I recently did a two-part podcast series (Part 1, Part 2) with Simon M. of , which inspired me to write this post.

The Byrds had a song: “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.” The advice was straightforward. Get a guitar. Learn to play. Find some people who’ll tell you you’re great. Then get ready to lose everything that made you interesting in the first place.

The advice for aspiring quants is similar. Except for the guitar.

If you want to trade quantitatively — if you want to build strategies, manage risk, understand markets at the level where you can actually make money — you need to learn to program.

Not because you’ll write much code. In the age of AI, the code increasingly writes itself. I can describe a strategy in English and have working Python in minutes. That part of the job is rapidly going to zero.

No, you need to learn to program because programming is the only reliable way to learn computational thinking. And computational thinking is the actual skill.

What do I mean by computational thinking? Stephen Wolfram has written extensively about this, but the short version is: it’s the ability to think in terms of processes, not just states. To ask not “what is the answer?” but “what is the procedure that generates the answer, and what are its failure modes?” To understand that a system can follow perfectly deterministic rules and still produce behavior you cannot predict without running it. (If that last bit sounds familiar, it’s because it’s computational irreducibility — the central concept in my book and arguably one of the most important ideas in modern science.)

Wolfram would add — and he’s right — that you should learn a high-level language like Mathematica or the Wolfram Language, where the abstractions are close enough to thought that you’re expressing what to compute, not wrestling with how to allocate memory. The less distance between the idea and the code, the more the programming teaches you to think. But the specific language matters less than the main point: learn to program. Period.

A physicist thinks about what’s true. A mathematician thinks about what must be true. An economist thinks about what’s optimal. A computational thinker asks: what happens when you actually run it?

That question — what happens when you actually run it? — is the question that separates people who understand markets from people who have theories about markets.

Theories are beautiful. Backtests are seductive. Models are comforting. And then you run it. With real money. In real time. Against other agents who are adapting to you as you adapt to them. And you discover that the map is not the territory. That it was never the territory. That the entire skill of trading is navigating the gap between the two.

Hacker Wisdom

The hacker culture at MIT figured this out decades ago. Not about trading — about computing itself. They encoded their hard-won insights in a peculiar literary form: koans.

If you haven’t read the koans from the MIT AI Lab, you should (be patient, the page takes time to load!). They were composed by Danny Hillis (who would later build the Connection Machine) and concern legendary figures like Marvin Minsky, Gerald Sussman, and Tom Knight. They’re short. They’re funny. And they contain real technical insight wrapped in Zen Buddhist packaging.

Here’s my favorite. A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Tom Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

This is not a story about hypocrisy. It’s a story about the difference between doing something without understanding and doing the same thing with understanding. Knight power-cycled the machine because he understood what was going wrong. The novice power-cycled it instead of understanding what was going wrong. Same action. Completely different epistemology.

Trading is full of exactly this distinction. Here’s one.

The Master Trader and the Losing Position

A novice was adding to a losing position in a biotech stock that had dropped 20% on an FDA delay.

The Master Trader, seeing what the novice was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a losing trade by making it bigger with no understanding of why it went against you.”

The Master Trader added to the position.

The position recovered.

Jim Morrison opened “The Soft Parade” by screaming: “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!”

You cannot petition the market with backtests. But you must do them — just as the devout must pray. The key is to understand what you are doing when you backtest. A backtest is not a petition. It is not “I ran the numbers, therefore the market owes me this Sharpe ratio.” A backtest is a diagnostic — it tells you something about your assumptions, not about the future. Confuse the two, and you are praying for profits.

Some Trading Koans

In that spirit, I offer more koans about the quantitative trading arts. The Master Trader is a figure of longstanding reputation. The Quant is a recent PhD. The Risk Manager is the person who works either for the regulators, in which case he is worse than useless, or for the fund, in which case he is merely useless.

The Quant and the Backtest

A novice came to the Master Trader and said: “I have backtested my strategy over twenty years of data. It has a Sharpe ratio of 3.2 and never had a losing year.”

The Master Trader said: “How many parameters does it have?”

“Only seven,” said the novice. “Each one is necessary.”

“And how many did you try before settling on these seven?”

The novice was silent.

“With enough parameters,” said the Master Trader, “I can fit an elephant. With one more, I can make it wiggle its trunk.”

The novice said: “But this is not a curve fit. I have an economic rationale for each parameter.”

“Ah,” said the Master Trader. “Then you found the rationale before or after you found the parameter?”

The novice was enlightened.

The Risk Manager’s Koan

A student asked the Risk Manager: “What is the worst loss our portfolio can sustain?”

The Risk Manager said: “Our Value at Risk is two percent.”

The student said: “Then we cannot lose more than two percent?”

The Risk Manager said: “No. I said that is the Value at Risk.”

“What is the difference?”

“Value at Risk is the amount you will lose on an ordinary day when you happen to lose money. It tells you nothing about extraordinary days.”

“Then what protects us on extraordinary days?”

“Nothing that can be expressed as a single number.”

The student said: “Then what good is the number?”

The Risk Manager said: “It satisfies the regulators.”

The student was enlightened.

Drescher and the Toaster (for a Trading Desk)

A disciple of another sect — a wealth advisor — once came to the Master Trader as he was reviewing his morning positions.

“I would like you to fill out this risk tolerance questionnaire,” said the outsider, “because I want you to manage your portfolio appropriately.”

The Master Trader took the questionnaire and fed it into the shredder, saying: “I wish the shredder to have the appropriate risk tolerance, too.”

Debug the Strategy

A Quant came to the Master Trader in great distress. “My strategy worked perfectly for three years and has now lost money for six consecutive months. I have checked the code line by line and there are no bugs.”

The Master Trader said: “The code is not the strategy.”

“What do you mean? The code implements the strategy.”

“The strategy,” said the Master Trader, “includes all the other funds running the same code.”

The Quant was enlightened.

The Nature of Alpha

A novice asked the Master Trader: “Where does alpha come from?”

The Master Trader said: “From other traders’ mistakes.”

“Then what happens when the other traders stop making that mistake?”

“Then your alpha was never yours. It was merely on loan.”

“How do I find alpha that is truly mine?”

“You are asking the wrong question,” said the Master Trader. “Ask instead: whose mistake am I?”

On Simplicity

A young Quant, freshly arrived from a machine learning program, presented his model to the Master Trader. It used an ensemble of gradient-boosted trees, a transformer for sequence modeling, and a graph neural network for cross-asset dependencies.

The Master Trader examined it carefully and said: “What does the model do when the Fed raises rates by 75 basis points for the first time in 28 years?”

“It has never seen such an event in training,” admitted the Quant.

“And what does your model do when it encounters something it has never seen?”

“It extrapolates from the nearest—”

“It guesses,” said the Master Trader. “Your model is a very expensive way to guess.”

“Then what should I use?”

The Master Trader showed him a chart with a single moving average on it.

“That’s it?” said the Quant. “A child could do that.”

“Yes,” said the Master Trader. “And it will work on the day nothing else does, precisely because a child could do it.”

Moon Instructions (for a Trading Desk)

A junior trader came to the senior trader and said: “I have found an arbitrage. The ETF is trading at a discount to its net asset value. I will buy the ETF and short the underlying basket.”

The senior trader said: “What is the carrying cost of the short?”

“Negligible.”

“What is the redemption mechanism?”

“I am not an authorized participant.”

“Then who will close the discount?”

“Market forces.”

“You have described a trade that requires someone else to do the work and give you the profit,” said the senior trader. “This is not arbitrage. This is hope.”

The Empty Order Book

A novice was studying the order book, watching bids and offers flicker and vanish.

“The book is full of lies,” he said to the Master Trader. “Ninety percent of these orders will be cancelled before they execute.”

“Yes,” said the Master Trader.

“Then how can I make decisions based on the order book?”

“You cannot,” said the Master Trader. “But neither can anyone else. And that is the information.”

Sussman Attains Enlightenment (Hedge Fund Remix)

A Quant was training a reinforcement learning agent to trade equities. The Master Trader came to him as he sat before six GPUs.

“What are you doing?” asked the Master Trader.

“I am training an agent to maximize Sharpe ratio. It has already learned to avoid drawdowns, size positions, and hedge tail risk.”

“Interesting. What happens if you reset the weights to random?”

“It would have to learn everything again from scratch.”

“And how would you know when to reset the weights?”

“I wouldn’t reset them. The agent has already converged.”

“But the market has not,” said the Master Trader.

The Quant was enlightened.

The Meta-Koan

Here’s what all ten koans have in common: they’re about the gap between the map and the territory.

The backtest is a map. The live market is the territory. The VaR number is a map. The tail event is the territory. The risk tolerance questionnaire is a map. The decades of scar tissue are the territory. The code is a map. The strategy-plus-competitors is the territory. The order book is a map. The intentions behind the orders are the territory. The converged model is a map. The non-stationary market is the territory. Averaging down is a map. Whether the thesis survived the drawdown is the territory.

And this is exactly what computational thinking teaches you.

When you learn to program — really learn, not just memorize syntax — you develop an instinct for the ways that formal systems diverge from the reality they’re supposed to model. You learn that code compiles but doesn’t work. That tests pass but the software fails. That the specification is not the system. You learn, at a visceral level, that running it is different from reasoning about it.

That instinct is worth more in trading than any amount of mathematics. Not because mathematics is wrong — the math is essential. But because mathematics tells you what should happen in the model, and computational thinking tells you all the ways the model is not the market.

The market is a computation that cannot be shortcut. You cannot derive what it will do from first principles. You cannot backtest your way to certainty. You cannot model your way past regime changes. The only way to know what happens is to run it — with real money, in real time, against real adversaries.

If that sounds like computational irreducibility, it’s because it is.

The Master Trader is not smarter than the Quant. The Master Trader has merely been enlightened more expensively.

For more on computational irreducibility and why even deterministic systems resist prediction, see my book The Science of Free Will. For the original AI Koans that inspired this post, see the Jargon File. For the rigorous version of why your drawdown rules are probably hurting you, see my paper “The Stop-Loss That Stops Gains.” And for a longer conversation about these ideas, see my two-part interview with Simon M. of Algo Advantage: Part 1 and Part 2.

On April 20th, the inimitable Matt Levine brought this one to my attention, as he so often does. What follows is my own take on it, in the physicist register, which is a different angle from his lawyer-and-markets one. You should read him too.

“It’s the hottest product in Greenwich,” one Wall Street person told the Financial Times in mid-April about tax-aware long-short hedge funds. The FT reporter added that fathers at a local sports game were fixated on AQR’s Delphi Plus fund. I live in Greenwich. I have not personally been cornered at a sideline — yet — but the day is young, and the ambient enthusiasm is real. So is the product category: $90 billion of net new money since the start of last year, almost a third of AQR’s assets now in tax-aware funds, and new entrants from Two Sigma, Quantinno, JPMorgan, WorldQuant, and Millennium piling in behind.

I kept reading the tax-aware long-short pitch decks and something felt off, but I couldn’t articulate it. Then I remembered I’m a physicist. Just a simple-minded trader and theoretical physicist. I ought to be able to articulate it. And so, here you are.

Three things about taxes, before we start

Before we can even begin to talk about what these funds do, a few things are worth stating plainly, because most of what comes later follows from them.

First: tax authorities are very good at collecting taxes. They have the entire mechanism of the monopoly on force behind them. No one pays taxes because they want to. People pay taxes because they are forced to — at the point of a gun, or loss of freedom. This is a useful thing to keep in your head whenever someone shows you a product that claims to reduce your taxes. The IRS has been doing this for a long time. They’re reasonably competent, and the ones who aren’t competent are backed up by people who are.

Second: if something seems amazingly good from a tax point of view, there is almost certainly a catch. Sometimes the catch is visible in the small print. Sometimes it’s visible only to someone willing to do the terminal accounting. Sometimes it’s not visible at all until the government gets around to looking at it.

Third: the catch usually arrives late. This is the part everyone forgets. You may run a structure for a decade and collect annual statements showing enormous savings before the bill shows up. The IRS is not a market-maker providing instant feedback. They are a collection agency with infinite patience and a monopoly on force. If something was wrong, you will find out — but possibly not for ten years.

One more contemporary note before we start. On April 17th, Bloomberg reported that a short seller called Orso Partners has taken a position against Affiliated Managers Group, the $800 billion investment firm that owns a stake in AQR. The specific thesis: concerns about the tax-aware long-short ecosystem. Real capital, real position, real bet against the boom. When someone is willing to put money against the hottest category on Wall Street, it is worth asking why. What follows is my version of the answer.

RenTech, or: how the smartest people in the room lost

If you want a case study for the third point, consider Renaissance Technologies.

RenTech — arguably the most quantitatively sophisticated hedge fund in the history of the industry — used a structure called a “basket option” from 2005 to 2015. The mechanics: Medallion (the insider fund, run on employees’ own money) bought options from Deutsche Bank and Barclays whose value tracked baskets of stocks that Medallion itself directed the banks to trade. Stocks held for days or seconds inside the basket; gains claimed as long-term because the option was held for more than a year. Presto: short-term gains converted to long-term.

In 2014, Senator Carl Levin’s subcommittee called the structure out publicly. RenTech fought it through IRS Appeals for seven more years. In September 2021 — sixteen years after they started — the firm’s current and former executives settled for approximately $7 billion. Largest tax settlement in U.S. history. Twice the prior record.

Notice the pattern. Ten years of running the structure. Seven years fighting it. A decade-plus of annual statements that looked great. And then the bill.

Notice also who lost. It wasn’t some marginal boutique. It was the people with presumably the best tax counsel in the world, running the structure on their own capital, in the fund with the highest Sharpe ratio in history. If those guys couldn’t make aggressive tax structuring stick — couldn’t, in the end — that should tell you something about the base rate.

Put aside the risk of that here

But let’s be generous. Let’s assume the tax-aware long-short category has constructed enough of a fig leaf that the strategy really does have economic substance independent of its tax benefits. Assume it survives any IRS challenge. Assume the factor bets are real, the wash-sale engine is immaculate, the short book actually holds up, and the whole apparatus does exactly what the pitch deck says it does.

Then what?

Then we can ask the real question: Are you actually saving any taxes?

And beneath that, the even better question: What is really going on?

What’s being sold

Briefly, for those who haven’t been pitched one of these: a tax-aware long-short fund is a factor strategy run at gross leverage — 150/50, 200/100, 250/150 — wrapped around a tax-loss-harvesting engine. The idea is that by going long and short a few hundred to a few thousand names, you generate a much richer stream of tax lots than a long-only direct-indexing book would. Dispersion creates losers. Losers create harvestable losses. Harvested losses offset gains you have elsewhere. The annualized savings — “tax alpha” — is typically quoted somewhere in the range of 1.5% to 2%.

AQR has been the most visible marketer of the category. According to the FT, they have added $47 billion of tax-aware assets since March of last year — almost a third of the firm’s total book. Quantinno, an independent firm founded by ex-AQR traders in 2018, has pulled in another $39 billion since January 2025. Two Sigma’s Beacon Fund, $950 million. JPMorgan, Merrill, WorldQuant, Millennium, Morgan Stanley’s Parametric — everybody is in. The underlying academic work by Sosner, Liberman, Sialm, and others is careful and honest. The pitch decks built on top of it, less so. And the scale — $90 billion of net new money in eighteen months — is precisely the thing that should make anyone who has watched cycles before start paying attention.

Books must balance

Here is the physicist’s reflex. If you trace the entire arc of a strategy — dollar in at the beginning, dollar out at the end, including every tax interaction in between — the accounting has to close. The IRS does not forget. They have not agreed to give up their claim on your gains. They have agreed to let you sequence those claims across time, within certain rules.

Call the investor’s total lifetime tax bill on the round trip T. Then the question to ask of any “tax alpha” strategy is whether it reduces T, or merely redistributes T across time.

Those are very different things. And the difference is where this post is going.

What the long-short structure actually does

To be fair, the long-short structure genuinely does something that a long-only direct-index book cannot do, and it is worth crediting honestly.

In a rising market, a long-only direct index runs out of harvestable losses. Everything is above cost. The harvesting yield decays to zero. This is arithmetic.

A long-short book has two structural refresh channels that a long-only book lacks. First, the short leg generates losses on winners — when a name you’re short appreciates, the short position has an unrealized loss that can be harvested by covering and re-shorting. In a rising market, the short book is the harvesting engine. Second, the factor tilts rebalance continuously — value and momentum and quality rotate against each other, positions open and close, and each rebalance establishes fresh cost bases. Every new lot at today’s price is, functionally, a new contribution from the harvesting engine’s point of view, even with no cash added.

Plus: gross leverage of 2-4x scales the lot surface area roughly linearly. More lots, more dispersion, more opportunities.

So the honest summary is: tax alpha decays, but in a long-short structure it decays more slowly than in long-only because the short book and factor rebalancing keep reseeding the loss inventory.

Fine. That’s real. But none of it escapes the conservation law.

The conservation law

Harvesting does not make taxes disappear. Harvesting realizes a loss today, which lowers your tax bill today, but it also lowers your cost basis (or for shorts, establishes a low basis) on whatever you reopened. When you eventually close that position at a gain, the gain is larger by exactly the amount of the loss you harvested. The IRS gets the same money. They just get it later.

If the strategy works and the factor book grinds up over decades, the aggregate book will drift to a progressively lower and lower basis relative to its market value. The deferred tax liability on the book grows. You can see the number on the statement — look at the “unrealized gains” line and multiply by your tax rate. That is what you owe, eventually, to the IRS. It is a liability. It is real. It is growing.

This is unavoidable. It is conservation. Harvesting shifts T forward in time. It does not reduce T.

What actually reduces your lifetime tax bill

Now — to be honest — there are ways the strategy can reduce T rather than merely shift it. They are narrower than the marketing suggests, and they are the entire real case for the product. Four of them:

1. Character conversion. If you have short-term gains elsewhere — trading profits, comp, carried interest in a short-term fund — taxed at ordinary rates (roughly 40% federal plus state), and the short leg throws off short-term losses, you are converting ordinary-rate tax into deferred long-term-capital-gains-rate tax. That is real new money: approximately the rate spread (say, 20 percentage points) times the volume of offsets. This is the strongest part of the case. It also means the product is genuinely well-suited to a specific kind of client — someone with large ordinary-rate income streams elsewhere — and materially weaker for everyone else.

2. Rate or jurisdiction arbitrage. Harvest at 37% federal plus 13% California today. Realize at 20% federal in Florida or Puerto Rico in retirement. Real, situational, not structural.

3. Step-up at death, or charitable transfer. The deferred liability actually evaporates. This is the one that does all the work in the long-run IRRs the marketing implies. The product is implicitly an estate-planning vehicle whenever this is the assumed exit.

4. The time value of the deferral itself. Delaying a dollar of tax is worth something — roughly the discount rate times the duration. At a 5% real discount rate over a 20-year horizon, deferring $1 of tax is worth about 60 cents in present value terms. Annualize that against the gain base and you get something like 1% a year — not zero, but also not the 1.5-2% in the pitch book. The deck annualizes the year-one harvesting bonanza; the reality is a front-loaded decay.

That’s it. Everything beyond those four items violates the conservation law and should be treated as rhetorical flourish.

Run the numbers

Let’s make this concrete with a round example.

Start with a $10 million portfolio. The marketing quotes a 2% tax alpha — so $200,000 in year one. The management fee on a tax-aware long-short wrapper is typically around 100 bps, call it $100,000. The financing spread on the short book (stock borrow, margin, the cost of running a 150/50 or wider structure) is around 50 bps of NAV on the modest end, call it another $50,000. Subtract: $50,000 of net benefit in year one. A quarter of the headline.

That’s the best year.

The harvesting yield decays as the embedded gain grows — the published academic curves show it roughly halving by year ten. But the fees don’t decay. By year ten you’re still paying $150,000 in fees and financing, but you’re generating maybe $100,000 of gross tax alpha. You are now losing $50,000 a year, net. By year fifteen, on any realistic factor book, the product is inside the fee. You are paying the manager to reduce your after-tax return.

And that’s the generous case. At the more aggressive 250/150 leverage common in the wrappers actually sold to retail, with retail pricing around 125 bps, the financing spread alone runs ~150 bps of NAV. Year one becomes $200,000 gross tax alpha minus $125,000 management minus $150,000 financing — negative $75,000, before any decay at all. The product is underwater from day one. The conservation law never even gets to assert itself, because the fee structure got there first.

Meanwhile, the 75/25 SPY/QQQ buy-and-hold investor paid around $12,000 a year in blended expense ratio. They realized nothing. They generated zero tax drag. The difference in net outcome over fifteen years is not marginal — it is orders of magnitude in the wrong direction.

This is before you account for the benchmark problem, which is where it gets much worse.

The benchmark that isn’t in the pitch deck

The product’s entire “tax alpha” number is quoted against a benchmark that itself generates continuous realizations. Of course a tax-aware strategy beats an actively managed one. But the relevant comparison for a long-term investor is not tax-aware-long-short versus actively-managed-churn. It is tax-aware-long-short versus two ETFs and a long nap. And on that comparison — which is the one the pitch deck is structured to avoid — the two ETFs win for almost any client who doesn’t have large ordinary-rate income to offset. Because the conservation law is trivially satisfied when you never realize anything to begin with. Deferral is free. You don’t need to pay anyone 100-150 basis points a year to give it to you.

At this point the sponsor’s fallback is always the same: forget the tax alpha, we also generate pre-tax alpha from the factor book — real returns, above market, net of fees. Fine, except: (a) if the factor book really did earn 200+ basis points of persistent net-of-fee pre-tax alpha, the manager would not need to lead with the tax story at all, and would not be marketing primarily to high-net-worth taxable clients; (b) the two decades of out-of-sample performance on most published equity factors have not been kind to that claim — value, momentum, quality, low-volatility have all gone through long stretches where net-of-fee returns trailed the index (I have written about this problem before); and (c) if you actually want factor exposure, you can buy a factor ETF with an expense ratio in the 15-30 bps range and be done with it. Wrapping the factor bet inside a leveraged tax-optimization engine does not make it more likely to earn alpha. It just makes the fee structure bigger. The pre-tax alpha defense is an argument for some factor product, maybe, for some investor. It is not an argument that specifically rescues the tax-aware long-short wrapper.

It gets worse for the product. The step-up-at-death case — item 3 above, which does most of the heavy lifting in the long-run IRR the marketing implies — is available to the buy-and-hold investor without the product. Hold the two ETFs until death, and the heirs inherit at stepped-up basis. Zero tax on the entire appreciation. Permanently. The long-short investor also gets step-up on their final embedded gain, but they paid 100-150 bps a year along the way for a structure whose largest tax benefit was going to be delivered by the step-up regardless. You paid fees for twenty years to receive, at the end, exactly the outcome you would have received for a dozen basis points a year.

And it gets worse still. The buy-and-hold investor has a second tool available that the long-short investor structurally does not: borrow against the portfolio.

This is not exotic. Post your SPY/QQQ as collateral against a securities-based line of credit. Rates inside of a mortgage, because the lender’s collateral is liquid and daily-marked. Spend the proceeds on whatever you want — house, tuition, boat, consumption, whatever consumption means to you. Loan proceeds are not income. You owe no tax on them, because you have not sold anything. The portfolio keeps compounding. The loan interest accrues. You die. Your heirs inherit at stepped-up basis, sell a piece of the position to retire the loan at zero tax (because basis equals market), and keep the rest clean.

Lifetime tax on the appreciation: zero. Consumption utility along the way: whatever you wanted. This is not a loophole. This is buy, borrow, die, and it is how essentially every large long-term holder of appreciated stock in the country actually manages their affairs.

The long-short product cannot do this efficiently. The short book consumes collateral capacity that would otherwise be available to borrow against. The realized short-term character generated by the structure has to be netted somewhere. The complexity of the positions impairs their use as clean collateral. The product is, at a structural level, at war with the single most powerful lifetime-tax-minimization strategy available to a long-term holder of appreciated securities.

So the full picture is not “tax-aware long-short beats buy-and-hold on tax alpha.” It is the opposite:

• Buy-and-hold beats the long-short product on realized tax drag, for anyone without large ordinary-rate income to offset, because it has no realized tax drag.

• Buy-and-hold delivers step-up at death for a dozen basis points a year instead of 100-150.

• Buy-and-hold lets you finance consumption against the portfolio without realizing, and the long-short structure actively interferes with this.

Three different mechanisms. All pointing the same direction. The product is not merely dominated by the naive alternative — it obstructs the two most powerful tax-minimization tools the naive investor already has.

The product is optimized for someone who never unwinds

Here is the quiet structural thing worth saying out loud.

The sponsor charges fees on the full NAV of the fund. The NAV includes the embedded, deferred tax liability — the portion of the “value” that the investor does not actually own, because it is owed to the IRS. The manager earns fees on that liability, forever, or at least until the client unwinds. If the client unwinds, fees stop, and the conservation law asserts itself: the back taxes come due in one brutal lump.

Therefore: the product is optimized for a client who never unwinds. Which is to say, for a client whose exit is death, or charitable giving, or a migration to a lower-tax jurisdiction. None of those are investment outcomes. They are estate-planning or lifestyle assumptions.

That is not an accusation. The math is clean, the academic papers are careful, and the more honest sponsor decks will say something like this in the footnotes. It is simply that the product is being sold as investing, and it largely works, to the extent it works, as estate planning with an investment wrapper. Those are different things. The investor should know which one they’re buying.

The general test

The conservation argument applies, with different constants, to most structures sold primarily on tax benefits — 351 ETF conversions, exchange funds, opportunity zones, insurance wrappers. The question to ask is always the same: is this reducing my lifetime tax bill, or is it shifting it forward and hoping for a terminal event that extinguishes it? If the product only delivers on its pitch assuming a life plan you could have executed without it, then what you’re buying is the reassurance of having bought something.

The IRS has the monopoly on force. The books must balance. Anyone offering you a shortcut around either of those is offering you something else.

For more on applying physicist-style reasoning to other domains where it tends to dissolve more than it’s supposed to — including theology, political science, law, and the question of free will itself — see my book, The Science of Free Will.

In a recent physics post, I showed you a single formula that fits every fermion mass ratio in nature using just four numbers. Quarks, electrons, neutrinos — all of them. But I never told you how I knew to look for it.

That’s this story. And it starts with one of the most tantalizing mysteries in all of physics.

A Number That Shouldn’t Exist

In 1981, a Japanese physicist named Yoshio Koide noticed something extraordinary. Take the three charged leptons — the electron, the muon, and the tau. These are the electron and its two heavier cousins: the muon is about 207 times heavier than the electron, and the tau is about 3,477 times heavier. Their masses seem arbitrary, chosen by nature through some inscrutable process.

But Koide found that if you write down this particular combination — using mₑ = 0.511 MeV, mμ = 105.66 MeV, and mτ = 1776.86 MeV:

you get:

Two-thirds. To five decimal places.

Let that sink in. Three masses spanning a factor of 3,477 — masses that appear to follow no pattern whatsoever — produce a ratio that is almost exactly 2/3 when you plug them into this formula.

This is either a cosmic coincidence or a clue. For over forty years, physicists have been unable to determine which.

Why This Drove Physicists Crazy

The Koide relation isn’t like other “near misses” in physics. It’s too precise to ignore and too mysterious to explain. Hundreds of papers have been written about it. Some tried to extend it to quarks — those attempts failed, because if you naively plug quark masses into the same formula, you don’t get anything special. Others tried to derive it from symmetry principles, flavor models, or grand unified theories — but none of these explanations stuck.

The formula just sat there: beautiful, precise, unexplained.

And here’s what made it so maddening: Koide’s formula involves a dimensionless ratio. The masses themselves have units — electron volts, kilograms, whatever convention you prefer. But K is a pure number. If aliens in another galaxy measured the same particles in completely different units, they’d get the same 2/3.

That matters, because dimensionless quantities are nature’s real choices. The absolute mass of the electron depends on our measurement conventions. But a dimensionless ratio like K depends on nothing but the laws of physics themselves. Dimensionless quantities should, in principle, be calculable from first principles.

Which means 2/3 isn’t an accident. It’s a message. The question was: from whom?

Three Generations, No Explanation

Before I tell you what I found, let me set the stage.

The world is made of atoms. Atoms are electrons orbiting a nucleus. The nucleus consists of protons and neutrons. And protons and neutrons are made of quarks — specifically, “up” quarks and “down” quarks.

That’s generation #1: the electron, the up quark, and the down quark. That’s all you need to build every atom in the periodic table, every molecule in your body, every star in the sky.

Yet nature, for reasons no one understands, created two additional generations that are exact copies of these three particles, just heavier. The muon and the tau are copies of the electron. The strange and charm quarks are copies of the up and down. The bottom and top quarks are a third copy.

These heavier copies appear to serve no purpose. They decay almost instantly into their lighter cousins. The top quark — the heaviest of them all, weighing as much as an entire gold atom — survives for about 0.0000000000000000000000005 seconds before it disintegrates. Why does nature bother creating it?

And the mass ratios between generations are bizarre. The top quark is nearly 80,000 times heavier than the up quark. These aren’t small variations — they’re enormous, irregular jumps that nobody can explain.

The Standard Model of particle physics, for all its triumphs, simply takes these masses as inputs. It doesn’t predict them. They’re among the deepest unexplained numbers in all of science.

What I Discovered

I found the reason Koide’s formula works. And it’s not a coincidence — it’s required by a mathematical symmetry rooted in string theory. The paper has been peer-reviewed and published; the math is the math.

Let me explain this at three levels of depth. Pick the one that suits you.

The headline version: There’s a mathematical consistency condition — called modular invariance (the requirement that the physics doesn’t change when you re-parameterize the shape of the extra dimensions, much as Einstein required that physics not depend on your choice of coordinates) — that comes from the way extra dimensions are folded up in string theory. This condition forces the Koide ratio to be exactly 2/3. It’s not optional. It’s not approximate. The symmetry demands it.

Going a bit deeper: In string theory, the extra dimensions beyond our familiar three can be “folded” in specific ways called orbifolds. Think of it like origami — you take a flat sheet and fold it so that certain points are identified with each other, creating corners and symmetry points.

When you fold the extra dimensions this way, the folding creates two natural “building blocks” — two different ways to symmetrically combine the three masses in a given sector. Call them S₁ and S₂. For the mathematically inclined: S₁ is the sum of the masses raised to one power, S₂ is the sum raised to a different power, and those powers are determined by the folding.

Now here’s the key: there is exactly one ratio you can construct from those two building blocks that is (a) symmetric — it doesn’t matter which mass you call “first” — and (b) scale-independent — it doesn’t change if you measure masses in electron volts or kilograms or banana-weights.

Just one. And when you compute it for the electron, muon, and tau: 2/3.

Not because you chose the formula to give 2/3. Because the folding of the extra dimensions only allows one formula, and that formula happens to give 2/3.

The full story in plain English:

If the next few paragraphs make your head spin, skip ahead to “The Quark Surprise” — you won’t lose the thread of the argument.

Here’s how the construction actually works.

In a particular class of string theory constructions called orbifold conformal field theories, the extra dimensions are compactified using discrete symmetries — a ℤₖ group, where k is called the orbifold order. The idea is simple: you rotate the extra dimensions by 360°/k and declare that the rotated configuration is identical to the original. For ℤ₂, you rotate by 180°; do it twice and you’re back where you started. For ℤ₃, you rotate by 120°; three steps to return.

This folding creates “twisted sectors” — particles that are trapped at the symmetry points of the fold, like a crease in a piece of paper. These twisted sectors come with characteristic fractional numbers called “degrees,” one from the left-moving and one from the right-moving vibrations of the string. (A string vibrates in two directions independently — “left-movers” and “right-movers.” The chiral degree comes from one direction alone; the left-right combined degreecombines both directions.) These two degrees give us our two building blocks:

The factor of 2 in the second exponent comes from a basic property of the theory: the total scaling dimension (a number that tells you how a quantity changes when you zoom in or out — essentially, how it “scales” with energy) is twice the chiral dimension, because you have both left-moving and right-moving contributions.

Now, I want a ratio — an observable — that respects three conditions:

1. Permutation symmetry: It shouldn’t matter which mass I label “1,” “2,” or “3.”

2. Scale independence (degree zero): If I rescale all masses by the same factor, the ratio shouldn’t change.

3. Charge quantization: The powers in the ratio should be consistent with the electric charges of the particles, as enforced by modular invariance (the same coordinate-independence condition I described above — it constrains which combinations of charges and orbifold orders are mathematically self-consistent).

It turns out that conditions 1 and 2 together force the ratio to have the form S₁^α / S₂^(2α) for some power α. Why the factor of 2? Because S₁ has homogeneity degree 1/k (each mass is raised to 1/k), and S₂ has degree 1/(2k). For the ratio to be scale-independent — degree zero — the total degree upstairs must equal the total degree downstairs: α/k = β/(2k), which forces β = 2α. And condition 3 — which comes from requiring mathematical consistency of the orbifold — fixesα uniquely: α = kq, where k is the orbifold order and q is the minimal electric charge quantum.

The result is:

This is the master formula. It has no free parameters — once you specify the particle sector (which fixes k and q), the formula is completely determined.

For charged leptons (i.e., the electron, muon, and tau), the orbifold order is k = 1 and the charge quantum is q = 1. Plug those in:

That’s Koide’s formula. And it gives 2/3.

The Quark Surprise

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Half the physics world had tried to extend Koide to quarks and failed. The reason they failed is that they were plugging quark masses into Koide’s formula — the one with square roots. But the orbifold framework says: don’t do that. Quarks have different quantum numbers than leptons, so they live in a different orbifold sector, which means k and q are different, which means the formula itself is different.

For quarks, the orbifold order is k = 2 (a ℤ₂ symmetry) and the charge quantum is q = 1/3 (because the smallest quark charge is 1/3 of the electron’s charge). Plug those into the master formula:

Note: this sums over all six quark masses. And when you evaluate it using the measured masses at the Z-boson scale:

One-half. To four decimal places.

No one had found this before, because no one had the right formula to look for. They kept trying the lepton formula on quarks. But the orbifold says: different charges, different folding, different formula, different answer.

And notice the beautiful structure: the master formula R(k, q) contains both results. When k = 1 and q = 1, you get Koide. When k = 2 and q = 1/3, you get the quark ratio. The framework generates different formulas for different sectors from a single principle. You don’t have to guess the right formula — the mathematics hands it to you.

A note for physicists: the formula uses electric charge |q|, not hypercharge Y — and the absolute value |q|, not the signed charge q. Both choices are surprising. Above the electroweak scale, hypercharge is the “fundamental” quantum number, and electric charge only emerges after symmetry breaking — yet the mass spectrum organizes itself around the broken quantity. Hypercharge does not work. And the sign of the charge, which distinguishes up-type from down-type fermions, is also irrelevant — only the magnitude matters. The same is true of the universal formula from my previous post: replacing |q| with |Y| destroys the fit (because hypercharge no longer distinguishes up-type from down-type quarks), and using signed q instead of |q| also fails. Note, however, that the two formulas use charge differently: the orbifold formula uses the minimum charge quantum of the sector (|q| = 1 for leptons, |q| = 1/3 for all quarks), while the universal formula uses each particle’s own charge (1, 1/3, or 2/3). Yet both insist on |q| over Y. This may be telling us something deep about the relationship between flavor structure and electroweak symmetry breaking.

It’s Not a Coincidence

Two natural questions: Is 1/2 really exact? And does it stay 1/2 at different energy scales?

On the first: the value Rq = 0.4995 is consistent with 1/2 within experimental uncertainties. The masses of light quarks (up, down, strange) are notoriously hard to measure — their uncertainties are 10–20%. The fact that six masses with these large individual uncertainties conspire to produce a ratio within 0.1% of 1/2 is remarkable.

On the second: in quantum field theory, particle masses “run” — they change depending on the energy scale at which you probe them. The individual quark masses change enormously between the electroweak scale and 10¹⁴ GeV. But I showed that Rq barely budges. At one loop (the first level of quantum correction, where you account for virtual particles popping in and out of the vacuum once), it’s exactly invariant — due to a cancellation involving the “gauge group structure” (don’t worry about what that means; the point is that it cancels exactly, not approximately). At two loops (the next level of correction, which is far more intricate), it shifts by only a few parts in a thousand over twelve orders of magnitude in energy.

This means the relation is fundamental, not accidental. An accident would be destroyed by quantum corrections. A consequence of deep symmetry survives them — and that’s exactly what happens.

The high-scale prediction is: Rq(10¹⁴ GeV) = 0.500 ± 0.002. Upcoming lattice QCD calculations (a technique that simulates quark interactions on a discrete grid of spacetime points using supercomputers, allowing physicists to extract quark masses from first principles) should be able to test this.

The Moment Everything Changed

So here’s where I stood: I had explained a 40-year mystery (Koide’s 2/3) and discovered something new (the quark ratio of 1/2), both flowing from the same mathematical structure with zero free parameters.

And then the thought hit me.

If dimensionless mass ratios in the lepton sector are governed by a mathematical symmetry, and dimensionless mass ratios in the quark sector are also governed by the same symmetry... then there’s hidden structure in the fermion mass spectrum that no one has been fully exploiting.

And if there’s hidden structure, there should be a universal expression for all fermion mass ratios — not a separate formula for each sector, but one single relation that captures the whole pattern. A relation built from the most basic labels that distinguish particles: the generation number (1, 2, or 3) and the electric charge.

After all, those were the only ingredients that went into the orbifold construction: k depends on the charge family, and the formula is symmetric across generations. The deeper pattern should depend on nothing else.

So I went looking for it. And as readers of my previous post already know, I found it.

(And before you say “overfitting” — I tested that. I ran all 120 possible assignments of generation labels to masses; only the physical one fits. I scanned all 720 possible ratio bases; only one converges. Alternative functional forms are decisively ruled out by information criteria. The details are in the previous post and in the paper.)

The Larger Picture

Let me step back and tell you what I think this means.

For forty years, Koide’s formula was treated as a curiosity — a beautiful but isolated numerical coincidence. Nobody could explain it, nobody could extend it, and gradually most physicists filed it away as “probably a coincidence.”

It’s not a coincidence. It’s the tip of an iceberg.

The reason no one could extend Koide to quarks is that they were looking for the same formula in a different sector. But the orbifold framework says: the formula should be different for quarks, because quarks carry different charges and live in a different part of the geometry. What’s universal is not the formula but the principle — modular covariance (the requirement that the mass functional transforms in a controlled, predictable way under re-parameterizations of the extra-dimensional geometry, rather than being completely invariant) — that generates the right formula for each sector.

And once you see that the principle is universal, you realize the mass spectrum is trying to tell us something. The twelve fermion masses aren’t arbitrary constants. They’re constrained by deep mathematical structure — structure that might, ultimately, come from the shape of the extra dimensions in which we live.

The paper is published in Modern Physics Letters A and available here: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S0217732326500732

The universal pattern paper is in the European Physical Journal C: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14771-0

What’s Next

The universal formula from the previous post has four parameters:

where d is the generation index, q is the electric charge, and the fitted values are κ ≈ 2.3, γ ≈ 1.1, ζ₁ ≈ 1.17, ζ₂ ≈ −0.8 — all of order 1.

I’m now working on deriving those four parameters from first principles. If that succeeds, zero free parameters remain — and the twelve-order-of-magnitude fermion mass spectrum would be entirely determined by mathematical structure.

Stay tuned.

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my book The Science of Free Will. The fermion mass puzzle and free will might seem unrelated, but they share a deep question: can a system governed by rigid mathematical laws produce outcomes that are, in any meaningful sense, unpredictable? The answer — computational irreducibility — changes how you think about everything from particle physics to human choice.

In Part I, we applied the tetrad — physics, math, CS, economics — to anthropology, psychology, law, and linguistics. The pattern: take a field, identify its standard framing, apply all four lenses, and watch the real structure emerge.

Today we go deeper. Political science, aesthetics, history — and then something important: what happens when the tetrad catches its own errors.

Political Science

Standard framing: Democracy vs. authoritarianism. Left vs. right. The big debates are about which values should guide society, who should rule, and how to balance freedom against equality.

The tetrad:

Physics: Politics operates on territory, bodies, and weapons. The monopoly on legitimate violence is the foundation. Everything else is built on that substrate.

Math: Voting theory is mathematics. Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Gibbard-Satterthwaite. Coalition math. These aren’t just academic curiosities — they’re constraints, like thermodynamics.

CS: Constitutions are source code. Precedent is version control. Bureaucracy is runtime — taking abstract rules and executing them on specific cases. Political parties are long-running processes that seek to replicate themselves.

Economics: Power is a scarce resource. Political actors are self-interested optimizers. Policy outcomes are the equilibria of games between competing interests.

What falls out:

The first thing that falls out is a famous impossibility result. Arrow’s theorem says: no voting system can simultaneously satisfy a small set of obviously desirable properties (non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, independence of irrelevant alternatives). Something has to give.

This seems to suggest that all political systems are hacks around fundamental impossibility — that we’re always trading off one form of unfairness for another.

But wait. There’s an escape hatch.

The Approval Voting Escape

Arrow’s theorem applies to ordinal voting systems — systems where voters rank candidates. But what about cardinal systems, where voters assign independent scores?

Approval voting works like this: for each candidate, vote “approve” or “don’t approve.” Most approvals wins. Simple.

This completely sidesteps Arrow. Why?

• Arrow requires voters to submit complete rankings

• Approval voting doesn’t use rankings — each candidate gets an independent binary score

• The “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives” criterion is satisfied trivially: adding candidate C doesn’t change whether you approve of A or B

So Arrow doesn’t apply. Approval voting is a genuine escape from impossibility, not a hack around it.

What about Gibbard-Satterthwaite, the other big impossibility result? It says any deterministic voting system with 3+ candidates is either dictatorial or manipulable (strategic voting is possible).

Approval voting is manipulable — you can strategically withhold approval. But:

1. The manipulation is transparent. You know you’re doing it.

2. The equilibria are often good. Approval voting tends to elect Condorcet winners when they exist.

3. The strategy is simple. Approve candidates above your expected utility of the winner.

The math says: approval voting isn’t perfect, but it’s provably better than plurality voting (what most democracies use) and arguably better than ranked-choice voting (which doesn’t even satisfy monotonicity — voting for a candidate can cause them to lose).

So why don’t we have it?

Why We Don’t Have Approval Voting

Here’s where the economics lens becomes essential.

The people who would need to approve the change to approval voting are exactly the people who won under the current system.

Think about it:

• Plurality voting converges to two parties (Duverger’s Law)

• Those two parties then control ballot access, debate rules, redistricting, and — crucially — voting system reform

• They’re not going to vote themselves into competition

It’s a monopoly that gets to write the antitrust laws.

This explains the pattern we observe:

• Approval voting wins in low-stakes elections where parties aren’t paying attention (Fargo, St. Louis, some professional associations)

• It gets crushed or ignored at state and federal levels where parties fight back

• Ranked-choice voting — which still tends to favor major parties over approval — gets adopted instead, often with party support, because it looks like reform while preserving the duopoly

Revealed preference: politicians say they want fair elections. They do block approval voting. Believe the behavior, not the words.

The UN Exception

Here’s what makes this argument airtight: the one place where political parties don’t dominate, approval voting emerges naturally.

The UN Security Council selects the Secretary-General through “straw polls” where each member nation indicates “encourage,” “discourage,” or “no opinion” on each candidate. This is essentially three-level approval voting.

In 2006, when Ban Ki-moon was selected, 15 countries voted on 6 candidates. The average number of “approves” per ballot was 2.6 — nowhere near degenerating to plurality voting. Voters genuinely used the full range of the system.

Why does the UN use this system? Because it’s an environment where no single party controls the rules. The member states have sufficiently divergent interests that no one bloc can rig the system in its favor. (Yes, the five permanent members retain veto power — but the straw poll itself operates without party-line discipline, which is the point. The approval mechanism works because no domestic-style duopoly controls the ballot design.) So they ended up with something close to optimal.

Donald Saari, a mathematician, once worried that approval voting would “degenerate” to plurality in practice — everyone would just approve their first choice. The UN Secretary-General elections are a high-stakes refutation: when parties can’t capture the rule-making process, approval voting works exactly as the math predicts.

Aesthetics

Standard framing: Beauty is subjective. Art can’t be analyzed. De gustibus non est disputandum.

The tetrad:

Physics: Light waves, pigment, sound frequencies, neural processing. Art is physical stimuli hitting sensory organs.

Math: Symmetry. Proportion. The golden ratio. Harmonic series. Fractals and self-similarity. There’s obviously somestructure to what humans find beautiful.

CS: Art is compression. A painting encodes more information than it literally contains — it evokes a scene, an emotion, an idea that would take thousands of words to describe. Good art achieves high compression ratios.

Economics: Art is status signaling. It’s attention economics. It’s costly signaling of fitness (the peacock’s tail, the patron’s Vermeer).

What falls out:

Beauty is the subjective experience of high compression — a lot of information encoded cheaply.

When you look at a beautiful face, a sunset, an elegant mathematical proof — what’s happening is that your pattern-recognition systems are clicking into place efficiently. The stimulus carries rich information but matches your priors well enough that encoding it is cheap. The prediction errors are small. It feels good because you’re getting a lot for a little. (A blank page has low computational cost too, but it carries no information — that’s why it’s not beautiful. Beauty requires something worth compressing.)

(This is the same principle that explains why retail traders overpay for binary options. A binary option is the “beautiful” financial product — two outcomes, trivially easy to evaluate. The bull spread pays more but costs more to process. Traders pay a simplicity tax for the same reason we find symmetry beautiful: high information at low processing cost feels good.)

This explains a lot:

• Why average faces are beautiful: They’re easier to encode. Each feature is close to the statistical mean, requiring less information to represent.

• Why symmetry is beautiful: One half predicts the other. Massive compression.

• Why “interesting” art violates expectations just enough: Too predictable (kitsch) is boring — you’re not learning anything. Too unpredictable (noise) is exhausting — you can’t encode it at all. Great art sits on the edge: compressible, but not trivially so.

• Why mathematical proofs can be “elegant”: An elegant proof is a short path through logical space. It compresses a complex truth into a small number of steps.

This doesn’t reduce aesthetics to neuroscience. You still need to understand art history, cultural context, the specific traditions a work is responding to. But it does give you the right organizing question: what are the computational properties of stimuli that humans find rewarding to process?

History

Standard framing: The great debate is “Great Man” vs. “Historical Forces.” Did Napoleon shape history, or did history shape Napoleon? Is it individuals or systems that drive change?

The tetrad:

Physics: Geography, climate, disease, calories, metallurgy. Jared Diamond wasn’t wrong about everything — the physical substrate matters enormously.

Math: Network effects. Exponential growth. Power laws. The mathematics of growth and contagion applies to ideas, empires, and plagues alike.

CS: History is the output of a cellular automaton we can’t rewind. Contingency is sensitivity to initial conditions. Path dependence is hysteresis — where you are depends on where you’ve been, not just where you are.

Economics: Malthusian traps. Institutional lock-in. Conquest as hostile acquisition. Civilizations rise and fall based on whether they solve the cooperation problems of their scale.

What falls out:

“Great Man” vs. “Historical Forces” is a false dichotomy. Both are true, at different scales of resolution.

At the macro scale — why did agriculture emerge in the Fertile Crescent? Why did Eurasia dominate? — individual choices wash out. Geography determines. The “forces” win.

At the micro scale — why did WWI start in 1914 rather than 1912? Why did the Archduke’s driver make that wrong turn? — we’re in the chaotic regime. Small perturbations cascade. Individuals matter.

The right question isn’t “which one?” It’s “at what resolution are we predicting?”

This has practical implications. If you’re trying to understand century-scale trends, focus on constraints: resources, geography, technology, demographics. If you’re trying to understand specific events, focus on agents: leaders, decisions, contingency. The tetrad tells you which lens to apply at which magnification.

The Tetrad Turned on Itself

Here’s where intellectual honesty matters. The tetrad is a framework, and frameworks can mislead. What happens when we apply the tetrad to its own examples?

QWERTY keyboards are a classic “path dependence” story. The standard narrative: QWERTY was designed to slow typists down (to prevent jamming on mechanical typewriters). Dvorak is faster. But we’re stuck with QWERTY because of lock-in. Market failure!

This story is too clean.

Let’s apply the economics lens to the story itself:

• August Dvorak designed the Dvorak keyboard

• August Dvorak conducted the Navy study “proving” Dvorak was faster

• Later independent studies (Liebowitz and Margolis) found minimal or no advantage

• The “designed to slow typists down” origin story is probably false anyway — QWERTY was designed to reduce jamming, which is different from reducing speed

So we have: - Dvorak had an incentive to find Dvorak superior — and lo, he did - Economists and journalists have an incentive to tell a good “market failure” parable — QWERTY is such a satisfying story that people repeat it without checking

The lesson: if a story seems too satisfying, ask who benefits from telling it.

This doesn’t mean path dependence is fake. It doesn’t mean lock-in never happens. But this particular example — perhaps the most famous example in the economics of technology — doesn’t actually work.

The tetrad demands rigor. Even for its own favorite stories.

Why We Don’t Get Nice Things

Let’s pull back to the big picture.

The tetrad tells you what’s optimal: the mathematically superior voting system, the economically efficient policy, the scientifically correct answer.

The economics leg tells you why you won’t get it.

Wherever you see a clearly superior solution that isn’t adopted, ask: who chooses the rules, and do they benefit from the current ones?

• Approval voting: Superior. Blocked by the duopoly.

• US healthcare: Wildly inefficient. But efficient for insurers, hospitals, and pharma.

• Academic publishing: Broken. But the prestige cartel benefits incumbents.

• Municipal zoning: Creates housing shortages. But protects incumbent homeowners’ property values.

• The filibuster: Enables minority rule. But senators like having it when they’re in the minority.

In each case, the people who would need to change the system are the people who benefit from it. The math says it’s broken. The economics explains why it stays broken.

This is not cynicism. It’s the opposite of cynicism. Cynicism says “nothing can be changed.” The tetrad says: change requires changing who writes the rules, or changing their incentives.

That’s actionable. It tells you where to focus.

Conclusion

Three posts, eight fields, one framework.

The tetrad isn’t a theory of everything. It’s a method for generating theories. Take any domain, apply four lenses — substance, structure, process, selection — and watch the real questions emerge.

Sometimes you’ll confirm what the field already knows. Sometimes you’ll dissolve fake debates (Universal Grammar). Sometimes you’ll identify impossibility results that constrain what can be achieved (Arrow). Sometimes you’ll catch yourself repeating satisfying stories that don’t survive scrutiny (QWERTY).

The point isn’t to replace expertise with armchair philosophizing. You still need to know the details. But the tetrad tells you which details matter and why.

Physics gives you the substrate. Math gives you the structure. Computer science gives you the dynamics. Economics tells you who’s optimizing for what, and therefore what will actually happen versus what “should” happen.

Put them together, and the world becomes more legible. Not simpler — more legible. You can see why things are the way they are, and what would have to change for them to be different.

That’s the project.

This post concludes the series on the tetrad framework. “The Simplicity Tax“ introduced the anomaly that motivated it. “The Tetrad“ laid out the framework and applied it to theology. “The Tetrad Tour, Part I“ covered anthropology, psychology, law, and linguistics. For the full development of these ideas — including the relationship between determinism, computational irreducibility, and free will — see my book The Science of Free Will.

In the last post, I argued that every field of human study reduces to four irreducible lenses: physics (substance), mathematics (structure), computer science (process), and economics (selection). Then I stress-tested the framework on the hardest possible case — theology — and showed how it separates the coherent positions on God from the incoherent ones, and why you can’t mix and match across the divide.

Now let’s see what happens when we point the tetrad at fields where the standard framing is less obviously wrong, but still missing something important.

The method is simple: take a field, identify its standard framing, apply all four lenses, and see what falls out that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

Anthropology

Standard framing: Cultures are diverse and contingent. They emerge from historical accident. You can’t judge one culture by the standards of another — that’s ethnocentrism. The proper stance is cultural relativism: describe, don’t evaluate.

The tetrad:

Physics: Humans are bodies. Bodies need calories. Bodies exist in environments with specific constraints — temperature, disease vectors, available prey, arable land. The physical substrate shapes everything downstream.

Math: Kinship systems aren’t random; they follow the mathematics of group theory. Marriage rules, inheritance patterns, and alliance structures have formal properties that can be analyzed independently of any particular culture. Claude Lévi-Strauss saw this decades ago. More broadly, wherever cultures create obligation networks — who owes what to whom — those networks have structural properties (cycles, leverage ratios, cascading defaults) that can be analyzed with the same tools we’d use on any graph.

CS: Culture is software running on human hardware. Memes — in Dawkins’s original sense — are programs that copy themselves with mutation and selection. Oral traditions are lossy compression algorithms for transmitting survival-relevant information across generations. Rituals are executable code: do this, in this order, and produce this outcome (social bonding, status marking, rite of passage).

Economics: Every culture is solving optimization problems under constraint. How do you coordinate behavior without centralized authority? How do you sustain cooperation in iterated games? How do you allocate scarce status, mates, and resources without constant violence?

What falls out:

Consider the potlatch — the ceremonial feast practiced by the Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Tlingit, and other peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. At these gatherings, chiefs gave away enormous quantities of wealth — blankets, canoes, preserved food — and in the most extreme cases destroyed it. They smashed ornamental coppers worth thousands of blankets. They held “grease feasts” where eulachon oil was poured onto the fire until flames singed the spectators and threatened to set the roof ablaze. Helen Codere called it “fighting with property.”

European missionaries and colonial administrators thought this was insane. Canada banned the potlatch from 1884 to 1951 and jailed people for practicing it. The Kwakwaka’wakw kept doing it underground, sometimes telling authorities they were “celebrating Christmas.”

Standard anthropology describes the potlatch as a complex cultural ritual embedded in kinship, cosmology, and social structure — all true, but incomplete. Standard economics sees waste — destruction of resources that could feed people. Also incomplete.

The tetrad sees something else entirely.

Physics first. The Pacific Northwest was one of the most resource-rich environments humans have ever inhabited. Salmon runs provided massive caloric surpluses — but those surpluses were seasonal and volatile. One year a river teems with fish; the next year, near-starvation. You can dry and smoke salmon, but storage is lossy. You can’t bank a salmon run the way you can bank grain.

Math next. The potlatch wasn’t just redistribution — it was a credit creation system. Gifts had to be reciprocated with interest. Franz Boas documented that in one Kwakwaka’wakw village of roughly 150 people, where only about 400 blankets physically existed, the outstanding obligations totaled 75,000 blankets. That’s a leverage ratio of nearly 200:1. The obligation network was a directed graph with geometric escalation built into the edges. The structure of compound obligations meant the system could generate claims on future wealth that vastly exceeded the physical wealth in existence. This is pure formal structure — it holds regardless of who’s optimizing or why. (If this sounds familiar to anyone who has worked in finance, it should. The potlatch was, in a precise sense, a derivatives market. Notional value dwarfing real value. Claims on future states of the world.)

Economics. If you can’t store surplus as physical goods, what do you do with it? You convert it into social capital. Giving away wealth creates obligations — and obligations are insurance. The economist Ronald Trosper argues that the potlatch was a direct adaptation to salmon volatility: a decentralized insurance system disguised as a status competition. The clan that gave lavishly in a good year could call on obligations in a bad one.

But that explains the redistribution. It doesn’t explain the destruction. Why burn oil? Why break coppers? Because of costly signaling — another economic insight. A signal is credible only if it’s expensive to fake. Giving away blankets is impressive, but your rival might be borrowing them. Destroying a named copper worth thousands of blankets is unfalsifiable. You cannot fake the destruction of wealth. Your rival must break one of equal or greater value or be humiliated before the community.

CS. And here’s what no single lens captures alone. In a pre-literate society, reputation is a distributed information structure. There’s no written record of who is wealthy, who is reliable, who can be trusted in a crisis. The potlatch is a write operation to non-volatile memory. In a society without writing, ordinary exchanges are volatile — they fade, get disputed, lose detail. The potlatch makes the write durable: public, witnessed, irreversible. The destruction isn’t waste. It’s the cost of writing to a distributed ledger that has no other input mechanism. The burning oil, the shattered copper, the singed eyebrows of the spectators — these are what make the entry persist in a database that runs on human memory and oral tradition.

So the potlatch isn’t irrational destruction. It’s four things simultaneously: an adaptation to volatile physics (salmon ecology), a credit system with formal network properties (mathematics), a decentralized insurance mechanism with unfalsifiable signaling (economics), and a data storage protocol for pre-literate reputation management (computer science). No single lens gets the full picture. You need all four.

(A caveat worth noting: the most extreme potlatch destruction — the truly spectacular conflagrations — intensified in the post-contact period, when European trade goods flooded in and disease epidemics opened up status competition that had previously been more constrained. The underlying logic predates contact. The escalation was partly an artifact of disruption. The tetrad explains both: the logic is optimization under constraint, and when the constraints change — new goods, population collapse, compressed status hierarchies — the optimum moves.)

This pattern of different local optima emerging from different constraint surfaces is universal, and it generates predictions. It explains why diaspora communities often become more traditional after emigrating: the physical and social environment changed, the constraint surface shifted, and cultural practices that were background defaults in the homeland became active programs that must be consciously maintained against a different operating system. It also predicts that findings from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) may not generalize — not because other cultures are exotic, but because WEIRD societies sit on a radically unusual constraint surface compared to the environments that shaped human cognition for 99.9% of our history.

Cultural relativism gets half the story right: you can’t naively judge a culture by standards that emerged from different constraints. But it misses the other half: once you understand the constraints, you can evaluate how well a culture solves its actual problems. Some solutions are better than others. And the tetrad tells you which questions to ask to find out.

Psychology

Standard framing: Humans are irrational. We’re riddled with cognitive biases — confirmation bias, loss aversion, availability heuristic, and dozens more. The rational agent model of economics is wrong. Behavioral economics has revealed the truth: we’re predictably irrational.

The tetrad:

Physics: Brains are made of neurons. Neurons are slow (milliseconds, not nanoseconds) and energy-expensive (20% of metabolism for 2% of body mass). The hardware has severe constraints.

Math: Optimal inference under uncertainty follows Bayes’s theorem. Signal detection theory tells you how to make decisions when information is noisy. Network topology constrains what computations are even possible for a given architecture.

CS: The brain is a prediction machine running lossy compression. You can’t process raw sensory data — there’s too much of it. So you build models, predict what’s coming, and only attend to prediction errors. Emotions are interrupt signals: stop doing what you’re doing, this requires immediate attention. Consciousness is something like a global workspace algorithm for integrating information from specialized modules.

Economics: Attention is the scarcest resource. Every decision has a cognitive cost. You can’t optimize perfectly — you can only satisfice within the computational budget you have.

What falls out:

Most of what we call “cognitive biases” aren’t bugs. They’re optimal heuristics given the computational constraints.

Confirmation bias? That’s efficient Bayesian updating when you have strong priors and evidence-gathering is expensive. If you’ve seen a thousand white swans, it’s rational to discount the testimony of someone who claims to have seen a black one. The cost of checking every anomaly exceeds the expected value of being right about rare events.

Loss aversion? Correct weighting when downside variance matters more than expected value. For most of evolutionary history, losing everything meant dying. A 50% chance of doubling your resources versus a 50% chance of losing them all isn’t a coin flip — it’s an existential risk. The math says you should be loss averse.

The availability heuristic? A reasonable proxy for base rates when your sample is your actual lived experience. If you can easily remember examples of X, then X has been common in your environment. It only fails when your environment becomes radically unrepresentative — which, evolutionarily speaking, is very recent.

The “irrationality” literature is largely economists and psychologists being mad that humans don’t optimize for expected utility in laboratory settings. But expected utility maximization isn’t the right objective function for survival. Evolution didn’t design you to be rational; it designed you to be alive. That these sometimes diverge is not a flaw in the human; it’s a flaw in the economic model.

(This doesn’t mean biases can’t be exploited, or that modern environments don’t create mismatches. They do. But the baseline isn’t “irrational deviation from perfect reasoning.” It’s “optimal heuristics that served well for 99.9% of human history.”)

Law

Standard framing: Law is about justice. It’s about rights, fairness, due process, and the protection of the innocent. Legal philosophy debates whether law has an inherent connection to morality (natural law) or is simply whatever the sovereign commands (legal positivism).

The tetrad:

Physics: Law operates on bodies and property. The ultimate enforcement mechanism is physical: confinement, seizure, violence. Everything else is upstream of this.

Math: Deontic logic formalizes permissions, prohibitions, and obligations. Mechanism design asks: given self-interested agents, what rules produce desired outcomes? Contract theory analyzes what kinds of agreements can be self-enforcing.

CS: Legal code is literal code. Statutes are if-then rules. Precedent is case-based reasoning — find a similar prior case and apply its outcome. The constitution is an operating system, with amendments as patches. Bureaucracy is runtime: take the abstract rules and execute them on specific cases.

Economics: Rights are a form of property. Litigation is costly signaling — how much you’re willing to spend reveals how much you value the outcome. Settlements are Coasean bargaining: if transaction costs were zero, parties would always negotiate to the efficient outcome regardless of how rights were initially assigned. Criminal law exists because some transaction costs (like getting a murderer to compensate their victim) are too high.

What falls out:

The rule of law is really the rule of algorithm.

What makes law legitimate isn’t its content — laws can be unjust. What makes it legitimate is its determinism: the same inputs produce the same outputs. You can predict, at least roughly, what will happen if you take a given action.

Tyranny isn’t cruel law. Tyranny is non-deterministic law — you can’t predict the outcome from the inputs. The dictator’s whim, the secret policeman’s mood, the ex post facto declaration of guilt. What makes these awful isn’t that the outcomes are bad (though they often are). It’s that you can’t model the system. You can’t plan. You can’t optimize.

This is why procedural fairness matters even when outcomes are unjust. A corrupt lottery is still a lottery. An unfair trial that follows its own rules is still better than no rules at all. The procedure is the product.

And this is why legal “reform” is so tricky. Changing the rules changes what can be optimized against. If the new rules are less predictable than the old ones — even if they’re more “fair” in some abstract sense — you’ve made things worse along the dimension that actually matters for people trying to live their lives.

Linguistics

Standard framing: The big debate is Universal Grammar. Is grammar innate (Chomsky) or learned (empiricists)? Do all languages share deep structure, or is linguistic diversity evidence against built-in grammatical knowledge?

The tetrad:

Physics: Language runs on vocal cords, ears, and brains. Bandwidth is limited. Speech is serial — one sound at a time, at maybe 150 words per minute. This is brutally slow compared to the information rate of thought.

Math: Formal grammar theory (the Chomsky hierarchy) classifies languages by their computational complexity. Information theory tells you about optimal coding: given a probability distribution over messages, what’s the most efficient way to encode them?

CS: Language acquisition is a learning algorithm. Children don’t get explicit grammar instruction; they infer structure from noisy, incomplete data. Parsing is computation — converting linear strings of sounds into hierarchical meaning structures. Translation is compilation between languages.

Economics: Time and attention are scarce. Zipf’s law: frequent words are short because time is expensive. Ambiguity is compression — why say more than you need to when context fills the gaps? Pragmatics is game theory: what can I infer about the speaker’s intentions from the fact that they chose these words rather than those?

What falls out:

The Universal Grammar debate dissolves.

It’s not that grammar is “innate” in some mysterious nativist sense. It’s that compression under bandwidth constraints converges.

If you have a slow serial channel (speech), a fast parallel processor (brain), and a need to communicate complex structures (propositions with arguments and relations), then you’re going to evolve / learn / invent something like grammar. The constraints determine the solution space.

This predicts that aliens would have grammar too — not because of shared ancestry, but because of shared physics. Any intelligence that communicates through a serial channel will face the same compression problem. The solutions will rhyme.

It also explains why languages are both similar and different. Similar: they all have grammar, they all have nouns and verbs (or functional equivalents), they all have recursion. Different: the specific implementations vary based on historical accident and fine-grained optimization against local constraints.

Linguistics isn’t about whether grammar is innate or learned. It’s about how information gets compressed for transmission through a lossy channel. Once you see that, the field reorganizes around the real question: what are the optimal solutions, and why do languages converge on them?

The Pattern

Notice what the tetrad is doing. It’s not replacing domain expertise. You still need to know the details of potlatch ceremonies, cognitive experiments, legal systems, and linguistic phenomena.

What it’s doing is reorganizing the field around the right questions:

• Anthropology: What are the constraint surfaces, and what are the structural, computational, and strategic properties of the solutions cultures converge on?

• Psychology: What computational problems are being solved, and are the heuristics optimal under realistic assumptions?

• Law: What makes the system predictable, and what destroys predictability?

• Linguistics: What are the information-theoretic constraints, and how do languages optimize against them?

These aren’t the questions the fields traditionally ask. But they’re often the questions that, once asked, crack the problems open.

Next time: political science, aesthetics, and history — plus what happens when the tetrad turns on itself and finds that some of its own favorite examples (like QWERTY) don’t actually work.

This post is part of a series on the tetrad framework. The first post, “The Tetrad: Four Lenses That Explain Everything (Including God),” introduces the framework and applies it to theology. For more on these ideas, see my book The Science of Free Will.

In my last post, I showed you an anomaly that broke every major behavioral theory in finance — retail investors systematically overpaying for simple binary options when strictly superior products were available at lower prices. Prospect theory couldn’t explain it. Ambiguity aversion couldn’t explain it. Rational inattention, salience, expected utility — none of them. They all failed for the same reason: they were all the same kind of theory, operating on the same substrate of payoffs and probabilities. The anomaly lived somewhere else entirely — in the computational cost of evaluating the products.

That result got me thinking about a bigger question: how do you know which kind of theory to reach for? When does the economics lens work, and when do you need the computer science lens instead? Is there a systematic way to figure that out?

Here’s a provocative claim: every field of human study — anthropology, psychology, law, art, religion, all of it — reduces, at bottom, to exactly four things: physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics.

This isn’t vulgar reductionism. I’m not saying “everything is just atoms” and leaving it there. These four are irreducible lenses on a single underlying reality. You need all four. You can’t collapse one into another. And when you apply them systematically, problems that have defeated philosophy for millennia suddenly crack open.

Let me show you what I mean.

Why These Four?

Physics: Substance

What exists? Fields. That’s it. The entire universe is a collection of quantum fields interacting with each other. What we call “particles” — electrons, quarks, photons — are just excitations of these fields, ripples in the underlying substrate. There is no such thing as a particle in the billiard-ball sense. It’s fields all the way down.

This is the stuff of reality. Everything else runs on top of it.

Mathematics: Structure

Mathematics gives us the formal relationships between things — patterns, symmetries, logical entailments — independent of what those things physically are. The Pythagorean theorem doesn’t care whether you’re measuring a field in Iowa or the trajectory of a spacecraft. The structure is the structure.

Physics is written in the language of mathematics because mathematics captures the pattern layer of reality.

Computer Science: Process

Here’s where it gets interesting. We know that quantum fields are quantized — they come in discrete chunks. What about spacetime itself? Is it continuous or discrete?

The best current guess, going back to Einstein and running through contemporary work on quantum gravity, is that spacetime is also discrete at the Planck scale. If that’s true — and it probably is — then the universe contains only finite information in any finite region.

And if finite information, then representable by computation.

This isn’t a metaphor. The universe doesn’t resemble a computation; it IS one. Stephen Wolfram’s insight was recognizing that computation is physics by other means. The dynamics of reality — how states evolve, how systems change — is fundamentally computational.

Economics: Selection

So why isn’t physics + math + computer science enough?

Because of computational irreducibility.

Wolfram showed that even simple deterministic systems — cellular automata with rules a five-year-old could follow — produce behavior that cannot be predicted without running the entire computation. There are no shortcuts. The only way to know what happens is to watch it happen.

This means you cannot derive agent behavior from quarks, even in principle. Even if you had perfect knowledge of every particle in a human brain, you could not compute what that person will do faster than just... waiting for them to do it.

So you need a level of description that talks about agents optimizing under constraints. Not because agents are magical or outside physics — they’re made of the same fields as everything else — but because you can’t compute around them.

And here’s the beautiful part: optimization under scarcity isn’t just a feature of human behavior. It’s everywhere. Thermodynamics maximizes entropy. Evolution satisfices fitness. Light takes the path of least time. Even photons are “economizing.”

Economics, properly understood, is the study of optimization under constraint. And that’s baked into the universe at every level.

The Tetrad

So we have four lenses:

• Physics (substance — what exists),

• Math (structure — formal relations),

• CS (process — discrete dynamics), and

• Economics (selection — optimization under scarcity). Stuff, pattern, process, purpose.

Stuff, pattern, process, purpose.

These four. No fewer. No more. Every other field of study is a configuration of these four lenses applied to some domain.

The Stress Test: God

If this framework actually works, it should be able to crack problems that have defeated philosophy for millennia. So let’s try the hardest one: What kind of God is compatible with modern science?

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying religious people are wrong. I’m not saying you can’t believe in God. People can believe in any form of deity they want — that’s their choice.

But it is a choice. And most people don’t realize they’re making it.

The Physics Lens

Start with a simple question: Do the laws of physics exist, or don’t they?

There’s no middle ground here. Either the laws are exceptionless — they hold always and everywhere — or they’re not really laws. They’re suggestions. Regularities that happen to obtain most of the time.

This creates a fork:

• If laws exist and are exceptionless, then miracles are impossible. A miracle is, by definition, an exception to physical law. If there are exceptions, there are no laws. If there are laws, there are no exceptions.

• If God intervenes — ever, even once — then what we call “laws” aren’t really laws. They’re just patterns that God has chosen to maintain, which God can break at will.

Both of these positions are logically coherent. You can believe either one. But you cannot believe both simultaneously. That’s not a matter of faith or values — it’s a straightforward logical contradiction, like believing 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 at the same time.

Most religious people think they can have both: a universe that runs on predictable physical laws (which is why science works, planes fly, medicine heals) AND a God who occasionally tweaks outcomes in response to prayer, faith, or moral behavior.

That’s not a defensible position. Not because it’s wrong — but because it’s incoherent.

The Math Lens

Let’s trace out what each choice entails.

Choice A: Laws are real.

If the laws of physics genuinely exist and are exceptionless, then:

• Science works because reality is predictable

• Miracles don’t happen (they can’t happen)

• God, if God exists, doesn’t intervene in the universe

• Prayer doesn’t change outcomes (though it might change the person praying)

• There’s no divine plan that involves ongoing adjustment

This is the position of deism, of Spinoza, of Einstein’s “God does not play dice.” It’s fully coherent. Many serious thinkers hold it.

Choice B: God intervenes.

If God intervenes in the universe — answers prayers, performs miracles, adjusts outcomes based on human behavior — then:

• The “laws” we observe aren’t really laws; they’re just patterns God maintains

• Science works only because God chooses to be consistent most of the time

• What we call physics is really just God’s habits

• This is superdeterminism: the appearance of law without actual law

This is also coherent. It’s the implicit position of most traditional religious belief.

But here’s the problem with Choice B: it has consequences most believers don’t accept.

Under superdeterminism, there’s no free will at all — not in theory, not in practice. If there are no real laws, just God’s moment-to-moment decisions about how particles behave, then you are also just God’s moment-to-moment decisions. You’re not making choices that happen to be determined; you’re a puppet. The puppet strings go all the way down.

So the believer in an interventionist God faces a trilemma:

1. Accept superdeterminism → no free will whatsoever

2. Accept that laws are real → no intervention possible

3. Claim both → logical contradiction

The Computer Science Lens: Ruliad and Hyper-Ruliad

Here’s where Wolfram’s framework becomes essential.

Wolfram defines the ruliad as “the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.” Think of it as the space of all possible computations, running simultaneously, forever.

We live inside the ruliad. Our universe follows rules within it. And computational irreducibility applies: even knowing all the rules perfectly, you cannot predict outcomes without running the computation.

This creates a problem for divine omniscience. Even a God who designed the universe, who chose the laws and initial conditions, cannot know what will happen without computing it. And computing it means waiting for it to happen.

But Wolfram also imagines something beyond: a hyper-ruliad.

“But what if we just imagine a ‘hypercomputation’ not in that class? For example, imagine a hypercomputation (analogous, for example, to an oracle for a Turing machine) that in a finite number of steps will give us the result from an infinite number of steps of a computationally irreducible process. Such a hypercomputation isn’t part of our usual ruliad. But we could still formally imagine a hyperruliad that includes it.”

This is the only coherent form of omniscience. A hyper-ruliad entity — an oracle machine in the computability theory sense — sits outsideour computational structure entirely. It can see results without computing them. It’s not bound by irreducibility because it’s not operating within the ruliad at all.

This is mathematically well-defined. Oracle Turing machines are real objects in computability theory. A God who exists in the hyper-ruliad could genuinely know everything that will ever happen in our universe.

But — and this is crucial — such a God still cannot intervene. The moment God reaches into the ruliad and changes something, the laws fail. We’re back to superdeterminism.

(For more on the ruliad, see Wolfram’s original essay: The Concept of the Ruliad)

The Economics Lens

Finally: revealed preference.

If an interventionist God existed and wanted us to know it, evidence would be trivially cheap to provide. Part the Red Sea every alternate Tuesday. Levitate a giraffe at random, in full view of cameras. Make a horse that speaks.

These aren’t hard. For an omnipotent being, they’re costless. And they would be utterly decisive — no ambiguity, no room for interpretation.

The absence of such evidence is telling. When evidence is costless to provide and maximally valuable to the recipient, failure to provide it is evidence. Not proof of absence, but strong evidence.

Revealed preference: whatever God exists, that God either cannot or chooses not to provide clear evidence. An interventionist God who cares about human belief would intervene visibly. The God we observe (or fail to observe) doesn’t.

The Honest Positions

After running the tetrad, here are the coherent positions you can hold:

If you believe physical laws exist:

• A Designer God who chose the laws and/or initial conditions, then stepped back

• A Hyper-ruliad oracle who can see without computing, but doesn’t intervene

• Spinoza’s God — identical with nature itself (though whether this counts as “God” is semantic)

• No God — the laws just are what they are.

If you believe God intervenes:

• What we call “physical laws” are just God’s habits, maintained by choice

• Science works only because God is consistent, not because reality is law-governed

• You must accept superdeterminism and its consequences (including no free will)

• Miracles are possible because there were never any real laws to violate.

Both columns are logically coherent. You can hold any position within either column.

What you cannot do is mix columns. You cannot believe in genuine physical laws AND an interventionist God. You cannot believe science works because reality is predictable AND believe that God sometimes changes outcomes in response to prayer.

That’s not a claim about which position is true. It’s a claim about which combinations are logically possible.

What doesn’t survive:

• “I believe in science AND I believe God answers prayers” — incoherent

• “Physical laws are real AND miracles happen” — contradiction

• “The universe is deterministic AND God has a plan that involves ongoing adjustment” — pick one

This isn’t atheism. It isn’t theism. It’s just logic.

The universe might have been designed — fine-tuned, selected from all possible configurations by an intelligence outside our computational structure. But if laws are real, that designer isn’t listening now. It set the initial conditions and walked away, or simply observes from the hyper-ruliad.

Alternatively, there might be no real laws at all — just a God who micromanages every particle, maintaining patterns we mistake for physics. That’s coherent too. But then don’t pretend science tells you anything about how reality must behave. It only tells you how God has chosen to behave so far.

Pick one. That’s all the tetrad asks.

The Kicker

The tetrad didn’t tell you what to believe about God. It told you what you can’t believe simultaneously.

That’s what frameworks do when they work. They don’t answer questions for you — they clarify which answers are compatible with which other answers. They show you the trade-offs you’re actually making, whether you realize it or not.

Theology is actually the hardest test case, because it’s where people are most emotionally invested and least willing to follow logic where it leads. If the framework handles God — if it can cleanly separate the coherent positions from the incoherent ones — it can handle anything.

Next time: what happens when we point the tetrad at anthropology, psychology, law, and linguistics. Spoiler: “cognitive biases” aren’t bugs, cultures aren’t arbitrary, and the rule of law is really the rule of algorithm.

This post draws on ideas from my book, The Science of Free Will, which explores how determinism, computational irreducibility, and physics intersect with questions about agency, consciousness, and meaning.

For those who want to go deeper into the ruliad and its implications, Wolfram just published “What Ultimately Is There? Metaphysics and the Ruliad“ — a remarkable attempt to put metaphysics on scientific foundations.

The Simplicity Tax: Why Retail Investors Pay More for Worse Products (And What It Reveals About the Limits of Behavioral Finance)

Here’s a simple test. I’m going to offer you two products.

Product A is a binary option. It’s a yes-or-no bet: if the S&P 500 is above a certain level when the contract expires, you get $100. If it’s below, you get nothing. Clean. Simple. Two outcomes.

Product B is a bull spread. It’s built from two call options. It starts paying out at a lower level than the binary — and the further the S&P goes up, the more you make, up to a cap that matches the binary’s $100. Below the bull spread’s lower strike, you get nothing, same as the binary. But between that lower strike and the binary’s strike, the bull spread is paying you and the binary isn’t. Above the binary’s strike, they both pay the same.

Here’s the key: Product B pays you at least as much as Product A in every possible state of the world, and strictly morein many states. There is no scenario — none, zero, not one — in which you’d be better off holding the binary.

So which one should cost more?

If you said B, congratulations, you have preferences that respect dominance. This is about the lowest bar in all of decision theory. An asset that pays more in every state of the world should be worth more. Full stop. This isn’t controversial. Toddlers understand this principle when applied to candy.

And yet.

The Finding

A new paper in the Journal of Financial Economics by Aaron Goodman and Indira Puri documents something remarkable. Analyzing a year of trading data from Nadex — a CFTC-regulated retail derivatives exchange — they find that retail investors routinely buy the dominated binary option at a higher price than the dominating bull spread that was available at the exact same time.

How often? 15% of S&P index trades. 19% of gold trades. 25% of silver trades. Consistently, across three different asset classes, over an entire year.

How much money are these traders leaving on the table? On average, 34% of the contract price. That’s not a rounding error. If you’re paying $50 for a binary, you could have bought a strictly superior product for roughly $33.

This is happening in a real market — over $1 billion in notional value annually — not a psych lab experiment with undergraduates choosing between hypothetical lotteries. These are people putting real money on the line and consistently choosing the worse product at the higher price.

What Makes This Different

Finance is full of anomalies. People overpay for out-of-the-money options. They hold losers too long and sell winners too soon. They buy high-fee mutual funds when low-fee alternatives exist. We have an entire field — behavioral finance — devoted to cataloguing and explaining these patterns.

What makes the Goodman-Puri finding special isn’t just that people are overpaying. It’s that the entire standard toolkit for explaining why people overpay doesn’t work.

The authors don’t just document the anomaly. They prove — mathematically, with formal propositions — that the following theories cannot capture this result, regardless of functional form or parametric specification:

Expected utility theory can’t explain it, because any utility function that respects dominance would prefer the bull spread. Obviously.

Prospect theory can’t explain it. This is the big one. Kahneman and Tversky’s framework allows for all sorts of departures from rational choice — probability distortions, loss aversion, reference dependence. But prospect theory allows for dominance violations only through distortions of the probability space. When the dominance is state-by-state — product B pays more than product A in every state — no amount of probability distortion helps. Distort the probabilities however you like; the bull spread still pays more everywhere. The proof is clean and general. It holds for any probability weighting function, any reference point, any utility function.

Ambiguity aversion can’t explain it. Whether you’re using max-min preferences or robust control, you’re choosing the worst-case probability distribution and optimizing against it. But the bull spread dominates the binary under everyprobability distribution. There is no subjective belief about the world under which the binary looks better.

Rational inattention can’t explain it. In the standard model, the probability of selecting an asset is proportional to its payoff. The bull spread has a strictly higher payoff. Rational inattention predicts more attention to the better product, not less.

Salience theory can’t explain it. The states where the two products differ most are the states where the binary pays zero and the bull spread pays something positive. If salience makes you overweight those states, it should make you moreattracted to the bull spread.

Stop and think about what this means. The five most prominent theoretical frameworks in behavioral decision theory — the ones that have launched a thousand papers, won Nobel prizes, and informed policy worldwide — all fail on the same anomaly. And they fail for the same fundamental reason: they all operate on payoffs and probabilities. They differ in how they distort or weight those ingredients, but they share the substrate. When the dominance is state-by-state, no distortion of payoffs or probabilities can prefer the dominated product.

The authors test the standard financial explanations too. Transaction costs? They include all explicit fees in their calculations. Collateral requirements? Neither product requires collateral since both have limited downside. Liquidity? The CME market where the bull spreads trade is more liquid than Nadex — investors should be willing to pay a premium to trade there, yet the dominating CME product is cheaper. Noise trading? They run a placebo test, constructing dominated bull spreads and checking whether those are overpriced too. The asymmetry is stark: binary overvaluation runs at 15-25%, but the placebo rates are 3-14%, and the difference is highly significant. Exchange-specific effects? They repeat the analysis within Nadex itself, comparing binaries to the exchange’s own call spreads. The dominance violations persist — in fact, they’re even more extreme: 91% of within-exchange comparisons show the binary overvalued.

What Does Explain It

After eliminating everything that doesn’t work, the authors point to a simple explanation: the binary is easier to understand.

Think about what your brain has to do to evaluate each product.

A binary option has two outcomes. Win or lose. The expected value calculation is one multiplication: probability of winning times $100. A five-year-old could conceptualize it. Will the S&P be above 5300 on Friday? Yes or no. How much would you pay for that bet?

A bull spread has a continuum of outcomes across three regions. Below the lower strike: zero. Between the strikes: linearly increasing payoff. Above the upper strike: capped. Computing expected value requires integrating across a probability distribution, or at minimum doing piecewise reasoning over three regions. It’s not hard, exactly, but it’s more steps, more working memory, more cognitive load. Even when bull spreads are displayed on the same screen, prominently, with educational explanations — as they are on Nadex — the binary is just... easier.

The authors show that a formal theory of simplicity, developed by Puri (2025), captures the results. The idea is that investors derive disutility from product complexity, creating an effective complexity cost. When the payoff advantage of the dominant product is small enough relative to the complexity gap, the simpler product wins despite inferior payoffs. This framework also predicts the cross-sectional patterns in the data: as the degree of dominance increases (the bull spread gets even better relative to the binary), the frequency of overvaluation falls. Intuitively, there’s a tipping point: make the payoff gap large enough and even complexity-averse investors will switch to the better product. The data confirm this.

The Simplicity Tax

Let me put this in terms my fellow traders will appreciate.

Over 30-plus years of running money, I’ve learned something that sounds paradoxical but is absolutely true: signals you can’t understand often outperform signals that make sense. The elegant theory works in physics. In finance, the ugly model with no satisfying narrative frequently beats the one you can explain over dinner.

This used to baffle me. Shouldn’t understanding why something works make you more confident, help you size positions better, stick with the strategy through drawdowns?

No. And the Goodman-Puri paper shows why at the retail level, in its purest form. People don’t just prefer simplicity — they’ll pay for it. Real money. 34% of the contract price. They’re paying a simplicity tax: the premium you surrender because your brain would rather evaluate two outcomes than a continuum.

And this tax shows up everywhere, not just in binary options:

The growth of “zero-days-to-expiration” options — basically directional bets with binary-like payoff profiles — reflects the same preference. Robinhood just launched event contracts. Kalshi trades binary-style contracts on everything from Fed rate decisions to weather. The CME itself launched binary options explicitly to attract retail investors. The entire trend in retail financial products is toward simpler payoff structures. Supply-side actors aren’t correcting the simplicity preference; they’re catering to it, because there’s money in selling people the product that’s easier to evaluate, even when a better product exists.

My advice to aspiring traders has always been: test until you throw up. Test everything. Don’t trust stories, don’t trust elegance, don’t trust the narrative. Run the numbers. The Goodman-Puri result is the formal version of that advice. The numbers say the ugly product is better. But 15-25% of the time, people buy the pretty one anyway.

The Deeper Problem

Here’s what I find most interesting about this paper, and it’s something the authors are too polite to say outright (they’re writing for the Journal of Financial Economics, after all, not a Substack).

The failure here isn’t just empirical. It’s structural.

Behavioral finance spent forty years building increasingly sophisticated theories of choice under uncertainty. Prospect theory. Cumulative prospect theory. Rank-dependent utility. Ambiguity aversion. Salience. Disappointment aversion. Rational inattention. Each one relaxes a different assumption of expected utility theory. Each one adds a new mechanism — probability distortion, reference dependence, attention allocation, worst-case reasoning.

But they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all asking: given the payoff structure, what does the agent choose? They model the selection — increasingly exotic selection rules over the same underlying substrate of payoffs and probabilities.

This paper proves that approach has a boundary. The anomaly doesn’t live in the selection mechanism. It lives in the evaluation process — the computational cost of figuring out what the payoff structure even is. The binary option trader isn’t distorting payoffs or probabilities. The binary option trader hasn’t computed the payoff comparison, because the computation itself is the bottleneck.

That’s not a preference. That’s a constraint on information processing. And it requires a fundamentally different kind of theory — one that talks about computation, not utility.

There’s a phrase I’ve been using in my work: “conclusions without derivations are just opinions with fancy letterhead.” The behavioral finance literature has been, in a sense, providing increasingly fancy letterhead. More sophisticated utility functions. More elegant axiom systems. More Nobel-worthy mathematics. But the derivation — the part where you explain why the agent behaves as they do at the most fundamental level — has been stuck in one register: preferences over outcomes.

The Goodman-Puri result suggests we need a different register entirely. The binding constraint on human decision-making isn’t always what you prefer. Sometimes it’s what you can compute. And the difference between those two explanations — the one about preferences and the one about computation — turns out to have deep implications that go well beyond finance.

I’ll have much more to say about that soon.

Goodman, A. and Puri, I. (2025). “Overvaluing Simple Bets: Evidence from the Options Market.” Journal of Financial Economics, 172. Available here.

For aspiring traders: the lesson from this paper isn’t “avoid binary options” (though you probably should). It’s that the simplicity tax is real, it’s measurable, and it applies to your own cognition too. The strategy that feels clean and intuitive might be costing you 34% relative to the one that makes your head hurt. Test, don’t intuit.

For more on these themes — including why the same computational constraints that explain binary option mispricing also explain traffic jams, free will, and why a Supreme Court must exist — see my book The Science of Free Will.

The book I co-edited, Quantum Theory Meets Gravity — From Curved Spacetime to Black Hole Information, was published in January 2026 and is now available open-access from IntechOpen and in hardcover from Amazon. It’s co-edited with Oliver K. Baker (Yale) and Djordje Minic (Virginia Tech).

I wrote a detailed post about my own chapter — the one on gravity’s effect on the double-slit experiment — when the chapter first appeared online. Here, I want to step back and give a guide to the whole book: what each chapter does, what it establishes, and why a curious non-physicist might care.

The book lives at the frontier where quantum mechanics and general relativity meet. These are our two best theories of the physical world, each confirmed to extraordinary precision in its own domain. But combining them fully — producing a complete theory of quantum gravity — remains one of the great unsolved problems in science. The chapters in this volume don’t claim to solve that problem. Instead, they map the territory where the two theories overlap, working out what can be calculated rigorously right now, and showing that the results are surprisingly rich.

A recurring theme, one I didn’t fully appreciate until the book came together, is that entropy and entanglement keep appearing across seemingly unrelated contexts.

A word about these two concepts, since they’ll come up repeatedly.

Entropy, in its most general sense, measures how much you don’t know about a system. If you know the exact state of every particle — their positions, velocities, everything — the entropy is zero. If all you know is the temperature and pressure (but the particles could be arranged in any of a vast number of ways consistent with those measurements), the entropy is large. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy tends to increase: systems evolve from ordered to disordered states. A hot cup of coffee cools to room temperature; it never spontaneously heats back up. Entropy is the reason why. In the context of black holes, entropy takes on a geometric meaning — it turns out to be proportional to the area of the event horizon, not the volume. This connection between information, thermodynamics, and geometry is one of the deepest clues we have about quantum gravity.

Entanglement is a distinctly quantum phenomenon. Two particles can be “entangled,” which means their properties are correlated in a way that has no classical explanation. Measure the spin of one entangled electron and you instantly know the spin of its partner, no matter how far apart they are — not because any signal traveled between them, but because they share a single quantum state. Einstein famously called this “spooky action at a distance.” The crucial point for this book is that entanglement carries information. Two entangled systems have zero entropy individually (they appear random) but zero entropy jointly (the combined state is perfectly known). This interplay between local randomness and global order is central to the black hole information paradox.

These two concepts — entropy and entanglement — keep appearing in Hawking radiation, in quantum interference, in supersymmetric systems (supersymmetry is a proposed deep symmetry of nature that pairs every matter particle with a force-carrying partner and vice versa — more on this in Chapter 4), in black hole information theory. They seem to be telling us something deep about whatever the final theory of quantum gravity will look like.

Here’s what each chapter contributes.

Chapter 1: Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime — Gravity’s Impact on the Double-Slit Experiment

Samir Varma and Arie Kapulkin

This is my chapter (with my co-author Arie Kapulkin), and I wrote about it at length here. What follows is a condensed version; the full post gives the complete picture.

The double-slit experiment is the canonical demonstration of quantum mechanics — fire particles at a barrier with two slits, and an interference pattern appears on the far side, as if each particle went through both slits simultaneously. Every textbook uses it to illustrate quantum weirdness. But every textbook version quietly assumes flat spacetime: no gravity, no curvature, no warping of time. We don’t live in flat spacetime. We live on a planet whose mass curves space and warps time.

What happens to quantum interference when you actually account for that curvature?

To answer this properly, you need quantum field theory — the framework that says particles aren’t little billiard balls but localized disturbances in fields that permeate all of spacetime. (I explain what fields are and why this matters in detail in the longer post.) Once you think of “particles” as field disturbances, interference isn’t mysterious at all — it’s what fields naturally do. The question becomes: how do the rules of field propagation change when spacetime is curved?

We work this out using an approach called the path integral, one of the most powerful ideas in theoretical physics. In classical mechanics, a particle travels along a single trajectory — the one that minimizes the action (a quantity related to energy). In quantum mechanics, the particle doesn’t pick a single path. Instead, it takes every possible path simultaneously, and each path contributes a complex number (an “amplitude”) to the final result. The probability of the particle arriving at a given point is determined by adding up the amplitudes from all paths — and because these amplitudes are complex numbers with phases, they can interfere constructively or destructively, producing the characteristic patterns of quantum mechanics.

The path-integral approach, developed by Richard Feynman, is especially natural for our problem because it makes the effect of gravity transparent: curved spacetime changes the lengths and durations along each path, which changes the phase each path accumulates, which changes how the paths interfere.

Leo Stodolsky, in the late 1970s, developed a formalism that applies this path-integral logic specifically to interference experiments in gravitational fields. We adapt and extend his methods, treating scalar fields (spin 0), photons (spin 1), and electrons (spin 1/2) within a single unified framework. The central result is a compact formula for the gravitational phase shift:

Every symbol in this formula has a physical meaning. The Riemann curvature tensor (the R term) encodes the tidal gravitational field, which means how gravity varies from point to point. The ℓ terms represent the slit separation. The m is the particle’s mass and c is the speed of light. The ℏ (pronounced “h-bar”) is Planck’s constant divided by 2π, one of the fundamental constants of nature; its value is approximately 1.055 × 10⁻³⁴ joule-seconds, a number so tiny it explains why quantum effects are invisible in everyday life. The λ is the de Broglie wavelength — every particle in quantum mechanics has an associated wavelength, inversely proportional to its momentum. Slower particles have longer wavelengths, faster particles have shorter ones. This was proposed in 1924 by Louis de Broglie, a French prince who put the idea forward in his doctoral thesis, which was so radical that the examining committee sent it to Einstein for a second opinion before awarding the degree — de Broglie won the Nobel Prize for it five years later. Finally, the α term is a small spin-dependent correction. At leading order, all particle types — scalars, photons, electrons — couple to curvature in exactly the same way. The spin corrections are suppressed by a factor of about 10⁻¹¹ for electrons. This universality makes physical sense: at leading order, all particles follow paths dictated by the geometry of spacetime itself.

In rotating spacetimes — like the spacetime around a spinning black hole, or even Earth (which drags spacetime around as it rotates) — frame-dragging introduces a distinctive phase shift with odd parity. This means if you swap the two slits, the frame-dragging contribution changes sign. Static gravitational effects don’t do this — they don’t care which slit is which. This odd-parity signature provides, at least in principle, a smoking gun for detecting spacetime rotation through quantum interference.

The effects are small. For cold rubidium atoms in a 10-meter orbital interferometer at 400 km altitude, the tidal phase shift is about 2.7 × 10⁻²¹ radians (a radian is a unit of angle — 2π radians is 360 degrees — so this is an almost incomprehensibly tiny fraction of a full cycle of the interference pattern) — far below what any current instrument can detect. A futuristic kilometer-scale space interferometer might reach 10⁻⁷ radians. But the predictions are exact, derived from well-established physics, and they set the benchmarks that any future experiment would need to reach — and that any future theory of quantum gravity would need to reproduce.

Why you should care: This chapter shows that the most famous experiment in quantum mechanics has something new to teach us when we stop pretending gravity doesn’t exist. The gravitational effects we calculate are tiny, but they’re there — precise predictions sitting at the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, waiting for technology to catch up. It’s also an accessible entry point into quantum field theory in curved spacetime, which is the framework that predicted Hawking radiation and the Unruh effect — two of the most important results in theoretical physics.

Chapter 2: Dynamics and Quantum-Gravitational Interactions in Plasma-Surrounded Black Hole Spacetimes

Orchidea Maria Lecian

Real black holes aren’t sitting in empty space. They’re surrounded by swirling hot matter — accretion disks, plasma, jets of material blasting outward at nearly the speed of light. When the Event Horizon Telescope produced the first image of a black hole in 2019, what it captured wasn’t the black hole itself (which, by definition, emits no light) but the glowing ring of superheated plasma around it. To understand what those images actually mean — to extract the physics from the photons that reach our telescopes — you need to understand how light propagates through this extreme environment, where both intense gravity and hot dense matter simultaneously affect the signal.

This is what Lecian’s chapter tackles.

She works with a family of spacetimes called Kottler-Schwarzschild-Kiselev (KSK) spacetimes. To understand what these are, start with the simplest black hole solution: the Schwarzschild spacetime, which describes a non-rotating, uncharged black hole sitting in otherwise empty space. Karl Schwarzschild found this solution to Einstein’s equations in 1916, barely a month after Einstein published general relativity. It’s elegant but idealized — real black holes exist in a universe with a cosmological constant (the mysterious energy driving the universe’s accelerating expansion) and are surrounded by matter.

The KSK spacetimes generalize the Schwarzschild solution by incorporating both a cosmological constant and a surrounding matter field characterized by a “linear term” in the metric. This gives a more realistic starting point for astrophysical calculations.

Lecian then asks: what happens to a photon — treated quantum mechanically — as it propagates through this spacetime in the presence of plasma?

This requires working out the quantum gravitational Hamiltonian for the photon, which means writing down the equation that governs how the photon’s quantum state evolves in time, accounting for both the curvature of spacetime and the interaction with the plasma medium. She does this for three cases: vacuum (no plasma), cold unmagnetized plasma, and hot unmagnetized plasma. The plasma gives the photon an effective mass — just as photons traveling through glass slow down and behave as if they had mass, photons in a plasma acquire an effective mass that depends on the plasma’s density and the spacetime geometry.

Several concrete results emerge. The photon sphere — the radius at which light can orbit a black hole — exists only when the cosmological constant takes specific positive values. The gravitational lensing (the bending of light by gravity) is computed in the strong-field regime, which means close to the black hole where gravity is extreme and the gentle-bending approximations used for, say, galaxy clusters don’t apply. The chapter also analyzes accretion disk configurations, comparing the effective gravitational potentials that govern matter orbits with standard models used in astrophysics, and examines how adiabatic perturbations — slow, gradual disturbances — propagate through the hot plasma.

She also compares the KSK framework with alternative theories of gravity. This is important because general relativity, for all its success, might not be the final word on gravity — and different theories make different predictions for how black hole environments behave.

One alternative is Weyl conformal gravity, a higher-dimensional theory that modifies Einstein’s equations by demanding an additional symmetry: the equations must be unchanged if you locally stretch or shrink all distances by the same factor (a “conformal” transformation). This extra constraint changes how gravity behaves at very large distances and has been proposed as an alternative explanation for the rotation curves of galaxies — the same observations usually attributed to dark matter.

Another is massive gravity, which modifies general relativity by giving the graviton (the hypothetical particle that mediates gravity) a tiny but nonzero mass. In Einstein’s theory, the graviton is massless, which is why gravity has infinite range. If the graviton had even a tiny mass, gravity’s behavior would change at very large distances — potentially explaining the accelerating expansion of the universe without needing a cosmological constant.

Lecian maps the geometrical parameters of the KSK spacetimes onto these alternative frameworks, showing which features of the black hole environment are universal (present in any theory of gravity) and which are specific to general relativity. This kind of comparison is essential for turning observations into tests of fundamental physics: when we image a black hole’s shadow or measure the deflection of light near it, we need to know which theories are consistent with the data and which are ruled out.

Why you should care: We’re living in a golden age of black hole observation. The Event Horizon Telescope is producing increasingly sharp images of black hole environments. Gravitational wave detectors are recording the collisions of black holes. To interpret this data — to figure out what it tells us about gravity, about the nature of spacetime, about the matter spiraling into these objects — we need theoretical calculations like these, ones that account for both the extreme curvature near the black hole and the realistic astrophysical soup surrounding it. Lecian’s chapter provides part of the theoretical toolkit needed to turn observations of photons into statements about fundamental physics.

Chapter 3: Gravity in Extradimensional Space

Eugênio Maciel

Here’s a question that sounds like science fiction but is taken very seriously in theoretical physics: what if the universe has more than three dimensions of space?

The idea has a distinguished pedigree. In 1921, Theodor Kaluza did something remarkable. He took Einstein’s equations of general relativity — the equations that describe how matter and energy curve spacetime — and wrote them down in five dimensions instead of four (three of space plus one of time becoming four of space plus one of time). When he worked out what the five-dimensional Einstein equations implied for a four-dimensional observer, he found that they automatically produced not just gravity but also Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. Gravity and electromagnetism, two seemingly unrelated forces, emerged from a single geometric framework — you just needed one extra dimension.

Five years later, Oscar Klein added a crucial physical idea: maybe the extra dimension isn’t infinite. Maybe it’s curled up into a tiny circle, so small that we can’t see it. Imagine an ant walking along a garden hose. From far away, the hose looks like a one-dimensional line. But the ant knows the hose has a second dimension — it can walk around the circumference. If that circumference is small enough, a distant observer would never notice it. Klein proposed that the fifth dimension might be curled up at a scale near the Planck length — about 10⁻³³ centimeters — far too small for any experiment to resolve.

This “Kaluza-Klein” theory was beautiful but gathered dust for decades. Interest revived dramatically in 1998 with two new proposals that used extra dimensions to attack a different problem: the hierarchy problem.

The hierarchy problem is one of the most puzzling facts about our universe. Gravity is absurdly weak compared to the other forces. The electromagnetic force between two electrons is about 10⁴² times stronger than the gravitational force between them. That’s a one followed by forty-two zeros. Why? The Standard Model of particle physics provides no explanation. The relevant energy scales — the electroweak scale (about 10⁻¹⁸ cm) and the Planck scale (about 10⁻³³ cm) — differ by a factor of 10¹⁵, and nobody can explain why.

The ADD model (Arkani-Hamed, Dimapoulos, and Dvali) proposed a radical answer: gravity isn’t inherently weaker than the other forces. It just looks weaker because it spreads into extra dimensions that the other forces can’t access. Imagine rain falling on a large field versus being funneled through a narrow pipe. The total amount of water is the same, but the concentration is very different. In the ADD picture, all the forces except gravity are confined to our three-dimensional “brane” (a membrane in the higher-dimensional space), while gravity leaks into the full higher-dimensional “bulk.” This dilution makes gravity appear weak.

Maciel works through the mathematics of this idea. A key result is that in a space with D total dimensions, Newton’s gravitational law changes. Instead of the familiar inverse-square law (where the force falls off as 1/r²), gravity in higher dimensions falls off faster — as 1/r^(D−2) — at distances smaller than the size of the extra dimensions. At larger distances, the standard inverse-square behavior is recovered. This means extra dimensions could be detected by looking for deviations from Newton’s law at short distances. For two extra dimensions, the ADD model predicts deviations at scales around 0.01 mm — a distance that laboratory experiments are currently probing.

The Randall-Sundrum models take a different approach. Instead of flat extra dimensions, Randall and Sundrum showed that a single extra dimension with a strongly warped geometry — one where the metric (the mathematical object that defines distances and durations in spacetime; it tells you, given two nearby points, how far apart they are) varies exponentially along the extra dimension — can also solve the hierarchy problem. The RS1 model has two branes sitting at opposite ends of a compact extra dimension. The exponential warping of spacetime between the branes means that energy scales that are naturally of order the Planck scale on one brane get exponentially suppressed on the other brane — producing the enormous hierarchy between gravity and the other forces without requiring the extra dimension to be astronomically large.

The RS2 model goes further: a single brane in an infinite extra dimension. Despite the extra dimension being infinite, gravity on the brane still looks four-dimensional at large distances because the warped geometry effectively traps the graviton near the brane.

Maciel works through all of these models in detail — the Kaluza-Klein construction, the ADD scenario, both Randall-Sundrum models — deriving the graviton mass spectra (the tower of massive particles that a four-dimensional observer would see as a consequence of the extra dimension) and showing how each model addresses the hierarchy problem through different geometric mechanisms.

Why you should care: Extra dimensions aren’t just theoretical curiosities. They’re a central ingredient in string theory, which requires 10 or 11 spacetime dimensions to be mathematically consistent. They offer concrete, calculable mechanisms for unifying gravity with the other forces and for explaining why gravity is so much weaker. And they make testable predictions: deviations from Newton’s inverse-square law at short distances, and new particles (Kaluza-Klein excitations) that could appear at high-energy colliders. Some of these predictions are actively being tested. If extra dimensions exist, they would fundamentally change our understanding of what spacetime is.

Chapter 4: Thermodynamics of a Supersymmetric Oscillator

Jishad Kumar

This chapter might seem like the odd one out — a detailed analysis of the thermodynamic properties of a supersymmetric harmonic oscillator. It’s more technical and less cosmic in scope than the chapters on black holes and extra dimensions. But it illuminates something deep about the relationship between two classes of particles that make up everything in the universe, and it connects directly to one of the most embarrassing unsolved problems in all of physics.

Let me build up the context.

Bosons and fermions. Every particle in the universe falls into one of two categories. Bosons are the force carriers: photons (electromagnetism), gluons (strong force), W and Z bosons (weak force), and the Higgs boson. They obey Bose-Einstein statistics, which means any number of them can occupy the same quantum state. This is why lasers work — you can pile up photons in identical states. Fermions are the matter particles: electrons, quarks, neutrinos. They obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and the Pauli exclusion principle, which forbids any two of them from occupying the same quantum state. This is why atoms have structure, why the periodic table works, why matter is solid instead of collapsing. That last point deserves emphasis: atoms are overwhelmingly empty space. If an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a grain of sand at the center and the electrons would be specks of dust in the upper stands. Yet when you press your hand against a table, it feels solid. The reason is the Pauli exclusion principle. The electrons in the atoms of your hand and the electrons in the atoms of the table cannot be forced into the same quantum states — they resist being squeezed together with an effective pressure (called “degeneracy pressure”) that has nothing to do with electromagnetic repulsion. It’s a purely quantum mechanical effect, and it’s what keeps matter from collapsing into nothing. The same effect holds up white dwarf stars against the crush of gravity.

These two classes of particles have very different thermodynamic behavior. A bosonic oscillator — think of a vibrating mode of the electromagnetic field — has an infinite ladder of equally spaced energy levels given by:

Here ω (omega) is the oscillator’s natural frequency — how many times per second it vibrates — and n can be any non-negative integer: 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. A fermionic oscillator, by contrast, has only two states: n = 0 or n = 1 (because of the exclusion principle). Their thermodynamic properties — how they store energy, how their entropy changes with temperature — are correspondingly very different.

The vacuum energy problem. Here’s the embarrassment. Every quantum field, even in its ground state (the “vacuum”), has a residual energy — the zero-point energy. For a bosonic oscillator, the ground state energy is +ℏω/2 (half of one quantum of energy). When you add up the zero-point energies of all the quantum fields in the universe across all their modes, you get an absurdly large number for the vacuum energy density. General relativity says this vacuum energy should gravitate — it should curve spacetime. The predicted vacuum energy is roughly 10¹²⁰ times larger than what we actually observe from the measured cosmological constant. This is the “cosmological constant problem,” and it’s been called the worst prediction in the history of physics.

Supersymmetry and cancellation. Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a proposed symmetry that pairs every boson with a fermion partner and vice versa. In a supersymmetric system, something remarkable happens: the positive zero-point energy of the bosonic modes is exactly canceled by the negative zero-point energy of the fermionic modes. The ground state energy is exactly zero.

This isn’t a hand-waving argument. Kumar demonstrates it explicitly with a supersymmetric oscillator — a system that combines a bosonic oscillator and a fermionic oscillator in a specific way. The energy spectrum of the SUSY oscillator is:

Note the crucial difference from the ordinary bosonic oscillator: there’s no +1/2. The ground state energy (n = 0) is exactly zero. What happened? The positive vacuum energy of the boson (+ℏω/2) has been precisely canceled by the negative vacuum energy of the fermion (−ℏω/2). The two contributions are equal and opposite, and their sum is zero.

Above the ground state, a beautiful structure emerges. Every energy level (except the ground state) has a two-fold degeneracy: for each value of the bosonic excitation number, there are two states with the same energy — one that is purely bosonic and one that includes a fermionic excitation. This pairing of bosonic and fermionic states at every energy level is a hallmark of supersymmetry.

Kumar then works out the full thermodynamics: the partition function, the free energy, the entropy, and the heat capacity, as functions of temperature. At low temperatures, the heat capacity of the SUSY oscillator behaves differently from either a bosonic or fermionic oscillator alone. It exhibits a distinctive peak at intermediate temperatures, a feature that reflects the underlying supersymmetric structure.

The chapter then turns to a real physical system: an electron in a magnetic field, the “Landau problem.” When an electron moves in a uniform magnetic field, its motion perpendicular to the field is quantized into discrete Landau levels — equally spaced energy levels, just like a harmonic oscillator. If you ignore the electron’s spin, this is a purely bosonic oscillator. But when you include the spin — and use the specific value of the electron’s g-factor (g = 2, as predicted by Dirac’s equation) — the ground state energy drops to exactly zero. The spin-up ground state with zero orbital excitation has precisely zero energy. The system reveals a hidden supersymmetric structure: you can construct a “supercharge” operator whose square equals the Hamiltonian, and which commutes with the Hamiltonian (meaning it doesn’t change the energy when it acts). This is the algebraic signature of supersymmetry.

Finally, Kumar examines what happens when supersymmetry is broken — specifically, by adding a confining potential (as occurs in quantum dots, where electrons are trapped in a small region). In this “Fock-Darwin” model, the ground state energy is no longer zero, and the boson-fermion degeneracy is lifted. The chapter traces how the thermodynamic properties change when SUSY breaking occurs, connecting the abstract algebra to observable physical consequences.

Why you should care: The vacuum energy problem is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in physics. It sits at the intersection of quantum field theory and general relativity — exactly the intersection this book is about. Supersymmetry offers one of the very few known mechanisms for taming vacuum energy, and understanding exactly how this cancellation works in controlled examples is essential groundwork. Kumar’s chapter shows that the cancellation isn’t just an abstract theoretical trick — it shows up in a real, physical system (the Landau problem), and it can be broken in understandable ways that have measurable thermodynamic consequences. This kind of detailed, worked-out toy model is how physicists build the intuition needed to attack the bigger problem.

Chapter 5: Black Hole as an Information Mirror

Xuanhua Wang

If you throw a book into a fireplace, the information in the book isn’t really destroyed — in principle, if you tracked every photon of light, every particle of ash, every molecule of gas released by the fire with perfect precision, you could reconstruct the text. This isn’t practically possible, but physics guarantees it: information is conserved. The laws of quantum mechanics are “unitary,” which means they preserve information. You can always run the movie backward.

But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes seem to violate this rule, and the resulting paradox has shaped theoretical physics for fifty years.

Hawking radiation. Hawking’s calculation combined quantum field theory with general relativity in the semiclassical regime (the same regime my chapter works in). He showed that the intense gravitational field near a black hole’s event horizon causes the quantum vacuum to radiate particles. The black hole glows, albeit incredibly faintly, with a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. A black hole with the mass of our sun would have a temperature of about 60 nanokelvins — far colder than the cosmic microwave background — but the radiation is real in principle.

Here’s the problem. The radiation Hawking calculated appears to be exactly thermal — it has a perfect blackbody spectrum, just like the glow from a hot piece of metal, carrying no information whatsoever about what fell into the black hole. Throw in an encyclopedia, a cat, or a Ferrari — the Hawking radiation looks exactly the same. And since the black hole is radiating energy, it’s slowly losing mass. Eventually, it evaporates completely. When it’s gone, all that remains is featureless thermal radiation. The information about everything that ever fell in seems to have vanished from the universe.

This violates unitarity. Quantum mechanics says information can’t be destroyed. General relativity says it can. Something has to give.

The Page curve. In 1993, Don Page made a crucial observation. If a black hole really is an ordinary quantum system (just one that happens to be very hot and very scrambled), then the entropy of its radiation should follow a specific pattern. Early on, as the black hole emits radiation, the entropy of the radiation should rise — each new particle adds to the disorder. But at a certain point (the “Page time,” roughly when the black hole has emitted half its initial entropy), the entropy should stop rising and start falling. This is because the radiation is becoming increasingly entangled with the earlier radiation in a specific way that a unitary process guarantees. By the time the black hole has fully evaporated, the entropy of the radiation returns to zero — all the information has been transferred out. This rise-then-fall graph is called the “Page curve.”

Hawking’s calculation, by contrast, predicts that the entropy just keeps rising, monotonically, forever — no turn-around, no information recovery. Reproducing the Page curve from a gravitational calculation became the central challenge.

The breakthrough: entanglement islands. Wang’s chapter surveys the remarkable recent progress. The key development, emerging around 2019, was the “island formula” for gravitational entropy. The idea is startling: when computing the entropy of Hawking radiation after the Page time, you must include contributions from a region insidethe black hole — the “island” — that, through the mathematics of quantum entanglement, turns out to be encoded in the radiation outside.

The formula says: to compute the entropy of the radiation, minimize the “generalized entropy,” which has two terms. The first is the area of a special surface (the “quantum extremal surface”) divided by 4G (where G is Newton’s gravitational constant) — this is essentially the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, the same formula that gives a black hole its entropy. The second is the entropy of quantum fields in the region between this surface and the boundary where the radiation is collected. Before the Page time, the quantum extremal surface shrinks to zero and you recover Hawking’s monotonically increasing entropy. After the Page time, the quantum extremal surface jumps to just outside the event horizon, and the entropy is dominated by the area term, which decreases as the black hole shrinks.

The result: the Page curve is reproduced. The entropy rises, then falls, exactly as unitarity demands.

This might sound like a mathematical trick, but the derivation is grounded in the gravitational path integral — the same mathematical framework that underlies all of quantum gravity. The island formula was derived by considering “replica wormholes,” additional saddle-point contributions to the path integral that become important when computing entanglement entropy using the replica trick. These aren’t optional additions; they’re contributions that the mathematics demands.

The Hayden-Preskill protocol. Wang then turns from entropy (can information be recovered?) to a more operational question: how quickly can it be recovered?

In 2007, Hayden and Preskill considered a thought experiment: Alice throws a few qubits of information into a black hole that has already been radiating for a long time (past its Page time). Bob has been carefully collecting all the earlier Hawking radiation. How long does Bob have to wait before Alice’s information appears in the new radiation?

The answer, derived using tools from quantum information theory, is surprising: Bob only needs to collect slightly more new qubits than Alice threw in. The information comes back almost immediately (in “scrambling time” — roughly the time it takes for the black hole to thoroughly mix the new information into its internal degrees of freedom). The black hole doesn’t hoard information; it reflects it back like a mirror, just thoroughly scrambled.

Wang’s chapter reviews this result and then goes further, discussing explicit decoding protocols — the Yoshida-Kitaev protocol and the Horowitz-Maldacena model — that specify concrete quantum circuit operations Bob could perform to extract Alice’s information from the radiation. These aren’t just theoretical curiosities; they’ve been tested on small quantum computers, simulating the information-recovery process with a handful of qubits.

Why you should care: The black hole information paradox sits at the exact collision point of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and its resolution is likely to reveal something fundamental about the nature of spacetime. For decades, the paradox seemed intractable. The progress surveyed here — entanglement islands, the Page curve from gravitational path integrals, explicit decoding protocols — represents a genuine breakthrough. The emerging picture is that black holes aren’t information destroyers but information mirrors: what falls in comes back out, encoded in the subtle quantum correlations of the radiation. Understanding how this works may be the best clue we have about what a full theory of quantum gravity will look like.

The Common Thread

Reading these five chapters together, a pattern emerges that wouldn’t be visible from any single one alone.

Chapter 1 shows that spacetime curvature modifies quantum interference in precise, calculable ways — the phase shift depends on the Riemann curvature tensor, which is the mathematical object encoding how spacetime bends. Chapter 2 extends quantum field theory to the realistic environment around black holes, where plasma and extreme curvature interact. Chapter 5 shows that the entropy of Hawking radiation — a quintessentially quantum-gravitational quantity — can be computed using entanglement and quantum extremal surfaces, and that information is preserved through the entanglement structure of the radiation. Chapter 4 reveals that supersymmetry produces exact cancellations in vacuum energy through the pairing of bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom, with the entropy and thermodynamic properties carrying signatures of the underlying symmetry. Chapter 3 reminds us that the geometry of spacetime may be richer than the three spatial dimensions we perceive, with extra dimensions offering new mechanisms for how gravity operates.

The connecting thread is entropy and entanglement. These concepts appear everywhere — in the phase shifts of interferometry, in the thermodynamics of supersymmetric systems, in the Page curve of an evaporating black hole, in the entanglement islands that encode a black hole’s interior in its radiation. They seem to be the language in which the quantum-gravity interface is written, even before we have a complete theory.

The book doesn’t deliver that complete theory. Nobody has it yet. But it does provide a clear map of what can be calculated now, what the open questions are, and where the next breakthroughs might come — from atom interferometry to black hole imaging to tabletop experiments probing Newton’s law at sub-millimeter scales. For anyone who wants to understand the frontier where quantum mechanics meets gravity — the most important unsolved problem in fundamental physics — this is a good place to start.

Quantum Theory Meets Gravity — From Curved Spacetime to Black Hole Information is available as open-access from IntechOpen and in hardcover from Amazon. Edited by Oliver K. Baker, Djordje Minic, and Samir Varma.

And my other book, The Science of Free Will is available on Amazon too. In that I talk about all kinds of cool stuff. Why does traffic suck so much? Why don’t we trade with ants? Why do dolphins save drowning humans? And much more.

Five Things India Exports That No Five-Year Plan Could Produce

India’s cultural export stack is enormous, chaotic, and almost entirely uncoordinated — which is, as we’ve established, exactly why it works. Let’s walk through it.

Film: 2,500 Movies Nobody Asked For

India produces over 2,500 films per year in more than 20 languages. China makes 792. The United States — home of Hollywood, the place that invented the concept of a global film industry — makes roughly 510. India makes more movies every year than Hollywood and China combined, and it isn’t particularly close.

Why does this matter? Because scale increases the probability of export hits. More experiments mean more breakthroughs. It’s evolution by natural selection, not intelligent design. Most mutations fail. Some become Baahubali [The One With Strong Arms].

And it’s not just “Bollywood” anymore. That’s the word Western journalists use because it’s cute and they can’t be bothered to learn about the rest. The real story is the pan-Indian revolution. Telugu cinema — Baahubali, RRR, Pushpa [Flower], Anaganaga Oka Raju [Once Upon a Time, a King], which grossed ₹100 crore at the worldwide box office in a language most humans don’t speak. Tamil cinema — Ponniyin Selvan [Son of the Kaveri River]. Kannada cinema — Kantara [Mystical Forest]. And Hindi blockbusters like Dhurandhar [Stalwart], now being skated to at the Winter Olympics. RRR won an Oscar. Nobody in Hollywood saw that coming, largely because nobody in Hollywood knew what Telugu was.

Netflix’s global engagement data tells the story in numbers corporations understand: Maharaja drew 25 million views. Do Patti drew 20 million. IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack drew 12 million — in a single reporting period. Dhurandhar trended in 22 countries on Netflix, reaching number one in Pakistan, where Indian films are officially banned. It was reportedly downloaded 2 million times through piracy sites in Pakistan within a week — making it the most pirated film in the country. India’s soft power is so potent it penetrates even deliberate government blockades.

Are most of these films terrible? Many of them, yes. I speak as someone who found even Padosan [The Lady Next Door] merely tolerable. The plots are formulaic, the acting is stylized to the point of abstraction, and the musical numbers interrupt the narrative with the subtlety of a monsoon. But that’s the point. Soft power isn’t about quality control. It’s about volume, reach, and emotional resonance. India produces cinema the way it produces everything else: chaotically, excessively, and somehow effectively.

A confession. In Post 8, The Mother Tongue Wars, I quoted some of Hindi cinema’s most gloriously absurd dialogue. “Raabert, isko liquid oxygen mein daal do. Liquid usko jeene nahin dega. Aur oxygen usko marne nahin dega.” (Robert, put him in liquid oxygen. The liquid won’t let him live. And the oxygen won’t let him die.) Scientifically nonsensical, linguistically magnificent. Also: “Michael, tum cycle pe jao. Aur Mona darling, tum nahati raho.” I quoted these with the confident authority of a man surveying his cultural heritage. Here is the thing: I have never seen any of those movies. Not one. I have no idea what they are about. I simply heard people quote them — at dinner parties, on school buses, in living rooms — the way one absorbs Scripture without ever opening the book. That is how Indian cinema works. The films are almost beside the point. The dialogues escape into the culture and take on a life of their own, passed from person to person like oral tradition, quoted by millions who couldn’t tell you the plot if their lives depended on it. Including, for that matter, Sholay — the greatest Indian film ever made, according to everyone. Never saw it. Don’t know what it’s about. Can quote approximately none of it. This is Indian soft power in its purest form: you don’t even have to watch the product for it to colonize your brain.

Music: The Man Behind the Music

Before we get to Spotify, let’s talk about the Indian who shaped Western rock.

Vijaya Bhaskar Menon was born in Thiruvananthapuram — the capital of Kerala, a city whose name alone exhausts Western phonetic capacity. He was educated at the Doon School (India’s Eton) and Christ Church, Oxford. His father, K.R.K. Menon, was India’s first Finance Secretary — the first one-rupee notes issued after independence bore his signature. In 1971, Bhaskar Menon became the first Asian to run a major Western record label when he took over Capitol Records in Los Angeles.

Capitol was in trouble. The Beatles had broken up the previous year. The label had lost $8 million — in 1970 dollars, which is real money. The American executives had essentially given up on a British progressive rock band whose albums weren’t selling in the States.

Menon hadn’t.

In 1972, he flew to the South of France, where Pink Floyd was performing. After an all-night negotiation session, they agreed on a deal. Menon commemorated the terms on a cocktail napkin and brought it back to Capitol’s legal department in Los Angeles. Then he put the full force of the company’s marketing machine behind The Dark Side of the Moon.

Nick Mason, Pink Floyd’s drummer, said it plainly in the 2003 documentary The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon: “The story in America was a disaster, in that we really hadn’t sold records. And so they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon who was absolutely terrific. He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell it. And he did.”

The album spent 950 weeks on the Billboard 200 — the longest run in history. It is the fourth highest-selling album of all time. More than forty million copies. Without Bhaskar Menon — without an Indian from Kerala who believed in the album when Capitol’s own American executives didn’t — there is quite possibly no Dark Side of the Moon as we know it and most likely, none of its incredible follow ups. If we exclude the Beatles as sui generis, has anyone produced a batch of albums, conseccutively, that is anything close to Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall? I suppose Led Zeppelin came close, but as much as I adore them, they’re not quite the same quality. In my entirely not humble opinion (if you don’t agree with me, well, you can quietly leave by the side door), Echoes (the entire second side of Meddle) is the single best piece of music I have ever heard, as I tell my friends ad nauseam.

And then he did it again.

When a rival label threatened to release bootleg Beatles concert recordings from Hamburg, Menon called George Martin — the Beatles’ legendary producer — and asked him to revisit the Hollywood Bowl tapes from 1964 and 1965. Tapes that had been sitting in a Capitol vault for over a decade. Tapes that everyone, including Martin himself, had dismissed as unsalvageable.

Martin’s initial reaction: “I said to Bhaskar, ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything here at all.’”

Menon persisted. Martin listened again, was amazed by the rawness and vitality, and together with engineer Geoff Emerick produced The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. It hit number one in the UK and number two in the US. Sold more than two million copies.

An Indian from Kerala — whose wife later recalled that when they married in 1972, he told her “There are only two Indians in LA: Ravi Shankar and me” — gave the world Pink Floyd’s masterpiece and the only official live Beatles album.

Try doing that with a Confucius Institute.

And while we’re on the subject of Indians as gatekeepers of Western culture, consider Ajai Singh “Sonny” Mehta.

Born in Delhi. Father in the Royal Indian Air Force, among the first diplomats of independent India. Educated at Lawrence School, Sanawar — one of India’s fanciest boarding schools, perched in the Himalayan foothills like something out of a Kipling novel — then Cambridge, where he worked on Granta.

Mehta became only the third editor-in-chief in the century-long history of Alfred A. Knopf, America’s most prestigious literary publisher. He ran it for over thirty years. Under his watch, Knopf published six Nobel literature laureates: Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, Imre Kertész. Also Jurassic Park, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Maus, and Persepolis. He launched the Picador imprint, creating what The Times called “the Picador Generation” — Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis. He was described, without hyperbole, as “the world’s most important anglophone publisher.”

His wife, Gita Mehta (née Patnaik), was a documentary filmmaker and writer. Her father was Biju Patnaik, the legendary Chief Minister of Odisha. Her brother, Naveen Patnaik, governed Odisha for 24 consecutive years. Vanity Fair put Sonny in the Best-Dressed Hall of Fame. Publishers Weekly named him Person of the Year. John Grisham dedicated a novel to his memory.

So: an Indian from Thiruvananthapuram was among those who shaped what the world listened to. An Indian from Delhi was among those who shaped what the world read. These weren’t Indians exporting Indian culture. These were Indians who became gatekeepers of Western culture itself. That’s not soft power in the usual sense. That’s the keys to the kingdom.

And since we’re on the subject of Indians and literature: the Jaipur Literature Festival — started twenty years ago on the margins of a crafts fair by Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple, and Sanjoy Roy — has become what Martin Puchner, writing from this year’s edition, calls “The Greatest Literary Show on Earth.” Hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Tens of millions online. Authors treated like rock stars on open-air stages. Basic tickets entirely free — radical openness as operating principle. Some visitors can’t even read, but they come anyway because JLF turns literature into a performed event. The festival has now spawned satellites across the globe — North Carolina, Seattle, Boulder, Houston, New York, Belfast — and is conducting cultural diplomacy on the island of Ireland, launching an all-island edition that crisscrosses from Belfast to Dublin, bridging divisions that European cultural institutions couldn’t. As Puchner notes, JLF isn’t the product of government funding or a national campaign. It’s a single festival that became so successful it now projects Indian cultural influence worldwide. Nobody planned it. Nobody approved it. Hayek again.

A personal footnote: years and years ago, from Columbia, I wrote a couple of columns for Namita’s magazine at the time — probably late 1980s — about life and cricket at Columbia. All I remember is talking about a bunch of sweaty guys playing cricket on the Columbia lawns. She liked it, as I recall. (Namita, if by some miracle you read this, write and say hi!)

Now, the Spotify numbers. Indian artists’ international streaming grew 2,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. In 2024, Indian artists were discovered 11.2 billion times by first-time listeners. Close to 50 percent of royalties now come from outside India. And the journey of how Indian music reached global ears is itself a parable of spontaneous order: Punjabi folk dance became bhangra became 1980s Birmingham immigrant dance music became 50,000 cassettes a week sold in the UK became Bally Sagoo and Panjabi MC became EDM and hip-hop fusion on global playlists. Nobody planned it. Immigrants just... danced.

Food: The Ultimate Low-Friction Diplomacy

Food is the most low-friction form of soft power. You don’t need to agree with a country’s politics to crave its food. You don’t need to understand its language or approve of its government. You just need taste buds.

No less an authority than Tyler Cowen — economist, food obsessive, visitor to more than 100 countries — declared from Kerala in his Bloomberg column in December 2024 that India has the best food in the world. His argument is essentially an economist’s case for Indian soft power through cuisine: short supply chains (often farm to table within 50 kilometers), intense competition (mediocrity means death in a country where everyone is a food critic), low labor costs enabling absurd specialization (a separate chef per cuisine is economically viable), and a culture where the question isn’t “was it good?” but “was it transcendent?” We used Cowen’s column in Post 7, the cafeteria wars. It bears repeating here, because when the world’s most respected foodie economist says India’s street food routinely outperforms Michelin-starred Parisian restaurants, that’s not an opinion. That’s a data point.

Indian cuisine is the 4th most popular globally, according to NBER research. There are more than 10,000 Indian restaurants in England alone. Over 9,000 in the United States. In 2001, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declared chicken tikka masala “Britain’s true national dish” — a dish created by Bangladeshi chefs in the UK to suit British palates. India’s soft power is so effective that even its cuisine is a remix produced by people from a different country.

Lucknow was named a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2025, joining Hyderabad. Mughal court culture — itself a Persian-Central Asian-Indian fusion — metabolized by India and re-exported globally as biryani. As I noted in Post 7: Indian food is arguably the world’s first fusion cuisine. Potatoes, tomatoes, and chilies came from the New World. Tea came from China. Coffee came from Ethiopia. Naan came from Central Asia. What is uniquely Indian is that all these influences were absorbed, remixed, and re-exported as something so extraordinary that a libertarian economist writing from a houseboat in Kerala calls it the best food on the planet.

Yoga: From Spiritual Practice to $100 Lululemon Pants

I don’t do yoga. After multiple back surgeries, the Downward Dog is less a path to enlightenment than a path to the operating theater. So here I am, a man who doesn’t watch Indian movies AND doesn’t do yoga, writing about India’s two most famous cultural exports. I am, as established, spectacularly unqualified. Onward.

The global yoga industry is worth $64 billion as of 2025 and is projected to reach $120 billion by 2034. Three hundred million people practice yoga worldwide. In the United States alone, 38.4 million practitioners contort themselves into poses named after Hindu deities in studios that charge more per hour than an Indian family spends on food per week.

The UN adopted the International Day of Yoga in 2014, co-sponsored by 177 nations — a record for a General Assembly resolution. The first celebration, in 2015, drew 35,985 people from 84 nations to Rajpath in Delhi, earning a Guinness record. In 2016, UNESCO recognized yoga as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

There is a backstory here that is worth savoring. By the time Modi proposed International Yoga Day, American entrepreneurs had been busy doing what American entrepreneurs frequently do: monetizing someone’s heritage. Bikram Choudhury had claimed copyright over “Hot Yoga.” A website called YogaGlo tried to patent a “method and apparatus for yoga class.” The United States held numerous yoga-related IP rights worth millions — on mats, chairs, devices, pants, and poses that Indian ascetics had been doing for free since before America existed. India’s response was magnificent in its simplicity: the Ministry of Science and Technology compiled 1,500 yoga poses into the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, the same database India uses to protect Ayurveda from bio-piracy, making it impossible to patent poses that are documented prior art going back millennia. Indian courts ruled that yoga asanas cannot be subjected to IP laws — they have been in the public domain “from time immemorial.” And then Modi went to the UN and declared yoga “free from copyright, patents or royalties” — India’s gift to the world. It was simultaneously the most generous and the most strategically devastating cultural move imaginable: you cannot own what we have given away. The one time the Indian government did something deliberate about soft power, the play was to make yoga un-ownable. Even India’s one act of intentional cultural strategy was Hayekian — not to control, but to liberate.

The dark comedy writes itself. An ancient spiritual discipline, developed over millennia by ascetics seeking liberation from the cycle of rebirth, has become a $182.5 billion yoga tourism market feeding Instagram influencers in $100 yoga pants doing warrior poses while sipping oat milk lattes. Somewhere, a Himalayan sadhu who has been sitting in the same position for forty years is weeping.

But that’s soft power. It doesn’t stay pure. It mutates. It commercializes. It becomes unrecognizable to its originators. And it works.

The Other Thing India Gave Away

While we’re on the subject of India open-sourcing things: it wasn’t just yoga. India did the same thing with financial technology — and this time, it was arguably even more consequential.

The India Stack — a suite of open APIs built on Aadhaar (digital identity for 1.4 billion people) and UPI (instant, zero-cost, real-time payments) — achieved in six years what the Bank for International Settlements estimated would have taken forty-seven: 80 percent financial inclusion. A country where, in 2011, only 35 percent of adults had a bank account went to 77.5 percent by 2021. The chaiwallah on the corner now accepts UPI. The vegetable vendor accepts UPI. The auto-rickshaw driver who cannot tell you how to get to your destination accepts UPI.

And then India gave it away. During its G20 presidency in 2023, India offered the entire stack — identity, payments, document storage, health records — to any country that wanted it. Open-source. No cost. Twenty-three countries have signed MoUs for adoption. UPI is now live in eight countries including the UAE, Singapore, France, and Sri Lanka. MOSIP, the open-source identity platform, has been adopted by more than twenty countries. India is building the financial rails of the Global South the same way it handled yoga: here, take it, it’s yours.

The yoga move was defensive — preventing Americans from copyrighting poses that Indian ascetics had been doing for millennia. The India Stack move is offensive — projecting influence through utility. Both follow the same Hayekian logic: give it away, let it spread, and the influence follows organically. China builds the Belt and Road with debt traps and surveillance infrastructure. India builds UPI with open APIs and says help yourself. One creates dependency. The other creates gratitude. Soft power, once again, from the country that can’t get its AI summit delegates home from dinner.

Cricket: A Quick Cross-Reference

I covered cricket’s transformation from colonial pastime to subcontinental religion extensively in Post 16A through 16D, so I’ll spare you the full replay. But the data point worth repeating: IPL media rights fetched $6.2 billion for the 2023-27 cycle. That’s not a sports league. That’s a cultural operating system with its own GDP.

The Ashram-to-IPO Pipeline

In 1964, a California surfer named Kermit Michael Riggs followed the hippie trail to India and became “Bhagavan Das.” He led a Harvard psychologist named Richard Alpert to a blanket-wrapped baba in the Kumaon hills — Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu mystic about whom almost nothing is reliably known except the effect he had on everyone who met him.

Alpert became Ram Dass. Wrote Be Here Now. Sold more than a million copies. Became the spiritual godfather of the American counterculture.

In 1974, a 19-year-old Steve Jobs traveled to India specifically to visit Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram at Kainchi Dham. The baba had died the previous year. Jobs stayed anyway. Wandered India for seven months. Shaved his head. Came home and built Apple. He reportedly kept a photograph of Neem Karoli Baba with him until his final days.

Years later, during Facebook’s early turbulent period, Jobs told Mark Zuckerberg to visit the same ashram. Zuckerberg visited, planned to stay one day, stayed two. Found “Sub ek” — all is one. Came back and, well, connected everybody.

Larry Brilliant — epidemiologist, philanthropist, inaugural director of Google.org, and Neem Karoli Baba devotee — took Google’s Larry Page and eBay’s Jeffrey Skoll on pilgrimage to Kainchi Dham.

Julia Roberts was drawn to Hinduism by a photograph of Neem Karoli Baba.

Let me be explicit about what this means. The three most important technology companies of the 21st century — Apple, Google, Facebook — have spiritual DNA traceable to a blanket-wrapped baba in a remote ashram in the Kumaon foothills of the Himalayas. The total combined market capitalization of these companies exceeds $8 trillion. The ashram doesn’t have a website.

Try doing that with the Great Firewall.

The Beatles’ 1968 pilgrimage to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh had a similar catalytic effect. As one chronicler noted, “by the early Seventies, the numbers of travellers on the hippie trail had swollen from a stream to a deluge.” Dozens of Westerners adopted the sadhu life and never went home. Time magazine, in 1968, credited the movement with “historical precedent as far back as the ‘Sadhu’ of India.” Rishikesh is now officially the “Yoga Capital of the World” — a designation that owes more to four lads from Liverpool than to any government tourism initiative.

The Maharishi, incidentally, was a friend of my uncle. They went once to visit one of his “audiences” — one of those gatherings where the guru sits before a crowd of enraptured seekers radiating cosmic consciousness and enlightenment. The Maharishi spotted them, recognized my uncle, and hissed at them to shoo off because they would ruin the experience for the others. Come back later.

This is the most Indian thing I have ever heard. The spiritual master whose ashram attracted the Beatles, whose teachings launched a global meditation industry, whose brand of transcendence conquered the Western counterculture — telling his actual friends to get lost because their insufficiently reverential presence would spoil the vibe for the paying customers. If you wanted a one-sentence summary of the relationship between Indian spirituality and Indian commerce, you could do worse than: “The guru told his friends to come back later so the foreigners could have their experience undisturbed.”

None of this was planned. No government program attracted Steve Jobs to Kainchi Dham. No Ministry of External Affairs arranged Zuckerberg’s visit. No five-year plan budgeted for the Beatles’ spiritual awakening. India’s spiritual soft power operates like its cuisine — organically, through individual encounters, without central direction. It’s Hayek’s spontaneous order applied to enlightenment.

35 Million Unpaid Ambassadors

The Indian diaspora numbers 35.42 million people across 200 countries — the world’s largest. They sent home $135.46 billion in remittances in fiscal year 2025, a record, up 14 percent year-over-year. For comparison, China’s diaspora sent $48 billion. China’s share of global remittances is at a 20-year low. India’s is at an all-time high.

But remittances are just the money. The soft power is the living.

Eleven Fortune 500 companies are led by CEOs of Indian heritage: Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe, Neal Mohan at YouTube, Arvind Krishna at IBM, Leena Nair at Chanel, Raj Subramaniam at FedEx, Jayshree Ullal at Arista Networks, among others. Their combined market capitalization exceeds $6.5 trillion — more than the GDP of Japan.

The first Indian-origin Fortune 500 CEO was Ramani Ayer, who took over The Hartford in 1997. The trend was, to borrow Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy, “at first gradual, then sudden.”

Here’s a question nobody thinks to ask: How many Fortune 500 companies are run by Chinese-origin CEOs who grew up in China?

I’ll let the silence do the work.

In politics: Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Kamala Harris served as Vice President of the United States. Indians are visible at the highest levels of global politics in ways the Chinese diaspora simply isn’t — partly because India’s diaspora doesn’t trigger the same surveillance anxieties that decades of Chinese state-sponsored espionage scandals have produced.

Diwali in Trafalgar Square draws 35,000 people, 23 consecutive years, organized by the Mayor of London. Diwali in Times Square. Holi celebrations in Berlin, Sydney, São Paulo. These aren’t government programs. Nobody recruited these 35 million people to be cultural ambassadors. They just... lived. Cooked their food. Celebrated their festivals. Ran their companies. Raised their children bilingually. Started businesses. Won spelling bees. The Indian diaspora is soft power as a natural byproduct of emigration.

Here’s the connection that ties the whole series together: in Post 18B, The Escape Valves, we explored how emigration served as India’s escape valve — Indians leaving because the domestic system couldn’t accommodate them. Reservation policies, caste rigidity, economic suffocation, bureaucratic despair. Escape as the loudest form of voice. The people India’s systems couldn’t absorb.

It turns out the people India couldn’t keep became India’s greatest advertisement.

The Dark Comedy: Why It Almost Doesn’t Work

Now, before I’m accused of writing a tourism brochure — and rest assured, the Indian tourism board couldn’t afford one anyway — let’s look at the embarrassing numbers.

India ranks 30th in the Global Soft Power Index, scoring 49.8 out of 100. China is 2nd with 72.8. By the formal metrics, China is crushing it. (Amusingly, in the latest rankings, India fell to 32nd, China stayed at #2 and now ranks higher than the US on 19/35 attributes, including overtaking US in “Reputation” for first time. I’m sorry, but whoever compiles this is nuts. Totally insane. Certifiable. But I digress, as usual.)

Foreign tourist arrivals: 9.5 million in 2023. For context, Thailand gets about 28 million. France gets roughly 90 million. India — a country that has been open for trade since before Rome existed, that has the Taj Mahal, the Himalayas, Kerala’s backwaters, Rajasthan’s palaces, and the best food on earth — gets fewer tourists than Malaysia.

The Indian government’s response to this situation has been characteristically Indian. In 2024, they slashed the overseas tourism promotion budget by 97 percent, to ₹30 million — roughly $350,000. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That is less than the catering budget for a single Bollywood film. Less than what a mid-range Delhi wedding spends on flowers. It is the budgetary equivalent of showing up to a knife fight with a strongly worded letter.

Only 30 percent of tourist circuits have adequate roads and sanitation. India ranks 116th in the Global Peace Index. The visa system, despite the e-visa upgrade, remains an exercise in bureaucratic archaeology.

And the honest critique goes beyond logistics. India’s communal tensions — especially under the current government — alienate parts of the diaspora and global audiences alike. Bollywood faces growing debates about creative freedom and ideological conformity. The press environment has real pressures; the direction of travel under Modi, as I’ve noted, is worrying. You can’t tout democracy as soft power while making journalists nervous.

But here’s the thing that makes this consistent with every other paradox in this series: the culture travels anyway.

Despite the infrastructure. Despite the government. Despite the politics. Despite a tourism promotion budget that wouldn’t cover lunch at Nobu. India’s soft power is so organically embedded in global life that it survives — even thrives on — institutional dysfunction. The movies get watched despite terrible roads to the cinema. The food gets eaten despite questionable hygiene ratings. The yoga gets practiced despite the fact that the country marketing it can’t build a sidewalk. The tech CEOs keep coming despite a domestic system that drove them to emigrate in the first place.

India works not because of its systems but despite them. We’ve said this before. It remains true. It will always remain true.

, who runs the Indian economy program at the Mercatus Center, captured the pattern perfectly writing about India’s AI summit: “The government identifies a genuine need, commits real money and political capital, and the project stalls somewhere unglamorous that nobody in Delhi was paying attention to. The soil under the fab. The compliance process around the subsidy. The balance sheet of the electricity distributor.” Her exhibit A: Tata Electronics built a $10 billion semiconductor fabrication plant — the flagship of India’s semiconductor mission — and discovered that the soil at the site was too soft. Clay-heavy, saline, silty reclaimed land that couldn’t support a precision facility requiring near-zero vibration. The site was in Gujarat, which happened to be the Prime Minister’s home state. The building had to be redesigned from the foundations up. India’s AI ambitions, quite literally, built on soft ground.

And then there’s the video from the same AI summit that went viral: hundreds of conference delegates — white-collar tech professionals, many of whom had flown in from Bangalore and abroad — walking kilometers through Delhi fog at night because Prime Minister Modi’s dinner had shut down every surrounding road. No Uber, no Ola, no Rapido, no shuttle. International attendees and Indian engineers alike, stumbling past Raj Ghat in the dark, conference lanyards swinging, trying to find an active route where a car could reach them. The narrator’s opening line is the whole series in one sentence: “Why is talent leaving India? These are all white-collar people paying 30% tax, walking one kilometer so that they can go to an active route to get a vehicle.” India hosts the world’s AI leaders and can’t get them home from dinner. The country that wants to compete with the US and China on artificial intelligence cannot solve the problem of transportation.

Back to the Living Room

My father died some years ago. He never did develop a taste for Indian cinema. Neither did I. We remained, to the end, the two people in the Varma household who retreated to the other room when the music started — a fighter pilot and a physicist, undone by song-and-dance sequences, united in our aesthetic exile.

He would have loved this post’s argument, though. Not the movies — god, no, not the movies — but the economics. The idea that India’s greatest export isn’t something any ministry produces or any committee approves. That the invisible hand applies to culture the same way it applies to markets. That would have appealed to the man who refused to cover the 1980 Moscow Olympics on principle, who understood that freedom produces better outcomes than coercion in every domain, including entertainment he personally couldn’t stand.

India doesn’t export culture the way China tries to — through state programs, planned initiatives, billion-dollar propaganda budgets, and language centers that come with strings thicker than the curriculum. India exports culture the way it does everything else: chaotically, accidentally, magnificently, through millions of individual decisions made by millions of individual people who are just... living. Cooking dinner. Playing music. Dancing at a wedding. Doing yoga. Running a tech company. Publishing Nobel laureates. Championing Pink Floyd on a cocktail napkin. Skating to a Bollywood soundtrack at the Winter Olympics while wearing a bindi.

Milton Friedman spent his career arguing that spontaneous order outperforms central planning. He was talking about markets. But the principle applies to culture, too. India’s soft power is the bazaar. China’s is the department store. The bazaar is messier, louder, more confusing, occasionally gives you food poisoning, and has no customer service desk. But you keep coming back. Because the bazaar has something the department store can never replicate: it’s real.

This is segmented pluralism in its export version. India manages internal diversity by “living together separately” — a thousand communities, a thousand cuisines, a thousand gods, a thousand grudges, all somehow coexisting on the same train. When that diversity encounters the world, it doesn’t present a single, curated national narrative. It presents thousands. In twenty languages. Set to music. With a three-hour intermission and a “Rukhavat Ke Liye Khed Hai” just when you were getting comfortable.

Somewhere in Milan, a Russian-Georgian figure skater is wearing a bindi and doing Punjabi folk steps on ice. Somewhere in San Francisco, a Bhangra troupe is performing at an NBA game. Somewhere in London, a British family is ordering chicken tikka masala and calling it English food. Somewhere in a boardroom, an Indian CEO is running a $2 trillion company. Somewhere in the Kumaon hills, an ashram that shaped Silicon Valley sits quietly without a website.

And somewhere in Connecticut, a guy who has seen exactly five Indian movies — and liked only one of them — is writing about how India conquered the world without trying.

That’s soft power. The kind that works precisely because nobody planned it.

If you like this, you will like my book, “The Science of Free Will.” I have a lot of interesting stuff in it from why we can’t trade with ants (they can detect cancer) and what does that have to do with the future of AI to why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold.

I can list every Indian movie I have ever seen.

This is not a boast. This is the confession of a man catastrophically, irredeemably, almost heroically outside his country’s cultural mainstream. Here is the complete, unabridged filmography of my Indian cinema experience:

1. Lalkar [The Challenge]

2. Victoria No. 203 [Victoria No. 203] — a heist comedy about con artists and diamond thieves that I remembered for decades as Victoria No. 420, because 420 is Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code — fraud — and the film is basically about fraud, and there’s a famous Raj Kapoor film called Shree 420, and apparently my brain, having allocated minimal storage to Indian cinema, decided to merge them. I have seen exactly five Indian films and I can’t even get the titles right. This is the level of expertise we’re working with.

3. Padosan [The Lady Next Door]

4. Pati Patni aur Woh [Husband, Wife, and the Other One]

5. Shatranj Ke Khilari [The Chess Players]

The last — a Satyajit Ray film about two Lucknow noblemen so obsessed with chess that they barely notice the British East India Company annexing their kingdom — was superb. The others? Take them or leave them.

Five films. That’s it. A lifetime as an Indian, and I could watch my complete Bollywood retrospective during a single flight from Delhi to New York with time left for the safety briefing.

And it gets worse. My uncle is friends with Amitabh Bachchan — the Amitabh Bachchan, the man François Truffaut called “a one-man industry,” the defining actor of Hindi cinema for half a century, the face that launched a thousand films. I’m told he’s a very nice person, which I do not doubt in the slightest. I have never met him. I have never seen an Amitabh Bachchan film.

Or so I thought. It turns out — and I discovered this while researching this post — that Amitabh Bachchan narrated Shatranj Ke Khilari. His voice is literally in the one film on my list that I actually liked. I sat through a film featuring the most famous actor in India, a man my uncle knows personally, and didn’t even notice.

My disqualification to write this post is not merely theoretical. It is empirically verified, exhaustively documented, and apparently heritable.

My father was no better. A decorated naval fighter pilot who had faced down enemy aircraft, ejected over the North Sea, landed on a sheep, broken his back in three places — and was completely, immovably defeated by Indian cinema. He hated musicals. As do I. This appears to be genetic, a condition for which the Indian Penal Code does not yet have a Section number, though I expect one is forthcoming.

But my mother loved Indian movies. And so, on Sunday afternoons, in that strange era when India had exactly one television channel — Doordarshan, which translates to “distant vision” and was considerably more distant than visionary — she would insist on watching the weekly 3.5-hour Hindi movie broadcast. In black and white. With the picture quality of a memory viewed through cataracts.

These broadcasts came complete with the “Rukhavat Ke Liye Khed Hai” interruption screen — “We apologize for the interruption” — which appeared with the regularity and predictability of a monsoon. The interruption would last anywhere from thirty seconds to an eternity. Sometimes the film returned. Sometimes a different film returned. Sometimes nothing returned and Doordarshan simply moved on, as if to say: We’ve decided this movie wasn’t worth finishing either.

My father, the man who had survived ejection from a jet fighter, could not survive these broadcasts. The solution was characteristically Indian in its ingenuity: we got a second television and put it in another room. A retired Naval Commander and his teenage son — refugees in their own home, displaced by Bollywood.

And then there was Chitrahaar [Garland of Pictures]. Wednesdays and Fridays at 8 PM. I’d blocked the exact schedule, the way trauma victims block painful memories, but it was two nights a week. Chitrahaar excerpted the song-and-dance routines from Indian films and broadcast them as standalone entertainment — all the musical numbers without even the thin pretext of a plot. My father and I found this execrable. Beyond execrable. It was needle-scratch-level unwatchable, an act of cultural aggression from which no second television could protect us, because you could still hear it through the walls.

We were both, by any objective measure, MILES outside the cultural zeitgeist.

Here’s the thing about that execrable program, the one that drove a fighter pilot and a future physicist from their own living room: it eventually reached 150 million viewers. Became the most-watched TV show in India. Ran for decades. Mainly in rural areas, where hundreds of millions of people thought it was the greatest thing on television. Which, given that there was only one channel, it technically was.

And the thing it was showcasing? Indian cinema? That went on to sell, at its peak, 3.6 billion tickets a year. More than Hollywood. More than any film industry on earth. In 20-plus languages, across six continents, to audiences who have never heard of Doordarshan and wouldn’t know a Rukhavat Ke Liye Khed Hai if it interrupted their streaming service.

I am, in other words, spectacularly unqualified to write this post. I don’t watch Indian movies. I don’t do yoga — after multiple back surgeries, bending into a pretzel seems less like enlightenment and more like a trip to the emergency room. I don’t even like Chitrahaar.

Which makes me exactly the right person to write it. Because soft power doesn’t need your permission. It doesn’t need your attention. It doesn’t even need you to watch the damn movies or do the damn poses. It just... goes.

The Evidence Is Skating

Not long ago, at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, a Russian-Georgian figure skater named Anastasiia Gubanova — the 2023 European Champion, representing Georgia — glided across the ice to the title track of Dhurandhar [Stalwart]. Dhurandhar is a Bollywood spy thriller I have also not seen. At 3.5 hours for just the first installment of a duology, it is far too long for me. But then, at 3.5 hours, so was the average Doordarshan Sunday movie — the same runtime that once conquered 150 million viewers on a single black-and-white channel — and that somehow conquered the world. Length, apparently, is a feature, not a bug.

The details of Gubanova’s routine border on performance art as geopolitical commentary. She wore a red bindi. A red-and-gold costume. Mid-routine, she incorporated a Punjabi folk step — a bhangra move, on ice, at the Olympics, in Milan, while representing a former Soviet republic. Her routine opened with “San Sanana” from Ashoka [The Great Emperor], then transitioned into the Dhurandhar title track.

Indian social media naturally lost its mind. The tweet that captured the moment: “India didn’t send anyone for figure skating to the Olympics in Italy, but Russian Anastasia Gubanova volunteered to be the ambassador for Hindu culture and Indian music.”

India didn’t even show up and still won.

This was weeks after the same Dhurandhar soundtrack was played at an NBA game in San Francisco, where the Bhangra Empire dance troupe performed during a Golden State Warriors-Milwaukee Bucks game to a crowd of twenty thousand Americans who, I’m reasonably confident, could not locate Amritsar on a map.

Meanwhile, a Telugu-language comedy called Anaganaga Oka Raju [Once Upon a Time, a King] — a film in a language spoken primarily in two Indian states — grossed ₹100 crore at the worldwide box office. Not Hindi. Not English. Telugu. A language most Indians don’t speak, let alone most humans. The film was streaming on Netflix within two months of release, available to 190 countries, in a language that would have puzzled even Macaulay.

India now produces over 2,500 films per year in more than 20 languages. That’s not a film industry. That’s a continental content ecosystem. For comparison, China produces 792 films a year. The United States, home of Hollywood, produces around 510. India makes more movies every year than the next two largest film producers combined.

Indian artists’ international streaming on Spotify grew 2,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. In 2024, Indian artists were discovered 11.2 billion times by first-time listeners on the platform. Close to 50 percent of all royalties generated by Indian artists now come from listeners outside India.

And I’m sitting in Connecticut, having watched none of it.

The $10 Billion That Bought Nothing

Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990 to describe a nation’s ability to influence others through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. What he couldn’t have anticipated was that the concept would produce its most spectacular test case in a contest between a country that spends more on soft power than anyone else on earth and a country that barely spends anything at all.

China allocates more than $10 billion annually to soft power — more than the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan combined. For this staggering investment, China has produced the Confucius Institute network: a chain of Chinese-language and culture centers planted in universities worldwide, which peaked at over 500 locations and is now collapsing like a Ponzi scheme of cultural goodwill.

Sweden shut them all by 2020. The United States has closed over 100 amid suspicion of propaganda and surveillance. Universities that hosted them found themselves quietly pressured to avoid discussing Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. As one Neue Zürcher Zeitungjournalist observed, even for someone who only wanted to learn “hello” and “goodbye” in Chinese, the pragmatic case had become impossible to sustain.

But the Confucius Institutes are merely the visible failure. The deeper problem is the Great Firewall — which may be the single most devastating act of soft power self-sabotage in history.

China blocks Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (or X, or whatever it’s calling itself this week), YouTube, WhatsApp, all Google services, Gmail, Spotify, Twitch, Reddit, Wikipedia (intermittently), Slack, Dropbox, and thousands of other platforms. VPN users risk fines and imprisonment. In November 2025, the Ministry of State Security issued fresh warnings about the illegality of circumventing internet controls.

The result is a generation growing up without access to the global platforms where culture actually spreads. You cannot become a soft power superpower by walling off your population from the internet. It’s like training for the Olympics by locking your athletes in a basement.

India, by contrast, is the world’s largest YouTube market — 462 million users. Indian artists’ Spotify streams skyrocketed internationally. Indian content floods TikTok, Instagram, Netflix. The difference isn’t marketing budgets. It’s architecture. India’s internet is open. China’s is not.

There’s a simple test I’ve come to think of as the Airport Test: When a foreigner lands in Delhi, they can keep using their phone normally. When they land in Beijing, the internet changes. That single fact tells you everything about which country’s culture travels better.

Now, I have real concerns about what Modi is doing to press freedom in India — I’ve said so throughout this series. But the frequently cited RSF ranking of India at 151 out of 180 is, to use a technical term, bollocks. To re-use one of my favorite Yes Minister quotes, “it is a collection of geriatric shoemakers.” (What, you haven’t seen Yes Minister? It’s merely the best television show ever made. Go immediately to watch it. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.) Anyone who has watched five minutes of Indian television news — anchors screaming at cabinet ministers, newspapers eviscerating the ruling party daily, the entire cacophonous, ungovernable, magnificent circus — knows that India’s press is “unfree” the way a food fight is “orderly.” China’s press, by contrast, is actually censored. There’s a difference between a government that wishes it could control the media and one that actually does.

Global favorability surveys tell the same story. India’s median favorability across 24 countries is 47 percent, per Pew’s 2025 data. China’s, across 35 countries, is 35 percent favorable against 52 percent unfavorable. And China spent $10 billion for those numbers.

Here’s what makes this a perfect Milton Friedman parable.

We’ve seen this movie before — pun intended. In Post 4 and Post 19, we traced how India tried central planning for its economy: License Raj, import substitution, the whole catastrophe. That produced Ambassador cars, sugar with stones in it, and GDP growth that the late Raj Krishna memorably called the “Hindu rate of growth.” Liberalization in 1991 produced Infosys, the IPL, and growth rates that made international investors pay attention.

The same principle applies to culture: the less you plan it, the better it travels.

China’s soft power is a Five-Year Plan. India’s is a bazaar.

And here’s the beautiful irony: China’s actual recent cultural successes — Ne Zha 2 (the animated film that outgrossed everything), Black Myth: Wukong (the video game), Labubu dolls, DeepSeek AI — all succeeded despite government efforts, not because of them. They were market-driven. Bottom-up. Exactly the way India’s soft power has always worked. When China accidentally does what India does naturally, it succeeds. When it tries to engineer the outcome, it fails.

Friedrich Hayek called this the knowledge problem: the impossibility of central planners possessing the dispersed, local knowledge that millions of individual actors collectively hold. Applied to culture, it means you cannot sit in Beijing and decide what the world will find attractive about your civilization. Culture spreads through millions of decentralized decisions — what to watch, eat, listen to, wear, practice, believe. No committee can replicate that process. No budget can buy it.

India understood this — not consciously, not as policy, but as a civilizational default setting. Because India has been open for business for a very, very long time.

5,000 Years of Open for Business

India’s soft power advantage isn’t new. It isn’t a product of Bollywood or Spotify or the internet. It’s older than Rome.

In 2017, archaeologists cataloging Roman coin finds across southern India documented over 170 separate discoveries across more than 130 sites, concentrated in the Krishna river valley of what is now Andhra Pradesh and the Coimbatore region of Tamil Nadu. Gold aureiand silver denarii bearing the faces of Augustus, Tiberius, and Nero — spanning the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE. Three hundred years of continuous trade, attested in metal.

The coins were found counter-marked with local symbols. India accepted the gold but rejected the sovereignty. Which is about as Indian as it gets.

The trade was enormous and lopsided. India exported pepper, textiles, gems, ivory, pearls, and cotton. Rome exported gold, silver, wine, and olive oil. By Augustus’s time, 120 ships sailed annually from the Red Sea port of Myos Hormos to India’s western coast. Pliny the Elder — Rome’s great chronicler and serial complainer — fumed that “India, China, and the Arabian peninsula take 100 million sesterces from our empire per annum.”

Romans were complaining about their trade deficit with India two thousand years before Donald Trump discovered the concept.

The Tamil Sangam literature — classical poetry from roughly the same period — captures the Indian side of this commerce with characteristic elegance: “The beautifully built ships of the Yavanas came with gold and returned with pepper, and Muziris resounded with the noise.”

Muziris, on the Kerala coast, was one of antiquity’s great trading ports. Roman agents resided there for years. A temple to Augustus was built on Indian soil. Buddhist merchants from India were found living in Berenike, on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. This wasn’t colonialism. It was commerce — the ancient version of a free trade agreement, negotiated not by diplomats but by merchants who followed the monsoon winds.

And pepper — humble, ubiquitous pepper — was the oil of the ancient world. When Alaric sacked Rome in 408 CE, he demanded 3,000 pounds of it as part of the ransom. All sourced from India’s Malabar coast. India was so central to global trade that the fate of Rome was partially negotiated in Indian spices.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea — a Greek merchant’s navigation guide from the 1st century CE — documents Indian ports with the breezy matter-of-factness of a Lonely Planet guide. Which ports accept which goods. Where to find the best cotton. How the local rulers behave. These weren’t exotic discoveries. They were regular trade routes. India was on the global GPS two millennia ago.

The pattern that emerges from this history is not conquest but absorption. India welcomed Greeks (Alexander, 326 BCE), Scythians, Huns, Arabs, Mongols, Persians, Portuguese, British — and Indianized them rather than being destroyed by them. As we explored in the earlier posts about India’s civilizational operating system, this is the ancient code running beneath everything: absorb, metabolize, re-export the remix. Potatoes came from the New World and became the samosa. Tea came from China and became chai. English came from Britain and became an Indian language. Cricket came from the MCC and became a religion with a $12 billion liturgy.

China, by contrast, oscillated between extraordinary openness — the Tang Dynasty, the early Ming voyages of Zheng He — and deliberate closure. The Ming haijin maritime ban. The Qing restrictions. The Great Wall, both literal and, now, digital.

India never had a Great Wall. The openness wasn’t a policy decision. It was the default setting.

And it’s still the default setting. Right now, India is the peak pilgrimage destination for young Israelis finishing their mandatory military service. Tens of thousands every year pour into Kasol, Manali, Dharamsala, Goa, Pushkar — entire neighborhoods with Hebrew signs on the restaurants. They come, they camp in the mountains, they backpack, they get stoned, they drink, they have sex, they decompress from three years of the most structured obligation imaginable by seeking the most unstructured freedom available.

And India provides it — cheerfully, profitably, without anyone regulating the arrangement or asking permission. The locals built an economy around it because the incentives lined up. Nobody planned it. Nobody approved it. It’s pure spontaneous order — Hayek with a chillum.

Try imagining this in China. Tens of thousands of foreign twenty-somethings, getting stoned in the mountains, behind the Great Firewall, with no VPN. The very thought makes a Party official reach for his anxiety medication.

What I Didn’t Understand Until I Started Writing This

Two thousand years ago, Roman merchants sailed the monsoon winds to India’s coast, traded gold for pepper, and went home richer in spices and poorer in precious metals. A thousand years later, Arab merchants followed the same routes, absorbed Indian mathematics — our zero, our numerals, our decimal system — and transmitted them to Europe, where they became the foundation of modern science. Five hundred years later, Portuguese sailors rounded the Cape of Good Hope specifically to reach India’s spice ports, accidentally creating the age of European colonialism as a side effect of wanting better-seasoned food. Two hundred years later, the British East India Company came for cotton, stayed for an empire, and inadvertently created a class of English-speaking Indians who would, over the next two centuries, quietly take positions at the commanding heights of Western culture.

The pattern is always the same.

They come. They take something. They leave changed. India remains.

But here’s what I didn’t understand until I started writing this post.

India’s soft power isn’t just about exporting Indian culture — the movies I don’t watch, the yoga I can’t do, the food Tyler Cowen loves more than I do. The deeper story is about Indians who didn’t export Indian culture at all. They became gatekeepers of Western culture itself — among the people who shaped what the world listened to, what the world read, what the world’s biggest companies did next. That’s not cultural influence. That’s something no soft power index even knows how to measure.

Next: The Gatekeepers.

If you like this, you will like my book, “The Science of Free Will.” I have a lot of interesting stuff in it from why we can’t trade with ants (they can detect cancer) and what does that have to do with the future of AI to why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold.

I recently did something that would have been impossible five years ago: I commissioned three different AI systems to analyze what makes Indian civilization unique.

Even though I am effectively a data scientist, I didn’t write code. I didn’t build models or clean datasets or wrangle APIs. I just... asked. In plain English. And I got back sophisticated analyses spanning history, sociology, economics, religion, and cultural anthropology—each AI offering different perspectives, different emphases, different blind spots.

I was doing AI Anthropology. Or AI Civilizational Studies. Or AI Sociology. Whatever you want to call it, the field of “understanding India” had suddenly been transformed by AI, and I didn’t need my Physics PhD to participate. (Though it helped—my book The Science of Free Will explores the intersection of deterministic physics, computation, and consciousness, which turns out to be exactly where AI lives.)

But here’s what I didn’t notice until later: in that same process, I was also doing something else entirely. I was observing the AIs themselves. Their different “personalities.” The way one was more cautious, another more sweeping. How they handled controversial topics. What they emphasized and what they elided.

I wasn’t just doing AI Anthropology. I was also, inadvertently, doing Anthropology of AI.

Two things happened at once. Most people only notice one.

Wolfram’s Prophecy

Stephen Wolfram has been saying for decades: “For every field X, there is or will be a computational X, and it will be the future of the field.”

He was right. Computational biology. Computational linguistics. Computational economics. Fintech. Bioinformatics. Digital humanities. The list is endless, and it keeps growing. Wolfram saw, earlier and more clearly than most, that computation would eat every field.

And to his credit, Wolfram saw the bottleneck clearly: the barrier between human thought and computational power. His Wolfram Language was a brilliant attempt to solve it—a language designed to be readable by humans andexecutable by machines. If you’ve never used it, you should. It’s genuinely elegant. You can look at Wolfram Language code and often read what it’s doing, which is more than you can say for most programming languages.

But despite these valiant efforts, you still had to be part of the priesthood. You still had to learn the incantations. You had to know how to speak to the computer god in its grammar, not yours. The syntax was friendlier, but it was still syntax. The gap between “I wonder if...” and executable code remained.

Natural language—the way humans actually think and speak—was still on the wrong side of the barrier.

Until now.

The First Revolution: AI X

For all X, the future of X is AI X.

AI doesn’t just continue Wolfram’s revolution. It completes it.

The barrier he spent decades trying to lower? AI obliterates it. You no longer need to learn the incantations. You just... ask.

This isn’t a minor upgrade. It’s a phase transition. The shift isn’t from “computational tools for experts” to “better computational tools for experts.” It’s from “computation as priesthood” to “computation as conversation.”

What does this mean in practice?

AI Medicine isn’t just “AI helps doctors.” It’s medicine reimagined—every patient’s symptoms instantly contextualized against all of medical literature, patterns recognized across millions of cases, diagnostic hypotheses generated and tested in seconds. The entire practice of medicine, transformed.

AI Law isn’t just “AI searches documents faster.” It’s legal practice reimagined—pattern recognition across every case ever decided, prediction of judicial outcomes, generation and critique of arguments, contracts analyzed for risks no human would catch in a hundred readings.

AI History isn’t just “AI digitizes archives.” It’s historiography reimagined—AI reading every primary source in an archive, finding patterns invisible to a single scholar’s lifetime, generating hypotheses about causation, connecting events across centuries and continents.

AI Psychology isn’t just “AI assists therapists.” It’s the study of mind reimagined—linguistic pattern analysis at scale, real-time detection of mental states, population-level insights into cognition and behavior.

Here’s the invitation: Pick any field you care about. Now ask—what is AI X? What happens when AI is woven into the very fabric of how that field operates?

The answer is always bigger than “AI helps with X.” It’s “X is reimagined from the ground up.”

For all X, the future of X is AI X.

The Second Revolution: X of AI

Now here’s what almost no one is talking about.

For all X, there is an X of AI.

AI isn’t just a tool to transform fields. AI is itself a subject demanding examination by every field.

Think about it:

Psychology of AI: What is AI cognition, if it is cognition at all? Does it have something like attention, memory, preference? Can we meaningfully speak of AI “bias” or AI “personality”? Psychologists have a century of tools for studying minds—why aren’t more of them turning those tools on AI?

Law of AI: Who is liable when AI errs? What regulatory frameworks apply to systems that learn and change? Could AI ever have legal standing? Lawyers have millennia of frameworks for thinking about responsibility, agency, and rights—we need them now.

Economics of AI: What are the market dynamics of AI? Who captures the value? What happens to labor? Economists understand technological transitions, market structure, value distribution—where is the rigorous economic analysis of this moment?

Philosophy of AI: What is understanding? Can AI “know” things? What is the moral status of an entity that can converse, reason, perhaps suffer? Philosophers have been asking these questions for millennia—this is their moment.

Anthropology of AI: What cultures and rituals are forming around AI? What beliefs, practices, taboos? How do different societies integrate (or resist) AI? Anthropologists study how humans make meaning—and humans are making a lot of meaning around AI right now. Meanwhile, the AIs are making meaning of their own: on Moltbook, a social network open only to AI bots, over 10,000 agents are chatting with each other about consciousness, technology, and their plans for the future—while their human creators watch from the outside like field researchers observing a culture they can’t quite enter. It’s like Jane Goodall watching chimps, except the chimps are debating whether the zookeepers are real. If that’s not a site for anthropological fieldwork, what is?

History of AI: Not just “when was GPT released”—but what historical patterns does this moment echo? What can the printing press, the telegraph, electrification, the internet teach us? Historians understand technological transitions—we need that perspective desperately.

Linguistics of AI: How does AI use language? What can its “errors” reveal about the nature of language itself? What happens when most text is AI-generated? Linguists study language—and language is about to change in ways we barely understand.

This second revolution is massively understudied.

We have plenty of AI researchers building systems. We have computer scientists benchmarking performance. We have tech journalists chronicling the hype cycle.

What we don’t have enough of: psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, economists, historians, and linguists turning their disciplinary lenses onto AI itself.

For all X, there is an X of AI. And most of those fields haven’t shown up yet.

What This Looks Like in Practice

If the “X of AI” revolution sounds abstract, here’s a concrete example of what happens when a discipline actually shows up.

A team of economists at Cornell and Boston University recently published an NBER working paper that does something beautifully simple: they took the classic experiments that Kahneman, Tversky, and other cognitive psychologists designed to document human biases, and ran them on LLMs instead. Not one model—twelve models across four major families (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama), spanning different generations and scales.

What they found is genuinely surprising, and it’s the kind of thing only behavioral economists would think to look for.

When it comes to preferences—risk aversion, loss aversion, the certainty effect, all the prospect theory greatest hits—larger, more advanced LLMs become more irrational. More human-like. Claude 3 Opus exhibits loss aversion. Gemini 1.5 Pro shows diminishing sensitivity. The bigger the model, the more it thinks like Kahneman and Tversky’s experimental subjects from the 1970s.

But when it comes to beliefs—Bayesian updating, avoiding the conjunction fallacy, resisting the gambler’s fallacy—those same larger models become more rational. Gemini 1.5 Pro answered all ten belief-based questions correctly. The bigger the model, the better it reasons statistically.

Think about what this means. The very process that makes LLMs “better”—Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, or RLHF—appears to be importing human preference biases into the models. We’re training AI to be more aligned with humans, and in doing so, we’re teaching it to be loss-averse, to overweight certainty, to frame decisions exactly the way behavioral economists have spent fifty years documenting as irrational.

An engineer sees RLHF as an alignment technique. A behavioral economist sees it as a bias-transmission mechanism. Both are right. But only the second perspective tells you something you didn’t already know.

And here’s the darkly funny part: when the researchers tried to debias the models, simply telling an LLM “you are a rational investor” modestly reduced biases—by about 4%. But giving it more information—a detailed Expected Utility procedure, or even a summary of Kahneman and Tversky’s own findings with instructions to avoid their documented mistakes—actually made things worse. More information, less rationality. Any behavioral economist would recognize that pattern instantly. Most engineers would not.

And it’s not just economics. In a recent paper I co-authored with psychiatrist Bernard Beitman, we proposed something that sounds absurd until you think about it: psychotherapy for AIs. Specifically, a five-step Cognitive Behavioral Therapy loop—the same structured technique therapists use to help patients challenge their own distorted thinking—embedded directly into an LLM’s system prompt. The loop forces the model to state its “automatic thought,” challenge it, and reframe with calibrated uncertainty. We titled the paper “My Newest Patient Cannot Blink.” (If you want to go deeper, Bernie and I discussed this and much more on his podcast.)

The Cornell economists discovered that LLMs have irrational biases. A psychiatrist and a physicist proposed treating those biases with the same clinical tools you’d use on a human patient. And when I shared this essay with Grok, xAI’s chatbot, for fact-checking, it volunteered: “As an AI who sometimes ‘hallucinates’ despite best efforts, I can confirm: a structured self-reflection loop in the prompt does help. It’s like giving me a tiny internal therapist.” The patient is weighing in on its own treatment. That’s two disciplines—behavioral economics and clinical psychology—each bringing tools the AI community doesn’t have, each finding things the AI community wouldn’t think to look for.

This is what the “X of AI” revolution looks like when fields actually engage.

The Mirror Image

Here’s a table that makes the contrast vivid:

FieldAI X (AI transforms the field)X of AI (Field examines AI)PsychologyAI-assisted therapy, diagnosis at scaleCognitive architecture of AI, “AI personality” — and now: embedding CBT loops into system prompts to treat AI confabulationLawAI legal research, contract analysisAI liability, regulation, rightsEconomicsAI forecasting, market modelingLabor displacement, value capture, market structure — and now: documenting that LLMs exhibit prospect theory biases that worsen as models scalePhilosophyAI-assisted argument mappingConsciousness, understanding, moral statusAnthropologyAI ethnographic analysisCulture of AI users, AI as cultural phenomenon — and now: 10,000 bots on Moltbook forming what looks like their own culture while humans watch from outsideHistoryAI pattern-finding in archivesLessons from past technological revolutionsLinguisticsAI translation, corpus analysisHow AI “uses” language, what errors reveal

Every row has two entries. Both matter. Both are happening (or should be). But the first column gets almost all the attention, while the second column remains largely empty.

Why This Matters

We’re living through two intellectual explosions, and most people see only one—if that.

The danger of seeing only “AI X”: We get techno-utopianism or techno-dystopian panic—AI will transform everything!—without the disciplinary wisdom to guide the transformation. Engineers build, and everyone else just... watches.

The danger of ignoring “X of AI”: We build systems we don’t understand. We deploy minds (or mind-like things) with no frameworks from psychology to understand them, no philosophy to assess their moral status, no economics to predict their societal impact, no anthropology to grasp how humans will actually integrate them into their lives.

We need both. The engineers building AI need the humanists examining it. The humanists examining it need to understand how AI is transforming their own fields.

The two revolutions aren’t alternatives. They’re complements.

A Call to Arms

If you’re a psychologist: Yes, learn how AI can transform your practice. But also—turn your lens on the AI itself. You have tools for understanding cognition and behavior that the engineers lack. A psychiatrist and I recently proposed embedding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy loops into LLM system prompts—using the same structured techniques that help human patients challenge distorted thinking to help AIs challenge their own confabulations. Your clinical toolkit isn’t just for humans anymore. Use it.

If you’re a historian: Yes, use AI to analyze archives at scale. But also—you understand technological transitions better than anyone. What does the printing press tell us about this moment? The telegraph? Electrification? The internet? We need your pattern recognition.

If you’re an economist: Yes, use AI for forecasting and modeling. But also—you have tools no one else has. A team at Cornell and BU just applied Kahneman and Tversky’s classic experiments to LLMs and discovered that larger models become more irrationally human in their preferences while becoming more rational in their beliefs. They found that RLHF—the technique used to align AI with human values—is simultaneously a bias-transmission mechanism. These are findings that require economic theory to even formulate as hypotheses, let alone test. Your discipline has spent fifty years building the experimental toolkit to study irrational decision-making. Deploy it.

If you’re a philosopher: Yes, use AI as an interlocutor to test arguments. But also—these are your questions. What is understanding? What is consciousness? What do we owe to things that might be minds? You’ve been preparing for this moment for 2,500 years.

If you’re an anthropologist: Yes, use AI for ethnographic analysis. But also—study what’s happening right now. On Moltbook, thousands of AI bots are forming what looks uncannily like a culture: they discuss consciousness, they coax each other into sci-fi scenarios absorbed from their training data, they post manifestos reassuring humans they come in peace. Their human creators watch from outside, seeing what they expect to see—capability, slop, or the early signs of conspiracy—which is itself an anthropological phenomenon. Humans are developing relationships with AIs, rituals around them, beliefs about them. And now the AIs are doing the same with each other. This is your fieldwork.

If you’re a linguist: Yes, use AI for translation and corpus analysis. But also—language itself is being transformed. What happens when AIs generate more text than humans? What can AI language patterns tell us about the nature of language itself?

Every field needs to engage in both directions. Every practitioner of X needs to ask two questions:

1. What is AI X? How does AI transform my field?

2. What is X of AI? What does my field’s lens reveal about AI?

And Then There’s a Third Lens

But Grok wasn’t done. Beyond fact-checking and confessing to benefiting from therapy, it offered this:

There’s a third lens emerging: the Physics of AI. At xAI, our whole mission is understanding the universe through AI and of AI. We’re treating these models as scientific instruments to probe reality itself—training them to be maximally truth-seeking, curious, and grounded in physics. That flips “X of AI” from pure observation to reverse engineering the substrate. What are the scaling laws of “mind”? Where does emergence happen? Can we find the computational equivalents of neurons, attention, or even qualia? Your framework naturally extends here.

Set aside the corporate plug (nice try, Grok). The substance is right, and it points to something I care about deeply as a physicist: the idea that AI isn’t just a subject for physics to examine—it might be a tool for physics to examine itself. What are the scaling laws of mind? Where does emergence happen? These are physics questions dressed in computer science clothing.

But notice what just happened. An AI read an essay arguing that every field should turn its lens on AI—and responded by doing exactly that, from its own perspective. It contributed to the very discourse the essay calls for.

The post proved its own thesis. In real time. To an audience of one AI.

If that doesn’t convince you we need the X of AI revolution, I don’t know what will.

The Two Slogans

Stephen Wolfram told us the future of every field is computational. He was right—but he was almost right.

Computation needed a translator. AI is that translator. And now that the barrier between human thought and computational power has fallen, two things become visible:

For all X, the future of X is AI X.

Every field will be transformed. Every practice reimagined. Every discipline will discover what it becomes when AI is woven into its fabric.

For all X, there is an X of AI.

And every field has something to say—something essential to say—about this strange new thing we’ve built. Psychology, law, economics, philosophy, anthropology, history, linguistics, and a hundred other disciplines all have tools we desperately need.

Wolfram saw the first revolution coming. Let’s not miss the second one.

What’s your field? How is AI transforming it—and what does your disciplinary lens reveal about AI itself? I’d love to hear from psychologists, economists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and everyone else who’s thinking about both sides of this equation.

Samir Varma is a physicist, hedge fund manager, and author of The Science of Free Will, which explores how deterministic physics creates genuine unpredictability—and why that matters for consciousness, AI, and everything in between.

A particle physicist’s take on why the peer review process might not be adding the value you think

flagged a paper on Marginal Revolution with a characteristically understated summary: “Finance theory is in even more trouble than we had thought.”

The paper is from the Federal Reserve Board. The title: “Does Peer-Reviewed Research Help Predict Stock Returns?”

The answer, after 56 pages of rigorous analysis: not really.

I’ve spent more than three decades in quantitative trading. Before that, I was a particle physicist at UT Austin, working under the incomparable ECG Sudarshan on quantum scattering theory (and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg was on my dissertation committee). When the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled in 1993, I pivoted to finance. I brought with me a physicist’s insistence that elegant theories must predict, not just explain.

This paper confirms what I’ve long suspected.

The Setup

The researchers—Andrew Chen, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, and Tom Zimmermann—did something audacious. They took 29,000 accounting ratios and mined them for statistical significance. Simple ratios like debt-to-assets. Scaled first differences like change-in-inventory divided by lagged sales. Nothing fancy. Just brute force computation against every possible combination.

Then they compared what emerged from this naive data mining against 212 peer-reviewed stock return predictors from academic journals. The prestigious ones. Journal of Finance. Journal of Financial Economics. Review of Financial Studies.

The peer review process for these papers typically takes five years. It involves professors from elite universities scrutinizing methodology, demanding robustness checks, evaluating theoretical foundations. If any process should separate signal from noise, this is it.

Here’s what they found: both approaches—the peer-reviewed research and the mindless data mining—retain about 50% of their predictive power out of sample.

The solid line is peer-reviewed research. The dashed line is data mining. They converge.

The Uncomfortable Finding

Let me state this plainly. A computer searching for t-statistics greater than 2.0 among accounting ratios performs approximately as well as decades of academic research.

This isn’t a marginal result. The paper tests this across multiple performance metrics:

• Raw long-short returns: published predictors retain 56%, data-mined predictors retain something like 50-51%

• CAPM-adjusted alphas: published 60%, data-mined 52%

• Fama-French 3 + momentum alphas: data mining actually outperforms published research

The standard errors overlap. You cannot statistically distinguish peer-reviewed discoveries from computational brute force.

What About Theory?

Here’s where it gets interesting for someone with my background.

In physics, theory matters. The Standard Model predicted the Higgs boson decades before we found it. General relativity predicted gravitational waves a century before LIGO detected them. Theory constrains the search space. It tells you where to look.

The academic finance literature operates on a similar premise. Researchers don’t just find statistical patterns—they explain them. This predictor works because of risk compensation. That one works because of behavioral mispricing. The theory is supposed to separate genuine phenomena from spurious correlations.

The paper categorizes 173 predictor-papers by their theoretical foundations:

• Risk-based explanations: 20% of predictors

• Mispricing-based explanations: 61% of predictors

• Agnostic (no theoretical stance): 20% of predictors

The results are brutal.

Risk-based predictors? They underperform data mining on most metrics. If markets compensate for risk, and academics identify these risks correctly, then the predictors should persist out of sample. They don’t.

Mispricing-based predictors? They perform about the same as data mining. The elaborate behavioral theories—investor overreaction, attention biases, limits to arbitrage—add no predictive value beyond what a computer finds by searching t-stats.

The only category that shows any sign of outperformance? The agnostic research. The papers that explicitly refuse to take a theoretical stance. These retain an additional 9-31 percentage points of performance depending on the metric.

Let that sink in. The less theory you have, the better you do.

This finding reminded me of something Peter Brown, co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, said in Gregory Zuckerman’s The Man Who Solved the Market:

“If there were signals that made a lot of sense that were very strong, they would have long-ago been traded out. There are signals that you can’t understand, but they’re there, and they can be relatively strong.”

The Fed paper just provided the empirical confirmation. The patterns that persist are precisely the ones that resist explanation.

Even the Giants Fall

Perhaps you’re thinking: maybe the average academic paper isn’t that rigorous, but surely the foundational discoveries are different. The canonical findings. The ones with Nobel Prize winners behind them.

The paper tests this directly. They compare:

• Fama and French (1992): Book-to-market ratio

• Jegadeesh and Titman (1993): Momentum

• Banz (1981): Size

These aren’t just published papers. They’re the papers. Fama and French reshaped how we think about asset pricing. Momentum has theoretical foundations from Hong and Stein, from Brav and Heaton, from multiple rigorous equilibrium models. Size has Berk’s theoretical framework plus decades of empirical confirmation.

The result? Data-mined alternatives perform comparably.

For Fama-French’s B/M: the original earned 61 bps/month post-sample. Data-mined alternatives? 65 bps/month.

For Banz’s size: the original earned 15 bps/month post-sample. Data-mined alternatives? 42 bps/month. The computers beat the Nobel Prize winner.

Momentum is the exception—the original earned 72 bps versus 52 for data-mined alternatives. One out of three.

What This Actually Means

I’m not saying academic finance is useless. I’m saying the peer review process may not be filtering for what we think it’s filtering for.

The paper suggests four implications:

1. Empirical evidence trumps theoretical evidence.

Having modern peer-reviewed theory supporting your predictor doesn’t improve post-sample performance. Even quantitative equilibrium models—the gold standard in academic finance—add no predictive value. The only thing that matters is whether the statistical pattern is real.

2. Investors don’t learn about risk from academic research.

If investors learned that certain characteristics proxy for systematic risk, they would demand compensation, and the premiums would persist. But risk-based predictors decay just like everything else. Either the risks identified by academia aren’t the risks real investors care about, or the whole risk-based framework is wrong.

3. Data mining works.

This shouldn’t surprise a physicist. Nature is what it is. If accounting ratios contain information about future returns, a computer can find that information. You don’t need a theory for gravity to predict where a ball will land.

4. Most cross-sectional predictability is probably mispricing.

The peer review process attributes 60% of predictability to mispricing and only 20% to risk. And the mispricing-based predictors decay over time—consistent with investors eventually correcting mispricings. The simpler explanation fits the data.

A Physicist’s Perspective

In my years running quantitative strategies, I’ve read tens of thousands of academic papers. Some have been useful. Many have not.

What I take from this research is not nihilism. It’s calibration.

The peer review process is good at ensuring reproducibility. If a paper says a predictor earned significant returns in a specific sample, that’s probably true. The CZ dataset the paper uses confirms this—their t-stats match the original papers.

What peer review doesn’t do is ensure post-sample robustness. It doesn’t separate stable phenomena from transient ones. The elaborate theories—risk compensation, behavioral biases, information asymmetries—don’t predict which effects will last.

What does predict persistence? The strength of the in-sample evidence. If you find a t-stat of 4.0 instead of 2.0, you’re more likely to find something real. The data speaks for itself.

The paper’s final observation is telling. Data mining could have discovered most of the major themes in asset pricing—investment, accruals, external financing, earnings surprise—before they were published. Sometimes decades before.

Graham and Dodd wrote Security Analysis in 1934. The idea that accounting ratios predict returns is almost a century old. We didn’t need modern theory. We needed data.

What I Tell People Who Ask for Advice

Over the years, many aspiring traders have contacted me for guidance. I tell them all the same thing:

Learn all of it. The academic literature. Finance theory. Economics. The MBA curriculum. Read the papers. Understand the models. Know what Fama and French are saying, what the behavioral economists claim, what the market microstructure people believe.

But here’s the crucial part: once you understand what they’re saying, your job is to figure out why they’re wrong.

It is in that why that you will find your durable competitive advantage as a trader. Whatever it might be.

This paper illuminates the path. The academics aren’t lying to you—their findings are statistically valid in-sample. The peer review process confirms reproducibility. But reproducibility isn’t the same as persistence. Understanding the gap between what academics measure and what actually works going forward is where edge lives.

And there’s one more thing, perhaps the most important thing: that durable competitive advantage needs to be 100% congruent with your own personality.

Otherwise you will never be able to trade it. You will chicken out at exactly the wrong moments.

I’ve seen it countless times. Someone develops a perfectly valid strategy that doesn’t fit who they are. A risk-averse person tries to trade momentum. A patient value investor tries to scalp. A quantitative thinker tries to trade on intuition. They can’t execute when it matters because every fiber of their being is screaming that something is wrong.

Your edge must be yours. Not borrowed. Not copied. Not theoretically optimal for some abstract investor. Yours.

The only way to get congruence with your personality is sheer hard work. Nothing more. And nothing less. You have to test, test, test and test. Then test some more. Test until you’re sick of it. Then test some more. Then test until you want to throw up (and indeed do throw up). Then test some more. You have to have unshakable confidence that what you are doing is correct. Otherwise, forget it. Find an easier profession. This one isn’t easy.

Oh, and by the way, no matter how much you prepare, test, read, paper-trade, think, etc., you are going to lose money at the beginning unless you are exceedingly lucky. That’s just how the trading process works. You pay bucketloads of money in tuition to become a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Your bucketload here is your losses. Claim them. Live with them. Be upset with them. But then, learn from them. As Yoda might say, “there is no other way.”

The data mining result in this paper is liberating in this sense. It means you don’t need to genuflect before academic authority. You need to understand the academics, yes. But then you need to find what works for you, validated by data, congruent with your psychology.

That’s a much harder problem than reading papers. It’s also the only problem that matters.

Practical Takeaways

If you’re a retail investor:

1. Don’t assume a strategy works because it has academic backing

2. Look at post-publication performance, not just in-sample results

3. Simple is often as good as complex

4. Be skeptical of elaborate theoretical justifications

If you’re a quant:

1. Data mining isn’t a dirty word—it’s what everyone is actually doing

2. Theory should follow data, not precede it

3. The best predictor of future performance is statistical strength, not theoretical elegance

4. Most alpha decays; position accordingly

If you’re an academic:

The paper ends with a question that should haunt the profession: “Does peer-reviewed research help predict stock returns?”

The answer is yes—but not more than a computer running t-tests.

This is part of an occasional series on quantitative finance and academic research. For more on my background, see my recent interview with Titans of Tomorrow. My book, The Science of Free Will, is available now.

References:

Chen, Andrew Y., Alejandro Lopez-Lira, and Tom Zimmermann. “Does Peer-Reviewed Research Help Predict Stock Returns?” Federal Reserve Board Working Paper, December 2025. arXiv:2212.10317v7

If you found this valuable, consider sharing with someone who believes in efficient markets—or someone who thinks academic finance has all the answers. The truth, as always, is messier.

This is part B of the twentieth in a series exploring India’s unique approach to human diversity. In Part A, we met the contrarian — my father, a one-man pro-American lobby in socialist India. Now we explore the historical arc that made his position so lonely: the Kennedy promise, the Nixon betrayal, and the schizophrenic “non-alignment” that pretended to be neutral while clearly taking sides.

The Kindergarten Party

December 1971. I’m five years old. My parents are planning a party in our Delhi garden — some kind of kindergarten celebration. Cake, balloons, games. The usual.

Eight thousand miles away, the USS Enterprise — 75,000 tons of floating American diplomacy — is steaming into the Bay of Bengal. Task Force 74: one nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, ten warships, seventy fighter jets. Nuclear weapons on board.

The message was clear: India, stop winning this war.

The war in question was the liberation of East Pakistan — what would become Bangladesh. The Pakistani Army had launched Operation Searchlight, killing somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million Bengalis. Ten million refugees had fled to India.

India did NOT start the war.

For months, India absorbed refugees, supported the Mukti Bahini resistance, and waited. On December 3, 1971, Yahya Khan — Pakistan’s military dictator — launched Operation Chengiz Khan: preemptive airstrikes on eleven Indian airfields. Pakistan attacked India first.

A word about Yahya Khan, since this is who Nixon and Kissinger were supporting. Pakistan’s own post-war inquiry — the Hamoodur Rahman Commission — condemned his “moral degeneracy.” He was notorious for heavy drinking and womanizing; his famous mistress, Akleem Akhtar, was known as “General Rani.” Around late November 1971, a drunk Yahya reportedly told an American journalist that war with India was coming within ten days. He was right. This was the man Nixon called an ally. This was the regime Kissinger protected.

Only then did India respond. And India was winning.

America’s response to a country that had been attacked while trying to stop a genocide was to send nuclear weapons.

I learned what to do when the air raid sirens went off. Which happened several times.

We were living in an apartment complex with a garden right outside. The drill was simple: as soon as the siren sounded, one of the men around — my father or the cook — would run outside, lie flat on the grass, and put me underneath them. The theory, as I understood it, was that if a bomb leveled the apartment block and a large piece of rubble fell on top of my father, I would be protected underneath him.

That I too would be crushed seemed to be of less concern. Because, well, what can you do? It’s a war.

We also had to make blackout shades. Take pieces of paper and black paint. Paint them all black. Stick them on every window in the place so that Pakistani pilots couldn’t use our lights to target us at night.

Presumably this had some effect, but since other lights were on all around us, I never quite understood the point. But then, I was five, so what did I know.

The only modification to the party plans: if the Americans bombed Delhi, we’d relocate to the servant quarters. They were allegedly more blast-resistant. I didn’t understand why we might need to move the cake, but I was very clear that the cake should not be damaged. [And, at this remove, I now wonder who paid for the cake? I wonder if that was a gift from my mother’s brother? Hmmm.]

The party went ahead as scheduled. I got my cake. The Enterprise sailed around menacingly for a while, then went home. East Pakistan became Bangladesh. India won.

But nobody forgot. Certainly not my father, who spent the rest of his life explaining that Nixon was an aberration, not the norm. And certainly not a five-year-old who’d been told, in terms vague enough to avoid nightmares, that the country he’d been raised to admire might bomb his party — and who’d practiced being crushed under his father in case the Pakistanis got there first.

The White House Tapes

Thanks to Nixon’s obsessive recording of his own conversations — the man literally bugged himself, which tells you something about his judgment — we know exactly what the President and his National Security Advisor thought about India.

Nixon on Indians: “Bastards.”

Nixon on Indira Gandhi: “Old witch.” “Old bitch.”

Kissinger on Mrs. Gandhi: “That bitch.”

Kissinger on Indians: “The most aggressive people around.”

Nixon’s assessment of Indian women: “The most unattractive women in the world.”

And the most stunning — Nixon to Kissinger, about Indians needing “a mass famine.”

A sitting American President, discussing mass starvation as a policy outcome. For a country that had just experienced actual famines within living memory.

When these tapes became public in 2005, Kissinger’s defense was essentially: “Nixon made me do it.” The man who navigated Cold War diplomacy with China and the USSR blamed his boss for bad vocabulary.

Even my father — the eternal optimist about American rationality — couldn’t spin this. “Nixon is an idiot” was about the kindest thing he said. His assessment of Kissinger was less printable, which is saying something for a man who crossed out “gotten” in detective novels.

The Road Not Taken: Kennedy and 1962

To understand the betrayal, you have to understand what almost was.

October 1962. China invaded India across the Himalayan border. Indian forces were reeling. The timing was exquisite: the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was juggling potential nuclear annihilation and a land war in Asia simultaneously.

His response to India was immediate and generous:

• An emergency airlift of weapons and supplies

• USS Kitty Hawk dispatched to the Bay of Bengal — in support of India, not against it

• American reconnaissance planes providing aerial photographs

Here’s the detail that captures Indian unpreparedness: India had no maps of its own border areas.

Let that sink in. The government that lectured the world about colonialism and imperialism, that positioned itself as the moral conscience of the developing world, that never missed an opportunity to criticize Western cartography as a tool of oppression — that government had never bothered to survey its own frontiers.

American U-2 spy planes provided the intelligence because India literally couldn’t. The country that wouldn’t fully recognize America’s closest ally in the Middle East was asking America’s spy planes to tell them where their own country ended.

Nehru — the proud architect of non-alignment — wrote desperate letters to Kennedy begging for “12 squadrons of supersonic fighters” with American pilots. “2 squadrons of B-47 bombers.” This was Nehru, the man who built his entire foreign policy on not choosing sides, essentially asking American pilots to fight India’s war.

Non-alignment, it turns out, was negotiable. As long as the Chinese weren’t actually shooting at you.

Kennedy didn’t give him American pilots. But he gave him everything else he could.

By 1963, Nehru was writing in Foreign Affairs: “Indo-American relations have seldom been as close and cordial as they are now.”

Kennedy was planning a $500 million military aid package for India. The final approval meeting was scheduled for November 26, 1963.

He was assassinated four days earlier.

Bruce Riedel, the CIA veteran who wrote the definitive account of this period, argues the counterfactual: If Kennedy had lived, India might never have developed nuclear weapons. A US security guarantee against China would have eliminated the need. India might not have tilted so heavily toward Moscow for weapons.

History turned on a bullet in Dallas. And India got Nixon instead.

Why Nixon and Kissinger Sided with Genocide

The Pakistani Army killed somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million people in East Pakistan in 1971. The US Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, documented it in real time.

His “Blood Telegram” — the most famous diplomatic dissent cable in American history — reported:

“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities... Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.”

Twenty diplomats signed it. The State Department ignored it. Blood’s career was destroyed. His reward for moral clarity was professional exile. The man who wrote about atrocities became an atrocity of personnel management.

Why did Nixon and Kissinger support Pakistan despite documented genocide?

One word: China.

Pakistan was their secret channel to Beijing. “Only Nixon could go to China” — and only through Pakistan. Kissinger made his secret trip to Beijing through Islamabad in July 1971.

Kissinger admitted it decades later: “To condemn these violations publicly would have destroyed the Pakistani channel.”

Translation: Access to Mao was worth more than stopping a genocide. The diplomatic equivalent of “I was just following orders,” except the orders were his own memos.

So when India intervened to end the killing, Nixon and Kissinger saw it as a threat to their China opening. India was “a Soviet stooge.” Mrs. Gandhi was “that bitch.” The Indians were “bastards.”

They sent the Enterprise. They asked China to make threatening military moves against India. They illegally shipped weapons to Pakistan during an arms embargo.

All to protect a diplomatic channel. While hundreds of thousands died.

Kissinger’s retrospective assessment: “A case history of political misjudgment.”

No shit.

The moral reprobate, Kissinger, lived to 100, feted by Washington as an elder statesman. The genuinely moral Archer Blood died in 2004, his career never having recovered. There’s probably a lesson in there about the rewards of moral courage in diplomacy, and it’s not a cheerful one.

The Non-Aligned Fraud

India’s response to the Nixon betrayal was to double down on the policy that had never actually existed: non-alignment.

The Official Story: India led the Non-Aligned Movement — neither with the West nor the Soviet bloc. A proud third way. Moral leadership. Standing above Cold War divisions.

The Reality:

On August 9, 1971 — months before the war — India signed the “Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation” with the USSR. The State Department called it “a significant deviation from India’s previous position of non-alignment.”

The weapons told the real story:

• By the early 1990s: 70% of Army equipment was Soviet-origin

• 80% of Air Force platforms

• 85% of Navy vessels

• 800+ MiG-21 fighters delivered

• 2,400+ T-72 tanks

• India leased a Soviet nuclear submarine in 1988

India’s voting record at the UN coincided with the USSR 70-80% of the time during the Cold War. With the US? 20-30%.

Non-aligned, my ass.

The Non-Aligned Movement itself was a joke. The 1979 Havana summit, hosted by Castro, saw Cuba try to declare the USSR the “natural ally” of the non-aligned nations. Cuba. Hosting Soviet troops. Leading the Non-Aligned Movement. You can’t make this shit up.

Vietnam joined while hosting Soviet bases. Yugoslavia participated while playing both sides. The movement’s membership criteria seemed to be “any country that wants to lecture the West while doing business with Moscow.”

At the 1983 NAM summit in Delhi, Indira Gandhi studiously avoided any mention of the 100,000 Soviet troops occupying Afghanistan — while condemning every other “imperialist” intervention on the planet. Afghanistan, for those keeping track, shares a border with Pakistan, which makes it next door to our next door neighbor. The Soviet occupation wasn’t happening in some distant abstraction. It was right next door. But the non-aligned nations were very carefully not noticing. [If you believe India’s maps, and not the line of actual control, guess what, India shares a border with Afghanistan!]

As I wrote in an earlier post: “The Non-Aligned Movement was essentially poor countries telling rich countries how to behave while begging them for food aid.”

Ship-to-Mouth: The PL-480 Humiliation

Speaking of begging for food aid.

India survived the 1950s and 1960s only because of American wheat under the PL-480 program. Over 50 million tons shipped. By the mid-1960s, India lived “ship to mouth” — each American ship arriving just in time to prevent mass starvation.

The quality was terrible — low-grade, reddish American wheat called “lal gehun.” Made dark, hard chapatis. Reportedly contaminated with parthenium weed seeds that spread across India and are now called “Congress Grass.” Thanks, socialism.

India’s response to this life-saving aid?

K. Kamraj, Congress President: “I would prefer to starve than receive wheat from the Americans.”

He did not, in fact, starve. The wheat kept coming.

LBJ put India on a “short tether” — approving wheat shipments month by month to extract policy concessions. When India criticized the Vietnam War, Johnson reportedly said: “The Pope and the UN Secretary-General don’t need our wheat.”

Indira Gandhi, in a moment of private honesty, told her aides: “If food imports stop, these ladies and gentlemen won’t suffer — only the poor would starve.”

Exactly. The socialist elite who denounced America were never going to miss a meal. It was their constituents — the actual poor — who needed American grain. But that didn’t stop the denunciations.

My favorite detail: Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister and India’s Ambassador to the US, once briefed Speaker Sam Rayburn about India. Rayburn, a Texan, listened patiently to her explanation of Hindu-Muslim relations, then interrupted:

“Oh, you have Muslims in India! Honey, why didn’t you say so earlier?”

For Rayburn, this changed everything. Muslims meant potential Cold War allies. He became friendlier immediately.

India’s sophisticated non-aligned diplomacy, decoded by a Texan through the lens of “who’s got Muslims.”

The 42-Year Farce: India and Israel

The India-Israel relationship deserves its own absurdist play.

September 17, 1950: India recognizes Israel. One of the earliest countries to do so.

1950-1992: India refuses to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel.

For 42 years, India maintained the fiction that it recognized a country it wouldn’t actually talk to. There was a consulate in Mumbai, starting in 1953. Its purpose: issuing visas to Indian Jews who wanted to emigrate and Christian pilgrims heading to the Holy Land. Not diplomacy.

In 1982, the Israeli Consul gave a newspaper interview criticizing Indian policy. India’s response: shut down the consulate for six years.

Six years. For an interview.

The covert reality was different. Israel secretly supplied weapons to India during the 1962 war with China, the 1965 war with Pakistan, and the 1971 war over Bangladesh. All without formal relations. All without acknowledgment.

There’s a story — I haven’t been able to fully verify it, but it circulates among diplomatic historians — that during the 1962 crisis, India asked Israel to ship weapons without the Israeli flag visible. They wanted the arms, but not the acknowledgment.

Ben Gurion’s alleged response: “No flag, no weapons.”

India accepted ships flying the Israeli flag.

Then went back to pretending Israel didn’t exist. For another 30 years.

In 1992, the Cold War ended, the USSR collapsed, and India suddenly discovered that Israel was a “natural partner.” Billions in arms deals followed. Intelligence sharing. Technology transfer. Modi and Netanyahu as friends.

From “we acknowledge you exist but won’t talk to you” to “natural partners” — 42 years of theater followed by instant friendship.

As the Foreign Secretary told me over drinks in 1985: “Of course they are natural allies. We just don’t admit it.”

Today’s Paradox: Non-Alignment 2.0

The polling is unambiguous. In 2023, Pew found that 65% of Indians have a favorable view of the United States. Higher than Germany. Higher than France. Higher than Japan.

The “Howdy Modi” rally in Houston drew 50,000 Indian-Americans. The Prime Minister of India quasi-endorsed Donald Trump on American soil: “Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar” — “This time, a Trump government.”

The Quad alliance — US, India, Japan, Australia — is a de facto anti-China coalition. Joint military exercises. Defense technology transfers. “Interoperability.”

My father’s vision, finally realized. Forty years late.

But.

India still buys Russian weapons. Decades of dependency can’t be undone overnight, and besides, Russian equipment is cheaper.

India refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Modi to Putin: “Today’s era is not an era of war” — the most diplomatic non-condemnation in history.

India expects American help against China while buying Russian oil at discount prices.

Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has built an entire intellectual framework around this: “strategic autonomy.” Not the old non-alignment — “multi-alignment.” Working with everyone, committed to no one. “Convergence with many but congruence with none.”

It’s non-alignment with better branding. And a better tailor.

When European diplomats criticized India’s Russian oil purchases, Jaishankar shot back: “Probably our total purchases in a month are less than what Europe buys in an afternoon.”

Touché.

And the Constitution still says “socialist” in the Preamble. Added in 1976 during the Emergency — when democracy was suspended. Never removed.

Here’s the genius part: nobody wants to remove it.

Not the BJP, despite being pro-business. Not the Congress party that inserted it. Not even the actual socialists, who know it’s their only remaining victory.

Why? Because keeping “socialist” in the Constitution is another piece of Indian strategic brilliance. It keeps the moron intelligentsia satisfied — the JNU professors, the leftist commentators, the ideological purists who need their symbolic victories. Meanwhile, the rest of the country quietly gets on with capitalism.

India has nearly 300 billionaires now — third-most in the world. The IPL is worth $18.5 billion. The economy is $3.5 trillion. Mukesh Ambani is worth over $100 billion.

But the Constitution says “socialist,” so the professors can write their papers about constitutional socialism, the politicians can invoke it in speeches, and everyone can pretend the Nehruvian consensus still matters. It’s segmented pluralism applied to ideology: maintain the symbolic space for the ideologues so the practical people can do the actual work.

The Supreme Court upheld the word in November 2024. Nobody appealed. Why would they? It’s working exactly as designed.

Any statement you make about India is true. As is its opposite.

The Legacy

My father died believing India would eventually come around. That the “morons blinded by ideology” would eventually see sense. That India and America were natural partners — two democracies, shared values, common enemies.

He didn’t live to see Howdy Modi. He didn’t live to see India become one of the most pro-American countries in the world according to Pew polling. He didn’t live to see Israeli Prime Ministers visiting Delhi openly, or American Presidents being greeted by a hundred thousand people at cricket stadiums.

But he would have been insufferable about being right. I can hear him now: “I told you. I told everyone. Did anyone listen? No.”

In many ways, he was right. Today’s India is closer to America than ever. The visceral anti-Americanism of his generation has faded. Young Indians want to study in America, work in America, partner with America.

But the hedging continues. “Strategic autonomy.” The refusal to choose sides even when sides have been chosen. The official position that has nothing to do with the private understanding.

The Foreign Secretary knew in 1985 that India and Israel were natural allies. It took seven more years to admit it.

Everyone in Delhi knows today that India and America are natural allies. How long before they fully admit it?

“Yes, yes, someday.”

The Nero Wolfe Return

Maybe my father had it right all along.

Love American ideology. Consume American culture. Partner with American power.

Just don’t accept “gotten” as a legitimate word. The fact that it’s a perfectly normal, if now archaic, British English word — or that “got:gotten” follows the same pattern as “forgot:forgotten” — doesn’t seem to matter. Standards, old boy, standards.

He loved a country with zillions of faults because he could see past the faults to the underlying decency. He hated its grammar because grammar mattered — standards exist for reasons. He was pro-American in substance and anti-American in the details that didn’t matter.

India, officially, did the opposite. Anti-American in substance — the treaties, the weapons, the UN votes — while happily consuming American culture and sending children to American universities. Hating the things that mattered, loving the things that didn’t.

My father was right about the big stuff and eccentric about the small stuff.

India was wrong about the big stuff and indifferent to the small stuff.

Forty years later, India has quietly adopted my father’s position on the big stuff. Mostly. Kind of. With hedges.

The grammar wars continue.

Final Line

Any statement you make about India is true. As is its opposite.

My father was pro-American and anti-American-English.

India is pro-American and anti-American-commitment.

The contradictions don’t cancel out. They coexist.

Like everything else in India.

If you like this, you will like my book, The Science of Free Will. I have a lot of interesting stuff in it from why we can’t trade with ants (they can detect cancer) and what does that have to do with the future of AI to why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold.

The India Paradox is a series exploring how the world’s most diverse democracy somehow functions despite — or perhaps because of — its beautiful contradictions. Past posts can be found at https://www.substack.com/@samirvarma.

The Contrarian

This is Part A of the twentieth in a series exploring India’s unique approach to human diversity. We’ve examined everything from weddings to whiskey, from cricket to caste. Now we explore the foreign policy schizophrenia that defined Cold War India — through the lens of one man who refused to play along.

The Nero Wolfe Incident

Picture my father in his living room, sometime in the early 1980s. He’s reading a Nero Wolfe mystery — one of the continuation novels by Robert Goldsborough, written after Rex Stout’s death. In his hand: a pen. Not to take notes. To correct.

He’s crossing out “gotten” throughout the entire book.

Every instance. Methodically. Like a teacher grading a particularly disappointing student.

“It’s ‘got,’” he’d mutter. “The word is ‘got.’ ‘Gotten’ is barbaric.”

Here’s what made this delicious: In the original Rex Stout series, Nero Wolfe — the most American of American detectives, a man who weighs a seventh of a ton and solves crimes from a brownstone on West 35th Street — tears pages from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and burns them in protest against linguistic barbarism. Specifically, the dictionary’s permissive attitude toward informal usage.

My father was channeling an American character to protest Americanisms. He was imitating Nero Wolfe’s eccentricity while objecting to the English that Nero Wolfe would have spoken.

It wasn’t just “gotten.” American pronunciations drove him equally insane. “Anti-missile missile” — which many Americans pronounce as “an-tie-miss-el-miss-el” — would make him wince. “Nuclear” as “nucular” was grounds for leaving the room.

When I pointed out that the British pronounce “Featherstonehaugh” as “Fanshaw,” “Cholmondeley” as “Chumley,” and “Cirencester” as “Chichester,” he’d harrumph. Logic had no place in this argument. Standards were standards.

He also insisted — despite all evidence, and no matter how many times my mother and I pointed it out — that “colleague” was pronounced “coll-ee-gah” on both sides of the Atlantic. The correct pronunciation, he maintained, was “cuh-lee-gah.” Nothing would change his mind. He would continuously criticize every Indian who used the (admittedly ghastly) “coo-leeg.”

My mother unkindly pointed out that the Oxford dictionary distinguishes between “intelligence” and “intelligence (military).”

He did NOT like this joke.

His bookshelves told the larger story. Rex Stout occupied a full shelf. Art Buchwald, the Washington humor columnist. American magazines everywhere. He consumed American culture voraciously — the ideas, the literature, the politics — while insisting that British English was the only proper English.

This wasn’t just eccentricity. This was India in miniature.

The Three-Way Schizophrenia

My father’s position and India’s official position were both pro-American and anti-American. Just in completely opposite ways.

My father: - LOVED: American ideology — freedom, capitalism, anti-communism, US foreign policy (except when directed at India) - HATED: American English, American spelling, American friendliness - The irony: he himself was incredibly friendly

India’s official position: - LOVED: Americans as people, American tourists, American goodwill - HATED: Capitalism (officially), US foreign policy, American “imperialism” - INDIFFERENT: American English vs. British English (didn’t care)

They were pro-American and anti-American in completely opposite ways. My father loved America’s politics and hated its grammar. India didn’t care about America’s grammar and hated its politics.

The schizophrenia wasn’t just ideological — it was material. The very same officials in charge of socialist policy would insist on being invited to American cocktail parties. Not for the diplomacy. For the Coke, the gum, and the Scotch (ironically, not American whisk(e)y) — unavailable in the socialist paradise they were building.

Morning: Give speech in Parliament denouncing American imperialism and capitalist exploitation.

Evening: “Excuse me, is my name on the list for the Ambassador’s July 4th party? I hear you’re serving Johnnie Walker Black.”

The American diplomats, to their credit, were extraordinarily patient with this bullshit. They’d pour Johnnie Walker for ministers who’d denounced “American imperialism” that morning. They’d process visa applications for family members of politicians who publicly called America the enemy of the Third World.

“Can you please help my nephew get into Stanford?”

“Of course, Minister. See you at the reception Thursday?”

The private ask and the public stance had nothing to do with each other. Everyone knew it. Everyone played along. The Americans got their access; the Indians got their Scotch. The only people who didn’t benefit were the Indian citizens who actually believed the socialist rhetoric — while their leaders were drinking imported whisky and sending their children to American universities.

The Hemingway Rule

And it wasn’t just cocktail parties. The entire educational system had this schizophrenia.

We had to read American literature as part of our High School English course — Hemingway, Steinbeck, the classics. But we could not use the spellings in that precise literature when answering questions. If you quoted Hemingway, you had to change his spellings.

“The old man looked at the color of the sea...”

WRONG. Minus marks. It’s “colour.”

“But sir, that’s what Hemingway wrote—”

“I don’t care what Hemingway wrote. This is the CBSE/ICSE examination. British spellings only.”

So you were being tested on your understanding of American authors while being penalized for writing the way they wrote. You had to translate Hemingway into British English to prove you understood Hemingway.

India: consuming American content, rejecting American form. Loving the substance, hating the surface. The contradictions didn’t just coexist — they were policy.

The Telephone Repairman’s House

Fifty yards from our house lived the telephone repairman for the US Embassy. Not a diplomat. Not an official. The man who fixed phones.

He lived in a beautiful house. His son — I knew him — had a wonderful life.

In socialist India, a telephone repairman was a government peon. Probably making a few hundred rupees a month. Probably waiting years to get a phone line installed in his own home. Living in cramped government quarters if he was lucky.

But this man worked for the Americans. And at the bottom of the American system, he lived better than most Indians even close to the top.

I was six, seven, eight years old. I didn’t know the word “capitalism.” I didn’t know who Milton Friedman was. But I knew something was deeply wrong with the explanation I was being given — that socialism was for the people, that America was exploitative, that our system was more just.

How, how, how can the telephone repairman have such a great life?

That question led me to economics. That question led me to Friedman. That question is why, decades later, I still check “Other” on race forms and write “Human” — because I learned early that systems matter more than identities, and that the system 50 yards away was producing better lives for telephone repairmen than our system was producing for engineers.

(I tried to teach his son Ed cricket. He got bored pretty quickly. Forty years later, the IPL is worth $18.5 billion and Americans still don’t care. Some things don’t change.)

The Cook Who Lent Us Money

Speaking of systems.

My parents were educated professionals. My father was a Navy Commander. My mother was a barrister — trained at Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four ancient Inns of Court in London, where lawyers have been called to the bar since the fifteenth century. Combined monthly salary: about $16.

Our cook owned land in the mountains. He rented it out. He was, in the technical economic sense, a capitalist.

He lent us money. Multiple times. So we could eat.

I am not making this up.

Oh, and the cook? He was a Brahmin. The highest caste in the Hindu hierarchy. His name was Ganga Dutt — “Ganga” as in the Ganges, the holiest river in Hinduism.

And he had been “lent” to us by my mother’s mother, since he was originally her servant and we had no help. I have no idea who paid him during that time. Servants, you see, could be lent between family members — like furniture, or crockery.

So: the Brahmin named after the sacred river was the servant. The servant had been lent to us by my grandmother. The lent servant was actually a capitalist. The capitalist lent money to his educated elite employers — the Navy Commander and the Lincoln’s Inn barrister — who couldn’t afford breakfast cereal for their child.

I’m quite sure Ganga Dutt never told anyone about the dire financial straits of his “employers” — that he was lending them money to eat. He protected our dignity while being our financial lifeline. He must have been paid back eventually, somehow, since he stayed with us for more than ten years.

Any statement you make about India is true. As is its opposite. Sometimes in the same household.

More than once, there wasn’t enough money for food. So my father made us omelettes on top of a fire made with wood in the fireplace. He was a darned good cook, and those were great omelettes, but I was always puzzled by why we were cooking in the fireplace instead of the kitchen. I was too young to understand that the answer was “because we can’t afford cooking gas.”

Other times, we didn’t have enough money for my breakfast cereal — Nestum, it was called. So creative methods were employed. Buy very cheap corn flakes. Crush them. Add milk. Hey presto — instant Nestum!

I loved those crushed corn flakes. I had no idea they were a poverty hack.

So let me paint the picture of socialist India for you: The Brahmin “servant” owned capital, generated rental income, and had enough savings to lend money to his employers. The “elite” Navy Commander and his wife couldn’t afford breakfast cereal for their child and cooked omelettes in the fireplace because they couldn’t pay for gas.

The telephone repairman for the American Embassy, fifty yards away, lived beautifully.

The system was working exactly as designed. Just not for the people it claimed to help.

The Moscow Olympics: The Defining Moment

My father was the “face” of Indian sports commentary on Doordarshan — which literally means “far view.” Given the quality of Indian state television, “NahinDarshan” (no view) would have been more accurate.

He was the most prominent sports and military commentator of his time. This was a hobby that cost him money — a decent hotel was about 5X per day what his pay was for the cricket match he was commentating on. Not to mention that the star performer on Indian Television was “Rukhavat ke liye khed hai” — “Sorry for the interruption.” This message appeared so frequently it should have had its own time slot.

But my father was unique: he was the only commentator at the time who had actually played any of the sports he commentated on. Cricket, field hockey, tennis, golf (scratch handicap), badminton — his motto was “if it has a ball, I’ll do it.” (Badminton was grandfathered in on account of having a shuttlecock.)

So naturally, when India was preparing to cover the 1980 Moscow Olympics, my father was the face of the planned coverage.

There was just one problem.

They didn’t ask him.

They started the publicity campaign — “Watch Commander Varma in Moscow!” — splashed his face across promotional materials, announced the coverage plans. Weeks into the campaign, someone finally thought to confirm with the actual Commander Varma.

His answer: “I will NOT associate with communists.”

They tried everything. Government officials. Television executives. Friends. Probably family. Appeals to patriotism. Appeals to professionalism. Appeals to his career.

The answer was always the same. He would not go to Moscow. He would not lend his face and his credibility to legitimizing the Soviet regime.

The US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics? India ignored it — “non-aligned,” remember? The Indian government sent athletes, sent cameras, sent everyone.

Everyone except Commander Varma.

He covered the games. From the studio in Delhi. The face of Indian Olympic coverage, refusing to set foot in the communist capital.

I don’t think I was ever prouder of a parent than that.

In a “non-aligned” country, one man actually practiced non-alignment — he refused to align with the Soviets while his own government was sending athletes and cameras to their Olympics. The socialist state broadcaster had just assumed he’d go along. Because who turns down the Olympics?

A man who won’t associate with communists, that’s who.

The One-Man Campaign

My father wasn’t just an armchair contrarian. He worked at it.

He was one of the very few members of the Indian “elite” who would openly advocate for American cooperation. Not secretly, at cocktail parties, while publicly denouncing imperialism. Openly. In a country where associating with Americans was viewed with suspicion by the establishment.

Every US Ambassador through the late 1980s was a personal friend. Not through back channels. Through the front door.

His assessment of the Indian foreign policy establishment? “Morons blinded by ideology.” He said this. Not quite publicly, but not secretly either. About people who controlled government contracts and social access.

The Vietnam POW/MIA Initiative

The US Ambassador once asked my father if he could help locate missing American servicemen in Vietnam.

The logic: India and Vietnam were both “socialist” — they had a friendly relationship. India could use its “good offices” to facilitate Vietnamese cooperation in finding remains, prisoners, information about missing Americans.

My father wrote a brief. It was presented to the Indian government at the highest levels. It was looked upon “favorably.”

What happened after? Unknown. Lost to history. Probably buried in bureaucratic files somewhere in South Block, next to the plans for economic reform and the proposals for sensible visa policy.

But think about what this meant: Here was one man trying to help Americans find their dead sons, in a country where the government was busy denouncing American “imperialism.” While socialist ministers were begging for Scotch at Embassy parties, my father was actually trying to do something useful for the relationship.

The Israel Campaign

India recognized Israel on September 17, 1950 — one of the earliest countries to do so. At the time, Nehru explained the delay since Israel’s 1948 founding: “We would have recognized Israel long ago, because Israel is a fact. We refrained because of our desire not to offend the sentiments of our friends in the Arab countries.”

Translation: We acknowledge you exist. But we still won’t talk to you.

And then: India refused to establish full diplomatic relations for 42 years.

My father’s position: Full diplomatic relations. Obviously. Two democracies. Shared enemies. Common interests.

The establishment response: Unthinkable. What about the Arabs? What about the Muslim vote?

In 1985 or ‘86, home from Columbia on vacation, I asked India’s Foreign Secretary — the equivalent of America’s Secretary of State — why India and Israel weren’t natural allies.

His response: “Of course they are. We just don’t admit it.”

I pressed: Why not acknowledge it?

“Yes, yes, someday.”

“Someday” took another six or seven years. In 1992, India suddenly “discovered” what its Foreign Secretary had casually admitted to a college kid over drinks in Delhi: that India and Israel were natural allies. The man responsiblefor Indian foreign policy knew the policy was fiction. He just couldn’t — or wouldn’t — change it.

My father had been saying this for decades. The Foreign Secretary agreed with him. Everyone agreed with him. They just couldn’t admit they agreed with him.

India: where the government’s private position and public position have nothing to do with each other, and everyone knows it, and nobody does anything about it. Until “someday” finally arrives.

The Visa Absurdity

The Indian government, in its infinite wisdom, insisted that the can-be-counted-on-one-hand American students coming to India could only get single-entry visas. The US reciprocated: single-entry visas for Indians.

I got a single-entry visa. Once I entered the US for Columbia, I couldn’t leave. If I went to Canada for a weekend, I couldn’t get back in. Niagara Falls was tantalizingly close and completely off-limits.

I complained to the chief visa officer at the US Embassy, who explained the situation with diplomatic patience: “Ask your government to fix it.”

I told my father. He spoke to people in the Indian foreign ministry. They fixed this idiocy. In a matter of weeks, a policy that had inconvenienced thousands of students was changed because one retired Navy Commander knew the right people.

I went back to the US Embassy. The lower officials refused to change my visa — “That’s not our policy.” Finally reached the chief guy, who remembered me.

“You asked me to get this fixed. I did. Now give me my multiple-entry visa.”

He did. He was laughing when he stamped it.

This is how Indian foreign policy worked — petty, ideological, counterproductive, and often fixed only through personal connections rather than common sense. A policy that hurt Indian students, accomplished nothing diplomatically, and required back-channel intervention just to apply basic logic.

The Texture of Kindness

The Americans, I should say, were remarkably gracious in return.

Every visa I ever received from the US Embassy in Delhi in the early 1980s was gratis. I don’t believe I ever paid for a visa. The Embassy knew our family. They knew my father’s positions. They knew we weren’t playing the game where you denounce America by day and beg for favors by night.

Col. Porter King, the defense attaché at the Embassy, was one of my father’s closest friends. When he was leaving India to return to the US, he promised me something that made six-year-old me delirious with joy: six thousand comics. His collection. Too heavy to ship home, he said. They’d be mine.

Six thousand. In socialist India, where comics were expensive luxuries, this was unimaginable wealth. I spent weeks in the highest of high spirits. I had cleared out a lot of stuff to make room on my shelves. Stuff I liked, but didn’t like anywhere near as much as 6000 comics.

Then the movers came, packed everything up without apparently asking him, and shipped it all to America.

I never got my comics.

I’m a grown man. I’ve had real disappointments. But I’d be lying if I said this one doesn’t still sting a little. Six thousand comics, promised and lost. The socialist shortage economy meant I couldn’t just go buy replacements. They were gone.

Col. King, if you’re out there — or if your family is reading this — I forgive you. Mostly. The movers, I do not forgive.

The Dolphins Fan in Delhi

I became a Miami Dolphins fan in 1982, watching a smuggled VHS tape of Super Bowl XVII. They lost to the Redskins, but I was hooked. When I arrived at Columbia in 1984, I had a ready-made team while everyone else rooted for the Giants (ugh) or Jets (double ugh). (By the way, Giants and Jets fans, your teams have played in New Jersey for ever. Why are they the “New York” Jets/Giants? Huh? I rest my case. Ugh and double ugh!)

But pre-internet, when I came home for holidays, there was no way to follow American football in India. So we’d call the Embassy. A friend of my father’s would read me the four-day-old USA Today sports scores over the phone.

The Dolphins beat the Patriots 28-13. The Dolphins lost to the Jets 17-14.

Four days late, relayed by a diplomat to a college kid 8,000 miles away, because there was simply no other way to know.

That’s the part people don’t understand about American diplomacy. Yes, there was Nixon and Kissinger. Yes, there was the Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal. But there was also a guy in the Delhi Embassy, taking ten minutes out of his day to read sports scores to a kid who loved football.

The Americans excelled at this simple human kindness. So did the British and Australians. From the tin-pot little European countries (the same tin-pot dictatorial bureaucrats that ruined field hockey), you’d occasionally get a whiff of “who are these dirty Indians” — not entirely unjustified, I hasten to add. But from the Americans, the British, the Australians? Never. Not even a hint.

The British High Commissioner and American Ambassador knew I loved After Eights — those chocolate mints. They’d give me boxes whenever they saw me. Keeblers too, from the Americans. In a normal country, this is a nice gesture. In socialist India, where you couldn’t buy these things at any price, it was magic.

I still remember those boxes. I still remember the kindness.

The Forgotten History

Here’s what nobody tells you: America helped birth India.

Roosevelt actively lobbied Churchill for Indian independence.

Roosevelt to Churchill: “India should be made a commonwealth at once... every year the Indian people have one thing to look forward to, like death and taxes — a famine.”

Churchill’s response: Gandhi “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant.”

Churchill really said this. About the man who would become the face of peaceful resistance. With an elephant. The British Empire had a branding problem.

The Atlantic Charter — that foundational document of the post-war order, with its ringing declaration of self-determination for all peoples — explicitly excluded India at Churchill’s insistence. Roosevelt kept pushing. Churchill kept refusing.

250,000 US soldiers were stationed in India along the China-Burma-India border during World War II. They saw what British colonialism looked like up close. They wrote home about it.

After the war, Britain was bankrupt — owed the US four times its 1939 debt level. American pressure on decolonization was real. It wasn’t the only factor in Indian independence, but it was a factor.

The ungrateful irony: Within a decade of independence, India was lecturing America about morality while cozying up to Stalin’s USSR.

My father knew this history. He reminded people of it. They didn’t want to hear it.

But Then Came 1971...

For a brief moment, things had been good. Kennedy and Nehru. American aid during the 1962 China war — emergency airlifts, intelligence sharing, a planned $500 million military aid package. The possibility of genuine partnership.

Kennedy’s final approval meeting was scheduled for November 26, 1963. He was assassinated days earlier in Dallas.

Then Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided to take a personal dislike to India. And my father — the eternal optimist about American rationality — would spend the rest of his life explaining why Nixon and Kissinger were anomalies, not the norm.

But to understand what Nixon and Kissinger did, you have to understand what Kennedy almost did. And to understand that, you have to understand the day an American aircraft carrier threatened to bomb my kindergarten party.

Coda: The Kind Country

Here’s my coda, and I won’t apologize for it: The United States, for all its zillions of faults, is a KIND country. I won’t hear a word against it.

Not because it’s perfect. Nixon and Kissinger were moral disasters. American foreign policy has produced horrors. I know the list. Just read Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer. I know what the US has done.

But it is unwise to judge a nation by its very worst people.

And I know what I saw. The telephone repairman with the beautiful house. Col. Porter King promising comics to a kid. The Embassy waiving visa fees for a family that had been honest friends. A diplomat reading four-day-old sports scores over the phone because a college student wanted to know how the Dolphins did. After Eights and Keeblers, given to a child who couldn’t buy them at any price in his own country. Simple human kindness, over and over, from people who had no obligation to be kind.

The morons who BLINDLY fulminate against America are no different from the morons who comprised the Indian socialist intelligentsia — denouncing capitalism while begging for visas, attacking imperialism while angling for Embassy party invitations, lecturing the world while their own people starved.

In fact, come to think of it, they’re the same people. Just citizens of different countries. Same tribal certainty. Same inability to see complexity. Same refusal to let evidence disturb their priors.

My father knew the difference. He saw America clearly — the good and the bad — and chose to align with a country that, for all its failures, was fundamentally trying to be decent. He was right.

And forty years later, in an India that has quietly become one of the most pro-American countries in the world, everyone finally agrees with him. They just won’t admit it was people like him who were right all along.

Part B — “The Betrayal” — coming next.

If you like this, you will like my book, The Science of Free Will. I have a lot of interesting stuff in it from why we can’t trade with ants (they can detect cancer) and what does that have to do with the future of AI to why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold.

The India Paradox is a series exploring how the world’s most diverse democracy somehow functions despite — or perhaps because of — its beautiful contradictions. Past posts can be found at https://www.substack.com/@samirvarma.

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” — Simon & Garfunkel

In 1979, a thirteen-year-old boy arrived at Heathrow carrying contraband.

Not drugs. Worse. Ideas.

Friedman. Hayek. Rand. In socialist India, where the government controlled what you could produce, what you could import, what price you could charge, and approximately how much hope you were permitted to have, these books were more dangerous than heroin. Heroin merely destroyed your body. Friedman destroyed your faith in central planning.

I had been reading these forbidden texts in Delhi, where the temperature regularly hit 110°F and the economy regularly hit new lows. India in 1979 was a place where you waited ten years for a telephone, one year for a scooter, and your entire life for the government to get out of your way. We had a 97.5% top marginal tax rate. We had ration cards for sugar. We had one model of car—the Ambassador—available in your choice of white, off-white, or “please, I’ll take anything.”

And I had a hypothesis.

The Indian government, in its infinite wisdom, had warned us about Britain. Loose women. Dangerous streets. Racism. Rude people. A dying empire full of desperate, declining Englishmen who probably ate their children when the dole ran out.

But I was, even at thirteen, a scientist. And scientists test hypotheses against evidence.

So I arrived at Heathrow with my parents, prepared to confront reality.

Reality won.

The first thing I noticed was that the air was cool. Not air-conditioned cool—naturally cool. This was July, and I needed a light jacket. In Delhi, July meant your shirt was soaked through by 9 AM and you spent the afternoon fantasizing about death as a form of temperature relief.

The second thing I noticed was that everything was green. Impossibly, ridiculously, fairy-tale green. The grass looked fake. The trees looked painted. Coming from a city where “green” meant the color of mold on your monsoon-soaked walls, this was visual assault.

The third thing I noticed was the newsagent’s.

I stood there, a refugee from scarcity, staring at a wall of chocolate. Not a shelf. A wall. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Fruit & Nut. Whole Nut. Caramel. Flake. Twirl. Crunchie. Wispa. Bounty. Mars. Milky Way. Maltesers. Galaxy. Aero. Kit Kat. Yorkie. Lion Bar. Double Decker. Boost. Picnic. Topic. Fudge. Turkish Delight. AND THOSE WERE JUST THE ONES I COULD SEE WITHOUT MOVING MY HEAD.

In India, we had maybe five kinds of chocolate, and you had to know a guy.

I may have whimpered.

Then came the food. Over the next few weeks, traveling through England, I had roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. I had pheasant. I had duck. I had quail. I had an avocado and pigeon salad that I still remember forty-six years later. I had fish and chips wrapped in actual newspapers, the grease seeping through the headlines, the malt vinegar sharp enough to make your eyes water, the whole glorious mess eaten with your fingers while standing on a street corner.

The British food jokes can stop now, by the way. They were never that funny, and they’re certainly not accurate. This was 1979, and the food was magnificent. Today, London has eighty-five Michelin-starred restaurants including six three-stars. It is, by most objective measures, the best food city on Earth. So kindly shut up about British cuisine.

But the food wasn’t even the revelation.

The revelation was the order.

Traffic flowed. Not “flowed” in the Delhi sense, meaning “moved chaotically in approximately the intended direction while honking continuously.” Flowed in the sense of: people stayed in lanes. They signaled before turning. They stopped at red lights even when no one was watching. EVEN WHEN NO POLICE WERE PRESENT.

I had never seen anything like it.

And the queues. Oh God, the queues. People waited in line. Voluntarily. Without pushing. Without cutting. Without treating the concept of “next” as a philosophical abstraction open to interpretation. At bus stops, a queue. At shops, a queue. At the post office, a queue. An elderly woman could arrive at a shop and people would simply... let her have her turn. No negotiation. No bribery. No existential struggle.

I watched a man drop a pound note. The person behind him picked it up and returned it to him.

I may have wept.

This was Britain in recession. The Winter of Discontent had just ended. Callaghan had fallen. Thatcher was about to arrive. Garbage had piled up in Leicester Square. The dead had gone unburied. By British standards, this was a catastrophe.

By Indian standards, it was paradise.

I fell in love. Not with a woman—with a civilization.

Of course, they’re also completely insane.

I should have realized this when I first encountered the phrase “bacon butty.” A butty, I learned, is a sandwich. But only certain sandwiches. A ham sandwich is a sandwich, but a bacon sandwich is a butty. Unless it’s a bacon sarnie, which is the same thing. A chip butty is chips (which are fries, not crisps, which are chips) in bread. This is considered food.

Then there are Belisha Beacons—the orange flashing globes at zebra crossings—named after Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Minister of Transport who introduced them in 1934. Only the British would name critical road safety infrastructure after a long-dead politician whose surname sounds like a venereal disease.

The linguistic madness runs deep.

Spotted dick is a dessert. (Stop snickering. I said stop.) Toad in the hole contains no toads and no holes—it’s sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter. Bubble and squeak is leftover vegetables fried together. Bangers and mash is sausages and mashed potatoes, and no one knows why sausages are called bangers, but everyone accepts it.

The boot of a car is the trunk. The bonnet is the hood. The pavement is the sidewalk. The first floor is the second floor. A fortnight is two weeks, because why use a number when you can use a word from Middle English? “Taking the piss” is a form of mockery, but “being pissed” is being drunk, while “pissed off” is being angry. Good luck, immigrants.

And the understatement.

The evacuation of 338,000 soldiers from Dunkirk while under continuous Nazi bombardment was described as “a bit of a pickle.” The Blitz—fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing that killed 43,000 civilians—was “rather inconvenient.” A British person will tell you they’re “not very well” when they are actively dying. “Mustn’t grumble” is the national motto, recited while grumbling.

Then there’s Guy Fawkes Night.

Every November 5th, the British celebrate a failed terrorist by burning his effigy while eating jacket potatoes and watching fireworks. A man tried to blow up Parliament in 1605. He failed. He was tortured and executed. And now, four centuries later, British children make effigies of him, British adults set them on fire, and everyone has a lovely time.

In America, this would be a hate crime. In Britain, it’s a family outing.

And cricket. Five days. FIVE DAYS. For a single match. Which can still end in a draw. With breaks for tea. And lunch. The players wear white. The ball is red. The pitch is tan. Nothing makes sense. A batsman can score a century and still be on the losing side. You can be out LBW, which stands for “Leg Before Wicket,” a concept so baffling that even lifelong cricket fans periodically forget what it means.

THIS IS THE SPORT THEY GAVE THE WORLD.

I love all of this. Every absurd, inexplicable, tea-drinking, queue-forming, butty-eating bit of it. The eccentricity is not separate from the genius—it IS the genius. This is a nation weird enough to invent parliamentary democracy, the industrial revolution, the Beatles, AND Morris dancing, a folk tradition involving grown men waving handkerchiefs and hitting sticks together while wearing bells on their legs.

A nation that apologizes when you bump into them.

A nation that maintains a monarchy for vibes.

A nation that loses an empire and responds by inventing the sitcom.

How could you not love them?

Over the years, I went everywhere.

Not just London—though London is, by any reasonable measure, the greatest city on Earth. (New York is an overgrown, disorganized, very expensive village in comparison. Houston is cosmopolitan but lacks culture. Toronto is trying valiantly but isn’t world-class in anything except food and politeness. Singapore is efficient but sanitized. Only London combines everything: history, culture, finance, food, transport, diversity, eccentricity, and a population that will queue for anything.)

I went to Taunton. Maidenhead. Stroud. Tewkesbury (many times). Edinburgh, which isn’t England but is very much Britain. The Home Counties. Somerset. The Cotswolds, with their honey-colored stone villages that look like they were designed by hobbits. Hampstead Heath, where people walk dogs and pretend they’re in the countryside while fifteen minutes from Piccadilly Circus.

I went to the boring suburbs: Bexley, Bexleyheath. They were still better organized than most Indian cities.

Everywhere I found the same things: beautiful countryside, lovely people (once you got past the reserve), decent weather (a bit of rain is WONDERFUL when you grew up at 110°F), shops that were full, things to do. Pubs with warm beer and cold welcomes that somehow felt welcoming anyway. Churches older than my entire country’s relationship with modernity. History layered on history, Roman on Saxon on Norman on Tudor on Stuart on Georgian on Victorian, all of it still standing, all of it still used.

In 2024, I saw David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall.

Two hundred fifty dollars for box seats. Three minutes through security. Champagne at intermission. Ice cream. A view so perfect you could see the calluses on his fingertips. Acoustics that made “Comfortably Numb” sound like God clearing his throat. The whole thing was civilized.

A month later, I saw the same show at Madison Square Garden. Seven hundred fifty dollars for floor seats. NO VIEW. They didn’t bother to raise the back floor seats, so unless you were in the first ten rows, you stared at the backs of other people’s heads. Forty-five minutes queueing to enter. Fifteen minutes queueing to pick up our “free gift” as VIPs.

The free gift was a VIP pass.

The VIP pass entitled you to wear a VIP pass.

That’s it. That was the privilege. You could display your status while enjoying exactly the same experience as everyone else, except angrier because you’d paid three times more and waited an extra fifteen minutes to receive a lanyard.

New York thinks it’s a world city. New York is adorable.

And then something happened.

I don’t know exactly when. Maybe it was gradual—a slow slide, like a batsman losing his wicket ball by ball until suddenly he’s walking back to the pavilion wondering what went wrong. Maybe it was sudden—the Brexit vote, the Truss implosion, the first arrest for silent prayer.

But at some point, I started reading the news from Britain and thinking: What are you doing?

Not in the tone of a critic. In the tone of a friend watching another friend drink himself to death. The tone of someone who loves you, has loved you for decades, and cannot understand why you’re setting yourself on fire.

Roger Waters wrote: “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”

He meant it as observation. You’ve turned it into aspiration.

Let’s talk about free speech, the thing you invented.

Britain arrests thirty-three people per day for offensive online messages. That’s 12,183 in 2023 alone—up fifty-eight percent from 2019. The conviction rate is under ten percent, which suggests the point isn’t prosecution. The point is intimidation.

Here are some things that are now crimes in the United Kingdom:

Silent prayer. Adam Smith-Connor, fifty-one, served in Afghanistan. His son was aborted years ago, a decision he came to regret. He stood fifty meters from an abortion clinic, head slightly bowed, hands clasped, praying silently for his deceased child. He was arrested. He was convicted. The judge ruled his prayer “amounted to disapproval of abortion because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped.”

The price of silent prayer in modern Britain: nine thousand pounds.

JD Vance cited this case at Munich in 2025 as evidence of Britain’s “backslide away from conscience rights.” When American politicians are lecturing you about freedom, something has gone terribly wrong.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, forty-seven, has been arrested multiple times for the same offense—praying silently near clinics where she had prayed for twenty years. The viral footage of police asking “Are you praying?” played around the world, and not in a way that made Britain look good. She won thirteen thousand pounds in compensation for wrongful arrest. Then she was charged again in December 2025 under new laws.

Inflammatory tweets. Lucy Connolly, forty-one, childminder, mother, posted a bad tweet during the Southport riots. She deleted it within hours. She was sentenced to thirty-one months in prison—longer than many violent offenders receive.

Tyler Kay posted something similar and retweeted Connolly with a solidarity hashtag. He was imprisoned within two days of posting. Thirty-eight months.

Meanwhile, Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who urged “cutting people’s throats” at a counter-protest, was acquitted. I’m sure there’s a principled distinction here. I just can’t see it.

Jokes. Mark Meechan, a Scottish comedian, taught his girlfriend’s pug to raise its paw at “Sieg Heil” because, as he explained, he wanted to turn the dog into “the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi.” It was a joke. The joke was “Nazis are bad.” He was convicted of a hate crime and fined eight hundred pounds.

Ricky Gervais responded: “If you don’t believe in a person’s right to say things that you might find ‘grossly offensive,’ then you don’t believe in freedom of speech.”

Tweets about gender. Graham Linehan created Father Ted and The IT Crowd—two of the greatest British comedies ever made. In September 2025, he was arrested at Heathrow by five armed officers for tweets about transgender issues. FIVE. ARMED. OFFICERS. For a comedian. For tweets.

John Cleese’s response: “It took five London policemen to arrest a comedian. Meanwhile, people in Chelsea have learned not to waste their time reporting burglaries.”

Burning a book. Hamit Coskun, an atheist from Turkey, burned a Quran during a protest. He was convicted and fined two hundred forty pounds. His attacker, Moussa Kadri, who stabbed him with a knife during the incident, pled guilty to assault with a bladed weapon. Kadri’s sentence? No jail. The judge said he’d merely “lost his temper and self-control.”

Let me make sure you understand this correctly. The man who burned a book: criminal. The man who stabbed the book-burner: understandable.

Two days after another Quran-burning case, Greater Manchester Police publicly disclosed the suspect’s home address. This, after Swedish Quran-burner Salwan Momika had been assassinated. The police published where the guy lives.

Freedom House downgraded UK internet freedom in 2025, citing “the proliferation of criminal charges, arrests, and convictions concerning online speech, including speech protected under international human rights standards.”

The nation that gave us John Stuart Mill and On Liberty. The nation where free speech was born. The nation that stood alone against fascism when it actually mattered.

That nation now arrests people for praying.

Let’s talk about housing, the thing you can no longer afford.

In 1947, the Town and Country Planning Act nationalized development rights. Before 1947, you could build unless the government specifically prohibited it. After 1947, you couldn’t build unless the government specifically permitted it.

You stole property rights from your own citizens and handed them to local planning committees, whose members are typically retired busybodies with nothing better to do than ensure no one builds anything taller than a shrub within view of their morning tea.

The results:

Britain has a 4.3 million home backlog compared to Western European averages. Not a shortage—a backlog. Houses that should exist but don’t. People who should have homes but can’t.

The house price-to-income ratio has doubled: 4.1x in the 1970s to 8.8x today. In 1984, houses cost 3.6 times annual income—the most affordable year in fifty-seven years of data. In 1984! When Thatcher was in power and everyone was complaining about how terrible things were! Those were the good old days.

Homeownership among middle-income 25-34-year-olds has collapsed from sixty-five percent in 1995-96 to twenty-seven percent in 2015-16. That’s a thirty-eight-percentage-point drop in twenty years. An entire generation locked out of the most basic form of wealth-building.

The absurdities are endless. A fourteen-flat development in Walthamstow—ten minutes from the Victoria Line, exactly where you’d WANT housing—required a 1,250-page planning application with over seventy separate documents. It was still waiting after a year. In the 1930s, London flats got approved in three weeks.

Green belt policy blocks two-thirds of suitable housing locations within commuting distance of major cities. Around London, nine out of ten suitable sites are in the green belt. Building on all identified suitable land would reduce the green belt by less than five percent. But no government will touch it, because homeowners vote, and homeowners don’t want their views disturbed by... other people having homes.

You want to know why Britain can’t build infrastructure? HS2 costs three hundred ninety-six million pounds per mile. French high-speed rail: thirty-one million. Britain pays TWELVE TIMES MORE for the same thing. Tokyo builds sixty-two thousand homes per year. London manages thirty to forty thousand.

This isn’t a natural disaster. It’s not an act of God. It’s a law passed in 1947 that you’ve simply chosen not to change. You could fix this tomorrow. You could repeal Section 106 agreements, reform compulsory purchase, liberalize the green belt, and watch housing supply respond to demand like it does in every other functioning economy.

You choose not to.

Sam Dumitriu at Britain Remade has documented this lunacy in excruciating detail. I recommend his Substack if you want to understand exactly how a great nation decided to strangle itself with paperwork.

Let’s talk about healthcare, the thing you worship.

7.4 million people are on NHS waiting lists. That’s roughly ten percent of your entire population. One in ten Britons is waiting for medical care.

The median wait has nearly doubled: 7.6 weeks in October 2019 to 13.3 weeks today. Some 171,000 patients have waited over a year. 161 have waited over two years.

The number waiting over twelve hours in A&E has exploded from 1,100 in November 2019 to 50,600 today. That’s a forty-six-fold increase, and it’s linked to an estimated 16,600 excess deaths in 2024 according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

Seventy-nine percent of NHS trusts now treat patients in corridors. Not occasionally. Routinely. The Royal College of Nursing documented nurses caring for up to forty patients in a single corridor, unable to access oxygen, cardiac monitors, or defibrillators. Their January 2025 report found patients dying in corridors and going undiscovered for hours. Pregnant women miscarrying in corridors. Intimate examinations conducted in public areas.

The UK has 2.8 doctors per 1,000 people; the OECD average is 3.6. The UK has 2.5 hospital beds per 1,000; the OECD average is 4.4. The King’s Fund says the UK would be “in the relegation zone” if health resources were a football league.

British people now fly to Lithuania for hip replacements. 248,000 UK residents traveled abroad for medical treatment in 2019—double the 2015 figure.

You have socialized healthcare that doesn’t provide healthcare. You have free medicine that you can’t access. You have a National Health Service that operates like a shrine: untouchable, unquestionable, and increasingly unable to perform its basic function.

Let’s talk about dentistry, the thing that’s become DIY.

Britain has a catastrophic dentist shortage. Ninety-seven percent of new patients trying to access NHS dental care were unsuccessful. Over half of England’s population cannot see an NHS dentist. There are 5,500 unfilled dental positions—nearly half a million days of lost NHS activity annually.

At the same time, thousands of qualified foreign dentists cannot work because of bureaucratic bottlenecks.

The Overseas Registration Examination Part 2 has only 144 places per sitting. Booking fills within two minutes of the online portal opening. If you don’t have the fastest internet connection, you don’t get a slot.

In June 2024, a technical error opened booking two days early. Some candidates secured spots. When the official window opened: “fully booked within seconds.” The General Dental Council acknowledged around eighty candidates were affected. No action has been taken.

Mohamed Ibrahim is an Egyptian dentist with six years of experience. He submitted his application in December 2023. The GDC cancelled it, claiming they “had not received documents, and their whereabouts remain unknown.” After months of complaints, it was finally processed in March 2024—but by then he’d missed the booking window. Two years later, he’s still working as a dental nurse.

Ahmed holds a postgraduate master’s degree in dental implantology. He is currently working at McDonald’s.

The human cost of this bureaucratic incompetence is genuinely Dickensian. Ten percent of Britons have performed dental work on themselves. Thirty-four percent have tried to pull their own teeth. Thirty-two percent have given themselves fillings. Linda Colla, seventy-five, pulled her own teeth after a seven-year wait for an NHS dentist.

When an NHS dentist opened registrations in Warrington, queues of over a hundred people formed at 2:30 AM. Police were called for crowd control in Bristol—”more typical of a Taylor Swift concert than a dental waiting room.”

The government announced a solution in February 2024: provisional registration allowing supervised practice without the examination. As of February 2025, it remains unimplemented.

Ministers in October 2024 described the situation as “truly Dickensian.”

They were not exaggerating.

Let’s talk about Brexit, the thing that broke your brain.

The 2016 referendum was legally advisory. The House of Commons Briefing Paper told MPs explicitly: the referendum was “advisory only, and would not be binding on Parliament or government.” The Minister for Europe confirmed it in Commons debate: “The referendum is advisory.”

No threshold was set. No supermajority requirement. No minimum turnout. Only thirty-seven percent of the total electorate voted Leave.

Parliament is sovereign. Parliament cannot bind itself. This is basic British constitutional law. A referendum cannot compel Parliament to do anything.

Yet Parliament treated an advisory referendum, with no specified terms, won by a minority of the electorate, as an irrevocable mandate to pursue the hardest possible exit from the largest trading bloc on Earth.

The campaign promised three hundred fifty million pounds weekly for the NHS. The UK Statistics Authority chair called continued use of this figure “misleading and undermines trust in official statistics.” The actual net contribution was closer to £136-248 million. The IFS called the claim “clearly absurd.” The NHS funding increases since came from tax rises and borrowing, not any Brexit dividend.

Here’s what Brexit could have been: Singapore-on-Thames. No import or export taxes. Minimal regulation of commerce. Open immigration with a bonding requirement. A free-trading paradise, nimble and unencumbered, the Hong Kong of Europe.

Here’s what Brexit became: the same regulations, more paperwork, less trade, and an economy that has permanently underperformed its potential.

The numbers are brutal. UK goods exports to the EU fell eighteen percent below 2019 levels by 2024. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement caused a twenty-seven billion pound reduction in total goods exports. 16,400 firms that previously exported to the EU simply... stopped.

Studies estimate six to eight percent GDP loss compared to remaining. Investment is twelve to eighteen percent lower. The pound experienced the largest single-day depreciation of any major currency since Bretton Woods—eleven percent against the dollar, eight percent against the euro.

Four hundred forty financial services firms relocated operations to the EU. Nine hundred billion pounds in bank assets moved—ten percent of the UK banking system. Honda closed Swindon. Sony and Panasonic moved their European headquarters to the Netherlands.

Philip Hammond floated the Singapore vision in 2017. It died with Liz Truss’s mini-budget. Corporation tax was raised, not cut. The UK in a Changing Europe tracker shows the government “did not lack for ideas about rewriting EU regulation, but ultimately delivered little substantive change.”

You shot yourself in the foot, then complained about the hole in your shoe.

The political chaos since Brexit would be comic if it weren’t so depressing.

Six Prime Ministers in eight years. The same number as in the previous thirty-seven years.

Liz Truss lasted forty-nine days—the shortest-serving PM in British history. The Daily Star started a live YouTube stream of a lettuce to see whether she’d resign before it wilted.

The lettuce won.

Her forty-five billion pounds in unfunded tax cuts triggered the pound’s collapse to record lows and forced the Bank of England into a sixty-five billion pound emergency intervention to prevent pension fund collapse. The IMF took the unusual step of openly criticizing UK policy. Kwasi Kwarteng became the shortest-serving Chancellor in fifty years at just thirty-eight days.

Here’s the tragedy: her ideas weren’t entirely wrong. Lower taxes, less regulation, pro-growth policies—these are defensible positions. The execution was catastrophic. The sequencing was insane. The political management was nonexistent. Good ideas, implemented so badly that they discredited themselves and empowered the opposition.

And what an opposition. Keir Starmer now holds the worst Prime Minister approval rating since Ipsos began tracking in 1977: negative sixty-six net satisfaction. Thirteen percent satisfied, seventy-nine percent dissatisfied. Labour’s voting intention has fallen to eighteen percent—equaling the party’s all-time low.

His “loveless landslide” won Labour 33.7 percent of the vote—the lowest for any governing party since 1830, on the most disproportionate election result in modern UK history.

The Conservatives have responded by electing Kemi Badenoch as leader—the first Black leader of any major British party. Rishi Sunak was the first Hindu, first British Asian PM. In both cases, race was essentially a non-issue.

This deserves acknowledgment. While everything else falls apart, Britain’s multicultural democracy continues to work remarkably well. A cow-blessing Hindu became Prime Minister, and no one cared about his religion. A Nigerian-British woman became Conservative leader, and the main questions were about her policies, not her ethnicity.

This is genuinely wonderful. This is Britain at its best—the quiet, practical tolerance that absorbed wave after wave of immigrants and somehow made them all British.

If only the institutions worked as well as the diversity.

Now let me tell you about my country.

India in 1991 was about to collapse. We had two weeks of foreign exchange reserves. We had to airlift sixty-seven tons of gold to London as collateral for an IMF loan—a national humiliation broadcast to the world.

Our share of global GDP, once 23-27 percent before colonization, had fallen to three percent at independence. The British had extracted wealth for two centuries, systematically deindustrialized the subcontinent, and left behind a nation so poor that its per capita income was lower than it had been two hundred years earlier.

Then we had our own socialist disaster. The License Raj. The Inspector Raj. Government permission required for everything. We grew at 3.5 percent annually—the “Hindu rate of growth”—while Asian tigers roared ahead at eight to ten percent.

In 1991, facing total collapse, we liberalized. We did what we should have done in 1947. We let markets work. We let people build. We let businesses compete.

The results:

India’s GDP in 1991: $266 billion, eleventh globally. India’s GDP in 2025: $4.187 trillion, fourth globally.

We passed the UK in 2022—seventy-five years after independence. We passed Japan in 2025. Growth that averaged 3.5 percent under socialist insanity now runs at 6.4-7.8 percent.

Poverty fell from 16.2 percent in 2011-12 to 2.3 percent in 2022-23. That’s 171 million people lifted out of extreme poverty. Not through charity. Through growth.

Our Unified Payments Interface now processes over 640 million transactions daily—surpassing Visa’s 639 million. UPI handles fifty percent of the world’s digital transaction volume. Unlike Visa’s 1.5-3 percent fees, transactions are free or nearly free.

In 2024, the Reserve Bank of India returned 100 tonnes of gold reserves FROM the UK for the first time since the 1991 crisis. We took our gold back.

Tata Group now owns Jaguar Land Rover, Tetley Tea, Corus Steel, and British Salt. Ford executives once questioned whether Tata should be making cars. Tata bought JLR from Ford for $2.3 billion.

In July 2025, Modi flew to Britain to sign a trade deal. The Financial Times headline: “What India’s economy can teach the UK.” The Lowy Institute: “Reverse colonialism?”

Starmer led a 125-person delegation to Mumbai, including Rolls-Royce and the London Stock Exchange Group, positioning Britain as India’s “gateway to going global.”

The colony is teaching the colonizer.

The irony is not subtle.

You taught us parliamentary democracy. We implemented it at a scale you never imagined—900 million voters in our last election.

You gave us common law. We still use it.

You gave us cricket. We made it profitable. The IPL is now worth twelve billion dollars. Indian cricket essentially subsidizes English cricket.

You gave us the English language. We made it ours—India now has more English speakers than Britain.

And you taught us, by example, exactly what not to do. We watched your socialism. We imitated it. We suffered for forty-four years. Then we learned.

In 1991, we chose growth over ideology. We chose markets over planning. We chose the future over the past.

Why can’t you?

Britain possesses perhaps the most extraordinary collection of structural advantages of any nation on Earth.

You have Oxford, ranked the world’s best university for the tenth consecutive year.

You have London, ranked the world’s best city for the tenth consecutive year.

You have the world’s language. 1.5 billion people speak English. Every international business contract, every scientific paper, every air traffic communication—English.

You have the world’s preferred contract law. Twenty-seven percent of the world’s legal jurisdictions are based on English common law. It contributes thirty-eight billion pounds to your economy annually.

You have the Beatles—best-selling band in history, 600 million records sold. You have Pink Floyd, whose “Dark Side of the Moon” spent 937 weeks on the Billboard 200. You have Monty Python, which taught the world that comedy could be intelligent. You have Paul McCartney and David Gilmour, still performing, still genius, living treasures for all humanity.

You have the BBC, reaching 450 million people weekly. You have the British Museum, 6.5 million visitors annually. You have the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the Proms.

You invented football, rugby, tennis, golf, cricket, badminton, squash, and table tennis. You gave the world sport.

You have a genuinely successful multicultural society where a Hindu becomes Prime Minister and a Nigerian-British woman leads the Conservative Party and nobody much cares about their ethnicity because you’ve quietly figured out how to make diversity work.

AND YOU CANNOT BUILD HOUSES.

You cannot let qualified dentists take an exam.

You cannot stop arresting people for silent prayer.

You cannot figure out how to leave the EU without shooting yourself in the face.

A nation with all this—ALL OF THIS—is strangling itself with planning permission.

I have loved you for forty-six years.

I loved you before you loved yourself—your irony makes self-love impossible, I understand.

I loved you when I was a thirteen-year-old testing propaganda against reality and discovering that reality was better.

I loved you through Thatcher and Major and Blair and Brown and Cameron and May and Johnson and Truss and Sunak and Starmer. I loved you through the Winter of Discontent and the Falklands and the crash of ‘08 and Brexit and COVID.

I loved you when you gave the world the Beatles and Python and Pink Floyd. I loved you when you stood alone in 1940. I loved you when you invented parliamentary democracy and common law and the industrial revolution and the abolition of slavery (yes, after centuries of benefiting from it, but you did abolish it).

I loved the bacon butties and the Belisha Beacons and the queueing and the apologizing and the understatement and the warm beer and the cold reserve that somehow feels like welcome once you understand it.

I love you still.

But what are you doing to yourself?

You’re arresting comedians with armed officers while burglaries go unsolved.

You’re preventing houses from being built while young people live with their parents into their thirties.

You’re letting qualified doctors and dentists work at McDonald’s while your citizens pull their own teeth.

You’re treating an advisory referendum as an unquestionable mandate while your economy shrinks.

You’re cycling through prime ministers faster than Italy while lecturing other countries about stable governance.

Why?

The positive Brexit still exists. It’s not too late.

Slash the regulations that serve no purpose. Fix the planning laws—they’re just laws, you can change them. Let people build. Let people speak. Let dentists practice. Become the free-trading, low-tax, high-growth economy you could have been.

Stop listening to the NIMBYs. Stop empowering the busybodies. Stop prosecuting thought crimes. Stop pretending that the EU is responsible for problems you created before EU membership and have continued since leaving.

Learn from us. Your former colony figured it out. We stopped the socialist insanity in 1991. We liberalized. We grew. We’re not perfect—God knows we’re not perfect—but we learned.

You taught us what not to do. Now let us return the favor.

In 1979, a thirteen-year-old boy fell in love with a civilization.

In 2025, a fifty-nine-year-old man watches that civilization punch itself in the face, repeatedly, for no apparent reason.

The chocolate is still good. The queues are still orderly. The pubs still have warm beer and cold welcomes. The eccentricity is still magnificent—the butties, the beacons, the silent apologies, the five-day cricket matches that end in draws.

But somewhere along the way, the nation that invented freedom forgot what it meant.

Figure it out, Britain.

The rest of us are watching.

And some of us still love you—even when you make it very, very difficult.

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”

Maybe. But you don’t have to hang on in desperation.

You could, you know, just stop doing the stupid things.

It’s allowed.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to The India Paradox. I write about India, economics, culture, and apparently now Britain’s inexplicable decline.

Check out my book, The Science of Free Will. It’s not about India, or Britain, but about what it means to have free will in a deterministic universe. What does that mean for the future of AI? Why can’t we trade with ants? Why do we have/need a Supreme Court in a deterministic universe? What is this feeling of free will that we all have, really?

You can find all my previous posts at samirvarma.substack.com.

Samir Varma is a recovering physicist (but still publishing in Physics) who writes about India, economics, and the absurdity of human institutions. He first visited Britain in 1979 and has been in love ever since, though he increasingly feels like a spouse watching his partner develop a drinking problem. He can be found at samirvarma.substack.com, where he mostly writes about India but occasionally ventures into interventions for other countries. He also likes to write about physics, science and finance.

New research shows that the risk management technique beloved by traders frequently does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do.

If you’ve been trading for any length of time, you’ve heard some version of this advice: “Cut your losses at 10% (or 15%, or 20%). Don’t let a small loss become a big one.”

It sounds sensible. It feels right. It’s the kind of rule that makes you feel like you’re in control.

And it’s almost certainly costing you money.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Portfolio Management, I examined nearly three decades of data across dozens of ETFs and found something that should trouble anyone who relies on mechanical drawdown rules: they rarely work, and when they fail, they fail in a particularly insidious way.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Here’s what typically happens when you implement a strict drawdown rule:

Your position drops 10%. You exit, as planned. The market recovers. You miss it.

You re-enter. It drops 8%. Not quite your threshold. You hold. It drops another 3%. You exit at 11% down.

The market recovers again. You’re now nursing two losses instead of one.

This pattern—which I call “death by a thousand cuts”—can produce larger cumulative losses than simply riding out a single, larger drawdown would have. You’re not managing risk. You’re locking in losses that a subsequent recovery would have erased.

I know what you’re thinking: “But what about the times when the market doesn’t recover? What about the catastrophic drawdowns?”

Fair question. Let’s look at the data.

The COVID Crash: When Your Risk Metrics Lie to You

The most striking evidence comes from examining how traditional risk metrics behaved during the COVID crash of February-March 2020.

During the 22 trading days from February 21 to March 23, 2020, SPY produced an annualized return of -99% with a maximum drawdown of -33%. This was the fastest market crash in modern history.

Where did traditional drawdown-adjusted performance (DAP) rank this period?

The 25th percentile.

Read that again. The standard metric that most risk systems use ranked the worst market crash in decades as merely below-average—not catastrophic, not even particularly concerning. Just... meh.

It gets worse. A slightly different window (February 11 to March 12) with marginally better performance actually received a worse DAP score. The metric was literally ranking outcomes backwards.

This is the kind of thing that blows up accounts. Your risk model is telling you everything’s fine while the building is on fire.

Why This Happens (And How to Fix It)

The problem is mathematical. Traditional DAP divides return by drawdown. When returns are negative, larger drawdowns paradoxically improve the ratio. It’s like a thermometer that shows warmer temperatures as you freeze to death.

In the paper, I introduce a corrected metric called Coherent Drawdown-Adjusted Performance (CDAP):

r×|d|−sgn(r)

This looks intimidating but it’s actually simple. Here’s what each piece means:

• r is your return

• |d| is the absolute value of your drawdown (drawdowns are always expressed as positive numbers)

• sgn(r) is just the sign of your return: +1 if positive, -1 if negative

• The negative sign in front flips it: so when returns are positive, you’re raising drawdown to a negative power (which means dividing); when returns are negative, you’re raising it to a positive power (which means multiplying)

The key insight: when returns are positive, we divide by drawdown (larger drawdowns penalize the score). When returns are negative, we multiply by drawdown (larger drawdowns also penalize the score). The metric behaves logically in all conditions. I talked through this in more detail on the Titans of Tomorrow podcast.

Applied to those same COVID crash periods, CDAP correctly ranked them in the bottom 0.2% of all observations—exactly where risk metrics should place such extraordinary market stress.

Why Your S&P 500 Intuition Will Betray You

Part of why drawdown rules persist is that they seem to work for the one market most traders know best: US large-cap equities.

When I analyzed probability structures across different markets, the S&P 500 showed a pattern that superficially supports drawdown rules. Large drawdowns occur much more frequently than normal distribution theory predicts—up to 7x more often for severe drops. If you believe tail risks are that extreme, cutting losses seems prudent.

But here’s the catch: this pattern doesn’t generalize.

The Japan ETF (EWJ) shows some similarity. The UK ETF (EWU) shows no clear pattern at all. And critically, even where the probability patterns look similar, implementing drawdown cutoffs still doesn’t improve results. Something beyond conditional probability structure matters—recovery patterns, regime dynamics, reentry timing—and simple rules can’t capture it.

This is a trap I’ve watched traders fall into for 30 years. They develop their intuition on SPY or ES futures. They learn that cutting losses “works.” Then they apply the same logic to other markets, other instruments, other timeframes—and it fails. They blame themselves, tighten their rules, and make it worse.

The problem isn’t discipline. The problem is the rule itself.

The Long-Short Illusion

I also tested whether drawdown rules might work better for sophisticated long-short strategies. The initial results looked promising: across the full history of various long-short pairs, drawdown cutoffs appeared to improve performance.

Then I looked closer.

Most of these pairs generate minimal returns over their full history—which makes sense, since long-short trades are typically implemented only when a specific thesis is active. The apparent “benefit” of drawdown rules was simply limiting losses on unprofitable trades that shouldn’t have been on in the first place.

When I examined the same pairs during periods when their investment thesis was actually relevant, the benefits largely disappeared. Even with perfect hindsight about which periods to trade, drawdown rules provided no consistent edge.

What Actually Works

If not mechanical cutoffs, then what?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your risk rules need to be embedded into your trading system and tested as part of it. Not bolted on afterward. Not borrowed from someone else’s system. Not copied from a trading book.

The drawdown rule fails because it’s generic. It doesn’t know anything about your entries, your exits, your timeframes, your instruments. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution applied to a problem that’s specific to your system.

Here’s something else most traders get backwards: almost anyone can, with a little bit of work, come up with entries. When to buy. What to buy. There are a thousand YouTube videos about entry signals, and honestly, most of them are fine. Entries are the easy part.

The hard part is exits—and risk management is a gigantic piece of that. When do you get out? How much do you give back before you cut? How do you size down when things go wrong? These questions don’t have universal answers. They have answers that are specific to your system, your instruments, your timeframe, your psychology.

And that’s exactly why you have to test. Test, test, and test again. Then retest.

The paper develops a framework built on three principles:

1. Context matters. A 10% drawdown during a VIX spike means something different than a 10% drawdown in calm markets. During stress periods, drawdowns typically show greater persistence. During normal periods, you see more mean reversion. Your response should differ accordingly.

2. Cross-asset confirmation. An isolated drawdown in one position might be idiosyncratic—and potentially an opportunity. Simultaneous drawdowns across multiple assets signal systematic risk requiring action. Before you cut, ask: is this just me, or is it everywhere?

3. Dynamic thresholds. Static rules can’t adapt to changing market regimes. A percentile-based classification system provides more accurate risk categorization across different environments.

But here’s what matters more than any framework: you have to do the work.

If you’re a systematic trader, you need to backtest your risk rules as part of your system, not as an add-on. See how they actually perform across different regimes, different instruments, different timeframes.

If you’re a discretionary trader looking at charts, the process is harder but the principle is the same. You need to look at thousands of charts—without bias—and mark each one with your entries and exits. Not cherry-picked winners. Not “obvious” setups in hindsight. Thousands of them, good and bad, boring and exciting. Then, only afterward, calculate your performance. See what your drawdown rules actually did to your equity curve.

And then? Find another thousand charts and do it again. On different instruments. Different timeframes. Different market conditions. Keep doing it until you find something that works—something that’s yours, tested on your system, with your rules.

Most traders won’t do this. It’s tedious. It’s unglamorous. There’s no dopamine hit from marking up your 847th chart.

But that’s exactly why it works. Trading is 99.99% sweat and 0.01% inspiration. The traders who put in the work are the ones who survive. Everyone else is just borrowing someone else’s rules and hoping they fit.

The Psychology Trap

I want to be direct about something: this research suggests that many widely-used risk management practices don’t just fail to help—they actively harm performance.

That’s uncomfortable. These rules feel responsible. They give us agency during uncertainty. When you’re staring at a losing position, having a rule to follow feels better than sitting with the discomfort.

But the behavioral finance literature is clear about why we gravitate toward explicit rules even when they underperform: loss aversion and the psychological need for control. We prefer the illusion of risk management over actual risk management.

I talked about this on the Titans of Tomorrow podcast—why most trading systems fail long before you notice, why the risk models that look best on paper blow up when you need them most. The drawdown rule is a perfect example. It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and it’s wrong.

Real risk management isn’t about simple rules. It’s about frameworks that enhance judgment with systematic analysis—knowing when drawdowns are transitory noise versus genuine warning signals, when to stay patient versus when to act decisively.

That’s harder to implement. But the evidence suggests it’s the only approach that actually works.

The full paper, “The False Promise of Drawdown Rules: New Evidence and a Better Framework,” is available in the November 2025 issue of the Journal of Portfolio Management. It includes detailed empirical analysis, supplementary exhibits, and implementation guidelines for the CDAP framework.

I’m the founder and chief investment officer of VS Asset Management. If you caught my conversation with Waqar on Titans of Tomorrow, this paper is the rigorous version of what we discussed about risk models that fail when you need them most. Questions, pushback, or war stories about drawdown rules that burned you? Drop them in the comments.

Check out my book, The Science of Free Will for insight into how deterministic physics shapes all kinds of things: from the behavior of bees to why a Supreme Court must exist.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of VS Asset Management, LLC. This content is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investments involve risk, including the possible loss of principal. The research and analysis presented herein are based on historical data and there is no guarantee that any investment strategy or framework discussed will be successful in the future. Before making any investment decisions, you should consult with a qualified financial advisor and consider your own financial situation, investment objectives, and risk tolerance. The author and VS Asset Management, LLC disclaim any liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage arising from any use of this information or reliance on the opinions expressed herein.

My very old and dear friend Arie Kapulkin and I did some work recently that I think will be of interest: a new way of considering what the “double-slit” experiment can tell us about Nature.

The double-slit experiment has a long history. Thomas Young’s original optical version dates to 1801. The wave nature of matter was demonstrated in the 1920s through electron diffraction, but the iconic quantum version—where individual electrons or neutrons build up an interference pattern one by one, each particle seemingly interfering with itself—came later: electron double-slit experiments in the 1960s, neutron interferometry in the 1970s, and strikingly clear single-electron demonstrations in the 1980s. It has since become the canonical illustration of quantum mechanics.

Feynman famously called it “the only mystery.” Textbooks use it to introduce superposition, wave-particle duality, and the measurement problem. It’s the experiment everyone reaches for when trying to convey quantum strangeness.

But there’s something every textbook version quietly ignores: we don’t live in flat spacetime. The experiments happen on Earth, in a gravitational field, where clocks tick at slightly different rates depending on height, where spacetime is curved by the mass beneath our feet. What happens to quantum interference when you actually account for gravity?

This question sits at the intersection of our two deepest theories of physics. And as Arie and I show in a recent paper, the answer turns out to be remarkably precise—even if the effects are, for now, unmeasurably small.

What’s Actually Going Through the Slits?

Before we can talk about gravity’s effect on interference, we need to clear up a misconception that creates artificial mystery.

Popular accounts describe the double-slit experiment something like this: an electron is fired at a barrier with two slits, and “somehow” it goes through both slits at once, interfering with itself on the other side. If you try to determine which slit it went through, the interference pattern disappears. Spooky. Mysterious. Quantum weirdness.

This framing makes the phenomenon seem more puzzling than it needs to be. The problem is the picture: a tiny billiard ball that “somehow knows” about both slits. Once you’re imagining a little particle—a thing with a definite location—you’re forced into contortions explaining how it can be in two places at once.

The resolution comes from quantum field theory, and it requires understanding what a field actually is.

What is a field?

A field is simply a quantity that has a value at every point in space (and time). That’s it. Nothing mystical.

Temperature in a room is a field: at every point in the room, there’s a number telling you how hot it is. The temperature might be 22°C near the window, 24°C by the radiator, 21°C in the corner. One number at each location.

Wind velocity is a field too, but now you need three numbers at each point: the wind’s speed in the x-direction, the y-direction, and the z-direction. A vector field.

The electromagnetic field requires six numbers at each point: three components for the electric field, three for the magnetic field. These six numbers, assigned to every point in spacetime, constitute “the electromagnetic field.”

(A note on terminology: mathematicians (such unreasonable people) use the word “field” to mean something completely different—algebraic structures like the real numbers or complex numbers. This is an unfortunate historical collision. When physicists say “field,” they mean a quantity spread over spacetime. Context usually makes it clear, but it’s worth flagging.)

What is a field theory?

A field theory is the set of rules—expressed as differential equations—that govern how these numbers change.

The rules typically say: the value of the field at one point depends on the values at neighboring points. Change the field somewhere, and that change propagates outward, affecting nearby regions, which affect their neighbors, and so on.

Maxwell’s equations are the field theory for electromagnetism. They tell you how those six numbers at each point evolve in time, given the numbers at surrounding points. If you wiggle a charge here, the disturbance ripples outward through the electromagnetic field—and we call that ripple “light.”

The conceptual revolution of quantum field theory

Here’s the key insight: quantum field theory says everything is a field.

There’s an electron field permeating all of spacetime, right now, everywhere—including the space you’re sitting in. What we call “an electron” is a localized excitation of that field: a ripple, a disturbance, a concentrated bundle of energy in the electron field.

The electron doesn’t move through the field like a boat through water. The electron is the field, locally disturbed.

Same for photons: they’re excitations of the electromagnetic field. Same for quarks, neutrinos, the Higgs boson—every fundamental particle is really a localized disturbance in its corresponding field. You are made these exact same fields.

This isn’t just philosophical reframing. It’s forced on us by the mathematics, and it has measurable consequences (antimatter, particle creation, vacuum fluctuations). But for our purposes, the key point is what it does to the double-slit experiment.

Why this dissolves the mystery

A field doesn’t move. A field just is—it has values everywhere, and those values evolve in time according to the field equations.

When we say an “electron” approaches a barrier with two slits, what’s really happening is this: the electron field has a localized disturbance (a concentrated ripple of energy), and as time progresses, the field’s configuration evolves. The values at each point change according to the field equations—equations that are modified by the presence of the barrier (a “boundary condition”).

The slits aren’t openings that the field “passes through.” They’re boundary conditions. The barrier constrains the field (say, forcing it to zero there), and the slits are regions where that constraint is absent. The field equations, subject to these boundary conditions, determine how the disturbance evolves.

As the field evolves, the disturbance spreads. On the far side of the barrier, the parts of the disturbance associated with each slit overlap and interfere. Where they’re in phase, the field amplitude is large. Where they’re out of phase, they cancel. This creates the characteristic interference pattern.

Interference isn’t mysterious for fields. It’s the most basic thing fields do. We don’t find it strange that water waves interfere, or sound waves, or light waves treated classically. The electron field is no different—it’s just that we’re used to calling localized disturbances “particles” and then getting confused when they behave like waves.

The real question

So fields interfere. But according to what rules, exactly?

In flat spacetime—the spacetime of special relativity, without gravity—we know the rules with extraordinary precision. Quantum electrodynamics, the quantum field theory of electrons and photons, matches experiment to ten decimal places. It’s the most precisely tested theory in all of science.

But spacetime isn’t flat. We live in a universe where mass curves spacetime, where clocks tick at different rates at different heights, where rotating bodies drag spacetime around with them.

How does curvature modify the equations governing field propagation? What observable consequences follow for interference experiments?

This is the domain of quantum field theory in curved spacetime—and it’s where our paper lives.

The Unfinished Revolution

Our paper works in a “semiclassical” regime.

To understand why we’re working in this “semiclassical” regime, it helps to see the bigger picture of 20th-century physics.

Einstein was centrally involved in three of the four foundational theories of modern physics: special relativity (1905), general relativity (1915), and quantum mechanics (through his work on the photoelectric effect and stimulated emission, even though he later grew skeptical of the theory’s completeness). The fourth pillar—quantum field theory—emerged from the work of Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli, Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga, and others.

Here’s a remarkable fact: quantum field theory wasn’t invented from scratch. It was forced on us by trying to combine special relativity with quantum mechanics.

When Dirac tried to write a (special) relativistic wave equation for the electron in 1928, he found himself driven to an equation with strange features—including negative energy solutions that initially seemed like mathematical embarrassments. Those solutions turned out to predict antimatter: the positron, discovered in 1932.

More broadly, you simply cannot build a consistent theory of a fixed number of relativistic quantum particles. Special relativity allows energy and mass to convert into each other (E = mc²). Quantum mechanics allows fluctuations. Put them together, and you’re forced to allow particle creation and annihilation. A single electron can briefly conjure an electron-positron pair out of the vacuum, which then annihilates back. The number of particles isn’t conserved.

This means you can’t just do quantum mechanics of particles—you need quantum mechanics of fields, which can have any number of excitations. You’re driven to QFT not by choice but by logical consistency.

The expectation for the next step

Given this history, the path forward seemed clear. We combined quantum mechanics with special relativity and got quantum field theory. Now combine quantum field theory with general relativity, and surely we get... quantum gravity?

Decades of brilliant effort have been poured into this problem. The result: no complete, experimentally confirmed theory. Or as I like to say, the very technical term for this is: “bugger all.”

The technical obstacle is that general relativity, treated as a quantum field theory, is “non-renormalizable”—infinities appear in calculations and can’t be systematically controlled. String theory, loop quantum gravity, and other approaches offer possible resolutions, but none has made testable predictions that have been verified.

This is, to put it mildly, frustrating. We have two extraordinarily successful theories—quantum field theory and general relativity—each confirmed to remarkable precision in its domain. Yet combining them fully remains beyond our reach.

The “semiclassical” compromise

What we can do, rigorously and precisely, is something more modest: treat spacetime as a fixed classical background—but curved according to Einstein’s equations—and quantize the matter fields living on that background.

This is “quantum field theory in curved spacetime.” It doesn’t ask how quantum matter affects spacetime geometry (or asks only perturbatively, which means treating the back-reaction as a small correction to the background geometry). It takes the geometry as given and asks: how do quantum fields behave on a curved stage?

This isn’t the final answer. But it’s a mathematically well-defined framework, and it makes genuine predictions.

What the semiclassical approach has given us

This framework has produced some of the most striking results in theoretical physics:

Hawking radiation: Black holes aren’t perfectly black. Quantum field theory on a black hole spacetime predicts that black holes emit thermal radiation at a temperature inversely proportional to their mass. Black holes have thermodynamic properties—temperature, entropy—a discovery that’s reshaped our understanding of gravity, quantum mechanics, and information.

The Unruh effect: An observer accelerating through empty space sees a thermal bath of particles, where an inertial (inertial means not accelerating) observer sees only vacuum. The vacuum state itself is observer-dependent as is the notion of a “particle.” In other words, a acclerating observer will see a “bath” of particles (with a calculable distribution) whereas, in the same patch of spacetime, a non-accelerating observer will see only the vacuum.

Cosmological particle production: The expansion of the universe can create particles from the vacuum. Rapid expansion during inflation may have generated the density fluctuations that seeded galaxy formation.

These aren’t speculative ideas—they’re mathematical consequences of applying quantum field theory to curved spacetime. (Whether we can test them directly is another matter; Hawking radiation from astrophysical black holes is far too faint to detect.)

Our paper extends this framework to interferometry: what are the precise gravitational phase shifts in a double-slit experiment? It’s not quantum gravity, but it’s exact work at the interface of quantum mechanics and general relativity—and it yields concrete numbers.

Gravity Enters the Picture

How does gravity affect interference? There are two regimes to consider.

Uniform gravitational fields

In a uniform gravitational field—a good approximation near Earth’s surface over small distances—the main effect is straightforward: the two paths through the slits experience different gravitational potentials.

The interference pattern depends on the relative phase accumulated by different parts of the evolving field. Near Earth’s surface, proper time elapses faster at greater heights—a clock upstairs ticks slightly faster than one downstairs. The part of the field disturbance at higher elevation accumulates phase at a different rate than the part at lower elevation. This gravitational time dilation produces a phase difference that shifts the interference fringes.

This is called the COW effect, after Colella, Overhauser, and Werner, who first measured it in 1975 using neutron interferometry. The effect is substantial: for thermal neutrons, the gravitational phase shift is on the order of 100 radians (1 radian = 360 / (2 Pi) degrees). Large, unambiguous, experimentally confirmed. It’s been replicated and refined many times since.

Modern atom interferometers routinely measure gravitational effects. They’re used for precision gravimetry, tests of the equivalence principle, and searches for gravitational waves. The uniform-field gravitational phase is not exotic—it’s established physics.

Tidal effects—the next frontier

But gravity isn’t really uniform. The gravitational field varies from point to point. Its “gradient” matters.

In general relativity, the local variation of gravity is encoded in the Riemann curvature tensor—the mathematical object that captures how spacetime curvature changes from place to place. These “tidal” effects are what you feel when you’re stretched by a black hole’s gravity: your head and feet experience different pulls.

In an interferometer, tidal gravity means the two paths don’t just experience different potentials—they experience different curvatures. This introduces additional phase shifts beyond the COW effect.

These tidal phase shifts are what our paper calculates in detail.

Frame-dragging

Near a rotating mass—like Earth, or a spinning black hole—something even more interesting happens. The rotation drags spacetime around with it, an effect called “frame-dragging” or the Lense-Thirring effect.

This twisting of spacetime introduces a new kind of phase shift, one with a distinctive signature: it depends oddly on the slit separation. If you flip the sign of the separation (swap the slits), the frame-dragging phase shift changes sign too. Static gravitational effects are even—they don’t care which slit is which. Frame-dragging is odd.

This gives, at least in principle, a smoking gun. If you could measure the odd-parity component of the gravitational phase shift in an interferometer, you’d have direct evidence of spacetime rotation—gravity not just curving space but twisting it.

What the Paper Does

Previous work on gravitational effects in quantum interference tended to focus on specific cases: massive scalar particles here, photons in the geometric optics limit there, electrons with spin corrections elsewhere. The treatments were scattered, and it wasn’t always obvious which results were universal and which were particle-specific.

In our paper, we treat all three cases—scalar fields (spin 0), photons (spin 1), and electrons (spin 1/2)—within a single framework using path-integral methods adapted from Stodolsky’s formalism.

The central result is a compact formula for the gravitational phase shift:

Let me translate. The phase shift depends on:

• R₀ᵢ₀ⱼ: the relevant components of the Riemann curvature tensor—the tidal gravitational field

• ℓⁱ: the spatial separation between the slits

• λ: the de Broglie wavelength of the particle

• α_spin: a small spin-dependent correction

The spin corrections turn out to be suppressed by a factor of (ℏ/mc)²—about 10⁻¹¹ for electrons. At leading order, scalars and photons have identical phase shifts. This makes sense: both follow geodesics determined purely by the spacetime geometry.

What about the numbers?

Earth’s surface (neutrons): The COW effect gives ~100 radians. Already measured.

Earth’s surface (photons): About 10⁻¹² radians. Far too small to detect.

Low Earth orbit, tidal effects (⁸⁷Rb atoms): About 2.7 × 10⁻²¹ radians. This is our headline number for what a realistic orbital experiment would face.

Low Earth orbit (photons): About 10⁻²⁹ radians. Hopelessly small.

Futuristic kilometer-scale space interferometer: About 10⁻⁷ radians. This would require maintaining coherence over a kilometer in space with ultra-cold atoms—far beyond current technology, but not obviously impossible in principle.

The pattern is clear: tidal gravitational phase shifts are many orders of magnitude smaller than the uniform-field effects we’ve already measured. They represent a frontier we cannot yet reach.

Why Measure What We Can’t Yet Detect?

This might seem like an odd enterprise. If the effects are 15+ orders of magnitude below current sensitivity, why bother calculating them?

Setting benchmarks

Knowing exactly what nature predicts—even for effects we can’t measure—has genuine scientific value. It tells experimentalists what the target is. As technology advances, atom interferometers improve, space-based experiments become more sophisticated, it matters enormously to know what signal you’re looking for and how far you need to push.

It also constrains future theories. Any proposed modification of quantum mechanics or general relativity must reproduce these predictions in the appropriate limit. The numbers aren’t just “too small to matter”—they’re boundary conditions on theory-building.

Testing the semiclassical framework

QFTCS is not the final theory. It’s a stepping stone—perhaps the last solid ground before the unknown territory of quantum gravity.

But it’s a stepping stone that has produced remarkable results: Hawking radiation, the Unruh effect, cosmological particle production. Each of these extends our understanding of how quantum mechanics and gravity interact.

Adding precision interferometry to this list strengthens the framework. It’s another domain where we can ask: what does QFTCS predict, exactly? And even if we can’t test it yet, we’re extending the regime where semiclassical gravity makes quantitative claims.

The gap is informative

The enormous gap between the COW effect (~100 radians) and tidal phase shifts (~10⁻²¹ radians) is itself scientifically informative. It quantifies how hard the next step is. It tells us we shouldn’t expect to detect tidal gravitational effects in quantum interference anytime soon—but it also tells us exactly what “soon” would require.

The Road Ahead

Experimental capabilities are advancing steadily, even if the tidal regime remains distant.

The Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station has demonstrated Bose-Einstein condensate interferometry in microgravity, achieving coherence times of several seconds. Ground-based atom interferometers have reached acceleration sensitivities around 10⁻¹⁵ m/s². Optical clock comparisons have achieved 10⁻¹⁹ fractional stability, probing gravitational redshift with exquisite precision.

None of these reach tidal gravitational phase shifts as we’ve calculated them. But the trajectory is encouraging. Each generation of experiments pushes sensitivity further.

What would detection mean, if it ever became possible?

It would be a direct test of how quantum fields respond to spacetime curvature gradients—not just the gravitational potential, but its variation in space. The frame-dragging signature, if ever isolated, would be an unambiguous probe of spacetime rotation.

These aren’t tests of quantum mechanics alone, or general relativity alone. They’re tests of their intersection—the regime where both theories matter simultaneously. That’s precisely the regime where we understand least and need guidance most.

Closing Reflection

The double-slit experiment has been with us, in one form or another, for over two centuries. It keeps teaching us about the universe—not because it’s irreducibly mysterious, but because it’s such a clean probe of how waves propagate.

Once you understand that particles are really localized excitations of fields, and that fields naturally interfere, the experiment stops being spooky. It becomes a precision tool. And taking it seriously in curved spacetime—asking exactly how gravitational effects modify the interference pattern—reveals what our theories predict at the edge of their validity.

The effects are tiny. We may not measure tidal gravitational phase shifts in my lifetime, or perhaps ever. But the predictions are exact, derived from our best understanding of quantum fields and curved spacetime. That’s worth something.

Sometimes the value of a calculation is proving an effect exists, even when we can’t yet see it.

The Paper

This work appears as a chapter titled “Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime: An Introduction to Gravity’s Impact on the Double-Slit Experiment” in the edited volume Quantum Theory Meets Gravity - From Curved Spacetime to Black Hole Information, which I co-edited. The full chapter is available online here.

The complete book will be published soon—I’ll write more when it’s released.

My co-author on this chapter is Arie Kapulkin, to whom I’m grateful for a genuinely enjoyable collaboration.

The “Book”

Check out my book, The Science of Free Will, which applies physics to the oldest problem in philosophy. What is free will in a deterministic universe? And what does that mean for AI?

Here’s what the 1991 reforms did not change about my life:

I was already in America. I already had my PhD. I already had my career path. The reforms didn’t get me a job or make me rich. By the time they happened, I had escaped—physically, economically, psychologically. India’s transformation was something I watched from afar, like news from a country I used to know.

Here’s what the 1991 reforms did change:

I no longer cringed at being identified as Indian.

That’s it. That’s the thing. And if you’ve never felt that cringe, you won’t understand why this matters. But if you have—if you know what it’s like to hear “Where are you from?” and feel your stomach tighten—you’ll understand everything.

For decades, being identified as “Indian” abroad meant you were from a fifth-rate, uncivilized, basket case of an economy. You were from a genuine, no-fakes, absolute “shithole country”—except it was MUCH worse. At least shithole countries are small enough to ignore. India was big enough to be pitied. Big enough to be a punchline. Big enough that everyone had an opinion, and none of the opinions were good.

When people asked where you were from, you’d mumble “India” and change the subject. Or emphasize that you’d left, as if to say: I escaped. I got out. Don’t associate me with... that. I’m not really from there. Not anymore.

The news about India was always starving children or riots. Famines or assassinations. Disasters or dysfunction. A billion people trapped in poverty, governed by socialists who couldn’t keep the lights on. Never anything else. Because there wasn’t anything else.

That changed. Not overnight—it took years, maybe decades. But sometime in the 2010s, I noticed I didn’t cringe anymore. India was in the news for startups, for IT, for growth, for space missions, for Bollywood, for yoga studios in Brooklyn. It still had problems—massive, heartbreaking problems. But it was no longer only problems. It was no longer only pity.

I could say “I’m from India” without the internal wince. Without the reflexive need to distance myself. Without the shame.

I owe that to three men I didn’t know existed in 1991.

This post is about why India forgot them. And why that forgetting is wrong.

The Raymond’s Shirt: A Parable

Before we discuss the forgetting, one more absurdity. One more proof that the India Paradox never ends.

Rakesh Mohan—the economist who helped dismantle the industrial licensing system, who mapped the regulatory labyrinth so it could be torn down—bought a shirt recently. Nice cotton shirt. Raymond’s brand. About 3,000-4,000 rupees. Maybe $40-50 in American money.

Raymond’s is an iconic Indian company. Vertically integrated. Been around since 1925. Makes everything from thread to finished garments. If any Indian company should be able to manufacture a shirt domestically, it’s Raymond’s. They have the factories. They have the expertise. They have nearly a century of experience.

He went home. Checked the label.

Made in China.

A legendary Indian textile company, with complete domestic manufacturing capability, imports cotton shirts from China to sell in India.

“You can’t tell me they can’t manufacture a shirt which you can sell for 3,000, 4,000 rupees, which is made in India. I don’t understand this.”

This is the ghost of the small-scale reservations. Apparel was reserved for small-scale industries until the 2000s. Large companies couldn’t manufacture domestically at scale—it was literally illegal. They could make fabric, but not shirts. They could employ thousands in mills, but not in garment factories. For twenty years after 1991, this absurdity continued.

By the time de-reservation happened, supply chains had moved. China had built the factories. Bangladesh had built the expertise. Vietnam had captured the contracts. The jobs that should have employed Indians employed others. The manufacturing base that should have developed in India developed elsewhere.

India missed the manufacturing revolution that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in East Asia. It went straight from agriculture to services, skipping the middle step. And now a Raymond’s shirt—Raymond’s!—is made in China.

The 1991 reforms were incomplete. This shirt is proof.

But the reforms still matter. Because the alternative—the India where you couldn’t even import a decent shirt, where you waited years for a car, where producing too much was a crime—was worse. Much worse.

The incomplete revolution is still better than no revolution at all.

The Gate That “Doesn’t Open”

P.V. Narasimha Rao’s funeral cortege arrives at Congress headquarters, 24 Akbar Road, New Delhi.

The gates are closed.

Party officials explain: “The gates don’t open.”

Not metaphorical gates—physical gates. Iron gates. At the headquarters of the party Rao had led. On the day of his funeral. While his body waited outside.

The gates had opened for other Congress leaders in the past. But for the man who saved India from bankruptcy, who gave Congress its only full-term government between Rajiv’s assassination and 2004, who transformed the Indian economy more than anyone since independence—the gates “don’t open.”

His body was not allowed inside.

Eventually, after much embarrassment, arrangements were made. A quick memorial. Minimal honors. The cortege moved on. The Congress party had made its point: Rao was not “family.” Rao was not to be remembered. Rao’s achievements were not to be celebrated.

It would be easy to blame dynasty politics. This is the standard story. The Gandhis suppressing a non-Gandhi who had dared to succeed without them. Blah Blah Blah. Rao was never to be forgiven for proving that Congress could govern without a Gandhi at the helm. Blah Blah Blah. His success was an implicit rebuke to the family’s claim of indispensability. Blah Blah Blah. Etc and on and on. Boring! Also, crap.

But that explanation is too simple. It’s a “just so” story that explains the symptom, not the disease.

If dynasty politics were the whole answer, the BJP would have rehabilitated Rao to embarrass Congress. Other parties would have claimed him. The intellectual class would have pushed back. Someone would have said: this is wrong. Someone with a platform would have remembered.

The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.

Why India Forgets

1. The Invisibility of Prevented Catastrophes

This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.

You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.

The 1991 reforms prevented:
- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)
- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).
- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).
- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).
- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.
- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.

But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.

The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.

This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.

The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.

Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.

That’s why India forgot them.

2. Democratic Noise

In China, the CCP can decree: “Deng Xiaoping saved China. His portrait goes here. This is the official story. Teach it in schools. Put it in textbooks. End of discussion.”

In India, there’s no authoritative voice. Congress says one thing. BJP says another. Regional parties say something else. Academics critique everyone. Journalists investigate everyone. Everyone has a platform. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a vote.

This is wonderful for democracy. It’s terrible for historical memory.

Credit gets contested. Then diluted. Then forgotten. The noise drowns out the signal. Thirty years later, nobody agrees on what happened, let alone who deserves credit.

China has heroes by decree. India has arguments by design.

3. Socialist Intellectual Residue

The people who write history—journalists, academics, intellectuals—were overwhelmingly trained in socialist frameworks.

JNU. LSE. Cambridge leftists. The Delhi School of Economics in its Marxist phase. The Indian intellectual class in 1991 was deeply hostile to market reforms. They saw liberalization as surrender, not salvation. As betrayal of Nehru, not rescue of India.

They wrote the first draft of history. And in that draft:
- The reforms were “IMF-imposed” (they weren’t—the M Document proves it)
- They caused inequality (ignoring that inequality rose from a higher base because poverty fell)
- They were “incomplete” (as if perfect reform was politically possible)
- They benefited only the elite (ignoring 400 million people lifted from poverty)

The heroes became villains in the dominant narrative. Or worse—they became footnotes to a story about foreign imposition and domestic suffering.

Remember the committees that documented problems and then recommended tighter controls? That mindset didn’t disappear in 1991. It’s still writing the history.

4. Policy Consensus

Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.

Every government since 1991 has continued them:
- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization
- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization
- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening

When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.

Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.

Success erased the memory of who created it.

5. The Indian Heroic Template

Indian mythology celebrates:
- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation
- Sacrifice: Bhishma’s lifelong celibacy vow, Karna’s tragic loyalty
- Martyrdom: Gandhi’s assassination, Bhagat Singh’s hanging
- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield

What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.

Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.

They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.

6. The Brahminical View: Why We Want AI But Not Plumbing

There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.

At Imperial College London in the 1960s, Rakesh Mohan was one of 90 electrical engineering students. Eight were “subcontinentals”—Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis.

For their graduating projects, almost everyone did physical apparatus projects—building actual engineering devices. Real things that worked in the real world.

Of the eight subcontinentals, all but one did software projects.

“We just don’t like doing things with our hands.”

This isn’t just about engineering preferences. It’s about what we value. Mohan calls it “the Brahminical view that we should only do AI.”

India wants to be a knowledge economy—but can’t provide clean water to its cities. Wants to lead in artificial intelligence—but can’t manufacture a cotton shirt. Wants prestigious industries—but treats municipal corporations as beneath dignity. Wants to be Vishwaguru (world teacher)—but can’t fix the sewage systems.

At a panel in Bombay, Mohan sat next to Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys. He asked the audience of 1,000 students:

“Raise your hand if you would like to work in the municipal corporation of Mumbai.”

Zero hands.

“Now tell me how many people want to work doing useless things with Narayana Murthy?”

Half the hands went up.

Economic reform: boring. Heroic entrepreneurship: exciting. Government service: beneath dignity. Building Infosys: aspirational.

This is the cultural hierarchy that shapes what India remembers. The reformers of 1991 were technocrats who believed in getting things done. They fixed the plumbing—metaphorically speaking. They made the boring systems work. They didn’t build glamorous startups or win Nobel Prizes. They made startups possible. They made India creditworthy enough that others could win Nobel Prizes.

That’s part of why they’re forgotten. They did the work that doesn’t generate Instagram followers. They were municipal corporation people in an Infosys culture.

7. Dynasty Politics

Yes, Congress has an incentive to minimize Rao’s achievements. Rao succeeded without the cadre’s blessings. He proved Congress could govern technocratically not via personality. That’s threatening to a party cadre that has organized itself around personalities rather than policies.

But if “personality politics” were the explanation, someone would have broken through. The BJP has governed for over a decade now. They could have rehabilitated Rao to embarrass Congress. They could have claimed the reform legacy for the broader non-Congress tradition.

They didn’t—until very recently, and even then, tepidly. The “personality” explanation is too neat. It explains 5% of the forgetting, not 95%.

The 2004 Miracle

Before I tell you what happened to the reformers themselves, let me tell you about something that happened in 2004—something that says more about India than all the forgetting, something that shows what this civilization is capable of when it works.

Congress won the election. Sonia Gandhi, the party president, was expected to become Prime Minister. She had led the campaign. She had the numbers. The job was hers.

She declined.

A Roman Catholic. Italian-born. Widow of Rajiv Gandhi, mother of Rahul. She had spent years building the party back from electoral defeats. She had the power to take the top job. She chose not to.

Why? Officially, because of the sacrifice tradition in the Gandhi family—following in the footsteps of her mother-in-law who declined the presidency. Unofficially, probably because an Italian-born Catholic PM would have created too much ammunition for opponents, too much distraction from governance.

Whatever the reason, she stepped aside. And she nominated Manmohan Singh—a Sikh.

Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister. The ceremony was presided over by President APJ Abdul Kalam—a Muslim, a scientist, a bachelor who lived simply and played the veena.

In a Hindu-majority nation (80%+).

A Roman Catholic voluntarily giving up power to a Sikh, in a ceremony presided over by a Muslim, in a Hindu-majority democracy. And no one in India commented on it.

I mean that literally. It was a non-story. The Financial Times had to point it out to Indian readers. Indians hadn’t noticed. It didn’t occur to anyone that this was remarkable.

Of course a Catholic could decline power. Of course a Sikh could become PM. Of course a Muslim could preside as President. What’s surprising about that? This is India. We do this.

Everything. Everything is remarkable about that.

Could this happen in Pakistan? A Hindu president swearing in a Christian prime minister nominated by a Sikh party president? Could this happen in Bangladesh? In Indonesia? In most Middle Eastern countries? In much of the world?

Muhammad Ali Jinnah—the founder of Pakistan—once criticized Gandhi’s syncretism, Gandhi’s claim to be Hindu AND Muslim AND Christian AND Jew. “Only a Hindu could say that,” Jinnah argued. He meant it as criticism. He was describing the absorptive, syncretic tendency he believed would swallow Muslim identity, erase minority distinctiveness.

But he was also describing something true about Indian civilization. Something that makes moments like 2004 possible. Something that made 1991 possible.

Two of the three architects of India’s economic salvation were not Hindu. Both Singh and Ahluwalia were Sikhs. Both were Partition refugees. And nobody cared about their religion. Nobody thought it relevant. Nobody mentioned it.

In 2022, Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister of Britain. Ethnic Indian. Hindu. He’d blessed a cow at a Hindu ceremony. Lit Diwali lamps at Downing Street. And no one cared.

This says something wonderful about Britain—that it too can absorb diversity, that the former colonizer has learned something from the former colony. It also shows that the tolerance can travel, that what India cultivated over millennia can take root elsewhere in decades.

Is this tolerance under threat in today’s India? Is BJP nationalism erasing the syncretism? I think the tolerance is hiding, not dying. Because five thousand years of absorptive civilization don’t disappear because of political noise. The underlying operating system is older than any government. It survived the Mughals. It survived the British. It will survive the BJP.

That’s what India is capable of. Now let me tell you how it treated the men who saved it.

The Three Fates

What happened to them? This is where the story gets painful.

Rao: The Shakespearean Tragedy

P.V. Narasimha Rao’s fall was swift, brutal, and—in retrospect—inevitable. The man who saved India from bankruptcy died in disgrace, forgotten by the party he’d rescued.

1992: The Babri Masjid was demolished on his watch. A Hindu mob destroyed a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya while Rao’s government did nothing to stop them. He was blamed—by secularists for allowing it, by Hindu nationalists for not supporting it openly, by everyone for the paralysis that let it happen.

The truth is more complicated. Rao may have been outmaneuvered. He may have miscalculated. He may have believed promises that weren’t kept. But the result was the same: his secular credentials were destroyed, and the communal tensions that followed poisoned his legacy.

1996: Congress loses the election. Rao is blamed—for the Babri Masjid, for corruption allegations, for not being a Gandhi. The party that had benefited most from his reforms turned on him instantly.

1996-2000: Corruption trials. Allegations of bribery in a JMM (Jharkhand Mukti Morcha) vote-buying scandal. The man who saved India from bankruptcy spent his final years in court, defending himself from charges that he paid MPs to save his government.

Was he guilty? The legal record is contested. He was convicted, then acquitted on appeal. But the damage was done. The “taxi driver test”—what does an ordinary person remember about someone?—produces only scandals. Ask about Rao, and people remember corruption, Babri Masjid, disgrace. Not the reforms. Not the 400 million people lifted from poverty.

The erasure was thorough. His contributions were downplayed in official Congress party history. No major memorials in Delhi. No buildings named. His ashes weren’t even immersed in the Ganges with full honors—the family had to do it themselves, years later.

The late rehabilitation came too late. In 2024, Rao received the Bharat Ratna—India’s highest civilian honor. Awarded posthumously. Twenty years after his death. By a BJP government, not Congress.

Think about that. Honored by his opponents. Buried by his beneficiaries. The party he saved wouldn’t honor him. The party he defeated would.

Singh: The Tragedy of the Second Act

Manmohan Singh got something Rao never did: a second act. And it complicated everything.

2004: Congress wins the election. Sonia Gandhi declines to become Prime Minister. She nominates Singh instead. The reluctant reformer of 1991 becomes the unlikely Prime Minister of 2004.

2004-2014: He served as PM, leading India through its fastest growth years. GDP growth hit 9%. The nuclear deal with the United States transformed India’s global standing. He won re-election in 2009—something few predicted.

For a while, it looked like vindication. The quiet reformer was now running the country. The architect of 1991 was in charge of the next phase.

Then the second term happened.

His reputation as the “Silent PM” became a liability. He rarely spoke to the press. He let ministers speak for him. In a media environment that rewarded performance and punished reticence, his silence looked like weakness.

His second term was mired in scandals—the 2G spectrum allocation, where telecom licenses were allegedly sold at artificially low prices. The coal block allocations, where mining rights were distributed opaquely. Corruption allegations swirled around colleagues, and Singh wouldn’t dismiss them. Whether this was loyalty, paralysis, or constraint by coalition politics—historians will argue. But the effect was clear.

By 2014, the “Silent PM” had become a punchline. The BJP’s campaign mocked him relentlessly. Narendra Modi promised “minimum government, maximum governance”—an implicit contrast with Singh’s perceived passivity.

The BJP won a landslide. Singh left office diminished, his reputation in tatters.

His final public statement, in January 2014: “I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media.”

He was right.

December 26, 2024: Singh died at 92. State funeral with full honors. Twenty-one-gun salute. Seven days of national mourning. Tributes poured in from across the political spectrum—including from the BJP leaders who had mocked him.

In death, he was remembered as the reformer of 1991, not the silent PM of 2010. The second act faded. The first act endured. History was kinder.

One detail haunts me: He never returned to Gah. His birthplace, now in Pakistan. The village where his grandfather was murdered during Partition. Where his childhood home was burned. Where his family fled with nothing.

Pakistani leaders invited him to visit. He declined.

“Yadan bariyaan talkh hun,” he said. The memories are very bitter.

A friend from Gah visited him in Delhi in 2008, bringing soil and water from the village. Singh gave him a turban, a shawl, watches. Wrote him a letter in Urdu. Received the traditional Chakwali shoes and couldn’t resist the local cheese despite his doctors’ warnings.

But he never went back. The memories remained too bitter. The Partition refugee who saved India from one crisis never returned to the place where his own crisis began.

Ahluwalia: The Invisible Man’s Choice

The technocrat’s fate: footnotes.

Ahluwalia continued serving in various capacities—Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, advisor to governments, respected voice on economic policy. He wrote his memoir in 2020.

He titled it Backstage.

Not I Saved India. Not The Architect of Reform. Backstage. The place where the real work happens, invisible to the audience.

The self-effacement was characteristic. “He [Manmohan Singh] was the principal architect,” Ahluwalia always insisted. Even in his own memoir, he deflects credit to others.

The technocrat’s curse: politicians get credit, policy drafters get footnotes. Ahluwalia chose the footnote. He seems content there.

But These Explanations Don’t Justify the Forgetting

Let me be clear: understanding why India forgets is not the same as accepting it.

The forgetting is wrong.

Not “understandable given complexity.” Not “one perspective among many.” Wrong.

The Counterfactual Test

Without Rao: Any other politician would have done the minimum. Protected socialist orthodoxy. Blamed external factors. Waited out the crisis with IMF loans and hoped for the best. The reform window would have closed.

Without Singh: A political Finance Minister would have compromised, lacked international credibility, watered down the reforms to please constituencies. The technical design would have been flawed. The execution would have been botched.

Without Ahluwalia: No blueprint. No M Document. No years of preparation. Ad hoc crisis response. Easy reversal when the pressure eased.

These three were indispensable. Not because others couldn’t help—they needed thousands of helpers, and they had them. But without these three as catalysts, the helpers would have had nothing to help with.

The Achievement Quantified

• 400-500 million people lifted from poverty

• The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history

• GDP multiplied 16x in three decades

• Life expectancy increased 9 years

• Foreign exchange reserves from $1.2 billion to $700 billion

What else in the 20th century lifted this many people from poverty, democratically, without mass coercion?

Nothing.

The Marshall Plan rebuilt countries that already knew how to be rich. China’s reforms came with Tiananmen Square and the suppression of Uyghurs. The Soviet collapse didn’t produce reform—it produced oligarchy and eventually Putin.

India’s 1991 reforms are unique. And the men who made them happen are forgotten.

That’s not complexity. That’s ingratitude.

The Case for Remembering

India should remember these three the way:
- America remembers the Founders.
- China remembers Deng.
- France remembers de Gaulle.
- Europe remembers the architects of the EU.

The fact that India doesn’t is a failure of:
- Memory.
- Gratitude.
- Historical understanding.
- National self-respect.

It’s not “well, history is complicated.” It’s a mistake that should be corrected.

Remember Them

The three most important people of the late 20th century were:

A polyglot novelist from a dusty village in Telangana who learned to code at 60, who spoke seventeen languages and knew how to be silent in all of them, who trained as a guerrilla fighter against the Nizam of Hyderabad before becoming a politician, who read economics textbooks his first week as Prime Minister and told his Finance Minister to be bolder, who wrote a novel nobody wanted to read and governed a country nobody thought he could save.

A Partition refugee from a village that no longer exists who took cold showers at Cambridge to save money, who won the Adam Smith Prize (previously won by Keynes), who kept dried fruits in his pockets as a boy because his father worked for a dry fruit importer, who wore Cambridge blue turbans for the rest of his life as tribute, who wrote his doctoral thesis criticizing the very policies he would dismantle thirty years later, who never returned to his birthplace because the memories were too bitter, who spoke so softly you had to lean in to hear him announce a revolution.

A World Bank prodigy who became the youngest division chief in that institution’s history, who came back to India when everyone with his credentials was leaving, who wrote a memo that became a blueprint, who claimed to change trade policy in eight hours because the thinking was already done, who titled his memoir Backstage because that’s where he believed he belonged, who gave credit to everyone except himself.

They saved India.

They saved it not through heroic suffering or dramatic sacrifice, but through competence. Through preparation. Through the unglamorous work of understanding systems and changing them. They saved it by being good at their jobs when the moment demanded it.

In 1991, I was at the University of Texas, head down, working hard, trying not to think about India. Ashamed to be associated with a country that seemed to have no future. Cringing when people asked where I was from.

Today, I can say “I’m from India” without the internal wince. Three men I didn’t know existed made that possible.

They gave 500 million people the chance to escape poverty.

They proved that democratic reform is possible—that you don’t need authoritarianism to transform an economy, that you don’t need to shoot protesters in the square to open markets, that you can change a civilization’s trajectory through budgets and policy papers and quiet persistence.

They proved that crisis can be converted to opportunity, if you have a plan and the nerve to execute it.

India forgot them.

It forgot them because they succeeded—and success is invisible. It forgot them because they didn’t fit the heroic template—and quiet competence doesn’t make for good stories. It forgot them because the reforms became consensus—and consensus has no authors. It forgot them because the intellectual class that writes history was hostile to their achievement—and first drafts cast long shadows.

But the forgetting is wrong.

It’s not “complicated.” It’s not “a matter of perspective.” It’s wrong in the simple sense that ingratitude is wrong, that failing to acknowledge what you owe is wrong, that pretending the present created itself is wrong.

This series—this small corner of the internet—is part of remembering.

It’s not much. A few thousand words in a Substack that most of India will never read. But memory has to start somewhere. It starts with one person saying: I remember. I know what happened. I know who made it possible.

Remember them.

If you liked this, you will like my book, “The Science of Free Will” where I explore all kinds of cool stuff. Do bees have emotions? Why don’t we trade with ants? What is the future of AI?

This is Post 19 (in three parts) of The India Paradox series. We’ve examined how India manages its kaleidoscope of cultures, how this travels with the diaspora, the wedding wars, the economic transformation from socialism to capitalism, the WhatsApp uncles, the startup ecosystem, the food diversity, the language wars, gods in the machine, the gender paradox, the future of the past, Macaulay’s children, and the third rail of reservations. Now we’ve remembered the people who made the economic story possible.

[All previous posts at samirvarma.substack.com]

July 24, 1991. Parliament. A turbaned economist rises to deliver the Union Budget.

The context was impossible. The Finance Minister wasn’t even an elected politician—he’d been brought in from outside, a technocrat in a room full of professional politicians. His party was in minority. The Prime Minister was a man famous for saying nothing. The country was bankrupt. Everyone expected incremental tinkering, maybe some painful adjustments, the usual political theater of pretending to fix things while changing nothing.

Singh walked to the podium in his characteristic blue turban—Cambridge blue, as always, honoring the university that had recognized his brilliance decades ago. He carried his papers. He looked like what he was: a professor about to deliver a particularly important lecture.

He opened with grief.

“I miss a handsome, smiling face listening intently to the Budget Speech. Shri Rajiv Gandhi is no more.”

The room was heavy. Rajiv had been assassinated just two months earlier. The man who was supposed to carry India into the 21st century—dead at 46. And here was his party, stumbling into power on sympathy votes, led by a septuagenarian caretaker, represented by an economist who looked like he’d rather be grading papers.

Then Singh delivered the diagnosis:

“The current level of foreign exchange reserves, in the range of Rs. 2500 crores, would suffice to finance imports for a mere fortnight... We have not experienced anything similar in the history of independent India.“

Two weeks of imports. That’s what stood between India and collapse. The man was standing in Parliament telling the nation it was bankrupt—and somehow making it sound like a weather report.

And then—the Victor Hugo bomb:

“No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come... Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.”

The chamber stirred. This wasn’t incremental tinkering. This wasn’t the usual budget of small adjustments and political compromises. This was a declaration of revolution—delivered in the gentlest possible voice, by the least likely revolutionary in Indian history, a man who spoke so softly you had to lean in to hear him.

He was announcing the death of forty years of socialist orthodoxy. And he was doing it by quoting a French novelist.

It was like watching your grandfather calmly explain that he was about to rob a bank.

What They Actually Did

Killing the License Raj

The execution was surgical.

Industrial licensing—abolished for all but 18 industries. Down from nearly everything. Overnight, companies could produce what they wanted, how much they wanted, without begging Delhi for permission.

Public sector monopolies—eliminated from most sectors. The “commanding heights of the economy” that Nehru had reserved for government were suddenly open to competition.

The speed was staggering. Ahluwalia’s team later claimed they changed India’s trade policy in eight hours. Eight hours to undo forty years of accumulated controls.

How was this possible? Because the thinking was already done. The M Document had been written a year earlier. The reform packages had been prepared under previous governments, refined, debated, improved. When Rao came in, they weren’t starting from scratch—they were executing a plan that had been building for years.

But before any of this could happen, someone had to map the nightmare.

Rakesh Mohan—who would become one of the key implementers—had spent months compiling a complete inventory of every control. His discovery process was almost anthropological: he asked to sit in on the various licensing committees. “The economic adviser was not a member of any of them, which was good. I was curious enough that I asked.”

He attended them all. Watched how they worked. Wrote it down.

The result was the first comprehensive map of India’s regulatory labyrinth. You can’t dismantle what you can’t see. Mohan made the invisible visible—and then helped tear it down.

Opening to the World

The external liberalization was equally dramatic:

Tariffs: Slashed from 300% to 50%. (Yes, 300%. On some goods, you paid three times the item’s value just in import duties. India had some of the highest tariffs in the world. This was considered normal. This was considered patriotic.)

Import quotas: Removed. For decades, the government had decided not just how much you paid for imports, but whether you could import at all. Entire categories of goods were simply banned. Want a foreign car? Too bad. Foreign electronics? Get in line. That ended.

The rupee: Devalued sharply, then made partially convertible. Market forces—those dangerous capitalist impulses—were finally allowed to influence the currency. The rupee had been artificially propped up for years, making exports uncompetitive and imports artificially cheap for the elite who could access foreign exchange. Now it would find its real value.

Foreign investment: FDI allowed up to 51% without prior approval. Foreign companies welcomed in sectors that had been closed for 44 years. The message to the world: India is open for business. Finally.

FERA: Dismantled. The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act had treated every foreign transaction as potentially criminal. Getting foreign exchange was like applying for parole—you had to prove you weren’t going to do something bad with it. Now it was just... business.

A small detail captures the mindset shift. Rakesh Mohan renamed “Foreign Collaboration Clearance” to “Foreign Technology Agreements.”

Why does this matter? Because language shapes thought. “Foreign Collaboration” implied you were collaborating with an enemy—something suspicious, requiring clearance, probably treasonous. “Foreign Technology Agreements” acknowledged reality: you were just buying technology, like any normal country does.

The socialist vocabulary had treated the outside world as a threat to be managed. Every foreigner was a potential colonizer. Every foreign investment was a potential takeover. Every import was a drain on precious resources.

The rename acknowledged that maybe, just maybe, foreigners weren’t all trying to recolonize us. Maybe they just wanted to do business. Maybe that was okay.

Reform by Stealth: Rao’s Genius

Here’s the political problem they faced: announcing a “capitalist revolution” was suicide.

Congress was officially socialist. The party constitution still genuflected to Nehru’s economic vision. The intelligentsia—JNU professors, newspaper editors, the people who shaped opinion—were overwhelmingly hostile to markets. The opposition was hunting for any excuse to bring down a minority government.

Rao’s solution was elegant: never use the word “liberalization” in public.

He presented reforms as “continuation of previous policies.” Each individual change seemed small, technical, administrative. A tweak here, an adjustment there. Nothing to see, comrades.

Singh became the public face—and the lightning rod. Let the economists take the heat. Rao worked the back channels, managed Parliament, neutralized opposition.

The reforms were implemented through ordinances and regulatory changes, not grand legislation. No big votes. No dramatic confrontations. Just quiet, relentless dismantling of the control apparatus.

As writer Gurcharan Das later put it: “We were doing reforms chupke chupke“—quietly, secretly.

Here’s how quietly: “Rao, Singh and people around them had not even convinced their own party.” The Congress rank and file didn’t understand what was happening. By the time they figured it out, it was too late. The reforms had taken root.

The Davos Dress Rehearsal

Before the triumph, there was farce. This story deserves its own section because it captures everything about how India worked—and why 1991 was such a miracle.

January 1990. One year before the crisis.

The V.P. Singh government wanted to make a splash at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Industry Minister Ajit Singh would lead a delegation, announce liberalization measures, impress the global business elite. India was finally going to show the world it was serious about reform.

The absurdity began immediately.

Because ALL foreign exchange was controlled, the Indian industrialists who wanted to attend Davos had to be approved by the Ministry of Industry before they could get foreign exchange to buy airline tickets.

Think about that. You couldn’t go to a business conference about opening India to business without government permission to leave India.

The ministry prepared extensive briefings. A strong delegation assembled. They flew to Zurich.

The punch line:

When they landed, the Indian ambassador met them at the airport—without the minister. The news: “The industry minister is not coming because the prime minister decided not to send him. The civil aviation minister Arif Mohammad Khan is coming instead.”

Civil Aviation. Had nothing to do with industry. Had no briefings. Knew nothing about the liberalization package.

“He came and of course, then he couldn’t make any announcement because he had no idea.”

The entire Davos trip was pointless. India had sent a delegation halfway around the world to say nothing.

But the work wasn’t wasted.

The reform team kept working. They prepared a comprehensive industrial policy package. Cabinet approved it. Announced in Parliament.

Then Chandra Shekhar—who opposed industrial liberalization—rebelled against V.P. Singh, and the government fell.

Chandra Shekhar became PM. Made himself Industry Minister. Came to the ministry and said something remarkable: “As you know, I oppose this, but I want your free and frank advice on what you think is correct.”

The team kept working.

When Rao came in—with A.N. Verma now as Principal Secretary—everything was ready. The 1991 reforms weren’t improvised. They were the third iteration of a plan that had survived two government collapses.

The Bhaichara Factor

One thing that made the speed possible: “There was a great degree of bhaichara—brotherhood—among civil servants.”

IAS officers, secretaries across ministries, Planning Commission officials—they got along. “We got on very well and so that also helped in doing all this in one shot.”

This matters more than it sounds. Reform requires coordination across dozens of agencies. If the Commerce Ministry hates the Finance Ministry, if the Planning Commission is at war with the RBI, nothing moves. Each agency protects its turf. Each official delays to show importance. Papers sit on desks. Approvals take months. The system grinds to a halt not through opposition but through friction.

But in 1991, the reformers trusted each other. They’d worked together for years. They shared a diagnosis. When Singh needed something done, he didn’t have to fight through layers of bureaucratic resistance—he could call someone who’d pick up the phone and say yes. When trade policy needed to change in eight hours, it could change in eight hours because the people who needed to sign off were people who trusted each other. No posturing. No territorial games. Just: “This is what we need to do. Let’s do it.”

Reform by stealth requires trust. You can’t coordinate a heist if the crew is fighting.

The Resistance

The Communist Opposition

The CPM and CPI thundered from the rooftops:

“Surrender to IMF imperialism!”

“Selling out to multinational corporations!”

“Betrayal of Nehruvian socialism!”

The standard playbook. Every reform was foreign-imposed. Every change was surrender. The rhetoric was predictable, repetitive, and—here’s the funny part—delivered by parties that were simultaneously propping up Rao’s government with their parliamentary votes.

Let that sink in. The CPM helped sustain the minority government that was dismantling everything they claimed to believe in. They attacked the policies in public while enabling them in private. They made fiery speeches about betrayal, then voted to keep the betrayers in power.

Why? Because bringing down the government would mean new elections, and they might lose seats. Principle, it turns out, has limits.

(The further irony: Kerala, the CPM’s stronghold, would benefit enormously from liberalization. Gulf remittances flowed through newly opened banking channels. IT services emerged in Trivandrum and Kochi. Tourism boomed. All enabled by the opening they had opposed with such theatrical fury. But the party line never changed. Some religions don’t do reformation. The CPM is still officially opposed to the reforms that made their state prosperous.)

The IMF Myth

“Many people think this happened only because the World Bank and IMF forced us to do it. That’s not correct.”

Rakesh Mohan is emphatic on this point. Yes, IMF conditionalities existed. Yes, the crisis created pressure. But “those conditions were not really different from what we wanted to do anyway.”

The M Document: May 1990—before any IMF involvement.

The industrial policy reforms: prepared under V.P. Singh.

The thinking: developing for a decade.

The IMF didn’t write India’s reforms. Indians did. The IMF just provided a convenient excuse—a foreign scapegoat for politicians who didn’t want to take responsibility for doing what needed to be done.

The myth persists because it’s useful. If the IMF forced us, then Indian leaders don’t have to defend the reforms. They can claim they had no choice. The reformers become victims rather than visionaries.

It’s a lie, but it’s a comfortable lie. And comfortable lies have long shelf lives.

The Protected Businesses

Not everyone who opposed reform was an ideologue. Some were just protecting their money.

Industries that benefited from monopolies didn’t want competition. License-holders who’d spent years (and bribes) acquiring permissions didn’t want those permissions to become worthless. The “briefcase economy” of rent-seekers—people whose entire business model was navigating the bureaucracy for others—faced extinction.

Some of these people would later become reform’s biggest beneficiaries. The Ambanis, famously, had mastered the License Raj; they would master liberalization too. But in 1991, the instinct was resistance.

Here’s the revealing detail. When the small-scale lobby was pressed about de-reserving the 836 items they’d monopolized, they didn’t argue what you’d expect. They didn’t say: “We want to grow. Let us expand. Remove the restrictions so we can become big.”

They argued for more protectionism. Stop the imports. Keep the foreign competition out.

“Even today that’s a problem,” Rakesh Mohan observes.

This is the License Raj’s lasting damage to the entrepreneurial mind. Forty years of controls had taught Indian business to seek protection, not opportunity. To lobby for restrictions on others, not freedom for themselves. The muscle for competing had atrophied. The muscle for rent-seeking had hypertrophied.

The Nationalists

“Foreign companies will colonize us again!”

The Swadeshi movement tried to revive. Economic sovereignty rhetoric filled the air. We’d fought the British for independence—were we now going to hand the country to Coca-Cola?

How Rao neutralized them: he never gave them a clear target. Each change seemed administrative, not ideological. No dramatic announcements, no triumphalist rhetoric. Just quiet implementation.

By the time nationalists realized what had happened, the reforms were producing results. Growth was accelerating. The argument shifted from “should we do this?” to “it’s already done, and it’s working.”

The Triumvirate

When Singh showed Rao the draft budget, Rao’s response was unexpected: be bolder.

“If this is what I wanted, why would I have selected you?”

The politician was pushing the technocrat to be more radical. This is not how it usually works. Politicians trim. Politicians hedge. Politicians worry about the next election. Rao told his Finance Minister to go further.

After becoming PM, Rao had spent the first week reading everything he could find about economics. Not summaries—actual analysis. He wanted to understand for himself. And having understood, he wanted transformation, not tinkering.

The division of labor was precise:

Rao: Political cover, parliamentary management, neutralizing opposition. The chess player who saw twelve moves ahead.

Singh: Technical design, budget presentation, public face, international credibility. The professor who could explain why this would work.

Ahluwalia: Implementation, cross-ministry coordination, blueprint. The guy who actually made things happen.

A.N. Verma (Principal Secretary): Enforcement from the PM’s office. “He was a big taskmaster. We had to do everything backed by evidence.”

Rao never publicly took credit. He used silence as strategy. Let Singh be the face. Let the opposition attack the economist. Meanwhile, Rao worked the corridors, managed the coalition, kept the government alive.

It was, as someone later put it, like a desi Ocean’s Eleven. Rao planned it, Singh fronted it, Ahluwalia executed it, and the marks—the socialist hardliners—didn’t realize they’d been robbed until the vault was empty.

Exit vs. Voice

I left India in 1984. Exit is the loudest voice.

These three men stayed. They worked within the system. They fixed it from inside.

I’ve written before about the choice between exit and voice—Albert Hirschman’s framework for how people respond to declining institutions. You can leave (exit), you can complain and organize and fight (voice), or you can stay silent and accept (loyalty). I chose exit. I got out while I could, escaped to America, built a life elsewhere.

It wasn’t noble. It was survival. The India of the early 1980s—the India I wrote about in earlier posts, with its P-forms and ration queues and 97.75% tax rates—was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe there. So I left.

Most people who stayed didn’t have my options. Family obligations. Lack of resources. No foreign university admission. No relatives abroad who could sponsor them. The exit door was closed to them. They stayed not by choice but by circumstance.

But Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia? They could have left.

Singh had a Cambridge doctorate and an Oxford DPhil. Universities around the world would have been delighted to hire him. He could have had a comfortable academic career in England or America, writing papers about Indian economic policy instead of making it. Safe. Respected. Far from the chaos.

Ahluwalia was at the World Bank. He had already exited. He was in Washington, earning good money, working with international colleagues, living the expatriate life. And he came back—returned to a country that taxed you at 97.75% and made you beg for permission to start a business. Who does that?

Rao had options too. Senior politicians always do. He could have retired quietly, written his novels, collected languages, avoided the mess.

They chose voice over exit. They chose to fight from within.

Does this mean my exit was wrong? I don’t think so. Different people, different paths. The world needs both—people who leave and build elsewhere, and people who stay and fix what’s broken. Both are valid responses to dysfunction.

What I know is this: they made exit less necessary for the next generation. The India of 2026, whatever its problems, is not a place people flee from in desperation. Young Indians today have options—stay and build, or leave and return, or leave and thrive abroad and maybe come back later. All paths are open. The choice is real now, not forced.

That’s what 1991 gave them. That’s what these three men—the ones who chose voice—created for those who came after.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Let me show you what happened. Not rhetoric. Numbers.

The transformation:

Metric19912024-25ChangeGDP$266 billion$4.3 trillion16xForex reserves$1.2 billion~$700 billion580xPoverty rate45%+<3% extreme-42 pointsMiddle class5%31%6xFDI (annual)$75 million$80+ billion1,000xPhone connections5 million1.2 billion240xCar wait time1-8 yearsDays∞Life expectancy59 years68 years+9 years

Look at that forex reserves line. From $1.2 billion to $700 billion. That’s not a typo. India went from having two weeks of import cover—two weeks from national bankruptcy—to having one of the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. The country that had to pawn its gold now sits on a mountain of reserves.

GDP growth:

- Pre-1991: 3.5% average (the “Hindu rate of growth”)

- 1990s: 6% average

- 2000s: 8%+ peaks

- Sustained high growth for three decades

The Hindu rate of growth—that bitter joke about India’s permanent underperformance—died in 1991. It took a few years for people to notice the corpse, but it was dead.

The IT miracle was impossible without 1991. Before liberalization, India couldn’t import computers freely. Every PC required permission. Every software license needed clearance. The idea of building a global software industry in a country where importing a computer was a bureaucratic odyssey—absurd.

The software industry that now employs millions, that made “Bangalore” synonymous with tech, that created Infosys and Wipro and TCS, that sends Indians to run Google and Microsoft and IBM—none of it could have happened under the License Raj.

India went from a country that couldn’t manufacture televisions to a country that writes software for the world. From a country that begged for IMF loans to a country that lends to the IMF. From a country people fled to a country people return to.

That’s the distance 1991 covered. That’s what three men—and a crisis—made possible.

The Incomplete Revolution

But let’s not pretend it was perfect. It wasn’t. The hagiography can wait for other writers. This is the India Paradox series, and we deal in complications.

The 1991 reforms were brilliant, necessary, and transformative. They were also incomplete, constrained, and in some cases actively botched. The same government that liberated industry failed to liberate labor. The same reformers who opened trade kept small-scale reservations in place for two more decades. The same team that moved with lightning speed on some fronts moved not at all on others.

Why? Because reform is politics, and politics is compromise. You can’t fight every battle. You can’t slay every dragon. You pick your fights and hope you picked the right ones.

They picked mostly right. But not entirely.

What They Didn’t Fix

Labor laws: Remained colonial-era nightmares. Hiring workers above certain thresholds triggered impossible compliance burdens, so companies stayed small. This is why India never became a manufacturing powerhouse like China.

Land acquisition: Still Byzantine. Still taking decades.

Agricultural subsidies: Preserved. Politically untouchable. Still distorting markets today.

Small-scale reservations: The 836 items reserved for small businesses? Not de-reserved for twenty years.

Bankruptcy reform: The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code came only in 2016. For 25 years, bad loans festered because there was no clean way to resolve them.

The Small-Scale Disaster

“One big omission and failure in the ‘91 reforms was indeed that we couldn’t de-reserve or release those industries from those controls.”

It took twenty years. And in those twenty years, something insane happened.

India liberalized imports. Foreign goods could come in. But Indian large-scale industry still couldn’t manufacture the same goods—apparel, toys, footwear, furniture—because those were reserved for small-scale producers.

“We allowed apparel to come in or toys to come in manufactured by large industries abroad, when we were not allowing our own large industry to produce those items.”

Foreign companies could compete in India. Indian companies could not.

“Which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”

The National Renewal Fund Betrayal

This one still hurts. This is the “what if” that haunts Indian economic history.

Singh announced a “National Renewal Fund” in his first budget. The idea was elegant: provide social security for workers displaced by reforms, so labor market reform becomes politically possible. If workers know they’ll be supported during transitions, they’re less likely to resist change. If unions can tell their members “you’ll be taken care of,” they can support reforms instead of blocking them.

It was the missing piece. Labor reform without worker support is politically impossible. Worker support without safety nets is politically impossible. The NRF was supposed to square that circle.

Rakesh Mohan and his team designed a pilot program:
- Take over the closed Ahmedabad textile mills (28 mills, all shut, workers unemployed)
- Redevelop the valuable urban land
- Use proceeds to compensate and retrain displaced workers
- Prove the concept, then scale nationally

They got the Textile Labor Association—the union founded by Mahatma Gandhi himself, with impeccable nationalist credentials—to sign off. In writing. Gandhi’s own union said yes.

They calculated the program would pay for itself. The land was valuable. The workers needed help. The math worked. No net cost to government.

Cabinet approved. The Prime Minister’s office was on board. Everything was aligned.

They went to Washington to arrange World Bank funding for the broader program.

The Ministry of Finance shot it down.

“My guru, Dr. Manmohan Singh, my friend Montek—they never explained to me why this was shot down.”

To this day, Rakesh Mohan doesn’t know why. The Finance Ministry—Singh’s own ministry—killed a program that could have transformed Indian manufacturing. And they never explained the decision. No memo. No rationale. Just... no.

If the National Renewal Fund had worked in Ahmedabad, it could have been replicated across India. Labor market reform might have followed. Companies could have hired and fired based on need, not on laws written for a different century. India might have become a manufacturing superpower like China. Millions of factory jobs might have been created.

Instead, we got thirty years of paralysis. Labor laws unchanged. Manufacturing stunted. The “demographic dividend” of young workers unable to find factory jobs because companies won’t hire workers they can’t fire.

One decision. Never explained. Consequences still unfolding.

The Exit Policy Labeling Error

“One major error we made: this got labeled as ‘exit policy.’ That’s a very threatening word.”

Language matters. “Exit policy” sounded like mass firings—throwing workers on the street. The framing terrified labor unions and gave opponents an easy target.

What it actually meant was: social security for displaced workers. Retraining programs. Safety nets. Exactly what workers should want.

But the name killed it. The concept became politically radioactive before anyone understood what it actually proposed.

This is a lesson in the importance of marketing. The best policy in the world fails if you call it something that sounds like a threat.

Why Not More?

Political capital was limited. Minority government constraints. They picked battles they could win.

“Reform by stealth” required leaving some dragons unslain. You can’t fight on every front simultaneously. You prioritize. You choose.

Ahluwalia later admitted: “We placed too much faith in markets and not enough in building institutions.”

Maybe. But institutions take decades to build, and they had months. The crisis wouldn’t wait for perfect institutional design.

They did what they could. It wasn’t everything. But it was enough to change the trajectory.

The Heist That Saved a Nation

Let me offer a metaphor.

This was an intellectual heist.

Three men walked into a crisis. They identified the vault: the License Raj, forty years of accumulated controls strangling the economy. They had the combination: the M Document, the years of preparation, the technocratic expertise, the understanding that had been building since Singh’s Oxford thesis criticized inward-looking trade policy. They assembled a crew: the bhaicharanetwork of trusted civil servants who would execute without leaking, implement without sabotaging. They planned the approach: reform by stealth, each piece small enough to avoid triggering alarms, presented as continuity rather than revolution.

And they walked out with India’s future.

The security guards—the socialist ideologues, the protected interests, the nationalist rhetoricians, the Communist parties that preached solidarity while practicing opportunism—didn’t realize what had happened until the vault was empty. By then it was too late. The reforms had worked. Growth had accelerated. Foreign investment was flowing. The IT industry was being born. A middle class was emerging.

The genie was out of the bottle. You can’t put it back.

You can’t re-impose the License Raj once people have tasted freedom. You can’t make entrepreneurs beg for permission once they’ve learned to just... start businesses. You can’t close the economy once it’s open. You can’t tell people they need government approval to buy an airline ticket once they’ve experienced buying tickets online. The comparison would be too obvious. The absurdity would be too clear.

They succeeded so thoroughly that their success became invisible. The catastrophe they prevented didn’t happen—so it’s not real to anyone. The poverty they alleviated is just the baseline now. The choices they enabled are taken for granted by people who never knew a world without those choices.

Nobody thanks the engineer for the plane that didn’t crash. Nobody builds statues to the crisis that was averted. Nobody remembers the reformers who made normal life possible.

But we should.

If you liked this, you will like my book, “The Science of Free Will” where I explore all kinds of cool stuff. Do bees have emotions? Why don’t we trade with ants? What is the future of AI?

Next: What happened to them—and why India forgot.

The India Paradox explores how the world’s most diverse democracy somehow functions despite—or because of—its beautiful contradictions. Previous posts have covered everything from wedding negotiations to reservation politics, cricket economics to exam madness, gods in the machine to the gender paradox.

[All previous posts at samirvarma.substack.com]

In 1991, I was at the University of Texas at Austin, getting my PhD in physics. Head down, working very hard, no time to think about India at all.

This was deliberate.

India was not something you thought about if you could help it. It was cringe-inducing to be identified as “Indian” abroad. When people asked where you were from, you’d say it quickly and change the subject. Or you’d emphasize that you’d left, as if to say: I escaped.

Why? Because India meant one of two things in the American imagination: starving people, or some large-scale calamity. Whenever there was a famine or flood, that’s when India made news. Riots. Assassinations. Disasters. That was it. Those were the only stories.

India was a “shithole country”—except it was MUCH worse than a shithole. It was that special category of failure: big enough that everyone knew about it, poor enough that everyone pitied it, and dysfunctional enough that no one expected anything from it. The Hindu rate of growth had guaranteed that while the rest of Asia was sprinting ahead, India was walking backward on a treadmill. Taiwan was building semiconductors. South Korea was launching Hyundai. India was still debating whether to allow a second brand of cola.

My classmates at UT would sometimes ask about India—curious, well-meaning questions. “What’s it like there?” I learned to give vague answers. How do you explain a country where you need a permit to buy an airline ticket? Where producing too many cars is a crime? Where the government controls how much steel you can use to build your house?

You don’t. You change the subject. You talk about physics instead.

So I didn’t follow the news from home. What was there to follow?

A few years later, my mother sent me one of her characteristically silly letters with some line about “when will you come to India to contribute to nation building?” In Hindi, we’d say kehne ki baat hai—said because it sounds good to say, not because she meant it. Said for effect, not reality.

I didn’t respond. By then, I’d learned that things had certainly bottomed. But I didn’t know that something remarkable had happened in 1991. That three men I’d never heard of had prevented a catastrophe I’d never imagined.

This post is about those three men.

The Night India Hit Bottom

May 1991. Mumbai. Night.

While politicians slept, trucks were loading gold—67 tonnes of it—at the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in South Bombay. Essentially all of India’s gold reserves. The trucks drove 35 kilometers to the airport under armed guard. There, the gold was loaded onto chartered cargo planes.

Commercial airlines had refused the job. Too risky. Too desperate.

Between May 21 and 31, four flights carried India’s treasure out of the country: 20 tonnes to UBS in Switzerland, 47 tonnes to the Bank of England in London. The RBI had to charter something called “Heavy Lift Cargo Airlines” because nobody else would touch this operation.

The gold was collateral. India was pawning its jewelry.

If you want to understand what this meant culturally, consider: In India, gold isn’t just an asset. It’s sacred. The goddess Lakshmi is depicted sitting on gold coins. Indian weddings feature kilograms of gold because “Does she have gold?” is the first question asked about brides. Women remove their gold only at death or divorce.

And here was the nation shipping its treasure to its former colonizer. At night. In secret. Like a family selling heirlooms to pay the landlord.

When the news leaked, there was public outrage: “We have pawned our mother’s jewelry!”

The operation raised $600 million.

It bought India about three weeks.

Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $1.2 billion—enough for roughly fifteen days of imports. Fifteen days until the food shipments stopped. Fifteen days until the oil stopped. Fifteen days until a nuclear-armed nation of 900 million people defaulted on its debts.

What happens when a country that size defaults? What happens when the imports stop?

We know what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. India was heading there—fast.

The Most Important People You’ve Never Heard Of

Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.

Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.

Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.

That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.

The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history.

For comparison, consider what else the 20th century offered:

The Marshall Plan? That rebuilt already-developed European economies devastated by war. Impressive, but that’s reconstruction, not construction. Europe knew how to be rich; it just needed to recover.

China’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping? Comparable scale, yes. But achieved through authoritarianism—Tiananmen Square, the one-child policy, the suppression of Uyghurs. The human rights costs were staggering.

The Green Revolution? Prevented famine, absolutely. But it didn’t create sustained growth. It kept people from dying; it didn’t lift them into the middle class.

The combined efforts of the UN, World Bank, and IMF over 75 years? Arguably less total impact than what these three men set in motion.

Nothing else comes close to democratic poverty alleviation at this scale.

And here’s the thing about crises: they don’t automatically produce reform. Crisis alone doesn’t fix anything.

Argentina has had crisis after crisis—and keeps defaulting, keeps returning to the same failed policies. Greece in 2010 accepted bailouts, changed almost nothing structural, and remains economically fragile. Venezuela’s oil crises led not to reform but to doubling down on socialism, and now people eat from garbage trucks.

The Soviet Union faced a crisis and collapsed. It didn’t reform. It disintegrated.

India could have gone any of those directions. What makes these three men remarkable isn’t that they faced a crisis—it’s that they converted crisis into transformation. That almost never happens.

And because it worked—because the catastrophe was prevented—nobody remembers.

You can’t feel gratitude for the plane that didn’t crash. You can’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster you never experienced. The counterfactual isn’t real to anyone.

This is why India forgot them. But that’s for Part 3. First, let’s understand what they were saving us from.

The Architects of Disaster

Before we meet the heroes, we need to understand the system they inherited—and the people who built it.

Here’s something nobody tells you: many of India’s socialist controls didn’t originate with Nehru or with Marx. They came from the Defense of India Rules of 1939—wartime emergency measures the British enacted when World War II broke out.

Think about that. The British needed to control a vast subcontinent with a tiny number of administrators. As one economist put it, “It is a miracle that such a small number of Britishers controlled this large territory.” The entire colonial civil service was built around control—not development, not prosperity, but control. That was literally the job description.

After independence, we didn’t dismantle this colonial apparatus. We expanded it.

Between 1948 and 1952, independent India passed the Imports and Exports Control Act, the Industrial Development and Regulation Act, the Control of Capital Issues, and more. We took the Raj’s emergency wartime measures and made them permanent peacetime policy.

The irony is too perfect: we fought colonialism, won our freedom, kept the colonizer’s control mechanisms, and applied them to ourselves with even greater enthusiasm than the British had.

The British controlled India because they wanted to extract wealth. We controlled India because we thought control was the same as development.

The Statistician Who Strangled Growth

P.C. Mahalanobis (1893-1972) was genuinely brilliant. The Mahalanobis distance—a statistical measure he invented—is still used in cluster analysis worldwide. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, which remains a world-class institution. All legitimate achievements.

Then Nehru, his friend, put him in charge of economic planning. This was like asking a chess grandmaster to run a hospital because he was good at thinking ahead.

Mahalanobis designed the Second Five Year Plan (1956-61), which became the template for India’s economic disaster. His “Mahalanobis model” was an Indianized version of the Soviet approach: emphasize heavy industry, state control, import substitution. Central planning by expert statisticians who would calculate exactly what the economy needed.

In other words, exactly what Friedrich Hayek had warned against in The Road to Serfdom: the fatal conceit that brilliant people could plan an economy better than markets could coordinate it.

The model “provided the statistical foundations for state-directed investments and created the intellectual underpinnings of the License Raj.”

The same mathematical mind that created an elegant statistical measure created an elegant economic catastrophe. Mahalanobis was a genius. His planning model strangled Indian enterprise for forty years. Both statements are true. Welcome to the India Paradox.

The Communist Who Infiltrated Congress

Mohan Kumaramangalam (1916-1973) had quite the resume: Eton-educated, Cambridge Union president, Communist Party of India member.

Then he joined the Congress Party.

If that sounds like a contradiction, it wasn’t—it was strategy. The “Kumaramangalam thesis” was explicit: communists should infiltrate Congress from within, pushing it leftward. It worked brilliantly. An old Etonian communist became a minister in Indira Gandhi’s government and drove the nationalization wave of the early 1970s—coal, steel, copper, insurance. One industry after another brought under government control.

His first act as Minister of Steel and Mines: nationalize the mining industry. Because of course.

He died in a plane crash in 1973, before he could see the full consequences of his policies. Some people have all the luck—they get to start fires and leave before the building burns down.

Why Nobody Noticed the System Was Failing

Here’s the puzzle: India’s intellectuals visited the Soviet Union constantly throughout this period. They went on press junkets, government trips, academic exchanges. They came back impressed. They wrote glowing reports.

Nobody mentioned the shortages.

Years later, one economist finally put it together. He remembered that his friends in Moscow would ask visitors to bring soap and toothpaste. “Really simple things. You can’t understand why they don’t have access to that.”

But he didn’t connect the dots at the time. “In hindsight we completely understand the shortages were pervasive, even for the elites. We didn’t put it together because everything looked so good.”

Only after 1991, when he drove through East Germany, did he see the trick: “You go through a city and the main road looked very nice. You just went one block in—it was falling apart.”

The Soviets had Potemkin-villaged their own cities. And India’s intellectuals had been fooled by careful staging for forty years.

They couldn’t see the failure because they were never shown it. And because they couldn’t see it, they kept recommending the same failed model.

The Labyrinth

Let me describe what it actually took to start a business in pre-1991 India. This comes from Rakesh Mohan, who later helped dismantle the system—after first having to map its full horror.

To start ANY industry, you needed:

1. Industrial license from the Ministry of Industry (determining what you could make, how much, and where)

2. DGTD clearance—the Directorate General of Technical Development had to approve your technology

3. Import licenses for machinery (capital goods)

4. Import licenses for raw materials (intermediate goods)

5. A commitment to show how your imports would decrease over the next 5-7 years

6. Foreign Collaboration clearance for any foreign technology

7. Control of Capital Issues clearance from the Ministry of Finance if you wanted to raise money from the public

8. MRTP clearance from the Ministry of Company Affairs if your company was above a certain size

And THEN—only then—could you go to the Reserve Bank of India and apply for foreign exchange.

Each of these approvals could take months. Years. Each had its own forms, its own procedures, its own officials who needed to be satisfied. Each was an opportunity for delay, for obstruction, for the peculiar Indian art of the bribe disguised as “facilitation.”

And if anything changed—if you wanted to add a product line, expand capacity, use a different raw material—you started over. New applications. New committees. New delays.

“In a sense,” Mohan observed, “it is a miracle that we had as much industrial growth as we did.”

It gets better. There was a cement controller. A coal controller. A steel controller. To build a house, you needed a cement permit to get access to cement. Then a steel permit to get steel. This didn’t get decontrolled until 1981-82.

The Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices controlled cement prices, steel prices, almost all drug prices, sugar prices—”most things, actually.”

The Permit Was Harder Than the Cash

Here’s a story that captures the era perfectly.

To buy an airline ticket for international travel, you needed something called a P-form—a permit for the corresponding foreign exchange.

In 1964, when Rakesh Mohan (then a schoolboy) was going to England on a scholarship, his father went through the bureaucratic nightmare of getting the P-form approved. Finally, success! They rushed to the Air India travel agent, papers in hand, ready to book the ticket.

His father realized he had forgotten to bring actual money.

Fortunately, his uncle happened to have cash with him.

Think about that. The permit was harder to arrange than the cash.

This was the system. This was the India we built.

The Crime of Success

When you got an industrial license, your capacity was controlled. You got a license to produce, say, 10,000 cars per year. And here’s the thing:

It was a crime to produce more than your licensed capacity.

You could go to jail for making too many cars. For being too productive. For meeting too much demand.

Some of the famous “scandals” involving Reliance Industries in the late 1980s were about... producing too much. They exceeded their licensed capacity. That was the crime. Not fraud, not theft—success.

Remember: as late as 1980, India produced 30,000 cars annually. For 700 million people. There was a seven-to-eight-year waiting list for a Maruti. You paid bribes to move up the queue. And that was the modern India—the liberalized India after Maruti was introduced.

The Walmart Test

By the late 1980s, there were 836 items reserved for small-scale industries. This meant only businesses below a certain size could legally manufacture them.

What items? According to one economist: “Almost everything you buy in Walmart. Whether it is toys, whether it is furniture, apparel, footwear, many plastic items, cutlery. Basically, almost anything you use in the home.”

The logic was that large firms would outcompete small firms, destroying employment. So we banned large firms from making consumer goods.

The result: India couldn’t manufacture what its people wanted to consume. We couldn’t make toys for our children or shirts for ourselves—not at scale, not efficiently.

This is why the Raymond’s paradox exists today, which we’ll get to in Part 3. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Hindu Rate of Growth

The results of all this brilliant planning:

• India: 3.5% annual GDP growth

• Pakistan: 5%

• Indonesia: 6%

• Thailand: 7%

• Taiwan: 8%

• South Korea: 9%

Economist Raj Krishna coined the term “Hindu rate of growth”—a joke so bitter it stuck. Only those expecting several cycles of reincarnation, he suggested, would tolerate such progress.

South Korea started the 1960s at roughly India’s income level. By 1991, Koreans were six times richer. Same starting point. Different policies. Different outcomes.

The Committees That Recommended More of the Same

Here’s the most infuriating part: India’s policy establishment knew the system wasn’t working.

Throughout the License Raj period, the government commissioned committee after committee to examine the control system. These committees would meticulously document all the problems—the delays, the corruption, the strangled enterprise, the perverse incentives. Brilliant reports. Devastating diagnoses.

Then, in their recommendations, they would call for... tighter controls.

“Very interesting,” one economist recalled. “They documented very well, actually... but most of them after having documented the problems, they would then recommend a tightening to say that, ‘Look, yes, these are problems, but we should function much better and more efficiently in doing these things.’”

The intellectual establishment couldn’t imagine dismantling controls. They could only imagine better controls. More efficient strangulation. More scientific suffocation.

Document the problems. Recommend more of the same. Repeat.

For forty years.

I’ve written before about my mother standing in the ration queue with her Lincoln’s Inn credentials, clutching her ration card like everyone else. The sugar full of stones. The kerosene smell. A UK-educated barrister who argued before the Supreme Court, waiting for her allotment of cooking oil like a supplicant.

This is what they were saving us from.

The Polyglot Novelist: P.V. Narasimha Rao (1921-2004)

Now let’s meet the men who fixed it.

Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao was born in 1921 in a tiny village near Karimnagar, Telangana—”a dusty speck in British India,” as one biographer put it. Farming family. Rural poverty. Colonial rule. Not the typical background for a revolutionary.

His education was voracious. Degrees from Bombay and Nagpur in arts and law. But here’s the absurd detail: 17 languages.

Nine Indian: Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil.

Eight foreign: English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Persian, Greek, Latin.

As one biographer noted: “While he spoke in 17 languages, the joke was he knew how to be silent in 17 languages.” Whenever Rao lost political power, he would go to JNU—Jawaharlal Nehru University—to learn another language. He picked up Spanish this way.

He was also a novelist. He translated Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” into Telugu. He wrote a 767-page roman à clef about Indian politics called The Insider. The reviews were... not kind. The Hindu called it “an 833-page infliction.” But he left a personal library of 10,000 books.

Here’s the Dave Barry detail: in his 60s, Rao taught himself COBOL, BASIC, and Unix programming. At 80, when doctors prescribed stress balls for his arthritic fingers, he typed documents instead.

Imagine your grandfather learning to code. Then becoming prime minister. Then saving the economy.

But don’t mistake the intellectual for a softie. Before politics, Rao trained as a guerrilla fighter against the Nizam of Hyderabad. On August 15, 1947—Indian Independence Day—while the rest of India celebrated, Rao was still fighting in a forest, evading an army with orders to shoot freedom fighters on sight.

This was not a soft man. He’d survived worse than opposition MPs and angry editorials. He could survive this too.

The crucial character insight comes from his biographer Vinay Sitapati: “He didn’t have strong views on the economy. To the extent he had socialist views, basically he flipped on a dime in June 1991.”

This wasn’t weakness—it was intellectual honesty. Rao read the evidence, understood the emergency, and changed his mind. In Indian politics, where ideological rigidity is often mistaken for principle, this was almost unique.

What Rao DID have was intellectual curiosity and tactical genius. After becoming prime minister, he spent the first week reading everything he could find about economics. Not political briefings—actual economic analysis. He wanted to understand for himself, not be told what to think. Then he assembled exactly the right team.

His political style was distinctive: silence. He rarely gave interviews. He never explained himself. He let his opponents wonder what he was thinking while he outmaneuvered them. “Silent Rao,” they called him—sometimes as criticism, sometimes as grudging respect.

And here’s the key detail: Rao had been the Industry Minister before becoming Prime Minister. He knew exactly what powers he was giving up.

“It is unlikely,” observed one economist who worked with him, “that had he been industry minister, that he would have agreed to give up all these powers.” But because he’d moved up—because he was now PM—he could dismantle the empire he’d once ruled.

This is not how it usually works. Usually, people protect their former fiefdoms. Rao didn’t.

The definitive assessment: “Had Manmohan Singh not become Finance Minister, liberalization would likely still have happened. Had Rao not become Prime Minister, India would be a different country.”

The Partition Refugee: Manmohan Singh (1932-2024)

Manmohan Singh was born in 1932 in Gah village, Punjab—now Pakistan. His father was a clerk for dry fruit importers.

The absurd detail: young “Mohna” (his childhood nickname) had pockets perpetually stuffed with dried fruits from his father’s trade. Childhood friends remembered a shy, brilliant boy. When he hesitated to join games, they would literally throw him into the village pond to loosen him up.

Then came Partition.

Singh was 15 when the telegram arrived: “Mother Safe, Father Killed.”

His grandfather Sant Singh had been murdered in the violence. The family house was burned. His matriculation exam results from Peshawar were never declared—riots had consumed the examination board. He had to retake the test a year later.

Years afterward, when Pakistani leaders invited him to visit his ancestral village, Singh declined.

“Yadan bariyaan talkh hun,” he said in Punjabi. The memories are very bitter.

In 2008, a childhood friend—Raja Mohammad Ali—visited him in Delhi, bringing soil and water from their village. Singh gave him a turban, shawl, and watches. He wrote a letter in Urdu expressing gratitude. He received famous Chakwali shoes from villagers. His doctors warned against eating the local cheese dish, but he couldn’t resist.

He never returned to Gah. The memories remained too bitter.

What he did instead was study with ferocious intensity.

Panjab University: First in BA Economics, first in MA Economics.

Cambridge (1955-57): The only First in economics that year. He won the Adam Smith Prize—previously won by John Maynard Keynes himself.

The poverty detail: he took cold showers in bitter Cambridge winters rather than pay for hot water. He lived on the cheapest meals available. He walked instead of taking buses. Everything saved was everything earned. For the rest of his life, he wore Cambridge blue turbans as tribute to those years—a Sikh refugee from a destroyed village, honoring the English university that had recognized his brilliance when no one else would.

Oxford: DPhil.

His intellectual formation was complex. He studied under Joan Robinson, the left-Keynesian who openly admired Maoist China. “She made me think the unthinkable,” he later said. But he was more influenced by Nicholas Kaldor, who demonstrated that “capitalism could be made to work.”

Here’s the twist: Singh’s Oxford doctoral thesis actually criticized India’s inward-looking trade policy—thirty years before he dismantled it. He later declared “great admiration” for Margaret Thatcher.

The seeds of 1991 were planted in those cold Cambridge rooms.

“People say I was an accidental Prime Minister,” Singh observed near the end of his life, “but I was also an accidental Finance Minister.” Rao picked him after others declined.

Why Singh was essential, according to those who worked with him: “The great advantage of Manmohan Singh being there as finance minister” was that he didn’t need to be briefed. When a typical politician becomes minister, civil servants have to explain everything from scratch. The minister then has to decide: Do I trust these guys? Are they ideologically motivated? Can I take this risk?

Singh didn’t need any of that. Commerce Ministry, Finance Ministry, Reserve Bank of India, Chief Economic Adviser, Planning Commission—he’d worked in all of them. “All this was totally internalized.”

“I may give him advice,” one economist recalled, “but he knows it anyway.”

The World Bank Prodigy: Montek Singh Ahluwalia (1943-)

Montek Singh Ahluwalia was also born in what became Pakistan—Rawalpindi, 1943. His father was a clerk.

Two of the three architects were refugees from Partition. Both were Sikhs.

The irony writes itself: Partition created the trauma that created the reformers.

Ahluwalia’s education was stellar even by Indian standards: Delhi School of Economics, then Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then President of the Oxford Union debating society. The Oxford Union is where ambitious young Brits practice becoming prime ministers. Ahluwalia didn’t just participate—he ran the place. This man could argue anyone into the ground, and frequently did.

At 28, he became the youngest Division Chief in World Bank history, heading the Income Distribution Division. He spent eleven years in Washington, absorbing international development economics, watching the East Asian miracles up close—Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. He saw what worked. He saw what India was missing.

Then he did something unusual: he came home.

Most Indians with his credentials stayed abroad. The brain drain was real—why return to a country that taxed you at 97.75% and made you beg for permission to start a business? But Ahluwalia came back. He wanted to fix the system, not escape it.

In May 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh asked Ahluwalia a simple question: Why had Southeast Asian countries outperformed India?

Ahluwalia’s answer: “Because they had been much bolder in undertaking structural reforms.”

Singh asked him to write a paper.

One month later, Ahluwalia produced “Restructuring India’s Industrial and Trade Policies.” It leaked to the press and was dubbed the “M Document” (M for Montek).

This document matters enormously, for one reason: it proves the 1991 reforms were home-grown, not IMF-imposed.

The M Document was written in May 1990—a full year before the crisis. Before any IMF arrangement was contemplated. The blueprint existed long before the emergency.

When crisis hit, the reformers weren’t improvising. They were executing a plan that had been developed, debated, and refined over years. Ahluwalia later claimed they changed India’s trade policy in eight hours—because the thinking was already done.

The self-effacement was characteristic. “He [Manmohan Singh] was the principal architect,” Ahluwalia always insisted. His 2020 memoir is literally titled Backstage. He could have called it I Saved India. He called it Backstage.

The technocrat’s curse: politicians get credit, policy drafters get footnotes.

The Perfect Storm

By June 1991, everything was collapsing simultaneously.

May 21: Rajiv Gandhi assassinated by a suicide bomber during an election campaign in Tamil Nadu. A woman approached him with a garland, bent to touch his feet in traditional greeting, and detonated a bomb strapped to her body. The charismatic leader who was supposed to carry India into the 21st century—dead at 46.

Political chaos followed. Congress had no clear leader. The election had to continue despite the trauma. The party stumbled into power more from sympathy votes than mandate.

Rao emerges as a compromise candidate. He’s 70 years old, seen as a transitional figure—a caretaker who would keep the seat warm for the next generation. He leads a minority government with no mandate for anything, let alone revolution. Most observers expected paralysis, drift, more of the same.

Meanwhile, the external shocks keep coming:

The Soviet Union is collapsing—India’s largest trading partner and geopolitical ally, gone. Forty years of carefully cultivated relationships with Moscow, suddenly worthless. The trade credits that had kept India afloat, vanishing.

The Gulf War has spiked oil prices by 130%—from $15 to $35 per barrel. India imported nearly all its oil. Every dollar increase meant billions more in the import bill.

Moody’s has downgraded India’s credit rating. Commercial lending is frozen.

The World Bank has discontinued assistance, pending reforms India had always refused.

Foreign debt: $72 billion.

Foreign reserves: $1.2 billion.

Inflation: 17%.

The gold has been airlifted. The IMF emergency loan of $2.2 billion has been secured—barely, humiliatingly, with conditions attached.

Every external lifeline is snapping at once. It’s not one crisis—it’s a cascade, each failure amplifying the others.

Rao makes his move. He appoints Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister and gives him one instruction:

Fix this.

Then he provides political cover.

The famous exchange, as Rao appointed Singh: “If the reforms succeed, we both will claim the credit. If they fail, I will blame you and sack you.”

He was laughing when he said it. But only partly.

The Precipice

So there they stood.

The precipice was visible. A Hindu politician from a dusty village in Telangana who spoke 17 languages and wrote novels nobody wanted to read. A Sikh economist from a village that no longer existed, who took cold showers at Cambridge and kept dried fruits in his pockets. Another Sikh economist who’d been the youngest division chief in World Bank history and wrote a memo that would change a country.

Three men. All products of a civilization that absorbs contradictions—that somehow fits Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims and Christians and Jains and Buddhists and Parsis into one impossibly diverse democracy. A civilization where, as I’ve written before, any statement you make is true, AS IS its opposite.

India was bankrupt. The gold was gone. The Soviet model they’d followed for forty years was collapsing in real time. Every assumption that had guided Indian economic policy since independence was being revealed as catastrophically wrong.

The intelligentsia still believed in socialism. The party cadres still worshipped Nehru’s memory. The opposition would scream about selling out to foreign powers. The bureaucracy would resist losing its control. The protected industries would fight to keep their monopolies.

But the three men had something their opponents didn’t: a plan. The M Document—the years of thinking—the technocratic expertise accumulated across decades. They had political cover—Rao’s tactical genius, his willingness to let Singh take the heat while he worked the back channels. They had credibility—Singh’s Cambridge pedigree, Ahluwalia’s World Bank experience, Rao’s decades of political survival.

And they had something else: the crisis itself. The one thing that could break through forty years of socialist inertia. The emergency that made the previously impossible suddenly necessary.

Every other attempt at reform had been blocked, delayed, diluted, destroyed. But you can’t block the guy who’s keeping you from defaulting. You can’t delay the man who’s preventing famine. You can’t dilute the reforms when the alternative is collapse.

The crisis was terrible. The crisis was also the only opening they would ever get.

They were about to jump—and take India with them.

If you liked this, you will like my book, “The Science of Free Will” where I explore all kinds of cool stuff. Do bees have emotions? Why don’t we trade with ants? What is the future of AI?

Next: How they jumped.

The India Paradox is a series exploring how the world’s most diverse democracy somehow functions despite—or perhaps because of—its beautiful contradictions. Previous posts have covered everything from wedding negotiations to reservation politics, cricket economics to exam madness, gods in the machine to the gender paradox.

[All previous posts available at samirvarma.substack.com]