How Drumming Will Improve Your Economics

I’m convinced that drummers would make marvellous economists. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t. They are used to dealing with a lot of variables at the same time. Anyone who can handle tom-toms, a floor tom, a bass drum, a snare drum and a variety of cymbals should laugh in the face of hypothetical constructs like treatment effects. A good drummer is as precise as a good economist, if not more. They also appear to find joy in pursuing something that was considered an accompaniment, and have gradually taken centre stage, becoming an indispensable part of the paradigm that created them. Additionally, drummers have a certain charisma that economists could really use.

Given my track record in economics, what would happen if I tried my hand at drumming? Well it’s a relatively easy forecast for a seasoned pseudo-economist like me to make. At first, I would appear almost prodigious, “a natural” at what most people find difficult. Then suddenly it would dawn upon everyone that I lack some skill that is essential for drumming, say timing. Then I’ll reject the principles of drumming and call them counterintuitive. And finally I’ll wind up as a technically flawed “intuitive” pseudo-drummer. I think I’d be all right with that. Just as the most appealing part of an economist to me is eloquence, the thing I value most in a drummer is panache. I read my fairytales carefully and I know appearances wouldn’t appear if they didn’t matter. 

Of Pets and Comfort Movies

When I first watched How to Train Your Dragon, I loved it. It’s the sort of movie I can watch many times over without getting bored. I was thrilled to finally see dragons in a non-Chinese context and amazed that they did such a great job without having to use an all-star cast. I didn’t know Gerard Butler was Gerard Butler, so he’s clearly done a terrific job. It was refreshing to see America Ferrera in a non-America Ferrera role (fat and/or unattractive with more insecurities than Cinderella. Speaking of which, why did Cinderella figure the Prince would marry a peasant woman the morning after but won’t dance with a woman wearing regular slippers on the night of the ball? And couldn’t fairy godmother think of something more useful to gift her non-fairy godchild? Like education or better living conditions? Pretty cheap of her getting away with one dress and a temporarily inflated pumpkin).

But I digress. I think a lot of our recent fascination with dragons has something to do with our growing passion for depilation. We want to have hairless pets that don’t look naked. Dinosaurs have been portrayed to be pretty mean by Michael Crichton (twice). So the next best alternative is dragons. Plus, the cumbersome issue of factual accuracy can be easily dispensed with in this case. We don’t mind pets with bad teeth because a lot of us are dentists’ nightmares ourselves. But we have a real issue with hair, so a hairless beast that breathes fire is the ultimate pet.

Watching How to Train Your Dragon is like watching Asterix. Except that the Romans have been replaced with dragons in the first half and Obelix has been replaced with dragons in the second. The movie goes to show that dogs are still our number 1 pets in the real world. The best dragon pet wags its tail, is hyperactive, is extremely loyal, makes puppy eyes and licks its master’s face. So in addition to the convenience of discarding facts altogether, dragons can be modelled along the lines of dogs, goldfish, piranhas, iguanas, or pretty much anything else that takes your fancy. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Ideal (Imaginary) Pet. 

The Lunch

It was that time of the year again. The hostess felt a bit old to go through the birthday-treat-at-some-fast-food-joint routine. She wanted a memorable meal.

She considered taking her friends to a nice place. But there was the issue of taking me along. Could she treat me at McDonald’s somehow? Or was there a place that was not as expensive as most nice places are where she could feed me without going entirely bankrupt?

Always the best problem solver of the lot, I suggested that we have a buffet lunch. Of course I quoted the price I had seen (not paid) a year ago and it ended up being something of an underestimate.

We reached a certain Italian restaurant. The hostess had thoughtlessly asked everyone to consume the entire birthday cake, disregarding the fact that she would end up paying for a buffet lunch regardless of how hungry we were. Perhaps there was a ray of hope in her heart that I would be too full for a buffet and that I’d do the decent thing and settle for Haldiram’s instead. Her hopes were dashed in much the same way as mine are when I hold a math exam in my hands.

“Ah! 5 diners!” the waiters must have thought. “Ha! 5 waiters!” we retaliated in our heads. I knew what was expected of me and I wasted no time in rising to the challenge. I quickly walked to the buffet and stacked my plate with everything I could. I ate quickly to prevent my stomach from knowing that it’s full, and took quick breaks where I walked around the buffet with a plate to work up an appetite.

The hostess watched me with great satisfaction, clearly impressed that I was indeed all I claimed to be. The other guests followed my lead. “Please eat more”, the hostess pleaded, sounding like a loving aunty seeking praise for her paranthas through high-speed ingestion of copious quantities. I shoveled in the food with my fork, anxious to make her feel happy about what I had talked her into.

Growing up with a lot of people who love food can cause you to imbibe more severe stereotypes than you would consider yourself capable of. I don’t call these stereotypes severe simply because of the strength of one’s conviction in them, but also because of how deep seated they are – you don’t even consider them stereotypes so much as you think it’s the way of the world, making it all the more difficult to root them out. To me, people with small appetites were anomalies, clearly not the fittest of the race, and not people that I befriended as such. I assumed they must either be obsessed with their appearance or are yet to be schooled in the simple pleasures of life. Or maybe both. A majority of my friends, through this natural selection process I’d created in my head, loved food as much as I did, which meant that those who didn’t eat a lot got sidelined by the entire group quite easily. They didn’t have much to do other than sit in the corner and watch the rest of us eat.

Recently, I chose a very unlikely group of friends. I’m convinced that I may never have known them had it not been for the fact that we all shared a strong caffeine addiction and tremendous respect for a certain tea stall. I thought they were rather weird for being almost indifferent to food. It went against my whole idea of how the world should be.

On the hostess’ birthday, they did something they’ve never done before. Not to my knowledge, at least. They came over to my side. I finally felt accepted. I can safely continue to cling to my stereotypes while they turn morbidly obese. 

Four I's

So you left your glasses at home. “What do I need them for?” you must have muttered to yourself when your mother asked you if you were carrying them. Your youth and foolishness, and to some extent your newfound confidence in your ability to make do without glasses after switching to lenses, probably led you to say something to the effect of, “Am I not carrying enough already?” Your economic training was grossly inadequate to make you realise that hand sanitizer and spectacles are not perfect substitutes.

You went to college, slightly annoyed with your right eye for being so uncooperative on such a fine morning, but you blinked away your worries. You took off the lens, cleaned it and put it back on, commanding your eye to behave itself now that you had given it due attention. But when it started watering in class you realised that, unlike you, your eye doesn’t usually get unnecessarily belligerent, so you should probably go see what the matter is.

You patiently removed the lens once more, and with your other eye you noticed that the edge was chipped. Oops. How did you even manage to wear that in the first place? Your poor eye had to put up with all your crap in addition to this. “Oh well, left eye, looks like it’s just you and me then,” you said. But when you failed to notice a step on your way out and your brain grew positively confused with extremely clear and extremely blurred vision, you decided to remove the other lens too. “I don’t need lenses either,” you told yourself proudly. Or so you thought. Until someone waved at you and you waved back without knowing who the person was and whether they had waved at you or someone else.

It so happened that on this day you wanted to return some notes. You walked, in fact strutted, to the photocopy shop, secure in the knowledge that you won’t have to spend any money there today. You saw three men, approximately the same height and build, all wearing vests and grey trousers. “Will Prem bhaiya raise his hand if I call out his name?” you wondered. But the problem solved itself when someone called him and he turned around. Mission accomplished!

All you had to do was get home. You could do that part with your eyes closed. Taking the wrong exit or the wrong metro is too routine to be considered a detour anymore. Oddly enough, you didn’t even do that, despite not being able to read any sign boards and voluntarily impairing your hearing with earphones. In fact, things were surprisingly easy. You didn’t have to worry about protecting your glasses or lenses from the rain. You were able to figure out which escalator went up and which one went down even though you couldn’t see them properly. You held your book five inches from your face and looked positively captivated by whatever was on the page. You didn’t have to look sheepish when you dropped your phone and iPod because you couldn’t make out if anybody was looking at you. The metro ride itself made you see Delhi as an awesomely green city because you couldn’t see the garbage. You counted stations and managed to get off at the right one even though you were listening to music and reading a book at the same time, thereby feeling smug about your ability to multi-task. And most of all, it was so much fun pretending to stare at everyone very attentively, even though you couldn’t make out much other than the colour of their clothes.

“What a day it has been,” you told yourself as you wore your spectacles to write about how you don’t need them at all. 

Holy Matrimony

I must be a pretty big fan of matrimony because I keep trying to marry things – like finance and development or business and research. In writing a blog, I tried to marry my expertise in fake news with my desire to make a last ditch attempt at salvaging my interest in economics. The first couple of months passed in absolute wedded bliss. Then fake news started paying more attention to politics. When real news started getting funnier than fake news, the latter had a midlife crisis. Economics, meanwhile, pregnant with the aftermath of the financial crisis started having severe mood swings. The marriage is in shambles now. The financial crisis is a 21^st century bastard. I’ve decided to stop playing matchmaker for a bit.

Say No to Mutual Disdain

It appears to me that there is some mutual disdain between MBAs and economists. So I decided to resolve the problem in a manner befitting a neo-rationalist.

Economics would define a rational individual as one whose returns to investing in education are higher than the costs.  Let’s say there are 3 types of returns to education: monetary returns, which are frequently advertised by placement cells; social returns: let’s say this is the disutility from having people who don’t really know you asking you “But why _________ (insert-name-of-course)?” – we seek to minimise this; and private returns – your ability to satisfy your own prejudices about education and knowledge by studying the course that you choose. The costs of education are monetary costs, the psychological costs of having every weekend ruined by a Monday test for two years, physical costs in the form of sleep deprivation and the opportunity cost of sitting home and doing nothing.

Monetary costs and physical costs are usually higher for MBAs. Let’s assume that the psychological costs and opportunity cost are the same for both. MBAs clearly have higher monetary and social returns to education. Private returns that exceed the sum of monetary and social returns signify a greater-than-average-sized ego and I’m sure that can be accommodated satisfactorily in the realms of rationality. It appears to me that economists use the positive NPV method while MBAs try to maximise the difference between expected wages and signalling costs. We act smug and they act smart.

It should be possible to create software that calculates return on education based on student profile, placement statistics of the institute and cost of the course with a corresponding probability distribution for jobs that the student is likely to land. It would be a runaway hit in India. Matrimonial sites will have a field day trying to steal the code. 

The Worst Consumer

I find it quite tiresome to take myself shopping. It would be completely out of line to say that this is because I’m not properly schooled in the joys of exchanging money for something that I believe has greater marginal utility because, as my parents will testify a million times over, of course I am. No, that’s not the problem at all. I’m just a very difficult person to shop with. If I turn up somewhere aimlessly with no intention of buying anything, I end up making several regrettably useless impulse purchases. When I do plan my shopping expeditions, I have such a specific idea in mind that it’s nearly impossible to find what I want. Being a strong believer in the “power of the consumer”, I drag the hapless idiot who agreed to shop with me from store to store, making faces at everything available. Shopping can also instil a very strong belief in love at first sight. 

Consider shopping for formals. This is my least favourite type of shopping because I’m required to spend a lot of money buying clothes I wish I didn’t have to wear. I try my best to find the perfect fit and then wear it as sloppily as possible to register my protest against the practice of coercing adults to wear uncomfortable clothes that rarely look good. I believe formal clothing is a devious corporate agenda that seeks to restrict movement to make employees seem measured and graceful and emphasise every flaw in their body so that they are too self-conscious to be particularly rebellious at work.

All this vileness notwithstanding, I had another “love at first sight” incident when I went shopping for a formal jacket. I fell hopelessly in love with a grey jacket. My sister, staunch believer that she is in the “black is always in” philosophy, insisted that I look for a black jacket because grey would make me “look old” and “unlike someone looking for a job”. Her opposition reinforced my faith in the grey jacket and I argued that I wanted to look wise beyond my years and unlike a typical job-seeker.

We finally ended up looking for a black jacket (just to compare) and when I found it, that was sort of love too. Helped along its way by its reasonable price tag, I settled for it. But it wasn’t my first love. I soon started having misgivings about it and started telling myself that I looked like a funeral director in it.

It’s an absolute joy to be enrolled in an economics course when every rationality assumption  crumbles before you.