A beast called government

This is the fifth installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

There is nothing in the world as dangerous as blind faith. No, no, this is not yet another rant against organised religion: there is enough damnation already scheduled upon me. There is another beast that benefits from blind faith quite as much as religion, and that causes as much harm from our lack of questioning: a beast called government.

Don’t get me wrong, we need government. We need it to take care of law and order, of defense, and for a handful of other things. (I don’t have a very large hand.) But the governments we have, not just in India but virtually everywhere, are vast, monstrous behemoths that are many multiples of the size they need to be. The cost of this, of course, is borne by us: we pay far more tax than we should need to in order to keep government going, and to justify its size the government clamps down on private enterprise and individual freedoms.

Part of our blind faith in government comes from the way we view it. Governments are not supercomputers programmed to work tirelessly for the public interest, nor are they benevolent, supernatural beings constantly striving to give us what we require. On the contrary, governments are collections of people, individuals like you and me, motivated by self-interest. The actions of government are the actions of these men and women, and the best way to understand how they are likely to behave—and therefore, how governments are likely to behave—is to consider their incentives.

Outside of government, we get ahead, whether in our jobs or doing business, by giving other people goods or services that they require. There is a direct correlation between what we give and what we get, and clear accountability: if I overstep my deadline for this column one more time, for example, Mint will surely find another columnist to fill this space!

But the incentives in government are different, and they do not drive a bureaucrat to work in the public interest. This is superbly illustrated in C Northcote Parkinson’s delightful classic, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. Parkinson, examining the British civil service, found that it tended to expand by a predictable percentage every year, “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.” He explained this with “two almost axiomatic sentences”: “(1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” and (2) “Officials make work for each other.”

In other words, it is in bureaucrats’ interest to expand their departments and get greater budgets allocated to them so as to increase their sphere of power. Indeed, mandarins who solve problems and increase efficiency actually risk making themselves, or their departments, redundant. Do we really expect them to be like the proverbial fool on the tree, who cuts the branch he sits on?

If bureaucrats want to increase the power they have, politicians want to build vote banks. That is how they rise in the political system, and it is silly to expect them to stop when they get to power. This means giving sops to interest groups that have supported them when they come to power, and reaching out to others. One illustration that speaks for itself is the Haj subsidy. Indeed, it would be irrational for a politician to focus on anything else but what will get him elected.

But we’re a democracy, so why don’t we just vote such politicians out? Well, to begin with, our system of government has what public choice theorists would call “concentrated benefits and diffused costs.” In other words, what is hundreds of crores of subsidy for a troubled industry or a free TV to a Tamil Nadu voter is just a few paise a year for you. Who do you think is more likely to lobby a politician or bother to go out and vote?

Of course, a few paise a year for thousands of pointless causes each add up to the majority of your tax money, but now we come to another reason for why people don’t vote against government wastage: what economists call ‘rational ignorance’. Besides earning a living, there are many good uses of your time, and finding out a break-up of where your tax money goes would simply take too much of your time. This is exacerbated by the fact that many taxes are indirect and hidden away – indeed, inflation often functions as a form of taxation – and that the politicians you have to choose from, all driven by the same impulses and catering to different interest groups, really aren’t too different from each other.

I had promised last week to elaborate on how a lot of well-intentioned and seemingly sensible government spending actually harms us all, and I shall do so in the weeks to come. I wanted to first highlight how wastage in government is not an aberration, but is written in the DNA of our system, and is integral to its nature. Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Understanding that process is the first step to turning it around.

Courtroom on the idiot box

High-profile court trials live on TV soon,” reports the Times of India. The report elaborates:

The government is speaking to major SMS operators to examine the feasibility of having major cases decided by public voting.

Ok, ok, I made that second bit up. The government doesn’t need to do that. It has other revenue streams.

Let us trade with Pakistan

My belief in how we should deal with Pakistan was outlined in an earlier post, where I wrote:

I embrace what appears to many to be two contradictory approaches: an uncompromisingly hard line when it comes to terrorism, and a deepening of trade and people-to-people contact. Both work towards the same end.

I remmbering discussing this with Nitin Pai over a series of emails, trying to bring him round to my point of view, and Nitin has now come out with an excellent Op-Ed in Mint that elaborates on my point about using trade to subvert the military’s hold on Pakistan, and explains how the peace process should be re-engineered. Do read.

Orkut and censorship in India

Orkut has been at the heart of many storms in India (1, 2, 3, 4). Well, no doubt facing the threat of being blocked in India, they have agreed to cooperate with the Indian government to catch people who post “objectionable material on the web.” Indian Express reports:

Following a meeting between representatives of the site and the Enforcement Directorate last month, the Mumbai Police and Orkut have entered into an agreement to seal such cooperation in matters of objectionable material on the web.

“Early February, I met three representatives from Orkut.com, including a top official from the US. The other two were from Bangalore. We reached a working agreement whereby Orkut has agreed to provide us details of the ip address from which an objectionable message or blog has been posted on the site and the Internet service provider involved,” said DCP Enforcement, Sanjay Mohite.

The big worry here is what Mr Mohite means by “objectionable message or blog.” As I’d outlined in my WSJ Op-Ed, “Fighting Against Censorship,” free speech is coming under sustained attack in India, and giving offence is too often treated as a crime. I hope the Indian government won’t misuse this to act as a cultural or moral police: India isn’t China, and should have nothing to fear from free speech.

There’s more on this subject on Slashdot and Boing Boing.

(Links via separate emails from Neha Viswanathan and Kunal.)

Update: Brazilian authorities also get special access to censor Orkut. Details on Boing Boing.

Update 2: Google responds. (Scroll down.)

Singur: Media bias or media ignorance?

ATimes of India report begins:

Protests against Bengal’s industrial revitalisation could receive a new fillip after the suicide of a 62-year-old cultivator, an organiser of the Krishi Jami Raksha Committee (KJRC) in Singur, who lost nearly an acre of land to the Tata Motors project.

This is either dishonest reporting or shoddy journalism, and I shall give the benefit of the doubt to the reporter and assume that it is the latter. The protests at Singur are not against “Bengal’s industrial revitalisation” but against the forceful appropriation of land by the government. As I wrote in an earlier post on eminent domain and Singur, it really does not matter if the farmers got compensation: if they did not want to sell, it is theft.

Now, eminent domain might be justifiable as a last resort for matters of public use, such as building roads, but it is outrageous when it is applied to take land from poor farmers and give it to a rich industrial house. The irony here is that Tata would probably have been willing to negotiate with the farmers for the land directly, but by law, farmers aren’t allowed to sell their agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. Yes, that’s right: even if Tata was willing to talk to the farmers and negotiate with them, and farmers were willing to sell, it would have been an illegal transaction. So Tata had no choice but to go to the government, which, of course, is not into negotiating, and simply took the land by force.

I entirely agree with Shruti Rajagopalan when she writes here that the fundamental right to property, revoked in 1978, should be reinstated in our constitution. An “industrial revitalisation” is only sustainable when property rights are sacrosanct. Otherwise it’s a mockery.

India in the 19th century

Most of the Indian women I know who are around 30 years old are unmarried—and they’re happy that way. That is why I was somewhat bemused by this line in a Reuters report of Liz Hurley’s wedding:

Indian women are commonly married off in their teens to a man of their parents’ choosing, and are a cause of despair if they are still a spinster at 30.

Clearly the reporter in question, Jonathan Allen, had just flown down to India for the wedding, and obviously hadn’t spent any time here to get to know the place. Perhaps he even read Kipling for his research.

In tune with their coverage of India in the 19th century, another Reuters headline reads, “Horses, elephants to star in Hurley’s Hindu wedding.” I’m relieved that there is nothing in the text about how Indians worship the cow and consider it their mother. Joy.

(Link via Divisha Gupta via email from Gautam John.)

Television and cricket

This piece of mine has been published in the March 9, 2007 issue of Time Out Mumbai as “Field Days.”

Television was the best thing that happened to Indian cricket, and then the worst.

Once upon a time television pushed cricket into the modern age in India. As India opened up to the world a decade-and-a-half ago, in more ways than one, kids in small towns throughout the country tuned into satellite television and saw a brave new world. Instead of homegrown DD commentators uttering banalities in two languages, they saw the best cricket broadcasters in the world educating them on the game: From the likes of Richie Benaud, Ian Chappell, Geoff Boycott and Martin Crowe, they learned to appreciate the nuances of the sport. They picked up the values that would help them thrive in international cricket: once, pot-bellied Indian cricketers would saunter between wickets and refuse to dive while fielding because, apparently, Indian grounds were hard. Look at any Indian cricketer below the age of 25, and you shall see the good that television has done.

But television also made itself a slave to the monster it created. In a celebrity-obsessed era, viewers craved the familiar, and broadcasters stopped taking chances: at a certain point in time, it became default policy to hire ex-cricketers as commentators. Sometimes ex-cricketers provide the insight only a player can. But most ex-cricketers who have turned to commentary in the last few years have been hired for star value. They know it, and don’t work as hard at preparing for a game as they should, and it shows. Cliches abound, as they work on auto-pilot. It is no coincidence that India’s only world-class commentator is the only non-player who’s made a place for himself in the commentary box: Harsha Bhogle. It is unlikely that too many others will get a chance.

Broadcasters have also started treating cricket less as a sport and more as entertainment. In the breaks during a game, there is less analysis and more tamasha. So when, during a tea-break, we expect cogent commentary about the pitched battle on the field during the last session, we get the Shaz and Waz show, with impromptu beauty contest thrown in. “The voting is still on,” says Shaz. “Pinky is ahead of Minky. SMS now!” Cut to close-up of cleavage. And the cricket: yes, there’s also cricket. Damn.

It is believed that this is what the people want, but is that true? There is no feedback mechanism from the market to indicate that. When a channel broadcasts a game of cricket, it has an effective monopoly on that match: once it has acquired the telecast rights, no one else can show it, and the fan has to stay with them. In the absence of competition in terms of broadcast quality, there is no way for people to indicate when they don’t like a feature on the show. They will watch the World Cup regardless of whether there is statistical analysis in the breaks or Mandira Bedi in noodlestraps.

But maybe that is, indeed, what viewers want. Glamour brings in the column inches and attention. Controvery brings in the eyeballs in an era when people are so jaded that they want sensation, action, fighting. Over the next couple of months, expect some rivetting cricket in the World Cup. Also expect some pretty faces on television, and Extraa Innings with 816 ‘A’s at the end of extraaa. There will be the Match Ka Mujrim type of shows on the news channels, picking villains for the Bollywood drama the game has become. There will be debates about Ganguly, debates about Tendulkar, debates about Dravid and Chappell. There will be jingoism, there will be hyperbole, there will be crass sensationalism, but there will be cricket as well. That’s all we really want, the 22 men in pajamas battling it out on the field with bat and ball. Isn’t it?

God appears!

A 30-year-old gent from Mumbai has reportedly approached the Bombay High Court asking that they declare him to be God. HIndustan Times reports:

“I am the supreme lord and the god of all religions. I am Jesus Christ, Lord Ram, Lord Krishna and even Gautam Buddha. Earlier, I was born as Alexander the great,” Dharmendra Mishra told the court.

This supreme god had one prayer to make to the high court — ask President APJ Abdul Kalam to officially declare him as god and hand him the affairs of the nation.

“Give me the power to rule the country, the world and the United Nations,” he told the division bench of acting Chief Justice J.N. Patel and Justice S.C. Dharmadhikari.

This is savagely joyful. To my unending dismay, the court dismissed his petition, “saying that such a case does not fall under the jurisdiction of the judiciary.” Pah.

But the most delightful element of it all is that the fellow works in a call center. I can imagine some poor housewife from Texas calling a helpline because her washing machine isn’t working, and this guy picks up and says, “Hello, this is God on the line. How may I help you?”