Viswanathan K's Thoughts

How do we define ourselves, asks Gurwinder Bhogal? Sure, we have internal drivers and ideas, but we also temper that with feedback from others. Are we overdoing it? Is it acceptable? Are we fitting in or becoming outcasts? This approach made sense since time immemorial when the feedback we got was from a small set of people with whom we interacted regularly.   But in the age of the Internet and social media, that approach is not working, argues Bhogal. We now get feedback from people we barely know. Even the famous people we listen to online, well, what they say online may not be “indicative of who they are”.   Who doesn’t like to be popular? But popularity online carries a new risk: “They often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of

In his book, Accelerating India’s Development , Karthik Muralidharan looks at the role of bureaucrats in India’s poor public service systems. As mentioned in earlier blogs, democracy forces politicians to over-promise. To deliver on those promises, they need a capable bureaucratic system. To improve the bureaucracy, investments have to be made. But we are a poor country – so there isn’t enough money to invest. Even worse, any investments in improving the bureaucracy will take a long time to translate into visible actions, but a politician’s re-election cycle comes within 5 years, why then would a politician invest in the bureaucracy?   In addition, politicians want to have pliable bureaucrats who will do their bidding. So they have actively undermined the professionalism and capability of the bureaucracy.   A lesser-known fact is that the Indian bureaucracy is understaffed . Not a typo. As a ratio of public servants to the population, India’s ratio is lower than China’s or a We

So the American pre-polls were totally wrong. The race didn’t turn out to be “too close to call”. Instead, as Andrew Sullivan wrote: “It’s not just a Trump victory. It’s a Trump triumph.” How does he come to that conclusion? “There is, yes, a mandate. When one party wins the presidency, Senate, and probably the House, that’s usually the case.” Mandate for what? This one is easy to answer because Trump had easy to understand policy goals, unlike his opponent who seemed to have none. “Americans have voted for much tighter control of immigration, fewer wars, more protectionism, lower taxes, and an emphatic repudiation of identity politics.”   Wait, surely that last point (“an emphatic repudiation of identity politics”) can’t be true? Wasn’t Trump “whiteness personified”, as one political commentator said? Well, that’s not what the data says. Sullivan pulls up some of the relevant stats: (1) Trump won more non-white votes than any Republican since Nixon; (2) He gained massi

The West increasingly sees AI as a dangerous thing, something that is/will be used for bad things, lead to job losses and social upheaval. The extreme versions of such fears involve Terminator like scenarios where AI takes over the world.   On the other hand, India views AI as a means to solve societal problems and gaps for which the country (and thus its government) is too poor to solve. The history of how other countries solved these in the past is often proving irrelevant, like how India achieved huge telecom penetration by bypassing copper wires (history) to wireless (modern and a lot cheaper). AI is like that – it opens the door to find patterns. The Internet in general and the world of sensors that is increasingly integrated with the Internet produces voluminous data on just about everything. How longs are trucks idling at checkpoints? How long does it take for goods to move from A to B? Crunching so much unstructured data is beyond human or conventional software. AI, on the

How do advertisements work, asks Kevin Simler. The conventional theory says that ads create a positive association with the product in hand (love, happiness, attractiveness), and that association eventually nudges us into buying it.   But is that true? If it were, Simler says: “All an advertiser needs to do is show a pretty face next to Product X, and suddenly we're filled with desire for it.” Obviously, things aren’t that simple. While we aren’t perfectly rational: “Neither are we puppets at the mercy of every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a billboard.”   How then do ads work? His theories make for interesting reading. Some ads work by just creating awareness (FYI) that a certain product exists e.g. Fevicol. If that info can be provided in a memorable way, all the better. This approach works for products which are needed infrequently – the aim of the ad is to try and ensure you recall the brand when you do need such a product. Other ads work by trying to give you “ ev

Karthik Muralidharan looks at the role of politicians in the poor state of India’s governance and delivery systems in his book, Accelerating India’s Development . Again, the situation is more complex than what most believe, which is why the title of that chapter is “The Politician’s Predicament”.   To reiterate the point from an earlier blog, India’s choice of “democracy before development” has created unique “political incentives and constraints”. Voters in India can demand welfare and subsidies when India is much weaker, both economically and in government capability. (Remember, the West progressively expanded democracy as it got richer, so by the time the poor started demanding more things via the ballot box, the state had more money and capability). Sadly: “Weak state capacity contributes to vote bank politics.” How? When the state can’t deliver to all, well, it can deliver only some things to some people. In a country where most people lack the most basic of amenities,

Most of us never learnt Western history from a social perspective – how, for example, did the Western welfare state emerge? Prof. Karthik Muralidharan looks into that in his book, Accelerating India’s Development .   Long, long ago, Western governments monarchies were about one thing only – security. After all, it was a time when your neighbor could attack, defeat, loot and occupy you, and enslave or kill your inhabitants. Those were savage times.   The role of the Western state changed only with the Industrial Revolution. As production increased phenomenally, better systems were needed. Roads, ports, railways initially.   As urbanization followed industrialization (people migrated for better paying jobs from the villages), the populations of towns exploded. Sanitation and sewage systems had to be improved. These improvements in turn boosted productivity and the state’s tax revenue, which could further improve infrastructure (and yes, continue to fund the military expansionism