Looking for “the One”? A Cynic’s Fantasy

‘Matrix’ is one of my favorite science fiction movies. In this movie, most of the human beings live the life in a virtual reality (the matrix), while their bodies are used as an energy source by the machines that have conquered the earth. A few humans have managed to escape the matrix and build up a resistance movement to break the matrix. The ruling machine class will do everything within their power to suppress this resistance. The movie is about this conflict and confrontation for the right to be free and not be a just a tool for select few!

Sometimes when I look around, I feel that this movie Matrix, to a great extent portrays the real world. The driving force as well as the reason for the existence of ruling class of politicians and business men is Power and Money. The politics mostly focuses on creation of power and the business mostly focuses on creation of riches and they help each other with their specialization and they exchange Power for Money and Money for Power.

They control all the resources. They extract the resources and convert them to products for their comfort or to increase their wealth. The common man treated as nothing but another resource; labor in the production process, the slave at their beck & call and the customer for what they produce which is a way to increase their wealth. They play with their policies so that this large mass of living resource is pacified, subdued and remain docile. The movies, the games, the TV and the religion are all used as means to keep the common man in a state to stupor. Slowly and steadily higher proportion of wealth shifts to this ruling class.

Occasionally we see some making an attempt to better the life of the society at large, to treat common man more fairly, to enable inclusive growth, to stop over exploitation of the earth’s resources, to sustain the environment and to bring about peace and harmony. This initiative is immediately snubbed. Look at some of the recent examples; Anna Hazare and Bhushans of Civil Society, Mr Thomas, former CVC, Mr. G V Ramakrishna and C B Bhave, former chairman of SEBI, Mr Tharoor former Minister, Sanjiv Bhat the IPS officer from Gujarat who has decided to take a position, Sreedharan,cheif of Delhi Metro and a host of not so famous and not so recent examples can be picked from politics, bureaucracy and social service.

Although corruption, fraud, exploitation, murder and terrorism are common currencies used by many (or most?) among ruling classes (both in business and in politics) technical faults, minor errors in judgment and even fabricated stories are blown out of proportion and exploited to suppress those who try to make a difference. I don’t claim these people are completely devoid of any errors. No human beings are. But the difference is that they mostly strive for the good of the society without being driven only by private agenda, their intentions are mostly honorable and they try to do the right thing in their endeavors, .

Unlike in Matrix there is not going to be “the One” with superhuman abilities to save the world. The change can only come from small contribution from each one of us. We need to learn to differentiate between technical faults of those who mean good and shenanigans of those who work to maximize only their private interest. We need to support these few good men instead of indulging in self righteous criticisms about those who try or making excuses for our inaction. We need to support the former, pardon their occasional errors in judgment and support them to go forward and perform. And for this we need to learn few tricks from the ‘bad’. If we don’t learn to do this, there may be no hope in this battle. Take it or leave it…

"What is the reason? Soon the why and the reason are gone and all that matters is the feeling. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it; but it is of course a lie. Beneath our poised appearance we are completely out of control". Merv the Frenchman in Matrix Reloaded.


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Some Inconvenient Questions

[I am a concerned citizen of the world. I worry about the doom that is projected for this mother earth on account of the irresponsibility of “we the people.” Recently I came across some contrarian thoughts in few books that I read (referred below) which raises some questions on the current popular thinking. I have attempted to draw attention to some highlights. Those interested can read up more.This may be a bit heretical but I believe it is worth being alive to these issues]

In 1798, an Austrian Monk Robert Thomas Malthus, who was also a political economist,  predicted a gloomy future for the mankind because he believed that population would increase at geometric progression and the food supply would grow at arithmetic progression resulting in collapse of the mankind. In 1898 another eminent British scientist, Sir William Crookes, argued that unless nitrogen could be chemically fixed from air by some scientific process, the human race would not be able to feed itself from the land available. They were not being paranoid. Their predications were based on facts, based on scientific estimation of arable land, based on the prevailing productivity of land, based on availability of fertilizer and based on their estimation of population growth. [1]

In the same year (1898) delegates from across the globe gathered in New York for the first international urban planning conference. Their main cause of concern was management of horse manure which had exploded to un-manageable problem in all major cities of the world. In 1894 Times London had predicted that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. Somebody in New York predicted about the same time that by 1930 horse shit would rise to Manhattan’s third-storey windows. All policy efforts to mitigate the problem offered no solutions. Urban planning conference broke up in three days instead of the planned 10 day schedule. [2]

Within 15 years after Sir Crookes made his predication a German Scientist Bosch invented a technology for large scale production of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer. Today almost half of the nitrogen in our body would have passed through such a factory. The invention of internal combustion engine was the environmental savior. It managed within two decades to address the problem that was driving nations around the world nuts. They also released significant land for farming which was hitherto being used to feed the horse and other draught animals.[3]

These solutions to the society’s vexing problems were not found by means of depopulation of society or by policy directions that reduced travel and commerce. It came about from human ingenuity and innovation. The internal combustion engines improved mobility, revolutionized travel and agriculture and helped the mother earth to sustain seven billion people without falling into the Malthusian trap.

With the exploding usage of these IC engines, today we are faced with the negative externalities of greenhouse gases (incidentally the methane gas produced by the ruminating animals produce 50% more greenhouse impact than the transport sector!) from this technological magic and we are worried about future of our energy options and global warming. In the same way the urban planning conference on horse manure failed to produce results, the Copenhagen Summit on climatic control was unproductive. The reason was not lack of intention. But because the marginal cost of discipline is much more than the benefit; not just for individuals, but also for countries. Garett Halden has nicely explained this “tragedy of commons”; the problem of free riding.[4]

We have to have innovations to address this. Not just knee-jerk relations based of fads and fashions. The renewable energy sources today have not reached the level of scalability to solve the global energy problem. Many of them, on a total input-output ratio of energy spent and energy output is quite inefficient and often a net consumer of energy. Matt Ridley has pointed out this conundrum with an interesting analysis. “Today about 125 kwh per day is the average energy consumption of a British national. Let us assume that we managed to brig it downto100 kwh which is to be supported with 25% each from nuclear, wind and solar, 5% each from bio-fuel, wood, wave tide and hydro. Then there would be sixty nuclear power stations, wind farms would cover 10% of entire land, solar panels covering an area the size of Lincolnshire, eighteen Greater Londons growing bio-fuels, forty seven new forests growing fast rotation harvested timber, hundreds of miles of wave machines off the coast, huge tidal barrages in the Seven estuary and Strangford Lough and 25 times as many hydro dams in the rivers as there are today’ Still with frequent power cuts.” [5]

We need to incentivize and encourage game-changing innovations and not hope for altruistic actions by individuals and countries represented by their political masters or jump at everything that sound green or organic without analyzing its true cost and benefit. We cannot be carried away by such dreams and take retrograde steps of arresting economic growth that would do injustice to billions of global citizens who hope to share some part of the benefit of human progress, massive drives to bio-fuels that will reduce land under cultivation leading to food shortage or hijack more rain forests. If we take this path the cure we are attempting will end up being a bigger disaster.

“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.” Sydney J. Harris
Related Reading: Question of Existence
References
[1], [3],[5] The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley
[2] From Horse Power to Horsepower, Eric Morris
[4] The Corruption Conundrum, V Raghunathan
Super Freakonomics, Steven D levitt & Stephen J Dubner
The Price of Everything, Eduardo Porter

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Give us the Facts

When India got its independence in 1947 as an outcome of partition there was large scale migration across the India-Pakistan borders. From West Pakistan, more than 300,000 refugees (this does not include thousands who moved to Delhi, Mumbai etc.) migrated to eastern Punjab leaving behind about2.7 million hectares and they were looking for land to settle down and farm. As against this, the total land left behind by Muslims who migrated to Pakistan was only 1.9 million hectares. The government had a huge challenge of allocating land to these refugee farmers equitably.

Sardar Tarlok Singh of Indian Civil Service, as the director general of rehabilitation in this region, managed this process with clear and simple guidelines which were enforced pretty well. To address the variation in productivity of land across regions, he defined a ‘standard acre’ which was the area that could yield specified quantity of rice. To address the lesser area available for allotment compared to what was left behind, he introduced a ‘graded cut’. As per this each party received only a specified fraction of the land area left behind by them. This hair cut, administered in a stepped fashion, was lowest for smaller land holding and highest for the highest slab.

The biggest challenge was verifying the authenticity of the claims. He addressed the same through open assemblies of refugees from the same village. False claims were punished by reducing allocation and even imprisonment which were strictly enforced. He was able to make allotment of 250,000 properties within 18 months from March 1948, when he started collecting claim applications. [1] (Compare this with the efficiency of administration of various development schemes run by the government these days even with availability of more people and better technology.)

Thus the most difficult problem of verification of claims was addressed through transparency. Peer verification, social audits and village assemblies were mechanisms used by generations. But as the society got larger, government procedures more complex and often opaque and exception handling ad-hoc, various government approvals, benefits and programs became inefficient and avenues for misappropriation.

Right to Information Act (RTI) is a good beginning. But the resources available for this are so limited that it will be practically impossible to scale up the transparency drive. The resources get clogged in meaningless queries, which often is the intention of those raising the queries. RTI is a good tool to dig deeper; but not a tool that can scale up easily.

To give momentum to the march towards more transparency, we need to have a system in place that continuously publish time series data to be published by various government departments on its expenditures, programs, exceptions, benefits, sanctions and approvals. At present most of the information dissemination by various government departments is nothing more than a public relation exercises. There are certain departments in certain states taking excellent initiatives. But often they remain as individual effort which dies down after the initiator has left or remain as islands of excellence.

What is needed is an institutional framework for publishing granular data in electronic form that can be queried and analyzed. The progress in Information Technology and better connectivity make this eminently possible and affordable. Various agencies can then access this data and make observations and conclusions. Some people may make simple queries for clarifications. Some pope will undertake extensive analysis of the data to identify trends or patterns or to measure efficacy of various schemes. Transparency Portal of Brazil is an excellent example for such an initiative.

This may be inconvenient for many and such people will always try to object and raise excuses. Some try to hide behind so called ‘privacy issues’. I agree privacy is important. But privacy is for private matters. When it comes to most government expenditure and government benefits, the public has the right to know how this has been spent and who the recipients are. Sometimes we hide behind strategic and security concerns. Certain information may have to be always confidential. But some can be released after time delay. We have to be very selective when we classify information on the basis of such consideration and it should not be a means to obfuscate. We should have mechanisms in place that would dispassionately evaluate the sensistivity to classify information as confidential.

This is a trend that we see around the world. An interesting example is how the data relating to government support during the recent financial market crisis in USA has been released. The central bank and industry lobbies resisted tooth and nails releasing this data. In December 2010, Dodd-Frank financial law forced the central bank to release the data relating to trillions of dollars of loans it extended to the various banks under trouble. However, it did not release the details of the loans under the discount window. Supreme Court has now rejected the objection by the banking industry and has forced central bank to release this data also[2].

It makes sense for the government to have a coordinated effort with help of experts to study the functioning of each department and develop an institutional framework and a time bound plan for defining the scope of data release. Let us publish time series data at the most granular level; details of individuals and entities who receive any kind of government patronage, input, aid or subsidies given against the quality and quantity of their output, details of companies found to have been engaged in corrupt practices, details of fund transferred to each department and how it has been spent as so on. Mário Vinícius Claussen Spinelli, Secretary of Corruption Prevention and Strategic Information, Brazilian Office of the Comptroller General has beautifully described the Three Laws of Open Government Data:

• If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist
• If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage
• If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower


In the beginning there was nothing. God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better. ~Ellen DeGeneres

[1] India after Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha
[2] Fed To Disclose Discount Window Crisis-Lending Data Thursday


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