Of Liberation and Development

Lord Acton observed that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He was of course referring to political, economic, and social power. I argue that power liberates, and absolute power liberates absolutely. I am referring to power that drives machines, or energy. This point is so important that I am forced to raise it to the status of a law. The The First Law of Liberation.

Since I am at it, I may as well outline the The Second Law of Liberation: Credit liberates, and absolute credit liberates absolutely. The corollary to that is naturally the conclusion that Microcredit liberates microscopically. The Third Law of Liberation states that knowledge liberates and absolute knowledge liberates absolutely and leads to Enlightenment. Enlightenment is outside the scope of the present discussion since it drags nirvana into the picture and since for now we are stuck in samsara, I will not insist on absolute knowledge; only the relative knowledge which is our lot in our everyday lives.

So there you have it: power, credit, and knowledge are the basic ingredients for the recipe that liberates. The utility of liberation is expressed in the Zeroth Law of Development which is that liberation is a pre-condition for development. Without freedom of thought and action, nothing of value can be accomplished. At its core, development is about freedom — economic, political, religious, … ad infinitum. Casual empiricism bears out that law: where these freedoms are missing, development is absent. If you really insist on it, check out the human development indicies of countries and you would notice that countries that are in economic, political, and religious shackles are not developed.

Now let us discuss the first of the Trinity: Power. (Just for the heck of it, I like to represent it by Shiva, the Mahadeva in the Hindu pantheon.) Power is another word for energy and it is energy that acts on matter to transform it. The reason that energy can do so is simply because matter is condensed energy. The fundamental point to consider is that it was energy that transformed matter into all the stuff that you see around yourself (not to mention the stuff that is yourself.) Everything without exception. I am writing this on a laptop while flying at 33,000 feet in a plane. Everything that I can see around me has been mined from the earth and transformed through thousands of processes involving technology to create machines that would astound us constantly if were not so jaded by their pervasiveness. Inside this laptop, for instance, there is a chip which processes signals. The chip is made of simple stuff — silicon, a few metals including gold, plastic (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) — the kind of stuff that you can grab in any handful of earth. What transformed that earth into a chip is energy which powered the machines that embody knowledge as technology. The conclusion therefore is that power, or energy, is what you basically need, and if you have sufficient amounts of power, you can do anything that your heart desires.

Power is the fundamental irreducible basic natural resource and all other resources can be derived using it, albeit indirectly. For instance, using power, you can mine any mineral you need from sea water of which there is a practically inexhaustible supply. You can get fresh water as well from it. All you need is power. So the conclusion is that if you have a shortage of power, all other shortages derive from that. Every poor country is one that does not have access to power and every rich country has access to power. Whether the rich country’s access to power is endogenously determined or not, is a different matter. If one has any doubts about how important power is to countries, one just has to remember that in all the wars that the US fights around the world, energy holds center stage.

Next on our list of liberating elements is credit. What do I mean by credit? I mean any capital that is available to one for use without having earned it before using it. This is a broader concept than just the money credit that you can access using credit cards, banks, loan sharks, etc. I am referring to capital that has been accumulated for generations which includes machines, buildings, roads, libraries, technology, and so on. If one thinks about it for a bit, one uses stuff that one has not paid for all the time. The current generation has access to and uses capital that it has not paid for. Therefore it can be said that the current generation is using credit. And the more credit that is available to any entity, the more productive it is going to be. To understand this bit, one has to merely look at the credit available to the population of a rich nation and compare that to that which is available to the people of a poor nation. People are born pretty much with equal capabilities on the average. What distinguishes them later in life is whether they had access to credit or not. A surgeon’s son grows up to a professional, while a peasant’s son grows up to be a manual laborer. On a higher level of aggregation, the people of a technologically advanced country have access to greater credit — more machines and more know-how — and therefore they are more productive.

For a glimpse of where I am going with this, I would like to now outline my argument here:

  1. Energy, credit, and knowledge are the basic ingredients for liberation.
  2. Liberation is a precondition for development.
  3. So if one wishes to bring about development, one has to assure the availability of energy, credit, and knowledge.

I will argue that underdeveloped countries have to struggle so hard to become developed because they are deficient in some or all of the three essential ingredients of liberation. I will further argue that it is possible to bootstrap the process of development but only if resources are used efficiently and if problems are solved by addressing causes rather than by alleviating superficial effects. Finally, I would address the question of the use of information and communications technologies for development. The point that I would discuss is that knowledge is the active agent of transformation. ICT, as the name implies, is technology that is concerned with information, and not knowledge directly. Not keeping the distinction between knowledge and information leads to confused thinking and ultimately immense waste of resources.

{Read the next article in the series Of Liberation and Development-II here.}

Simple Encrypted Exam Questions System

The recent spate of leaked exam papers is crying out for a solution. Here is my proposal. It is simple and cheap and will avoid the humongous costs of leaked questions.
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Why, oh why, don’t they own shoes?

If one ponders the question of why cobbler’s children often go barefoot, one comes to the obvious conclusion that cobblers are traditionally poor and cannot afford the luxury of the same shoes that they produce for others. It is not that they don’t desire shoes; only that shoes lose out in a cost-benefit analysis.

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Why loving thy enemies is a flawed strategy

Here’s a story I heard some time ago, about a farmer who consistently won the first prize for his fine crop of corn every year at the county agricultural contest. Peculiarly, after the contest he would give away the seeds of this prize-winning corn to the neighboring farmers. This puzzled some people, until someone finally asked him why he shared his good fortune. He answered, “Well, growing corn in my field requires pollen from the neighboring fields. If they don’t have good corn in their fields, I will never be able to grow good corn myself. So I give them good corn seeds.”
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Pondering Globalization

What is globalization? My definition of globalization is this: the web of material and informational connections that spans the globe and includes within it about 20 percent of the world population held together through socio-economic, political, military, and religious links.

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The Tathagata on “It’s the small stuff, stupid”

By and large, I am coming around to the conclusion that Indians must be amongst the most hardworking people on the planet. They are not lazy. At least they are not physically lazy. If there is an easy and simple way of doing something, that is not for Indians. Find a process that is tedious, complicated, involved, and pointless — Indians apparently will not only design such a process, but for the most part accept it without a complaint.

Thus have I heard that the Tathagata once said while sitting under the bodhi tree:

Hard work and hard thinking are substitutes, O Bhikshus. The harder you think, the less hard you have to work. Conversely, O Bhikshus, the less you think, the harder you have to work. Therefore, if you find someone working very hard at some trivial task, you will find that that person has not bothered to put any thought into whatever the **ck he or she is doing. Thus the Tathagata asks you to examine whatever the **ck you design very carefully so that all sentient creatures that are involved in the process will not have to work hard and can have some spare time to contemplate the universe and attain Buddhahood just like the Tathagata did.

So there you have it. Straight from the Tathagata’s mouth. You may ask why he keeps referring to himself in the third person. Atanu doesn’t know. Must have something to do with the fact that when you are a Buddha, you are allowed to refer to yourself in the third person. Atanu always says that. And then you ask what is with that “**ck”. Well, Atanu thought that he would clean up the Tathagata’s language a bit and replace the “heck” with “**ck”.

Thus have I heard that the Tathagata continued:

The Tathagata would urge you to examine, by way of illustration, you phone bill and your gas bill. Scan your bank statement. Notice how astonishingly brainless the whole shebang is. You will note that the more brainless it is, the harder you will have to work to pay your bills or to contact your bank. Surely, O Bhikshus, enlightenment will miss those people by a mile, if not more.

I take the Tathagata seriously. I examined my MTNL phone bill and my Citibank account statement. The Citibank statement was brainless as pointed out by the Buddha. It said on the back, “Reach us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” and below that it showed an icon representing a phone with the legend “Call Citiphone”. No phone number was mentioned. Lots of fine print followed. I desperately scanned it for a phone number. Finally, right at the bottom of the page, after lots of totally pointless text, in very very fine print, it noted the number for Mumbai as “(022) 9628962890”. I called that number and was promptly told that it was not accessible.

I examined the MTNL phone bill. It was crammed full of strange information in big bold print such as:

“CONSOLIDATED STAMP DUTY PAID BY ORDER NO.
Mudrank 0415/745/CR143/M1 dated 20-02-2004″
“SERVICE TAX REGN. NO. :- AAA CM 0828 RST 001”

On the back, it listed the names of five suburbs you could pay your bill by cash or check. It did not give any addresses; just the names of the suburbs. Thankfully, it did mention the times: between “10:00 hours and 16:00 hours.” It is the customer’s job to find out where their offices are. Included with the bill were a couple of glossy inserts.

One of the glossies said:
easy payments
BILL PAYMENT CENTER
Convenience is now closer to home!

What was the great convenience, you may ask. They had machines at some locations in Mumbai where you can go and enter your phone number, scan the barcode on your bill, stick in your check, and get a receipt. High tech solution to a trivial problem but one that involves traveling by car, train, or bus. I expect that it would take a person about two hours on average to pay the phone bill. It has not occured to the designers of this sainted system to allow people to put their checks into an old-fashioned envelope, stick a stamp on it, and mail it to then.

I examined my Mahanagar Gas bill. Same story. You have to travel somewhere to pay the bill in person. You cannot mail in a payment. Cost of mailing a payment: Rs 2. Cost of having to pay in person: Rs 30 for tranportation plus 2 hours of time. I estimate that there are at least half a million gas customers, 5 million MTNL customers, and a few odd million other customers of various services that require payment in person. Let’s round the total number of bill payment per month in the city of Mumbai to 10 million. In a year, about 120 million bill payment transactions have to take place. Let’s do the numbers.

Transportation costs: 30 times 120 million is Rs 3.6 billion, or Rs 36 crores. Time cost: 240 million hours, or 30 million 8-hour working days. Or about 2 full working days for every man, woman, and child living in Mumbai paying utility bills. An estimate of the money cost of the time: assume that working adults spend time in paying bills and that the average productivity of Mumbai adults is Rs 50 an hour. So 50 time 240 million hours works out to Rs 120 billion or Rs 1,200 crores.

Here is the punch line: it is a numbers game. It may appear that I am going on about a trivial thing: the ability to pay utility bills by check instead of in person. But because of the numbers of people involved, it adds up rather quickly. That represents economic waste — waste that a poor country such as India cannot afford. Mumbai’s transportation systems are overloaded beyond imagination. Requiring people to travel to pay bills is asinine to put it mildly. No doubt the idiots who design the system don’t have to travel and stand in line to pay the bills perhaps. But why don’t the millions of customers complain? Because, I suspect, that they are hard working people. Unthinking certaintly but they are not lazy.

Two things keep getting reinforced in my head the more I observe India. First, the economy is not focused on how to get things done with the least effort. Maximizing effort is another side to the whole issue about employment. The focus is not on production, it is on employment. Because so much of the effort is totally pointless and wasteful, we don’t have sufficient production. Another way of stating “less production” is “more poverty”. We are poor because we don’t produce enough because we are busy doing things which could easily be avoided.

The second, the people in India have not paid sufficient attention to what the Buddha said. The Tathagata was a very sharp guy. He did not become enlightened for nothing. (This ‘nothing’ is not to be confused with the concept of shunyata or emptiness which is central to Hinduism and Buddhism.) We should heed what the man said. For instance, check out Einstein & Buddha: THE PARALLEL SAYINGS which “is an inspired effort to meet the 21st-century challenge of developing a synthetic world view” according to a reviewer. I close this one with a favorite quote from the Buddha.

Multitudinousness of objects have no reality in themselves but are only seen of the mind and, therefore, are of the nature of maya and a dream.
— Buddha

Democracy in India

Just like India is the world’s largest potential market, India is also the world’s largest potential democracy. I don’t think what we have currently in India to be a true democracy. It is what I would call a cargo cult democracy. It is instructive to examine explore the two ideas of democracy and markets in the Indian context.

First, markets. One of the most important lessons mankind has learnt is that markets work. There are, however, very important pre-conditions for markets to work. When those pre-conditions are not met, markets fail. That means, the workings of markets in the presence of failures leads to socially sub-optimal, and even harmful, outcomes. Indeed, if the necessary conditions required for markets to function are not met, market fundamentalism can lead to positively disastrous results.

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Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games

Some years ago during the Kargil episode, I had analysed the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir as a dollar aution (DA)and written a piece called Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.

I believe that the model has interesting implications and is worth pondering. The DA game involves the auctioning of a dollar bill similar to an ordinary auction where the winner gets the dollar but with the special requirement that the second highest bidder has to pay the second highest bid amount to the auctioneer.
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As India Develops

My business partner at Deeshaa, Rajesh Jain has been focusing his Tech Talks under the heading As India Develops where discusses challenges and opportunities along the road to a developed India. The topics he introduces in these series of Tech Talks lie at the core of what needs to be done for India’s transition from an underdeveloped to a developed economy.

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India’s primary concerns

The Slimes Times of India is a widely read English newspaper in India. It perhaps reflects the concerns, the choices, the culture, and the mindset of those whom I refer to as the residents of India (as opposed to the residents of Bharat, the larger non-English speaking rural population). The print edition of the paper lands on my desk every morning.
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