Me Write Pretty Some Day — Part 2

{A continuation of my previous post Me write pretty some day.}

My obsession with fully comprehending a problem before attempting to solve it springs from a simple personal trait: I am unbelievably lazy. How to get something done with the least effort is my constant obsession. My motto is work as little as possible to get only those things done that cannot be avoided. So of course I have to identify a minimal set of things that are unavoidable and then figure out the most efficient way of getting them done. Easily enough stated, my creed is not easy to follow. Sometimes I misidentify the set of things that need to done, and sometimes even after properly identifying the set, my method is imperfect. But by and large, I do get by and have managed to keep body and soul together—with a little help from my friends, of course.

Though I have a tendency to avoid unpleasant truths, I could not evade the conclusion that something was radically wrong with India. Even while I was in engineering school, I was aware of the poverty around me and figured out that being born poor was like getting a very poor outcome in a random draw. I went to a good school because I was lucky to be born to middle-class professional parents; the cleaning lady’s kid would never see the insides of a school and would probably end up with a much poorer life through no fault of his. Having had good schooling, I was able to study computer science at one of India’s premier institutions (IIT Kanpur) and was even paid to do so. Who paid for my education? The unlucky kids from poor families who got dealt a lousy hand in life’s random draw.

The IITs are a portal to the US. I ended up at Rutgers University to do a PhD in computer science. But grad student life sucks compared to that of a yuppie in the Silicon Valley and I quit within a short time with another master’s degree to work for HP. California lies pretty much at the other extreme of the world from India, both geographically and economically. With a population of about three percent of India’s population, its economy was double the size of India’s. Why was California so rich and why was India so poor? I had sufficient time to ponder that question. What distinguished the two? What was the reason for the totally different ways of living: the thoughtless affluence of the few compared to the grinding dehumanizing poverty of the many? I came up with the hypothesis that per capita resource availability had something to do with it. The cause of India’s poverty, it appeared to me, was due to an imbalance between resources and people. As a first approximation to the statement of what India’s basic problem was it was not too bad.

In northern California living is easy and my work at HP was a breeze. I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about India’s problems. I soon realized that economics informs that fundamental question: Why is India poor? I liked the way economists thought (Thomas Schelling was one of the first economists I read) and I wanted to be one so that I could either justify or reject my hypothesis. A PhD in resource economics would do very well, I thought. And since the University of California at Berkeley was just up the road from me, I pestered the admissions committee sufficiently that they admitted me against their best judgment about allowing in someone with not a single economics course in their background. In case you are wondering, they liked having me there and I made lots of friends and even though I changed topics three times, each of my advisors was unhappy to see me go.

Enough of this biographical aside for now.

In all my readings about India, one thing that struck me was that no one appeared to ask the more fundamental questions such as:

• What is wrong?
• Where did we screw up?
• Why did we screw up where we did?
• How can we avoid such screw-ups?

It appeared to me that those at the decision making level in India did not have any clue about what was wrong, and they had even less than a clue about what to do about it. Even to an average seventh-grade student it is clear that problems have causes and exhibit symptoms. By examining the symptoms, one can figure out the causes of the problem. And by addressing the causes of the problem, the problem can be solved and thus bring about the removal of the symptoms.

The problem in India was that most people were not even very clearly perceiving the symptoms (poverty, illiteracy, corruption, overcrowding, etc.) to say nothing of understanding the problem and eventually solving it. The decision makers, especially, were evidently living in a separate universe which bore little relation to the universe the great unwashed masses inhabited. The government made plans that applied to their parallel universe and I don’t think they were the least astonished when their schemes did not work in the real universe. They were not astonished because they told themselves that their plans had worked marvelously and so they made even more of those idiotic plans.

Like individuals, countries also get hands dealt to them from a random draw. In one, you get leaders who are superhuman, and the country prospers; in another, you get puny unimaginative egomaniacs and the country ends up with malnourished children and illiterate adults. Can something be done to change the effects of the luck of that draw? I think there is.

For now, let me close with a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith (A Journey Through Economic Time, (1994)):

Ignorance, stupidity, in great affairs of state is not something that is commonly cited. A certain political and historical correctlness requires us to assign some measure of purpose, of rationality, even where, all to obviously, it does not exist. Nonetheless one cannot look with detachment on the Great War (and also its aftermath) without thought as to the mental insularity and defectiveness of those involved and responsible.

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey