Tag: vijay joshi

Incentives Matter

A little hobby of mine, that I have managed to get my daughter hooked on to as well, is etymology.

I’ve long held that concepts become more interesting, more relatable and therefore more memorable – in the literal sense of the term – once you’re able to tell yourself a story about the underlying concept. Look up the etymology of the word “average”, for example, and it is likely to be a story you won’t forget in a hurry. By the way, here’s a fun question the daughter asked some months ago, and I’ve been kicking myself for not having thought of it first.

So what is the etymology of the word incentive?

From Medieval Latin incentīvus (“that strikes up or sets the tune”), from incinō (“to strike up”), from in- (“in, on”) + canō (“to sing”).

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+etymology+of+incentive

I like words. I like stories that can be fashioned out of, and about, words. If you click around on the search result that I have linked to, you realize that you can go down quite a rabbit hole about the history of the word incentive. Words such as kindle, singing, and incendiary crop up, and the associations these words can conjure up in one’s mind can result in a very pleasant couple of hours. But the phrase that resonated the most with me was “sets the tune”. It fits nicely with what incentives actually do in real life – they do set the tune on which we are tempted to dance.

Now who sets the tune, for whom, and with what consequences – that’s a whole other story, and practitioners of public policy can tell this tale much better than most other folks. But even outside the always-fascinating drama that is always being staged in the theater of public policy, this story is at the heart of what plays out in applied economics. Who is incentivizing whom, towards what end, and do the incentives end up producing intended or unintended consequences, and at what cost – these are fascinating questions to answer.

My favorite story about getting incentives right comes from Marginal Revolution University:

And my favorite story about getting incentives wrong comes from Calvin and Hobbes:

https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvin%27s_Allowance

And that’s the tricky thing with incentives. Getting them right is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The reason it is a surprisingly difficult thing to do is because of a variety of reasons, but it is possible to start to think about building a framework that one might use to design incentives.

Begin by asking yourself this question: Who is designing the incentive, and for whom?

Let’s begin with a simple example. Let’s say I am designing an incentive for myself. If, I say to myself, I can finish writing the blog post you’re reading right now without taking a break, I’ll reward myself by having a cup of coffee. In this case, I am designing an incentive for myself – I am setting a tune for myself to dance to.

Note two other things about this little incentive scheme:

  1. It is a positive incentive. I am not going to punish myself if I do not finish my designated task – that would be a negative incentive. I am, instead, going to reward myself if I finish my designated task. Think of the old English phrase “the carrot and the stick” to get a sense of what a positive and negative incentive mean.
  2. It is a non-monetary incentive. I am not going to reward (or punish) myself with money. There is no prize money, nor is there a fine. There is, instead, a non-monetary reward – a nice hot steaming cup of coffee. Incentives need not always be monetary!

So, a positive, non-monetary reward to finish a task. What could possibly go wrong? Consider the opening paragraph of Ch. 6 of a lovely little book called In The Service of the Republic:

In 1902 in Hanoi, under French rule, there was a rat problem. A bounty was set—one cent per rat—which could be claimed by submitting a rat’s tail to the municipal office. But for each individual who caught a rat, it was optimal to amputate the tail of a rat, and set the rat free, so as to bolster the rat population and make it easier to catch rats in the future. In addition, on the outskirts of Hanoi, farms came up, dedicated to breeding rats. In 1906, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed over 250 people.

Kelkar, Vijay; Shah, Ajay. In Service of the Republic . Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.

By the way, the footnote associated with this little tale contains the link to the fuller story, and is worth reading in its entirety. It would appear that the cobra story from India doesn’t have any corroborative evidence. For those who don’t know the background, there is a very similar story from India, only involving cobras isntead of rats. (If you will permit a slight digression: I was telling both of these stories to my daughter, and her only observation was to note that the cobra story was unlikely because “won’t cobras be an example of an apex predator? They can’t grow as quickly as rats, correct?”)

But what can go wrong is what the government in Hanoi discovered – that the person for whom the incentive has been designed may well end up hearing a completely different tune than the one that the designer of the incentive intended. That is, the designer would like you to do x, but you end up doing y instead.

Teachers may set up assignments to incentivize learning, but students are playing a different game. They are looking to minimize efforts in order to maximize marks. Ditto for managers and members on a team in the corporate world. Ditto, as I and my wife have been discovering to our chagrin, for parents and kids! That last bit has been a particularly aggravating discovery, since both my wife and I are economists.

But this phenomenon of incentives not working out as envisaged has an entire “law” of its own, called Goodhart’s Law. This is what it says:

“Any measure that becomes a target stops being a measure”

You’ll find different phrasings of the same idea online, but that’s the simplest way to express the idea. If the measure (to stop the culling of the rat population) is rat’s tails that have been cut off, and you make this the target – well, they stop being a measure of the culling of the rat population!

And that’s why designing incentives is so very tricky. The Indian government found this out to its cost in the aftermath of demonetisation, for example, but rather than look for examples elsewhere, I think you learn about incentives best when you try to think of examples from your own life.

But you cannot – simply cannot – be a student of economics without appreciating both what incentives are, and how difficult it is to design and implement them. The study of this facet of economics will last for your entire life, and you will always find something interesting to learn about it, every single time.

Incentives matter.

Now, if you will remember, I had promised myself a cup of coffee if I finished writing this blog post without taking a break. Goodhart’s law would imply that I would indeed finish writing this blog post without taking a break, but presumably at the cost of either its length, or its quality, or possibly both. I leave it to you to judge if that has been the case.

Me?

I’ll go brew that cuppa.

The Long Reads on The Long Road To Breaking Free

Last week marked the 75th anniversary of our Independence. A lot of reflective essays were written to mark this special occasion, and some of them made for excellent reading.

But as a student of economics, I haven’t found anything better than a fantastic essay written by Niranjan Rajadhakshya in the Livemint. It makes for excellent reading, and there is enough material in there to keep students busy for years, let alone a semester. And I simply cannot do justice to the entire article in one blogpost.

So what we’re going to do is that we’re going to spend this entire week going through this article at our own leisure. I’ll give a broad overview today, and we’ll explore some of the finer nuances in the other four blogposts to come this week.

Let’s begin with the title itself. I don’t know if the choice of headline was intentional, and it is usually the case that the headline is not chosen by the author of the piece. But that being said, surely this is a nod to an excellent book written by Vijay Joshi? I, at any rate, interpret it as such, and strongly encourage you to read the book if you haven’t done so already.

Most essays would have begun with a nod, at the very least, to Pandit Nehru’s speech on Independence Day. It remains an excellent speech, and worth a re-read (or re-listen, if you so prefer). But Niranjan begins his essay with a quote from Sardar Patel instead, underlining the need for an economic regeneration in India’s case.

What might this entail? Niranjan highlights four major problems:

  1. Stagnation of economic output
  2. A chronically underfunded state
  3. A dire food situation
  4. A narrow industrial base centered around a few large cities

For each of these things to improve, Niranjan says, we needed a structural change in the way the Indian economy functions.

  1. People needed to move from farms to factories
  2. Almost consequentially (my interpretation, not Niranjan’s statement), we needed more urbanization
  3. And finally, we needed to move from household enterprises to formal enterprises

Why are these changes necessary in order to bring about a structural change in the Indian economy, and why is a structural change deemed necessary? These are excellent questions to ask if you are a student of economics. And the answer to these questions is a great way to begin your journey into the world of development economics.

But very simply put, here are the answers:

  1. Farms alone would not be able to generate the kind of surpluses necessary to raise the incomes of Indians, and certainly not as fast as was required.
  2. Try plotting per capita incomes for nations versus their rates of urbanization.
  3. Reflect on each of the figures in this paper (read the whole thing if you can, but please do look at all the figures)

Reflect on two paragraphs, which I will excerpt here without additional comment:

The famous dissent of economist BR Shenoy provided four red flags. First, the heavy dependence on deficit financing to build industrial capacity would lead to balance of payments pressures. Second, the focus on capital goods rather than wage goods for mass consumption would be inflationary, as people employed in new industries would get money incomes but nothing to spend them on. Third, high taxation to finance the plans would weigh on citizens. Fourth, increasing government control of the economy would eventually harm Indian democracy.

https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/the-long-road-to-breaking-free-11660502122505.html

In his landmark budget speech in July 1991, Manmohan Singh cogently argued that the balance of payments crisis was a symptom of a deeper malaise: macroeconomic imbalances, low productivity of public sector investments, loopholes in the tax system, indiscriminate protection that had weakened the incentive to export, lack of domestic competition, a weak financial system that was not allocating capital efficiently, lack of access to the latest technology, and much more. The great achievement of 1991 was not each reform in isolation, but the rollout of a comprehensive reform programme where different parts complemented each other.

https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/the-long-road-to-breaking-free-11660502122505.html

Was it any surprise that the 1970’s were a lost decade? Was it any surprise that Amitabh Bachchan was an angry young man in the 1970’s? What if the budget of 1991 instead happened to be the budget of 1978 instead (or even earlier, now that we’re dreaming)?

To say nothing of the future! Niranjan ends his essay with four challenges that await us in the future:

  1. India needs to develop more, and develop more equitably at the same time? Is that possible, especially while remaining a political democracy?
  2. Jobs! Niranjan speaks of our inability to create quality jobs for the millions who are now leaving agriculture, but the problem is even more urgent, because not enough people are able to leave agriculture in the first place!
  3. What of energy? How are we looking to anticipate the problems that will inevitably crop up, and start thinking about how to deal with them?
  4. And Niranjan ends on what I interpret to be a quasi-pessimistic note by asking where we will find ourselves in 1947. The reason I find it to be a quasi-pessimistic ending is because if the answer to this question isn’t clear by now, that ought to worry all of us. It certainly worries me.

We’ll take a look at the first two decades, roughly speaking, of India post independence tomorrow, using this excellent column as a reference. See you tomorrow!

A Review of Stubborn Attachments

I’d written a post last week, the title of which was “Growth. Just, only, simply growth.“

There’s two books that I’d recommend you read to get a fuller understanding of the importance of growth. One is a book about the need for growth in an Indian context. It is authored by Vijay Joshi, and the title is India’s Long Road: The Search for Prosperity.((The book started off as a collaboration between Vijay Joshi and TN Ninan. Things didn’t work out, for whatever reason, but that had a positive spillover for us readers, for now there’s two books to read. TN Ninan’s book is called The Turn of the Tortoise, and it is also worth a read.

Joshi’s book is an excellent read in it’s own right, and it provides a pretty good summary of the Indian story since independence. That’s hardly surprising if you are a student of the Indian economy, for Vijay Joshi has authored two excellent books on this already, with his co-author IMD Little. One covers the Indian economy from 1964 until 1991, and the other discusses India’s economic reforms post 1991.))

There are many reasons why India’s Long Road is an excellent read. The one that is directly relevant here is his succinct summary of why growth in India over the long run is such a challenge:

India should strive for rapid, inclusive, stable and sustainable growth within the parameters of a political democracy.

In the book, Joshi explains why he chooses these aspects as being worthy of his analysis, covers how well India has done along these parameters thus far and what needs to be done from here on in. But the reason I am beginning my review of Stubborn Attachments by speaking about Joshi’s book is because Joshi speaks about growth as being more than just an increase in GDP over the long run.

Rapid growth as measured by GDP, yes, but not at the cost of the environment – therefore sustainable. Rapid growth, yes, but also stable. Rapid growth, yes, but also inclusive. And growth, yes, but not by sacrificing democracy.

You might say that Vijay Joshi is stubbornly attached to growth, but with qualifications.

Here is one way to think about Tyler Cowen’s book, Stubborn Attachments. It is as if he takes Vijay Joshi’s statement above and distils it down to its barest minimum. And in his distillation, he leaves us with the following:

Growth at all costs, except at the cost of human rights and concern for the environment.

It’s not just his own philosophy, but as he puts it, it is his recommendation that this be your philosophy too:

No punches are pulled, this is my account of what I strongly believe you should believe too. My bottom lines, so to speak.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/preface-stubborn-attachments-book-especially-important.html

How does he arrive at his stubborn attachment to prioritizing growth above all else, subject to only two constraints?

Before we begin our journey in terms of answering this question, a couple of things to note.

He is trying to answer the question of what is best for “our civilization”. And as the book makes clear, that’s all of us – every single person on this planet is his implicit definition of “our civilization”.

Second, a useful way of reading the book is to think of this book as his answer to the Ultimate Big Picture Question: “But what is the point of all this?”

I think of his answer as a sort of Pascal’s wager: we don’t know yet if there is a point or not. But if and when we discover what the point is, it is better to be prepared to deal with that point, whatever that point may be. And better prepared is, in his view, more growth.

So how does he arrive at his stubborn attachment? He begins by laying out his philosophical starting points:

1. “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force.
2. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind.
3. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.

Cowen, Tyler. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (p. 19). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.

I have not the slightest objection to any of these points – they’re all but axiomatic to me.

So far, so good.

Next, how to choose which thing to get stubbornly attached to, given the points above? To arrive at that decision, there are, in his view, six things to consider:

  1. Time: Take the very, very, very long view when making a choice. This is not about dessert after lunch today and the implications of that for my future self. This is about dessert after lunch today and the implications for my daughter near the end of her life. More! It is about the implications for my daughter’s grand-daughter – and her grand-daughter, and ad infinitum. Make decisions about which things to get stubbornly attached to with the longest possible view in mind.

    Why, you ask? Well, think of it this way: would you expect your parents to take decisions that will benefit you tomorrow? Will you take decisions that will positively impact your children’s lives? Apply the principle of induction, and well, how could you not take the long view? (That is my argument, to be clear, not Professor Cowen’s. But I don’t think he’d disagree.)
  2. Aggregation: What if I want to go out for a nice dinner, but my wife prefers a nice light salad at home instead? My preference over hers or vice versa? Tyler Cowen has an easy way to resolve this: pick the option that maximizes long term growth, not short run pleasure. Nice light salad at home it is then, unfortunately for me. (He has a nice explanation later on in the book for why this makes sense, on pg. 52 of the Kindle edition.)
  3. Rules: I was telling some close friends about how I was not in favor of piercing my daughter’s ears while she was a baby. My logic was that she should choose for herself when she is old enough to do so. One of my friends asked if the same rule was applicable when it came to vaccination. Now, obviously, no: my daughter has had all her vaccinations. So really, the rule is she should choose when she is old enough to, except when it comes to issues of her health. Which, of course, has been the rule all along – I just didn’t state it well enough. The point, though is this: you have to be consistent with the rules you set for yourself, and for the game. Calvinball is fun to read about, but it is a poor way to live life.
  4. Radical Uncertainty: How can we know anything for sure? What if we are wrong? What if our actions have enormously negative unintended consequences centuries down the line? It is interesting (instructive?) to me that this is the one point among the six where Tyler Cowen doesn’t definitively say what his opinion/conclusion is when he ontroduces these concepts for the first time. It is almost as he if he is conceding the point that you can’t ever know for sure. But even so – or perhaps therefore – he is stubbornly attached to the idea of growth. What else is there, eh?
  5. How Can we Believe in Rights?: Professor Cowen says that this is undecided territory in philosophy – I don’t know enough to argue either way. But he also says that “some key elements of ethical reasoning do support the notion of objectively valid human rights, and, indeed, of their nearly sacred character.”
    As I said, I don’t know enough to comment authoritatively, but in my worldview, rights are axiomatic. How can you not believe in rights? There’s not much of a civilization left if there are no human rights. No?
  6. Common Sense Morality: Here is his definition of common sense morality – “Common sense morality holds that we should work hard, take care of our families, and live virtuous but self-centered lives, while giving to charity as we are able and helping out others on a periodic basis.” I’m more than ok with that description, but reconciling this with the more extreme utilitarianism view has, it seems, proven to be problematic. But he comes down on the side of common sense morality, and I’m happy to go along.

All right, so three basic points, and six things to consider. To which he adds two “moves”.

First, whatever it is that our civilization has been able to achieve so far is because of the productive power of our economy. Had our economy not been productive enough, Beethoven may have ended up being a farm laborer. Adam Smith could write about the division of labor precisely because society had been making use of the concept for thousands of years. We are where we are today precisely because of the productive power of our economy. Why not do more of it, then?

The second move is really a restatement of the first of the six things to consider. When in doubt, take the long term view, and whatever your long term view, make it longer.((Or that is how I understand it, at any rate))

From these ingredients then – the three basic points, the six things to consider and the two moves – he reaches the conclusion that growth is a moral imperative. He makes use of a concept called a Crusonia Plant((read the first three paragraphs of this review for a short description)) to arrive at this conclusion.

Growth, however, measured not by wealth, but by “Wealth Plus”:

Wealth Plus: The total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.

Cowen, Tyler. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (p. 30). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.

And that, of course, is why I began with Vijay Joshi’s book. As I said, a maximizing Wealth Plus is essentially Vijay Joshi’s statement distilled.

And to do this – to maximize Wealth Plus – there are three questions we need to continually ask ourselves:

What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth?

What can we do to make our civilization more stable?

How should we deal with environmental problems?

Cowen, Tyler. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (pp. 32-33). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.

Or, put another way, maximize growth subject to human rights not being violated, and subject to the environment not being ignored.

That is his stubborn attachment, and it is what he would like ours to be as well, all of us.

Please, do read the book to understand his defense of his view. The book is only 150 odd pages long, and written in an easy, conversational style.

I’ve been reading some of the reviews of the book in order to prepare for writing my own. Of the ones I have read, I am in complete agreement with the one that says that Tyler Cowen is basically saying let’s worship a community called humanity. And the one that I found most interesting was the one that put the argument in terms of optionality. I think that is another of way saying “Pascal’s Wager”.

Finally, what would my stubborn attachment be?

There are three reasons I have spent a large part of my review focusing on writing about Tyler Cowen’s assumptions, axioms and approach, rather than his conclusions.

  1. One of Ayn Rand’s unfortunate caricatures is fond of saying “Check your premises.” I have, for years, found that to be useful advice. And if you, like me, find yourself in agreement with Cowen’s premises, you should either reach exactly the same conclusion, or a closely related one (mine is closely related).
  2. Most of the reviews that I have read focus on the conclusions, or take issue with ways to implement the conclusions. See this review, for example. I found it enjoyable and instructive to think through Cowen’s premises, and they helped me make my own clearer. For the record, they are mostly the same, save for one, which leads me to my third point.
  3. Knowing is always and everywhere better than not knowing. I’d personally add this as a fourth axiom, in addition to the three he has listed out.

And so my own stubborn attachment: to know more, and to help other people know more. Ideas are the ultimate good. Not only can I share my ideas, I ought to share my ideas. You ought to share yours. Ideas should have sex! That, as Matt Ridley says, is what has built civilization – growth comes from “ideas meeting, and indeed mating.”

Wealth Plus, in other words, is an outcome of more people knowing more. What you really want to maximize is the spread of ideas. A civilization devoted to learning more, and helping everybody learn more, cannot help but accrue more Wealth Plus – it is an inevitable outcome. More, it is a guarantee of maximizing your chances of perpetuating this progress.

Or put another way, what provides nourishment to the Crusonia plant is the spread of knowledge, and without it, the plant may well wither.

And so my own personal stubborn attachment is to the accrual and spread of knowledge. Wealth Plus is a guaranteed, and welcome, consequence.