In general, MSISS focusses more on the "cost-to-benefit" analysis and specializes in trying to enumerating spillover benefits and spillover costs of our various actions, something that is not as strongly focussed upon by the other books in this genre. Also, in general, the book is quite a great read. You will often be surprised by how much you agree with his thoughts after you have read them, but still you would have never thought of it yourself despite having the same data points as he has (the idea of giving each voter two votes to challenge the political system was my favorite.)
That said, there were places I strongly disagree with what he says, and there are, of course, many places where I strongly agree with his deductions. The following are all my notes:
- The opening chapter on "more sex is safer sex" assumes that there is a general nature to find multiple partners. Coming from a society like Indian, I am mostly unable to appreciate it. Having one partner is all the society focusses on and I safely agree on that. Period.
- "Be fruitful and multiply" is all screwed up. The basic assumption is that parents should have as many children as they want since there is no spillover costs. At least in India, that's not true. The more population you have who can't fend for themselves, the more is the social cost of that population - education, health care, subsidies etc, all of which are taken from taxes, which in turn is a spillover cost. Of course, my reasoning means that the wealthy can have more children and the poor cannot, but one cannot be sure if the wealthy (or poor) will remain in the same social standing and not change places. Hence, I appreciate the general policy of countries like India, which basically says all parents should stick to two children or less, irrespective of the social standing.
- "Be fruitful and multiply" also talks about crowding and says that people chose to live in crowded places and hence shouldn't complain about it, and if they don't like it, they should go live in a different, less crowded town. Again, he doesn't know about other nations (than US), where your mere survival can only guaranteed by you living in a large city and hence the option of living in smaller towns and villages just doesn't exist. Ask a native of a Bihar village, who belongs to a lower caste and hence would have been squeezed out of his existence in his native town, and you will know.
- "Children at work" says that parents chose to send their children to work only because it is in the best interest of the family, and hence anti-child-labour protesters, coming from cushy western societies shouldn't protest because they don't know what it is to be a poor family in a slum in say Asia or Africa. Agreed. And yet, I can't understand how the same man can argue that parents should have as many kids and yet allow them to be translated into laborers. He is essentially saying it is okay to have lot of kids even if you are poor because you can send them off to child labor and recover the cost. Totally Disagree.
- Chapters "What I look about scrooge", "How to fix politics", "How to fix the justice system", "How to solve kidney shortage", "how to fight grade inflation", "Oh no! its a girl", "The high price of motherhood", "Racial profiling", "An outsourcing fable" are all brilliant reads.
Irrespective of my disagreements, I believe it is a great read for people interested in that genre. Go, pick up a copy from your local bookstore/library.
(ps: It is the first book, along with "Shine, coconut moon" by Nisha Meminger, that I picked up with my new Singapore Library membership. I have had it on my reading list for too long, but always stopped short of buying it. I am glad I picked it up finally and read through it. :-) )
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