Category: arbit

Rewarding Inefficiency

As the lockdown goes on and we have to spend tonnes of effort for things that we took for granted, there are some things I’m thankful I don’t have to spend effort for.

For example, ever since we returned to India a year ago, we’ve got milk delivered to the door every morning, and that continues. We buy our vegetables from this guy who drives a small truck in front of our road every other day (the time at which he arrives is less certain, but he maintains his thrice-a-week schedule).

For eggs, and as backup for vegetables, there is this “HOPCOMS” (a government-run fruits and vegetables shop) 100 metres from where I stay. The thing is so empty most of the time that I wonder if it would continue to exist if it had a profit motive.

It’s only for our staples, toiletries and other groceries that we have to visit organised stores, and in that too, I patronise this “independent supermarket” run by an enterprising bunch of Mallus rather than a chain. Plenty of other kinds of redundancy exists in the area where we live – there are a few family-owned grocers who don’t stock any “long tail stuff” but can supply the staples. And so forth.

This is very different from the situation in London, where I lived for two year, where for pretty much everything you go to the supermarket. If you are looking for “regular” stuff, you go to the little Tesco at the corner. If you want long tail stuff, you walk farther to the large-format Tesco. Bread, dairy, fruits and vegetables, groceries – for everything you go to Tesco. There were “unbranded” retail stores around as well (“off-licenses”, I think, they were called), but pretty much nobody ever went there.

It is the time of crisis when you start appreciating redundancy and inefficiency. All the “local supply chains” that we’ve relied upon continue to be reliable (the only exception being bread – all local bakeries are shut). It’s only for staples and toiletries that one needs to go to the supermarket.

Actually, not really, unless you are looking for long tail stuff. On my way back from the supermarket last Wednesday, I drove past one of the small family-owned groceries around here. There was a line one person long there. In other words, being a rather “inefficient” system around here, redundancy exists, and it is invaluable at crisis time.

Contrast this to a place like London, or even Gurgaon (or Gurgaon-like localities in other cities in India), where most shopping is done in branded chain stores. In that kind of scenario, at the time of crisis, there is no way out. The overoptimised and stretched (but “efficient”) supply chains mean that things come to a halt. You have no option but to regularly go to the supermarket and line up, and hope that their supply doesn’t run out.

My shopping habits apart, the larger question I’m wondering about is – once the crisis is over, how do we incentivise inefficiency? Clearly there are benefits to come out of inefficiency, in terms of slack in the system and greater resilience at the time of stress. However, these benefits are seldom seen in normal times, thanks to which businesses that push tail risks under the carpet can deliver super-normal returns and drive the more careful ones out of business.

We don’t know when the next such crisis will hit. It is highly likely that the next crisis will be nothing like this crisis, and we have no clue what it will be like. So how can we be prepared and have enough inefficiency in the system that when it comes around we are resilient?

Right now I have no answers.

The Two Overton Windows

If you want to appear intelligent when discussing something about public policy, you could do worse than uttering the phrase “Overton Window”. The Overton Window, “invented” by one Joseph Overton, suggests that there is a “range of policies acceptable to political mainstream”.

And so you frequently have political commentators talking about the Overton Window “shifting” whenever a new political idea (or person) comes to the fore. This was bandied about much when Modi became Prime Minister of India, or when Trump became President of the US, or when Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour Party leader.

While “shifting Overton window” is something you come across rather often in policy discourse, my argument is that with the rise of subscription media, the Overton window is not shifting as much as it is “splitting”. In other words, we now have not one but two Overton Windows.

Without loss of generality, let us call them the “Jamie Overton Window” and the “Craig Overton Window”. Since both the twins are right arm fast bowlers, it doesn’t matter which brother is associated with which Overton Window.

So how did we get here, and what does it mean for us?

We started with the classic Overton Window. Let’s assume that all politics can be reduced to one axis (if we do a Principal Component Analysis of political views, the principal axis is certain to account for a large share of the variance, so this is not a bad assumption). So the Overton Window can be referred to by a line which the shifts.

As long as the world was “ruled by mainstream media”, this Overton Window kept moving back and forth, expanding and contracting, but it remained united. And then with the start of subscription ad-free media (maybe a decade or decade and half ago), the Overton Window started expanding.

The “left media” (that’s a convenient term isn’t it?) started admitting stuff that was left to the then Overton Window. The “right media” started admitting stuff that was to the right of the then Overton Window. And so over time, the Overton Window started expanding. And things can’t get into the media Overton Window unless they’re part of the mainstream political Overton Window.

The thing is that as the media became subscription-heavy and hence biased, political ideas that were once on the fringe now got a voice. And so the Overton Window got larger and larger.

Until a point when it got so unwieldy that it split, giving rise to Jamie and Craig. The image on the right is an approximate illustration of what happened.

And once the Overton Window split, there was no looking back. They started moving away from each other well-at-a-faster-rate. The Jamies could not come to terms with the policies of the Craigs, and vice versa. Political analysts and commentators started getting associated with the Jamie and Craig camps.

For a while, a few commentators continued to write for both sides, but the extreme fringes, which were getting more and more extreme, started overreacting. “How can we have someone who has written 10 articles for Craigs write for us”, the Jamies asked. “Most of our commentators are Craigs, so we might as well become a Craig newspaper”, the other side reasoned.

And that’s where mainstream media is going. The Overton Window has split down the middle. Crossing this gap is considered a crime worse than crossing the floor in Parliament.

Sadly, it is not just media that is getting Jamie and Craig. Mainstream politics reflects this as well, and so across countries we get political opponents who just cannot talk to each other, since everything one says is outside the Overton Window of the other.

Maybe the only way this can end is by going across axes, or inventing a new axis even. With the current spectrum politics, there is no hope of the two Overton Windows coming to meet.

 

A trip to the supermarket

Normally even I wouldn’t write about a trip to a supermarket, but these aren’t normal times. With the shutdown scheduled to go on for another two weeks, and with some “essential commodities” emptying, I decided to go stock up.

I might just have postponed my trip by a few more days, but then I saw tweets by the top cop of Bangalore saying they’re starting to seize personal vehicles out on the road during the lockdown. I needed to get some heavy stuff (rice, lentils, oils, etc.) so decided to brave it with the car.

Having taken stock of inventory and made a longlist of things we need, I drove out using “back roads” to the very nearby Simpli Namdhari store. While I expected lines at the large-format store, I expected that it would be compensated for by the variety of stuff I could find there.

I got there at 230 only to be told the store was “closed for lunch” and it would reopen at 3. “All counters are open”, the security guard told me. I saw inside that the store was being cleaned. Since it’s a 3 minute drive away, I headed back home and reached there at 3:15.

There was a small line (10-15 people long) when I got there. I must mention I was super impressed by the store at the outset. Lines had been drawn outside to ensure queueing at a safe distance. Deeper in the queue, chairs had been placed (again at a safe distance from each other) to queue in comfort. They were letting in people about 10 at a time, waiting for an equal number to exit the store each time.

It was around 335 by the time I got in (20 minute wait). From the entrance most shelves seemed full.

The thing with Namdhari’s is that they control the supplies of a large number of things they sell (fruits, vegetables, dairy, bread, etc.), and all of them were well stocked. In times like this (I can’t believe I’m using this phrase!), some sort of vertical integration helps, since you can produce the stuff because you know the downstream demand.

(in any case, for things like vegetables and milk, where there is a large gap between “sowing” and “reaping”, production hasn’t fallen at all. It’s a massive supply chain problem and plenty of stuff is getting wasted while people don’t have enough. Stuff like bread is where vertical integration helps)

In any case I took two trips round the supermarket with my trolley, checking items off my checklist as I put items into the trolley (unusual times mean even disorganised people like me make checklists). Again the vertical integration showed.

Stuff that Namdhari’s owns upstream of, like staples and oils, were well stocked. High demand stuff for which Namdhari’s is only a reseller, like Maggi or crisps or biscuits were poorly stocked. Interestingly, “exotic stuff” (like peanut butter or cheeses, around which Namdhari’s has partly built its reputation) was reasonably well stocked, for which I was really thankful (we consume far more of these than the average Indian household).

How much to buy was a dilemma I had in my head through the shopping trip. For one, there was the instinct to hoard, since I was clear I didn’t want another shopping trip like this until the shutdown ends (milk, vegetables and eggs are reasonably easily available close to home, but I wasn’t there for that).

On the other hand, I was “mindful” of “fair usage policy”, to not take more than what I needed, since you didn’t want stockouts if you could help it.

The other thing that shortages do to you is that you buy stuff you don’t normally buy. Like the other day at another shop I’d bought rice bran oil because groundnut oil wasn’t available. While you might buy something as “backup”, you are cognisant that if you get through the lockdown without needing this backup, this backup will never get used.

So even though we’re running short of sambar powder, I ignored it since the only sambar powder on offer looked pretty sad. On the other hand, I bought Haldiram’s Mixture since no “local mixtures” are available nowadays, and mixture is something I love having with my curd rice.

I was a little more “liberal” with stuff that I know won’t go bad such as dry fruits or staples, but then again that’s standard inventory management – you are willing to hold higher inventories of  items with longer shelf life.

I might have taken a bit longer there to make sure I’d got everything on my list, but then my “mask” made out of a hanky and two rubberbands had started to hurt. So, with half my list unfulfilled, I left.

Even at the checkout line, people stood a metre away from each other. You had to bag your own groceries, which isn’t a standard thing in India, but enforced now since you don’t want too many hands touching your stuff.

Oh, and plenty of people had come by car to the store. There were cops around, but they didn’t bother anyone.

Hanging out on Hangouts

The covid-19 crisis has fundamentally changed the way we work, and I thikn some things we are not going to get back. For the foreseeable future, at least, even after official lockdowns have been lifted, people will be hesitant to meet each other.

This means that meetings that used to earlier happen in person are now going to happen on video calls. People will say that video calls can never replace the face-to-face meetings, and that they are suboptimal, especially for things like sales, account management, relationship management, etc.

The main reason why face-to-face interactions are generally superior to voice or video calls is that the latter is considered transactional. Let’s say I decide to meet you for some work-related thing. We meet in one of our offices, or a coffee  shop, or a bar, and indulge in pleasantaries. We talk about the traffic, about coffee, about food, do some random gossip, discuss common connects, and basically just hang out with each other for a while before we get down to work.

While these pleasantaries and “hanging out” can be considered to be a sort of transaction cost, it is important that we do it, since it helps in building relationships and getting more comfortable with each other. And once you’ve gotten comfortable with someone you are likely (at the margin) to do more business with them, and have a more fruitful relationship.

This kind of pleasantaries is not common on a phone call (or a video call). Usually phone calls have more well defined start and end boundaries than in-person meetings. It is rather common for people to just get started off on the topic of discussion rather than getting to know one another, cracking jokes, discussing the weather and all that.

If we need video and phone calls to become more effective in the coming months (at least as long as people aren’t stepping out), it is imperative that we learn to “hang out on hangouts”. We need to spend some time in the beginning of meetings with random discussions and gossip. We need to be less transactional. This transaction cost is small compared to the benefit of effectively replicating in-person meetings.

However, hanging out on hangouts doesn’t come easily to us – it’s not “natural”. The way to get around it is through practice.

On Sunday night, on a whim, I got onto a group video call with a bunch of college friends. Midway through the call I wondered what we were doing. Most of the discussion was pointless. But it gave us an opportunity to “hang out” with each other in a way we hadn’t for a long time (because we live in different places).

Overall, it was super fun, and since then I’ve been messaging different groups of friends saying we should do group video chats. Hopefully some of those will fructify. Along with the immediate fun to be had, they will also help me prepare better for “hanging out” at the beginning of my work meetings.

I think you should do them, too.

The Prom

The other day, the wife and I were discussing about growing up, and about school crushes, and how relationships worked in school. It was a fascinating discussion, and it has already led to an excellent newsletter episode by her. Here is the key point of our discussion, as she wrote in her newsletter:

There are rumours that some boys have a crush on a couple of girls. You think that it’s a pandemic like the COVID-19, and it’s going to get us all, except it doesn’t. This unfortunately follows a power law, only a couple of boys and girls will be affected by the “crush”, the rest of us just have to be affected by the lack of – crushes, bosoms and baritones. Now, the problem with middle/ high school is that it operates on mob mentality – everyone is only allowed to have a crush on the crushable.

And then later on in the piece, she talks about proms.

You are most likely to fall in love organically and benefit from it early on in life. So, wasting these precious years of socialising is a sin.

So, when I think about it, “prom” is a great concept. It gives everyone a shot at gaining some experience. You’re better off going to prom at 16 rather than at 26.

This got me thinking about proms. I had no clue of the concept of a “prom” while growing up, and only came to know of it through some chick flicks I watched when I was in my late teens. However, I ended up writing about proms in my book (while describing Hall’s Marriage Theorem – yes, you can find Graph Theory concepts in a book on market design), and the more I think about it, the more I think it is a great concept.

The thing with proms is that it forces a matching. One on one. One boy gets one girl and vice versa (I really don’t know how schools that don’t have a balanced sex ratio handle it). And that is very different from how the crush network operates in middle and high school.

As Pinky described in her post, crushes in middle and high school follow a power law, because there is strong mob mentality that operates in early puberty. Before “benefits” get discovered, one of the main reasons for having a boyfriend/girlfriend is the social validation that comes along with it, and such validation is positive if and only if your peer group “approves” of your partner.

So this leads to a “rich get richer” kind of situation. Everyone wants to hit on the hottest boys and girls, with the result that a small minority are overwhelmed with attention, while the large majority remains partnerless. And they continue to be partnerless this way, friendzoning large sets of their classmates at an age that is possibly most suited for finding a long-term gene-propagating partner. 

In most Indian schools, the crush graph in high school looks like this. The boys and girls towards the bottom are the “long tail” – they are not cool to hit on, so nobody hits on them. In other words, they are unloved in High School. Notice that it’s a fairly long tail.

Also notice that most of the arrows point upwards (I’ve drawn the graph so the most sought-after people are on top). Because nothing prevents “one way crushes”, everyone just tries “as high as they can” to find a partner. And most of these don’t work out. And most people remain unloved.

So what does a prom do? Firstly, everyone wants to go to the prom, and to go to a prom, you need a date. Which means that everyone here in this long tail needs a partner as well. In the original setup, when crushes were based on mob-mentality, there was no concept of seeking “undervalued assets” (people nobody else is hitting on). Now, when everyone needs a unique partner, there is value to be found in undervalued assets.

Basically a prom, by providing immediate rewards for finding a partner (soon enough, the kids will discover other “benefits” as well), moves the schoolkids from a “crush network” to a “partner network”, which better represents real-world romantic networks.

Many people may not be able to pair with their first choice (notice in the above network that even the most sought after people may not necessarily match with their favourites), but everyone will get a partner. The Gale Shapley (or should I say Shapely Gal?) algorithm will ensure a stable matching.

Moreover, it doesn’t help your cause in getting a preferred (if not most preferred) partner for the prom if you make your attempt just before the prom. You need to have put in efforts before. This means that in anticipation of the prom, “pair bonding” can happen much earlier. Which means that schoolkids are able to get trained in finding a partner for themselves much earlier than they do now.

That will make it less likely that they’ll bug their parents a decade (or two) later to find them a partner.

The future of work, and cities

Ok this is the sort of speculative predictive post that I don’t usually indulge in. However, I think my blog is at the right level of obscurity that makes it conducive for making speculative predictions. It is not popular enough that enough people will remember this prediction in case this doesn’t come through. And it’s not that obscure as well – in case it does come through, I can claim credit.

So my claim is that companies whose work doesn’t involve physically making stuff haven’t explored the possibilities of remote work enough before the current (covid-19) crisis hit. With the gatherings of large people, especially in air-conditioned spaces being strongly discouraged, companies that hadn’t given remote working enough thought are being forced to consider the opportunity now.

My prediction is that once the crisis over and things go back to “normal”, there will be converts. Organisations and teams and individuals who had never before thought that working from home would have taken enough of a liking to the concept to give it a better try. Companies will become more open to remote working, having seen the benefits (or lack of costs) of it in the period of the crisis. People will commute less. They will travel less (at least for work purposes). This is going to have a major impact on the economy, and on cities.

I’m still not done with cities.

For most of history, there has always been a sort of natural upper limit to urbanisation, in the form of disease. Before germ theory became a thing, and vaccinations and cures came about for a lot of common illnesses, it was routine for epidemics to rage through cities from time to time, thus decimating their population. As a consequence, people didn’t live in cities if they could help it.

Over the last hundred years or so (after the “Spanish” flu of 1918), medicine has made sufficient progress that we haven’t seen such disease or epidemics (maybe until now). And so the network effect of cities has far outweighed the problem of living in close proximity to lots of other people.

Especially in the last 30 years or so, as “knowledge work” has formed a larger part of the economies, a disproportionate part of the economic growth (and population growth) has been in large cities. Across the world – Mumbai, Bangalore, London, the Bay Area – a large part of the growth has come in large urban agglomerations.

One impact of this has been a rapid rise in property prices in such cities – it is in the same period that these cities have become virtually unaffordable for the young to buy houses in. The existing large size and rapid growth contribute to this.

Now that we have a scary epidemic around us, which is likely to spread far more in dense urban agglomerations, I imagine people at the margin to reconsider their decisions to live in large cities. If they can help it, they might try to move to smaller towns or suburbs. And the rise of remote work will aid this – if you hardly go to office and it doesn’t really matter where you live, do you want to live in a crowded city with a high chance of being hit by a stray virus?

This won’t be a drastic movement, but I see a marginal redistribution of population in the next decade away from the largest cities, and in favour of smaller towns and cities.It won’t be large, but significant enough to have an impact on property prices. The bull run we’ve seen in property prices, especially in large and fast-growing cities, is likely to see some corrections. Property holders in smaller cities that aren’t too unpleasant to live in can expect some appreciation.

Oh, and speaking of remote work, I have an article in today’s Times Of India about the joys of working from home. It’s not yet available online, so I’ve attached a clipping.

How Mani Ratnam Ruined A Generation Of Indian Men

If you fall in love, you might be falling in love with a terrorist. In the arranged marriage market, you’ll find a hot girl who asks if you’re a virgin

I had recently written about how the ages are 13 to 16 are “peak movie appreciation age”, and about how I got influenced by several movies in that period in life. One of them was Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (1998).

Of course, the most influential thing about this movie was the idea of dancing on top of a moving vehicle. I clearly remember our school picnic (on October 31st 1998), when responding to a challenge, a friend and I (later joined by another friend) clambered on top of the picnic bus and started dancing. I got a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi (presented by the friend who joined us later) for my efforts, which was duly shared between the rest of my class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmrmVs10X8

Dancing on top of a bus was fun, though it could get dangerous if the bus moved well-at-a -faster rate (I don’t think too many people copied that). The more dangerous thing about Dil Se was about the sort of ideas about arranged marriage that it presented.

Dil Se happened to be Preity Zinta’s debut movie (she was earlier mainly known for this Cadbury’s Perk ad) (it wasn’t technically her debut but I think it got released before the other movie she had shot).

Ten years back, when I was in the arranged marriage market, I wrote this series of blog posts called “Arranged Scissors“. One of them was a hypothetical letter I’d written to a prospective father-in-law (I don’t think I’ve got my actual father-in-law to read it). That included:

During the interview, I’m going to ask your daughter if she is a virgin. If you think she is the type that will be scandalized at such questions, you need not shortlist me.

I must admit that wasn’t an original. It was inspired by this movie released more than ten years before I wrote that.

Preity Zinta plays the role of this Mallu girl whom the protagonist (played by Shah Rukh Khan) meets in the arranged marriage market. They break out to a side room in the house for a chat. The first thing she asks him is if he is a virgin (that also happened to be Zinta’s first line on-screen, helping her set herself an image of a no-nonsense actress).

It fit into the story, so it was all fine. But for a generation of teenage boys watching Dil Se in 1998, it gave the perfectly wrong idea of what arranged marriage was like. It was almost like how Mani Ratnam was telling us that “if you fall in love, you might be falling in love with a terrorist. In the arranged marriage market, you’ll find a hot girl who asks if you’re a virgin”.

And some of us influential boys bought it. It didn’t help matters that just three years later, in Dil Chahta Hai, the Saif Ali Khan character finds that he can find himself a good match in the arranged marriage market (that occurred after my optimal age of movie appreciation, but Preity Zinta in Dil Se had influenced me enough that I bought the tripe anyway).

Many years later, many of us came into the arranged marriage market looking for Preity Zintas and Sonali Kulkarnis, only to find that it was an admission of failure, where you could at best look for a “common minimum program”, and which was overall a dehumanising experience (I’m glad I met my wife when I did, and she bailed me out of the market).

Now, we look back and curse the filmmakers. All because we happened to watch these movies at our most optimal movie appreciation age.

Range of possibilities

After I wrote about “love and arranged jobs” last week, an old friend got back saying he quite appreciates the concept and he’s seen it in his career as well. He’s fundamentally a researcher, with a PhD, who then made a transition to corporate jobs.

He told me that back in his research days, he had many “love work relationships”, where he would come across and meet people, and they would “flirt” (in a professional sense), and that could lead to a wide range of outcomes. Sometimes they would just have discussions without anything professional coming out of it, sometimes it would result in a paper, sometimes in a longer collaboration, and so on.

Now that he is in the corporate world, he told me that it is mostly “arranged jobs” for him now, and that meeting people for this is much less enjoyable in that sense.

The one phrase that he used in our conversation stuck with me, and has made it to the title of this post. He said that “love jobs” work when people meet with a “range of possibilities” in mind.

And that is precisely how it works in terms of romantic relationships as well. When you go out on a date, you are open to exploring a range of possibilities. It could just be an evening out. It could be a one-night stand. It could result in friendship, with or without benefits. There could be a long-term relationship that is possible. Gene propagation is yet another possible result. There is a rather wide range of possibilities and that is what I suppose makes dating fun (I suppose because I’ve hardly dated. I randomly one day met my wife after three years of blog-commenting, orkutting and GTalking, and we ended up hitting the highest part of the range).

Arranged marriages are not like that – you go into the “date” with a binary possibility in mind – you either settle into a long-term gene-propagating relationship with this person or you wish you never encounter them in life again. There is simply no range, or room for any range.

Job interviews in an arranged sense are like that. You either get the job or you don’t – there is one midpoint, though, where things don’t temporarily work out but you keep open the possibility of working together at a later date. This, however, is an incredibly rare occurrence – the outcome is usually binary.

It’s possible I’m even thinking about this “love jobs” scenario because I’ve been consulting for the last 8 odd years now. In all this time I’ve met several people, and the great part of this has been that the first meeting usually happens without any expectations – both parties are open to a range of possibilities.

Some people I’ve met have tried to hire me (for a job). Some have become friends. Some have given me gigs, some several. Some have first given me gigs and then become friends. Others have asked me to write recommendation letters. Yet others have become partners. And so on.

And this has sort of “spoilt” me into believing that a job can be found through this kind of a “love process” where a range of possibilities is open upon the first meeting itself. And when people try to propose the arranged route (“once we start this process we expect to hire you in a week”) I’ve chickened out.

Thinking about it, that’s how a lot of hiring works. Except maybe for the handful of employers which are infamous for long interview processes (I love those proceses, btw), I guess most of the “industry” is all about arranged jobs.

And maybe that’s why so few people “love” their jobs!

The Puritan Topper

This was an idea that sort of got ingrained in my head at the turn of the millennium – around the time I was transitioning from school to undergrad. That you would be a topper if and only if you led an otherwise diligent and disciplined life.

For starters you needed to be a nice person (among the things this entailed for a potential topper was to liberally share notes and clarify people’s doubts when called upon). You weren’t allowed to have any character flaws. You weren’t supposed to get distracted with things like hitting on someone or being in a romantic relationship. You would talk to, and be polite with, people of the opposite sex, but “nothing more than necessary”. “Bad habits” like smoking and drinking were out of the question.

These were just the necessary conditions. On top of this, of course, you had to work with single-minded devotion towards becoming the topper. You needed to be diligent, be rigorous with all your assignments, study more than anyone else and all that.

I don’t know how this view of the “puritan topper” got formed in my head. Maybe it was pattern recognition based on the profile of people who used to top in my schools (this was after I had all but given up on doing well academically, apart from entrance exams), especially in undergrad.

I’m also wondering if this image of the puritan topper had something to do with my own giving up – while I might have had the enthu to work hard at academics and do well, this sort of a puritan lifestyle that I had come to associate with toppers (I didn’t smoke or drink, but being nice to everyone all the time was well beyond me) seemed rather daunting.

In any case, this image of the puritan topper didn’t last long. At IIMB, for example, there was this guy who lived a few doors away from me who spent most of his time drinking and hardly any time studying, but aced all exams. Another guy quickly found himself a girlfriend, but continued to top. Suddenly, I found that “normal people” could be toppers as well, and that my view of the puritan topper had been formed mainly on a small number of data points and didn’t hold.

Yet, the number of years that this puritan topper image stayed in my head means that it’s one that has been hard to shake off. A couple of years back, for example, the all india topper in the IIT-JEE, while talking to the press, expressed tribute to his girlfriend for her support. While it’s normal for a class 12 person to have a girlfriend, this comment sort of threw me off – it didn’t fit my mental image of the puritan topper.

Sometimes it is possible to form an irrational belief based on a small number of data points, and irrespective of the number of data points you see to the contrary, it becomes hard to let go of these beliefs. And that makes you more irrational. But I guess, there’s no logic to a lot of these beliefs. Maybe as Rory Sutherland puts it, it’s all “psycho-logic”.

Why Activists Should Not Be In Government

Back in 2008, Salil Tripathi had argued in an article for Pragati (RIP) that human rights activists need to be unreasonable (check page 5 of this PDF). He had written:

[…] they see their role as defending the indefensible, so that the rest of us won’t suffer at the hands of a government with authoritarian tendencies. If they were to begin appearing reasonable, they’d lose resonance. More important, nobody will be speaking out for the innocent who will otherwise go to jail.

While Salil was talking especially about human rights activists (his own profession), this is broadly true of all activists in general. It is their duty to be unreasonable, since in a lot of cases they will be defending the indefensible.

If you are an environmental activist, for example, you will want to take unreasonable positions in favour of environmentalist causes. As Salil goes on to write in his old piece, the job of being reasonable belongs to somebody else.

They may even be selective – nothing prevents from others to pick up cases and causes these individuals do not. Let the think tankers and policy-makers become practical. Because otherwise, everyone will support the idea of safety-over-liberty, and we would all be losers.

That activists need to be unreasonable also comes from Graham Allison’s political resultant model. The basic idea is that every government decision is a function of all the positions submitted to it. You can think of the final direction of the decision as being the vector sum of all the positions submitted to the government. In this case, the job of the activist (human rights or otherwise) is to present the unreasonable and extreme case in favour of the activism, with the full knowledge that the government will go with a sort of political resultant.

So what happens when an activist comes into government? Remember that the activist is coming in with years of experience of taking extreme and unreasonable positions. Taking the “resultant” and the “reasonable view” has always been someone else’s job.

The risk of such a person being in government is that they could abandon the process of taking the “resultant” (which is what governments are expected to do), and continue from within government the process of going with the unreasonable policies and politics. That, however, makes for bad government and doesn’t give the people what they deserve.

As politics has been getting more and more extreme over the years (read this lovely essay on how louder politics is making it more unreasonable, drawing from sound theory), activists have been throwing their hats into the ring. Mainstream politicians have been endorsing extreme positions rather than taking them as just one of the inputs.

The problem is that such extremism isn’t how a government usually operates, and doesn’t make for good policy. Hence, activists shouldn’t really be part of the government.