall in the next 50 to 100 years.

The reasons I cited were simple: 

• with the advances we have been making over the past few decades (computers,  global commerce & what not), we will find better & efficient ways to produce, store & distribute food over the next few decades  (if we can double PC speeds every year, how much time does it take to double world food production ;))
• there are still untapped food production sources that we currently don't know of (GM crops, arrid lands in Siberia/Africa and what not)
• in the near-term: India & China (~38% of the world population) - will be investing heavily in food production as their populations become richer

There are two data points that helped my argument at the time:

• the gradual increase in world cereal production - rice, wheat & maize - over the past few decades
• the way food prices have gone down in US because of improved food production, storage & distribution (restaurants like McDonalds' & BurgerKings were able to offer buck a meal, and still make a buck because of scale economies).
  

I hypothesized that - in the distant future - world will evolve to a place where food will not be a main concern - and that food production will outpace population growth (the exact opposite of what Malthus predicted).

A couple of my classmates laughed at my theory - and asked me to watch out for food prices over the next decade before I come to any conclusions. And looking at the markets now, their caution does sound right. There has been a dramatic increase in the food prices over the past few years, and it is mostly effecting the poorest of the world. 

The emergence of India & China, and the resulting hunger for food & oil - seems to have put lot more pressure  on the demand side of the equation - than the supply side for both food & oil. Some of the new technologies (GM Foods) are facing lot of resistance from the civic bodies in the emerging world. Rise of the middle-class is effecting the arable land - people are looking for bigger and better houses, and urban sprawl is becoming an issue.

I really hope this is a short-term predicament for the world, and that we will survive this imbalance without any major famines, and will take a few steps towards the Shangrila I was dreaming of in the next couple of decades.

Elections and Knowledge of the masses

Elections and the accompanying results always amaze me. 

In the evolutionary game - can't believe somebody thought about giving everybody a piece of paper, and asking for their opinion on who should be their leader. Somewhere somebody tried this,  it worked and viola - we are in a world where a lot of countries boast about being democratic by passing around pieces of paper every 5 or 6 years. I am sure this is a very recent evolutionary trend, and yet to be seen if it will survive the tides of time.  If it indeed is an optimal solution, it is unclear why we haven't seen many public corporations conducting elections of employees to decide their CEO (..voting among share-holders is not necessarily same).

We have to assume a few things for democracy to work:

1. there is an easy way to conduct fair elections
2. participating voters are rational 
3. voters think as a collective, and vote for the long-terms interests of this collective (goes back to point 2 above)
4. Assumption that majority opinion is the best opinion

Unfortunately, lot of these assumptions don't hold true for most of the elections.

When some of these assumptions go wrong, elections are: 

• won by leaders who buy votes (literally distribute money and buy votes or introduce welfare programs that appeal to the majority), intimidate voters, create divisions in the society (religion, color, class, caste come into play)
  
• won by a small section of the society who know how to engineer the public opinion (The Clintons, Bushes, Gandhis of the world)
• won by people who know how to engineer the voting machinery (hijack polling booths, rig elections, manipulate people through newspapers/radio-tv stations)

And I clearly see some of these being played out in the recent election of the biggest democracy in the world. 

I also think lot of current democracies in the world are ruled by a few select political families - and the illuminati conspiracy theories may not too far from the truth.  It will be a  good topic for a social scientist to look at the facts and prove this wrong. 

Here are a few examples I have in mind: 

• Nehru-Gandhi family ruling India for the ~50 years of since its 60 years of independence. The fourth generation of Gandhi's (Rahul & Priyanka) are waiting on the sidelines now. Independent India - under this family - became one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and is still one of the poorest in the world
• Bhutto's ruled Pakistan for most of its democractic existence (even though democracy came in patches to Pakistan) - now 3rd generation claiming their power
• The others include Bushes, Clintons, Kennedies in US, Sukarnos in Indonesia, Rahmans in  Bangladesh - and we covered more than 60% of the world population.

While having these strong political families bring some semblance of stability to the democracy of these countries, it is surprising how these political families kept their grip on power over such periods  in democratic elections (>50 years, 4 to 5 generations) - even after their sub-par governance. Possible, humans are genetically wired to follow - and only few understood how to capitalize this inherent human characterstic. Possible - all that literature on leadership - is a waste of paper it was written on.

I am not suggesting that democracy is bad - but I feel elections need to  evolve to reduce some of these issues - or in the long-term, it can affect the human evolution (a bad leader for China or India can make zombies out of a huge percentage of the human-race, and can have a significant impact on the human evolution).

If I have to write the constitution for a country, at the least I would like the following codes for an  election:

• Make sure only people who know the value of their vote can participate in an election
• If you get elected, nobody in your immediate family (sons, daughters, spouses, parents) can contest for elections (for some reasonable time-limit)
• You can't contest an election if you already won the past two elections
• People who can engineer polls through power, intimidation, money,  etc. can't contest elections (way too many rich people & criminals own the democracy these days - and another trend is to buy newspapers/tv-radio stations for coming to power)

Wolfram Alpha

I tried the wolfram alpha search engine (www.wolframalpha.com) this morning, and the marketing video was really cool - it blew me away. I used to do data analysis as a marketeer, and I understand what we can glean from structured data. But extending it to every structured data out there, providing a natural language interface and giving it away for free to the citizens of the world sounded like an incredible leap for the man-kind. 

I tried a couple of searches with Google & wolframalpha for population data (mobile phone penetraion in China), and wolframalpha won it hands-down.

Using goolge, I have to

• visit multiple sites before, 
• read through some junk, 
• kill some annoying pop-up ads, 
• scroll down to get to the information, and 
• finally interpreting what the author is trying to say

I tried a couple of searches that are tough to fit in a structured format (e.g: paracetamol dosage, flu incidence in US), and Google is much better here (wolframalpha turns up blank page for these queries).

On the negative side:

Wolfram still has to add lot more information to their database, and the natural language query is not very user-friendly. Lot of my queries turned blank pages on wolframalpha, and I found it difficult to create queries for simple questions.

Overall, wolframalpha introduces a great new way of looking at search algorithms - it is not sufficient to present all the webpages that match a particular string, but what is more useful is intrepreting these pages, collecting facts, analyzing them, building a database,  and presenting them in a useable format.

I really hope Google works on something similar, and integrates it with their current search. I feel Google can do a much better job at this given its strong financial resources, and vast data that they analyze.