Tag: rsj

An Article, A Chart, A Blogpost, A Book and Some Thoughts

The Article

I’ve just about gotten around to catching up on a lot of reading, and I finally got a chance to read this Scroll article:

“A few days later, Radha walked into a sprawling, glistening factory in Sriperumbudur, on the outskirts of Chennai. It had rows and rows of workers, most of them young women like Radha, bent over work tables on which were laid out tiny, metal parts. They were assembling iPhones – the most expensive and coveted mobile phones in the world – made by Apple, the second-richest tech company in the world.

The factory was run by Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics. For long, most of its phone production for Apple was done out of China. But in recent years, with the relationship between the United States and China coming under strain, Foxconn had been scouting for new locations for its manufacturing units. The town of Sriperumbudur, situated in Tamil Nadu, one of India’s most literate states, seemed like a natural choice. Home to over 500 companies, including manufacturers of electronics, auto components and chemicals, it has grown into an industrial hub in the past two decades.”

https://scroll.in/article/1064027/indias-iphone-factory-is-keeping-women-workers-isolated

As always, please read the whole thing. In fact, an especial plea this around – please take the time out, and go read the entire article, and then come back and read this. If you’ll allow me to be greedy, take even more time out and have a contemplative cup of coffee before coming back here.

The Chart

Hasan, R., & Jandoc, K. R. (2010). The distribution of firm size in India: What can survey data tell us?. Asian Development Bank Economics Working Paper Series, (213)

This is one of my favorite charts to stare at, and often endlessly. It’s outdated now, of course, because it is from well over a decade ago. But even so, this chart tells a powerful story. The story it tells us is that we have failed to generate manufacturing based employment in our country. That is a problem because without a significant increase in the share of manufacturing in our GDP, it is unlikely that we will be able to meaningfully reduce poverty in our country.

The Blogpost

I’ve written about it already in the previous week, but just in case you haven’t already, please do go and read the whole thing. I know I’m assigning a lot of homework today, but if you can spare the time, rinse and repeat the whole contemplative cup of coffee routine too, after you finish reading the whole thing. Here’s one of the key paragraphs (to me) from the blogpost:

“One of the things we often argue about on these pages is that growth is the single biggest moral imperative for India at its stage of development. We can try to optimise for many other ideals and virtues, but if they come to us at the cost of growth, we must learn to ignore them. Because lack of growth will make even those ideals worse than where they are today. To illustrate this point, somewhat provocatively, I have made the point that we shouldn’t get rich at the cost of our environment, but we must also consider that staying poor doesn’t do any good for the environment either in the medium to long run. At our stage of development, we should only ask if our today is better than our yesterday. It is possible that our today isn’t ideal or it may be far from what the developed world might have at this moment. But that should be of limited concern to us. Because in trying to aspire for that ideal state or in trying to make that quantum leap to what a developed economy already has, we will put at risk the gradual increment that we can make every day.”

https://publicpolicy.substack.com/p/248-the-budget-line-is-real

RSJ here is arguing for not making the perfect the enemy of the good. The good, in this case, is the fact that more women are getting employed than before, at least at the margin. The perfect, in this case, refers to the fact that working conditions at the Foxconn factory are, well, less than perfect:

“The activist said that often women would not use the toilets at the hostel and would instead wait until they reached the factory. “This obviously took a toll on their health,” he said.

The problem of health has boiled over into a crisis in the past. In 2021, hundreds of workers from the Foxconn factory went on protest and blocked traffic on the Chennai-Bengaluru highway after a food poisoning incident that resulted in 250 workers falling ill, of which 159 were admitted to a hospital. The workers also complained that their living conditions were unhygienic and demanded that their employers take immediate steps to improve them.

After the protests, the factory stayed closed for a few days, until the administration promised to make improvements in the hostels and ensure hygiene in food preparation.

Since then, the situation has improved, workers said. But some women still do not see the living conditions and the restrictions as satisfactory.”

https://scroll.in/article/1064027/indias-iphone-factory-is-keeping-women-workers-isolated

So what should we as a society choose? Should we choose the good and sacrifice the perfect, as RSJ and Pranay suggest? Or should we choose the perfect and give up on the good, as the Scroll article might imply to some? 

Leave aside for now the question of how society should choose, because figuring out effective preference aggregation mechanisms is, er,  impossible. What is your preference if you have to choose between the good and the perfect? What should be your preference, and why?

Far be it from me to tell you what your answer should be, of course, because as far as I’m concerned, you should read the Scroll article, RSJ and Pranay’s newsletter, this blogpost and a hajjar other sources and come to your own conclusion. I’m old fashioned that way.

My job today is to help you build out a framework for you to arrive at an answer, and to provide you with a lot of different perspectives. If you end up agreeing with my framework, end up using it, and end up with an answer different from mine, all is good with the world, for we can then debate our disagreements and arrive at some sort of a synthesis, and what could possibly be better, eh? Like I said, I’m old fashioned that way.

The Book

“The first time I met Wu Chunming, she was working for a foreign company, making a thousand dollars a month, and living in a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Dongguan. The last time I saw her, two and a half years later, she was working for a Chinese company, making $150 a month, and living in a single room in a part of the city known for small shoe factories with poor working conditions. By every calculus that mattered, she had fallen a long way. But she was more serene than I had ever seen her. In a city where a Mercedes was the measure of all things, Chunming had somehow broken free and developed her own personal morality.

“Before I was always hungry,” she told me. “If I saw a sweater I liked, I would have to get it immediately. Now if I don’t eat the best things or buy the nicest things, it doesn’t matter so much. If I see a friend or a family member happy, then that is meaningful.” She was no longer panicked about being single at the age of thirty-two, and she had stopped having affairs with men she met online. “I believe I’ll become more and more beautiful, and more and more healthy, and my economic circumstances will get better and better,” she said.

Chunming hoped to have children someday, and she often asked me about American attitudes toward child-raising. “I would like a child to grow up to have a happy life and make a contribution to society,” she said.

“A contribution to society?” I asked her, startled. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean to be a big scientist or something like that,” Chunming said. “How many people can do that? I think if you live a happy life and are a good person, that is a contribution to society.”

Chang, Leslie T.. Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China . Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

TMKK?

Factory Girls is a book worth reading because it talks not about the industrial policy of China, but about the resultant sociology of China’s industrial policy. To the extent that you agree with the notion that the economic growth of a nation is the means to an end, it is a book worth reading. It is possible, of course, that you are of the opinion that economic growth is an end in itself. The book is still worth a read, because it is important to read books that offer perspectives which differ from your worldview. (My Twitter feed, for example, is absolute torture for me, but I force myself through it on a daily basis.)

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_ladders

Think of India (or any country, for that matter) as a player on a board of snakes and ladders. Industrial policy, when done well, acts as a ladder. But unintended outcomes of industrial policy act as snakes, pulling the country back  down to problematic parts. In this framework, it is hard for me to not think of China as having taken ladder after ladder over the last thirty years or so, only to fall a fair way back in the last two years or so.

And so yes, it becomes important for India to replicate the high growth eras that China and some of the East Asian countries accomplished. But it becomes as important, if not more important, for us to avoid the metaphorical snakes on the latter stages of the board. 

One should absolutely aspire to match (and inshallah, exceed!) China’s growth rates from twenty years ago. But one should also aspire to avoid India’s youth going all tang ping on us twenty years from now.

Easy to say, I hear you say, and I can guess what’s coming next. How exactly, you ask, do we go about doing this? 

Should our takeaway from the Scroll article be that we should ask Foxconn to four-letter-word-beginning-with-f off? Should our takeaway from Pranay and RSJ’s blog post be to ask Scroll to four-letter-word-beginning-with-f off?

Regular readers should be rolling their eyes round about now, for they know what’s coming. All together now…

  1. How about offering workers who have completed three years of work at Foxconn fully subsidized vocational training? Not three, but two instead, I hear the left liberals say? Not three but five, I hear the libertarians say? Well, have at it, ladies and gentlemen – figure out what the right time frame should be. Why, I might even go so far as to say that development economists should run RCTs to figure out the appropriate time frame.
  2. How about offering soft loans to folks who want to build hostels near Sriperumbudur? Or offer timely transport? Or other mechanisms to ensure a thriving housing market that allows women workers to make their own choices about freedom, perceived safety, food quality, and other parameters?
  3. How about offering additional tax breaks to companies like Foxconn contingent upon them (companies such as Foxconn) offering better working/living conditions to the workers? Or linking PLI payments to Foxconn’s customers to  incentivize such compliance? After all, Apple is one of the world’s best when it comes to sustainability, recycling, and other initiatives, and as we all know, can press its suppliers.

I’ll happily confess to not knowing if these suggestions make any sense, or go too far, or not far enough. I’m a beanbag economist, let alone the armchair variety. I’ve never worked in a factory, or regulated one, or designed regulations for labor policies in one. So if you are going to say that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll be the first to agree with you.

But I will say, and defend vigorously, this much:

Asking Foxconn to eff off is a bad idea, because god knows we need more manufacturing, more employment and more women’s participation in our labor force. Asking Scroll to eff off is an equally bad idea, because we’re missing the point if we ignore those in our society who point out the excesses of our new industrialization.

This is an ongoing process that will never stop, but  updating and simplifying labor regulations to reflect the modern factory is crucial. We need to do this  to encourage larger-sized, better run firms that are globally competitive and can offer labor protections. We need reforms that will make India a competitive  manufacturing destination without, eventually, the twin crutches of PLI or treatment of labor that ignores globally hard-won rights. The working class women of Tamil Nadu featured in the Scroll article are shouldering enough of a burden in contributing to growth; it is time we step up too. And when I say we, I don’t mean just the government. I’d include economists, policy-makers, think-tanks, the media and yes, society at large.

What the bazaar cannot provide by itself, sarkaar and samaaj must.

Don’t dilute the dialectic, dial it up!

Let differing opinions and ground reportage be offered up in the media, let’s all of us read/listen/see ‘em, and let’s figure out a middle ground by participating in the market for ideas. 

India needs, like it or not, Foxconn to teach us how China did it. India also needs, like it or not, Scroll articles to help us realize that Foxconn may well be pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable working conditions for labor.

Personally, I’m on team RSJ/Pranay on this one, because what India needs right now is a lot of industrialization. But I also worry about where this path might end up, and I’d like to keep an eye on what might go wrong in the years to come. And so I’ll disagree with Scroll for now, but I’ll celebrate the fact that I live in a country where Scroll publishes articles such as these.

It’s fashionable these days to say that labels are out of fashion, but I’m going to call this the liberal position. 

And finally, if you disagree with either the label or what I think it stands for, let’s have a debate! That’s my job da, and I’m very much up for it.

Factory Girls, The Indian Edition

Pranay and RSJ’s excellent newsletter speaks about an aspect of Industrial Policy in India that is going to be quite tricky: our ability to adapt to increased participation by women in our labor workforce:

The article is here; you won’t miss much if you don’t read it. It follows the predictable style of beginning with the personal story of an anonymous woman who moves from her village to work at Foxconn and using her story as a springboard pans out to the wider issues it wants to highlight – restrictive working conditions, poor food, low pay, long hours, semi-skilled work, lack of unions – you get the gist. All of it is made somewhat more poignant because these are all young women from underprivileged backgrounds who, anyway, have had odds stacked against them in their relatively young lives. This is a particular strand of reporting that always has currency in India and, prima facie, very hard to counter.

https://publicpolicy.substack.com/p/248-the-budget-line-is-real

As usual, please read the whole thing. I find myself in broad agreement with the points being made in it, because as far as I’m concerned, it really boils down to two key questions:

  1. What are you optimizing for?
  2. Relative to what?

And what we should be optimizing for is (as their newsletter points out) growth of the Indian economy, and greater participation by women in our labor workforce. This will not happen smoothly, perfectly or instantaneously, and the process will often involve many teething issues of many different kinds.

Second, conditions in these factories (and in the residences that have been constructed for the workers) may not be great, sure, but relative to what?

“…farm productivity in India is among the lowest in the world, and we have made the point that it is necessary for us to shift our workforce away from agriculture. We have lamented that for us to avoid ‘jobless’ growth, we need low-skilled manufacturing jobs in plenty so that we get the flywheel started, which will eventually lead to higher-skill – higher-value jobs over time. If a Foxconn factory helps us solve these issues right away, we should ask ourselves what more we can do to help them set up more factories. And not write tired old articles whose central thesis has been disproved in our own lifetime.”

https://publicpolicy.substack.com/p/248-the-budget-line-is-real

I couldn’t agree more. We need to shift our workforce away from agriculture, and we need more women – many, many, many more women! – to join the workforce. We do not know which ways will work and which won’t, but we simply do not have the luxury of closing down some routes.

India needs a hefty plate of chuqu, and fast. Chuqu?

Chuqu:

The pay for hard labor is low—often lower than the official minimum wage, which ranges between fifty and eighty dollars a month. Work hours frequently stretch beyond the legal limit of forty-nine hours per week. Get hurt, sick, or pregnant, and you’re on your own. Local governments have little incentive to protect workers; their job is to keep the factory owners happy, which will bring in more investment and tax revenue. But suffering in silence is not how migrant workers see themselves. To come out from home and work in a factory is the hardest thing they have ever done. It is also an adventure. What keeps them in the city is not fear but pride: To return home early is to admit defeat. To go out and stay out—chuqu—is to change your fate.

Chang, L. T. (2009). Factory girls: From village to city in a changing China. Random House., Location 151, Kindle Edition

In Praise of Missing in Action, by Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S. Jaitley

Some books are entertaining, and some books are erudite. Rarely do we get to read a book that is both.

Why do I write this blog? There are many reasons, but one of the most important one is that this is my attempt at making learning fun for everybody. And the most important factor behind me liking this book is just this – they make learning about public policy fun.

The subtitle of the book is “Why You Should Care About Public Policy”, but something that us academicians often forget is that supply does not, in the case of learning, create its own demand. You can write the most impressive (not to mention comprehensive) tome on public policy, but that’s no guarantee that people will read it. But with this book, the two authors have pulled off an amazing feat: not only will you most likely finish this book if you pick it up, but you will learn a lot from it. And more, you will be entertained for having done so.

Pranay and Raghu’s book is a delightful romp, but not through the subject of public policy, and the distinction matters. It is, instead, a romp through different aspects of life, to which the tools of public policy are applied. My biggest complaint with textbooks is that they teach you the subject, and include “boxes” in which you are allowed to think of the world outside the textbook. This book belongs to that all too rare (and therefore even more delightful) category of books that does the opposite. You are asked to only think of the world, and they attempt to make the world a more understandable place by supplying ways of thinking about it.

In order to do this, they divide the world into three different aspects: the state, the market and society. Or, to use their terminlogy: sarkaar, bazaar and samaaj. Think of the individual, and the individual’s life, as being impacted by her interactions with these three ‘pillars’ of society. How do these pillars impact her? How do these pillars interact with each other? What happens when the interactions between the individual and these pillars do not go along expected or ‘ideal’ lines? What are the potential remedies for these problems, and what are the costs of implementing these solutions? That is the focus of this book, and the answer to the subtitle of the book is, well, the book itself.

These three aspects – the state, the market and society – make up the three sections of this book. Each section is divided into bite-sized chapters, each dealing with a separate, specific issue. Three things bring each of these chapters to chirpy life – the breezy tone that they adopt, their obvious mastery over the concepts that they are explaining, and their obvious love of Bollywood. One chapter may be titled on the basis of a famous line from a Bollywood movie (Aap party hai ya broker, for example), while another may explain how to think about atmanirbharta by talking about Manoj Kumar and his movies.

But my favorite usage of this lovely party trick is when you encounter a line like this one: “The foundational premise of modern India is that the state is ontologically prior to society.” This is just the kind of line that is likely to make your eyes glaze over, no? Those of us who have struggled with weighty tomes on dreary afternoons in musty college libraries have learnt to resign ourselves to hours of tedium while tackling with what follows prose such as this. But this is what I meant when I wrote that first sentence of this post – they choose to explain what this sentence really means by asking you to think about Shakti, a movie starring Dlip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan.

Even better, they first speak about Shakti, and then foist that sentence upon you. A little bit like putting healthy veggies in a chicken pizza one might make for the young ‘un at home, if you see what I mean.

The authors mention in the book that it isn’t ‘an economic reasoning textbook’, but I’d beg to disagree. It absolutely is an economic reasoning textbook, and of the very best kind. It tells you how to get the most out of life, and better, tells you how and why one is unlikely to succeed in getting the most out of life if one gets basic tenets of public policy wrong.

Think of this book as the public policy companion to a book like The Economic Naturalist, by Robert Frank. Look at the world, and ask how the world becomes a more understandable place for having learnt public policy.

As an economist, I particularly enjoyed the sections on sarkaar and samaaj. Not, I hasten to add, because the section on the bazaar is in any way inferior, of course. It is simply because I am somewhat more familiar with the material in that section. But that’s all the more reason to buy the book, especially as a student of economics – becaue this book makes you more familiar with how the state and society also influence economic outcomes. Within the economic sections, the sandalwood story and the airline pricing story are my personal favorites. But practically every chapter brings along a delightful little nugget of information that is surprising, or a delicious twist of phrase that will likely make you chuckle, or sly titles to some of the chapters that will elicit both raised eyebrows and raised tempers.

The one complaint I have with the book is that I find myself wishing for an index and a bibliography at the end of the book, both of which are missing. It is understandable, for more than one reason, but as a fundamentally lazy person who also hopes to use this book as a teaching aid, both of these things would have gone a very long way. An online resource, perhaps, if one is permitted to be a little greedy?

But that minor quibble apart, there is nothing that prevents me from heartily recommending this book to you. Younger people might miss some of the references (“Vinod Kambli? Who he?” I can hear ’em go already), and they may also not have seen more than half the movies that have been referenced in the book – but that actually brings me to my final point.

A great way to read this book together would be to start a film club, and watch the movie in question in each chapter, before reading that chapter. Before the next movie screening, have a discussion about both the movie and the chapter, and all of the many “that reminds me” that might emerge from said discussions. Rinse and repeat for twenty-eight glorious chapters, give or take. I hope students in colleges and universities take up this suggestion, and spend some time in learning about movies, life in India, the role of the state, the market and society in the our own day-to-day lives, and a whole host of books, reports and papers as well. A positive externality that will result as a consequence of this will be the fact that you will have acquired a degree of expertise in public policy.

But as the authors themselves (and that wise old sage Crime Master Gogo) tell you, aa hi gaye ho, to kuchh lekar jao.

In all seriousness though, please do make sure that you read this book, if you are in any way interested in India. Recommended wholeheartedly.

On Muddling Through

Anticipating the Unintended is an excellent newsletter, and you should subscribe to it. This past Sunday, the authors came up with a lovely read on the Agnipath scheme. You may or may not agree with their analysis, but I would heavily recommend that you read it. There’s a lot that is important in it, but for today’s blogpost, I want to focus on this excerpt:

Considering the constraints, it is difficult to see what else the government could have done here. The need to reduce wage and pension costs to fund modernisation is real. And given the fiscally conservative instinct of this government, it won’t deficit fund the modernisation programme. As is its wont, it has chosen to put a bold announcement with emphasis on other benefits while trying to solve its key problems under cover. There’s this myth that a big bang approach to reform is the only model that works in India. That’s wrong. A lot of what has looked like big reforms in India have actually had a long runway that’s often invisible to people. A more comprehensive reading of the history of ‘91 reforms makes this clear.
So, the usual template has been followed so far: minimal consultation, no plans to test it out at a smaller scale and instant big bang implementation. The results are unsurprising.

https://publicpolicy.substack.com/p/173-lathpath-lathpath-lathpath-agnipath#details

Let’s figure out they key questions at play:

  1. What is the problem?: Wage and pension costs for the military spiraling out of control. You could argue that this is an old, inevitable problem made worse by the implementation of the OROP scheme, but for the moment, look past the cause and consider the effect. And the effect is that the Indian government spends over half of it’s budget on pension benefits (24%) and on wages (28%).
  2. What is the proposed solution?: That’s the Agnipath scheme in its entirety. I invite you, once again, to read the whole thing, but the first two to three paragraphs in the newsletter summarize the scheme very well, if you are not familiar with it yet.
  3. Why is this solution important?: Their takeaway is that the main focus of the Agnipath program is to reduce wage and pension costs, and that this is necessary. I agree on both counts – no matter what else is being said, and no matter what else Agnipath might achieve (a younger military, among other things) it’s main aim is to reduce wage and pension costs. And even a cursory glance at our government’s finances should make clear that this is necessary.
  4. The How: That’s what the rest of today’s blogpost is about! Here’s the thing: there is a problem, and it needs a solution. That (to me, at any rate) is clear. But is this (Agnipath) the best possible solution? And even if it is, is the current method of implementation the best way of going about it?

I don’t mean to get into a discussion of whether Agnipath is the best possible solution for this specific problem, nor do I mean to definitively answer the question of whether the method of implementation is optimal.

Instead, I hope to help you build a framework to start to think about the answer to these two questions (is this the best solution | is this the best way to implement said solution) in general. And then, if you like, you might want to use said framework to judge for yourself the Agnipath solution. I do exactly that in what follows: outline the principle, and apply it to the Agnipath case.

Minimal Consultation | No Plans to Test It Out | Instant Big Bang Implementation

Of the three things that RSJ and Pranay have highlighted in their excerpt , I plan to focus on the latter two in terms of the how question. The answer to the question about whether consultations were done or not, and whether they were minimal or not is essentially a grotesque Rorschach test, and I’ll skip it entirely. But the latter two – no plans to test it out, and instant big bang implementation – don’t just ring true, but are also truly important, especially if you are a student of public policy.

Let’s focus on the word “It” in the second phrase, “No Plans To Test It Out”. What does “it” mean, in this context? That’s simple, you might say – test the solution out.

And what’s the solution? Agnipath, you might answer a tad impatiently. Ah, but how do we know that this is the best possible solution? And here’s the simple answer to this question: you don’t know that this is the best possible solution, because as with everything else in life, the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. Your models might tell you that this solution is the best one, but all models work well, if at all, only in theory. To mix an apt metaphor, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

In other words, Agnipath is one of many different solutions to this problem. Moving to something like the NPS might be one, a modified version of Agnipath might be another, curtailing expenditures in other areas might be a third (to those who know their public finances in an Indian context, no I don’t think so either, but play along for the moment). May be the final solution that will be implemented at scale will be a mix of all these and more, who knows – but the point is, there are many possible solutions, of which at least some are worth trying out in an experimental sense.

The process should be seen as experimental, and probably involve acting on multiple potential solution ideas at a time (instead of just one). It can also be accelerated to ensure the change process gains and keeps momentum (to more or less degree, depending on where one is in the change process and what
problems, causes or sub-causes are being addressed). Trying a number of small interventions in rapid “experiments” like this helps to assuage common risks in reform and policy processes, of either appearing too slow in responding to a problem or of leading a large and expensive capacity building failure. This is
because each step offers quick action that is relatively cheap and open to adjustment; and with multiple actions at any one time there is an enhanced prospect of early successes (commonly called “quick wins”).

Andrews, M., Pritchett, L., & Woolcock, M. (2017). Building state capability: Evidence, analysis, action (p. 288). Oxford University Press., pp 170

So begin small, and begin with many different potential solutions. See which of these work and which don’t – which need tiny modifications to be better, and which need major surgery. Which might be usefully combined with some other solution(s)? Iterate towards a solution set that works “best” – and then implement this solution set at scale. But never presume, and especially without on the ground small scale implementation, that a proposed solution is necessarily the best one.

Pritchett and Woodcock have an excellent diagram for helping us think through this:

Andrews, M., Pritchett, L., & Woolcock, M. (2017). Building state capability: Evidence, analysis, action (p. 288). Oxford University Press., pp 172

“A.” in this case is the status quo, and given that there are no overt protests about it, we can say that the status quo is administratively and politically possible. But it is, as we have discussed, not fiscally sustainable, and hence undesirable.

“D.” in this case is the Agnipath solution. Let’s assume that it is a technically correct solution, and let’s assume that it (or something very similar to it) has either solved a similar problem in other countries (empirically validated) or has solved this exact problem, but in a simulation (theoretically validated). But it is not, as we are observing, politically possible. Now, sure, you can talk about the political motivations of the organizers of the protests, you can (and you should!) condemn the use of arson and wanton violence, and you can bemoan the role of the media. But if you accept that there is at least an inconvenient iota of truth in the idea that some sections of society feel hard done by this decision (warranted or otherwise), then you do in effect accept that it is not altogether politically possible. Your assessment may well differ from mine (and that is fine) but hopefully only in magnitude and not in direction.

The point is that we are trying to move from “A” to “D” in one fell swoop. Not only is that not a good idea in public policy, but we don’t even know if Agnipath is “D”! The very definition of D (or Agnipath) has changed in the recent past, is changing as we speak, and is likely to further iterate in the days/weeks/months/years to come. Which is as it should be, of course – my point simply is that these iterations and experimentations should happen in the design stage, not the roll-out stage.

So the general principle is that iterating through potential solutions at restricted scales is better. Even better when you learn from these iterations, modify your solutions, and come up with a hybrid that stands a better chance of working at scale. This helps in building out buy-in for your proposed solution as well. Won’t work perfectly, because nothing ever does, but remember that in public policy utopia ain’t our aim, being better than the status quo is.

Also, if you’re wondering about the title of the blog post, it is a tribute of sorts to a paper that ‘started’ studies in this particular area. Look up that phrase and the the name “Charles Lindblom” to go down a very nice little rabbit hole.

Bottomline: Crossing the river by feeling the stones remains excellent advice.

A Well Played Century

Congratulations to Pranay Kotasthane and RSJ on a well deserved century over at Anticipating the Unanticipated. It is one of the best newsletters out there on matters related to public policy, and I would strongly encourage you to subscribe, in case you haven’t already.

And to borrow a metaphor from cricket commentary, they brought up their century in style, with a fascinating piece about the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949:

The notorious Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949 was passed when Desai was the state’s Home Minister. To enforce the ban, the government created elaborate compliance machinery, misdirecting the limited policing capacity towards apprehending tipplers instead of protecting victims of other crimes. By the time this act was watered down in 1964, more than four lakh people had been convicted under Prohibition!

https://publicpolicy.substack.com/p/100-intoxicating-eardrops-

The paragraph I excerpted this from begins by saying that the BPA is rather well known, but I must have missed the memo. 4 lakh people – convicted for alcohol consumption. Because, of course, that was the most pressing issue facing a newly independent India: alcohol consumption. Pah.

Please, I implore you, read the entire post to understand how markets work when faced with arbitrary supply constraints in the face of palpable demand. (And a note to Pranay and RSJ: I’m dying a little, because for me, the perfect title for the post would have been Sharaabi Aankhein Gulaabi Chehra)

The post goes on to speak about another piece of genius policy regarding the “sale and holding” of gold, and the impact it had on status within Indian society. I often joke in classes on introductory economics about how Bollywood filmmakers needed unemployment benefits because “ismugglers” as a tribe began to dwindle post liberalization.

Or put another way, there’s a reason the title had to be “Once Upon A Time in Mumbai“.

The post also refers to another excellent blog worth following, written by Nitin Pai, and shows this graphic:

Source: http://acorn.nationalinterest.in/2014/01/29/what-causes-corruption-and-erosion-of-moral-values/

I’d only add one thing here – the second last level (“Unscrupulous and corrupt people become role models because they are successful”) is actually an even bigger problem, because interventions such as bans (and others, to boot: read the whole post) also stop honest people from being successful.

Put another way, Deewar is a great movie, but also a problematic one, because the audience’s Walter Mitty moments were related to Vijay, not Ravi.

There is much more in the 100th post, including a rant on education which I wholeheartedly agree with, but we’ll leave that for another day. Once again, congratulations to Pranay and RSJ, and here’s to the double century: cheers!