Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Karthik Muralidharan wrote this long (900+ pages) but excellent book, Accelerating India’s Development , on how to improve India’s governance. He starts by asking the question everyone laments, “Why is the Indian state (government) so ineffective at delivering core services?”   The answer is far more complex than the usual suspects. The first generation of independent India’s leaders had suffered in jail and under British rule: “(This gave them the) motivation and public trust to focus on nation-building investments because electoral success was virtually guaranteed.” As time passed, electoral success was no longer guaranteed. Inevitably then, electoral incentives changed the focus of politicians to “providing visible benefits”. Long-term good, sadly, does not fall in that category. Building new schools is visible and immediate; providing quality education is neither.   In addition, we became a democracy with universal adult franchise right at inception. No Weste...

As the US Presidential election date comes closer, the gap between Kamala Harris and Trump has reduced and they are almost neck to neck now. After the huge enthusiasm when she became the candidate (in money pouring in and in the pre-polls conducted back then), how could this have happened?   Andrew Sullivan feels the root cause is that nobody knows what she stands for: “This is the first presidential candidate who doesn’t seem to want you to know what she’ll actually do, or what she really thinks about anything much.” Normally such a candidate would have never cleared the shortlist (what the Americans call their primaries). But of course, the party never had primaries: “She is there because of a corrupt Democratic clique that hid Biden’s rapid decline until it was too late to have a real primary, then panicked at the thought of a chaotic convention, and simply anointed this hack — because no white male or female would run against a black woman and risk their political fut...

If decisions are so noisy, how come we rarely hear of it? The authors of Noise say: “The invisibility of noise is a direct consequence of causal thinking. Noise is inherently statistical: it becomes visible only when we think statistically about an ensemble of similar judgments.”   Further, when something is statistical, one doesn’t have a clear target what one is aiming at: “Strategies for noise reduction are… what preventive hygiene measures are to medical treatment: the goal is to prevent an unspecified range of potential errors before they occur.” They compare it the habit of washing your hands – you should do it without worrying about which particular infection you might be avoiding.   Unfortunately, such habits aren’t easy, because of the way we are wired: “Correcting a well-identified bias may at least give you a tangible sense of achieving something. But the procedures that reduce noise will not. They will, statistically, prevent many errors. Yet you w...

The government is terrible at many things. But it has also done other things extremely well. Like polio eradication and conducting elections on massive scales. Is there any pattern? Is the government good at certain types of activities? Which ones? And can it avoid the other kinds?   Pritchett and Woolcock came up with a model to analyze just those questions. It involves splitting proposed activities into a 2 x 2 grid – one axis is the action (Discretionary or Non-Discretionary); the other axis is the number of transactions involved (Huge aka Intensive or Few aka Non-Intensive):   The bottom left corner ( Policies ) is about actions that require discretion but are not done often. Examples include changing tax rates or setting eligibility criteria or location of dams. These are choices and decisions that have to be made, but since they aren’t done often, in theory , a government could use the relevant experts to make the right decision most of the time. But like any disc...

We know that any technology or invention can be used for good or bad. The bad effect is easy to see when it is a direct consequence – guns kill, for example. Direct. But it is harder to see the bad effect when a technology or invention sets off a chain of effects, and it is the last effect that is bad.   This question in my 13 yo daughter’s History book opened my eyes to this: “How did the Industrial Revolution lead to colonialism?” The answer goes like this. The Industrial Revolution increased production tremendously while also making a lot of items affordable. This set off new needs: (1) more raw materials; and (2) new markets to sell those surplus goods. What started as exploration to find places for the above-mentioned needs eventually resulted in colonialism (Why settle for negotiated bilateral deals? Wasn’t it more advantageous to just rule those places?).   It won’t be wrong to say that the Industrial Revolution was great for the West, and terrible for th...

What are the common sources of noise in decision making? Well, people have selective attention, and selective recall of the information, write the authors of Noise . Information is rarely coherent, it is often conflicting, and so people pick and drop parts. Therefore, what goes into the decision varies across individuals.   People are different. Some are strict, others lenient; some are optimistic, others pessimistic. You get the idea. If that sounds like bias, you’re right – it is actually both . It’s noise too because different people have different biases. This is called “level noise” – different people have different base levels.   People makes exceptions to their own rules. They also react differently if the same problem is presented in a different context. All these variations within the same person are called “pattern noise” .   Within pattern noise, there is a subcategory called the “occasion noise” – the mood of the person can produce different de...

SoHO stands for “substances of human origin” – simply put, it refers to human organs, blood and tissues. While one can donate any of these in India, it is illegal to be paid for it. The reason behind the law making it illegal for money to change hands for such transactions was to prevent desperate folks from making donations for money, without fully understanding the risks.   Pranay Kotasthane pointed out another aspect of SoHO in India – 80% of living organ donations are by women; and 80% of recipients are men. This would seem to be because of our societal bias with women probably being pressurized to donate organs for their male relatives in need.   Does this ban on payments for SoHO have any negative consequence? First, there is a shortage of SoHO in India – one estimate says around 12,000 people die daily because of blood shortage. Inevitably, SoHO-for-cash systems have arisen – they are, of course, illegal. How many people could get blood had the law not been the...

In their book titled Noise , the authors clarify that they understand why real-world decisions are so “noisy”: “Judgment is difficult because the world is a complicated, uncertain place.” However, they continue: “There is a limit to how much disagreement is admissible.” Taken too far: “System noise is inconsistency, and inconsistency damages the credibility of the system.”   Take the fact that different judges give different sentences for the same crime: “This variability cannot be fair. A defendant’s sentence should not depend on which judge the case happens to be assigned to.” Attempts to fix this by issuing guidelines for judges, which restrict the variation among judges, have been resisted by judges. Why? “After all, each case is unique, isn’t it?” Yes, the authors concede, sometimes the need for discretion is important. Their quarrel though is with all the too many cases where “variability is undesirable”. Like different premium quotes by insurance compan...

Errors in judgment. There are two causes for it: bias, and “noise”. In their book titled Noise , the authors start off by explaining what “noise” means in this context. Say 4 teams, A, B, C, and D go to a shooting range:   Team A is on target. B is “biased” (off-target but in a very consistent way). C and D are inconsistent – they are what is called “noisy”.   In the real world though, for most judgments, one doesn’t know what the target is. Or who missed and by how much. If that sounded wrong, consider a few scenarios of what the authors mean: Which movie should be made? Which candidate should be hired? What is the right premium for the insurance policy? In these scenarios, what exactly is the right answer? And how do you even gauge if the decision was wrong: after all, each of the decisions could go wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with poor judgment e.g. a freak earthquake, or a personal event in the employee’s life that derails his professional life. ...

Why are Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf considered the “inventors of the Internet”? Long, long ago, as computer networks started to get created, they were initially limited to universities and military installations in the US, writes Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine . Further, two different networks could not communicate with each other. Why not? Because they worked on different hardware, had computers that ran different OS’s, application software was written in different programming languages, and most importantly the protocol used for communication within a network was not standardized – each network followed its own method to communicate, so no two networks could communicate with each other.   In such a setup, vendors had no incentive to make things compatible with each other. In fact, corporations (who were major customers) considered the lack of compatibility a feature , not a bug! Why? Because they feared security leaks and industrial espionage. Thus, if a rival corpora...

Why has India adopted a no-first-use policy wrt its nuclear weapons? Shivshankar Menon looks into the reasons in his book, Choices . (Incidentally, India’s assurance that it won’t use or threaten others by its nuclear weapons is limited to (1) non-nuclear weapon countries, and (2) countries not aligned to nuclear powers).   Consider the alternative, he says: a declared first-use-if-needed policy. It’s what the US, Russia, and Pakistan have. America has it because that’s the only way to guarantee the security umbrella it provides to Japan, South Korea and much of western Europe. But once the US takes that policy, USSR/Russia has no choice but to adopt the same policy. Pakistan has it because of their paranoia of India and their weakness in conventional military strength.   Menon points out that the alternative, first-use-if-needed policy, is destabilizing by definition. It sets off guessing games as to when such a country might fire its nukes, what they might consider ...

The national budget gets a lot of coverage and analysis. While the state budgets hardly get covered or analyzed. Even though 60% of government spending happens through our states. This fraction is even higher for higher income states.   Karnataka’s (state) GDP is $340 billion. What steps should it take to become a $1 trillion economy? How much does the state spend on Bangalore v/s how much does it get from Bangalore? Obviously this wouldn’t be of interest for national media, but surely it should be for state media?   I am curious whether this problem of coverage is limited to the English media alone? Or is it a problem with the regional language media too? ~~   It’s a common complaint about how little parliament meets – we’re not talking of individual MP’s attendance, this is about how many days parliament is convened. In case you wondered, it’s 60 days per year. And so much of that gets washed away in shouting each other down, or boycotting sessions. But ...

In 2023, Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Infosys, Aadhar and India Stack, made a presentation on India’s digital transformation that has grown viral in recent times.   In 2008, we had the world’s most “unbanked” population, i.e., folks without bank accounts. History shows that the fraction of the population with bank accounts is a function of how it rich it is. By 2017, 80% of the population had bank accounts despite the per capita GDP still being low. (For comparison, 80% coverage is usually achieved when a country’s per capita GDP is around 10 times ours.)   How did that happen? Two critical factors were the dropping prices of smartphones and the even sharper drop in the price of Internet data costs. In turn, those two factors caused India’s digital payments to take off. The convenience of digital payments further drove the rise of bank accounts. Which then set off another virtuous cycle – subsidies and cash benefits could be transferred directly to recipients wit...

The Russia-Ukraine war has probably created a “major shift in the world order”, writes Amit Kumar. On the one hand, the US and Europe have moved closer to each other.   On the other side, how close have Russia and China moved to each other? This is a particularly worrying question for India, he writes, because “one of India’s historically most trusted partners now possibly shares an indispensable friendship with India’s primary adversary”.   Russia and China have several points of convergence: “The first point of convergence between China and Russia emanates from their shared antipathy for the US-dominated economic order and financial system. Both countries have been subject to a range of Western economic sanctions and export restrictions.”   Russia as the oil source addresses another critical fear of China. Oil from the Middle East has to go through the Indian Ocean, a route which can be blocked (in times of war). Conversely, China as the new consumer of Russian oil hel...

What is the appeal of a guy like Trump? The American Left’s “answer” to that question – white supremist, racism, gynophobia, xenophobia - never felt satisfying to me. While some fraction of his supporters definitely fall in those categories, surely not half of the country. How could half the country have turned into those things within months of Trump running for power the first time?   Andrew Sullivan’s post provided another answer, one which feels more likely. The one-line summary of it: “Trump has grasped some core truths of our time.” He expands on that.   First , immigrants in America. A part of that problem is the (relative) ease with which the Democrats want to grant even illegal immigrants eventual citizenship. But more than that, it is the change in who qualifies for asylum. In the Cold War era, asylum seekers were mostly to those escaping communism. This set was relatively small and thus manageable (most escapees went to Western Europe, not America); and...