My Last Superpower

I was a bit concerned when I scrolled through my blog a few weeks ago and realised that the average length of my posts was about 200 words. Such brevity is very unusual for me. It may be enough to make a point, but it’s certainly not enough to be particularly articulate.   

I wondered if I was unconsciously responding to the fact that most people have short attention spans (thank you for that, Google) or if I was unable to elucidate my own ideas. Worse still, what if 200 words were all I ever really had to say about anything? I'm not suggesting that ranting is good writing, but my rationale for disliking Twitter is that it doesn’t allow you to say much that makes sense because the word limit is crippling. All that nose-in-the-air-ing breaks down if I voluntarily operate within a word limit, even if it's self-prescribed. 

It’s quite intriguing that being concise has suddenly become important. If nobody likes reading or listening for very long and the average person, in general, favours succinctness, why did the world ever have such long articles, essays and books in the past? Perhaps the speaker/author’s conceit allowed them to get carried away. Or maybe preferences do change. Were the lengthy speeches of yore social constructs – unnecessary chatter to sustain social gatherings before alcohol and dancing were invented? Or has our grasp of language improved so tremendously in such a short span of time as to allow us to communicate so much by saying so little?

Well, I’m glad to say, I don’t care. The length of the last couple of posts has allayed my fears. I’ve still got it!

I’m also proud to say that I’ve stopped caring a terrible lot about grammatical perfection. It’s very liberating. Exams give me a lot of time to think about nothing and that brings so many ideas all at once that I have to scribble them down quickly, sometimes even before they are fully formed in my head. Have you ever had an idea and forgotten it? You feel like you lost the one spark of brilliance that could have changed your life forever. You progressively inflate its importance and genius until you remember that it was something stupid like having eggs for breakfast. It’s times like these when you wish you had just forgotten it altogether, so that you could continue feeling like you could have ruled the universe had fate not promptly snatched the opportunity. 

But to return to my original point, when I went back to read the scribbles, I realised they were not bad. Sure, there are errors. But just as researchers should not give precedence to method over matter, I, too, have learnt to stop prioritising language over content. It really is the thought that counts.

Size Matters

A lot of economics is about predicting people’s behaviour using axioms akin to laws in physics. The assumption that economics is like the physical sciences really bothers me. I side with Friedrich Hayek: the system is too complex for us to be able to provide a precise model of economic behaviour.

That scientific tools should not be directly applied in economics has been said many times before, but it’s not a point that usually receives the attention that it should, probably because most (but not all) of the people who say so are those who suck at maths. It’s hard to say why people persist with the use of complex calculus in behavioural modelling even though it is impossible for a majority of the population to even understand the reasoning process being ascribed to them, and the minority that does understand it would have to be in need of therapy if they really stood around at supermarkets trying to figure out how many units they should buy to equate the marginal utility to their marginal utility from money.

Russ Roberts argues that economics is more like biology than physics, and draws an interesting analogy between the two:

“We do not expect a biologist to forecast how many squirrels will be alive in ten years if we increase the number of trees in the United States by 20%. A biologist would laugh at you. But that is what people ask of economists all the time.”

Economists are rather cocky and don’t acknowledge the limitations of the field. We can look for the causes, try to understand the relationships between variables, figure out what incentives work, which ones don’t and in what settings or the channels through which a policy or action can take effect – but to believe we can predict the exact outcome and mathematically calculate the magnitude of the change in different variables is, well, cute – we can’t, and we’ve been wrong nearly every time we tried.

But perhaps there is something we can learn from physics. In his talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Richard Feynman says,

“Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics... we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things.”

Early models of the atom had subatomic particles arranged like the solar system: a nucleus at the centre with electrons orbiting it. There was no reason to assume such perfect symmetry between the two. It later turned out that the atom looked quite different.

In economics, we assume identical, rational micro agents and predict macro results by aggregating their behaviour. Microeconomics is more intuitive, in a sense more reliable because it is reasonable to assume that individuals try to maximise over certain parameters. But expecting perfect conformity between micro and macro outcomes may not be quite so reasonable. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that on the macro level, the presence of some non-rational agents or collective decision-making leads to thoroughly counterintuitive results.

The results might be quite different if we focus on studying macro behaviour as a whole instead of specifying individual motives for each micro agent beforehand. All we can really say is that when a lot of people’s behaviour is aggregated, on average it tends to produce certain types of results. 

You're in Hell, Potter

I was all of 11 when I first read Harry Potter. Even at that tender age, I had had enough of fairytales. I was coaxed to read it by many but I still put it off for about a year. When I finally got around to reading it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the plot wasn’t absolute rubbish like I expected it to be.

But the magic world didn’t fascinate me nearly as much as it should have. As a little girl, I thought Harry’s world sucked for two reasons: limited wardrobe options and the absence of telephones. I didn’t like the idea of wearing robes all the time or sticking my head in a fireplace every time I felt like talking to a friend.

Today, I’m older and wiser and I must admit that I feel sorry for anybody who thinks travelling by apparating or floo powder is better than driving a Jaguar. I abhor the shameless slavery – wizards and witches need house elves to work around the house because they don’t have any labour laws or dishwashers. I’m forced to call their education system to question if there’s just one school in each country instead of one in each neighbourhood. What of free choice and competition? I must also point out the sexism apparent in the narrative. Although Rowling is one of the few authors to use the word “witch” with a positive connotation, she often lapses into sexist linguistic patterns: “Triwizard” tournament in the “wizarding world” even though “witching world” sounds so much better.

All of Harry’s adventures would end even before they started if he had a cell phone with a network that worked in dungeons. But there’s so much more that’s wrong with his decision to live with the magic folk instead of the muggles. Wizards don’t have much by way of entertainment. They don’t have iPods or TV and pop culture is basically Voldemort myths and three weird sisters. They don’t even have cartoons or animated movies: they have to make do with photographs that wave at them. What is childhood without cartoons?

Adulthood isn’t much better. There’s no social life in prison because the dementors are such party poopers. I’d feel terribly insecure if owls were smart enough to find absconding criminals but law enforcers were not (although that may well be the case in my world too). Hell, even our bankers are capable of being far more evil than the stupid little goblins at Gringotts.

Most of all, I feel sad about the fact that they live in a world where there can never be any innovation. The best they can manage has already been done and they refuse to take a page out of the muggle book and get internet. Frankly, I don’t see how owl mail can ever be cooler than email. Magic folk have to buy expensive books because they don’t have Amazon, eBay, Flipkart or Kindle. They can’t send huge gifts because they use owls instead of FedEx. And when I think about how their Christmas gifts are broomsticks instead of MacBooks, I feel so sad that I want to cry for them. Technology makes magic look like such a loser.

When I tell anybody a fairytale, it’s probably going to be the story of Steve Jobs. That’s the stuff dreams are, and should, be made of.

It's only Inertia, Dear Boy

The London Olympics brings back fond memories of the 2010 Commonwealth Games – the media always had something to do. They were so happy. The world seemed so eventful.

Here is some of the fodder that the London Olympics is providing for the journalists: the logo is hideous, the allegations that Olympics uniforms are being manufactured in sweatshop labour conditions in Indonesia are being taken “very seriously”, the security threat of lone idiots disrupting the events has been recognised and the closing ceremony will include a tribute to British pop culture called “Symphony of Rock”.

The London Olympics Organising Committee is also taking the Symphony of Rock “very seriously”. No, really. They’ve pulled out all the stops. The list of performers is expected to include the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Coldplay, among others. You might even say they went overboard with their enthusiasm. Among those invited was The Who’s legendary drummer, Keith Moon. It’s very nice of the organisers to ask, of course. But they just missed him – by nearly 34 years. In an uncharacteristically selfish move, Keith Moon has declined the invitation to play at the Olympics because he is dead. What a bummer.

Well, you can’t argue with that. It certainly is a valid reason, possibly the only one acceptable for refusing the honour of representing one’s country on a global stage. But 1978 was such a long time ago. Things change. Perhaps the organisers were just checking if he’s still dead.

I suspect they saw pictures of Moon dressed like a sex kitten and assumed he had nine lives. Or maybe, since he is Keith Moon after all, they believed that he could do pretty much anything he wanted to, including rising from the dead to detonate a drum kit for an Olympics ceremony. The Who’s manager, Bill Curbishley, hasn’t ruled out the possibility. In his polite response to the invitation, he helpfully suggested, “If they have a round table, some glasses and candles, we might contact him.”

I would totally watch that.

Talk is Trash

I recently studied a few cheap talk models, beginning with the seminal paper by Crawford and Sobel in 1982. By “cheap talk”, most economists really mean free talk. A cheap talk game is one where one agent can send a message without incurring any exogenous cost: the only cost incurred is endogenous, i.e. it affects the sender’s payoff by influencing the receiver’s action choice. In short, cheap talk is a costless signal.

From a linguistic perspective, the “talk is cheap” maxim is traditionally taken to mean that the words in a message could be meaningless and need not be supported by truth, actions or evidence. The rising popularity of sarcasm should lend some added meaning to the phrase: what is said is very different from what is meant because the inherent meaning of our words is often diluted by how we say it.

So is the game theoretic use of the phrase cheap talk itself cheap talk? No! Economists are nothing if not precise. But it is possible that calling an entire subset of signalling games “Cheap Talk” is an attempt to make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is. If cheap talk is enough to make a paper sound interesting, imagine how much more intriguing a trash talk model would seem. Measuring the cost of indulging in trash talk and weighing it against the psychological advantage it confers could help us calculate whether being courteous is worthwhile at all. Children waste much of their childhood learning social conventions and much of their adult life brimming with resentment as they teach their children to fight their instinct to be frank.

Such a model might do to social relations what the prisoner’s dilemma did to gang loyalty – although it is socially optimal for all of us to be nice and the outcome is Pareto superior to any other, if each of us acts in a self-interested manner, being nasty would be a dominant strategy unless social ostracism outweighs the personal gain from feeling smug. However, if the psychological cost of courtesy is greater than its social benefit, we could adjust social structures to eliminate the rationale for teenage rebellion and angst altogether. It would be fascinating to see teenagers rebel by being excessively nice to everyone because their parents were so blunt all the time. Gandhi would be so proud. 

Goodbye Standing Around

I’ve encountered many people with a mortal fear of escalators. On the metro, there’s a queue at the ticket counter, a queue at the customer care centre, a queue at the security check, a queue to get in the train, a queue to get off, a queue to get out of the station and just as you’re about to pat yourself on the back for your endurance, there’s a queue to get on the escalator because someone’s trying to summon the courage to step on it. It’s pretty funny at first because they almost behave as if you’re asking them to jump onboard a moving train. But I don’t imagine it’s easy to face your fears when everyone asks you to hurry up.

Patience is at a premium at this point. There are those who are in an awful hurry and have had it with queues. They push everyone aside, pretty annoyed that they can’t part crowds like Moses parted seas, get on the escalator and start running on it. Perhaps they feel rather smart about adding their own speed to the escalator's, but given how crowded most metro stations tend to be, this isn’t any more helpful than leaning forward on a bicycle to make yourself more aerodynamic and imagining that this will get you through the traffic in half the time. These mixed signals are not amenable to any behavioural modelling. An escalator is an expression of laziness. Urgency does not go with it. 

I have also discovered that escalators can double up as shoe polishers. Delhi’s wonderfully quirky populace ensures that I never stop learning new things. People run their shoes on the deflector brushes along the sides of the escalator, often turning around and rotating their foot to make sure their shoes are perfectly clean: intriguingly meticulous for someone who left home wearing dirty shoes. Sometimes I just have to feel proud of our ability to optimise. 

Safety, impatience, rationality and unbridled athleticism – four excellent reasons for people with clean shoes to avoid escalators, but neo-rationalists don’t think quite so linearly. It’s not that I’m afraid of escalators or oppose them on health grounds. I just have trouble believing that you can get where you want to simply by standing around.

Addiction and Overdose

I have a confession to make: I’m a pop culture addict. And when it doesn't give me the kick I need, I dabble in counterculture and cult classics. I use movies, books and music to drive me to distraction, more so when I’m under stress, quite the same way that others in my position would use alcohol. The condition becomes very acute during exams.

There are moments of lucidity when I can see the world as it is and everything seems so simple and straightforward. But for the most part, I’m just stumbling through life, trying to push time along its way quickly in the hope that something nice will happen, much like trying to peek at the last few pages of a book in anticipation of a happy ending when things look particularly grim. It is a measure of the severity of my condition that I can’t describe reality without references to the details of my addictive behaviour. The only advantage over alcohol and other more popular addictions is the absence of major after-effects like hangovers or permanent brain damage.


I wonder what would happen if you make a pop culture addict go cold turkey. Just the thought sends shivers down my spine. I can see it: pop culture rehab. It must be where bad folks go when they die. 

Potayto Potahto

If we are what we eat, I’d probably be a potato (or a chicken?). I really feel for the potato. It’s one of my favourite vegetables and it is severely discriminated against. There is nothing villainous about it. In fact, if there was a king of vegetables (and clearly mango is the king of fruits), it would undoubtedly be the potato. Your brain loves potatoes. No, seriously. The human brain requires starch to function and what better source than the humble, delicious potato? And yet, we are so ungrateful to it: couch potato, potato head, dumb as a sack of potatoes - what’s so smart about a sack of onions?

I’ve always thought onions are evil and deceptive. They are so brash and overpowering that they make you cry. Broccoli is obviously the smartest vegetable. It’s green, it helps your body absorb calcium, it’s great for your health and it looks like a brilliant professor with crazy hair. And nobody likes it: it's an exceptionally smart anomaly in a family of otherwise stupid vegetables. 

If you want a dumb vegetable, think cauliflower. It looks like such an air-head. It has an even dumber cousin, cabbage, which has more layers of ignorance than anybody else in the vegetable world. Turnip heads are foolish and incompetent. Carrots are ferocious. Brinjals are seedy and not to be trusted. Okra looks a bit like Cruella’s fingers – definitely wicked. So many perfectly acceptable insults and people whale on the potato instead. It's a wild world. 

Losing my Decisions

Choice has made me miserable. You might even say that the constant stress of decision-making has ruined my life. It’s the more trivial choices that drive me insane. This is how having to make a choice really makes me feel. I didn’t worry so much about my choices earlier and I’m forced to admit that the pursuit of economics has a not-entirely-unimportant role to play in this matter.

It would save me much mental turmoil if I could just appoint someone else to make decisions for me. But the rebel in me would start resenting the decision-maker and wondering if I should follow his advice and that will be yet another choice I have to make. I’m beginning to have serious misgivings about the economic assertion that more choice makes a person better off.

Enter coin. My pride won’t allow me to outsource decision-making to anybody else, so I use the humble coin. It’s a dear. It has no ideological leanings that could cause me to see its recommendations through a tinted glass. It always has the time for me. It never judges me. And so far, it has never been wrong. I must mention here, before you dismiss my decision-making mechanism, that I’m not alone in randomising decisions and hoping that on an average, no other decision-making algorithm can consistently outperform a coin toss.

Much as I hate to make choices, the truth is that I have already chosen. The answer is in my head but I don’t know it because it’s hidden under many layers of rationalisations and tautological arguments. The coin forces the truth out of me: I keep increasing the sample size until the coin tells me what I want to hear. Or so I tell myself lest the rebel in me should start resenting the coin too.