India Uncut - Published by Amit Varma

Author: Jitin Nair

Our police are stuck in the 19th century, with a colonial mentality that treats all citizens as criminals by default, especially if poor.
In this fog of war, though, who can master the calculus of human life and figure out whether a particular measure will save more lives from Covid-19 now or cost more lives in the long run because of economic disruption and unintended consequences?
‘Flailing state’ is a term that was coined by the economist Lant Pritchett in a famous 2009 paper. It describes a state whose “head is not reliably connected to the arms and legs of implementation.”
Our founders did much that we should be thankful for – but they got this wrong. They designed a state to rule the people, not to serve them.
Our young are wasting away, and our jobs crisis is turning our demographic dividend into a bug, not a feature.
All this, 73 years after Independence, is not because of a virus. It is caused by bad governance, and a failing state whose failure was written into its DNA.
We have normalised the failures of the state. We have become blind believers in the Religion of Government. We look to mai-baap for all solutions, and do not question it. We have allowed ourselves to become subjects, not citizens.
To begin with, I have a visceral objection to the term ‘alternative medicine’. Most of the quackery we put in that category is not medicine at all.
And here you say, but so much of what I call quackery seems to work. Why so? Let me offer two reasons.
The first, as is commonly known, is the placebo effect.
If the medication outperforms the placebo, we know it works. No homeopathic medicine has ever passed such a test.
A second reason for why quackery seems to work is regression to the mean.
There are two problems with using alternative medicines. One, what economists would call the opportunity cost: you are not using medicine that actually works, and that could kill the patient.
Two, people who believe in such treatments can become complacent about the danger they are facing.
What can you do about it, you ask? Well, first, be a skeptic. Examine every assertion, read up on any subject on which you have an opinion.
Two great books I recommend on this subject are Bad Science by Ben Goldacre and Trick or Treatment by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst.
There is a delightful saying in Hindi that goes, ‘Ulta chor kotwal ko daante.’ The thief accuses the policeman. I am reminded of this every time someone in government uses the term ‘predatory pricing’, as if lowering prices for consumers is a terrible thing.
Here’s the typical narrative that has been built around predatory pricing. A big company comes into a market and lowers prices. Sometimes it willingly incurs losses while doing so. This drives its competitors out of the market, as they can’t match those low prices. Local jobs are lost. Having thus secured a monopoly, the big company raises prices. Consumers suffer. Lost jobs remain lost. This narrative is simple, and thus attractive. But it is wrong at several levels.
One, assume that a company does manage to drive all its competitors out, and is a monopoly. It then raises prices higher than what they were at the start. Immediately, competitors will rush in attracted by the high prices.
Yes, Jio cornered a big chunk of the telecom market by lowering prices – but prices remain below earlier levels, and their ‘predatory pricing’ has empowered millions of ordinary Indians.
Two, we often define monopolies too narrowly. For example, Facebook and Twitter may seem to be monopolies if we define their market as a certain kind of social media. (Personal updates and micro-blogging respectively.) But they are both competing with the millions of ways in which people can spend their time.
Three, people talk about the local jobs lost when competitors shut down, but that is the Seen Effect. The Unseen Effect is that the money saved by consumers goes back into the economy and generates more jobs.
When the government gets in the way of anything that benefits consumers, such as ‘predatory pricing’ or ‘dumping’ or international trade, think about what it is doing. It is redistributing wealth from ordinary people to rich interest groups. It is taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
Why is there so much rhetoric against ‘predatory pricing’ then? Politics. It is in the interest of those small retailers affected by Amazon to get together and lobby the government to help them. This comes at the cost of the common citizen. Small retailers form a large part of the base of multiple political parties in the country. They contribute election funds to those parties. Obviously, a quid pro quo is expected. It comes at our cost. The campaign against ‘predatory pricing’ seems like a trivial thing to outrage about. But it is one among countless illustrations of the cancer at the heart of our democracy: the vicious circle of money and power in politics. Money chases power so that power can generate money. That happens at our expense. That is why we should beware of the predatory state. 2020 Enabled by technology, young Indians show what it means to be a citizen 22 DECEMBER, 2019 BY AMIT VARMA This is the 28th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India. What does it mean to be a citizen? I have had reason to think a lot about that term recently, in all its different shades of meaning. At one level, citizenship is a legal status. Our government has tried to sharpen its definition with the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). At another level, citizenship denotes a package of rights that we possess, and a set of duties we have towards society and our fellow citizens. We saw
Why is there so much rhetoric against ‘predatory pricing’ then? Politics. It is in the interest of those small retailers affected by Amazon to get together and lobby the government to help them. This comes at the cost of the common citizen. Small retailers form a large part of the base of multiple political parties in the country. They contribute election funds to those parties. Obviously, a quid pro quo is expected. It comes at our cost.
But it is one among countless illustrations of the cancer at the heart of our democracy: the vicious circle of money and power in politics. Money chases power so that power can generate money. That happens at our expense. That is why
But it is one among countless illustrations of the cancer at the heart of our democracy: the vicious circle of money and power in politics. Money chases power so that power can generate money. That happens at our expense. That is why we should beware of the predatory state.
I have written before on these pages about the role that social media has played in dividing society and polarising our discourse.
One, innovations like the Facebook ‘like’ button and the Twitter retweet increased the ways in which we could be validated online, one notification at a time.
Two, this led to what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls group polarisation, as we divided into ideological tribes with firm boundaries.
Three, the innate bigotry and sexism of our society was validated by the discovery that many others shared these traits, which led to what sociologist Timur Kuran called preference cascades. We could express these feelings openly, instead of being sheepish about them. Our politics became polarised, and the rise
Three, the innate bigotry and sexism of our society was validated by the discovery that many others shared these traits, which led to what sociologist Timur Kuran called preference cascades. We could express these feelings openly, instead of being sheepish about them.
The state has fought back. It has fought back with lathis. It has fought back with disinformation. It has the legal monopoly on violence, and more coercive force than the people at large. But coercion only gets you so far.
There is a preference cascade in play, to use Kuran’s words, to show that our unity comes not in spite of our diversity but because of it.
It is a trivial fact that many of our finest thinkers need to go abroad to reach their full potential. Why is this so?
‘The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development’, Kremer’s seminal 1993 paper, is packed with insights on economic development, inequality, the market for talent – and the phenomenon of brain drain. The paper gets its title from the 10-dollar O-ring that caused the failure of the US$ 3.2 billion Challenger Mission in 1986.
Kremer looks at the interplay between talent, productivity and wages.
The upshot, in Kremer’s words, is that “small differences in worker skill create large differences in productivity and wages.”
What are the implications of this? One, talent tends to congregate in clusters. Two, capital chases quality, and thus gravitates to the clusters of talent. Three, the rewards for talent are outsize.
The O-Ring Theory explains why elite universities like Harvard draw the best students, and why industry pays a premium for students from there.
What are the lessons this has for Indian policy makers? I can think of at least three. One, make it easy for private players to invest in education. We cannot replicate an education ecosystem like that of the US overnight, and we certainly cannot design it in a top-down way.
Two, in a broader sense of our whole economy, since capital already has incentives to be elsewhere (where the skill is), create other incentives to draw it here. This is why ease of doing business, the rule of law and clear tax laws are so important.
Three, minimise trade restrictions.
The O-Ring Theory explains the inequalities that exist between countries. One way of lessening the impact of that is through free trade, with positive-sum transactions that leave both sides better off. This is why, as Kremer says in his paper, “trade restrictions cause large welfare losses.”
I would also urge you to check out Banerjee’s early theoretical work, some of which is beautiful for its clarity and elegance. His papers on herd behaviour and the propagation of rumours explain a lot about our modern times
World War 1 had just ended, and the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, was meant to make the loser pay for starting the war. Germany would have to disarm, give up territory and pay reparations to the winners. The amount came to 132 billion marks – which would be US$442 billion today.
Germany did not have anywhere close to that kind of money. Their only way out was to print the money.
Germany printed so much of it that it led to hyperinflation: a loaf of bread that cost the equivalent of 26 cents in 1919 rose to US$100 billion by the end of 1923.
Out of the resultant bitterness and anger rose Nazism, Adolf Hitler and the Second World War: the unintended consequences of a poor treaty and bad economics.
John Maynard Keynes wrote a book called The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, in which he explained why those clauses of the treaty would lead to disaster.
There are two points I want to make in telling you this story. One, economics has humanitarian consequences. Two, metrics matter.
A group of economists led by Simon Kuznets got to work, and the metric was formalised just as the Second World War approached. Keynes approved, as the title of his 1940 pamphlet indicated: ‘How to Pay for the War.’
Any metric can be gamed, and there were ample geopolitical incentives to game the GDP: a high GDP could get you entry into exclusive groups like G8 and G20, and a low GDP could get you more foreign aid.
Its pioneer, Kuznets, felt that any measure of national income should measure welfare and not just output. He was opposed to government spending being counted in GDP, but was over-ruled by the US administration.
Besides this, there is the question of what GDP cannot measure, summed up so well by the Widower Paradox: If a widower marries his domestic help, and thus stops paying her, the nation’s GDP goes down.
In India, GDP measurement has been shady. Firstly, the informal sector is most of our economy, and measuring this is hard. Secondly, the methodology the government uses is opaque, even arbitrary, and cannot be independently verified.
Today, we know that every one percent of GDP growth takes over two million people out of poverty. Thus, a falling growth rate is not just an economic problem but a moral failure.
The everyday principle here is this: price controls always lead to shortages. And yet, our politicians do not understand this.
The price cap will not offer any additional benefit to consumers – and will reduce the choices available to them.
Why, then, do politicians keep imposing price caps? The cynical view is that politicians don’t care about whether price caps work economically, as long as they work politically.
In one-day cricket, thus, two things have happened. One, there is better strategic understanding about the value of aggression. Two, batsmen are better equipped to act on the aggressive imperative.
Bowlers have reacted to this with greater aggression on their part, and this ongoing dialogue has been fascinating.
My column today is a tale of two satyagrahas. Both involve farmers, technology and the freedom of choice.
As the 1990s came to an end, cotton farmers across India were in distress. Pests known as bollworms were ravaging crops across the country. Farmers had to use increasing amounts of pesticide to keep them at bay. The costs of the pesticide and the amount of labour involved made it unviable – and often, the crops would fail anyway.
Then, technology came to the rescue. The farmers heard of Bt Cotton, a genetically modified type of cotton that kept these pests away, and was being used around the world. But they were illegal in India, even though no bad effects had ever been recorded.
As 2002 began, all cotton crops in Gujarat failed – except the 10,000 hectares that had Bt Cotton. The government did not care about the failed crops. They cared about the ‘illegal’ ones. They ordered all the Bt Cotton crops to be destroyed. It was time for a satyagraha – and not just in Gujarat. The late Sharad Joshi, leader of the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, took around 10,000 farmers to Gujarat to stand with their fellows there.
There are three things I would like to point out here. One, the lifting of the ban transformed cotton farming in India. Over 90% of Indian farmers now use Bt Cotton. India has become the world’s largest producer of cotton, moving ahead of China.
Two, GMO crops have become standard across the world.
The humanitarian benefits have been massive: Golden Rice, a variety of rice packed with minerals and vitamins, has prevented blindness in countless new-born kids since it was introduced in the Philippines.
The science may be settled, but the politics is not. The government still bans some types of GMO seeds, such as Bt Brinjal, which was developed by an Indian company called Mahyco, and used successfully in Bangladesh.
More crucially, a variety called HT Bt Cotton, which fights weeds, is also banned. Weeding takes up to 15% of a farmer’s time, and often makes farming unviable.
Part of the reason Trump came to power is that he provided simple and wrong answers for people’s problems. He responded to the growing jobs crisis in middle America with two explanations: one, foreigners are coming and taking your jobs; two, your jobs are being shipped overseas.
Both explanations are wrong but intuitive, and they worked for Trump. (He is stupid enough that he probably did not create these narratives for votes but actually believes them.)
Both explanations are wrong but intuitive, and they worked for Trump.
Contrary to the fulminations of the economically illiterate, all tariffs are bad, without exception.
Every tariff is a tax on your own people. And every intervention in markets amounts to a distribution of wealth from the people at large to specific interest groups. (In other words, from the poor to the rich.)
That quintessential American product, the iPhone, uses parts from 43 countries. As local products rise in price because of expensive foreign parts, prices rise, demand goes down, jobs are lost, and everyone is worse off.
Trump keeps talking about how he wants to ‘win’ at trade, but trade is not a zero-sum game. The most misunderstood term in our times is probably ‘trade-deficit’.
The most misunderstood term in our times is probably ‘trade-deficit’.
I run a trade deficit with my domestic help and my local grocery store. I buy more from them than they do from me. That is fine, because we all benefit. It is a win-win game. Similarly, trade between countries is really trade between the people of both countries – and people trade with each other because they are both better off.
When all political parties agree on something, you know you might have a problem.
Contrary to popular belief, our population is not a problem. It is our greatest strength.
A 2007 study by Nicholas Eberstadt called ‘Too Many People?’ found no correlation between population density and poverty. The greater the density of people, the more you’d expect them to fight for resources – and yet, Monaco, which has 40 times the population density of Bangladesh, is doing well for itself.
A 2007 study by Nicholas Eberstadt called ‘Too Many People?’ found no correlation between population density and poverty. The greater the density of people, the more you’d expect them to fight for resources – and yet, Monaco, which has 40 times the population density of Bangladesh, is doing well for itself. So is Bahrain, which has three times the population density of India. Not
A 2007 study by Nicholas Eberstadt called ‘Too Many People?’ found no correlation between population density and poverty. The greater the density of people, the more you’d expect them to fight for resources – and yet, Monaco, which has 40 times the population density of Bangladesh, is doing well for itself. So is Bahrain, which has three times the population density of India.
The economist Julian Simon pointed out in a 1981 book that through history, whenever there has been a spurt in population, it has coincided with a spurt in productivity.
And we interact with each other in positive-sum ways – every voluntary interactions leaves both people better off, and the amount of value in the world goes up. This is why we want to be part of economic networks that are as large, and as dense, as possible. This is why most people migrate to cities rather than away from them – and why cities are so much richer than towns or villages.
The error made by Malthus, Brown and Ehrlich is the same error that our politicians make today, and not just in the context of population: zero-sum thinking.
If our population grows and resources stays the same, of course there will be scarcity. But this is never the case. All we need to do to learn this lesson is look at our cities!
Shah is a master at top-down planning and micro-management. How he went about winning the 2014 elections, described in detail in Prashant Jha’s book How the BJP Wins, should be a Harvard Business School case study.
Shah looked at the market segmentation in UP, and hit upon his now famous “60% formula”. He realised he could not deliver the votes of Muslims, Yadavs and Jatavs, who were 40% of the population. So he focussed on wooing the other 60%, including non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits.
Some tasks of governance, it is true, are tailor-made for efficient managers. Building infrastructure, taking care of roads and power, building toilets (even without an underlying drainage system) and PR campaigns can all be executed by good managers. But the deeper tasks of making an economy flourish require a different approach. They need a light touch, not a heavy hand.
The 20th century is full of cautionary tales that show that economies cannot be centrally planned from the top down. Examples of that ‘fatal conceit’, to use my hero Friedrich Hayek’s term, include the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and even the lady Modi most reminds me of, Indira Gandhi.
The task of the state, when it comes to the economy, is to administer a strong rule of law, and to make sure it is applied equally. No special favours to cronies or special interest groups. Just unleash the natural creativity of the people, and don’t try to micro-manage.
The task of the state, when it comes to the economy, is to administer a strong rule of law, and to make sure it is applied equally. No special favours to cronies or special interest groups.
when it comes to public policy, why do good intentions often lead to bad outcomes?
His mother was ill once, and the young Narendra was tending to her. The heat was enervating, so the boy went to the switchboard to switch on the fan. But there was no electricity. My friend said that as he told this story, Modi’s eyes filled with tears. Even after all these years, he was moved by the memory.
My friend used this story to make the point that Modi’s vision of the world is experiential. If he experiences something, he understands it.
He sees a problem and works for the rest of his life to solve it. But what of things he cannot experience?
The economy is a complex beast, as is society itself, and beyond a certain level, you need to grasp abstract concepts to understand how the world works. You cannot experience them.
One understands abstract concepts by reading about them, understanding them, applying them to the real world.
Be driven by values and not confidence in your own knowledge. Gather intellectual giants around you, and stand on their shoulders.
The other learning from this is for all of us. How do we make sense of the world? By connecting dots. An ankhon-dekhi approach will get us very few dots, and our view of the world will be blurred and incomplete. The best way to gather more dots is reading.
A good man with noble intentions can make bad decisions with horrible consequences. The only way to hedge against this is by staying humble and reading more.
In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945 as Adolf Hitler was defeated, Karl Popper ripped into nationalism, with all its “appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.”
But must nationalism always be a bad thing? A provocative new book by the Israeli thinker Yael Tamir argues otherwise.
In her book Why Nationalism, Tamir makes the following arguments. One, nation-states are here to stay. Two, the state needs the nation to be viable. Three, people need nationalism for the sense of community and belonging it gives them. Four, therefore, we need to build a better nationalism, which brings people together instead of driving them apart.
“Only 3.3 percent of the world’s population,” Tamir points out, “lives outside their country of birth.”
“Political institutions crave to form long-term political bonding,” writes Tamir, “and for that matter they must create a community that is neither momentary nor meaningless.” Nationalism, she says, “endows the state with intimate feelings linking the past, the present, and the future.”
“The term ‘human’ is a far too thin mode of delineation,” she writes. “Individuals need to rely on ‘thick identities’ to make their lives meaningful.” This involves a shared past, a common culture and distinctive values.
Tamir also points out that there is a “strong correlation between social class and political preferences.”
I have one question, though. Why is our nationalism so exclusionary when our nation is so inclusive?
One of my favourite English words comes from chess. If it is your turn to move, but any move you make makes your position worse, you are in ‘Zugzwang’.
An Indian PM, after an attack for which Pakistan is held responsible, has only unsavoury choices in front of him. He is pulled in two opposite directions. One, strategy dictates that he must not escalate. Two, politics dictates that he must.
Given that Pakistan knows that it is irrational for India to react, and our leaders tend to be rational, they can ‘bleed us with a thousand cuts’, as their doctrine states, with impunity.
Steven Pinker, in his book Enlightenment Now, relates an old Russian joke about two peasants named Boris and Igor. They are both poor. Boris has a goat. Igor does not. One day, Igor is granted a wish by a visiting fairy. What will he wish for? “I wish,” he says, “that Boris’s goat should die.”
I feel exasperated when I hear intellectuals and columnists talking about economic inequality. It is my contention that India’s problem is poverty – and that poverty and inequality are two very different things that often do not coincide.
To illustrate this, I sometimes ask this question: In which of the following countries would you rather be poor: USA or Bangladesh?
And yet, while Bangladesh has greater poverty, the USA has higher inequality. Indeed, take a look at the countries of the world measured by the Gini Index, which is that standard metric used to measure inequality, and you will find that USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone, which are much poorer.
If poverty and inequality are so different, why do people conflate the two? A key reason is that we tend to think of the world in zero-sum
If poverty and inequality are so different, why do people conflate the two? A key reason is that we tend to think of the world in zero-sum ways.
If the rich get richer, the poor must be getting poorer, and the presence of poverty must be proof of inequality.
But that’s not how the world works. The pie is not fixed. Economic growth is a positive-sum game and leads to an expansion of the pie, and everybody benefits.
You might think that this is just semantics, but words matter. Poverty and inequality are different phenomena with opposite solutions. You can solve for inequality by making everyone equally poor. Or you could solve for it by redistributing from the rich to the poor, as if the pie was fixed.
It has been estimated that in India, for every one percent rise in GDP, two million people come out of poverty.
It is more urgent to make sure that every Indian has enough to fulfil his basic needs – what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his fine book On Inequality, called the Doctrine of Sufficiency.
Every election, HL Mencken once said, is “an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
It would be okay if the parties, once they came to power, provided good governance. But voters have given up on that, and now only want patronage and handouts. That leads to one of the biggest problems in Indian politics: We are stuck in an equilibrium where all good politics is bad economics, and vice versa.
The poor want jobs and opportunities. Those come with growth, which requires structural reforms. Structural reforms don’t sound sexy as election promises. Handouts do.
Why is it that Good Politics in India is always Bad Economics? Let me put forth some possible reasons. One, voters tend to think in zero-sum ways, as if the pie is fixed, and the only way to bring people out of poverty is to redistribute.
Two, Indian politics revolves around identity and patronage.
you’re likely to vote for whoever can look after the interests of your in-group rather than care about the economy as a whole.
Three, voters tend to stay uninformed for good reasons, because of what Public Choice economists call Rational Ignorance. A single vote is unlikely to make a difference in an election, so why put in the effort to understand the nuances of economics and governance?
Four, Politicians have a short-term horizon, geared towards winning the next election.
And while the BJP did make some solid promises in 2014, they did not walk that talk, and have proved to be, as Arun Shourie once called them, UPA + Cow.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
I’m not just dropping slang here. ‘Bullshit’ may appear to be a pejorative, but it has become a technical term after the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his seminal book, On Bullshit, in 2005.
A liar, as per Frankfurt, acknowledges the truth, and aims to deceive. For a bullshitter, the truth is irrelevant. Bullshitters aim not to deceive, but are just winging it, saying whatever comes into their head at a given point in time, which may or may not be true.
Politicians can get away with bullshit (and lying) because people don’t care about facts. We tend to form echo chambers with like-minded people, form whatever worldview appeals to us, and shut ourselves off from conflicting views.
Experiments by social scientists have found that when people with similar opinions are thrown together in a group, they tend to take decisions more extreme than any one individual would take. (This is known as ‘group polarisation’.)
When all discourse takes place along tribal lines, rhetoric matters, facts don’t.
The late farmer leader Sharad Joshi used to enjoy reciting a poem that described the Indian farmer’s plight perfectly. It addresses the non-farmer from the farmer’s point of view, and it goes: Marte hum bhi hain. Marte tum bhi ho. Marte hum bhi hain, marte tum bhi ho. Hum sasta bech ke marte hain, Tum mahanga khareedke marte ho.
Joshi’s insight in the late 1970s was that this was caused not by the greed of middlemen, but the interference of the Indian state.
Because the farmers are not allowed to sell to anyone else, they are forced to take the price offered to them.
Because the farmers are not allowed to sell to anyone else, they are forced to take the price offered to them. And because all produce comes through the APMC, buyers also have no bargaining power.
Now imagine what would happen if the free market was allowed to operate. Middlemen would compete to buy goods from farmers, and that competition would ensure that farmers would get a better price. They would also compete for customers, this ensuring that customers would pay less.
Joshi referred to this notional cost paid by the farmer as a ‘negative subsidy’.
Farmers are not allowed access to markets in anything they do. The state doesn’t allow free markets in inputs, because of which many of the inputs a farmer needs, from seeds to fertilisers to energy to even credit, are either hard to come by or of a low quality.
By denying them freedom, the state effectively imprisons our farmers in what a friend of mine calls PPP: Perpetually Planned Poverty.
Farmers are not allowed to sell their land for non-agricultural purposes. This restricts their market to other farmers, and ensures that the price they can get for their land is so low that it becomes pointless to sell.
Indeed, a common scam is for a crony of the state to acquire land from farmers, through the state, at low prices, and then get the land-use certificate changed so that they can sell at many multiples of that price. All perfectly legal – and deeply unethical. This is how Robert Vadra was alleged to have made his money, in fact.
With every generation, land holdings get smaller – one farmer’s land is split among multiple children – and more and more unsustainable.
With every generation, land holdings get smaller – one farmer’s land is split among multiple children – and more and more unsustainable. It is no coincidence that many recent popular uprisings have been around demand for jobs from land-owning castes like like Jats, Patidars and Marathas.
More than 50% of our country is in the agricultural sector, producing 14% of our GDP. In developing countries, less than 10% of the population works in agriculture.
This has been a year of glorious gifts from unelected middle-aged men. The Supreme Court of India is churning out enlightened judgements as if oppression is going out of fashion: Privacy, 377, and now Adultery.
On Thursday, the court struck down Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code.
Justice DY Chandrachud wrote in his judgement: “The history of Section 497 reveals that the law on adultery was for the benefit of the husband, for him to secure ownership over the sexuality of his wife. It was aimed at preventing the woman from exercising her sexual agency.”
Babylon’s ancient Hammurabi Code prescribed that a married woman caught in adultery “be bound to her lover and thrown into the water so that they drown together.” (No such punishment for an unfaithful man, mind you.)
Firstly, similar laws remain in the books, such as Section 498, which deals with “enticing or taking away or detaining with criminal intent a married woman,” and also treats women as the property of men.
Women still fill government forms that insist on Father’s/Husbands name, as if to establish ownership.
One telling metric: female participation in the workforce has actually gone down in the last two decades.
So many men signal how modern they are by boasting about how they ‘let’ their wife work, or how they ‘help out’ with domestic chores.
We have set the bar so low that not being a monster is now a matter of congratulations.
I can ignore and take for granted my maleness. But in every single thing a woman does, her gender comes into play.
Every time India loses a Test series abroad, the doomed relationship between the Indian Cricket Fan and the Indian Cricket Player comes into focus. The Player usually disappoints the Fan; and when the Fan is delighted, it is often for the wrong reason.
Well, no. All elite sportspeople think about the game probabilistically, and aren’t results-oriented. They value process more than results. That is the only route to success in anything – and I learnt it, viscerally, when I shifted from being a Fan to a Player.
Poker is a game of skill, but has a higher quantum of luck than other sports – in fact, it has been said that the key skill in poker is the management of luck.
But here’s the thing: thinking probabilistically tells you that the decision to flip the coin is always profitable (to the tune of one rupee), but the actual result is always a harsh binary.
Tails again. Now? Hell, he could even get ten tails in a row – unlikely as that seems, ten tails in a row is actually inevitable at some point if you spin the coin enough, and you just got unlucky here. (To get a sense of this, do read my old piece, ‘Unlikely is Inevitable’.) So you end up as a big loser – but does this mean your decision-making was flawed?
The key to winning in poker is to keep making the best decision you can, and not worry about the short-term variance of results. This is also the key to winning in life – but I won’t bore you any more on this.
My point is that all actions in all sports carry probabilities with them, and have an inherent EV.
The thing is, he could make the optimal move, with a 15% chance of success, and miss. He could do something sub-optimal, with a 5% chance, and succeed, as he will one-twentieth of the time in that situation. The first decision would not be wrong just because he did not score. The second would not be right just because he did. We have no way of knowing – though Messi is in the best position to judge – and we can only tell how good a player’s decision-making is over an extremely long term, when we have good enough sample sizes to draw reliable conclusions. In cricket, that long term is not possible. Now, consider the many kinds of EV a captain like Virat Kohli has to calculate when he takes the field. One is of the strategic value of aggression. Should batsmen be aggressive and show ‘intent’ in Test matches? The merit in this: you don’t let bowlers get into a rhythm; you could take the game away in one good session; if it works, the confidence can create a decisive virtuous cycle. The danger:
The thing is, he could make the optimal move, with a 15% chance of success, and miss. He could do something sub-optimal, with a 5% chance, and succeed, as he will one-twentieth of the time in that situation. The first decision would not be wrong just because he did not score. The second would not be right just because he did.
The thing is, he could make the optimal move, with a 15% chance of success, and miss. He could do something sub-optimal, with a 5% chance, and succeed, as he will one-twentieth of the time in that situation. The first decision would not be wrong just because he did not score. The second would not be right just because he did. We have no way of knowing – though Messi is in the best position to judge – and we can only tell how good a player’s decision-making is over an extremely long term, when we have good enough sample sizes to draw reliable conclusions.
But we should be aware that what happens on a cricket field is an inadequate way to evaluate a game, because it is a tiny fraction of what the sport is
The real drama of cricket, the ebb and flow that matters, lies in the possibilities and probabilities of what can happen, not in the boring binaries of what does.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote a play called Man and Superman. You could steal that title and use it for a film on Virat Kohli’s life right now. As a batsman, he is in superhero territory: he plays every match on a different, easier pitch than his colleagues do, and has established himself as an all-time great.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote a play called Man and Superman. You could steal that title and use it for a film on Virat Kohli’s life right now. As a batsman, he is in superhero territory:
George Bernard Shaw once wrote a play called Man and Superman. You could steal that title and use it for a film on Virat Kohli’s life right now.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote a play called Man and Superman.
It is certainly true, though, that while Kohli has transcended his human limitations when it comes to the skill of batting, he hasn’t done so when it comes to decision-making as a captain. Like all of us, he has a flawed machine inside his skull, with modules that evolved as features in prehistoric times, but which are bugs now. There are cognitive biases and flawed heuristic that can lead us astray in our decision-making,
I am just going to lay out some of the traps that anyone who selects a cricket team can fall into—and these apply to all of us, in everything we do.
First up, there is the Availability Heuristic, which is defined as “a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.”
Or it could lead to the Status Quo Bias, where he opts to stick with players he is familiar with, rather than take a risk on the relatively unknown. This can also come from the Ambiguity Effect, “a cognitive bias where decision making is affected by a lack of information.”
Or it could lead to the Status Quo Bias, where he opts to stick with players he is familiar with, rather than take a risk on the relatively unknown.
This can also come from the Ambiguity Effect, “a cognitive bias where decision making is affected by a lack of information.”
All humans give in to the Narrative Bias, “our tendency to make sense of the world through stories.” This is actually a necessity, for how else can we navigate a complex world, but we must beware of getting wedded to a false narrative.
This is called the Confirmation Bias, defined as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.” You see this all the time among political and ideological tribes on Twitter.
A related tendency is the Backfire Effect, which is “the finding that, given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly.”
The Endowment Effect may have something to do with it. This is “the hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.”
Here are some other biases that could apply to this narrative. The Ben Franklin Effect: “a proposed psychological phenomenon [that] a person who has already performed a favor for another is more likely to do another favor for the other than if they had received a favor from that person.”
Another factor that comes into play when sticking with a bad decision is the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which can also be described as Escalation of Commitment.
An everyday example of this: we buy a ticket to watch a movie, hate the first half, but don’t walk out at the interval because hey, the money we spent on the ticket will be wasted. The
An everyday example of this: we buy a ticket to watch a movie, hate the first half, but don’t walk out at the interval because hey, the money we spent on the ticket will be wasted. The correct approach is to view the ticket money as a sunk cost, and optimise our enjoyment in the time to come.
This might also lead to The Gambler’s Fallacy: “The mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future.”
Kohli might also suffer from the Curse of Knowledge: “A cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.”
Even if he does, his teammates are unlikely to dissent too much, which might lead to the False Consensus Effect: “The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.”
But could Kohli also be giving in to the Hostile Attribution Effect: “The tendency to interpret others’ behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.”
In this great democracy of ours, where the voice of the people is supposed to find expression in its politics, not one political party in the last 71 years tried to repeal 377.
In this great democracy of ours, where the voice of the people is supposed to find expression in its politics, not one political party in the last 71 years tried to repeal 377. Parties don’t have principles, only incentives, and all of them behaved this way because they feared that voters would not approve.
Consider free speech. As in any other marketplace, all of us benefit when there is competition in the marketplace of ideas. And yet, we have laws in the Indian Penal Code, like 295(a) and 153(a), which allow anyone to claim offence and shut free speech down.
Like 377, these laws are colonial artefacts. But they are actually validated by the most illiberal part of our Constitution, Article 19(2), which allows caveats to free speech on grounds like ‘public order’ and ‘decency and morality.’
You could get arrested for home-schooling your children if you find government schools inadequate, and there are so many restrictions placed on private schools that come between consenting parents and consenting teachers.
Our entire agricultural crisis is a result of our farmers having their autonomy snatched away from them. They are the least free of Indians, and are trapped in a cycle of dependency.
71 years after the British left is, we have the mentality of the colonised. We behave as if we are subjects of a mai-baap state, and not its masters. The state should exist to serve us, not the other way around. We give the state a monopoly on violence so that it can protect our rights, not so that it takes them away with the threat of violence.
There are too many freedoms to fight for, and unless the parties that run this country see political capital in it, they will not grant us those freedoms.
What is this Idea of India? It is the idea that we are one people. We celebrate our differences, but we recognise that what holds us together is stronger than anything that pulls us apart.
This is the second Idea of India. Here, we are divided by religion, caste, region, language. We feel schadenfreude, not sympathy, at the pain of others. Here, it is a zero-sum game, and we like to see others fall, as only their falling will help us rise.
It is true that all Indian politics is identity politics. Every government we have ever had, every party that exists today, has let this nation down. But this ruling party, and the entire Hindutva movement, has hit new lows with the way they actively tried to prevent aid from reaching Kerala.
One more Independence Day comes up, and it’s time to ask that annual question again: Where have all the leaders gone?
It’s a common lament that the politicians of today are the opposite of the freedom fighters who got us this Independence. We had giants then. We have pygmies now. Our leaders then were driven by principle. Our leaders now are driven by the lust for power. Why?
We had giants then. We have pygmies now. Our leaders then were driven by principle. Our leaders now are driven by the lust for power. Why?
The generations of men and women who rose up to fight against the British empire did so because they were animated by a higher cause. There was no personal upside to
The generations of men and women who rose up to fight against the British empire did so because they were animated by a higher cause.
The generations of men and women who rose up to fight against the British empire did so because they were animated by a higher cause. There was no personal upside to it.
The generations of men and women who rose up to fight against the British empire did so because they were animated by a higher cause. There was no personal upside to it. There was a principle at stake.
Once Independence was achieved, the incentives changed. Firstly, getting the British to leave was so miraculous, coming after a decades-long struggle, that our leaders did not notice what we did not achieve. Yes, we got political independence, but we still weren’t guaranteed the personal and economic freedoms that we had fought for.
Here’s what we did on August 15, 1947. We replaced one set of rulers with another.
In the early years of our independence, our politics was ruled by those who had come into the freedom struggle for the sake of principles, not power. I’m willing to give them the benefit of doubt. Their mistakes were honest mistakes – such as the embrace of the Fabian socialism that kept India poor for decades longer than it should have.
Those who did enter politics for reasons of principle would soon find themselves having to compromise on those principles for pragmatic reasons. So much so that by the time they actually achieved power, there could be no trace of those original principles.
There may be politicians who start off idealistic—but they cannot remain that way, no matter what their public positioning. Why is this? Incentives. Achieving power requires two things: Money and Votes.
First, money. Over the decades, it has gotten more and more prohibitive to fight an election. One needs crores to contest even a local election. Where does this money come from? Who can afford such large sums?
The money always comes from interest groups who expect a Return on Investment. There’s always a quid pro quo involved.
First, money leads to power. Then, power must lead to money. This is the chakravyuh of politics.
For example, if a big industrialist gives a political party money, what could he want out of it? One, he may want regulation that protects his industry or company from competition. Place tariffs on foreign goods, deny a license to a competitor, and so on.
Two, he may want special privileges that the government, using its monopoly on violence, can get him.
Three, he may want soft loans from a Public Sector Bank, which he otherwise may not get from a private sector bank that has different incentives and does due diligence.
You may oppose FDI in retail, for example, because small traders form a large chunk of your donor base, as is the case with AAP (and the BJP, until recently).
All of these, you will note, amount to a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from us citizens to moneybag interest groups. This is how Power provides RoI to Money.
There is just one way for these mafias to win our votes: by bribing us. The party in power may hand out immediate sops. The parties in opposition will promise them.
In the political marketplace, just as in any other marketplace, every brand does not try to woo every customer.
Parties will have vote banks that they will nurture over time, and reward when they are in power.
This can become a vicious circle. For example, everyone wants farmers’ votes, and once one party promises farm loan waivers, every other party has to follow suit.
Loan waivers are a temporary anaesthetic that perpetuate the problem, but politicians do not have the incentives to make the deep structural changes that are required in agriculture. Those will take years to play out, much beyond an election cycle – and parties need votes now.
The great tragedy of Indian politics is that all our politics is identity politics that centres around state patronage.
What can a party do without votes? What can a party do without money? The imperatives of our democracy make politics morally corrosive.
Imagine a limited government that existed just to protect our rights and nothing else. The incentives would change. It would have so little power that those who lust for power would be forced to look elsewhere for career options.
Who will have the incentives to make that change? Not the moneybags and the interest groups, that’s for sure. But what about the voters? If enough citizens demanded reform, the government would have to listen.
Andrew Brietbart once said, ‘Politics is downstream of culture.’ This is exactly right. Before we change our politics, we must change our culture.
In particular, I want to look at Incentives: what are the incentives of those who view the game, play the game, and run the game? How is their behaviour moulded by these incentives? What are the implications of this?
The opportunity cost of watching a Test match, for example, is what else you could have done with the five days you spent watching it.
For most of cricket’s existence, there haven’t been that many alternatives. There is a cliché about cricket and Bollywood being the two great 20th century passions of India, but think about it, what else did you have for entertainment?
Most cricket purists I know don’t actually spend much time watching Test cricket. (Look up another concept from economics, ‘Revealed Preferences’.)
I believe that we complain about Twenty20 cricket because Test matches came first, so we put that on a pedestal, and consider that the basis of comparison. (Another economic concept to look up: the ‘Anchoring Effect’.)
Had T20s come first, we might have viewed Test cricket through a different prism of values – and found it wanting.
A wicket has less value than in an ODI, as your batting resources need to be spread out over only 20 overs rather than 50. The risk-reward ratio changes, and the value of aggression goes up.
Consider the much-touted 360-degree game of AB de Villiers. There, invention came out of necessity, the new format making demands on batsmen to expand their repertoire.
Bowlers figured out that one way to counter the momentum of a batting side was to take wickets. Attack became the best defence.
The inevitable outcome of this is that batsmen will always train to play T20s, and will be unequipped for those specialised skills that Test matches demand.
Who is to say that Test cricket is superior to one-day cricket? Even many who do state that as a personal preference don’t actually put their eyeballs where their mouths are.
In all this, we ignore one essential truth: Every act of government is an act of violence.
Think about what the state needs in order to exist: our taxes. Money taken from us by force. No one pays taxes willingly. Without the threat of imprisonment—basically, abduction by the one entity that has a monopoly on violence—there would be no taxpayers.
Think about what the state needs in order to exist: our taxes. Money taken from us by force. No one pays taxes willingly.
There are two words that mean the act of taking someone’s property without their consent: no wonder people say that Taxation is Theft.
Assume that you pay 25% of your income in taxes. That amounts to one-fourth of your time and labour. It means that, for all practical purposes, from January to March every year, you are a slave to the state.
Assume that you pay 25% of your income in taxes. That amounts to one-fourth of your time and labour. It means that, for all practical purposes, from January to March every year, you are a slave to the state. Taxation is not just theft, it is part-time slavery.
Taxation is not just theft, it is part-time slavery. Contrary to a common canard, everybody pays taxes.
Even inflation—usually caused by the government printing money—is basically a tax on the poor.
I am not arguing that we should pay no taxes and live in anarchy. The state is a necessary evil. We need it to protect our rights, and there is no way around the paradox that by allowing it to exist, we give away some of our rights.
Most people would also accept that some amount of this violence is necessary, for we need the state to protect our rights. The larger question then is, what actions of the state are justified, given the violence involved at every step?
Most people would also accept that some amount of this violence is necessary, for we need the state to protect our rights. The larger question then is, what actions of the state are justified, given the violence involved at every step? This is where ideology begins.
Would Aditi Mittal have become a stand-up comedian had she not studied in a girls’ college? Appearing as a guest in the latest episode of my weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, she told me that studying at Sophia College enabled her to perform in front of others with confidence. Had there been boys in her class, she said, she would not have been able to claim the space of the class jester.
This came as a revelation to me, though it should not have. No male comedian would have experienced this; but every woman knows what it is like.
Here are some numbers: only 26% of Indian women are in the workforce, next only to Saudi Arabia among G20 countries.
According to a 2015 McKinsey study, our GDP could go up by 60% by 2025 if female participation in the workforce matched that of men.
Let me declare it upfront: I am a feminist. And because that particular F-word has so many shades of meaning, let me define what I mean by it: Feminism is the belief that women deserve the same respect as individuals that men do. The same moral consideration. The same legal rights.
Why does feminism get a bad rap then? This is because just as there are all kinds of human beings, there are all kinds of feminists. Not all stop at the principle of equal rights, and offshoots of feminism can often contradict each other. (Google “gender feminism vs equity feminism.”)
Indeed, one central cultural disconnect of our times can be summed up like this: Women are angry. Men are clueless.
I won’t turn away from declaring my feminism either because of this or because of my discomfort with the tactics of some feminists.
The reason for this is twofold: One, women being treated as second-class citizens hurts us all, and diminishes us as human beings.
Two, it is a sad truth that because of the power dynamics around us, men can actually make more of a difference than women can, especially when outspoken women are being constantly minimised and mocked.
The purist lament is simple: for a variety of reasons, the balance between bat and ball has been upset. Heavier bats, shorter boundaries, bad regulations, the malign influence of Twenty20 cricket.
“Yes, cricket has changed,” I want to tell them. “But it has changed for the better.
First up, let’s consider why the balance of the game has shifted towards run-scoring. Heavier bats are just part of the reason. The main cause is that batsmen have been forced to develop new skills because of the changed imperatives of T20 cricket.
That old cliché of T20 cricket being a slugfest where you can replace bowlers with bowling machines is nonsense. Bowlers, who once focussed on restricting runs, have realised that the best way to keep the score down is to take wickets.
That old cliché of T20 cricket being a slugfest where you can replace bowlers with bowling machines is nonsense. Bowlers, who once focussed on restricting runs, have realised that the best way to keep the score down is to take wickets. Attack is the best defence.
“You got Test match quality bowling—because the only way to slow down batsmen these days is to get them out—and T20 batting skills.” That illustrates how the game has evolved into a deeper, more complex beast—which is a good thing.
Here’s a thought experiment: if T20 cricket had been invented before Test cricket, and Tests came later, how would people have responded?
Another thought experiment: if someone introduced a five-day baseball game, or a nine-hour football game, how would people react to them?
Don’t make your happiness dependent on other people, and all will be well.
I know similarly aged people who have not lost their youthful delusions, and wake up every morning unhappy.
One: You are not special.
You are one accounting error of genetic composition away from a gorilla, and everything you are is a result of luck: the genes you happened to have, and the environment you were born and raised in. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it should be a relief.
Two: You are not entitled to anything.
Three: Stop looking for validation.
Our lives can be dominated by the need for the approval or admiration of others. This is foolish for one simple reason: others don’t give a shit, and are caught up in their own corresponding anxiety. They aren’t thinking of you all the time.
Four: Focus only on what you can control.
Instead, you should only feel good or bad about events in your immediate control. The rest is what it
Instead, you should only feel good or bad about events in your immediate control. The rest is what it is.
Five: Focus on process, not outcome.
Six: Focus on the positives.
Focus on the positives. This creates a virtuous feedback loop: you feel better and work better when you do this, and that creates even more joy for yourself.
Cut everything that is toxic and negative out of your life, including people who are always cribbing.
Seven: Happiness lies in small things.
The biggest lesson I have learnt is that happiness lies in small things: the rich taste of strong coffee on a rainy day; a few moments of laughter with friends or loved ones; getting lost in a book, or transported by a song, or giving in to the magic of a film.
Any government looks for ways to expand its power over its citizens. As much as we should protest these attempts, we should also consider that the real problem lies elsewhere. The biggest danger to our democracy is not one set of people lusting for power, but the mindset that all of us have.
The Indian people still behave as if we are subjects of an empire. We have no rights except those that our rulers are kind enough to grant us, and they are our mai-baap.
In a democratic republic, the people should be in charge, and the government should serve. The only legitimate role of the state is to protect the rights of its citizens – that’s what laws are for.
In a democratic republic, the people should be in charge, and the government should serve. The only legitimate role of the state is to protect the rights of its citizens – that’s what laws are for. And yet, in this inversion of roles that we have accepted, laws become the tool by which our rulers keep us in check.
whenever we see a social or economic problem of any kind, we assume that the solution must lie with government, and demand ‘regulation.’ We need to reverse our thinking.
whenever we see a social or economic problem of any kind, we assume that the solution must lie with government, and demand ‘regulation.’ We need to reverse our thinking. We should regulate the government, and not the other way around.
Most of the time when someone proposes any kind of government regulation, it is something that will harm the common citizen, help a special interest group and expand the power of an oppressive state.
In any marketplace, whether of goods, services or ideas, this is all it needs to do. Punish cheats and thieves. Enforce contracts. Ensure that all interactions are voluntary and there is no coercion. It needs to do no more than this.
The state is not a benevolent godlike force that works in society’s best interests. Politics is an interplay of power and money, and those in power have always been captured by special interests.
Further regulation is an attempt to protect one set of ideas and intimidate another. This reduces the possibility of dissent.
The most remarkable thing about Indian politics in this decade is how suddenly and completely it shifted from revolving around one family to revolving around one man.
I predict that the 2019 elections will be decided entirely by Modi. There will be a fight between a positive vote for him and a negative vote against him. If the negative wins, then by default someone else will take charge. Despite the comic posturing of various regional leaders, it will probably be Gandhi.
Demonetisation crippled our economy, the botched implementation of GST hurt it further, and he has carried out no reforms.
I am a cricket purist. I love Test cricket. But if God existed, I would thank Her for Her kindness in bringing about the IPL.
One, T20 leagues like the IPL increased opportunities for players. Before they came along, cricket was a monopsony. A monopsony is a marketplace with only one buyer. If an Indian
T20 leagues like the IPL increased opportunities for players. Before they came along, cricket was a monopsony. A monopsony is a marketplace with only one buyer. If an Indian player wanted to play at the highest level, he would have only one buyer for his services: the Indian team, or the BCCI.
But within a league like the IPL, there are multiple buyers for your services.
A BCCI babu’s job, at any level, depends on politics, and not on how well he finds or grooms talent.
But in the IPL, the bottom line of all the teams depend on how well they perform. As a matter of survival, they have to find and groom the best talent.
Kramnik first won the title at the turn of the century, beating Garry Kasparov at his peak. His masterstroke in that match was reviving an old opening for black called the Berlin Defence. Kasparov could not breach that wall, and the Berlin has since become an impregnable cliché in grandmaster circles.
Back in India, on the political chess board, Narendra Modi has found a similar defence for all seasons. It’s called the Nehru Defence. No matter what attack is unveiled against him, he counters it with the Nehru defence.
What irritates me more than the irrationality and dishonesty of the Nehru Defence is how the discourse has been shaped by it. Everybody is thinking in binaries.
One side thinks Nehru was a monster who ravaged India. The other side thinks Nehru was a great statesman who built everything that is good about this country. Both these narratives hold some truth, but you’re not allowed to acknowledge both.
These binaries apply to everything today, not just Nehru. This is a form of historical revisionism. Nothing can be grey any more. Everything must be black or white.
Aronian, Kramnik’s hapless victim and a cultured, thoughtful man, once said that a game of chess was like a conversation. One player asks a question; the other replies, and asks one herself; and so on, in the mutual quest for truth.
Inequality and poverty are different problems, requiring different, even opposite, solutions. India’s problem is poverty.
Let me begin this column with a question, dear reader, which I urge you to read carefully and answer before reading on: In which of these two countries would you rather be poor: the USA or Bangladesh?
Well, here’s something I’d like you to consider: the USA has far greater inequality than Bangladesh does. A measure called the Gini Index measures inequality across the world, and the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. And yet, that second group of countries is by far poorer than the first group It
Well, here’s something I’d like you to consider: the USA has far greater inequality than Bangladesh does. A measure called the Gini Index measures inequality across the world, and the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. And yet, that second group of countries
Well, here’s something I’d like you to consider: the USA has far greater inequality than Bangladesh does. A measure called the Gini Index measures inequality across the world, and the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. And yet, that second group of countries is by far poorer than the first group
There is a fundamental fallacy at the root of the obsession with inequality. We think of the world in zero-sum ways. That is, we behave as if there is a fixed pie, and the rich can only become richer if the poor become poorer.
In this vision of the world, the more inequality increases, the more abject the suffering of the poor. Redistribution is the only solution. And yet, this narrative is wrong.
The more you allow and enable such voluntary exchange, the more people trade to mutual benefit, and we all become better
The more you allow and enable such voluntary exchange, the more people trade to mutual benefit, and we all become better off.
And the larger these economic networks of voluntary exchange, the greater the scope for such mutual enrichment. That is why people migrate to cities from villages, and rarely the other way around.
In fact, within a country, cities are far more unequal than villages are. If inequality was such a bad thing, why would so many poor people vote with their feet by migrating to cities?
The reason India remained a poor country for so many decades after Independence is that, with the zero-sum vision of our leaders, we frowned upon free markets.
In 1950, when AI was in the realm of science fiction, Alan Turing came up with the Turing Test. Wikipedia defines this as “a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.”
Until the early 1990s, the thought of a computer beating a human in chess was laughable. But technology progressed quickly, and in 1997 a machine called Deep Blue beat the then-World Champion, Garry Kasparov.
Now, you’d imagine that this would mean the end of chess. Everyone would use computers in their analysis and pedagogy, and we’d all start playing like machines. But exactly the opposite happened, and chess was instead enriched.
There was once a study that aimed to see how many moves a grandmaster and a novice could think ahead in a game of chess. The answer was that they saw the same number of moves ahead, but the GM saw the right ones.
Learning chess is less about calculation and more about pattern recognition and heuristics.
Heuristics are simple rules that allow people to make decisions. For example, a chess player will be taught that it is important to occupy the center early, to take her king to safety by castling, to develop her pieces as much as she can, and so on.
Computers did not need heuristics, because they had the computing power to actually calculate every move and every position. (This is called ‘brute force’.)
This meant that the new generation of players who used chess programs as an analytical tool were no longer bound to the dogmas of the past, useful as they were.
Then it played Stockfish in a 100-game match. Alpha Zero won 28 games, and the rest were drawn. After four hours of learning, it beat a chess program into which years of development had gone.
While teaching itself chess, it discovered, developed and then used heuristics that seem to go beyond the ones humans discovered. For example, human are taught not to move the same piece multiple times in the opening when others lie undeveloped. Alpha Zero did this again and again, favouring activity over development.
In 1986, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote an essay named ‘On Bullshit’, which was published as a book on 2005 and became a surprise bestseller. The book attempts to arrive at “a theoretical understanding of bullshit.”
The key difference between a liar and a bullshitter, Frankfurt tells us, is that the liar knows the truth and aims to deceive. The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth.
The bullshitter is wise, for he has cottoned on to an important truth that has become more and more glaring in these modern times: that facts don’t matter.
The first chapter of Public Opinion, by the American journalist Walter Lippmann, is titled ‘The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.’ In it, Lippmann makes the point that all of us have a version of the world inside our heads that resembles, but is not identical to, the world as it is. “The real environment,” he writes, “is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.”
We construct a version of the world in our heads, and feed that version, for modifying it too much will require too much effort. If facts conflict with it, we ignore those facts, and accept only those that conform to our worldview. (Cognitive psychologists call this the ‘Confirmation Bias’.)
Lippmann sees this as a challenge for democracy, for how are we to elect our leaders if we cannot comprehend the impact they will have on the world?
Finding others who share our beliefs makes us more strident, and soon we form multiple echo chambers that become more and more extreme. Polarisation increases.
This also means that impulses we would otherwise not express in polite society find validation, and a voice.
Here’s another book you should read: in 1997, the sociologist Timur Kuran wrote Private Truths, Public Lies in which he coined the term ‘Preference Falsification’. There are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social opprobrium. But as soon as we realise that others share our views, we are emboldened to express ourselves.
Here’s another book you should read: in 1997, the sociologist Timur Kuran wrote Private Truths, Public Lies in which he coined the term ‘Preference Falsification’. There are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social opprobrium. But as soon as we realise that others share our views, we are emboldened to express ourselves. This leads to a ‘Preference Cascade’:
The ‘Idea of India’ that these elites spoke of was never India’s Idea of India. These ‘liberal’ values were imposed on an unwilling nation – and is such imposition, ironically, not deeply illiberal itself? This is what I call The Liberal Paradox.
The alt-right guru Andrew Breitbart once said something I never get tired of quoting: “Politics is downstream of Culture.” A political victory will now not come until there is a social revolution.
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in the Match IPL, playing for Goa Kings. The IPL here stands for Indian Poker League, and it follows a similar franchisee model as cricket’s IPL.
Match Poker is a format played by teams. It’s explained here, but I’ll sum it up briefly. Let’s say there are seven teams with seven players each. They play each other on seven tables, with one player from each team on every table.
Match Poker is a format played by teams. It’s explained here, but I’ll sum it up briefly. Let’s say there are seven teams with seven players each. They play each other on seven tables, with one player from each team on every table. Also, there’s one player from each team on every seat. So if you are on seat 1 on table 1, all the other tables with have players from other teams on seat 1.
The idea is that the same hand is then dealt across tables. So all teams play the same hand from every position. At the end of every hand, a team’s chips across positions are added.
At the end of a certain number of hands – 200 in the case of Match IPL – the team with the highest points (not chips) wins.
According to the guys who thought this up, this format ensures that “the luck element in conventional poker via the ‘random draw of cards’ has been removed.” In fact, the Match Poker guys claim that because this removes the element of luck, that makes poker a true sport. They
According to the guys who thought this up, this format ensures that “the luck element in conventional poker via the ‘random draw of cards’ has been removed.” In fact, the Match Poker guys claim that because this removes the element of luck, that makes poker a true sport.
This claim is both moot and false. It is moot because of two reasons, one small and one big. The small reason is that all sports do have an element of luck, and that’s doesn’t make them less of a sport. The big reason is that even though poker has a greater quantum of luck than other sports, it is still a game of skill in the long run.
Let’s start with point one: chips don’t matter. Teams are not ranked according to how many chips they win in a session, but how many hands they win. This is the opposite of regular poker.
A study on online sites showed years ago that the players who win the most hands lose the most money. A good cash game player will lose more hands than he wins, but will win more when he wins than when he loses, and be overall profitable.
Point two: You are not playing against the table, but against other players on your seat.
Now, obviously, folding every hand does not win you the whole thing. What I considered the optimal strategy was to fold all speculative hands and medium-strength hands, and push all value hands hard, but to define these value hands tightly.
We live in performative times. Peeps on Twitter are signalling virtue, peeps on Instagram are documenting what they want others to believe their life is like, and solitary loners are blogging about their solitary aloneness. All this merely makes explicit what was true for humans all along: we’re putting on an act.
I thought of this recently while watching a masterpiece released in 1980: Cannibal Holocaust. This was one in a wave of Italian cannibal movies that came along in the late 70s and early 80s, and was directed by Ruggero Deodato, known to the French as ‘Monsieur Cannibal’.
I thought of this recently while watching a masterpiece released in 1980: Cannibal Holocaust. This was one in a wave of Italian cannibal movies that came along in the late 70s and early 80s, and was directed by Ruggero Deodato, known to the French as ‘Monsieur Cannibal’. His work influenced directors like Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth.
Interesting trivia: years later, Deodato played a sophisticated cannibal in one of my favourite scenes in Eli Roth’s Hostel 2.
Roth was inspired by Deodato, and I consider Hostel 1 and 2 to be great films as well.
No party that has portraits of Indira Gandhi in its offices can be a credible Opposition.
Despite bonanzas like low oil prices and good monsoons, our economy has gone backwards under this regime, mainly because of Tughlaqesque misadventures like Demonetisation.
There are two reasons, one small and one big, on why the Congress needs to move away from the Gandhis.
Reason one: There is no reason to believe that Rahul has suddenly gained the competence (or even the intelligence) that he has so clearly lacked all these years.
I often make the point that some bad economic policies can be termed crimes on humanity. Indira carried out a series of policies – her bank nationalisations,
Indira carried out a series of policies – her bank nationalisations, FERA (1976), the Urban Land Ceiling Act (1976), the Industrial Disputes Acts of 1976 and 1982, alongside the many controls she imposed on the economy –that kept millions of Indians poor for decades longer than they should have been.
The commentator Nitin Pai once estimated that a one percent rise in India’s GDP brings two million people out of poverty.
What is even more egregious is that Indira did not implement these out of conviction, in which case she would be wrong but not necessarily evil. (Hanlon’s Razor.) Her sharp move leftward came because she needed to differentiate herself from the Congress establishment, and began as an act of political positioning.
No guidelines existed, though: many folks—including Shakespeare—had tried the form, and a handful (like Ogden Nash) did some amazing work in it, but limericks have been more lighthearted bar-room amusement than a serious form.
The basic form of a the limerick must be sacrosanct. A limerick is not just a rhyme scheme of aabba, but also a syllable scheme of 99669.
The limerick should contain normal sentences with perfect grammar. They should not only be musical when read aloud, but also normal sentences that would not sound not out of place in conversation.
The content of the limerick has to be
The content of the limerick has to be worth putting out there even as prose.
A limerick should never have the sole purpose of saying, ‘Look Ma, I can rhyme!’
Equally, I’ve sometimes messed it up even after getting all three guidelines right because I chose a non-musical sentence construction, like the time I put three stresses one after another. (This is called a Molossus.)
Iambic works best, and when one deviates, one should know why.
I just finished reading How the BJP Wins, an excellent book by the journalist Prashant Jha on the BJP election machine. It left me in awe of Narendra Modi’s political talent and Amit Shah’s management skills.
Why is it that the same group of men who are so good at campaigning are so bad at governing?
Every party that has ever been in power in India has aced the campaigning (after all, they won) and provided appalling governance.
Besides funders, the politician in power has to keep voters happy. Specifically, he has to please those particular vote banks that brought him to power. This
Besides funders, the politician in power has to keep voters happy. Specifically, he has to please those particular vote banks that brought him to power.
Imagine a politician telling a farmer: “I will remove the minimum support price, remove all price controls, and abolish APMCs. Like it?” Ya, I know. Forget it and give the loan waiver already.
All politics, therefore, amounts to bribery. Whatever you do in terms of governance is not to make sure the nation is better off, but to give RoI to your investors, and inducements to your voters. Governance does not sell. Government, of course, does not consist only of politicians but also of bureaucrats. Their incentives are aligned towards increasing their own budgets and power. To the extent that they are rent-seekers, they want to expand the scope of that as well. Why would anyone stop a gravy train they are on? This, then, is what I call the Paradox of Democracy. A party that needs to win elections can never govern well because
All politics, therefore, amounts to bribery.
This, then, is what I call the Paradox of Democracy. A party that needs to win elections can never govern well because it needs to win elections again. And it does this by redistributing wealth from all of its citizens to some of them.
Over the years, Modi has redefined himself from a ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ to a ‘Vikas Purush’ to a ‘Garibon ka Neta.’ It is hard enough to build a successful brand once, but Modi has managed to redefine himself time and again, adding new layers to his appeal without losing the old ones.
[Modi] distils the most important policy decision of the times in simple, accessible terms. He frames it as a binary between right and wrong. He projects himself as the man fighting the good battle, on the side of the people, victimized by the bad guys.
Jha breaks down one of Modi’s speeches in Moradabad to show how masterfully it is constructed. As contrast, he describes a speech by Rahul Gandhi in Bareilly that is not just complicated but also incoherent:
Jha breaks down one of Modi’s speeches in Moradabad to show how masterfully it is constructed. As contrast, he describes a speech by Rahul Gandhi in Bareilly that is not just complicated but also incoherent: Instead of keeping the story simple, he added too many elements to it and complicated it for the crowd.
“Welfare delivery may or may not be sharper,” writes Jha, “but it is, as an observer put it, louder.”
Jha describes Modi and Shah as “ruthlessly expansionist, in terms of both territorial limits and social base.”
Shah and Bansal soon identified “six issues that were dominant in popular consciousness – law and order, women’s safety, corruption, jobs, migration and ‘appeasement.’” They narrowed this down to two, and came up with the slogan, Na gundaraj, na Bhrashtachar/ Is baar Bhajapa Sarkar.
Shah set a crazy target of getting one crore new BJP members, and “by 31 March 2015, the BJP had 1.8 crore new members in the state.” (Both the means and the number itself are dubious, but that’s part of the game.)
As the chapter entitled ‘Shah’s Sangathan’ makes clear, Shah did not travel so much to micro-manage, but to put processes in place. Every cog of the machine had to function smoothly and in consonance with the others.
The chapter titled ‘Social Engineering’ is the most fascinating in Jha’s book. India votes on the basis of identity, and the caste landscape of UP seemed insurmountable for the BJP. But Shah “is slowly transforming the BJP into a party of the less privileged castes, while retaining the support of the privileged” – and UP is a fantastic case study of this.
In UP, Shah came up with ‘The 60% Formula.” He knew that Muslims (20% of UP’s population), Yadavs (10%, and loyal to the SP) and Jatavs (10%, loyal to the BSP) would not vote for them. That left them with “55 to 60% of the electoral playing field.”
In UP, Shah came up with ‘The 60% Formula.” He knew that Muslims (20% of UP’s population), Yadavs (10%, and loyal to the SP) and Jatavs (10%, loyal to the BSP) would not vote for them. That left them with “55 to 60% of the electoral playing field.” This meant upper castes, OBCs who resented the Yadavs, and Dalit sub-castes who resented the Jatavs, the elite among the Dalits who had cornered the gains of the previous BSP administration.
How would the BJP reposition itself to appeal to all these people? Its methodology had three components: Changes in the party’s organisation structure to make it more inclusive; reformulation of its messaging, so that backward communities felt both a sense of victimhood and a sense of emancipation; and alliances with parties with a base among these communities, despite the BJP’s [recent] overwhelming dominance.
This dominance of the party by Brahmans, Thakurs and Banias had been a traditional problem for the BJP. But how could the party be revamped without upsetting existing office bearers? [Shah and Bansal] then figured a way out. The party could increase the number of positions instead of eating into the existing pie.
The BJP went beyond tokenism, though. Jha quotes Badri Narayan, a scholar on the subject, as saying: What Kanshi Ram did for Jatavs, the RSS and BJP are doing for the rest of the Dalits.
The main driver of this campaign was Ram Madhav, a pracharak based in New Delhi. He brought both technology and a data-driven approach to the Sangh grassroots.
Madhav started by buying Lenovo tablets for all the regional pracharaks, and training them in how to use it. Then he supplied them with “detailed constituency-wise booklets for each candidate,” prepared by Prashant Kishore’s team, and granular voter data across constituencies prepared by Rajesh Jain. “This data was then used by the Sangh to do the quiet door-to-door campaigning, and work on voter mobilisation which was critical to bringing them out on polling day at the booth level.”
The key challenge before the BJP is this: their expanded electoral base means that they now represent multitudes, and contain contradictions. How long can the BJP claim to represent the interests of such a diverse collection of people? Surely at some point, something will give.
Dear readers, let me begin this column with a question for you: “If donkeys were to paint their own God, what do you think the picture would be like?” This question was asked in
Dear readers, let me begin this column with a question for you: “If donkeys were to paint their own God, what do you think the picture would be like?” This question was asked in the late-1880s in a classroom in Fergusson College in Poona, where Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, the second principal of that institution, was giving a lecture on logic. What would the Donkey God look like? Agarkar answered his question silently, raising both his hands above his ears and shaking them.
We have made wonderful progress thanks to technology, but the human brain is one gadget that cannot be upgraded. It fell into its current design in prehistoric times, and there have been no updates since. Many modules that were features then are bugs now, including a propensity to construct (or be drawn towards) simple narratives that help you navigate a complex world. Religion is the perfect app for that ecosystem.
The burden of proof is on those who say that God exists, not on those who claim otherwise. (You cannot prove a negative.) Thus, atheism is the common-sense default position, and not something radical.
Atheism is not a belief that there is no God, but an absence of belief in God. This is an important distinction because it answers those who classify atheism as a belief system just like religion.
As a letter writer to the Economist put it many years ago, atheism is no more a religion than not collecting stamps is a hobby.
If there was a God, he’d be a terrible, immoral God, worthy of our contempt.
All religious people are delusional by definition.
We don’t need God to be moral. The ‘morality’ that comes from religion is morality for the wrong reasons.
To end this column, here’s a thought experiment inspired by Agarkar’s donkeys: If we make God in our own image, what would your God look like – and what would that say about you?
Women are treated as the property of men in India. This is not merely reflected in our culture, but is enshrined in our laws.
This misogyny is common in our laws, but you could argue that the IPC is a colonial relic from Victorian times.
Treating women as property is an old Indian tradition, and finds reflection in our epics. In the Mahabharata, for example, Yudhishthir gambles Draupadi away, as if she is not an autonomous human being
Treating women as property is an old Indian tradition, and finds reflection in our epics. In the Mahabharata, for example, Yudhishthir gambles Draupadi away, as if she is not an autonomous human being but his possession.
(I recommend reading Irawati Karve’s Yuganta for her brilliant analysis of how the Mahabharata treated women.)
The Bollywood hero is the perfect archetype for the entitled Indian male. Most Bollywood wooing is basically sexual harassment. You could argue about whether popular culture reflects society or shapes it, but they amount to the same thing.
Almost a century ago, Vladimir Lenin is said to have coined the term ‘Useful Idiots.’ The term referred to those intellectuals or eminent people who gave a movement respectability by association, but weren’t actually respected within the movement itself.
As Arun Shourie famously said, NDA = UPA + Cow.
Many who had supported Modi in 2014 now realised that their optimism was misplaced and the worst-case-scenario was unfolding. Public intellectuals like Sadanand Dhume deserve credit for changing their mind when they were mugged by reality, and for having the intellectual honesty to continue to speak truth to power. But many did not.
Here are four possible reasons why these Useful Idiots continued to stay Idiots. One: Rationalisation
These Useful Idiots, having gone public with their support of Modi, had their reputations and self-esteem at threat. They could not simply change their minds. Also, they badly wanted to be right. So they rationalised away Modi’s inaction.
Two: The Carrot
Ignore the rumours about the BJP’s IT cell having prominent people on their payroll. There were enough legitimate ways to reward cronies. Rajya Sabha seats, Padma Awards, sinecures at government institutions, lucrative directorships in
There were enough legitimate ways to reward cronies. Rajya Sabha seats, Padma Awards, sinecures at government institutions, lucrative directorships in PSUs, seats in the Niti Aayog, and so on.
Three: The Stick
This government is vindictive, and it appears that it will remain in power for a long time. Who would want to mess around?
Four: The Lust For Power
I have been stunned and saddened over the last few months to see how so many people I knew have been transformed by proximity to power.
Although ‘right’ and ‘left’ are now useless terms, I’d fall into the economic right because I support free markets. I support free markets because I support individual freedom. And individual freedom is incompatible with the agenda of the social right – which, in India, basically means bigots and misogynists.
One peculiar quality of Indian society is its rudeness. People meet you for the first time at a party and think it is perfectly okay to ask you personal questions. For example, my wife and I often get asked why we have chosen to not have children.
I wait for the day a couple with kids is asked, “Oh you have kids! But why?”
Let me start by stating three principles that I think you would agree with. One: We should not cause suffering to others. Two: We should not kill anyone. Three: Consent is all-important, and we should do nothing to others without their consent. Do you agree with those three principles? Well, then, consider that when you have a child, you are basically bringing a person into this world without their consent, where they are guaranteed to a) suffer and b) die. You are breaching all three of those principles. How can this possibly be ethical?
Anti-Natalism, and arguments for not having children can be found in the works of Sophocles, the Buddha, the Arabic philosopher Al-Ma’arri, Schopenhauer and Kant.
Woody Allen perhaps put it more eloquently: “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”
There are two common types of arguments offered for having children. One, that parenting is rewarding, and it’s good for the parents, who become better people or have someone to look after them in their old age, and so on. This is a selfish argument. If we did everything to maximise our own happiness, and didn’t care about the impact on others, then conversations about ‘morality’ would be pointless.
The second argument is, what about the species?
It is true that all our impulses have evolved through natural selection so that our genes may be propagated onwards. Many of these have also been codified through cultural norms. That is why not only do many of us feel driven to have children, but all cultures also place a high value on it. However, unlike all other species, we have evolved to be thinking creatures that can actually fight our biological programming.
unlike all other species, we have evolved to be thinking creatures that can actually fight our biological programming.
However, unlike all other species, we have evolved to be thinking creatures that can actually fight our biological programming.
As Rust Cohle, the Anti-Natalist character in the TV series True Detective says, “The honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming: stop reproducing.”
When asked by strangers why I don’t have kids, I don’t launch into the above argument. Instead, I like to quote a poem by Philip Larkin, that encapsulates all of this quite perfectly. It’s called ‘This Be The Verse’.
And yet, it is our case that despite our parties seeming to hold opposite visions of what India should be, they are not just all equally bad, but they are bad in the same way. In moral terms, they are identical.
The Moral Question About Ends and Means Here’s a fundamental question in philosophy: how do we judge the morality of an action?
Here’s a fundamental question in philosophy: how do we judge the morality of an action?
Deontologists would say that there is something intrinsic in an action itself that determines its morality. There are certain first principles from which you arrive at sets of rules.
Utilitarians would say that whether an action is good or bad depends on its consequences.
Utilitarianism Problem one: Calculation How does one calculate utility? If you believe that the end justifies the means, you can make up any end you like, and argue that it gives you license to employ any means you like.
Utilitarianism Problem two: The Distinction Between Persons
In his classic book A Theory of Justice, John Rawls wrote: “Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.”
Utilitarians, like Godlike engineers, aim to calculate the overall utility of an action. Even if this was possible – it is usually not, as we argued above – it would still not be sufficient because victims of the actions would be
Utilitarians, like Godlike engineers, aim to calculate the overall utility of an action. Even if this was possible – it is usually not, as we argued above – it would still not be sufficient because victims of the actions would be different from beneficiaries of the action.
Utilitarianism Problem three: The Question of Justice (or Individual Rights) Harming one group of people
Utilitarianism Problem three: The Question of Justice (or Individual Rights)
Harming one group of people for the benefit of another, or of “society at large,” is unjust to the people being harmed.
The whole concept of rights ceases to have meaning if one can hold that the end justifies the means.
By this way of thinking, the purpose of the state is to safeguard these rights. To do so, however, the state has to be given a monopoly on violence.
Power always corrupts, and thus, the state always grows, and goes well beyond its only justifiable mandate.
This brings us to what the Left and the Right have had in common throughout history: they have disregarded individual rights and behaved as if the end justifies the means.
Saffron is the New Red
While the social policies of his party can be described as right-wing, his economic policies are resolutely left-wing: and both these formulations rely heavily on coercion.
Every government in India has practised left-wing economics, with its inevitable coercion. (Big government requires much taxation, which is never voluntary, and much rent-seeking.)
Most governments in India have also believed in different forms of social engineering.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself.”
POLITICS A neta who loves currency notes Told me what his line of work denotes. ‘It is kind of funny. We steal people’s money And use some of it to buy their votes.’
The most obvious unintended consequence of these waivers is what economists call Moral Hazard. Simply put, when farmers know that their loans are likely to be waived, they are incentivised to take loans they do not intend to return. (The same phenomenon applies in the case of the Too Big To Fail banks bailed out by the Fed in the US after the 2008 crisis.)
As we described in our recent essay on public choice economics, politicians come to power on the back of a) special interest groups and b) vote banks that they pander to. Once in power, they pay these groups back – with our money. Most governance amounts to a transfer of wealth from the people at large to special interest groups or vote banks. We call this Redistributive Bribery.
Farm loan waivers are an obvious example of this – the money to pay for the waivers does not fall from the sky, but comes from all of us.
To illustrate, here are four categories of Redistributive Bribery, with examples. One: Direct Subsidy to a Vote Bank
Farmers are an important vote bank everywhere, and this noble action for their benefit makes many non-farmers feel noble and compassionate. It probably hurts the farmers more than it helps them, by trapping them in a cycle of dependency, but that’s unintuitive and unseen.
There is no end to this sort of direct subsidy to vote banks. Free televisions, free laptops, free rice – they are
There is no end to this sort of direct subsidy to vote banks. Free televisions, free laptops, free rice – they are all Redistributive Bribery.
Two: Direct Subsidy to an Interest Group Interest groups spend lots of money getting their favoured politicians into office.
Two: Direct Subsidy to an Interest Group Interest groups spend lots of money getting their favoured politicians into office. Naturally, they want a return on investment.
Two: Direct Subsidy to an Interest Group Interest groups spend lots of money getting their favoured politicians into office. Naturally, they want a return on investment. And politicians are keen to deliver, for they need funds for the next election also.
Three: Regulation to Favour Vote Banks
Wait, you say, surely regulation isn’t redistribution. Well, it mostly is, though in an indirect and unseen way. Consider Rent Control.
Rent Control is a regulation meant to benefit a particular vote bank: renters. But think of its long-term effects. It removes the incentives of property owners to look after their property, and buildings become dilapidated over time.
Four: Regulation to Favour Interest Groups
Small traders and businesses have been a crucial support group for the BJP. No wonder, then, that the BJP opposes Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in retail.
The more the competition, the more consumers benefit. When FDI in retail is not allowed, the market is less competitive than it would otherwise be, and consumers lose value.
It’s not just restricting FDI in retail: All protectionism, without exception, amounts to redistribution of wealth from the common masses at large to special interest groups. Another example is black-and-yellow cabs and auto unions lobbying the government against Uber and Ola.
All protectionism, without exception, amounts to redistribution of wealth from the common masses at large to special interest groups. Another example is black-and-yellow cabs and auto unions lobbying the government against Uber and Ola.
All political parties engage in Redistributive Bribery. It is the oldest scam in politics — and perhaps even the basis of it. So why do we put up with it? We do so because while the benefits are visible, the costs are not.
The loss from much regulation and subsidy is often more than the gain, because incentives change for all involved. A positive-sum game becomes a zero-sum or negative-sum game.
We grew up in India as believers in the biggest religion in the world: the religion of Government.
We grew up in India as believers in the biggest religion in the world: the religion of Government. Like all religions, this one claims to reveal the One Big Truth, and worships the biggest God of all. It holds that Government is the solution to all our problems. Put in rational terms, we are taught that markets are imperfect, market failures are inevitable, and we need Government to set everything right.
Pioneered by scholars such as Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, Public Choice Economics had one key insight to offer: that governments aren’t supernatural entities, but consist of humans.
Pioneered by scholars such as Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, Public Choice Economics had one key insight to offer: that governments aren’t supernatural entities, but consist of humans. And humans respond to incentives. Therefore, to understand government, we must understand the incentives of the people it is made up of.
Markets are networks of voluntary exchanges that are basically a positive-sum game: in every voluntary transaction, both parties benefit, else they wouldn’t be transacting. The only way to make a profit is by adding value to someone’s life. The greedier you are, the harder you work to make others better off.
Milton Friedman famously expounded on the Four Ways of Spending Money,
In a nutshell, government brings together the worst conditions for spending money – you are spending someone else’s money on someone else, and are likely to care about neither the money being spent nor the service being provided. These are the worst possible incentives.
Consider the incentives of bureaucrats. What motivates them? In the words of economist William Niskanen: “Salary, prerequisites of the office, public reputation, power, patronage… and the ease of managing the bureau.”
Parkinson’s Law illustrates the state of the bureaucracy beautifully: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
The two implications of this, according to C Northcote Parkinson, after whom the law is named: One: “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals.” Two: “Officials make work for each other.” This is why government departments tend to grow endlessly and not get anything done.
The two implications of this, according to C Northcote Parkinson, after whom the law is named: One: “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals.” Two: “Officials make work for each other.” This is why government departments tend to grow endlessly and not get anything done. Here’s an example of this: Have you heard of the Churchill Cigar Assistant?
In theory, government is a noble defender of our rights. In practice, it is an ever-growing parasite.
To think this solves the problem is as delusional as Diana killing Ares and expecting that the problems of the world will be resolved.
We don’t have those in the real world. If we did, though, we would need only one God for the world to function perfectly: the God of Incentives. We would name him Milton.
It would be amazing if prostitution was legal in India. Over here, we use the law as an enforcer of morality, and prostitution is considered deeply immoral.
Why, then, is prostitution effectively banned in India? (Strictly speaking, it is soliciting in public which is banned, which in practical terms renders prostitution itself effectively illegal.)
A few years ago in a talk show, Kiran Bedi insisted that all prostitution involved coercion. No woman would want to be a prostitute of her own volition, she argued. On the show with her were actual members of the flesh trade, who laughingly told her she was wrong, and that they had joined the profession of their own free will.
Why do people willingly do them, then? It is because, of the options open to them, they feel that this is the best. If they had a better option, they’d go for
Why do people willingly do them, then? It is because, of the options open to them, they feel that this is the best. If they had a better option, they’d go for it.
What happens when you criminalise it is identical to what
Prostitution, per se, is a victimless crime. What happens when you criminalise it is identical to what happens when any other victimless crime is banned. (Such as drinking alcohol, gambling or inhaling cannabis.)
Prostitution, per se, is a victimless crime. What happens when you criminalise it is identical to what happens when any other victimless crime is banned. (Such as drinking alcohol, gambling or inhaling cannabis.) The underworld gets involved, and that’s when the shady business starts.
An unholy nexus springs up between the underworld and local politicians (The Bootlegger and the Baptist, basically), and everyone else suffers.
In other words, Indian law, like Kiran Bedi, assumes that coercion is a given. According to the law, prostitution and trafficking are the same thing.
Why is our law like this? Is this some kind of patriarchal virtue-signalling? Is this Victorian morality at play, part of a weird colonial hangover? These questions are moot. Whatever the reasons are, for both our law and our social attitudes towards prostitution, we must move forward.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” These are the opening words of Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder argues that we must not take democracy for granted. (The book was triggered by the rise of Donald Trump in the USA, but applies equally to us in India.)
Lesson number one: ‘Do not obey in advance.’ In authoritarian times, Snyder writes, “individuals think about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Lesson number two: ‘Defend institutions.’
He adds that one common mistake is “to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced they will do.”
Lesson number three: ‘Beware the one-party state’. Lesson number six: ‘Beware of paramilitaries.’ Lesson number 17: ‘Listen for dangerous words.’ Lesson number 19: ‘Be a patriot.’ (As opposed to a nationalist.)
Snyder cites the historian of Nazi Germany, Victor Klemperer, to describe the four modes through which truth dies and a post-truth world emerges. The first mode is “the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.”
The second mode is “shamanistic incantation.” Klemperer spoke of the “endless repetition” that served, in Snyder’s words, “to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.”
The third mode is “magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.” Modi embodies this, by doing the precise opposite of what he had promised in the runup to 2014. He had promised “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance”, but what he is serving up is “Maximum Government, Minimum Governance.”
The fourth mode is “misplaced faith.” As Snyder sums up Klemperer’s insight about the Nazis, “Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”
“Post-truth is pre-fascism,” Snyder writes,
Back in the day, we all got our information from mainstream media, and even if there were ideological biases, there was at least a consensus on facts. Those gatekeepers are irrelevant now.
That mildly tweaking the chemical balance of the brain could turn a person suicidal is not surprising: anti-depressants are so popular because we know you can turn the switch the other way. Indeed, it drives home the fact that what we call our ‘personality’ is actually deeply contingent.
The most popular case study in neuroscience is probably that of Phineas Gage, a 19th century American railroad worker. When he was 25, an iron rod went through his head, and a large part of his left frontal lobe was destroyed. Miraculously, he survived – but did he survive as himself? His memory and intelligence weren’t affected by his accident, but his personality changed so much that his friends and family described him as “no longer Gage.”
Over the decades, we have learnt that the physical structure of the brain determines personality. For example, sociopathy is not a behavioural defect but a biological one: damage to the amygdala, the part of the brain believed to cause feelings of empathy for others, is the probable culprit. Four percent of us are born sociopaths, though they are over-represented among criminals, bankers, lawyers and politicians. (I’m not joking.)
Tweaking the chemical or hormonal balance of the brain can also shape and change personality. That accounts for the popularity of anti-depressants and cognitive super-drugs like Modafinil (which I take occasionally). Similarly, a coffee or sugar high can change behaviour, and hunger or lust can transform us.
All humans, and their brains, are more or less identical. Tiny differences in our physical brains, and their chemical and hormonal balance, account for who we are.
I don’t mean to imply here that Nature is everything. Nurture is as important. As Steven Pinker once wrote, Nature gives us knobs of varying sizes, and Nurture turns them.
I would, at this point, like to present to you what I call The Binary Fallacy.
The Binary Fallacy is the ingrained, mistaken notion that there are just two options in any given situation.
Here’s the thing: the world is fake news. It’s deeply complex, with millions of events coinciding every moment, sometimes independent, often with chains of connections to each other that the human mind cannot unravel. We cannot deal with all this complexity. If we tried to do so, we would freeze with bewilderment and indecision.
So we tell ourselves simple stories to make a complex world explicable. And over time, decision-making shortcuts, or heuristics, get programmed into our brain as the species evolves. This is necessary for survival.
If we didn’t take cognitive shortcuts, the Decision Fatigue alone could kill us, leave alone the tiger.
This is what poker players learn, and is also the key insight of the Bhagavada Gita: keep making the right decisions, and don’t worry about the fruits of your actions.
The Hindsight Bias is our tendency to believe that a) whatever happened in the past was inevitable and b) that we knew it would happen. Therefore, someone who makes a fallacious prediction or carries out an action that leads to a bad outcome was… wrong. After all, he wasn’t right, and what other options are there?
Previous challenges to this act, on the basis of the Right to Privacy, were held up in court, and Divan could not make that argument for technical reasons. Instead, he based his argument on a person’s ownership of his own body.
Divan argued that the imposition of Aadhaar “completely takes away your political and personal choices. You are a dog on an electronic leash, tagged and tracked, your progress hobbled.”
Divan cited both Enlightenment and modern-day philosophers during his masterful submission, and John Locke was among them. It should be intuitive that all humans own their own bodies, but it was Locke, in the 17th century, who gave the first clear articulation of this: “Every man has a property in his own person. This no Body has any right to but himself.”
One, for the ‘Right to Self-Ownership’ to have any meaning, you need to respect the corresponding right of others.
Two, all legitimate rights flow from this right to self-ownership. The right to free speech – for your thoughts are yours, and you should be free to express them. The right to property, which is a result of your labours, and of voluntary exchange.
Three, because a situation where every person has to fend for themselves is unviable, and likely to be violent, the state is a necessary evil.
Note that these rights are not granted to us by the state, as if they are favours. Instead, we have these rights to begin with, and we have brought the state into being to protect them.
Our constitution paid lip service to individual rights, but did not do enough to safeguard them. It will not save us – and thus, nor will the Supreme Court. It is up to us to snap out of our apathy and declare, as that battery of lawyers did a century ago, that we will not be ruled any more, that we own ourselves. What is your view on this?
Our constitution paid lip service to individual rights, but did not do enough to safeguard them. It will not save us – and thus, nor will the Supreme Court. It is up to us to snap out of our apathy and declare, as that battery of lawyers did a century ago, that we will not be ruled any more, that we own ourselves.
The other day I was out at a restaurant with a friend. I thought we would go Dutch. At the end of the meal, the friend insisted on paying the bill. “Damn,” I said jokingly, “had I known I would have ordered dessert.”
Also, as a matter of courtesy, if a friend was paying, I would either order the same as always or even less.
This was best articulated by the economist Milton Friedman, who once famously laid out the four ways of spending money. One, you spend your money on yourself. (Example: you go out dining alone.)
Two, you spend your money on someone else. (Example: you buy a proforma wedding present for someone you are not close to.)
Three, you spend someone else’s money on yourself. (Example: You are on a foreign trip for your company at a five-star, all expenses paid for.)
Four, you spend someone else’s money on someone else. In this case, you will neither economise, for it is not your money spent, nor look for value, as you are not the beneficiary. It is in this fourth instance that the most money is likely to be spent for the least benefit.
Four, you spend someone else’s money on someone else. In this case, you will neither economise, for it is not your money spent, nor look for value, as you are not the beneficiary. It is in this fourth instance that the most money is likely to be spent for the least benefit. This is government.
Government is India is bad at two levels. Level one, it spends other people’s money on other people, which is a hopelessly inefficient structure to begin with. Level two, it has become an instrument for individuals to prey on citizens in a parasitic way, making money not by providing value but by robbing others of value.
The great Frédéric Bastiat once said: “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
In ODIs, teams have around seven batting resources for 50 overs. In T20s, they have the same number of batting resources for 40% of the overs. The reduced overs mean that the opportunity cost of a dot ball goes up, and the opportunity cost of a wicket goes down. The risk-reward ratio changes, so batsmen should attack more.
So here’s one stat you should keep your eye on this season: a batsman’s season-long strike rate minus the overall par-score strike rate (for a par score of 180, that would be 150). Let’s call it the Varma Number. If it is negative, the batsman has failed. Earlier pieces
So here’s one stat you should keep your eye on this season: a batsman’s season-long strike rate minus the overall par-score strike rate (for a par score of 180, that would be 150). Let’s call it the Varma Number. If it is negative, the batsman has failed.
Liberalism, however one tries to spin it, was an import from the west, and it is ironic that many of our finest freedom fighters
Liberalism, however one tries to spin it, was an import from the west, and it is ironic that many of our finest freedom fighters were influenced by British thinkers.
Until Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom struggle was a battle between the British empire on one hand, and Indian elites inspired by Western ideas on the other. Gandhi did catalyse it into a mass movement, but his intellectual influences weren’t Indian either.
Until Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom struggle was a battle between the British empire on one hand, and Indian elites inspired by Western ideas on the other. Gandhi did catalyse it into a mass movement, but his intellectual influences weren’t Indian either. He was more influenced by Ruskin and Tolstoy than any Indian thinker, and VS Naipaul once called him “the least Indian of Indian leaders.”
It is worth reflecting here that the state and society are two different beasts. This difference is a cornerstone of conservatism, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as a “political doctrine that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices.”
Early Indian conservatives were more interested in social rather than political battles, which is why they didn’t play much of a role in the freedom movement.
After Independence, the Nehruvian big state seemed to have subdued the Hindutva social project – but this was temporary.
Should the state be a superstructure that imposes certain values, decided upon by elites, upon society? Or should it be a servant to society, protecting its traditions without judging them from the prism of other value systems?
Equally, hugs are a technology for oxytocin generation. Romance is a technology for the way it makes us feel and the chemicals it releases. If we could pop a pill and feel the same way, would we bother to fall in love, or hug or cuddle or caress, or even woo?
The earliest conception of individual rights came from the 17th century Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke. Locke held that the most fundamental right of all, the one from which all others emerged, was the right to self-ownership. After all, it is practically self-evident and beyond argument that, right from birth, all of us own ourselves.
All individual rights arise out of this right to self-ownership. The right to life. The right to our thoughts, and thus to our speech. The right to our actions, which also results in the right to property. And so on. Freedom, another misunderstood term, means a condition in which these rights are not infringed.
All of our rights are contingent to our respecting the corresponding rights (and thus, freedom) of others. My fist stops where your nose begins, as that old saying goes.
Am I infringing on the rights of the troll I block? No, because there is no coercion involved. He is still free to say whatever he wants, but he is not entitled to my time and attention.
Obviously, words can be used to incite physical violence, and that is a reasonable limit of free speech. The US Supreme Court, in a famous case (Brandeburg vs Ohio, 1969) set the standard as “imminent lawless action.”
The Indian constitution, sadly, does not protect free speech. Article 19(2) lays out caveats such as “public order” and “decency and morality”, which are open to misinterpretation and, thus, misuse. This is a pity, but our democracy is a work in progress, and is made healthier by a free exchange of ideas.
Sometimes the most obvious truth can be a falsehood; and the most surreal story can be true.
Prohibition is the greatest boon to a bootlegger. It is the main reason he exists. And a politician who supports prohibition should be his greatest ally. He should support him to the point of funding him, and even share his profits with him. This is best illustrated, in economics, by the concept of Bootleggers and Baptists.
The regulatory economist Bruce Yandle first coined the phrase ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’. It describes how regulations evolve, and how the different interest groups that benefit from them become unlikely allies. For example, take a Baptist who preaches that alcohol is evil, and makes sure it is banned. Where there is demand, supply will spring up, so enter the Bootlegger.
Bootleggers and Baptists share a symbiotic relationship. In Yandle’s words, “Baptists flourish when their moral message forms a visible foundation for political action. […] Bootleggers, who expect to profit from the very regulatory restrictions desired by Baptists, grease the political machinery with some of their expected proceeds.”
Eric Hoffer writes in his book The True Believer, which is a book about the rise of mass movements, that they are driven by frustration.
Modi tapped into different kinds of frustrations during his rise to power. Among them were classical liberals who cared for freedom — both personal freedom and economic freedom — and were frustrated by nearly seven decades of state oppression that had kept hundreds of millions of people in poverty for much longer than they should have.
Modi is a master of optics, and as he built himself up as a national leader, he became a bit like a Rorschach Inkblot Test — you could see in him what you wanted to.
Now, a party on the campaign trail is like a young man wooing a woman: he’s on his best behaviour, and he’ll tell her just what she wants to hear. But governance is like what happens after marriage:
Now, a party on the campaign trail is like a young man wooing a woman: he’s on his best behaviour, and he’ll tell her just what she wants to hear. But governance is like what happens after marriage: the girl find out the truth
Indeed, he has shown us that he is actually a true heir of the Congress party: he has the economic vision of Nehru, and the political instincts of Indira Gandhi. And I mean both of those as a criticism.
Now, a 1000 rupees is equal to around 15 dollars. It is not really a high-denomination note. Modi had perhaps not bought anything from a store in two decades, so he didn’t realise that these notes are not used mainly for as unit of storage, as high denomination notes are in some other countries, but as a medium of exchange.
My friend Nitin Pai of the Takshashila Institution recently estimated that with every 1% rise in the GDP, 2 million people come out of poverty.
My friend the economist Suyash Rai said an interesting thing to me a few days ago. He said, “Mujhe communist se dar nahin lagta, mujhe classical liberal se dar lagta hai.”
My friend the economist Suyash Rai said an interesting thing to me a few days ago. He said, “Mujhe communist se dar nahin lagta, mujhe classical liberal se dar lagta hai.” (“I am not scared of communists, I am scared of classical liberals.”)
There are too many people who pay lip service to freedom but support this oppressive regime.
David Boaz once said, “There are only two political philosophies: liberty and power.” These are necessarily opposed to each other. Those who enter politics lust for power. If your ideas or your support seems useful to them, they will pretend to be on your side, but when they’ve gotten what they wanted, they will spit you out.
Lesson Number Two is that policy advocacy is mostly useless. If you want to make an impact on the political marketplace, you need to attack the demand side, not the supply side.
The average age in India today is 27, and 60% of the country is born after the liberalisation of 1991. This is both a problem and an opportunity.
Here’s the problem. These young people are growing up in an India that needs 1 million jobs every month — 12 million jobs a year — to accommodate this new workforce. These jobs aren’t there.
The government can’t create jobs, it can only enable job creation. But the reforms that would make this happen — labour reforms, ease of doing business reforms — simply aren’t happening.
Classical liberal notions like spontaneous order and the positive-sumness of things are unintuitive and hard to sell in the best of times, but even more so in times of scarcity.
Understand this: the prime minister of India in the year 2050 could be a 15-year-old girl who is sitting in a small town in India somewhere at this very moment, doing her boring homework.
In another two or three decades, this demographic tide will reverse itself, and we will become a rapidly ageing country. Will we still be poor or illiberal then, or will we be a beacon of freedom for the world?
DeVos has been demonised by the Democrats, who tried to block her appointment, but their attacks were mostly personal ones that did not focus on the substance of what she proposes to do in office. For decades, DeVos has been a proponent of School Choice. This would transform education in America, and would show a way forward to other countries, including India.
A recent Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), described by the government itself as “pretty depressing,” showed that 52% of students in Class V were unable to read a Class II textbook.
Teachers are not the problem, though, but a symptom of it. The problem is incentives.
How does one make them accountable, and make sure that our money is better spent? One answer is school vouchers.
Under a voucher system, the government, instead of giving money to government schools, gives vouchers to parents. Parents decide what is the best school for their children, and submit the voucher there. That school then gives the voucher to the government and gets the money. This changes the incentives for government schools and their teachers. They have to perform now, and deliver quality education, or parents will take their kids elsewhere.
Vouchers are only one piece of the puzzle, of course. They are pointless if there are harsh entry barriers for private players in education.
If a school provides budget education to children in a slum, why should it matter if its playground isn’t big enough?
Organisations like the Centre for Civil Society have long documented how thousands of poor parents in slums and villages across India prefer to pay to send their kids to a budget private school rather than to a free government school. This speaks volumes.
When you fight against the system, of course, the system fights back. The status quo is always fiercely defended by the special interests that benefit from it.
In the US, for example, teachers’ unions are the biggest opponents of education reform, as the current system give them power and privilege without accountability.
In the US, for example, teachers’ unions are the biggest opponents of education reform, as the current system give them power and privilege without accountability. They happen to be prominent donors
In the US, for example, teachers’ unions are the biggest opponents of education reform, as the current system give them power and privilege without accountability. They happen to be prominent donors to the Democratic Party who, as a result, oppose School Choice.
As an illustration, consider that the sanctimonious Elizabeth Warren actually advocated school vouchers in a book she wrote in 2003. She changed her stance when she joined politics and realised who the most influential donors in the Democratic Party were. That’s the whole game of politics right there: special interest groups purchasing politicians to benefit at the expense of the common people.
In ‘What is Populism?’ Jan-Werner Müller, a Princeton professor, lays out all the ingredients from which you can cook up a populist movement.
Consider the following characteristics that characterise populists, as defined by Müller. One, they claim that not only do they represent the people, but that whoever does not support them is, by definition, not part of ‘the people’.
Two, populists are not just anti-pluralism, but they’re also anti-elite.
Three, they portray themselves as victims even when they are in power.
Four, populist parties tend to become monolithic, “with the rank-and-file clearly subordinated to a single leader.”
Five, populists pride themselves on their “proximity to the people.”
As it is, indeed, to other populists. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez both hosted shows similar to Modi’s Mann Ki Baat.
Six, populism is simplistic, so populists can only think in simplistic terms, which leads to “an oversimplification of policy challenges.”
Seven, they populists tend to believe in conspiracy theories, which “are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.”
How do populists behave once in power? Müller outlines three things that they tend to do. One, they “colonize or occupy the state”.
Two, they “engage in mass clientelism: the exchange of material and immaterial favors by elites for mass political support.”
Three, they shut down dissent in civil society, starting with NGOs. Müller writes, “rulers like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and PiS in Poland have gone out of their way to try to discredit NGOs as being controlled by outside powers (and declare them ‘foreign agents’).” Sounds familiar? Modi fits Müller’s populist template so precisely that he seems like a bot generated by a populism machine, and not an actual person. It made me wonder: if a near-identical form of populism persists through vast stretches of time and geography, does it then reflect something innate in human nature? I’ll leave you with a pleasant thought, though. Here’s why I think both Modi’s and Trump’s populism will ultimately fail. The narratives of populism, based on some of the people being all of the people, only work in broadly homogenous societies. The USA will be a minority-majority country by the middle of the century (ie, whites will be less than 50% of the population), and a Trump won’t be possible then. As for India, our diversity is our greatest defence against creeping fascism. Populism might work at the state level, but nationally, we are too diverse. That puts a ceiling on how much support Modi can get, which I believe already peaked in 2014, when he could be all things to all people. I think he already senses this. How will he respond?
Three, they shut down dissent in civil society, starting with NGOs.
Modi fits Müller’s populist template so precisely that he seems like a bot generated by a populism machine, and not an actual person.
Here’s why I think both Modi’s and Trump’s populism will ultimately fail. The narratives of populism, based on some of the people being all of the people, only work in broadly homogenous societies.
As for India, our diversity is our greatest defence against creeping fascism. Populism might work at the state level, but nationally, we are too diverse. That puts a ceiling on how much support Modi can get, which I believe already peaked in 2014, when he could be all things to all people.
In 1848, a French economist named Frédéric Bastiat, 47-years-old at the time, wrote a seminal essay titled ‘That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen’.
There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
The essay went on to illustrate this with what is now known as the Parable of the Broken Window.
The great economics journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote his seminal text, Economics in One Lesson, based entirely upon Bastiat’s essay.
This is a guest column published today in the Sunday Times of India edit page. I am a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, but the man had some strange views. In Hind Swaraj, written shortly after he turned
I am a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, but the man had some strange views. In Hind Swaraj, written shortly after he turned 40 in 1909, Gandhi tore into some of the symbols of the modern age. “Hospitals are institutions for propagating sin,” he wrote. “To study European medicine is to deepen our slavery.” He railed against the railways, saying “it is beyond dispute that they propagate evil.” He argued against lawyers, despite being one himself, saying they had “impoverished the country.” But here’s a thing to note: despite these personal views, he never once suggested that railways, hospitals and lawyers should be banned.
A cashless society would be a disaster for India. Here’s why. One, a fully cashless society would mean the end of privacy.
Two, a fully cashless society could mean the end of dissent.
Three, a fully cashless society endangers freedom.
It is a myth that an advanced society must necessarily be cashless. In Germany, a country which knows the perils of authoritarianism, more than 80% of transactions are in cash, as citizens safeguard their privacy and freedom.
My objection here is not to cashlessness per se, but to the coercion implicit in the currency swap of November 8 and its aftermath.
My objection here is not to cashlessness per se, but to the coercion implicit in the currency swap of November 8 and its aftermath. A cashless society would only be good if we evolve towards it, not if we are forced into it.
The beneficiaries of forced cashlessness are not consumers, but vested interests like banks and payment companies.
What does a democracy mean? It means that the people are the rulers, and the government is there to serve us. But our governments rule us instead of serving us, and we are happy to be ruled. If we are going to play ‘choose your ruler’, what is the point of being free?”
I often quip, if Modi killed the poorer half of the country, some ‘respectable’ economist in his pay would publish a sober, reasoned argument that hey, India’s GDP per capita just went up, this is good for the economy.
In 1958, Chairman Mao ordered that that all sparrows over China should be put to death. It was hailed as a necessary step by a strong leader. Farmers were suffering because sparrows tended to eat their grain seeds. For the good of the nation, they had to be protected. Thus began The Great Sparrow Campaign. A countless number of sparrows were indeed wiped out—but there were unintended consequences.
Sparrows ate locusts, and once the balance in the ecosystem changed, locusts proliferated and destroyed China’s crops. There was famine, hunger, starvation: no less than 45 million people died in the three years following Mao’s orders. At the start, Mao exhorted them to bear with the inconvenience. But then the pain piled up. Mao’s
Sparrows ate locusts, and once the balance in the ecosystem changed, locusts proliferated and destroyed China’s crops. There was famine, hunger, starvation: no less than 45 million people died in the three years following Mao’s orders. At the start, Mao exhorted them to bear with the inconvenience. But then the pain piled up.
Modi claims that this move is an attack against black money and corruption. This is not true, and here are four reasons why. One, as per a recent estimate, only 6% of black money is kept in the form of cash.
Two, new 2000 and 500 rupee notes are on the way, and a black market for conversion from old to new is already thriving.
Three, as various economists have pointed out, this attacks the stock and not the flow of black money.
Three, as various economists have pointed out, this attacks the stock and not the flow of black money. To strike at black money and corruption, you
Three, as various economists have pointed out, this attacks the stock and not the flow of black money. To strike at black money and corruption, you need to strike at their root causes.
The fourth and most compelling reason is this: these aren’t really high-denomination notes. Modi has probably not bought anything from a store in 15 years, so he imagines that the poor do not use these notes.
Over 300 million people have no government ID, and there are crores of people stuck without a way to convert their hard-earned cash.
This is not an issue of implementation. Even if implementation was perfect, this would be a historic blunder because social engineering never works, and carries moral costs because of its unintended consequences.
When people have to queue up to withdraw their own money, on which limits are placed, it is an attack on property rights that is more out of the Communist handbook than any right-wing philosophy.
Indeed, Burkean conservatives and Hayekian libertarians alike would be aghast at Modi’s actions, as he propels India towards the Soviet Union so admired by Nehru, with its state oppression, artificial shortages and infamous queues. But Chairman Mao would approve.
‘There is no analog of American conservatism in India. The Indian right is driven by bigotry and nativism, with no deeper guiding philosophy behind it. [Consider the irony of these words.] You will not find any Burkean conservatives here.
I said. ‘There is no analog of American conservatism in India. The Indian right is driven by bigotry and nativism, with no deeper guiding philosophy behind it. [Consider the irony of these words.] You will not find any Burkean conservatives here. Don’t come.’
There have always been but two political philosophies, David Boaz once wrote, liberty and power.
When Modi took over, I expressed cautious optimism at first, but get threatened almost daily now for my vehement opposition to Modi. (He is right-wing on social issues, left-wing on economics, and thus an enemy of freedom in every respect.)
We live in an age of grand delusions, so it is appropriate to invoke the name of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. When Narendra Modi recently
When Narendra Modi recently announced the demonetisation of 500 and 1000 rupee notes, I instantly thought of Tughlaq, as did many others,
Modi has taken the risk of alienating them. That said, courage does not always go hand in hand with wisdom, and this move is a mistake at multiple levels.
As Lord Acton famously said, power corrupts. The more power you give one set of individuals over another, the more corruption you will have.
To end corruption, you need to vastly reduce the power that government gives one set of people over another people.
When a government is a thousand times larger than it should be, a rent-seeking parasitic beast that sucks the lifeblood of the people without creating any value, it is natural to be disdainful.
Four, Modi, like Nehru and Indira, is a top-down
Modi, like Nehru and Indira, is a top-down thinker who believes that an economy and a country can be run from above, as if the government is a proxy for god. This is, in the words of the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, a fatal conceit.
The BCCI’s coffers are filled by us. Our time is their money.
Now, the brutal fact is that most of us choose to watch men’s cricket much more than women’s cricket.
So most of the money that the BCCI has is because people watch men’s cricket, and it’s only fair that if I create value for the BCCI by watching the Indian men’s team, that money should go to the men’s team and not to the women’s team, who I chose not to watch. To take it from the men and give it to the women would, in fact, be condescending and patronising, and any feminist should be against such handouts. I’d imagine the appropriate feminist response to be, “We’ll earn our own way, thank you, we don’t want your bloody handouts.” Interestingly, the BCCI does already subsidise other parts of the game somewhat for its longer-term health. While the international men’s team gets all the eyeballs (and thus draws all the money), the BCCI pumps a large part of that money into domestic cricket, in nurturing a feeder system for the game.
So most of the money that the BCCI has is because people watch men’s cricket, and it’s only fair that if I create value for the BCCI by watching the Indian men’s team, that money should go to the men’s team and not to the women’s team, who I chose not to watch.
The counterpoint to this would be tennis, which, if I am not mistaken, pays men and women equally despite men bringing in more eyeballs (and thus money).
It’s rare that when a prize is given to someone, it is the prize that is elevated, not the recipient. That is exactly what has happened with the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Bob Dylan is an artistic legend who needs no validation – but the Nobel Prize itself has taken a lurch towards relevance.
What is literature? Definitions are troublesome, but I love Franz Kafka’s description of an ideal book as an “axe for the frozen sea within us.”
He is the most cited songwriter in US judicial opinions, showing how deeply his songs permeated into the culture.
Long before printed books existed, epic poets wrote their poems to be performed. We consider them literature today. William Shakespeare, in fact, wrote little that was meant for the printed page; and yet, if his plays are not literature, nothing is.
I am going to stretch that argument further. Shakespeare’s plays were basically screenplays for theatre productions, so how are they different, in terms of category, from screenplays for movies?
Would Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), William Goldman (All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) and David Simon (The Wire, Treme) be future candidates for a Nobel Prize for Literature? What about stand-up comedy?
We were poor when we became Independent in 1947, and while other countries have lifted themselves to wealth in that much time, we’re still poor. And government policies are the reason for our continuing
For the last 68 years, since a group of white-skinned rulers handed over power to a bunch of brown-skinned rulers, all the governments that have run India have done one thing incredibly effectively: they have redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich.
They have taken money from the poor in our country and given it to the rich, and, as if to troll us, they have done this in the name of fighting poverty.
Who benefits from competition? The consumers do. The greater the competition, the more value for money the common consumer gets. This is axiomatic. Our local retailers—all the people consulted by the ministers—were scared that their bottomline would be affected by this competition, so they successfully petitioned the government to block
Who benefits from competition? The consumers do. The greater the competition, the more value for money the common consumer gets. This is axiomatic. Our local retailers—all the people consulted by the ministers—were scared that their bottomline would be affected by this competition, so they successfully petitioned the government to block it.
The greater the competition, the more value for money the common consumer gets. This is axiomatic. Our local retailers—all the people consulted by the ministers—were scared that
All tariffs have exactly this effect.
All tariffs have exactly this effect. Let’s say I like to buy widgets. Local manufacturers sell me widgets for Rs 100 each. Foreign manufacturers, for a variety of reasons from technology to labour, can sell me widgets for Rs 80. But the local manufacturers petition the government to put a tariff on imports, and the government puts a Rs. 30-per-widget tariff on the foreigners, so they don’t bother coming over. The net result: each of us loses a notional Rs 20. Who gets that money? The local manufacturers. What just happened? The government redistributed wealth from the relatively poor masses to a specific relatively rich interest group.
What is seen here is the good done to one specific group of people (with money usurped from a poorer group, which by itself is surely morally wrong). What is not seen is what the consumers would have done with that money. They would have spent it or invested it, and it would have gone back into the economy, creating growth and employment. But the potential beneficiaries of that are not even aware of what didn’t happen.
What is seen here is the good done to one specific group of people (with money usurped from a poorer group, which by itself is surely morally wrong). What is not seen is what the consumers would have done with that money. They would have spent it or invested it, and it would have gone back into the economy,
What is seen here is the good done to one specific group of people (with money usurped from a poorer group, which by itself is surely morally wrong). What is not seen is what the consumers would have done with that money. They would have spent it or invested it, and it would have gone back into the economy, creating growth and employment.
Subsidies are also redistribution of the reverse-Robin Hood kind, if in a more obvious way.
Here’s the upshot: All interventions in free markets amount to a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Anything that reduces competition or artificially raises costs for the consumers amounts to just this. Restrictions on FDI, tariffs, licensing processes or regulations that make it harder to open a business or to run it, subsidies; and so on.
So why don’t we protest, you ask, given that we are a democracy? Well, think about the winners and the losers here. The costs of such redistribution are dispersed among more than a billion of us, and the benefits are concentrated to a few.
That is why government policy is not dictated by the people at large, but by the aggressive lobbying of hundreds of interest groups, out to make a killing at the expense of the poor.
That is why government grows and grows, and so many constraints are placed on the only force that can make us wealthy: economic freedom.

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India Uncut - Published by Amit Varma

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