It’s the Small Stuff, Stupid

An ironic bit of popular wisdom goes

In the context of economic development, I totally agree with the latter bit, but strongly disagree with the former bit. If we don’t sweat the small stuff, we don’t have much hope of managing the big stuff since the big stuff is exactly what arises from an aggregation of all those small bits of stuff.

I just went out to lunch in the neighborhood of where I work. A passerby stopped me to ask me where a certain company was. I said I don’t know but if he had an address, I could perhaps direct him. He only knew that it was close to the ‘Empire Building’. We spent some time trying to locate it and then finally gave up. I don’t know how long he spent walking around in the noon-day sun trying to get where he wanted to go. Perhaps he just wasted an hour, a lot of shoe leather, sweated in the heat, and when he arrived, he was tired. The opportunity cost of his trying to find a place is small but non-zero. He could have spent more time with his family or done some productive work. Add the cost of millions of people spending non-productive time searching, and soon you get a significant amount of loss.

That streets should have a name and locations along a street should have a number is a concept that should be evident to the meanest intelligence, one would expect considering that it is not exactly rocket science and that many parts of the world have had that innovation for generations, if not centuries. Yet it is a rare exception when you can find a place in India without an algorithmic description of how to get to it. A typical letter in a typical developed world would read:

Ramesh Singh
123 Gandhi Road
Pune, Maharashtra 44123

In India, it would be

Ramesh Singh
Networld Building
Opp: Star Cinemas
Vasant Sagar Complex near Local Station
Deccan Gymkhana
Pune, Maharashtra 44123

I have spent frustrating hours of my life searching for places in unfamiliar places such as Mumbai and Delhi, going round and round in circles in a cab asking people for a location. I assume that I am not alone and that in a country of a 1,000 million people many of whom find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings in the course of daily living and working, the story of spending time and energy needlessly is repeated a few tens of millions of times daily. Add that up for weeks, and months, and years, and decades — and soon you have a huge amount of wasted time and energy.

I have a prediction to make: that in about 10 or 20 years at most, Indians would have figured out this whole new-fangled thing called street addresses. We are bone stupid but not that abyssmally stupid that we cannot learn from others that street numbering saves time and energy. Since I am at it, I will make another prediction: that in about 10 years time we will learn the benefits of a standardized telephone numbering system and even learn that it is easier to read a long string of number when written thusly 408-083-2543 instead of thusly 4080832543. One may say that it really is a very minor matter. But it is not. Misdialled calls, numbers you cannot easily remember or copy down without errors, having to wonder if you need to add a 2 before you dial this number or should you add a city code or whatever is a needless aggravation.

Enough about phone numbers for now. The larger point is that standardization matters. It eases the friction that accompanies transactions which increase as an economy develops into a more complex web of interactions. Reducing transaction costs is what increases the pie because transaction costs are sheer losses (or dead-weight losses) that benefit no one. In a village economy, street addresses are not needed because everyone knows where everyone is and what he is up to today. In a city of a few million people and a few hundred square kilometers of buildings, one has to be more systematic.

It is all the small stuff, really, that end up making life miserable. Went to the bank yesterday. There were 20 people waiting huddled up near the teller’s counter. Surely it does not take an Einstein to figure out that handing out a number to each person waiting for a teller would ease the bother of having to keep standing in line.

I could go on and on ad nauseum about little innovations that have been around for ages and which we can adopt costlessly. I could fill volumes, honestly. There is a more important point all this is leading up to. That is, we need better technology, not necessarily ICT with its computers and cell phones and internet and world wide web. By technology I mean know-how — how to do stuff. The know-how exists. One just has to observe and learn and adopt. But observing, learning, and adopting takes thinking and effort; it is not as easy as simply buying a bunch of computers and firing off Microsoft Windows.

I am not a Luddite and I am not against hi-tech. Some of my best friends are techies and my education is in computer sciences and engineering and my salary is paid by a technology company. I just happen to believe that hi-tech needs a foundation and that foundation is made of lo-tech. Hi-tech without the lo-tech is about as useful as a car with a fancy engine but no wheels. Hey, that is a good analogy. A car with a fancy engine ain’t going anywhere in a hurry without wheels. And even if you do figure out that wheels are needed, you can’t go far if you don’t get round wheels. Square wheels just won’t do. Then even if you get round wheels, if the tires are not inflated, you get around with a lot of loss of fuel and in discomfort. That is, without air in the tires, your transaction costs are higher.

As a development economist, I have often asked myself what are the invariants that underlie development. I know for sure that high technology (computers, internet, cell phones) are neither necessary nor sufficent for development. Most of the developed economies of the world developed at a time when all those were not yet invented. I believe that one invariant is the ability to adopt innovations.

Post script: Here is a followup post The Tathagata on “It’s the Small Stuff, Stupid.”

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey