Talk the Talk

I talk too much. It’s quite futile for me to try to keep this post concise in the hope that people will think I’m trying to reform. 

Consider the facts of the case. I talk almost all the time. When I’m not talking, I’m writing. When I’m not writing either, I’m probably talking to myself or sleeping (and I talk an awful lot even in my dreams). In fact, the reason I embrace blogs and steer clear of social networking is that Facebook doesn’t give me enough “talk time.” Facebook allows other people to talk as well and I see that as an infringement of my talking space. I reject Twitter because it doesn’t let me talk enough. My emails go on for pages and my messages parody the SMS abbreviation. Even when people ask me to talk about things I have no particular interest in, an examination for instance, I exceed the word limit.

But then I came across people who are far worse. It’s like they have some serious illness that will cause them to die if they stop talking. I don’t believe I’ve even seen them pause for breath. You’d think this would make me feel better and realise that I’m not all that bad. To some extent, it did. But it also gave me a taste of what those around me must feel like when I talk and it’s quite annoying.

This is an important lesson for me. I must not befriend people like myself.

The Need for Mediocrity

Everyone should watch Aaj Tak once in a while. Rakhi ka Swayamvar was India’s answer to The Bachelorette. Masterchef India was in a league of its own. They have all brought much laughter to the world. But mediocrity extends well beyond TV shows.

Consider Chetan Bhagat or Stephanie Meyer. But they are relatively popular authors with mediocre abilities. Think of all the lousy books you’ve ever tried to read by authors whose names you don’t remember. Would you fully appreciate a good story if you had nothing worse to compare it to?

We are fortunate to have so much to dislike and mock. Imagine how boring life would be if every TV show was fantastic, every book was a masterpiece and every song was pure genius. What would we make fun of? What could possibly peel us away from TVs and computers? More importantly, how would one come to terms with their own mediocrity if they are surrounded by excellence?

Chances are that we won’t be able to take it. Conversations would taper away if everything was praiseworthy. We would actively seek mediocrity or pressure those who are great to generate so much material that some of it is bound to tend towards the average. We might even entirely lose the ability to recognise brilliance. 

The law of large numbers is fantastic. It makes life worth living.

Examination Simulation

I must admit that after two years of claiming to have every weekend ruined by an exam the following week, I find life extremely boring without them. I always thought that whoever came up with the idea of formalised tests must have been an evil, miserable person. I was suitably elated when my exams ended this week and proudly declared that they are “over forever.”

However, when I struggled to come up with a birthday surprise for a friend, I sighed and realised how “naturally” the idea would have formed itself in my head if I were to have an exam the next day. It really brings out the best in me in every aspect other than the subject matter of the exam. I don't feel motivated to do anything anymore because I no longer feel like I'm engaging in shenanigans. I try to fool myself into believing that I should be studying so that I can enjoy the things I usually spend my time on. 

As you draw close to an exam, every second of your time is so valuable, so precious that you feel rather kingly about squandering it. Without exams, wasting time is the equivalent of being a useless lout – nobody cares about your time anyway. Just as stolen apples taste better, time always seems well-spent when it is misallocated. Watching TV when you’re supposed to be studying is a lot of fun when you’re negotiating with your conscience for another hour’s break. Watching TV because you don’t have anything else to do is just sad.

In fact, exams are worth taking just for the joy of having them end – that goofy, incomparable feeling when you realise that you can stop pretending to study. 

The Hell with Airtel

Airtel has crossed the not-so-fine line between being friendly and being creepy. Their new scheme that “takes care of customer needs” without being asked to do so is nearly as stupid as its advertisement, which has a creepy guy asking a sweet shop to mix a lot of sweets together to match his friend’s revolting taste. In order to customise services to match customer needs, Airtel has decided to take it upon itself to activate Value Added Services automatically if a subscriber uses a facility frequently enough.

This scheme is the anti-Robin Hood: stealing from the poor to distribute to the rich. The epiphany came to me when my domestic help told me that she always runs out of balance within days of a recharge even though she never calls anybody. Someone called Airtel on her behalf and found out that they had “automatically” activated services that she didn’t want and her balance was being eaten away.

A large number of mobile phone owners in India don’t know how to use a phone beyond making and receiving calls. My domestic help is illiterate so she can’t even understand the messages that tell her that a service has been activated. It’s also quite unethical to levy the same rate for a service when the charge is deducted from the talk time as opposed to a cash payment. Not every recharge gives you full talk time so by automatically activating services, Airtel is actually overcharging customers.

Tut tut, Airtel. Shame on you. You’ve become a stalker. A creep. And a thief. Oo you.

Never Again

I don’t like equations and equations don’t like me. We maintain a comfortable distance at all times to avoid any awkward social situations. We had a pretty long relationship but things ended badly and it’s a bit difficult to claim to study economics and be at war with equations at the same time. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Many of my exams require me to memorise equations. This is something that I neither enjoy nor excel at. So I put it off. I procrastinate until the night before the exam. At night, I tell myself that I must get adequate sleep before the exam and that it’s a good idea to go over the equations in the morning, arguing with myself that my memory has a recency bias. I wake up freakishly early in the morning and procrastinate some more. In the metro, I casually glance through the equations and tell myself that I’m smart enough to work it out, still putting off the actual memorising. As last minute panic grips me before I enter the exam hall, I frantically leaf through my notes, but I tell myself that it’s impossible for me to know what I don’t already know in the next 5 minutes. So I put it off for “some other time.”

During the exam, predictably, I don’t remember the equations. For the ones I think I remember, I can’t correctly derive the results, possibly because I can’t remember all the parameters correctly. As gloom descends upon me I curse the evaluation methodology, the examination pattern, the education system and the universe in general.

After the exam, I tell myself that I’ll do better next time. The bad news is that I lied to myself each time. The good news is I’ve run out of exams. Somehow I don’t feel quite as happy as I thought I would about that. It’s as if there is no point in wasting time anymore.

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.