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You may now copy and read off line
when you find time. For the convenience of your copying in your floppy or in
your personal computer, we have done everything in a single web page. This is
completely private organisation and has no connection with any government. All
the opinions expressed here are personal and the facts stated have to be
verified by the reader.
What is there so
special about IAS aspirants?
Industrious young people should succeed in
getting government jobs. Well, an IAS aspirant is not an ordinary jobseeker.
They are not aiming at becoming couch potato. They want to work for India and
are willing to accept the challenges of life.
What is there so
special about IAS officers?
Those having work-experience under an IAS
officer can stand better witness even than IAS officers themselves. The IAS
officer can see up to a much greater distance than the ordinary folk. That
means they can imagine what is going to happen much ahead in time and what kind
of social interplays are going on in an inaccessible society, say, in the den
of terrorists.
Are they
astrologers, then?
Fortunately they are not. Whereas, in an
academic course, most students memorise whatever is written in the note and
write down on the script; a small minority always think about what they read,
design their own problems, solve them and can not refrain from thinking. So to
say, they teach themselves the game of rational guessing. UPSC looks for this
sort of young people for recruitment to the highest cadre.
How could I prepare
for it?
If you find pleasure in rational thinking
and in addition, you are ready to work hard, you can definitely try. Remember
that the examination is not testing how much money you have spent in
subscribing to costliest coaching centres. They are there to test your quality.
It may however be of some help if you get acquainted with the recent
discoveries and recent thoughts in the social sciences in the pasted portion of
the book “Marketplace of Coercion—a sketch of simultaneous evolution of human
society, intellect and institutions” and can afford the labour to interact (not
over telephone, please) by means of letters with us. Criticise this book or
support it, you must reveal your knowledge and intelligence. You may try to
fill in the gaps in logic and that can be interesting exercise. E-mail to sangsthapana@yahoo.co.uk or snail
mail to Kalyan Deb, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College, Kolkata-700 108.
Who is Gordon Tullock?
Here we paste from the official website of his
university
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Although trained as a
lawyer, PROFESSOR OF LAW GORDON TULLOCK never held a law school
appointment before coming to George Mason University's School of Law. In
addition, while he is an intellectual giant in the fields of economics and
public choice, he does not have a degree in economics. Professor Tullock
attended law school at the University of Chicago. He joined the Foreign
Service shortly after graduation and was posted to Tientsin, China. While
posted to an American college to study Chinese, he read Austrian economist
Ludwig von Mises's Human Action in his spare time and reports he later
found himself better trained than his contemporaries who had Ph.D.'s in
economics. Professor Tullock began
postdoctoral work at the University of Virginia in 1958 and taught at that
school's Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy from 1962 to 1967. The
Calculus of Consent (1962), cowritten with George Mason University's
James Buchanan, is a founding text of the public choice movement. With Buchanan, Professor
Tullock moved to Virginia Polytechnic Institute from 1968 to 1983 and to
George Mason from 1983 to 1987. In 1987, he left George Mason for the
University of Arizona. Professor Tullock is best
known for inventing the concept of rent-seeking: the use of political or
institutional power to extract wealth transfers from the rest of the economy.
He is the author of 16 books and more than 150 papers. He received an
honorary degree from the University of Chicago and served as president of the
Southern and Western Economic Associations. In January 1998 he was a
Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association. |
Why is
he so special to the have-nots and the exploited?
When in 1949 the Red Army took over Mainland China; a fresh
law graduate Gordon Tullock was working as a vice-consul for the US in
Tientsin. Later on he worked in South Korea. He learnt first hand how the
political corruption makes life of the poor people so miserable. He then
dedicated his enormous talent to the study of a pure theory of politics. If
anybody wants to alleviate the miserable condition of the wretched people in
any country throughout the world, one’s task is made much easier by reading
what Professor Tullock has found out by his dedication and genius. Otherwise,
one has to spend one’s lifetime rediscovering what one could know by reading
Gordon Tullock.
What
does Gordon Tullock Sangsthapana propose to do?
First of all, we
have to read, know, apply and exchange opinions through this website. All your
letters and queries may be sent to samataparishad@rediffmail.com or still better, by postcard or inland letter to the convener Kalyan
Deb, B. K. C. College, 111/2 B. T. Road, Calcutta-700 108. Mention your email
address, if any. You will definitely get a reply.
Why should the effort start in India?
We have a variety of systems simultaneously running in
India. If you were in the western world, you would perhaps always be thinking
in terms of formal institutions—the police, the legislature, the judiciary etc.
If you were in China, you would be thinking in terms of party committees and
their leaders. In Afghanistan, you have to think in terms of satisfying the
local feudal lords or their bosses in Kabul. But in India, you are rich to have
sort of everything. Thus it is the easiest for resident Indians having some
interaction with their world around, to get at the significance of Tullock’s
system of analysing the society. We are here giving a list of some of the works
by Professor Tullock. You may try to get them from your nearby library. We have
an ambition of uploading his works in this site as soon as we get permission.
Duke
University Press Organization of Inquiry 1961
(together
with James Buchanan) Calculus of Consent
(New York: Basic Books Inc.1970) Private
Wants, Public Means
The
Logic of the Law
The
Institute of Economic Affairs; 2 Lord North Street Westminster London SW1 P
3LB The Vote Motive with
a British commentary by Morris Perelman 1976
(Blacksburg,
VA: Public Choice Center, VPI and State
University ) The Roots of Order included in Toward a Science of
Politics—papers in Honor of Duncan Black 1981
The
Economics of Income Redistribution
Kluwer
Academic Publishers 101 Philip Drive, Asinippi Park, Norwell,
Massachusetts 02061 The Economics of Special Privileges and Rent Seeking
1989
Martinus
Nijhoff Publishers, Kluwer Academic Publishers Group P. O. Box 322 3300 AH Dordrecht The Netherlands Autocracy 1987
(Tucson, Arizona: Pallas Press) 1994 The
Economics of Nonhuman Societies
Edward
Elgar Publishing Ltd; 8 Lansdown Place, Cheltenham Glos, GL502HU, UK www.e-elgar.co.uk On Voting—a
Public Choice approach 1998
We are presently uploading about 70% of a book written by
the convener. It tries to apply Tullock’s thoughts to the concrete problem of
West Bengal, India and to human evolution. Your opinions will be extremely
welcome and duly acknowledged as well as utilised to better this site and the
following book.
Marketplace
of Coercion‑‑
A Sketch of Simultaneous Evolution of Human
Society, Intellect and Institutions
Second Electronic Edition, December 2002
Kalyan Deb
Preface
“Practice does not
run well with Marxism”—Marxists discuss among themselves. Marxist governments
are taking verily non-Marxist policies. “A theory propounded 150 years ago
can’t be enough for today’s world.”—Some would say. Of course they don’t seem
to know that what is substituting Marxism was propounded still earlier.
“Marx was correct
in saying that…” whisper political cadres of a party, which vows to fight the
Marxists; officially so. Why do people differ so much in their intimate thought
from their official stands?
Undoubtedly
Marx was a genius. But the discoveries made after his death could not inspire
his followers to think anew. Let us try that in somewhat wide range.
Problems of a problem child
When I was a young boy, my physicist uncle told me
that it was Newton, who discovered the laws of gravitation. I was very angry at
Newton, for if he did not make it, I thought, gravity would not have been there
and we could fly at will. Children these days seem to be much more intelligent
than I was in my childhood and they know the difference between discovery and
invention. Some even realises if one wanted to mitigate man’s misery caused by
the phenomena governed by these laws, one has to learn these laws. Moreover, if
one entertains a grudge, say, against gravitation, the grudge would go against
one learning the law and will eventually obstruct the mitigation of the misery.
That is to say that if we objected to Newton’s laws so much so that we did not
learn it, we could have never invented the airplane, on which we can fly now.
When Carnot
discovered his theorem, he did not mean to discourage or ridicule the other
engineers, who were continuously trying to increase the ridiculously low (1% or
less) efficiency of engines of his times. He wanted the engineers to have less
failure. He built up a theoretical framework that he thought would help them to
cut down on negative results. In general, when Marx spoke about
class-exploitation, he did not mean to admire it but he wanted all of us to
know it so that we could fight it.
Economics is also a science just as physics[1]
is. Economists sometimes seem to be doomsayers. But they do not work for making
people worse off.
I am sanguine that Amartya Sen failed to feel flattered when Bengali newspapers of Kolkata hailed him as the first and the only economist, who cared for the welfare of the poor.
Economists
tell the people what policy could cause which result. Their opinions may
often vary and some or all of them may subsequently turn out to be mistaken. If
we do not interpret the society, we do not achieve to improve it. Science has a
problem that makes it so unpopular[2].
In a science, there is no hero or villain. A child can of course start with
making them. For example, in my childhood, as I had just said, I started with
gravity as my villain and buoyancy my hero. But I later suffered to know that a
ship could become a wreck because of too much of my hero. The problem with the
social sciences is we remain over-engaged in discovering who the hero is and who
the villain and logic seems superfluous. If someone is convinced that
capitalism is the villain and if some other is convinced that it is the hero,
both tend to say, “What is the need of thinking about it—we all know what
capitalism is.” Precisely, each knew whether it is the hero or the villain and
each thought that his was the ultimate knowledge.
In search of “the political goodwill”
Still, in the voluminous discussions
regarding anything of social life, be it education or be it environment; we
often come across the conclusion, as “it will need political goodwill on the
part of the government”. I have always wondered that nobody deals with how this
“political goodwill”, I could instil in Vajpayee or in Buddhadeb or in the anchal
pradhan of the village I live in. However from this inability you could have
gained a kind of comfort in anarchist resignation that “government is bad and
has therefore to be simply done away with”, which is again fully untrue because
often you get good help from a government and even from a bad government made
of very bad people.
Rather let
us change our mode of thinking. Let us end our search for the hero and consider
everybody to be a villain. In his class, Gangeshbabu tried a lot to introduce
mathematics in my unwilling brain. After all he was trying to satisfy only his
own satisfaction. His satisfaction lay in learning mathematics by me. He did
not try to satisfy my utility, which was in sharing dirty jokes with the boy
sitting next to me. It will be little harm to our logic to consider Gangeshbabu
a self-seeking person. In the way, let us make it mandatory for our argument
here we shall not demand any morality[3]
before the concluding chapter.
The
word ‘bad’ is not sufficiently bad. Substitute it with any worse word that you
can afford to. Everyone says this society is bad because it is made of bad
people. Strangely this was not the problem that baffled me all along. The
question that always baffled me was why some good people get good help from
genuinely bad and selfish ones.
Thus you might call this book
How to Make a Good Society out of Bad People
If
good people were available aplenty, it could be an excellent idea to try with
them. But all observations seem to agree that wherever you go, you encounter
too many bad, really very self-seeking people, to the point that you tend to
call them even corrupt. So that it is suggested in this book in order that you
might manufacture a good society, it is sensible for you to attempt a venture
with this raw material, which is quite available and is unfortunately in
abundance.
We
are thus adopting a method admitting that individuals even as a part of an
organisation act to serve their respective self-interests. This does not at all
mean that we approve of it. This only means that if we, say, aim at weeding of
corruption, mere being angry against corruption will hardly help. Just as in
investigating a murder, you try to guess what the motive of the murder could
be; we shall also investigate how the practice of corruption helped its
perpetrator.
I
apologise hundred times, if anybody thinks, by this, I demean the
philanthropic or moral people. I have very real high regard for them just as
you have. Only because they are scanty, I reserve them for the most precious
uses, which will possibly spill over to another work.
What
seems very easily acceptable in a natural science was unfortunately hotly
debated in social sciences. The simple fact that man will naturally act to
maximise his own utility was considered immoral which was similar to
considering immoral for an electron to strike the positive plate. If, by now
even the declared socialist states like China or Cuba have taken to personal
incentives to boost up production; regarding the organisational behaviour, most
approaches lag to the alchemy age, where also lie most academic or journalistic
pursuits regarding the government, the most important of all the organisations.
How We apply Tools of Economics
In
economics you usually study exchange operations based on mutual volition. One
sacrifices something for the sake of getting another thing that one did not
have. The market rules that allow or even justify and protect such exchanges
are fairly recent and rather limited. This book reviews those in the eighth
chapter. Nevertheless the circumstance under which one individual determines it
prudent to seek something and invests or spends something for that; one’s
decision is quite amenable to the tools of economics. For a very simple
example, a lion sees a hare and disregards it. The lion’s marginal utility in
eating the hare (dU) is smaller than the lion’s decrease in utility at
that moment, by getting up and running after it (dL). If there is a bush around and the lion calculated
a 20% probability of the hare getting in the bush and evade being eaten, the
equation changes 0.80 dU< or >dL. The lion can not certainly calculate;
calculation is for students. The electron also can not calculate, the students
calculate for them.
Violence, volition or vote
Coercion
applied by one member upon another takes three forms in our society—the oldest
form inherited from our pre-human ancestors is violence, whereas the market
forces and the votes in an election are rather recent. Each has received fair
amount of specialised scholastic attention. Isolated study of anyone of these
three suffers from a frequent problem. When you study criminology, you assume
that the economy and the politics of the country are reasonably well run. You
don’t think that your prescriptions will suffer any material resistance from
the political or economic realities of the country. You also don’t think that
your prescription might inflict some injury upon some balance in some other
sector. Of course, on some occasions, you take cognisance of some reality in
another sector but you hardly afford to go any little beyond the very apparent
perception in field foreign to you.
Now
let us manufacture a story to show how we relate these three methods in our
real life.
Our
neighbourhood is two minutes’ walk from the bus-route. You have seen the canal
and the earthen lane that goes along its bank. The lane is the sole connection
for our three households with the outside world. But for only about a fifteen
feet stretch along its length, the lane allows rickshaw or trolley-van to pass.
Households of Banamali and Shambhu have advanced their fences so much that one
could only walk (or at the most ride a bike) beyond their houses. If we want to
carry brick into our houses or have to carry a patient to hospital, we have to
spend a lot of extra labour and money. In money terms, the trouble must be
wasting our thousands of rupees each year.
Keshab,
one among us proposed to them he would pay them one thousand rupees in exchange
for the fences being moved backed by a foot. The land to be sacrificed was
hardly worth two hundred rupees in our locality.
Paresh
worked as a home-guard in another police station. He was the boldest among us.
He wanted to use violence. That does not mean that he wanted us to take the law
into our own hands. He proposed that we try to implicate either of them in a
false criminal case. He was sanguine that after spending a few nights in
custody they shall become ready to oblige us.
Moloy proposed we should meet the panchayet chief en-masse and
urge her to interfere. The chief would not be able to disregard ten adult votes
of our three families.
There
may be different solutions to this problem. A person takes the path that seems
to be the easiest or the most effective. Public Choice theorists have tried to
extend the tools of economics to Voting with admirable rigour. I shall here
aspire to build up a theory of society, which is more general and less rigorous. For some time now, there
has been a sophisticated endeavour of building up a general field theory in
natural science. Apart from my lack of rigour, my attempt has another
difference from theirs. They don’t
envisage any practical benefit that I very much hope can be deduced from
general theory of societies presented here.
Most
probably you also professed Marxism at a stage, as I did. When I was a student,
I believed that exploitation and oppression by the ruling classes (neo
imperialist, comprador capitalist and feudal—to be specific) caused all our
sufferings.
Such
belief however suffered an onslaught whenever, really twice every working day,
the overcrowded bus I was riding, inched its way through enormous traffic mess
in the Burrabazar district. I was never liberal enough to consider the
gentlemen, the businessmen in their cars to be among the toiling classes, which
we, the passengers riding the bus, belonged to. However, caught in a
traffic-jam, I felt, the members of both the sides of the barricade
(this was a term quite popular among us, revolutionary students
of Kolkata )—the oppressed and the oppressor, wanted the traffic
constable to succeed. We both craved that the traffic constables to be quickly
successful in clearing knot, a duty, for which, he was posted there by the
state machinery. I remember one dawn, when there was no traffic police deployed
there, because the roads have very little traffic in that early morning hours.
But the few busses and lorries created such a free-for-all that our bus got
held up at the junction with Central Avenue for half an hour.
For
several years now, on the advice of Japanese experts, important thoroughfares
have been made one-way. Suppose the road you are driving along is not one-way.
The bus in front of you runs slow to fill in as many passengers as it can, it
is in your interest, you overtake it for which you have move to the channel to
your right. But if you find another vehicle there, which also is too slow, you
move further right. In this way, if the vehicles in your direction occupy the
whole of the available space, what happens? You have certainly seen this: when
you were waiting in desperation, possible at some crossing, a young man drove
past all of you through the right channel, which all of you, so long considered
should be kept empty for the traffic in the opposite direction. Some other
impatient ones followed suit to earn advantage when the signal would become
green, the formation of vehicles soon looks like armies of Kuru and Pandava,
face to face, Then everybody understands perusal of one’s self-interest beyond
a limit was very much against the interest of everybody and may be even the
first man, who moved deep into the opposite channel starts to lament the
absence of a sergeant, who could earlier prevent his own channel-crossing.
Definitions: Marx
classified contradictions in any society into antagonistic and non-antagonistic
ones. Antagonistic contradiction would defy resolution through negotiation. I
suppose that in any resolution of conflict if A’s gain is less than B’s loss,
it must be antagonistic because A cannot compensate B’s loss. However A can
force B or possibly annihilate B. For example, capitalism would never agree to
the loss of the whole world for the gain of being chained with the proletariat
and has therefore to be annihilated altogether. It could be fantastic if I were
the lonely traveller on the road. But it is beyond my capability to annihilate
all other traffic. It is still less within my capability to refrain from
using M. G. Road. So I have to endure what I cannot cure.
Externality, again, negative or positive in
that
Each other traffic had its own destination,
and its own purpose for travelling. As such I had no reason to consider them my
enemy. But when they came on my way, despite the fact that I had not “known
them enough even to hate them”, I felt immense grudge against them. Though they
were travelling for purposes completely irrelevant and unknown
to me, their travel, nevertheless, became negative externality for me.
That
does not mean they would always pose negative externality to me. Now suppose
that I am not travelling along M. G. Road, but I vend sarbat (cold
drink) at Burrabazar. I have found traffic jams to be immensely beneficial for
my business—when the busses get held up, passengers get down and start walking.
Then I do my day’s business in an hour. If I could I would rather pay a portion
of my additional profit to create a jam. For sure, jam is positive to me.
But negotiation fails
Let
me get back to my bus held up in a traffic jam in M. G. Road. I was dismayed to
find that even non-antagonistic contradictions as in this traffic case, do not
always offer a solution through negotiation. One point may however be noted at
this stage. Even though externality may be positive or negative, solution
through negotiation always poses problem. This point will be taken up again in
chapter 4.
I
would rather sit together with all other users of M. G. Road and work out a
negotiated solution to the problem of traffic jams.
I am not sure if sarbatwallah should
be invited. Possibly he has no power to enhance the jam; but only passively
enjoys the benefit from it. Then we can just ignore his interest and let him
suffer from our action. If he has any substantial role in creating jams, we,
the travellers should either bribe him to restrain him, if we can, the
contradiction becomes non-antagonistic. Otherwise we have to coerce him to
bring him into toe with us travellers—this means we have to fight out the
antagonistic contradiction. You possibly remember that in the1980’s the sarbatwallahs
of Sealdah railway station used to damage drinking water taps to boost up their
sales and had to be ousted by the authority on the demand of the passengers.
Jams being a pretty nuisance to everybody; everybody should sense benefit in
its annihilation. Though jams harm all of us, we ourselves cause the jams. If
none of us invaded into the territory belonging to the traffic in the opposite
direction, all the vehicles could move albeit a little later. Still you will
ridicule me at my suggestion of convening a meeting of all the users. And I too
agree that it was an absurd suggestion. Obviously, the commonest prescribed
remedy would be to instil moral ethics among the users, I am totally ignorant
of how I could instil morality or fellow feeling and the like things in others’
minds and therefore I have made such endeavour a taboo for myself.
Fortunately
for the users of M. G. Road and of all other roads of India, the state had long
back promulgated a rule of keeping to one’s left. Thus the rule promulgated by
the state worked as a pretty handy mechanism to reduce antagonistic into
non-antagonistic contradiction. In another language you might call this the
externality-reducing role of the state. In plain language this is referred to
as the conflict-reducing role of the state. You needed some rules coupled with
an administration to enforce the rules. Before you proceed further, you can
examine that this conflict of interest and necessity of reduction of conflict
with the help of rules and an administration to enforce such rules goes to the
essence of coexistence of individuals. If the first of this perhaps comes in
the shape of no-one-should-kill-another, the second may be no-one-should-encroach-upon-another’s-property.
Please do not resent that I am redoing school civics. Thousands of years before
these rules were being taught in schools, they were enforced and administered
in human tribal societies.
Do rules help if there is none to supervise?
When
I ride a bicycle on my neighbourhood street, and on a bend, suddenly encounter
another man on a bicycle, and he will also dislike a head on collision with me,
am I, or is he, confused whether the other would go to his left or to his
right? We both know the rules in India and move to our respective left sides.
Thus the rule helps and both the cyclists stand better of with it. Just perform
a mental experiment. Suppose yourself at Dalhousie driving your car to
Shyambazar. It comes to your mind that in your morning newspaper you came
across a notice that on an experimental basis (perhaps on the advice of a
visiting team of World Bank experts) the Bidhan Sarani stretch would be left to
private sergeants who would charge two rupees per car. A passage through C.R.
Avenue would be free but will be left to the civic morality of those who use
it, that is to say, no traffic police would be deployed in it. Will it be a
macro description of the random walk? Possibly not; even with none to oversee,
each car would cling to its left fearing “Otherwise I may be hit”. An NRI from
the US might think if everyone took one’s right side, it were better, would
nevertheless follow Indian system as long as in India. Thus the mere existence
of a rule, promulgated by the sovereign helps.
You
might say that the principal task of the state was to coerce the majority to
subjugation to be exploited by the ruling elite and such assertion I shall not
certainly dispute. But in the process of exploiting those people the ruler also
discovered that reduction of conflict among his subjects would (some of the
times) serve his purpose of exploitation. Thus whereas it was quite likely that
the function of reduction of conflict came initially as just a means of
increasing the spoils of exploitation; it has remained till now a function
which has made the state so indispensable in any society. Later on, we may very
much talk about whom the state injures and whom the state benefits. For now, we
confine ourselves to see that there is need of rules to reduce conflict
whenever there is an addition of person to you.
Now
I shall concoct an example for your examination. Here supervision and rule of
law come to the edge of complete anarchy. You feel the need of some
predictability in another’s behaviour whenever there is an addition of person
to you. I might talk about you being marooned at an island like Crusoe but
instead of Man Friday, you find another man of more or less your age and physical
appearance. Do you hope you will be extremely happy? Let me remind you of an
experience that might be yours. You were returning home by the last local
train. Most compartments in those hours usually remain empty. You rejoice at
such an opportunity of travelling alone and got into one empty compartment. As
the train starts, a person leaps into it and retires to one of the so many
empty seats, somewhat away from you. You have been carrying nothing valuable
with you but what if that person is not convinced? What if that person is a
maniac whose pleasure is in manslaughter? At one point of time, you start to
repent that you could better take either of the end-compartments that usually
attract all the passengers in those haunted hours. Your situation at that
moment is no different from what could be 20,000 years ago.
Back to civilisation
At
the next station, you change to one such end compartment, you did not get a
seat by the window this time but became assured that all of so many persons,
who were unknown not only to you but also among themselves could not be gang of
marauders or robbers. The co-passengers here will not allow you an airy seat by
the window, but will not rob you either. Whenever you find a large number of
persons, you presume the social rules would be obeyed by them but when you face
any one of them alone, you are not so sure that the single person would obey
the same rules[4].
I
told you that the naya rasta would not be as unruly as you might think.
But you are little likely to know that because you would not risk a journey
through this police-free avenue. It is most likely that in the morning you will
not be as adventurous as to do that and you will play safe by spending Rs. 2
through the Cornwallis Street. In fact you will not be alone. Just like you
many others would rather pay Rs. 2 than use the freeway, knowing fully well,
that for this Rs. 2 each is buying a service that may go against who buys it.
If in the pay way, Mr.X breaks a traffic rule, he will be brought to book and
the fact he voluntarily paid the private sergeant his dues will be no excuse.
Even those who very much resent the open and rampant acceptance of bribe by
traffic police, even those who will consider this experiment of deployment of
private sergeants thoroughly unethical, will use the pay-way. And this is a
very general attitude of humanbeing; if we observe history, we see
that most people much preferred to live under an inefficient and oppressive
despotism to living with no government at all[5].
There are a lot of examples like
this. When I go in for an examination, the university takes an examination fee,
which does not guarantee me to pass. The examiner takes the same amount of
remuneration for examining my script and for the script which is given the
maximum credit, and does not feel the slightest prick of conscience for she
received remuneration from my payment too, when she puts the zero on mine. When
I buy a railway ticket for say, Rs. 100, perhaps Rs 5 is set aside for paying
salary of the ticket collector, who does not take any part in running the
train; nevertheless, I not only pay this but if you ask me whether I shall
favour a proposal of doing away with them and a cut in my fare by Rs 5, I shall
prefer paying Rs. 5. If there is not any ticket collector I shall not buy the
railway ticket and that will make minuscule difference to the railways; which
will nevertheless run the trains and I shall have free ride. But I fear being
emulated by every other passenger. If nobody pays, they will stop running the
trains (as Gandhiji told them to do) and if they do not run the trains, I shall
have to look for other conveyances, which are definitely now costlier to me,
that is why I take now the train. If the railways wind up they will become still
costlier.
It could be wonderful if I could determine the exact
amount of revenue that the railways would consider sufficient to run the
trains. And then I could negotiate with all other passengers of the railways so
that we may pay right that amount. By these all of us could gain significantly.
I) We needed not pay the salary of the ticket collector II) We needed not pay
for the idiosyncrasies of the railway ministers. Though you will agree that the
arrangement would be enormously beneficial to all the passengers and will be
detrimental only to the handful of TTs (most of us have no reason to be
kind to them) you will say I was entertaining delusions of grandeur[6]
of being able to have the consent of millions of railway passengers. In other
words, you readily recognise that the process of bringing a large number of
people to consent (even when, by such consent, everybody is benefited) has a
cost, often a prohibitive cost. We could of course, being the citizens having
voting right, coerce the government to do what we wanted to do. But coming to
consent to vote for some specific issue also has a cost and that is also
prohibitive.
Some positive externalities[7]
“Our present discussion involves only negative
externalities, that is, externalities that inflict injury. This is not because
they are the most important. On the contrary, I suspect that the so-called
positive externalities are more important in the present-day world than the
negative externalities.”[8]
There
are a lot of examples. A dentist opens a chamber in my village and I am saved
from going to town[9] for seeing a
dentist (perhaps the same dentist). Now the dentist will not run the chamber if
I am the only person in the village with toothache. Thus other villagers’
suffering from toothache will be positive externality for me. A new auto
rickshaw route has opened from my village to the railway station (Rs 4, whereas
rickshaw takes Rs 15) Other passengers offer me positive externality; I may
even afford to subsidise their journey; if I pay Rs 2 per head for other 4
passengers, each of them will have to pay only Rs 2 and still I save Rs 3.
But
shall I be able to offer subsidy to them? No, because, my offer would offend
their ego.
Flood is a menace to my village. So I have
built up an earthen platform 10 feet high at a cost of my labour worth Rs
100,000. Upon it, I have built up my earthen house. But if I could unite the
residents of 100 other villages and build up an embankment for labour worth Rs
10,000 per family, all the villages could get the protection at a much lower
cost (Have you heard of the Embankment of 81 Mouja protecting Ghatal and Daspur
from flood?) I spend Rs 2000 each year for irrigation of my boro paddy.
If I united with other farmers of the 10 villages, I could erect a soil dam
with labour worth Rs 300 per family on the passing stream and my irrigation
cost could come down to Rs 500. However, in this last case we would have also
to fight with the villagers who live down stream; because our dam would dry up
their villages. In each of these cases, hardly do we ever reach a negotiated
solution. Usually we do not even try them. We usually pressurise the government
to do the needful. Again, when we want to pressurise the government, we must
take a united action. In that respect often our local political leaders order
us how much each has to participate. Another matter mentioned in the last
paragraph also necessitates our united action. After the dam has been erected
at government expenditure, the downstream villagers will unite to destroy it.
Though there will remain a token police guard, the real guarding will have to
be done by ourselves[10].
Each “reciprocal externality is, in general, the situation that will arise if
some service can be provided cheaply if it is provided for an entire
geographical area[11],
and is extremely expensive if the individuals attempt to provide it by
themselves.[12]”
I
should also contrast a case, which has no externality. Each year a number of
workers in the paddy field die by lightning. A rural household could erect a
lightning conductor on their mud house and peasants could even carry a
makeshift one on their bullocks to start the day’s work after erecting it
nearby. This one can do oneself, without much benefit (and with no harm) to
workers in the contiguous fields.
We
often cannot, unfortunately, even in the market place, sort out our own
problem.
“In an oriental bazaar,
the shopkeeper will begin by asking a price
somewhat higher than he actually hopes to get, but after some chaffering he and
his customer will reach an agreement on the price and quantity.”[13]
As you and I went to buy fish in our bazaar, you usually buy from an
established vendor Manu, who sells at fixed prices. On a morning, he sold rohu
for Rs 50 a kilo. I had little else to do, so I bargained with less
established Benu. At first he also demanded Rs 50 for the same 1 kilogram size rohu
but I offered Rs 40.
Have you got this to be a fish-market,
sir?- (Bengali idiom)
Over that Benu softened a little to agree to Rs 45. As
he told me that it was his last offer, he would not sell for a rupee less, if I
disagreed I might have my way. I feigned I would not pay even Rs 42 and I
started walking in mock frustration. And when he did call me back, he whispered
Rs. 44 and put my chosen fish on the weighing balance. But you would not be
able to invest so much time (and energy and possible humiliation). Even I did
not know that I would gain Re 6. Thus the time and etceteras I incurred was an
expenditure, a cost, which I afforded to, you did not. Cost of bargaining was
prohibitive to you, more than Rs 6, so you bought from Manu.
Consumer surplus
Did Benu make a profit by selling at Rs 44? Perhaps he
really bought it for more than that price from the whole-seller. But when he
sold it to me, he was expecting no other customer. His alternative to selling
to me was buying ice for Rs 2 and selling in the evening for expected Rs 46.
Or, perhaps he could sell to some other vendor at a discount. While it may be
true that if he knew at 5 am that he would not be able to sell by 10 am all he
was buying, he might have bought somewhat less than he had actually bought. By
any means, at 11 am, at the point of time when I bought from him, his equations
had completely changed for the worse, let us assume, he thought he would have
to sell for Rs 42 after a few minutes. Thus by selling to me he gained by Rs 2
in terms of what he expected the alternative to be.
On the other hand, while it was true, that I would not
have bought for Rs 50 it is also true (I tell you on condition that you will
not tell it to Benu) that if he did not call me back, I would have returned by
myself. I was really ready to buy for Rs 47. Thus I have gained Rs 3 by
bargaining.
Neither between us knows for sure the full story. But
assuming that my assumption regarding Benu’s action is true, we have as a
buyer-seller combine gained Rs 5. If either of us hated to bargain, if either
of us lacked in the skill of making one’s point without too much offending the
other’s ego, we together were destined to lose this Rs 5.
Thus
we arrive at a fantastic parameter, having all the qualities of a
quantity—above all, it can be measured, sometimes not accurately but then many
physical quantities are also not amenable to precise measurement. As we shall
see this cost of bargaining will be our principal economic tool with which we
shall probe any collective.
Why then the fixed price shops?
As
you are a permanent customer of fixed price Manu, you will say that the fish I
buy must be inferior to that you buy from Manu. “They buy from the same
wholesale market—how come someone sells at a lower price than the other!” I, however, consider myself an expert in
fish and shall not therefore lose any chance to bargain for a gain of a single
rupee.
If
all the customers were like me; Manu could not maintain his fixed price for a
single day. If all the customers were like you, Benu could not find any
customer throughout the morning (as is the case in the western world or in our
prestigious markets). But the market for fish is divided into people like you
(and Gordon Tullock[14]
) and people like me. That is why both Manu and Benu earn their living in the
same bazaar.
Manu
has been a quite reputed vendor for fairly long time now. Benu is young and a
new comer. If Manu starts to allow this kind of ‘oriental’ bargaining,
initially he might gain a few more customers, but after a few days, he will not
be able to afford so much time and energy that Benu is able to afford.Moreover,
it willhardly be advisable for him not to take the benefit from the fixed
“fixed price” clientele he possesses.
Thus the sellers are also divided in their ability (including human
capital). Where Benu (and I) try to afford the cost of bargaining by using our skills
and labour; Manu (and you) reduce cost of bargaining by you consenting to the
rule of fixed price proposed by Manu.
Private
enterprise also serves to reduce cost of bargaining. When a ‘promoter’ tries to
sell his ‘flat’s, he has to assure every purchaser that every purchaser will be
able to live there in peace and will not have to quarrel with the occupants of
the other ‘flat’s. “I lived in an apartment building that enforced a variety of
rules to prevent the individual apartment holders from annoying each other. On
a more serious level, a very large number of economic enterprises involve
“internalizing” externalities by private contract. Fortunately, or
unfortunately, according to your point of view, bargaining costs are not zero.
In many cases the bargaining costs are so high that in ordinary speech we would
say bargains were impossible. We turn, therefore, to some type of collective
decision-making process; that is, some arrangement under which individuals are
compelled to carry out the wish of others.” Private enterprise also serves to
reduce cost of bargaining. When a ‘promoter’ tries to sell his ‘flat’s, he has
to assure every purchaser that every purchaser will be able to live there in
peace and will not have to quarrel with the occupants of the other ‘flat’s. He
obtains signature from every purchaser of flat on a paper declaring that they
would not play their TVs loudly and will not litter the stairs. Purchasers also
promise to pay a monthly contribution for regular maintenance. Rules that they
give their consent to also oblige them to obey the decision of their elected
committee regarding the use of this common fund.
King of M. G. Road
If
M. G. Road were owned by, say, you, as your private property and you had to
live on a fee charged from each vehicle, what would you have done? You would
have tried to reduce traffic congestion so as to attract traffic from the
alternative routes. This would increase your income. Let us extend our
imagination a little further. Suppose you[15]
were an extremely benevolent king of the Mourya era 2300 years ago so that you
used to charge ridiculously low tax. You found gangs of bandits causing great
damage to the farmers. The farmers themselves tried to form
resistance-groups(R. G. party) to resist the bandits but each farmer wanted the
other to contribute more in labour and money so that they could not come to any
united action. You had then to intervene, hike the tax and, with the extra
money in your hand, recruit a strong police force to repel the bandits.“Thus we
finally come to the role of the state and this role superficially appears to be
a very modest one—that of reducing the cost ofbargaining. The reducing of
bargaining costs may not be terribly dignified, but it is a matter of great
practical importance in the world, and the states that perform this function
tend to be very major and important parts of our society.”
“…
Strictly speaking, nothing except bargaining costs prevents me from making an
arrangement with a large number of other people under which we may privately
build a network of roads…, we could anticipate a tremendous amount of
negotiation and bargaining, and no real prospect of a satisfactory outcome.
Once again, if we look at the modern world we find this even more obvious. When
we say that nothing except bargaining costs prevents this type of action, we
immediately realise how extreme these bargaining costs would be. The proposal
that we replace governmental roads with an agreement to build roads privately
is literally absurd. The full reason for its absurdity, however, oddly enough
has only recently been discovered. Activities of this type were traditionally
handled by the government, and there was realization that private persons could
not undertake them was simply that the bargaining costs would be excessive.
There would be no way of assuring agreement within a finite amount of time. The
development of government eliminates this problem. The outstanding
characteristics of government is that we do not have to obtain everyone’s
agreement. Somebody makes a decision and then “pains and penalties” are applied
to people who refuse to carry it out.”[16]This
way you will be fully doing what a king should do[17].
Let
us go again to history. Under the suzerainty of the Guptas, there reigned two
kings Poorandara and Chandrakanta with their janapadas (kingdoms) on a
river, perhaps a tributary of the Tapti. Both wanted to erect a dam on the
river so that in August or September, water floods the fields. As the monsoon
would be over, flood would leave the soil moistened and silted. That would be
enormously advantageous to both the farmers and the herdsmen and certainly to
both the kings.
Let
us read what Marx had to say regarding
their problem, of coming to their consent between them and ultimate solution.
Karl Marx wrote this originally in English.
“… There have been in Asia, generally, from
immemorial times, … the department of
Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions constituted artificial
irrigation by canals and waterworks the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in
Egypt and India, inundations are used for fertilising the soil…; advantage is
taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals.”[18]
Let us suppose
that erection of the dam would cost equivalent of 9,000 silver coins. The
benefit in additional tax earned would be 12000 to Purandara and 24000 to
Chandrakanta. If you were invited to arbitrate, you could ask them to share the
cost as 3000 and 6000. But as you know, the greedy kings continued
arguing. Under such situation we can say that the cost of bargaining between
them was at least 27000, which explains why they did not reach a decision until
the suzerain emperor Gupta asked them to pay 5000 and 9000 respectively and
erected the dam under the authority of the central government, while making
some profit over it. “This prime
necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the Occident,
drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy,
necessitated in the Orient where civilisation was too low and the territorial
extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of
the centralising power of the Government. Hence, an economical function
devolved upon all Asiatic governments the function of providing public works.
This artificial fertilisation of the soil, dependent on a Central Government,
and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains
the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert
that was once brilliantly cultivated.”[19]
Marx felt that the British Raj only “plundered” the
Indian people but failed to play the role of centralising. This centralising is
nothing but what Gordon Tullock calls reducing the cost of bargaining.
Who is afraid of the Control Commission?
The
necessity of reduction of cost of bargaining is not privy to humans. Let us
consider an example between wolves and sheep in a forest inhabited by these
only two species. Wolves often attempted on very little lambs, which had yet to
learn to run fast. But they got little meat from it and remained hungry. On the
other hand, sheep spend considerable time and energy in protecting their wards
from the hungry wolves. They are often unsuccessful and most of the lambs end
their lives in the paws of the wolves.
However,
from the viewpoint of wolves too, this is far from happy circumstances. As most
of the lambs do not live to become large stores of meat, the wolves remain
hungry almost always. Worse, their children also are undernourished. Only a few
adult sheep survive to give birth to few lambs, the wolves again kill most of
which within a short time. Ironically, it is because the wolves kill the little
lambs, wolves experience a perennial food shortage. The mortality due to
malnutrition among the kids of wolves is also quite high, though for a
different reason. The lambs don’t face any starvation. In fact they have food
more than is needed by them and they die because of the wolves and the baby
wolves don’t suffer from any predator but they die because the entrepreneurship
of their mothers is useless because of the lack of sheep. In a nutshell, wolves
themselves create the situation under which they suffer the bereavements.
This
much is the cool fact. Perhaps this is like a nyaya, as known to our
Sanskrit scholars. May be, by this narration you are reminded of some irony of
social situation that happened or happens not among wolves but among us humans
in your neighbourhood or in your place of work.
Now
let us devolve upon fable. Let us assume that all of them can speak. They
severally understand the stupidity of their own action but can hardly stop it.
An individual wolf can of course refrain from killing a lamb or a pregnant
female but it would hardly help the matters in the forest. Some other wolf
would help itself with lambs. Therefore, they convene a meeting of all the
wolves to decide that henceforth the wolves would not take any lamb as prey. In
fact they decided not to prey on any female of the species until she goes past
her reproductive age. The minimum age of the males that could be preyed upon
would be fixed for the present to be 5. However, this would be subject to
annual review and would be increased each year.
There
would be one or two deviant wolves, as remain in every society. May be, their
number is not very large, nevertheless, if they are allowed to disregard the
common interest legislation, other ones would emulate them thus the forest
would squarely return to the earlier law of the jungle, which was too
inefficient in terms of their economics. Therefore, they legislated a punitive
provision. If any other wolf in the forest finds such deviant behaviour, it
will have the right to complain to a control commission, which will inflict
very severe punishment upon it. Perhaps one of its eyes would be blinded. The
members of the control commission will however get a portion of the meat as
remuneration from all other wolves. Please do not think that I am presenting
Rousseau’s theory[20]
in a new cloak. Origin of state will come in the next chapter. This time we are
considering only its utility.
As
the reader must have noted, such constitution would be immensely beneficial for
all the wolves. Really they turn the forest into a large commune of Inner
Mongolia. But another serious problem arises. As the reader must have realised,
the wolves that live on the lambs must be fairly small in number compared to
the number of sheep. It is quite improbable that another wolf would witness a
wrongdoer wolf preying on a lamb.
They
then took a fantastic decision. They decided that not only the wolves but also
the sheep would have the right and duty (along-with the right to protection
from being predated when on this official duty) to inform the control
commission about such illegal activity.
The alternative to becoming Harun-al-Rashid
You
possibly remember that at one point I asked you to assume yourself to be a
benevolent monarch of the Mourya era. Now suppose, once you have hiked the
taxes and created a police force; the police might torture your people, for the
protection of whom you did recruit them. You do not like it. You would not have liked it even if you were a
very greedy monarch. By torturing the people they neither make your reign
stable nor do they fill your coffers. But it becomes difficult for you to learn
about all the tortures by becoming a Harun-al-Rashid. It becomes much easier
for you if you bestow a new thing called right to all the people. Right to
life, property, judicial remedy etc. that is available against police (but not
against the monarch, in case you wish to keep your hands free).
If only they knew to say “if”
Wolves’
fable is only a fable. Why? Only because wolves cannot imagine a situation,
which is not presently available in the real world. If they could imagine that
a lamb spared today would earn a big sheep a few years hence, they could
ultimately derive at the advantage of not killing the lambs.
Rather
let us now consider another possibility. Let the wolves be as stupid and as
ferocious as wolves are. They are ferocious not only against sheep but also
against another member of their own species. Then each of them would avoid
encountering or being encountered by another wolf. This behaviour essentially
means they will divide the territory among themselves. We have all seen how
street dogs maintain their territorial rights. They become more aggressive to
drive out an intruder dog or a human in an unaccustomed robe or a beer with a
strange beggar or a monkey even when escorted by a man with common dress. But
when the dog enters into an uncharted territory, it remains submissive, even if
confronted by another dog apparently possessing much lesser might. Animal
lovers say that our tigers in Sunderban divide territory in this fashion. In
such division of territory with just mutual fear I find natural law[21]
in operation. If you and I own a similar hut each, it is quite possible that my
gain by occupying yours will be less than your loss. And if we are equal also
in might, your resistance will be fiercer than my offensive and it will be very
likely that I would not start the adventure[22].
This is true in a husband wife-two person society[23]
and this is true between two great nations. This is nature’s way for reducing
unnecessary conflicts. We could be tempted to ascribe this to be the basis of
our property right as well. We are, however, to see that though this was an
elementary factor in the right to property there was more in the human right to
property than mere territorial right that even subhuman species win and
protect.
But
let us now return to our wolves. With its territorial right one wolf can then
selectively slaughter the sheep in its territory. With the territorial right to
a certain portion of the forest, the earlier negative externality of other
sheep preying on lambs has been “internalised”[24].
An individual wolf will now enjoy the
benefit of its good deeds or suffer the harm of its bad deeds without any
interference by any other wolf; thus bargaining would become redundant and cost
of bargaining will be zero. However, if it does not realise its own harm in
killing a lamb, it would come to another problem. After all, many men and women
also, misallocate, in your opinion, their resources and that is not the subject
matter of this book.
This
is one essential consequence of the right to property. If somehow property
right is enforced it becomes most likely that the owner will try to improveit.
In a primitive human tribe, one Gurt wants to build a hut. Now, read what Gordon
Tullock has written about his equations. “An individual caveman, perhaps,
wouldthink of putting up a hut in order to obtain shelter from rain. If, once
he put up the hut, anyone else could occupy it, or alternatively anyone could
pull it down because they wanted to use the wood for a fire, it is unlikely
that the individual would invest much in building the hut. If, on the other
hand, the man who builds the hut is given complete control of the hut from that
time on, so that he can prevent any others from occupying it and/or tearing it
down for firewood, then the incentives for producing such a hut are much
greater.
It
might be thought that the institution of property would help the man but injure
everyone else. This is clearly true if we are only considering an existing hut.
The man who built the hut is in a better position if he is “given property
rights,” which means complete disposition over the future of the hut, but
surely his fellow tribesmen would be better off if they were given freedom to
use it themselves. If, however, we consider a general rule giving anyone who
builds a hut the right to retain exclusive control over that hut, then this
institution will substantially benefit everyone.”[25]
A peculiar misconception reigns in the urban mind in this regard. Two decades
ago, I was narrating my tragedy in regard to producing fish in some of the
extremely poor villages. A Marwari businessman (note that; he was no ex-Naxal
intellectual) retorted “but it could not be considered a loss to the society,
it was only the personal loss of the cultivator”.
I
still stick to what I told him in reply. I said, “ Suppose that a 100 gm fish
is stolen from the tank I cultivate. The maximum gain to the thief is 100 gm.
Remember I bought the live fish at three times the cost of a dead fish mainly
due to much greater cost of transporting the live fish than the dead fish. Next
consider that at the time of my next netting (I found that the cost of very
frequent netting was prohibitive) that fish would have been 500 gm. Thus the
society loses this 400 gm. That was not all. I had tried to prove to the
villagers that cultivation of fish even in the tanks of their village was quite
profitable. There was no chance of falsifying in either direction. Each time I
visited the tank together with my workforce and hired implements, all the women
and children of the whole village came to witness whatever we did. They knew
whether I was going to make a profit or loss better than I knew. The money I
could lose in a venture there was a trifle compared to what an urban gentleman
would often lose in a single transaction in the share market. But the villagers
felt quite pity for that and it was definitely not the impression I had wanted
to plant in their minds. If they felt envy, they might have tried to do it
themselves.
Social forestry
Presumably
you are one among the environment enthusiasts, just as I am; and we also want
to promote social forestry. When you find human greed to cause enormous
deforestation, you feel we should stop it.
How
to protect the trees? Well, ban tree felling. My granddad had planted a sagoon,
which I now want to fell and sell. “Halt”. Legislators have determined that
that would cause a lot of damage to the earth—decrease its green cover, thus
increasing soil erosion and hampering recycling of carbon-di-oxide into oxygen.
I have to approach a specified officer, whose permission would relieve the
environment from such damages and at least absolve me from my crime against it.
However
economists tend to recommend an exactly opposite policy. Suppose that on a
particular day a bank discovers it has a cash shortage and is interested in
attracting more deposit and less withdrawal of money. Will it harass the
clients who come to withdraw cash in the hope that they will leave their
premises remaining invested? No, the bank simply helps the clients, who get a
feeling that they could well withdraw cash sometime later with as much ease and
therefore they don’t have to hurry in withdrawing. They then leave as much
money with the bank as they don’t immediately need, for future withdrawal.
You have planted trees in your backyard or in
your wasteland (miles of such wasteland still lie barren in our western
districts); you have protected them and irrigated them during the dry months.
If the society or the state or whoever gives you the right to derive the profit
from your enterprise, not only you will be interested to plant and protect more
trees but your neighbours also will try it themselves.
I
don’t mean to say that just if individuals are sanguine in earning profit from
an enterprise, their effort would rise above the threshold for production of
goods or service. An individual’s effort may often fail to protect the trees
because of a high cost of bargaining. Thus this is a necessary, but not a
sufficient condition. The other conditions will be taken up in the coming
chapters.
Fruit trees of your garden
You
have several grown up trees bearing guava, mango, coconut and papaya in your
garden. Whenever they bear fruit, you get horrified. Herds of young children
from the nearby slum (if it is a town) or from the hamlet of some “lower caste”
(if it is in the country) invade your garden. They pluck as soon as the fruits
settle. You do not dare protest. They will hurl abuses that they have not yet
attained the age of getting at the meaning of.
You wonder why you had planted those trees in
the first place. One noon a clay ball hurled by a little girl hit your elderly
mother. Still you hesitate to cut down all the trees, as suggested by some gentle
neighbours. You wonder because you had no objection to the children to have all
the fruits. Only if they would allow the fruits to come of their full size.
Inland fisheries
This is an extremely common experience
throughout the heartland of West Bengal and precisely why small-scale
horticulture has remained confined to a few small pockets. In a slightly
different form this phenomenon also accounts for the miserable[26]
state of inland fisheries, which I shall now describe in a little general
terms. Ramsagar people have been extremely successfully breeding Indian major
carps for a long time now. These seeds then travel all the way to Andhra
Pradesh and come back after two or three years to be sold in West Bengal. One
cannot dare cultivate fish in the tanks except when it is surrounded by very
friendly families (I mean families, whose friendship could be bought by bribing
them with a part of the catch). The tanks in the open fields outside the
villages receive a good deal of sunshine and are, therefore, experts, say, very
suitable for pisciculture. But fishermen practise the least intensive culture
in them. Suppose that you own a big tank (one to five hectare) with little
protection against theft of fish. If you cultivate fish in it very thinly; say,
you just release Rs 1000 worth of small (of a size that will survive in the
quality of water as also the population of predator fishes in it) fish in it,
stealing will not only remain small in absolute terms but remain small also as
a fraction of the total fish (because thieves will get very little return on
their investment of labour, which must be above a threshold; precisely why pick
pocketing, once quite a lucrative career option in Kolkata has fallen out of
favour now) released in it. Thus a cultivator will find his optimum at a very
low level of investment. The cultivator will often get the tank on
sharecropping rather than for free and that will just push the optimum further
to the left, leaving the basic pattern unchanged. In any case it will be much
under-utilisation of the tank. On the other hand if the cultivator could buy
protection for a fixed (say, 50 %) fraction of the catch, the optimum would
move to much larger investment for much more intensive cultivation of fish.
Land Reform
In
the fields cultivated by sharecroppers, there had been the great problem of
coming to agreement between the landlord and the peasant. Any attempt at any
innovative improvement was suspected by the other to be a ploy for cheating.
The famous land reform by the Left Front government during the early years of
its rule really did away with this constraint, whence the cultivator could, by
winning the sole right to decide, internalise the externality of the choice of
the landlord. This was the reason of
subsequent improvement in the agriculture in West Bengal. You might think that the same argument
could go for tanks as well. For most tanks it is not. Whereas for most parcels
(small parcels, you know) of land, the sharecropper lives nearer than the owner
and thereby exerts better control; for most tanks the person(s), who exercise
authority as or on behalf of the owners live nearer and it is the sharecropper
who comes from outside (another village one to ten kilometer away)
Promoter
If
you are too tired to listen to stories about rural economy, let us get into any
city. Some two decades back, there existed many dilapidated buildings inhabited
by a number of unhappy families. They were either coparceners or were living on
abysmally low rent fixed when Japanese airplanes dropped three bombs on Kolkata
driving away their owners to their country homes. Some of the occupants were
too poor to share any repairing cost. Some of them were too rich to live in
such a house but lived because it was too cheap.
Then
entered the “promoter”. He offered money for leaving. Someone could of course
demand more. The promoter would enter into negotiation with each separately. If
someone were too non-cooperative[27],
he would take strong-arm method. Ultimately the old building will be replaced
by a multi-storeyed building. The promoter really played the role of government
in reducing the cost of bargaining.
Capitalism
“Small
scale production produces capitalism each hour and each minute”-Lenin
Early
economists took small firms as their model to elaborate the price-system. The
essence of capitalism is the extreme ability of the buyer to choose. Suppose
that the inhabitants of one such dilapidated building come to agreement by
divine interference. They sold the whole thing at market rate and, as God does not
seek any share in the profit for Himself, they would divide the whole of the
money among themselves. Each of them will be enormously benefited. A rich
family may go on a tour to Europe with the money and a poor family may buy a
small house at a distance of half an hour’s journey by local train and use the
rest on food and clothing.
If
freedom to choose the exact mix that I shall consume, enhances my utility in
regard to consumption; the same freedom would enhance the efficiency of my
business enterprise. Returning to the agricultural fields of West Bengal, if I
can buy in a competitive market each of the raw materials—seed, fertiliser,
irrigation, security against theft, labour (with implements) each of that
quantity that I would determine to be optimum would be better than if I get
these ingredients in fixed packets.
Suppose
that the land-ceiling act has been rescinded and you own 100 acres of land. You
will possibly buy a power tiller, pump for irrigation and hire guards against
theft. But it could be nothing less than a miracle if you could utilise each of
these exactly at the quantity you have determined to be the optimum. This is my
(and possibly Lenin’s) definition of capitalism. To those, who consider my
definition perverse, I would say that agriculture in Hooghly is more
capitalistic than in Punjab. Abhijit Sen (of Cambridge University) highlighted[28]
the economic inefficiency in the use of tractor in Punjab, Haryana, West Bengal
and other states in India. At this moment I am unable to cite another complete
reference.
I
should not feign that security is available as a piecemeal in our rural market.
And its absence is the biggest source of inefficiency. During the time when
everybody around sows potato, one could definitely gain by planting green vegetables
in Hooghly. Conversely, in Nadia, when everybody grows green vegetable, one
could definitely gain by growing potato. The reason that they do not do so is
that the guarding cost would become prohibitive. That also means that the cost
of bargaining between the cultivator and the thieves is prohibitive.
Joint Family
Many
among us unlike the sahibs do not believe that there is any particular
virtue in tiny families. We rather consider joint families to be economically
wise (the children get playmates, outsiders need not be hired to babysit them
the elderly and the infirm get care) and therefore virtuous. Still the joint
family has become almost extinct.
Men
sometimes whisper to blame their wives; or, keep non-committal by blaming the
“decline of morality and compassion” in general. However if one sees how the
few joint families that still exist manage to run; one sees that these are
really business families. The running of the family business needs a leadership
structure and rules that double to reduce the cost of bargaining among
different nuclear units in these joint families.
Faith in leader
We
Bengalis have enormous faith in our great leaders. Only a decade ago many of us
believed Netaji (born 1897) would return to take the helm of India. This meant
that we implicitly believed that “we do not lack in individual talent or
ability; we lack only the ability to collectivise these individual abilities.”
Netaji further said “ a leader does not fall from the sky-a leader has to be
made out of ourselves.” We have a further skill of passing our own judgments in
the name of quoting our leaders. Netaji possibly never said, “India will need a
dictatorship for twenty years after independence.” Though our trust in
dictatorship shows our ignorance; this also shows that we strongly believe
firstly in our own resources and secondly in our great need for whatever agency
to reduce cost of bargaining among us.
Chapter 3:Right,
Might and Property
Jomi baaper noy, daaper “Right to land does not come from your dad, but
comes from your might” (a rustic proverb of Hooghly) ‘…biologists very
commonly talk about individual plants, animals, cells, organs, etc., in a
language that they are carefully thinking out a strategy and carrying it out.
Of course, this is untrue and is not what the biologists intend. What they mean
is that evolution has selected them for a particular behavior which is what
they would have planned for if they had thought the matter over carefully or
simply attempted to maximize the survival of their genes. The implicit
“anthropomorphizing” here is simply a convenient way of dealing with a
problem…’[29]
The word property stresses upon some
(material or non-material) entity’s such nature as may be depleted by use. If a
bird in a cage receives a daily ration (fixed or varying), the latter is a
property of the bird, which is the sole decider how it would allocate the
ration among different meals. But if there is another similar bird introduced
to the cage, even after doubling the ration, there arises a cost of bargaining.
The fence around it was originally erected by someone interested in protecting
it from the lure of the sky. But when the first bird is alone, the fence around
it doubles to protect it from any other bird claiming a share in the food.
Vaishnavite scriptures have talked a lot about how much we could
take our body made of 5 elements as our property. To start with, as long as
Nature (or Vishnu) is restraining others from using my eyes, and of course,
allowing me to use them, I usually consider my eyes my property.
You
are perhaps thinking that the right that the sheep got by the wolves’
parliament was a most humiliating and even meaningless right. I remind you that
in the hands of Nature, I and you are not getting any better right. We do not
ask, “If we are to die sooner or later, what is our use in having our right to
life?” really the right to life we possess as against Nature is fairly
precarious. On the optimistic side however, our average life expectancy has
been increasing over the past few centuries after we lately discovered we had
some means to increase this average. To that end, we imposed some rules upon
ourselves for better sanitation. Sanitary arrangements nearly eliminated
diseases like tuberculosis in the west Europe and the US long before the
discovery of chemotherapy. In this century also, they are imposing rules to
protect non-smokers from passive smoking. It will not be wrong to say that in
the contradiction against Nature, almost all the members of our species are
forming a coalition[30].
It
is true that between newborn twins, game is Zero-sum as far as one ml less
intake by A results in one ml more for B. Yet we may note that though to the
scale of milk-quantity consumed by A, the utility measured in survival
probability is not a linear function; rather it takes the common form of diminishing
return[31].
The mother should count[32]
her utility in terms of probability of child survival unto the latter’s
reproductive age. Under such consideration, the allocation may become fairly
queer. Cats often give birth to three or four kittens in one litter. It does
not seem that they consider egalitarian distribution to be the most efficient.
Some birds in the Himalayas have been heard to practise the most skewed
distribution. They feed the strongest until it is full and only after it
refuses any further, does the mother start to feed the second strongest.
Needless to say that under such discriminatory discretion, the weaker ones
quickly succumb to starvation.
Primates have however economised by,
usually, a single sperm fertilizing the egg. From primates’ point of view, if
one is to die before maturity, it is the earlier the better and the best being
for the ill-fated 99.99% sperms is to die before fertilizing the egg cell. This
scheme of allocation was enough until bipedality brought in the change discussed
in the fifth chapter. Let us assume that a human mother does not have any twin
children and she gives her breast milk entirely to the last born thus assuming
away any controversy as to distribution among the siblings. Child specialists
say that after attaining an age of 1½ year, a human child becomes a mini adult
as far as its diet is concerned. But you find that even 4 or 5 years later, it
remains far from a viable entity by itself. It would be naïve to think that
this peculiarity of human children has arisen after civilisation. At least
100,000 year ago we became used to remain dependent upon our mothers much after
getting accustomed to solid food.
But, when mother’s care started to go unto
a long time after weaning, the conflicts regarding getting food, care and
pampering that we had among us siblings could now invite parental intervention.
The mother, who gives food and has the power of withholding, could now divide
rights over food or toys as she pleases. Such discretion is bound to show some
prejudices—the parents may have their own ideas regarding what should be the
‘proper’ distribution; nevertheless that would work for reducing cost of
bargaining. As we found earlier, the making and enforcement of rules go to the
very essence of continuous existence of any collective. If a mother could
allocate food and toys among her children, children could be restrained from
fighting among themselves and conserve energy to fight the enemies of the
family[33].
A
point may however be noted here. After the parents have allotted property right
to several toys among their children according as what they think to be the
most efficient allocation, children however do not get their right to trade
immediately. Parents would not want their allocation to change by such trade.
When mid-day meal is given away among pupils, the donors require them to eat
it—not that they feed their cattle with it.
Experiments by Nature
Referring to
Tullock’s reference to anthropomorphism again we find that if economics is
defined to be the science of efficient allocation of scarce resources, subhuman
societies obey economics in their own way. Mother Nature performs random
experiment with them and the most efficient arrangement survives to actively
(as was extremely so in the case of our ancestors) or passively (say, in the
case of the plants or trees) exterminate the less efficient arrangement(s). The
mechanisms of all the living organisms have been created by such experiments.
It definitely took a lot of such trial and error by nature to give the
predatory fish Eel the ability to generate electricity. What it does could be
envied as a fantastic technological achievement. Eel hydrolyses water it lives
in and the oxygen that comes out partly dissolves in its surrounding water. The
water Eel lives in is somewhat deplete in oxygen due to bio decomposition of
leaves that litters it, therefore, when other fishes find a gradient of
dissolved oxygen, they move up along the gradient and end up in Eel’s stomach.
Now think, though Eel does all these actions, it does not know anything about
Faraday’s laws or about electron. Suppose it is traversing a region full of
only inedible fishes. The production of oxygen at that region by using up its
scarce ingredients for producing electricity is meaningless at that moment. But
Eel cannot stop that. Eel cannot change its course of action from an
inefficient to efficient economics but that does not mean that it does not
suffer from the problem or does not enjoy the benefit that economics pose. One
of the morals that this story provides is that we humans also suffer from or
enjoy the benefit of many factors quite unknowingly. When I know I have some
problem with my tooth, I go to my dentist, who must be knowing better than I
but then he also does not know many things about my tooth, precisely because
those things have not still been discovered.
Conditioned
Reflex
Suppose you are training your pet dog
to kick a ball. If you abhor having a dog as your pet, think that you are
redoing an experiment done by Pavlov. You give it its favourite food as soon as
it becomes successful in kicking the ball. But it might learn very different
thing. You did not notice that it was wagging its tail. It may have learnt that
your favour came because it wagged its tail. You can favour it when it wagged
and also when it did not wag its tail, when ever it kicked the ball.
I hope that in this way, you will be
successful in training a dog. Because the associative area in a dog’s brain is
enough developed to analyse the various stimuli and identify the correct one.
Otherwise, how do the dog-trainers retain their job? But I can tell you that
you will not succeed in training a scorpion in this manner. You explain that
the scorpion is much less intelligent than a dog and you are correct. But you
have seen that many living beings with fairly little intelligence can
accomplish many feats. The little tailorbirds (sylviidae) builds astonishingly
beautiful nests. The pity is that the tailorbird can not build a
different sort of nest even if the situation demands so. It can not “adapt” to
the changing circumstances. It can not learn that the dog can.
The pattern of nest of the tailorbird is
imprinted in its DNA. Its ability to learn new reflexes is extremely limited.
The higher mammals like dog have their quota of some inborn reflexes but in
addition to inheriting several reflexes they also inherit the ability to form
new associations (between new stimuli and reflexes) in the so-called Broca’s
area in their brain. One million years ago there was no rubber ball or no body
favoured the ancestors of your dog with their favourite food for doing the
great task of kicking anything that resembled a rubber ball in shape and
weight. Nevertheless, the dog’s brain developed the ability to make the association
with a stimulus that it did not know.
You remember that Pavlov measured the
reflex in terms of salivation that flows through a thin tube fitted into dog’s
mouth to a thin measuring cylinder. But salivation is not the only secretion
that results from a stimulus like food; though only that could perhaps be
measured with the rudimentary apparatus that Pavlov used. Other
gastrointestinal secretions result at the sight of food and presumably these
follow more or less the same pattern that Pavlov discovered the salivation to
follow.
The secretion in the sex glands may also be subject to conditioning. A
young husband may have arousal (with some physical associates) at the sight of
his wife. Some conditioning may also
work in the opposite way. At the time of a disease, the secretions from our sex
glands reduce. That is to say, there may be conditioned inhibition. Our body
preserves its scarce resources for the most urgent purpose of fighting the
disease because if we succumb to it, hardly will our ability for sex help us in
our reproductive success.
For male orangutans, growing big and very strong is a way of scaring the
other male competitors away from accessing the females. Their females also
have, in a way, grown preference for a big husband with “manly” cheek flanges.
Evolution has thus selected big males so that the average male orangutan has
grown to twice the size of a female. Compared to the other primates, our men
are only little larger in size than our women. Obviously, for our two-legged
male ancestors, individual strength and body size was not very important for
gaining access to their females. What was the most important factor is
postponed to a later chapter.
However, even for all male orangutans, growing big was not the best
option for reproductive success for all ages. If a male orangutan is the only
male around in the forest, it will quickly grow big and also grow cheek
flanges. But if a fully mature orangutan is nearby, such strategy will be
imprudent. At such an early age he will not be able to win a fight against a
fully mature orangutan. It will be his best bet to camouflage himself as a kid.
He can not certainly think in terms of cause and effect but Nature has done the
planning for him. For the adolescent male orangutans, the long calls as also
the distinctive odour of a fully mature orangutan act as the inhibitor of the
sex hormones that give rise to secondary sexual characteristics. This
inhibition saves them from the unnecessary hazard of inviting the wrath of the fully
mature dominant male, even if that also means its less appeal to the
females. You may also note that even
for us humans, research has unearthed an elaborate mechanism in hind (ancient)
part of brain for the purpose of bringing back the male genital in its limpid
state, which is needed for mitigating the aggression from other males rather
than for arousing a woman.
Could it be possible for an orangutan to
think?
An
orangutan female makes a special loud sound, known as rape grunt, only when it
is subject to forcible copulation. Now if it can withhold the sound
nevertheless, creating the specific neural electrochemical current associated
to this rape grunt in its brain, this current is her mental symbol for being
threatened with rape. To that extent she must be considered to be able to
think.
Suppose
that a cat has been able to make a different sound “wah” only when a dangerous
looking dog confronts her kittens. If the kittens also learn to make this
sound, that becomes their mental symbol. They can then “think” that if “wah”
then we must (well the reflex part of getting up a tree should directly be
associated to this mental symbol of the stimulus, until the mental symbol for
this reflex is also created).
Can
the cat distinguish this “wah” from its usual “miao”? Pity, it can’t. If it
could, it could think symbolically regarding that particular exigency.
If
you took me as your subject instead of a dog and elaborated a conditioned
reflex in me that I salivate on your ringing of a bell; subsequently, you could,
instead of ringing the bell, just utter “I’m ringing the bell” and observe the
same reflex. That is because a human being can be stimulated by this “second
signalling system”. Our analytical ability is far greater than that of a dog.
We can distinguish between “ringing” and “clinging”. How this came to happen
will be taken up in the sixth chapter.
When
my dentist as I waited seated me on the chair and sterilises her instruments
for extracting my tooth, it could be natural from the instincts I inherited
from my ape ancestors to get up and steal out of her chamber. I don’t do that
because I can recreate the toothache (that made my previous night horrible)
from the mental symbol “toothache” in my brain and can associate relief from
its recurrence to inhibiting my inborn reflex of running away from the dentist.
In
somewhat very generalized language, we may argue that all the living beings
exchange cause for the effect. A lion barters the labour of chasing the prey
with the satisfaction of eating. The chasing is instinctive. In human parlance,
this may be related to what is the first grade morality in Kohlberg’s language.
In the negative sense, this gives rise to avoiding doing something that
resulted in pain. Children first learn to avoid doing what arouses punishment
from elders. What is privy to humans is bargaining. And we can do that, solely
because we can imagine the result of the sacrifice we agree to make and the
utility we hope to receive against it.
Requirement of additional traits needed for bargaining has caused a two
percent difference among our DNA from chimpanzees.
Though,
even today, many of the human forays into the unknown are also random in
nature, in the history of living organisms, it was only the humans that could
imagine. Human beings could create the world in their imagination with “if”[34]
logic. Human beings could recreate their experience of hunting a big animal in
their cave mural. They could imagine the result of forming a coalition with
another man. Only the humans having what Pavlov called “second signalling
system”, the language, could simulate the experiment in thought, instead of
doing it on the real world. Thus humans could save upon the cost of enormous
negative[35] results
that Nature had to incur in its random experiments. I do not at all mean that
all negative results could be avoided by careful planning. However all human
achievements were caused by our ability to avoid some and where we could not,
by arranging it so that it might be less negative. I should perhaps keep also
it in record that I have seen random experiments in prestigious laboratories
and extremely researched and well analysed acceptance of calculated risk by
illiterate fruit vendors. The level of such logical imagination of course does
not always remain the same.
Chapter 4:Why is
the cost of bargaining so high?
Could we become as civilised as Flanders or Italy?
We
should, before proceeding any further, investigate why and how cost of
bargaining becomes large, that is to say, why people cannot sort out their own
problems themselves even though everybody knows that such solution would be
beneficial to both or all of them. Thus we find that though the solution of our
conflicts or the organization for our collective benefit very often is just
impossible without the coercive interference by rules promulgated by the state,
it does not always bring about the best solution. Laissez-faire economists have
all along been arguing for smaller government and lesser controls. Unlike[36]
Marxists of India, Marx himself was unhappy about the growth of public power.
Apparently his principal mistake was he thought that cost of bargaining could
be prohibitive only in India and not in Flanders, Italy or anywhere in the
western world. His second mistake was he could not foretell that in order to
protect capitalism; a capitalist state might compel the capitalist houses to
cooperate in order that recession might be stalled that is to say what the West
European states did after WW II were in a way reducing the cost of bargaining
among their capitalist industrial houses to save capitalism.
Dumb negotiation
We
still hear that some ancient houses, human families live peaceably with bastu(resident)
snakes. These people insist on that if one does not disturb the snakes, snakes
also would not disturb one. What these people say, I am sure, they honestly
believe in. but I feel uncomfortable regarding this truce because the snakes do
not speak out what they believe.
Poets
can often see the other side better than we commoners. In Bengali poetry, you
probably have read a piece in which a venomous snake once came out of its hole
to make truce with man. Because it could understand that it was needless for
snakes to kill man, as also it was needless for a man to kill snake. However
men could not understand its language and slaughtered it. Thus we can start
with a rule like: Where either cannot communicate or the other cannot
understand the communication, negotiation cannot take place and a contradiction
must remain antagonistic.
In
prehistoric times, when there was no state, moreover, before the men learnt to
speak, was everybody fighting all others?
Therefore,
in our inquiry into having negotiated solution to conflicts, let us consider,
now, two tribes of prehistoric era. These tribes might be inhabitants of, say,
two sides of a line of minor hills; which, for centuries, neither of them
ventured to cross to the other side. The reality was that for either tribe A, a
confrontation with B, victory could gain them little but an equally probable
defeat could cause extinction. Tribe A had no direct means to ascertain the
behaviour of tribe B. But perhaps they regarded hill god was saving them from
the demons that the members of tribe B were. Even if it was an imperfect
knowledge, it resulted in fairly correct prediction that if they did not cross
the line tribe B would also not cross it. This was in the way of natural law in
operation.
Fall back upon rules, but
negotiation might be better
While
showering praises on rules, I should not forget often we prefer to use another
method of coming to consent that is by discussion - or bargaining. Which fish
you buy in the bazaar and how much, depend on its price, which the sellers also
cannot increase or decrease at their sweet will because how much money they
earn also depends upon the per kg price they charge from you. It is less if the
price the seller charges is too high and also if too low. We might have some
problem in abiding by the rules. In some cases both parties may benefit themselves
by colluding between themselves to defeat the provision or even the purpose of
the law,. Some of the years, potato
price skyrockets and in November, West Bengal Government declares it would fix
the maximum price. None takes this seriously. Suppose I am the sole producer of
potato and you are the sole buyer. Will you like Chhaya Ghosh to come between
us? If she fixes Rs 8 a kilo, I shall try to dump as much as possible but you
will not relish so much coughing out so much money. If she fixes Rs 2, I shall
produce so little that you will continuously poke me for producing more. Both
ways it would be unnecessary trouble for both of us and we will possibly
conspire to transact at a mutually bargained price.
What is money?
It
is the money matter in which the advantage of bargaining vis-à-vis rules is
most easily understood. This is because money is a one-dimensional quantity, so
to say, a scalar, it can simply be counted—two is greater than one and 102 is
better than 101. With the introduction of money, the bargaining has become
enormously easy. We may say that in cases we can bargain through the
money-terms, cost of bargaining is likely to be lower. Suppose I have gone to a
very primitive weekly market, where use of money is not yet in vogue. I have
gone there with a few lambs, which I aim to exchange for some cereal plus some
other necessities. You will perhaps be able to imagine how much bargaining I
shall have to do, though at the end, hopefully, if the market is sufficiently
large, I shall get the same amount of cereal and of the other things[37],
as I might obtain in the same bazaar, in case I could sale the lambs for money
and buy the things I need with the sale-proceed. The use of money saves much
labour spent by me and by others, whom I transacted with. In exchange of goods, I shall have to ponder a
lot whether I should exchange a particular lamb for a basket with 20 kg of rice
plus 10 kg of potato or for a basket containing 15 kg of rice plus 20 kg of
potato.
An extended definition for transaction
What
is transaction any way? Transaction is necessarily done by parties both of whom
benefit by the transaction. If I voluntarily exchange one lamb with a specified
bag of maize, it must be that I value that bag of maize more than the lamb and
the person with whom I have transacted must have valued the lamb more than the
bag of maize. When a bargaining is successful so that a transaction has been
done, both parties must have gained. But remember either of us could not do it
if the other lacked the skill of imagining in terms of “if”. The logic in our
use has been derived from thinking in terms of transaction through money.
Nevertheless, wherever I change the course of action or inaction (that I would
otherwise prefer) in view of some specified change by you in your action or
inaction; we shall take freedom to call it a transaction and shall extend our
line of argument to it.
The
only assumption is, however, a bit overzealous. We assume that I know the full
significance (to me) of the demand I am making from you. And vice-versa.
If
you thought that only where money matters are concerned, bargaining is better,
follow the following example. When I found another cyclist coming to me, going
to our respective left sides was a means to avoid collision but it might not be
the best means. Suppose what was coming was not a cycle but a car and to its
left it faced a hump on the road that could cause much damage to it and to my
left there was a thick layer of sand, which posed pretty danger to me of being
toppled. We both could gain by breaking the rules, but remember—both must have
reached the understanding. In case, I went to my right side I could avoid the
sand layer and the car sticking to its left side could run over me. If the car
went to its right side, it could avoid the risk of being damaged by the hump
but if I was simultaneously negotiating my way through my legitimate left side,
it could have killed me, but my neighbourhood brethren would have then caused
more damage to the car and its driver than the hump could do. It could be best
if we both could sort out the alternatives and reached a decision but we did
not have the time for that.
Quarrel
It is good to start with a quarrel—Bengali proverb
By
quarrelling at the start you get to know other’s utility-function, especially
his limits. Later on you can always apologize saying that it was all because
you did not then know how great a man he was. Educated people also evince
finesse when they quarrel. That makes the formal speeches often quite stereotyped
and people don’t listen to because already they know what they would hear.
The most illuminating thing is the quarrel
among illiterate old ladies. I have often felt this offers the largest
opportunity of learning language to their grandchildren. During quarrel none
speaks in a low voice and each tries to communicate fully and as far as their
ability permits, uses the language that the hearer understands.
They
hurl the most impossible abuses on the other. Gentlemen try to shield their own
children from listening to these—I fail to feel that the caution helps very
much.
When it comes to internecine bargaining, we
find that each nation hires some of its very meritorious people, in its Foreign
Service. This finding seems to suggest that there must be intricate methods of
using language in bargaining so as to make it successful in reducing conflict
to avoid possible war. Avoidance of war is definitely high on the priority of
the leaders of the most (though unfortunately not all) states.
Every society prizes its members with the
best bargaining ability with the highest income. They become Prime Minister,
managing director or party-secretary. Others languish as professors,
accountants etc. I think language was invented for bargaining.
Non-selfish infliction of injury
“A
wise enemy is better than a stupid friend.”
A stupid will not get my utility functions and my limits. He will not
often understand his own equations too. He will go on bargaining on unrealistic
premises. On the other hand, a wise enemy may inflict injury for his own
benefit; as long as I understand his equations to some extent (that would
require that also I should be somewhat wise) I can try to avoid such injury.
But a stupid would be quite unpredictable, even if he is my friend, he might
inflict such injury that would not benefit even him.
Not
only a man, but also any animal continuously goes on estimating. If on a narrow
lane I confront a stray dog, I estimate if it could bite me. If I determine it
could, I would keep it as far as possible. But it is also estimating me. If I
were carrying a pole on my shoulder it would not be very scared but if I were
wielding it and more, if I am moving it violently, the dog would rather avoid proximity
with me and would play safe. Dog’s brain is much less developed than of mine.
It is capable, nevertheless, to make that much distinction. One of the earliest
(in those good old days when the city could boast of robust and beautiful
bullocks roaming in the streets) discoveries in my life was that country cows
were more submissive than Kolkata cows. Later on I understood the reason was
that they had discovered that the Homo sapiens samples in the countryside were
bolder than the Homo sapiens samples in the city.
When
one member of Homo sapiens estimates another member, one judges the complexion[38],
the size of the eye, the shape of the nose, the width of the lips, the
smoothness of the cheek and certainly the height. Indian subcontinent having
the greatest (non-African) racial intermingling, the parallel to which you will
find nowhere else in the world, you find all specifications, readily.
I
had always wondered why all should go for a particular specification. If one
child is verily attached to its dark complexioned and extremely affectionate
father, why, after growing up, should the adult person consider fair complexion
to be beautiful and not the reverse? Then, in addition to the conditioned
(learnt) reflexes and often in superseding to them, people heed to some
unconditioned (instinctive) reflex. This is not the only occasion. When we
cannot express some conditioned reflex or some unconditioned one in language
(one of the reason being the said dominant reflex stays for too little time
before being suppressed by conditioned inhibition) and yet it out powers some
unsuppressed (and therefore sustained and capable of being expressed in
language) reflex, they call it subconscious mind. But what is the evolutionary
justification for considering fair to be better?
When
I encounter a stranger, I presume that he is likely to oblige me if he is
personally satisfied with his life recently. Satisfaction with one’s life
somewhat brightens up the skin in a matter of days. Extreme fatigue or
frustration darkens one’s skin in a matter of even hours. Likewise, eyes get
wide open in delight, and he is less likely to harm me (though we have all seen
our beloved Gabbar to commit murder while laughing but that is why he was so
special)
As
children, we all used to look upward to look at parent’s face. I don’t know why
sharp nose is associated to determination. However we definitely want to deal
with a man, who keeps his promises. It is however my personal prejudice that
male beauty was way above in importance than female beauty in human evolution[39].
However, as we deal with a specific person for some time, conditioned reflexes
become dominating.
In
choosing the path of the least conflict, civilised human behaviour is often not
very different from animal, say, bovine behaviour. In a crowded train, for
example, the gates remaining jammed by people seeking fresh air, passengers,
while getting down, avoid the side guarded by stout men and choose the side
manned by the weaker souls, who can be pushed down to the platform. The dinner
rule obeyed in lion families and other subhuman societies prove that some
conflict reducing rules are instinctive. If the rules were such that the cubs
should have the first access to food, you could say that this was evolution’s
mechanism to enhance the transmission of the species. The rules are however not
that. Infantile mortality for lack of nutrition is quite high in lion families.
The right to first access to goes to the adult male member, who needs it, the
least. Animals
have to learn some social science as, so to say, whom to fear and how much.
Their learning of mechanics or of gravitation is rather (as much as you will
agree to) conscious. They not only practise to use them but also learn from
their mothers and also from their experience that they will have to obey the
rules of the natural sciences. Even in a primitive human tribe, an individual
could of course incur some extra cost by affording some extra labour in
addition to the labour requisitioned by the clan to hunt some smaller animal
for himself. And for different individuals there must be different optima in
allocation of time and risk between taking extra prey and fighting against
others for a larger chunk in the common pool. In our common experience with
street dogs or cats, we find that once they determine the optimum, they do not
enter into futile fight with a stronger contender. At a given situation, say A
is stronger than B, B is stronger than C and so on. Under such spectrum of
comparative coercive capability, the chief A came as someone with
a comparative advantage in violence conquering his neighbours for the specific
purpose of taxing them.
Pedestrian intimidation
When
parties to a conflict can communicate between them, another factor however
becomes very important. For either party to a negotiation, there is often
little incentive for communicating one’s true intention. When a car faces a
pedestrian in a narrow lane, it does not immediately take its left side—rather
it moves straight towards him, emitting a mock threatening that it would run
over him. Only when the man comes very near, does the car move to its left
side. If the car, on the other hand, clung to left immediately on seeing the
man, the man would walk along the middle or the best part of the lane, leaving
very little space for the car. Several animals or even inferior species
involuntarily show them off as dangerous being to thwart adversaries. Do you
recall the jackal painted blue or the khokkos that declared the demons
to be its favourite food?
Wilful false representation:
When
you are looking for a little piece of land for building your dream home, it is
nothing unusual for a prospective seller to demand a fabulous price for it.
Rather if they demand a small price, you will suspect that the land might have
some defect in title.
What
is interesting is that after a purchase is complete, both the seller and the
buyer have profit in declaring a much larger price than at which the deal was
really concluded. The sellers may have other adjoining plots that they will
subsequently sell. And the buyer also may have faint idea of selling the house
in some future time. Exaggeration serves the purpose of both. Only when there
exists real fear of harassment in the hands of the taxman, either or both will
act otherwise.
In the second chapter, I promised I would
explain why cost of bargaining is positive even if externality is positive. In
an extreme case, suppose, in a two person society, each gains Rs 100 by a total
expenditure of Rs 50, provided of course, both must give consent. Even then if
one agrees to spend the Rs 50 alone, the other may want further Rs 49 for the
latter’s mere consent. The latter may pose to be harmed and argue that still
the former would gain Re 1.
If
you allow some personal experiences to be shared, I shall tell a tale. Once I
found two old men engaged in chitchat. Both were retired from job and quite
poor. Nevertheless, pride prevented plain speak. The more wretched of them told
he wanted to take shelter in the other’s home. The other believed it was humour
mixed with humility. Incidentally I knew it was nothing but the very truth.
Often a person knows he won’t be believed and he may speak the truth so that
the false will be communicated. Lie detection has so long been a so much
necessity to man but technology has all along failed us.
They
say, technology has revolutionised information, but that goes only to what I
want to share and you want to believe. If I want to hide or if you won’t
believe, what solution does technology have?
Shall
I remind you the 1991’s Moscow episode, which kept the world at tenterhooks for
several days? Remember Yenanyev’s State Committee for State of Emergency? They
said Gorbachev was being retired because of “ ill health”—they wanted the world
to believe that the CPSU had duly substituted Gorbachev by Yananyev; because
prior to that, Bulganin or Khrushchev or
Brezhnev had been ousted using this terminology. They wanted to hide the
fact that going even by the party-constitution, Gorbachev was not duly sacked.
Technology
is only information-deep. This you have experience while surfing on Internet.
You click your mouse on something you want to know more about. But the screen
will be showing the same thing again and again. You can know only what they
want you to know and have, therefore, uploaded.
Or on entering Howrah station, you want to
know which platform your train would start from. But in the jungle of
information regarding where you stay while at Delhi or which cold drink you
should quench your thirst with, or that you must inform the GRP/RPF if you find
any SUSPECIOUS LOOKING OBJECT( that will essentially depend upon how suspicious
you are. I never suspect that a GRP/RPF man will ever take into his cognisance
anything, which he suspects he could get some bribe from) you do not find the
list of which train would start from which platform. Interestingly when nobody
heard the name of information revolution, in the non-electronic 1970’s you
could get this information right walking up the stairs from the subway.
Let
us have a pleasant break by thinking about your wife. Scriptures tell us that
the few exceptions, where lying is not a sin include praising one’s wife’s
beauty. You may please her by telling her that she is more beautiful than Mrs.
Nene. You may praise your colleague as the best scientist (or the best engineer
or anything) in India. They may offer similar compliments in return. Of course,
we never do that as crudely. That means we always do this in a fairly subtle
manner.
As
one can always convey the wrong intention, mistrust is also quite natural
corollary. Let me remind you that in the local train that night, you did not
ask your lonely co-passenger his destination so as to get an idea about his
intention. Whenever you find a large number of persons, you presume that social
rules would be obeyed by them but when you face any one of them alone, you are
not so sure that the single person would obey the same rules, unless of course,
you are sufficiently powerful, to make that person obey the social rules.
However if you are too powerful, the problem might be the other way round. In
the lonely compartment, I may suppose, both the strangers could feel safe, in
case, each of them flaunted an awe-inspiring dagger, on his robes. However neither
could take a nap under such cohabitation.
Mistrust
may go both ways. When my boss shouts he would retrench me from my job, I may
suppose he would not actually go that far. Bertrand Russell somewhere said that
poor people get cheated more by mistrusting where they should trust than by
trusting where they should not.
As the chapter name suggests, I shall talk about man
here. But before that, let us see what evolution means.
Manu’s Law
Let
us again allow some intelligence, not to all, but only to the parliamentarians
among wolves. They then legislate what Manu gave to the Hindu men. Each male
wolf is allowed to marry as many wives as he can afford to but with
puritanically enforced duty to give each wife and her children a decent
maintenance. Wolves being a tough lot, their Hindu leviathan was also tough.
Any dereliction of this duty is punished with high hand.
Suppose
a wolf, Sanadam by name, dislikes killing lambs perhaps because of piety or
perhaps because he dislikes the taste. His territory gets full of so much sheep
that it is enough for him to kill only very old infirm (they say that old sheep
taste good) ones and his children would not die of starvation. As they have
somewhat inherited their father’s taste, they would also carry on their
father’s practice; the males among them would marry more wives and soon (say,
after a thousand generations) the forest (read the world) would be inhabited by
only those wolves, who devolve from Sanadam, from their father’s side.
As
our ancestors in the genus Australopithecine[40],
started to walk on two legs, instead of four, this bipedality for the first
time in the history of primates, brought forth two important characteristics. One,
mothers could now carry their infant children to safety with their two hands.
This was less strenuous, an important advantage in terms of better child
survival. With this factor, a new higher static population was to be reached, a
new better equilibrium. “Other conditions remaining the same,”(subsequently our
ancestors themselves continued changing the “other conditions”, study of the
effect of which will be the theme of the succeeding chapters) the new
equilibrium is usually imposed by the limiting factor (in Marxian terminology,
we say, the principal contradiction was between scarcity of a certain resource
and the of ability of the species) of resources, often food but sometimes
territory or something else. One disadvantage was however just a corollary of
this advantage. Evolution put no more emphasis upon a child getting quick
maturity. That is to say, survival probability of a child born to our
ancestors, say, ten million years ago, depended to a great extent upon how
quickly it could become self-dependent, but bipedality could erase that factor
to some extent. Another advantage came in the form of being able to see up to
long distance in human standing position and this made our ancestors able to
venture into thinly vegetated terrain.
Lately,
some brilliant experiments have been done to identify which among the various
hypotheses (foraging, carrying, vigilance by being able to see to a long
distance, display, and thermo-regulation) makes a chimpanzee of these days to
try to walk on two legs. Though the results reported seem to corroborate the
foregoing paragraph; it should be emphasised that not what the chimpanzee
likes, but what gave some of their cousins the “reproductive success” is
important.
Whether
we gained or lost as a result of our ancestors’ “decision” to walk on two legs
was not immediately apparent. Two-legged locomotion was new and brought new
problems and that was in an extremely crucial matter. For the mothers of our
biped ancestors, the birth canal through which a baby must pass from uterus to
the outside world became twisted and this caused a problem during labour.
Assistance during delivery became essential and it became risky for our female
ancestors to give birth to their children while alone. This meant our females
had to seek and give assistance during childbirth. They could not live alone.
Presumably, they started to live with their mothers and sisters and their
children. The complication did not end there and human motherhood continued to
be going along with huge pain and risk. Children got used to being nurtured by
a group of motherly females. After attaining puberty, a male child could leave
them in search of female partner for sex.
There
were so many other disadvantages. As Ian Tattersal writes in April 02 issue of
Natural History, “As a result of our upright, bipedal posture, we suffer a huge
catalog of woes, including slipped disks, fallen arches, wrenched knees,
hernias and aching necks. No engineer, given the opportunity to design human
beings from the ground up, would ever dream of confecting jury-rigged body plan
such as ours.”
Because
of all those disadvantages, two-legged locomotion must have been rejected by
evolution, if it did not provide with enough advantage in terms of reproductive
success. Throughout the last 25000 years humans know what advantages they have
gained from it. But these recent advantages could not be the reason for us
being selected by evolution at the time we started to walk on two legs 6 or 5
or 3 myr ago.
Two,
wielding and manipulating sticks needed better coordination of different
sensory organs. This factor got man started in the path of a chain of changes
and self-generating improvement, so that at the end of the day, we find now
that the associative activities take much greater area as a fraction of total
cortex in human brain. Condition reflex takes place in all animals but its
complexity in human brain is unmatched. The inborn intellectual potential
depends upon better association among the 1.5 million neurons in human cerebral
cortex of about 2000 sq. cm, which with biological advancement could not fit
into the skull, contracted forming fissures and further convolutions of the
cerebrum and came to frontal lobe. This frontal lobe accounts for 29% area in
human brain, compared to 16% in monkey brain and 3% in a cat’s brain.
Back
to those starting days; you find whereas other animals fought among them or
with other species mainly with the help of their bodily might, our particular
species after branching out from chimpanzees, concentrated upon intelligence
and group action based on intelligence. Only 2,000,000 years (2 myr) ago, our
ancestors had a brain size of 600ml, but for us the average size is 1,450ml.
It
appears that we devolved from a particular group of anthropoid apes that
specialised in taking smaller animals as prey with the help of their hands. We
shall see that at that moment a series of processes started in each step of
which quantitative improvement crossed a threshold so that qualitative change[41]
could take place. Our hand became more and more able to make intricate
manoeuvres, so that we started to wield stick.
We
have been using sticks for a much longer period than stone-axes. In fact it is
the ability to manoeuvre sticks that gave our fingers such finesse. Sticks
being biodegradable do not offer much help in writing our prehistory. May be,
stone axes were used principally to cut and sharpen sticks for the last few
lakhs of years (sticks were also used to drill stone rather recently by modern
man).
Freud
was correct in finding human fascination for sticks but his interpretation was
wrong. Our children of both genders derive immense pleasure and confidence from
holding sticks in their hands. May be that the association of sticks to
coercive ability and hence power has become encoded into our DNA, has thus
become an unconditioned reflex (instinct).
When
manipulation of stick (and stone axe much later) became principal implements
for survival for our ancestors, evolution did no more put emphasis upon bodily
might, that is to say physical strength became secondary to determine which
individual would survive longer and would produce more offspring. Ability to
manipulate stick became primary. Sticks have remained the symbol of authority
for our species for quite a long time.
It
would be very unpopular to forward a hypothesis that we devolved from a
carnivorous subgroup (of anthropoid apes), which had the peculiar sexual
behaviour. Consent was often subject to social decision rather than a personal
preference so much so you might feel that liking of the individual was
superfluous to them. Much earlier, perhaps more than two crore years (20 myr)
ago, the elimination of the tail, secondly the front entry and thirdly
our erect posture (which we ourselves take pride in claiming it to be upright
and graceful) give a clue that social decision rather than union by personal
decision set the dominant direction of our procreation, whenever our ancestors
approached our present characteristics that have made us this much peculiar in
the animal kingdom, during the first several millions of years of our
existence.
But when man could manipulate the stick and much later
the stone axes, there was no reason why these they would reserve for killing
only other species. Man could kill man, loot his wife and cannibalise him. This
became a more brutish world than before. Man could become just extinct by
mutual cannibalisation. Fortunately, since much before all these our ancestors
had been organised in tribal groups[42],
our brutality or mercy was under the control of the clan and the tribe that
we belonged to. A few years back, a colleague wondered, “If man is selfish by
nature, how come, in a bank counter, they always pay the cash after receiving
the cheque. The clerk could deny having received the cheque.” No, they could
not. An individual clerk belongs to the tribe of staff-members, who will not
allow such rupture of confidence with the customers. Individuals can definitely
do that where they are less subject to such social scrutiny.
Obedience to
leadership became an important constituent of our psyche because disobedience
and the resulting anarchy would make both the individual and the group
non-viable. Those disobedient individuals had to be controlled by the
leadership; alternatively they could themselves become the leaders. If the
members continue to go onto different directions all along, such a group is
bound to get exterminated by groups having greater cohesion.
Violence market-some theoretical exercise
For a
market under perfect competition, we are choosing a large rural weekly market
disregarding all other commodities; we are considering only the market of rice.
Assume that the sellers and buyers are, small people with little power to
dominate each other and the only factor influencing their decisions of selling
or buying is the price. Huge interaction among the potential buyers and sellers
is going on. Everybody is trying to get at least a little benefit by bargaining
that is hardly producing any result. Rice is not highly perishable commodity
and any seller is not in a hurry to dispose off stock. Under such a situation,
rice is selling between, say, Rs 7 and Rs 10 per kilo according to quality.
Buyers are also quite able to distinguish between fine rice and coarse. Nobody
can sell any amount of rice for a little higher price than that is offered in
the market. The sellers, who stick to a price of Rs 8.50 for their rice, the
quality of which fetches Rs 8 in the market will end the day without selling
anything.
Now we
consider a society under a perfect anarchy, and see how it compares with the
rice market. Members of this society are, assumed to be, also eager to get
rice, but not for money. If you cannot visualise this society, I would suggest
you to recall what you read in the description of famine in the starting pages
of Bankim Chandra’s Anandamath. I would then suggest to you to consider
this society to be also a market, though the terms are not cash. Threat of
murder is the usual bill of exchange instead of money. People’s ability to
exert violence at a certain time is limited and they will exert violence on
somebody who will yield the maximum amount of rice. Thus they will not coerce
the very impoverished. However, as you will readily recognise that such a situation
cannot rule the rice market over a number of years together. If such a climate
prevailed over the rice market, say, if it spilled over from 1770 to 1771 and
1772, people would have to weigh the options of snatching rice against
producing it and cost of production would have risen a lot because producers
had to find their optima of a division of their labour between producing and
guarding the rice against snatching. Rice would have become much costlier and
rather a luxury item. Obviously, such a society could not maintain the
population even after one third died of starvation in 1770-71. A further 90%
had had to die. You would immediately say that such a predicament would most
affect the majority peasants; they would unite and decide to protect each other’s
paddy by mutual help against snatchers. To that point we shall come after we
scan the situation without this arrangement in some more detail.
On the
other hand, under the ordinary prices, very few people would find it gainful to
murder and/or run the risk of being murdered, for earning some rice. Thus we
can conclude that the system of voluntary exchange has at least one
self-generating element in it vis-à-vis the exchange under violence.
However the violence-market (as we may call it) may be considered to be
always reigning in the so-called underworld. In the underworld, the “market
players” don’t of course fight for a bag of rice. Threat of murder is the usual
bill of exchange. They demand quite large sums of money for the favour of sparing
one’s life in lieu of money. Here again, hopefully, they would not target
people like me. They would target the big guns. But here also we have to
remember that the abduction market depends for its survival on the simultaneous
existence of a market of a voluntary exchange. Only a market of voluntary
exchange can create the money (that is the goods and services that money can
buy) that the abductors “earn” against their violence. A society cannot exist
if its only currency is coercion of the violent kind. Even before our
speciation, or for any other social species (that is barring the extremely
loony species for that matter) the society must have had at least a little
mechanism to reduce cost of bargaining, so that the minimum subsistence, if not
allowed to everybody, the society must have had allowed the minimum productive
activity that would produce the goods and services, as also to those, who
snatch from them. Obviously if the snatchers are not allowed subsistence, they
would not allow the producers to subsist. If the society is supposed to be
clearly divided between the snatchers and producers, the necessity of reducing
cost of bargaining will be only between the snatchers. But such clear division
seems to be a modern phenomenon. In the prehistoric age there must have been
enormous overlapping. In any case, we don’t lose any generality by assuming
overlap. As anthropologists tell us the prehistoric human tribe would allow
subsistence to anyone, even those incapable of earning their livelihood
themselves. This was of course, presumably until a whole tribe faced
starvation. Still that subsistence was for only preserving the individual; it
became immaterial from the evolutionary viewpoint of preserving the gene, which
was not allowed the subsistence by allowing sex-partners to be shared with the
handicapped males.
Some might suppose that the individual snatchers would restrain their
snatching below a level that would allow production (which include snatching
from outside the tribal society) to the subsistence level for the tribe.
Biologists have lately disproved such hopes and it is also against our
elementary assumption of individual selfishness.
You can guess that the animal world lives in such a perfect competition
of violence; and man also once lived under the law of the jungle of such
proportion. Only an extremely poor standard of life is possible for a small
population under such circumstances.
In the earlier chapters we found that the subhuman societies could
slightly improve upon the situation by the existence of the natural law and
thereby the chief, who cannot however make a cooperative behaviour possible in
the human sense. Nevertheless, they restrain their mutual violence below a
level of mutual extinction.
Well, higher mammals may reach their contract locus through a primitive
intimidation, which somewhat reduces the chance of breaking out of a bloody
war. But the human bargaining involving language is a lot more sophisticated
that is out of bounds for any other species. The situation is fairly akin to
what was happening millions of years ago. Communication of threat of murder and
its perception do not require very high intelligence. But working one’s way
through such murderous climate requires a comparatively sophisticated bargaining
ability in addition to one’s ability to commit violence.
For a pretty long time, we have been forgetting our weekly market in
rice. Suppose that one morning, a few buyers have come and so far I am the only
seller who has opened the counter. Each seller coming subsequent to me adds to
the negative externality I face. Likewise in a community I am the only thief,
each other entering the profession adds to the negative externality I face.
Now in the weekly rice market, suppose, I have somehow gained confidence
with a large financier, who has lent me Rs 20,000 for the day. I fit several
secret agents who go to all the sellers and buy all their stocks before anyone
guesses my conspiracy. For that I had however to cough up 0.50 per kilo and
after I accumulated all the rice by 9am, I started to sell at my monopoly
price, that is to say, I sold to each customer at a price, which suited my
profiteering. For example, I sold jhingeshal –20kg at a profit of Rs 3
and 50 kg at Re 1.50 per kilo in a single market day. I had predetermined that
that was the maximum that I could make.
Likewise in the perfect anarchy for rice, I
could internalise other’s violence by offering my violence in return. On the
market day I used my cash to internalise rice under other’s control. But there
is a difference between money and violence. Money adds up as a scalar quantity
but for violence, comparative ability is more important. If you consider a
longer duration, after I have securely stocked the rice I looted I can start
looting fresh rice-perhaps with a greater might due to my added energy obtained
from the rice. But in case of weekly market too, I could get started on the
next market day on a fresh profiteering drive with new secret agents. In the market I could rob the buyers @ Rs 1.50
per kg creating the monopoly by uniting all the rice unto myself. In the
process of uniting however, I had to invest 0.50 per kg to the other sellers,
who, however lost nothing compared to a perfect competition market. In anarchy
also I could unite all the violence by using my comparative advantage and
accumulate all the rice and all the violence in the society into my hands. All
the sellers might ultimately recognise me as their sole buyer. As a monopolist
of violence also, I could sell rice at whichever price I wished to. As a
monopolist of violence also, I could oblige everybody to use their violence
only for my benefit and I could give them some rice free to everybody in
return. Once I could convince everyone in the society about my superior ability
in violence, each individual will rather want to exercise their violence as I
tell them. And get satisfied with the rice (which is my cost to form the
monopoly) that I give to them in return.
Once I have formed the monopoly in violence, in order that I might
further increase my stock of rice especially if I looked forward to further
gain in some remote future, I would try to increase the production of rice.
Interestingly that would make my discretionary ability/power regarding use of
violence under my control, to oppose the formation of any other monopoly either
in the anarchy or in the market, among the producers of rice and among the
suppliers of fertiliser and tillers to those producers.
Let us refer to politics more frankly. Now suppose that there is a king, who does not fear that parliamentary system poses much danger to his reign. He will advisedly utilise the convenience to minimise the contradiction among different classes and other pressure groups. [43]
It is not entirely a new assertion. Political scientists have long
pleaded for democracy. What is new is we don’t plead or call it ethical. We
just call it profitable for the king.
Back to our ancestry
For the most part of, say, the last 5 crore (50 million) years, our
ancestors knew “anger is the solution”. Of course this was not always so. Some
of the times, they also believed that “fear is the solution”. They always tried
to find a boundary between these two. And certainly the traits capable of
finding the most optimum boundary were being selected by evolution. This was
the best thing that the evolution could do under a perspective of perfect
competition market of violence described above.
An amoral approach to morality-1
The
question I would pose under this heading may seem highly immoral. How did
morality come to us? Did morality have any evolutionary advantage? Did the
trait of morality endow any particular advantage to the individual, who
happened to have it by chance? Or, crudely put, does morality have any
“scientific” basis?
Some
would argue that subhuman creatures are never immoral. I suspect that that is
precisely because nor are they ever moral.
Under
the situation of perfect competition of violence, it was the best bet to find
out relative ability of inflicting bodily harm and then to avoid any
confrontation with that mightier. This way, one could attain the safest
possible circumstances for oneself. What if you could convince yourself that it
was moral to capitulate to the power that be. Really we always do it. If a
powerful man makes a vulgar joke, I heartily laugh as if I enjoyed it
thoroughly. If the lampions of my neighbourhood play the microphone throughout
the night; the next morning I show as if that sound made my otherwise
monotonous night a memorable night of celebration.
The
problem with most people is that they can not really do this very convincingly.
But some can. Those who can “endure” are presumably better fitted in a society
in which any wrong “can not be cured”. Consider a situation of, say, 1 myr ago.
I find an egg but as soon as I am about to satisfy my hunger with it, a male, a
very strong male finds me. I fully know that any attempt to take it will be
futile and would rather be inviting aggression from him. Under such
circumstances, the best thing I could do was to feign that I had not seen it. I
might hope that he might not have so far seen it. It would be stressful. Now it
is very stressful for me to restrain myself from eating it, but if I convince
myself that it was immoral for me to even look at it, I can save myself both
from the stress and from his aggression. Then I have reached the 1st
grade of preconventional morality as enunciated by Kohlberg. The moral
preaching, “the property of any other man is like a stone, the wife of any
other man is like your mother” is helpful for keeping my stress hormones under
safe level; though the connotation for “the other man” in this case means a
stronger man. This connotation will change for higher grades of morality that
we shall discuss in the next chapter.
We don’t
know exactly when, but it must be between 5 and 3 myr ago, a third alternative
started to become more and more significant. This alternative was to find
another sufferer, a co-victim to form an alliance, a coalition against an
enemy. Such an alliance or coalition can work wonders for a couple of hopeless
individuals.
Consider musical chairs; a little girl would teach you the winning
trick. They two entered into an alliance never to compete for the same chair,
until in the last round. This way, they reserved the first two positions for
them. Thus the worst for an alliance member could be to become second.
We may however make ourselves aware of why alliance making could not
make itself universal among all primates. Consider a situation that might come
about in the competition. In the last round but one, as the music stops, a boy
finds he could by no means win the chair attempted by the third boy (who is not
in collusion with either). The former could however easily occupy the other
chair, which his ally was attempting to get.
What will
he do? This must be a split second decision. Will he honour the alliance and
admit defeat? Or, will he defy the alliance? Amorally, it will be sensible for
him to take this decision according as he looks forward to another contest
another time.
In fact, the formation of coalition against a dominant male, who was reserving access to all the females available to the group, was not entirely new to the other primates. But among them, why it could not become the dominant method will become evident, as we shall inquire into how this coalition forms and works and that will be a major part of the rest of this work. The great anthropologist Levi-Strauss gave long descriptions about how alliances among primitive men formed through exchange of women. However, we have also to remember that Levi-Strauss studied living primitive populations and that study could not be fully describing the state of affairs millions of years ago, when there was no language understood by all.
We often apply Darwinian evolution in the following way. Suppose a male
chimpanzee reaches its dreamland with fairly large number of females and no
male competitor worth any mention. Its reproductive success will be measured in
terms of enormous “libido” and having as many female partners as possible.
But he will find his El Dorado rarely. As you know (really everybody
knows) that reproductive success requires very different things for a female
primate from a male primate. If a child is conceived but is not born alive or
dies of malnutrition in childhood or remains so undernourished that it does not
grow up to become another reasonably healthy productive adult; that will become
a loss to both the parents in terms of passing of genes. However, in the El
Dorado I talked about, a male needed not worry about all that; because the time
he could spend for foraging for his child or its lactating mother could be
better spent in chasing another female of his species, so that if he could impregnate
enough number of females, as many times as his libido will allow him, at he end
of his reproductive age, he would find more survivors than he might find by
being faithful to one two wives.
The
picture is different for the reproductive female. For her, the gestation period
is quite high. She has to carry a long number of months. After that, for
several years, she has to care for the baby. Her care after delivery will very
much decide the probability of its survival. So evolution has selected her traits
that make her fairly careful for her child. In keeping with this difference in
traits between the male and the female, there might be continuous tussle
between them. Even if females were a little bigger in number, because of their
much higher time of involvement in procreation, females would always be in
short supply. Nevertheless, if a male has enormous advantage in violence or
some other related respect like Veerappan, he might steamroller female dissent
but most males are not so fortunate whether among other primates or among us
humans.
Ina real world, where females are always in
short supply, especially for such males that can not always hope to win in a
battle against all other males, it might be advisable to enter into a give and
take relation with the females. This will be especially true for a species in
which females almost never live alone. While the mother cares for her child, it
would be satisfying for her to know that some male was utilising his greater
physical strength and time for foraging food for her or guarding against
predators, sex in return for such services would not be a bad trade. In fact
such “family ties” will be very much profitable for a female for her
reproductive success and in order that she can continue receiving this convenience,
she may use sex with such partner. Occasionally she may practise even homosex
with another female who renders these service. Thus, in these families even the
so-called non-procreative sex serves a very important purpose in procreation.
This explains aseasonality and other sexual extravaganza among higher primates
and especially among us[44].
However we may also note that even in a society legally allowing polygamy,
polygamy is fairly rare for two reasons. A girl might be thinking while
considering the proposal of marriage from a married man (As it was reported on
a study in Senegal) the man with another wife and child(ren) will be unlikely
to offer the same amount of care for his newly wed wife and latter’s children.
Even if we consider that only those girls, who could not find a single (or
divorced or widower) husband offering her with anywhere near the same
attractive package of promises of love, security and maintenance would agree to
marry a man with his wife living, the cost of bargaining (the report did not
use this term) among co-wives is large making life miserable. In other words, a
girl also values the “affiliative” relationship with her prospective husband.
This was
true not only after she became able to think in terms of cause and action, but
also this was true for some other (definitely not for orangutans) whenever she
could exercise a choice. Female savanna baboons (another cousin of humans) also
have been found to prefer less conspicuous males to the dominant ones. Among
sub-primate species as cats and dogs heterosexual sex-partners sometimes work
as a coalition. A conspicuous male dog may run after several females but has
one among them as his steadfast consort. Whenever there is food, he will not
allow any of those other females to have a share in it. Thus, in the real world and almost all the
times, the fitness for male reproductive success is not about having enormous
“libido” and having as many female partners as possible.
Nevertheless, the method of gaining confidence among females was never
the principal means towards reproductive success until very recently only among
humans and even that in a complicated spectrum of coercions (to be followed up
in the chapter 8.) Males traditionally fought for females
Most often, there is competition among males for access to females and a
balance in this anarchy has to be reached. In the 1830’s Illinois, the Mormon
theology utilised the then shortage in the number of men to women to preach
polygamy. But the balance changed few decades after they colonised Utah; as the
wealthy and the mighty cornered the women, many men found no girl to marry and
some of them practised homosex. Presumably, a man will have less marginal
utility in having a second wife than will a man without any. And, if they
divide these two girls—one for one, total utility will increase. In case, both
of them were exercising coercion proportionate to their marginal utility, a
monogamy practice would emerge. Presumably, in the subsequent banning of
polygamy again in 1876, the men’s role was more important than that of the
“gentile” outsiders. In a little diversion, I might mention that the state’s
promulgation of monogamy law is till this century the society’s latest
endeavour to reduce the cost of bargaining among men clashing for access to
women. With such promiscuity, a male suffers the risk of being rejected by all
the females on the one hand and invite aggression from others, maybe, stronger
males, on the other. Even if his survival is not at stake, his promiscuity will
harm him more than help in his reproductive success. Not the simple sex-action,
but alliance formation determined males’ reproductive success all through for
at least 3 myr. Homosex has also received evolutionary justification because it
helped in alliance formation. You may note that chimpanzees also practise
homosex. Among australopithecines, this may have taken a significant role. The
males with somewhat womanly appearance with less hair on the skin had a better
chance of being accepted into a coalition and thereby of better survival of
their genes. The male-female alliance, or the same sex alliances, when
engendered through homosex are easier because they communications required are
less sophisticated. For the last 22lakh years (2.2myr), the focal need was of
vocal communication rather than the early methods described above. To that we
come to in the next chapter.
Chapter 6:War
and Piece
In
this chapter we shall see how the contradiction between people are solved so
that the collective can keep it viable. During this investigation I shall
however place some hypothesis about how the human brain evolved. The late
nineties of the last century saw wonderful discoveries in this regard. It is
difficult not to relate to them.
Some
of the arguments are however just present as valid for any society, in some
cases even subhuman societies and as the reader will find, for very wide ranges
of periods from millions of years to a few months or years. These are not my
hypotheses but are arguments. Whether they are valid are for the reader to
judge.
The
fight of one collection of people against another collection of people is an
integral part of the world we live in. Two companies fight for market share,
two parties fight for vote, two gangs fight for the exclusivity of the loot and
very tragically, two patriotic peoples fight for the sake of their respective
motherlands.
United we stand
When
I was a college student I belonged to a student front and continuously believed
we could do better in union election if we could solve our internal
contradiction better and could wage a coordinated fight. However in that effort
our front got bifurcated and we lost whatever place we had had in the union.
Unity needs something more than emotion. Really, how the non-antagonistic contradictions
could be solved holds the key to how emotions towards unity would grow up.
West
Bengal people know best how factories get locked out because of squabble
between labour and management. However, insiders also know what so manifests so
often hides infighting among directors or among labour leaders or both. Net
result of course devastates the interest of both sides.
Because Big is Beautiful
History
sides with big battalions and prehistory sided with the bigger clans. Thus when
a victorious clan became larger through procreation, there was incentive for
keeping it intact. The compulsion for which an individual could not make it
alone, however, does not mean that they did not have any conflict among them.
This period was much before an individual Ram could set on his into
Dandakaranya. If one could save one’s skin from wild animals, there was hardly
any escape from demons, which were really other human tribes. However
the compulsion did not mean that men did not have any conflict among them.
To
start from an extreme anarchy; suppose, I belong to a gang of pirates (of
Chambal, say) and cannot change to some safer profession. I cannot still
imagine how I could maintain my allegiance to my gang if I always knew that any
of my fellow members could slaughter me with impunity. Thus the tribe has to
give me at least some assurance of personal life and subsistence to ensure
member loyalty. If any collective wants to keep stable for some length of time,
it should have some fences (between your punch and my nose). But you will
possibly note that the right to life or to subsistence that I get, as a member
is very different from the natural law mentioned in the previous chapter. There
it was no more than just a truce point. But here, if I was one night murdered
for nothing, it was not I, who could take revenge but it would create feeling
of insecurity among all other members. Today’s civilised society gives this or
that benefits to the elderly and the infirm on this logic.
Two
is certainly stronger than one, power grows with number but a collective must
be able to keep the cost of bargaining below prohibitive. The clan that could
endure becoming large by resisting fragmentation could fight a thousand
battles without losing a single[45].
But don’t be so optimistic as to think that fences would make egalitarian
distribution of the scarce resources or create any humanitarian tradition.
Let
us visualise the above theorisation by imagining the situation during the
fabulously enduring government organisation that was available during the reign
of the great Mughals. Contrary to what
the history texts teach us it definitely was quite lenient to the democratic
side. The local rulers enjoyed fair amount of autonomy. Suppose the charge of
management of land conflicts has been given to a particular emir, who decides
against the wish of some quite senior official, say, of the suba(the
state) level. Do know that the latter’s high rank would not change it. Higher
officials seldom interfered in the decision in a local subject. In
return the local ruler will also not bother about who will get the booty in a
war against an enemy of the emperor.
I
definitely do not mean that problems did not generate. And several historians
specialise in seeing where and how they did among whom. What is special about
the rule was that a fraction of the upper rank emirs led an extremely austere
life but they did not effectively grumble against a larger fraction of office
bearers of the local level getting immensely rich. It seems sometimes
that the empire benefited them more than the empire benefited the emperor
himself. However these matters were keenly observed and a part was levied to
the central government by a judicial function of the empire. However all these
are my guesses and I shall simply surrender if some student of Moghul history
challenges me.
True that in the tribes of ants or termites,
self-sacrifice is the general rule rather than an exception, but their
procreation requires the whole tribe, whereas a human being could procreate
individually. Natural selection favours individual’s[46]
such traits that cause greater transmission of progeny. In a war he very much
staked his life for the victory of his tribe. A defeat would nevertheless
result in his death. But in peacetime, he would very much want a greater share
from the public pool for himself, for his children (after he becomes able to
recognise them) and perhaps for their lactating mother(s). This gave him the
edge in the game of transmitting his own progeny. Absence of private property
among primitive men, greatly delighted Marx, Engels or Lenin, who thought this
prehistoric society (only with a much inferior technology) was a prototype of
the higher phase of communist society, which they cherished as their goal. By
abolition of private property, Marxists were to create selfless people[47].
In the coming pages we shall however see that human evolution was impossible
without selfish instincts in primitive men. What a parent could do among the
children could not be that easily done by adults upon adults. Now we shall
involve ourselves in considering how leadership could develop among primitive
men. [1]
“Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
Why if it
prosper, none dare call it treason.” ‑‑Sir John Harrington, Epigrams of Treason
To quote a couplet
favourite to Gordon Tullock
If there was a war for the post of the
chief, three consequences could come out. Bali defeating Sugrebe, who became
immaterial for the time being. Another is both coming to a tacit or express
understanding to divide the territory and/or to divide their interest in cows
and women-which might again be a truce point. And the third is of course, one
accepting the suzerainty of the other, who in turn, acquiesces to some limited
controls over some of the interests. Such division between predictable kin, who
could decide upon dividing their territory as a means of reducing cost of
bargaining and yet could remain united in any fight against a stranger, could
take place only at a higher stage of intelligence and communication. Possibly,
at the time of our evolution, only the first thing could happen.
Around 1950’s some books used to be banned
by some governments, which believed books could cause revolution. Books did not
then become as orphaned as now they are and banned books had their own special
attraction. As a very young boy, when I read History of the CPSU(B), I used to
be enthralled to find that each time the counter-revolutionary traitors got
defeated (I did not know whom I should thank for it—God or Marx) and Stalin was
able to steer the USSR to the path of great emancipation. Later on we saw that
though Nripen Chakraborty and Binoy Chowdhury commanded a lot of respect but
when they failed to see eye to eye with Jyoti Basu; they realised the
impossibility of having any section of rank and file to carry flag with them.
Trotsky or Bukharin; Lin Piao or Chen Po Ta had worse luck in their respective
countries.
Just
as in the present market perspective, a monopoly cannot endlessly increase its
profits by price-hike, an autocrat could exhaust his superiority in violence by
changing the said optimum in some member, though less mighty than the a chief.
Let
us try to concoct an example. Suppose it is monsoon, the riverbed, where our
clan derives all the stone for manufacturing stone axes, is inundated, our clan
has two axes each member. At this time, the chief orders to deposit all the
stone axes to him. A member Taggu is ready to deposit one but parting with the
last axe in his possession would very much undermine his sense of his own
security-so that he is ready to risk a fight against the chief. On the other
hand the chief finds his marginal utility in securing one more axe very small.
Under this quite possible situation, the chief may secretly allow Taggu to hold
on to his last axe.
Under
such situation, the chief may enter into a tacit understanding with Taggu, but
it could be better for both if they could talk and come to another
understanding, by which the chief would perhaps allow Taggu to keep both his
axes and in return Taggu would side with the chief in case of any rebellion.
This understanding, you may call a coalition. Even then he had to serve the
purpose of the chief. You may call that Taggu is engaged as an officer by the
chief, even then the chief cannot control every bit of action or inaction by
Taggu. At this point I do not find much difference in which word the relation
is defined. In both cases there was the fear of treachery.
A plunderer like Nadir Shah or Tamer lane
needed not care for the economy, nevertheless, had to maintain the inner
discipline in his army. He had to delegate some of his authority to some
section-officers or commissars (so to say) and you always knew that this
partial delegation of authority was very delicate choice. Once you have
delegated the power, the persons that got it would not exercise it in the exact
manner, you would like them to do, partially because each would try to maximise
one’s utility instead of maximising yours and also because another’s judgment
will had to be at least a little different.
Whenever the spectrum of comparative ability for
violence is such that though A is the strongest man and still B and C have a
combined strength more than A, there rises a possibility that B and C may form
a coalition. To insist on that this strength might be measured in different
perspective in very different ways, I shall forward a rather unusual example.
In a three member family this strength is determined by the affection one can
draw from the other two as also the service one renders and the money one
brings to the family[49].
But as the reader will readily recognise that the additional ability, which is
the ability to bargain, which includes the ability to create real or false-hope
or fear in other members, immediately becomes included in the measure of
strength so much so that in any human society, we cannot conceive of any strength
without this ability. India has now been ruled for several decades
mostly by coalitions. In the parliamentary democracy the strengths being
measured by number of members sent to the House of the People, we are quite
comfortable with the simple arithmetic. In a primitive polity, suppose the
number of stick wielding strongmen measured the strength of a clan. We further suppose that the strength of a
clan was vested in its headman. If the tribe comprised three such clans each
vying for power of the whole tribe, A having 5, B having 4 and C having 3, a
coalition between B and C would most probably be victorious over A.
There might be some confusion among A, B and C regarding their own strengths. A might think his 5 men were able to defeat their 8 adversaries. The truth could be revealed only by actual fight. Therefore, the fight and the resulting bloodshed or even death was the cost that that tribe had to bear. The superiority of some other system that might be unquestioned chiefdom or like a democracy was in their lesser cost of bargaining.
Now let us redefine the above story with
some specific example of conflict. X had taken away the beautiful wife of A,
who ever since, had a tremendous grudge against X. We are considering a time,
when human brain became enough developed to withhold the anger and yet keep it
in one’s memory, for future revenge. Now, B has also a similar fate in the
hands of X. Now B’s grudge against X is a positive externality to A, because A
does not have any compassion for B or for B’s wife. If B takes the revenge, A’s
purpose is also served with no risk and no labour but unfortunately B is not
that much bold. A alone is also not that much bold. However in case they could
put their angers together to satisfy their common objective, they could both
gain.
Though
the benefit is enormous, the hurdle to be overcome is also fairly daunting.
Most of the time since our ancestors among Australopithecine group of species
started to walk on two legs, they could not speak. In the modern world, we
sometimes find a foreigner incapable of speaking or understanding any of the
local languages, still bargaining with the roadside vendors and even making
occasional purchases. But now even the foreigner knows[50]
that simple rules of exchange of goods for specified currency bills would be
obeyed in Kolkata as are obeyed in his own city, say, Tbilisi. We are here
imagining a situation, in which both the rules and coalition had to be made out
of nothing, not even the elementary language and not even the human brain
developed enough to make abstract thinking possible. In that era, the most
probable coalition could take off between two such men in a tribe, as had in
their brains the most developed associative area, remembering that children of
the same clan have some random variation in different aspects. As soon as human
brains were that much developed so that a coalition became at least temporarily
possible, the ability of comparative individual violence was substituted by the
ability of collective decision-making. The enviably well-coordinated collective
activity of a tribe of ants or wasps is nevertheless instinctive. Our cousin
chimpanzees practise happy group hunting. But there existed a special
difficulty in coordinating men into forming a coalition of men against men than
group hunting. You do not suspect that I was conspiring with a deer against
your wishes; but when you and I are trying to form a coalition against another
man X, you are always worried that I might be secretly colluding with X against
you. Coordination among men is possible only after you solve the bargaining problem.
Collusion-coalition
Thus in order that coalition remains viable,
a counter-coalition needs to be ruled out. Where a coalition needs reduction of
cost of bargaining between you and I, in order that we might resist
counter-coalition, you need to and might require of me to increase cost of
bargaining between X and I. But that is not enough. You will try to make me
believe that you were not yourself colluding with X. You might think of
engaging C to keep a watch on me.
It
was not a mean achievement. May be, several thousands of generations passed for
our ancestors to improve from a two-man coalition to a three-man coalition
However, from the viewpoint of reducing cost
of bargaining between you and I, you might not object to me knowing this fact
that you have appointed C for that purpose and you will also serve your own
purpose of keeping me believing that you were not colluding with X by agreeing
to C simultaneously working as my agent to keep a watch on you. That will
simultaneously increase my predictability to you and yours to me.
Lots of trouble! But that is what human brain is meant for.
Neither of us wanted C
to collude with X and both of us severally keep watch on him. Effectively C
becomes a member of our coalition sharing a part of the prize we loot from X.
However the danger, though reduced, does not end there. You may be suspecting
me to be conspiring with both C and X and want to induct a fourth member D. And
a situation arises when everybody keeps watch on everybody else for any
deviance from some specified rules. Subsequent to this, this keeping watch (and
bearing with being kept watch upon) becomes recognised as a rule itself and
thereby as a social virtue. The tribes that did so became cohesive and
invincible. The tribes that did not so recognise got eliminated by the ones
that did.
An amoral
approach to morality-2
Keeping our alliance or coalition will be
enormously beneficial to both you and me but occasionally this will need
temporary sacrifice by each of us two. Even if you are the stronger, you have
to share with me. Consider the situation of 1 myr bp described in chapter 5.
You and I together find an egg, when both are hungry. If you are not in
coalition with me, you could use your superior strength to have the whole of it
but now you can not do that. You have to share. If you could not restrain your
greed, in future, you would not get my help. So, formation of alliance needed a
morality that would help you restrain the greed at the same time limiting the
mental stress for such restraint. Those cousins of our ancestors, who could not
so restrain could not keep themselves in a winning alliance. They could not
make headway in having the reproductive success. On the other hand our
ancestors had this 3rd grade morality in conventional level of
Kohlberg. They could pass on their genes and most of us have inherited this
morality from them.
Mutual communication
Then,
how did the chief communicate with
Gattu? Or, Gattu with Taggu? That was the ultimate point I so long tried to
come to. In the very initial millennia it was not the spoken language. Man
tried to associate the slightest blink in another’s eye, the tone, and the
nuances of body movement to whether he subsequently proves cooperative or
non-cooperative. First grew the associations with visual[51]
stimuli, which are till now much stronger than the sonic.
This is except for a visually impaired
person. People losing eyesight in unfortunate accidents develop extraordinary
hearing ability within months. Possibly the brain has an ability to change the
allocation of scarce resources to maximise the utility. The sonic neurons are
then given more shares in the oxygen (or some other nutrient) that was earlier
allotted to the optic neurons. This variation is not evolutionary and does not
need generations of time. Rather the ability to better the allocation came from
evolution; possibly much earlier than we became primates.
Does
it not seem a puzzle to you how we could become able to decipher the characters
having minute difference between one another. The characters you write were too
intricate for our ape ancestors. Was there any evolutionary justification?
No,
it was not possible that we developed that skill as a result of writing itself.
History of writing is too short (of only a few thousand years) and the practice
was limited to too few people to allow any credibility to such an idea.
Man’s
first reading material was another man’s face. As such, the primates, for the
purpose of earning their “daily bread”, needed not and did not develop the
ability of very minute scrutiny of what they saw. This they needed when they
tried to read another man’s mind by reading his face (we also read attitude by
following how one moves one’s limbs).
However,
when the spoken language was scribed and read, it could utilise both the optic
and sonic stimuli. I remember having read of one occasion (in some western
country, may be in the US) on which all the people in a research laboratory in
Biophysics felt somewhat directionless; for which they assembled before a
blackboard and jotted down the points of their work in the hope that something
would emerge out of it. And even a child would have used this method; unable to
do a sum mentally would do it by writing. A living computer like Mrs Sakuntala
would be admired as miraculous but none would ask one’s child to emulate her
because solving any problem by writing is an advantage and it is better to
learn how to take this advantage from one’s childhood.
Here
also a disadvantage comes as corollary of this advantage. Just as a blind can
decipher the minute difference between two sounds, use of language and our
preoccupation with it somewhat disabled us in the sphere of face reading. I
have studied some illiterate people in this respect. Whereas a fair number of
people like you and me could not recognise Sridebi in an unusually veiled
photograph; for my illiterate subjects, I started by covering everything except
the lip and then proceeded by uncovering the chin, nose and the eye one by one.
I did all these during a marriage ceremony and all the ladies, who were
functionally illiterate, accepted this as a good fun. One housewife could name
her just seeing the lips. Mostly they faired much better than their
school-going sons and daughters.
By Ram, we are shortly going to open courses
in Astrology in our colleges. This is my advice to the teachers who will take
the classes in Face Reading that they try to make their students illiterate as
quickly as possible. That will not be too difficult. Television and telephone
have already accomplished that job to a great extent.
Khoojooi Dhumba
You
can utter these words, though you don’t know their meaning. If you are
wondering whether I am trying to smuggle another pair of foreign words, don’t
worry. I too don’t know if these have
any meaning in any of the many languages of the world. In our childhood, you
and I learnt various consonants and vowels that we can combine and recombine in
numerous ways. The number of words we can pronounce or understand is far
greater than we can ever use in any modern language. I would urge you to
consider the evolutionary justification for this ability that we have become so
habituated to that we don’t ever ask how we came to have it. As such, Nature is
fairly miserly. How come that in this only one respect Nature suddenly became
so generous only with us?
This
leaves us with the only explanation that this inborn ability hardwired into our
brains arose not from any linguistic discipline, but from a continuous effort
to defeat any discipline. Vocal communication and its symbolism, start, mould
and continuously create new abstraction, not primarily to communicate but with
the ulterior purpose to convince. It was bargaining—the continuous effort to
unfold what was hidden in the other man’s brain, the continuous effort to
predict the unpredictable, the continuous effort to influence, not the nature,
but the fellow tribesmen, made possible, may be, in thousands of steps, each
step spanning a number of generations and representing some improvement in his
language together with some improvement in the associative areas in his brain.
Moreover this effort must not have been a child’s play. Success or failure in
this effort was a matter of life and death, a matter of survival and of
“reproductive success”. We find the first sign of growth of pharynx needed for
articulate speech in Homo ergaster some 2.2 myr (22 lakh years) ago. Starting
from that period till 600,000 years ago when Homo heidelbergensis species had
fairly developed pharynx, among our male ancestors’ survival and reproductive
success must have very much depended upon their ability to create new sound
signals, and decipher the ones created by others, to create one’s own grammar
(syntax) and to understand that created by others. This sound symbols were not
meant solely for communication but also for hiding communication from some
other person and perhaps for conveying different messages to different people
by the same sound signal. During the last 2 million years, this ability
presumably held the key to the formation of a successful coalition, to the
ruling out of a counter-coalition and to getting into a ruling coalition. In
short, this determined an individual’s dominance status in the group and hence
their “reproductive success”.
Fundamentalists
in archaeology might consider my hypothesis too much speculative and therefore
unscientific. My humble submission for their consideration would be that
science does not stick to a single method. Despite the great achievements of
archaeology, its findings remain far from conclusive on many issues. Only a few
years back, we took Homo erectus to be one of our notable ancestors. But now
that genetics has settled the point that we migrated out of Africa long after
their time, we don’t now consider ourselves to be their descendants. Radio
carbon dating also gives quite approximate values because little radiation
emanates from a million year old fossil. And even DNA study loses much of precision
for that age.
Some time back, we were telling that Homo
ergaster or perhaps even Australopithecine mothers probably received some form
of assistance during child delivery. For such assertions we can not adduce any
proof in the archaeological sense. Likewise, we can not find direct proof of
how much homosex australopithecines used or how much vocal communication H.
ergaster or H. heidelbergensis used for making coalitions between males. Such
problems are fairly known also in physics, which “speculates” certain
hypotheses. The wave mechanics had little “archaeological” basis more than the
de Broglie experiment and matrix mechanics did not have even that until the
results were applied to hydrogen atom and derivations tallied with
observations.
Let
us rather speculate how this ability passed from one generation to the next,
say, 15 or 10 lakh years ago. As is consistent with the behaviour of any other
primate, bringing up of children was done entirely by the mother. At these
stages the pharynx has already fairly developed and capable of making a number
of sound signals, though the range was quite smaller when compared with what
the modern human possesses. Mother made some sound signals that her children
picked up. Since the start of bipedality, mother used to nurture her children
till long after weaning. These years between two and six became crucial years
in picking up of pronunciations for children.
These “pre-language” sound signals passed along matrilineal lines, even
if the sons would be utilising it more in later life than the daughters. Those boys who could make and remember a
larger variety of sound signals had higher probability of allying with remoter
(matrilineal) cousins.
As
an alternative method, in the absence of any standard system (vocabulary) of
sound signals, dominant males were likely to each have his own way of
expression. If you disbelieve, you don’t have to take a time machine to go to
them and verify. Just ask the sales persons you know and ask them how they
tackle their boss and their buyers. Even now they have to try a lot to
understand the real meaning of what they hear. Human beings, unlike your
computer, never limit their understanding to just the verbatim. We always
understand more than we listen to and we always say less than we understand.
A dominant male would like to ally with
someone who understands more. That does not mean the dominant male also ought
to have been very brainy. But you have seen that even if idiots are in a
majority in any society, when it comes to making alliances, idiots also prefer
sane ones to other idiots. With passing time, this second process took
precedence, that is to say, the formation of coalition depended more and more
on building up of mutual trust rather than on kinship or homosex. Let us somewhat
speculate about how distinct the dialects could be. Personally I am not at all
qualified to make such speculation. But I am doing it only to show what I mean
by the “variety in dialects”. A few vowels, perhaps “a” and “aa” and fewer
consonants perhaps “m” and “b” had to be shuffled to mean various things.
Among
the subordinate males, everybody wants to become favourite with the dominant
male; but when a brainy boy with a better communication ability and better
ability for symbolic thought faced a dominant male, he was more likely to sell
himself as his potential ally. But at this stage came a problem you could least
anticipate. Men with better Broca’s area (of course by a copying error) could
have better reproductive success; but their children had less chance of a live
birth through the tight squeeze of mother’s pubic bones. Such mothers also
suffered greater risk of labour death. Thus, those brainier babies, whose
cortex had (again, by a copying error)
formed more convolutions in a not so large skull had better chance of survival
through the passage from uterus to the world. At the same time, mothers with
spacious pelvis had a better chance of survival as also of giving birth to
living babies. And their daughters or granddaughters had above average spacious
pelvis. 1.5 million years ago, our ancestors (or their contemporary related
species, archaeology doesn’t allow us to say that with certainty) had brains
about twice as large as those of chimpanzees. This was however only two-thirds
the size of our brains.
It
should not be supposed that by selling himself, a boy makes himself a complete
slave to the dominant male. Even if you think that the latter could kill the
boy at his own sweet will, he would risk a lot. No other boy will come to ally
with him rather they would form a coalition among themselves against him alone.
And there is always the risk of the former’s mother and could unite in
revenge.
Were
they bargaining on a level playing field? They were not. “Level playing field”
is a mathematical model that economics uses. Absence of this “level playing
field” is an accusation that preachers of a particular political philosophy
hurl against market economy. “Level playing field” is not present in West
Bengal or Gujarat, the US or Cuba and it was not present between the dominant
and subordinates.
However
there was another problem that delayed the growth of intelligence. In contrast
to 11% fat that make up our body, our brain is made of 60% fat—the
polyunsaturated fatty acids[52].
In those ages, it was not available from our usual diet. Only those of our
ancestors, who could get enough fish from the lakes of Ethiopia in the meals of
pregnant and lactating mothers, could have the brainier offspring.
Those,
who think of human brains in terms of computer hard disks, may wonder why must
the skull size enlarge to house a better brain? And here you confront a problem
with biological evolution. Evolution can not design a completely new apparatus.
You may note that our DNA is only 2% different from chimpanzees’ after our
branching out 5 myr ago. Some of the times, some neutral variation can transmit
through a few generations. As I have just mentioned, the enlargement of brain
was far from a neutral variation. Broadening of pharynx also resulted in
impossibility of simultaneous breathing and swallowing. This is a disadvantage
and each year thousands of people choke to death in India while eating
unmindfully. Therefore, throughout the last 2 myr, there always was a
possibility of better brain and a better speech being rejected by evolution.
They must have yielded a better reproductive success in almost each ten
generations in order that they could remain selected by evolution. In short, I
would only refuse to believe if anybody tells me that modern human brain
developed with serving the only purpose of making better stone tools and
foraging food for the last 2 myr. Everybody else is procuring food and fighting
for it with much less intellect. Nevertheless, if the conclusions derived from
the hypothesis presented here fail to satisfy observed phenomena, the
hypothesis will have to be rejected in its entirety.
These
processes went through quite a number of succeeding bipedal species, which
were, or were related to our ancestors. Each boy and each man had his own
language for his own symbolic thought. With this symbolic thought as well, we
need not attach some fetish. Symbolic thought to that extent starts as soon as
an animal can distinguish two sound symbols and can create conditioned reflex
with an object. They tried to paint a rosy picture of a winning coalition
between the speaker and the listener. At the same utterance each had to imply a
threatening in case the listener joined a counter-coalition. Basic requirement
for forming a coalition was to communicate two statements “if you ally with me
you would get such and such benefits” and “if you don’t, you will get such and
such injuries”. These two things are salient even now in any interaction inside
any society. When these get open and crude, we call it wrangling or politicking.
Each pair of men in a coalition (an alliance) had to evolve their special
language for communication between themselves. And each had an interest in
keeping it unintelligible to a third male. When one man could communicate
these, he could also use this “if” when alone.
Vocal
sound as also symbolic thought could not have resulted in reproductive success
in any other way than by formation of coalition. It is true that a male cricket
invites a partner for sex by its drone. A male cuckoo invites a female for sex
by its song. But they have never risen above just inviting louder and sweeter.
It is also true that for primates including us, male voice and body odour are
more or less sex exciting to the females, much less so for us, than for
orangutans. But these do not explain our very wide vocal range. A competition,
a hide and seek must have been there to explain our vocal range.
In
the next generation, the average intellect would become a little higher. We can
guess that the increase was too small to be perceptible by any direct
measurement as are available to us today. The random variation would remain
fairly large and the best among them will tend to form a new coalition.
Formation of this new coalition would again focus on higher intellect—each time
lower intellects would be sorted out and precipitated. We arrived at our final
edge, our fantastic intelligence 200,000 to 130,000 years ago.
A superstition seems to me universal. We
often believe that the primitive world was simple and carefree. If it were so,
we never had got to possess this big brain. Reality was just the opposite. The
institutions of the present day—primarily, the discipline in language (each has
to use the same word to mean the same thing), institution of marriage and the
institution of property has made our individual life much more predictable and
carefree, whence (sometime 70,000 to 40,000 years ago) we could start to use
our intelligences for mutual benefit rather than for mutual deception.
Nevertheless, we can find in any human society just what is needed for the
formation of various kinds of coalitions in addition to what we could expect in
any other primate society. In a sense, I suspect that instead of considering
social psychology to be a branch of human psychology, human psychology should
be considered a particular branch of social psychology. Human psychology may be
understood in terms of “animal psychology” adapted to the need of forming of
coalitions and ruling out of counter-coalitions.
Morality (Remembering
Kohlberg’s study )
And what rules did the coalition members
specify for mutual obedience? The principal rules were as would strengthen the
coalition or as would weaken the chances of a counter- coalition. Let us try to
construct an example. It is moral to steal, snatch or plunder an axe from a
non-member and it is highly immoral to do the same from a member. Because if
you snatch an axe from a non-member that would weaken him. It was the first such step by which the
selfish aggrandisement by one was found recognised and appreciated by another
and human groups realised that they could internalise the externality by
forming the coalition. By forming the coalition, A can utilise B’s grudge
against X and B can utilise A’s grudge against X. nevertheless, to make it
impossible to form any counter-coalition, as we have seen, each want to put a
restriction on the other against having any communication with X. This is also
what you always see in today’s society. But this prevention of a
counter-coalition will achieve new dimension. Suppose I am the chief and I am
getting immense booty by looting my neighbours. I shall always fear that some
of my trusted friends may get bitter about me getting bigger share and they
might defect to form a counter-coalition together with some of the people we
now loot, against me. Suppose I am a panchayet leader in a highly corrupted
state. One of my friends who regularly get (lesser than I get) share from the
money I plunder from the panchayet may suddenly become enormously
“honest” and by allying with some of the people we now jointly loot, expel me
from party membership, So writes Gordon Tullock, ‘One thing that should be kept in mind, however, is that a person
trying to organize such a coalition must never call attention to the
possibilities of further coalitions in the future. Thus instead of simply
saying “Let us all go and take our neighbor’s money,” which would imply that
once you have the money your neighbors may attempt to take it from you, he is
well-advised to imply that there is some special reason why some distribution
of wealth which is different from that which now exists is desirable. Thus, he
asks not for a transfer of wealth because the recipients would like it, but
because it is “just” in some sense. Presumably the recipients are mainly motivated
to take the money because they would like it but the placing of the issue in
terms of some abstract model of justice, or social peace, or charity etc.
disguises the fact that the transfer is simply motivated by the desires of the
recipients to receive it. Under these circumstances, the recipients themselves
may feel more secure about keeping the funds that are transferred to them than
they would were the transfer argued for in an undisguised way.’
The
prehistoric tribes used to distinguish themselves with the help of some tattoo.
This tattoo then made plunder by them the “just” plunder and murder by them the
“just” murder.
This
tattoo now takes some other forms—colour of the flag or the name of a nation.
In the local political circles, the reader is possibly acquainted to the word
aamader (our) person. Once a party secretary certifies you as “our person”
you may get facilities you could not think of earlier.
Milgram’s
experiment and its subsequent elaborations in different laboratories in Europe
are too well known to require a narration here. It is available in any standard
textbook.
Our
allegiance to the tribe we belong to has been subject to a lot of study in the
recent past. We belong to our
organisation we work for, to the neighbourhood we live in, to our province, to
our caste, to our town, to our village, to our religious community, to the
cult, to our linguistic community. The urban gentry often could not explain why
their menial staff so much longed for their poor home. “They get so much facility
in Kolkata and still they want to go to their village on every excuse.” Their
village home don’t have electricity, drinking water, and television. But they
could identify in the society there. They had some social prestige, the power
there. In the city, they were always treated as outsiders and were led to feel
alienated.
In
the very preliminary stage, the ruling coalition captured the women of the same
tribe. Group marriage is one of the
early findings of anthropology. At the time of its formal discovery its
original genesis was long past and lost. Its birth was not as peaceful as its
discoverers thought it to be. It appears this phase started as soon as
bipedality offered our ancestors the “facility” of killing each other about the
time considered of human speciation and at this phase incest taboo was not
demanded by the society. It does not matter much to our logic if people, in
that age, practised incest taboo as a matter of personal preference.
Human
brain is so more developed than its second best; human language is so more
intricate than the best communication any other species can boast of, human
society is so systematically organised to balance its huge number; that it
seems logical that any one of these three could not evolve in isolation. At each
stage, these three made simultaneous achievements over and above their previous
stage and presumably there were many such stages.
One
question may be asked at this point. Why must we make such difficult
hypothesis? Is it not sufficient to assume that human brain developed just as a
result of survival of the fittest? That is the fittest brains survived just in
the way giraffes with taller necks survived to produce greater number of
offspring. But you will recognise that greater intelligence hardly helps when
one is in isolation. They say that the great genius Archimedes was slain by an
ignorant Roman soldier. Our highly efficient technologists, who earn fabulous
sums of money in the US or in Europe, miserably fail to earn a living back in
their own country. Intelligence or the power of the brain, in whichever term
you call it, works wonders only when in good company.
First company
First
such company got incorporated for hunting of large animals.[53]
Hunting of a giant animal having much greater physical might happened to be a
great social occasion[54].
One man with a stick could not kill, say, even a giraffe. The giraffe might
trample him. But a group of men could, provided they coordinate their
actions. It set the ball of social
interaction rolling. In collusion coalition, we understood and got the benefit
of the power sharing arrangement and now tried our hand in reversing nature’s
arrangement of comparative might among animals. In such an operation, even some
division of labour was needed—trumpeting, supplying sticks and stones and the
ultimate simultaneous charging. Coordination is always better when there is a
two-way traffic, feedback from the man to his commander. Commander needed to
have the best communicative (and understanding others’ communication) faculty.
Hunting for a goal
If
we want to reconstruct the circumstances faced by our ancestors as a member of
a hunting band, let us consider an example, in our known world, of when there
is a tremendous need of communication between members of a group, a need that
every member of a group feels. Let us consider a neighbourhood junior football
team. When the play is on, there exists very little opportunity of linguistic
communication. Everybody is tremendously interested to know the immediate
future action of the boy in possession of the ball and wants to take the cue
from such action by his teammates and precaution from the action of his
adversaries. A single movement of member of a football team immediately creates
differential positive or negative opportunity for each member either of his own
team or of the opposite team. Each member has a personal stake in proving to
the gallery he did a good job for his team and would like to see other
teammates giving him an opportunity to do that. Say, each of the two boys playing
at right forward and the left forward would want the score to his credit and
could bargain regarding how they could cooperate, if they got time but each has
also a stake in his team winning. Success of bargaining between them matters
not only to these two boys but also, say, to the left back, really to everybody
in the team. Everybody tries to increase the positive externality that
reduction of cost of bargaining offers to each and thus wants to create and
impose some rule that will do that.
Thus each member has the stake to keep
himself constantly informed of, so as to predict the movement of at least those
members, who are reaching the ball. All through these ninety minutes, there
remains a tremendous urge for speedy communication to specific teammates and
simultaneously to mislead the members of the opposite team. Under such a
situation, it becomes incumbent upon the whole tribe, whatever its power
structure may be, to see to it that each member is free to pursue such of his
personal interests as are helpful to the tribe as a whole. To that end, the
tribe, that its elites delegate some person some specific powers associated to
some specific responsibilities. In a junior football team, powerful members
might have determined that Tapan was an asset striker for the team and
everybody should always pass the ball over to him instead of attempting to make
the score himself. In that primitive tribe, they might have decided that Gattu
having an aim that none else could have even remotely match, everybody should
supply the stone-axes to Gattu instead of trying themselves. This right
essentially comprises what we know today as quasi property[55].
The reward or punishment gets decided at least to some extent by my good deed
or bad and is not solely by where I am located in the echelon in the coalition.
Persons
are different in capabilities. Now consider a local gang in a village in the
corrupted state we had been considering. Whereas Tapan as in charge of land
conflicts can bring 200 more votes than Rabi. If Tapan is given the charge of
distribution of ration cards, he can do little better than Goutam, the present
incumbent. Under such situation, other things remaining equal Tapan is
preferred for land conflicts. The secretary, who personally sees the most
important department of liaison with police, Ashok (who works the squatters’
union and procure most of the musclemen needed for rigging) are all important
people. It is to be understood that this model though I tried to make
realistic, suffers for the lacuna that the responsibilities and jurisdictions
are often overlapping. Thus Goutam may have sizable influence in the particular
colony he lives in; and Ashok may depend upon him for that particular colony.
Again, the secretary wants to keep a particular constable appeased by backing
him in his land conflict with his sharecropper; because he is a leader in the
police association and thereby wield a lot of influence in his station.
Secretary is not sure if Tapan will continue to patronise him as Rabi did.
Under this very complex network, the effect of logrolling will be superimposed.
That is to say, someone will vote on some issue along with another in
consideration of the latter voting along with the former on some other issue or
may be in another committee.
It
is one of our preliminary assumptions that the decision that will be reached
will be better by bargaining. The sum of the gains of all the members=the total
return will be higher than that could be the return if the decision were
imposed by, say, a representative (who is totally disinterested in the personal
gains of the members) sent from the state capital. Because, individuals, who
are involved are better judges of own their utility. Bargaining enables a
collective utilisation of private capability.
Do not suppose the local committee or the
district committee would discuss the issue in the simple straightforward
language I am presenting, such straightforward admission will be decried as
immoral. They will encrypt every offer, counter offer and argument in such
Marxist (or Socialistic or religious, as the case may be) jargons that any
uninitiated person would not make out anything and get bored. Those, who will
get the jargons at their face value, will be misled and precipitated[56].
Those, who will get the jargons at their face value, will be misled and
precipitated.
Coming
back to those millions of years after our branching out from apes; the
situation was like if you plant a hundred palms in a square meter of well irrigated
fertile plot. Each will try to outgrow others to access sunlight. Each will
become very tall soon, though their other survival characteristics would pay
the price for this. As the human intelligence increased by bargaining, people
were not bargaining for some intellectual exercise. They were doing it because
its result would determine their life and death. Human brains also competed to
be more and more intricate when their other virtues lagged behind. In the
jungles of sub-Saharan Africa there was no professor who gave lessons on poetry
but the brain that would write Meghadutam after 50,000[57]
years as also would enjoy reading them attained that sophistication in the cut
throat competition of outgrowing others in brain capability.
Thus evolved a peculiar sub sub sub… species with
immensely lopsided survival characteristics.
My
palm-planting example might cause a misunderstanding me. Some might suppose, I
was telling that mere effort in some specific direction might cause in the next
generation, a mutation in that direction. That is to say, giraffes longed for
longer necks; their subsequent generation thus had longer necks.
No,
that did not or does not happen. In the very preliminary stage, the ruling
coalition won the women of the same tribe. The ruling coalition by advancing
generations, reached a stage when lesser brains had been exterminated long ago.
Bargaining had started because people understood it was better to bargain than
to fight. In the millennia when their intelligence had enough matured, they
also realised the value of reducing cost of bargaining[58].
Some members arrived at a point by bargaining through interference by other
ones who were not directly involved in the bargaining. Or, perhaps when several
tribesmen were in a squabble, the chief considered it profitable to assert his
authority not by taking side with one but by imposing some rule by which their
squabble would mitigate and the desire of most of his coalition members would
be appeased.
While we talk about culture, we get almost unknowingly
involved into cultural differences. We talk about Brahmin culture or Islamic
culture. It seems from this that culture ought to have been different in
different tribes from the very beginning. At the same time, whatever difference
is there—some form of culture is essential for any group of human being.
Recently many of us have noted that the segregation of
culture has been breaking down. Thus the culture of a Brahmin landlord is
becoming hardly different from that of their maidservants.
This is because of TV. However even then, it should
not be so—TV has many channels. With so much choice to exercise, one should
easily find an ETV culture or Star-TV culture. The word culture has something
regenerating in it. That is to say, if someone eats, one’s appetite decreases.
Unlike eating; some cultural practice induces further such practice (not often
in that particular individual) by others in the tribe. For this purpose, a
special word for a special meaning is transmitted from one individual to
others. If I read that all the authors use “bipedalism” and don’t use
“bipedality”; I too shall use “ism” rather “ity”. Thus you find that culture is
aggressive by nature and culls a particular practice to promote another for no
particular convincing reason other than bringing in harmony. 3 myr ago, a male
might make a particular eye movement to indicate his desire for a particular
female with an intention that that none other than his male ally would make out
the meaning. 300,000 years ago, a male might utter “da” to mean a delicious
looking crab for his heartthrob, while another might call it “pe”. Now if a boy
was shifting his affiliation with the former to that with the latter, he had
had to change his vocabulary. This kind of things, I might call anarchy of
culture but I suspect this was really absence of culture. Likewise, each
twosome male-male coalition approached its own rules. For example, in one
coalition it might be forbidden for the boy to have any liaison with the
consort of the super-ordinate. And after the super-ordinate is, say, devoured
by a tiger or becomes immaterial somehow otherwise, the boy enters into
coalition with another elderly male, who would not mind if the boy goes on a
fishing expedition with her. The point I want to stress is the evidences of
culture that our Cro-Magnon ancestors left between 40 kyr and 30 kyr were
impossible to create if there was only brain and no set of rules and governance
not as an inevitable consequence of human intelligence. Human intelligence was
necessary but not sufficient for culture.
As it aims at specifying interpersonal fencings, it
also determines specific reflexes to be conditioned. A specific culture
comprises a lot of things. And these usually come as a package, often not very
rational package. Consider the two different cultures that had been in vogue in
what is now Bengal. One culture considered it prudent to veil their women and
considered nothing wrong in eating beef. Another culture did not consider it so
much necessary to veil their women but considered beef to be a taboo. The mix
could as well be interchanged. Veiling the woman with eating ham. Our children
don’t inherit any culture. They only inherit the ability to be imbued with any
culture. If they had been brought up in another culture, the young men who
hijacked the planes to plunge on the twin tower could well show heroism enough
to receive President’s medal in defending the US interests in Asia.
When,
in the original statements of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, they
restricted its applicability to “inanimate” objects; the optimism in biological
evolution may have surprised Kelvin and Clausius. In the strictly physical
sense this was not necessary. Motor-efficiency of no animal ever surpasses that
of the Carnot engine working between the same pair of temperatures. Hundreds of
authors in the social sciences have so far applied this 2nd law to
social anarchy. The wonder of “survival of the fittest” is that it works like
the Maxwell’s demon, who stood guard between two chambers full of gas
molecules, allowed those with higher velocity to pass from A to B and those
with lower from B to A. in the hundreds of millions of years of life on the
earth, it happened only 80,000 to 40,000 years ago; at least one clan of H.
sapiens could recognise marriage and essentially this meant that fitness of a
society as a whole substituted individual fitness in the matter of survival.
Social recognition of marriage essentially meant that if B committed adultery
with A’s wife, then C or D would support A against B and at the same time, if A
committed adultery with B’s wife. Thus the objectivity of rules of
coalition-formation got elevated to a higher stage. It was not needed that such
rule was decided in a meeting of A, B, C and D. It was not even needed that
father decided this for his sons. Rather I would tend to believe that this rule
was decided by an authoritarian mother, prior to this, anywhere between 35,000
to 100,000 years passed men and women lived with fully mature brain in an
extremely immature anarchy.
Today,
if a deaf and dumb mother nurtures her only child in complete isolation from
any other human, the child will grow up to become a prototype of what our
ancestors had been during this period. As you readily know that such a child
despite possessing all the inborn human faculties will grow up to a very poor
chap. When all our ancestors were like this chap, they had hardly any impact
upon the world around them. What I want to make out is that even now each of us
“is born free” but all our achievements resulted after we were “in chains”.
Did we learn to obey social rules once for
all? No. What was coded into our DNA was obedience to rules for the sake of
alliances. That faculty was then co-opted and now also that faculty is co-opted
for social coordination. We have not inherited social coordination from ants or
birds, we have built up our own method of social coordination based on primate
traits and our good luck of having some despot to rule over us.
For that particular fortunate clan, rules
came along with what we know today as culture, language and everything that we
consider desirable today in a human society. Culture is that part of societal
rules that works as the first line of defence against a deviance. As an
“uncultured” person breaks such rules, they do not call for punishment but
frowns, that is, cautions other members and give that person a tacit warning
that if they do not mend their way they might be excluded. Getting left out of
a coalition is so deeply embedded in our psyche; we rarely take such risk. Only
at this stage, we can start to think in terms of inclusive fitness. You could
say that only at this stage individual fitness gave way to “inclusive fitness”.
In the third chapter we had been talking
about how Nature perfected our body by a trial and error method. Not only with
our bodies but also with our societies, Nature performed such experiments.
Better societal structures resulted from them. Because it was not necessary
that all or most among the societies in all the tribes attained this elevation.
Suppose that at least in one clan or in one tribe, the chiefs (or the leading
coalition) found their personal utility maximised by this change.
An amoral approach to morality-3
When
we had enormously improved brain as also conventional morality needed for
binding ourselves into coalitions; by random variation some of us also had the
ability to imagine better rules that could make bigger coalitions.
Society
with the most efficient arrangement, which stands winner, survives. Though the
population of our male ancestral tribe was minuscule compared to our present
6bn, in the span of thousands of years such situation came again and again and
we may suppose that on different occasions, the initiative for reducing cost of
bargaining came with different make up. A section could now hardly be defrauded
by keeping language exclusive, for which everybody had now inherited the brain
capable of. A stage came when it became impossible to prevent
counter-coalition. Transaction cost could hardly be made prohibitive, when
making coalition was showing diminishing return and solidarity of the tribe
rather needed that such unprincipled coalition be prohibited by
prohibiting incest. Simultaneously, as incest taboo got to be enforced inside a
tribe, economics of evolution demanded cooperation between males and females in
child rearing more profitable[59]
in transmitting a man’s own genetic code. A man who could care for his wife and
children had greater chance of being survived by more children. Reduction of
conflict among men[60]
in a tribe demanded chastity from women. Chastity became a virtue and got to be
admitted and even enforced by the ruling elite; possibly this was the first
occasion in which the ruling coalition had to agree to their power being curbed
for the sake of solidarity of the tribe. What the feminists do not seem to
understand is that the alternative to chastity for women is not freedom but
continuously remaining as an object of greed of the power that be. Care by
father was also something new among primates. Better childcare led to greater
survival, moreover children tended to remain dependent upon their mother and
father till still higher age. Mother’s influence upon their children increased
and extended throughout the lifetime of both, elderly women started to babysit
their daughter’s children. Though women took only a passive role by this model
in the evolution of human brain, women took a great role in domestication of
man.
Symbolic
thought and culture have gulf of difference between them. Pre-language vocal
communication developed for the specific purpose of getting a personal
advantage by getting into and through a coalition. As soon as there started the
slightest pre-language vocal communication, symbolic thought developed and in
another way, (that is by organising in one’s mind an image of what might
happen) served the same purpose. But such coalition was autonomous, free from
any backlog that culture could bind it to the previous generation. Culture came
with domestication, not with just ability to create and utilise rules and
languages but with the birth of specific rules and specific language,
transmitted through generations. It was perhaps not necessary that making of
stone-axes must have been transmitted through generations with the help of
language. Even if we assume that one could “inspect from behind shoulders of
elders and learn it”, social cohabitation, cohesion was priori needed for
making stone axes or grave goods. And such cohabitation was not possible when
there was no respect for the elderly males. Kind of exchange, in which a
division of labour is possible does not necessarily require higher intelligence
but needs some objectivity.
The
most primitive societies that anthropologists have so far studied are
nevertheless subject to certain rules imposed by their societies. These rules
reduced the cost of bargaining among their individuals.
Those
who have studied the languages more closely have given the opinion solely on
the basis of linguistic evidence that African and Eurasian languages diverged
from a common source about 70,000 to 50,000 years ago.
“All
languages are changing to some extent all the time and before the invention of
writing they seem to have changed faster. Since the various waves of conquerors
left their homeland at different times, they were speaking different varieties
of Indo-European at the times of their departures and the further changes that
took place after they left made their languages more and more unlike. As they
split up and settled in different regions, the differences became so great that
the Greeks, for instance, could not possibly understand the Germans; and a
little later some of the Germans could not understand other Germans.
“you will find a brief discussion of how far such a splitting process could go when there was nothing to interfere with it…Six centuries ago the local dialects in England (small as that country is) had become so different that it was often thought necessary to translate a book in order that it might be locally understood.
During the 70,000[61]-year-old
discipline in the language, there has all along gone on the two way process. On
the one hand there are the centralising institutions starting from the royal
courts to the specialised journals act toward working out a common form that
may often be just forcible imposition of one way of expression upon the other
forms, on the various other tribes, be they the resident of a geographical
area, be they students of cryogenics scattered throughout the world, work out a
mode of expression that is somewhat different from those who are outside the
group. Perhaps a most recent example is the developing language of electronic
chatting. Some time back, even a book has been published with the meanings of
the special words used in this e-chat language.
…local
differences were so great that a man trained in northern England would
have serious difficulty reading a manuscript written in the southern part.
However, the dialect of London had a certain prestige throughout the country;
and although this dialect itself was by no means uniform, changing with shifts
in city population, it gradually came to be accepted as the standard by the
latter half of the fifteenth century it was quite generally used writing
throughout the country except in the extreme north…Strong local differences in
spoken English remain to this day, especially among the less educated classes.
But throughout the modern period written (or at least published) English has
been surprisingly uniform.
Just as our babies don’t inherit any specific
language of today, but inherit the “language acquisition device”(LAD) nicknamed
language-instinct, they also don’t inherit any (social rule, which is better
known as) morality. Ability to work in and through coalitions is coded in our
DNA along with the LAD because these two interrelated abilities among our
ancestors were at the root of our birth. Ability to obey the rules, ability to
impose rules on others, will to deceive others by flouting these very rules—the
usual things you can conceive of in “continuous making and unmaking of
coalitions” are all coded into our DNA.
Unfortunately
the few people that by random variation had this 5th grade morality
of postconventional level did not have any individual reproductive success. Let
us make a wild model. Let a tribe be made of five clans of five families each
clan. Let four such clans make a tribe of 500 people. We further suppose that
10% of people are bestowed with 5th grade morality. Each clan will
then have 10% probability of such people leading them. These clans survive.
Remember that the people with 5th grade morality in the clans in
which they were not in the leading positions did not have the reproductive
success and the people with lower grade morality led by 5th grade
people had the reproductive success.
These
people, who could imagine the society under a better set of rules, had better
ability of hierarchicization in their Broca’s area. They engineered the better
society and later on became scientists and philosophers in our historical
period.
Inter-tribe war
Better
use of language and rules made our male ancestors’ a better-coordinated tribe,
women not to be won by violence inside the tribe, our male bands then started
to prey upon other Homo sapiens tribes (75,000 to 40,000 years ago), for women
to be taken as wives and men to be slaughtered and perhaps cannibalised. This was another
step by which better language spread. After the vanquished lost their women,
whether they lived to work as slaves (as in rather later times, after our
forefathers learnt animal husbandry) or were butchered became immaterial
because after all, they were unable to transmit their progeny. The tribe that could defeat
other tribes, could annihilate the males, capture the females, and use them to
propagate the victors’ own progeny, the evolution at this time got a
revolutionary speed. In this killing game, mutual communication among the
members of a clan could be enormously beneficial. If the members could shout
with sound signals that would be understandable by other members of the same
clan but not understandable by the other clan, it was surely very much of a
comparative advantage. Suppose you are a fighting male and found me hiding in a
bush. I do not know if you have located me. If you give a fearful shout or a
simple cry for help, I could run away or could attack you. However if you make
such body gestures and such relaxed voice that I feel that you must not have
been able to discover my location until I find your clan members wielding
sticks and stone-axe have surrounded me. There could be many similar occasions,
when feint could win. The clan that could use the sound signals could use their
comparative advantage, to vanquish the other clans. Passwords for strategic use
must also have been invented in the prehistoric era, though much later.
Encrypting
in sound signals and restraint of body-movements and restraint of almost
involuntary animal like howling, however, required greater intelligence.[62]
Getting
more females through tribal war penetrated deep into our historic times (Parashuram,
making the “world” nikshatriya-slaughtering all Kshatriya (the warrior
Varna) males might not be just a wild imagination. Our khokababu winning
over the demons and rescuing his princess has always been a favourite story for
the grannies. Young girls of other tribes have always been quite welcome and
their males have always been “demon”s, until our forefathers learnt to enslave
them. This fight for women is well
proven at least for India. West Eurasian males eliminated three fourths of
indigenous male gene in the last ten thousand years.
Taming of Fire
We know that lighting of fire was a big achievement
for man. In fact, when man learnt to roast the animal flesh before eating, the
diseases like Anthrax became irrelevant. But we should not forget that the
lighting of fire must not have been a universal skill. If you have doubt, ask a
group of young teenager picnickers to light a fire in an open field with the
materials available there. Very few will be successful. Lighting of fire must
be a skill possessed by a limited number of tribesmen. Yet the whole tribe
enjoyed its benefit. It is the speciality of human society that its
organisation allows us to enjoy many things that we do not possess any skill at
and should other humans not make them for us we would have missed them.
Thus
a stage came when a man skilled in lighting a fire or in making a wheel had an
extra opportunity to be included in the ruling coalition, though his special
skill might not be related to hunting for animals or for women. This factor
might have helped in perpetuating the progeny of these skilled men. And when
the time came for our male ancestors to launch their extermination campaign of
all other men of the world, our skilled forefathers definitely got a good share
in this added opportunity to transmit their progeny. This also might have taken
a part in the rapid improvement of brain and language and a stage was reached,
when our ancestors became quite homogeneous in intelligence. On the other hand,
the average intelligence was high enough so that by random fluctuation several
individuals had above average aptitude or hobby in some matters. Some of these
aptitudes and skills were again related to greater procreation otherwise than
by forming earlier kind of coalition. Possibly this was the time when women’s
role in child rearing started to be recognised by men to be conducive to better
procreation.
In
the millennia, we were spreading into territories now in or about Syria, it is
doubtful if the women and men spread simultaneously. Gene data now suggest that
during the early historic and late prehistoric periods that is to say from
12000 B.C. onwards, India was invaded by the so-called west Eurasians and they
came mostly as male-only bands. If during these later periods, male-only bands
invaded and took the women as their booty, we can extend to assume that the
aspiration or compulsion, whatever you call it, that propelled these male bands
to run over different territories was also present 40,000 or 50,000 years ago
and at least at these stage looting of women from other tribes became more
important factor than looting wife from others of the same clan. Many of our
mothers (female ancestors) migrated much earlier out of sub-Saharan Africa than
our fathers, because as early as 90,000 years ago there is evidence of Homo
sapiens living in the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. I suspect they
were no less in intelligence than our male ancestors (with their social
cohesion and discipline as their final edge), who migrated much later, about
60,000 to 40,000 years ago, or, may be, still later. Thus inter-tribe wars
played a greater role, at this later stage and the tribe, which was more
linguistically disciplined, could win.
During the 1970’s many thought that human
language was about 10,000 years old whereas agriculture was older; about 30,000
years old. In the 1980’s it was argued that agricultural could not be possible
without language. In my opinion, not only agriculture but also animal husbandry
was impossible without language. Language in its very elementary but
disciplined form must be as old as the modern man and by any means it cannot be
less than 40,000 years old. The similarity in the two of the ancient languages
Latin and Sanskrit ranges far beyond the basic words and that gives rise to the
suspicion that the west Eurasian male bands brought a quite voluminous
vocabulary with them while coming to India. I do not know whether the
suggestion that the Deva bhasha had its principal roots outside the
Indian borders would be palatable to all, but it seems that as a matter of fact
it was that way.
Chapter 7:Objectivity
and Institutions
Institution
signifies some objectivity—some impersonality of the rules. The reward or
punishment gets decided to some extent by my good deed or bad and does not
solely depend upon how I am related to the hierarchy of the coalition.
Those,
who start to think in terms of essential goodness of Man (because, Viswakarma
Created Man so specially on the order of Lord Brahma), find no difficulty in
explaining how men become objective, moral and everything. We, who think human
character developed as it was required by evolution of the species and of its
society, suffer from the additional burden of proof how it became necessary for
the individuals, in their own interest, to become objective.
Objectivity becomes imperative as soon as
there come rules. The very first rules came up with the need for preventing
counter-coalition and for keeping cost of bargaining low among members of the ruling
coalition. Armed with that much objectivity human tribes could embark on
hunting of big animals. It further strengthened the objective recognition of
personal skill.
Zigzag change
The
institutions are not founded once for all. Take the institution of Democracy
for example. In our historical times, most of the times we have found autocracy
to be the common form of government. Yet democracy is quite old. We have heard
of democracy in the earliest times we have heard of. Thus it is not wholly
impossible that democracy existed in some of the societies we have no
historical record about. This is my justification for using examples from our
present world to visualise the phenomena of the prehistoric times.
As
our ancestors understood the advantage of objective recognition of personal
skill for collective utilisation, they also understood that continuous making
and unmaking of coalition and counter-coalition were going against the
collective interest of the tribe as a whole.
Democracy-1[63]
Democracy
is one such possibility of social arrangement for reducing this anarchy. The
often-mentioned virtue of democracy lies in its ability to realise the change
of government without bloodshed.[64]
Let
us leave Democracy at this stage for detailed discussion later, and continue
our study of institution in general. As a common phenomenon, institutions
develop during the time of good governance and decay at the time of bad rulers.
Marx[65]
noted this in India. What is known as matsyanyaya (big fishes devouring
smaller ones-the phase before the ascension of the Pal’s in the early 8th
century A.D.) in the history of Bengal
refers simply to such absence of the institution. Chandragupta Mourya or
Akbar is remembered not only for their conquests but also for they revitalised
the institutions. Arthashastra(328 B C) contains remarkable sanctions
for the protection of the freedom and dignity of women. Though, somebody might
dismiss these as more in the way of precepts than in the way of practice, the
pragmatism is noticed unfailingly. And the precept part is clearly distanced.
The well-known precept regarding security was “an well ornamented young lady
walking alone, enjoys a good sleep under a tree and embarks on her journey
afresh on the next morning.” The writer did not feign that he was describing
the state of affairs, nevertheless, did not fail to demand it from the
king-in-council.
Assume away the civilisation, another once
The
early economists so often used the agricultural example to elucidate their
point in order that the number of variables they had to deal with remained
limited. In this example with robbers in this discussion, it is easier for us
to visualise a collective that appears to be independent of the mainstream
politics. Because the convention we
are habituated to, allows us to disregard the interaction between some specific
member of the gang with specific members of mainstream politics or of the
police force.
Division of labour
Rifles
or ammunitions are after all mechanical instruments and need periodic
servicing. Though we heard about legendary pinpointed aim of gangs’ men each is
certainly not endowed with the same degree of the skill. Provisioning is also a
specialised affair because, most probably often we shall be left with a lot of
gold and cash but no food. Reconnaissance is again very important because none
of us want a carefully planned operation to end in earning a cash of a few
hundreds and some household utensils. The chief will definitely coordinate all
these but though we may expect, being quite experienced in the profession, he
knows something of everything, he can never feel in his heart, self-satisfied
with his knowledge and wisdom. Again the distribution of the loot is by no
evidence, egalitarian. Thus everybody will try to exaggerate his own importance
and claim a larger booty. The chief will perhaps clamp down his own decisions
on each matter; it may not be the best that is the most optimal decision.
In
addition to assuming away his exhausting his comparative advantage in
comparative violence, a better decision may be reached by bargaining. Suppose S
is skilled in scouting around the villages for profitable opportunities and R
in shooting. But, when there is the talk about paying the shooter more than S,
S claims he could shoot better than R. In case the chief priori-fixes the
duties and earning; each of them wants more hands to assist him. Under this
situation, if they bargain they are the most likely to come to a better
decision in these three regards.
Partly Impartial
Again, as the decision has very much effect upon the
total earning of the gang, each member will seek part in decision making on two
mutually exclusive reasons. One, for greater personal share and two, for
increasing the total earning of the gang. Bargaining power will depend, once
again, upon not only how much coercion one can inflict upon the another but how
much benefit one can shower upon with his special skill. Thus, though,
everybody will try to gain advantage in personal share by highlighting his own
skill, each will also have a stake in an objective estimation of every other’s
skill. I should remind some reader, who may not have remembered our
self-imposed mandate, gang members practise, at least partially the virtue of
objectivity; not because they consider it moral. Rather they find this
objectivity needed to keep their profession viable—and this need make this
objectivity moral. At this stage at least some of them have attained 5th
or 6th stage of moral reasoning in the post conventional level
mentioned by Kohlberg. Some of our ancestors achieved this stage many millennia
ago.
Only
a small percentage of people attain this post conventional level even today. I
do not preach that ten or twenty thousand years ago, it was the Satya Yug,
when everybody used to attain this highest stage. My bias is to believe that
the percentage was the same then. We can definitely say that human society has
achieved its present magnificence for this small fraction of population. But it
is difficult to say how the future society will utilise them.
Compare
the circumstances with our stone-age tribe. Suppose there is a man, who is an
expert of making stone axe. In our evening gathering, while it is quite likely
that he will be no exception in demanding extra share of our earnings for
himself, another demand by him may be that before the coming of monsoon we
should build up our inventory of stones for making stone-axes.
The
distribution of labour force with special skills in different fields with
varying compensation is routine in a market economy. When people can freely
bargain and systems for reducing cost of bargaining exist, you approach perfect
competition. For example, job applicants come with credentials as to their
special skills that reduce the trouble that the employer faces in judging their
skill and the jobseekers face in proving theirs.
In
the gang however no credential from any impartial institution is available and
only judgment as to the measure of one’s special skill can be made through
scanty and partially subjective observation by a limited number of members, who
may have some incentive for false judgment[66].
But they also have some stake in making a correct judgment. And this is a very
important factor in the development of the independence of institutions.
At the same
time the less communicating members are the less cohesive. If some members have
not made themselves conversant in the nuances of the language of the elite in
the gang, will now have a possibility of being left out from the decision
making of the group, of course, they may always threat to form a
counter-coalition. But it is very clear that the probability that disruption of
unity would benefit any section of members of the gang is fairly small. Now
suppose we are not considering a gang of robbers but are considering the
democratic system of our country. If you are one of those interested in preserving it; you may try to impart the
training of language of discourse in a democratic polity to all and especially
the marginalised of our people. However, in the process you will not be able to
defraud them. So you will try to empower them too. The elite may or may not
share your interest. Often the elite thinks the empowerment of the marginalised
is not a good bargain for their support for the regime. But it is also fact
that in this world there exist some very remarkable democracies.
Universities
Whether
I have better skill in a particular field, say, masonry, than Partha, can
create great debate between us. I would want higher remuneration, and Partha
has no reason to agree to it. Our employers will have to test us individually
or to impose their decision upon us-all these giving rise to formidable cost of
bargaining on each of us.
It
will be beneficial for all of us if we had an institution to judge our
respective skills. As you find, it was customary for us two to pay for the
testing. But there is no reason why it must be so. All the potential employers
and employees may be made by the state to pay, and that is usually advocated on
the ground of the good externalities created.
But
an institution is also made up of humans, not angels. How does it maintain its
objectivity? In an examination, say, I have proved my worth for a 50% credit. I
would gain if the examination system, by some mistake, award me 60%, which
would, I estimate, give me benefits for which I am now ready to spend Rs
100,000.
This
is a conservative estimate. Candidates getting 60%marks in West Bengal Joint
Entrance Examination, and thereby admitted to a government-aided engineering or
medical college will spend much less money and get, perhaps a more worthy
degree. Whereas those getting 50% and missing their choice course in such
colleges, if do not lose hope and get into a private college in West Bengal or
in some other state, would spend about Rs 3 to 4 lakh for possibly a less
worthy diploma.
In
fact, it is not necessary that I must be now able to have that much money in
cash. I may threaten the examiners if I knew their names and addresses. Of
course by threatening them, also I run the risk of landing in jail, but if I
estimate that such risk is worth less than Rs 100,000, I would rather try my
luck that way. How does the Board or the University prevent this? They keep the
names and addresses of the examiners secret and make it illegal even for the
examiners to reveal which candidates they are examining. In our terminology,
this way, they increase the cost of bargaining between a specific candidate and
their examiners above the prohibitive level.
Not
only the university but also the other institutions that are needed to protect
objectivity against specific personal interest also use this method of, which
we had named “ruling out counter-coalition”. When I want to bribe an
investigating officer of the police station, I always bear the fear that this
particular officer could be of the Nazrul Islam type. Here again you find that
it is not needed that either must be very honest. What is utmost needed is one
must fear to reveal one’s real utility function.
Incidentally,
I have mentioned a field, in which, really, there exists no system of awarding
diploma. You knew the harassment it meant to you when you got to build or
repair a house.
Discovery of Fact
At
the initial stage, we had noted that coalition started by convincing others.
But a stage comes when objective revelation of fact becomes vital. This
objectivity lies at the basis of any institution. A bureaucracy is often blamed
to be faceless; it may seem so, but this facelessness is the virtue that makes
all institutions so vital. Could a habitually dictatorial polity dispense with
it? Please follow this hypothetical but quite possible example.
Suppose
that in a war against India, one very patriotic brigadier Asif inflicts heavy
casualty on Indian side. But then an Indian (also very patriotic) secret agent
in the Pak army working in the guise of a menial under him convinces top bosses
that Asif had been a collaborator. Asif faces court-martial and remains in
prison until the time of his retirement. Thus if the court martial is manned by
anti-India diehards, who however lack in the cool skill of discovering the
facts, this court martial results in a steady benefit stream for their enemy.
Civic parallel
If this military example, you think, is
irrelevant to our civic society, you may easily think of civic parallels. If
the civil court cannot maintain the rights of a buyer, it would injure not only
the interest of the buyer, but also the health of the economy. In fact this
objectivity was splendid means of reducing cost of bargaining. You have heard
many arguments for and against charging fees in government hospitals and
colleges. Are you decided? About a family that you personally know to be fairly
poor, you felt they should get free medicine and free education. Again, for
some other family, which …these sum up to that there should be mechanism to
record pecuniary status objectively with the least interference from political
manipulation. In its objectivity it should be at par with a university or a
court of law. And you know that all the rhetoric of macroeconomic reform with social
justice reduces to junk without the institutions of judgement.
Do I Need an Institution?
If
I suspect I may be having diabetes, I have my blood tested for sugar. I pay for
it. Presumably my neighbours are not that much interested in knowing whether I
have sugar; I don’t ask them to contribute to pay a part of the bill.
I
am also interested in knowing if the water supplied by Corporation or Public
Health is free from germs but the tests are too costly. Central Government,
through large hoardings and generous newspaper advertisements asks me to drink
only safe and transparent water. As I am a loyal citizen, my awareness should
be generated. But I am unfortunate to have known that even transparent water
might contain hordes of germs and Arsenic. I could of course buy bottled water
but the cost would leave me starving. Or, I could buy a water-purification set
marketed through handsome advertisements. But biology professors don’t
guarantee that water from such a set would be free from Hepatitis virus. So what
could I do?
Fortunately this is a matter in which many
people might be interested. We could collect donations for building up a system
of testing drinking water for virulence. Alternatively, we could coerce the
government by telling them that we would not vote for them unless they create
the institution[67] for
objective evaluation of the water they supply. My friends make enormous
sacrifice for the sake of their future generation.
Most
people are, at heart, nobler than I. They buy a costly water purification set
for their children. “The more sugar you pour, the sweeter it will be”. The more
you spend, the better result you get. The costlier private coaching you could
afford to, the better career your child will earn.
I am often suspicious. Is the famous school
in the big town really better for my child? If there were an independent
agency, which evaluated schools and the verdict of which I could trust; it
could help me a lot in deciding where I would admit my child.
I
am not talking about educational experts. Government uses experts for
accreditation of universities and colleges. These experts possess almost divine
omniscience. They can judge a university by a few visits over a few days.
But I want ordinary investigators, who can
continuously follow the change of performances of a single batch, of pupils
from different family backgrounds in that single batch and make continuous
evaluation of the impact of the schooling on each segment of students. Amartya
Sen’s Pratichi Trust started to do it in Birbhum and in other remote
districts. Could we unite to make it
possible elsewhere?
Any alternative to this model?
And
of course, it was possible only after the human brain had enormously developed
and crossed another threshold. Let us ponder somewhat about how it could
develop. Could it develop because everyone understood that it was good for
general welfare? If that happened there could be no rent seeking today. Could
it happen that the chief alone could understand and enforced the rules that
reduced cost of bargaining? If that could happen, today we could find the most
autocratic states to be the most socially cohesive societies. Of course we
could make another hypothesis that at that era, human brain was capable enough
only to be subjugated to the coercion exerted by the chief, and only later on
human brain developed to understand the benefits of collective decision-making.
All data seem to tell us that our ancestors about 20,000 years back had no less
intelligence than us. Our total exposure, newspaper and Internet were absent
but their knowledge about their own members was definitely not less than how
much we know about colleagues in our workplace or our neighbours in our
neighbourhood. By eliminating these alternatives, we are left with the only
alternative that the ruling elite (coalition) had to agree to this objectivity,
which had to be recognised as a kind of rule itself and thereby as a social
virtue. The tribes that did so became strong and invincible. The tribes that
did not so recognise got eliminated by the ones that did.
Chief reincarnate
Ruling coalition creates rules including that
of objectivity for reducing cost of bargaining. The chief now finds it gainful
to pose as an institution for implementing these rules. Even
now you find that in a society, in which the market system is not well
established, the privileges are recognised on the basis of one’s ability of
committing violence and this privilege gets more respected as the elite uses it
also for reducing cost of bargaining among those down under them. The feudal
lords become super-parents and their power and property get the flavour of
holiness. Thus two mutually counter currents of a coalition gaining advantage
in violence and a chief implementing the rules set by the coalition for itself
(and of course, often the chief becoming autocrat flouting those rules).
Whatever
despotism we consider during the historical period, such despotism is
nevertheless, much beyond the comparative advantage in violence. When we consider the fight between Bali
and Sugrebe (which relates to hardly one or two millennia B. C., the fight
itself might be no different from the occasional fight for chiefdom that breaks
out even in a herd of elephants—But in a human tribe, the other members cannot
be allowed to remain disinterested.
Sub-coalition & counter-coalition
Despotism in
any autonomous human society, whether that is a modern university or that is an
ancient city-state, works by increasing the transaction cost[68]among
potential challengers of power.
In my boyhood I heard this so many times in tea shops
in city slums or our countryside. Elderly people lamented, usually when a bit
inebriated, the division in our military made it impossible for them to stage a
coup d’etat. They seemed to envy our military-ruled neighbours.
Of course, one could make a positive approach of
reducing (in a civilised society, that is principally done through
institutions) cost of bargaining among potential allies. The chief may consider
the gain of the coalition to be his gain. But that is not always true. His
equation may be quite different. Now, say, you are considering a Prime
Minister. By the viewpoint of a common man he should give the maximum priority
to the interest of the country. From the viewpoint of his party members however
he should give the maximum priority to the party-interests. The faction in the
party that made him the leader of the parliamentary party however will think
otherwise. Again there must be a hardcore within the faction. However
ultimately any leader will be working in the best interest of his own only. And
if this interest clashes with an institution at any level, the leader will try
to weaken the institution.
Thus we may make a model of a democratic country. The
entire population is united in a coalition, which is the constitutionally
proclaimed repository of all authority. It has been determined that a better
keeping up of the unity of this great coalition, one could allow some inner
sub-coalitions—political parties. Then numerous sub-coalitions build up, some
not envisaged in, nevertheless, not ruled out in the basic rules. And some are
in the way of a counter-coalition. The most important counter-coalitions
against a democratic polity consist of the chief. From such a model, we also
get an idea of what we consider corruption. We do not call a petty thief
corrupt. Corruption is committed only when a person betrays the trust reposed
by the coalition. However, betrayal of a trust reposed by a bigger coalition is
not considered so much of a corruption as betrayal of a trust reposed by a
smaller sub-coalition is.
Marx
My
coalition model would not sound much different from Marxian hypothesis of
historical determinism. History of mankind is the history of class struggle.
Marxian hypothesis is much more definite, conceptually straightforward and
testable. It is another matter that it does not stand the tests. Human
coalitions date back much earlier into prehistoric evolutionary period. Marx as
also most of his adversaries did not look into how the individuals inside a
given class could solve their (non-antagonistic) contradiction so that they
could wage a war against their class enemies
(To put it straight, how individuals in a class are prevented from free
riding on the sacrifice by other individuals in that class)
Chief as “defender of faith”
The
chiefs usually assure they would respect the institutions and the rule of law.
That takes somewhat different forms in different perspectives. Whenever there
was a coup d’etat in an Islamic country the generals usually promised to uphold
Islamic religion and law. Several decades ago, when socialism was somewhat
fashionable, some junta promised to establish socialism. Akbar had some
difficulty in obeying the theological precepts, but that was only in his
personal life. Nevertheless, the difficulty embarked[69]
him on the way of declaring a war against Islam. These days, chiefs often find
becoming a reformer to be the cheapest way to override the institutions. Indira
Gandhi’s crusade[70] against the
judiciary and the institution of property, Vajpayee’s endeavour to get rid of
the dicta from the Parivar, Jyoti Basu’s success in defeating the “dogmatist”s
in the party are only few cases that can be remembered. The supremo creates the
assumption that he would increase the transaction cost so as to prevent
counter-coalition. He however takes every chance to use his power to prevent[71]
any counter-coalition against himself.
Vajpayee’s
example is unusually instructive. If BJP together with its allies (precarious
allies, who do not support any of its policies) could not get majority then he
could not become the Prime Minister. If his party BJP won absolute majority he
could not become the Prime Minister, Advani would have been.
The
result is a continuous pair of counter-currents--on the one hand, there is a
coalition inside a coalition; politburo inside the central committee and a hard
core inside the politburo[72];
on the other, bigger coalition sometimes asserts the institutions on the face
of a formidable challenge by a counter-coalition. Some time back, people often
used to say, “All (read, all the leaders) are looking after their party
interests, none care for the people.” In parliamentary democracy there is
nothing immoral in looking after one’s party interest-but “all” really seek
their respective personal interests.
Chief fights institution
Suppose I am the king- I
Here
a chief fights alone against the objectivity of a simple forensic laboratory.
Suppose I am the Prime Minister of a very powerful country. A moment of my
indiscretion can cause my military to start war causing death to thousands of
people. Yet, on one occasion, I was powerless to change a simple sample in the
custody of a small pathological laboratory. Let such replacement need consent
of three persons. Even if each of them individually will have no objection to
carry out my secret order, in exchange of, say, a little sum of Rs 1000000 for
each, much more than what, I am always ready to pay; it would be the cost of
bargaining among them that kept the deal unaccomplished.
A few days later; I visited a country with
much less military might. During my stay over there, their government very
easily changed the blood sample for the sake of proving its innocence in a
charge of cold-blooded murder by its police. Voodoo police had murdered some
Voodoo civilians and wanted to implicate Ghutsi terrorists in it. I come to the
conclusion that it was much more comfortable to lead a backward country.
Suppose I am the king- II
Perhaps
the chapter name is wrong. Often it is not the chief alone but sub-coalition
acting through the chief fights the institution. Let us manufacture another
example in some detail.
Let
us consider that I am the chief of a particular province in a savage country, I
don’t have much of legitimacy but with some arrangement with my legitimate
sovereign, run my territory essentially as I wish to. I lead the Voodoo tribe
but Ghutsi men do also inhabit in my province. Voodoo people are convinced that
it is only I, who could save the territory from the evil that Ghutsi men bring in.
The Voodoo colonies were devastated by an earthquake the last year, many died
and relief from the whole world poured into my hand. Belonging to a savage
country, I am not as moral as Indian leaders are, after giving to my sovereign
a generous portion that his honour demands, I pocketed all that came, kept in
my Swiss bank[73] account.
The money that came, equivalent of Rs 5000000000 to be exact was enough for
building a mansion for each of the earthquake victims but as I know very well,
my fellow tribesmen prefer living in huts so I did not care. Now, some western
people who had to be let in, lest they would not have given me the money, have
started to ask for accounts.
Under
such a situation, it could be fantastic, if I could, another once generate
awareness among my fellow Voodoo tribesmen that all these hue and cry for money
lost related to the conspiracy by Ghutsi devils. If at this moment, at least
one Ghutsi man killed a Voodoo person or raped a Voodoo girl, it could be
fantastic positive externality to me; really I am ready to spend a portion of
my prize on some Ghutsi man for the sake of internalising such externality.
Further
suppose that with the help of my hot line in Switzerland with the chief of the
neighbouring Ghutsi principality, I manage to make some Ghutsi men burn up a
few Voodoo men in a caravan. In the subsequent months, unemployed Voodoo young
idlers, with the assistance of my personal security force, butcher about a
thousand Ghutsi men, women and children. As I earnestly desired, there was
outcry for my ouster throughout the world. As desired by the ex-American
president (Lincoln or Clinton-my sovereign often confuses his name) I have even
photographed myself with some plundered Ghutsi families. And as much as they
shouted against me, I became more secure in my throne. Because now all the
Voodoo people earnestly believe that I am their sole saviour.
Postscript:
We have been able to convince our collaborator chief of the Ghutsi principality
to start an extermination campaign over all Voodoo people in his jurisdiction.
That would make my position all the more secure.
And
I throw challenge to all the philanthropic people of the world. You cannot
build up an institution to book me.
Democracy-2, a seemingly trivial point
A
chief can fight only those institutions that fall within their purview. In a
democracy you find some times the chief wants to fight the institution of the
impartiality in the election process by rigging the elections but I tell you it
is quite difficult for a big chief in a big election because of the
organisational difficulty. Only when a terrorist organisation gives a call for
boycotting the elections that the police may feel inspired to rig an election.
Police personnel never love to fight the terrorists. It is a very thankless job
and a lot of risk. They may hope that the elections would bring an end to the
terrorism. Most of all, in those cases there was none to resist the rigging.
People did not go to cast vote not so much by the fear of the police as much by
the fear of the terrorists who had called for boycotting the elections. Now
consider the private armies. The private armies of local leaders owe their
primary allegiance to the local leaders and not to the top boss. That explains
why whereas petty elections, say, for the students’ union in a college having
little consequence in terms of money or power can be so easily rigged, the
almighty chiefs become quite helpless in the elections which they are concerned
in. Only under special circumstances would the workers (official or unofficial)
at the grass-roots level take the trouble. I am really clueless how Ershad
could convince the armed forces to rig the elections in his favour but that was
not repeated. Normally we can hope that the local private armies would come
forward to rig an election only when the election will also include some
parliamentary or assembly seats, signifying power and money in local
politics.
It will be of
some interest to note that even Marx at a time thought that the institution of
objectivity in the election process was so strong in the UK and in the US that
his proletariats in these two countries could seize power from bourgeois
parties without bloodshed. It was another story that the proletariats did not
care.
The few
people, who have read Marx in his original works know that Marx was an admirer of such institutions, that can withstand
pressure from different interests in order to remain objective. I request
everybody to read what he wrote about British Factory Inspectors, in the first
few pages of Capital that I have seen to ornament drawing rooms of very many
middle class people in Kolkata.
Chapter 8:Market
Coalition
Trade in Skill
8.1
Again we go back to our primitive tribe. A particular man had a special
aptitude in lighting a fire. Everybody was not interested in fire-most liked to
eat meat raw. But another man several hamlets away was fairly interested. Apart
from this bondage of fire, they had little other bondage. They were no brothers
or half-brothers and even did not belong to the same clan. As long as looting
wives of the same tribe was the principal purpose of a coalition, a coalition
based on skill could not predominate. Then the latter coalition, between the
practitioner of a skill and its patron was completely new. Now you and I could
form a coalition, not a general purpose one, but a special purpose coalition,
-that you light a fire whenever I am fortunate to possess a piece of raw meat.
Why it is a
coalition
8.2 The older collusion-coalition works for
mutually agreeing to reserve the limited resources for its members. Zero-sum
game relates to collection economy of the hunter-gatherer and remains the
commonest phenomenon, say, when military generals conspire to seize power and
divide state-resources among themselves. In a market, the opposite is not
obvious or immediate. It was a common experience a generation back. When a town
was being industrialised, the elderly natives resented the increase in the
price of eggplant (aubergine) (or any of the locally produced item for that matter).
This is also my explanation why I call the relation in the market a coalition.
When the seller sells eggplant to you, I am being deprived. The deprivation
differs only in degree, when my fiancée marries a much wealthier (and therefore
more suitable) boy.
Advantages
8.2.1
We should contrast it from the original coalition we knew. unlike a
collusion-coalition, this one did not preclude the formation of another
market-coalition for some other purpose with somebody else. If you buy pulses
from one grocer and rice from another; neither has much reason to object. It is
better than your buying both items from the other or from a third.
8.2.2
In the long run however, for any piece of these developments, most people may
not find their balance to worsen by increase in another’s consumption, rather
often the bargain is the opposite so that more the number of consumers, better
are the consumers. The people resenting the increase in the prices of eggplant
would shortly find that the nearby market gardens would produce more aubergine
and perhaps their acreage would also increase. This will bring the price almost
to the earlier level.
8.2.3 Thirdly, after some time, they also
realise that the labour influx brought with it opportunities of added income.
They could now rent out their residential accommodation for higher rent, which
more than made up for their additional expenditure on eggplant and other such
items.
8.2.4. Of course, there is no guarantee that
all would gain and then the people who gain may be asked to share a part with
who lose; so that losers’ resistance to market may be mitigated. (Here however
we are not entering into the question of who could ask.) After all that is
again a non-antagonistic contradiction and it can be solved without a fight.
8.2.5 Whereas the former form of coalition
depended for its viability upon rules to rule out any counter-coalition,
latter’s subsistence depended nevertheless on rules but very different kind of
rules, the principal purpose of which was to create different sort of
predictability. As we saw it earlier; these rules work for reducing cost of
bargaining. Civil law including the standardisation of weights and measures and
rules of arithmetic fall within the market rules.
Market making
8.2.6 It is the need of this market making
that makes me to invigilate other customers. In a weekly market in a remote
village, customers keep vigilance against others shoplifting. Likewise, in any
urban marketplace, the vendors keep vigil upon other vendors defrauding the
customers by short weight. One vendor defrauding customers gives the market a
bad name and it becomes a negative externality for each other vendor of the
market. This vigil is also the source of market-morality. When the conductor of
bus asks to show the ticket; he is taking the help of, as also is enforcing the
rules of a market coalition comprising not only the passengers, but also all
the potential passengers, each of whom has a stake in the busses plying on the
route. When ticket collectors of the railways ask for the same, they are
supposed to be exercising government authority. Definitely they are doing so,
but they are also partly enforcing the market rules. It is thus natural that
participants use different degrees of morality when they deal in a big market
and in a small (lest it may not survive) market. People, who will consider
cheating the bus-conductor horribly immoral; may well travel on a train without
ticket at an hour the TT has no chance to surface.
Skill-trade
8.2.7
Also when more people want to use a particular skill, more people try to
acquire it so that the skill becomes more available. I do definitely pay you
for your service with a piece of meat, raw or roasted, as you prefer. The fact
that you are lighting the fire does not necessarily mean that you like roasted.
But you may not get sufficient incentive in it. You want frequenter opportunity
of selling your skill. In case you are about to leave for a better market for
your skill, I might try to restrain you by force or by recruiting more patrons for
you. This way, I make a market for you. Now in a world of modern markets, I
might try to or my effort might be explained in the model of subsidising other
consumers or producers.
8.2.8
Secondly, Even in the prehistoric age, a tribe could utilise any technological
achievement only when there could be trade in skill. Possibly in some
millennium, making of wheels was the new technological breakthrough and human
tribes were accommodating their society to this. At some other time, lighting
of fire had been.
8.2.9 On the other hand, trade in property
could not evolve in regard to some material object, which could be snatched.
Right to property in the modern sense that allows trading in it, must have
started with regard to skill. But in a nascent political system or in a
primitive tribe; it is fairly possible that an autocrat wants to interfere in a
market.
8.2.10 But especially in regard to skill, a
despot often gets nonplussed. An autocratic manager of a firm gets unusually
gentle while speaking with the accountant. Erstwhile Soviet government’s
trouble in controlling their talented citizens is history now. Akbar did never
substitute his chief engineer Kasim Khan, who rendered valuable service during
many a military campaign with his special skill in laying bridge of boats even
after he was reasonably confirmed that Khan was so much against his policies
that he could commit treason at any time.
Collisions
8.3.1 Firstly, a coalition between a buyer
and seller had to be sufficiently strong so as to make others to bear with it.
The original method of bringing another to consent was coercion, not exchange.
Conscious exchange started only with human coalition, collusion-coalition to be
specific. When volition-exchange came, it was not purity of the volition that mattered.
There was no reason, why everybody should honour the volition. Natives may
sometimes demand that eggplant has to be sold to them at a somewhat lower price
than they are sold to the immigrant labour. Sellers may even oblige them. The
coalition between a seller of a skill and its patron is completely new at the
start; the coalition for trade does not immediately replace the command
elements. Economics was built up on a very small part of the individual’s
behaviour in exchange operations. It is quite natural for the powerful people
to demand that goods or service should be rendered only for their benefit.
8.3.2
If I have less money and more ability of violence, I shall try that matters
should be decided through violence. If I feel that I can influence the
government through my vote or through my connections more than I can influence
the market through my money; I would “urge” the government to intervene. I
would ask for subsidy on imported petroleum, on all commodities and services
used by my wealthiest countrymen. On the other hand if I don’t have the
facility, I would argue for a free market. During the last decades, we Bengali
people have often complained that a Bengali landlord would rather rent out his
accommodation to a Non-Bengali than to a Bengali family. This was
because the landlord knew that after the Bengali family gets the accommodation
on rent, it would assimilate with the Bengali population of the neighbourhood
and in case of any dispute, the neighbours may not support the landlord without
any question. Such probability is less with a family speaking some other
language.
This
is not even a modern phenomenon. The feudal lords always preferred to recruit
their guards from outside their own clan and even import some people from
distant regions. Immigrant labour is always more sincere in their work than the
homegrown. Bengali professionals shine only when they move out of Bengal. When
boy cannot breakthrough in politics or in organised dadagiri, he
concentrates all his efforts on some marketable skill.
8.3.3 At any stage of development of
society, the political power may try to monopolise the benefits of trade to
itself. Indira Gandhi was not the first ruler, who made State Trading
Corporation a monopoly. Nawabs of Bengal often monopolised certain trades. And
it required a Mahatma Gandhi to do the Dandi March. Elite think that
subsidy in railway fare is very injurious to economy; however subsidy to
airfare should continue in “national interest”.
8.3.3 A party in a market transaction may turn
to violent means; for getting some facility that the party could not get
strictly by the operation of the market forces. People therefore often prefer
entering into market transaction with someone who has the least chance of
resorting to violence (Bengali house owners often preferred a non-Bengali
tenant). That is why often labour from a minority society is preferred. In my
opinion, that explains the diversity of caste and community in cities and
villages.
Consequences
8.4 Right to property
8.4.1 But both the participants in an
exchange, must gets benefited-that is why they take part. The coalition based
on specific demand and supply immediately results in multiplicity of
coalitions. Because a single individual could belong to a number of coalitions,
it became very possible for individual rights to be recognised by them. When a
single individual belongs to a coalition domesticating cows, horses or dogs as
also to another coalition buying or selling wheels, they are likely to form
also another coalition resisting anybody stealing property, be it a cow or be
it a stock of cut wood for making wheels. This is the reason why the passenger
in a new route, which has not yet proved its viability, keeps vigil against
another passenger travelling without ticket. This comes as a new element in the
right to property.
Not by government alone
Institution
of property is often thought to be guaranteed just by the government. The
formal government can’t reach everywhere. You did not think that it could
protect you in the lonely compartment of the last local train. Societies have
very different attitudes towards property. In different districts of West
Bengal, you find very different attitudes. In some region, you can safely
display large bundles of currency bills without fearing somebody would follow
you and if in a desolate place, snatch the money from you. Yet you cannot
produce any fruit there, because fruit is considered a public property there.
But in parts of Nadia or in Murshidabad, stealing fruit from another’s tree is
quite a crime, but stealing potato from field is not that much of a crime
(“Poor man, never gets to eat potato!”). Getting firewood from garden belonging to one, who is not likely
to need it for personal use and certainly from an absentee landlord (government,
for example) is almost never considered to be an offence by the society. This
is really a simple need, yet it causes great damage to the forests. Precious
timbers have been finding their way to light the oven of the poor residents.
You will see people to use bamboo-bridge over a stream, which has water running
through it only during the rainy season. But as soon as the stream gets dry,
local people tear the bridge apart and take the broken pieces away as fuel. If
the panchayet does not construct a new bridge the next monsoon, they
themselves have to suffer a great lot. Don’t they understand it? They do. Any
human race anywhere on the earth never was as stupid as not to understand the
stupidity of the situation. It is a simple case of cost of bargaining. “I do it
because even if I don’t do; another will do.”
However, the circumstances need not be
accepted as karma.
You
heard of Arabari-model. It was promoted by some of those exceptional officers,
who despite working for a government department made it their personal cause to
promote the official motto of that department.
I owe you an explanation. They are “exceptional” by
the law of probability. It is especially true for a country like ours where
getting a job in government or with any other organised sector employer is
matter of choice of the employer. (The particular course students take and
qualify in is also mostly chosen on the basis of their estimation of the job
market that will be, when they will enter into it as job-seekers. High-end meritorious
ones, as those, who get, say, high rank in I I T entrance test, may, however,
not be so worried) and not a choice of the employee. Thus the treasury officer,
say, whom you found to be very insincere, who knows, might make a wonderful
traffic-officer in a state transport corporation.
It is said that the very poor and very
uneducated local population, who used to destroy the trees, were “involved” by
giving them the benefit in the grown up trees. Well, even this was nothing new
in Arabari. Well-meaning officers throughout India have tried this since a long
time back. Outsiders often fail to get
at the dynamics inside a tribal society, which they consider to be fully
cohesive and try to treat as a single unit[74].
What was the new thing in Arabari was that small, cohesive groups were given
sort of property right over a section of the forest, whence each individual
kept a vigil over each other of the group and the group as a whole kept vigil
against intrusion by outsiders in their “territory”. The technique of Dr. Yunus
in Bangla Gramin Bank was also similar. A loan was the “property” of a
group of deprived women in his case. Default in repayment by an individual had
to be made up by others in the group, failing which the entire group was to be
treated as defaulter. Each individual member then kept vigil in such detail on
every other; that each had to keep utmost sincerity in regard to her
profession. In this case, the social dynamics was more advanced because an
individual could choose which other individuals she wanted to be in the same
group with whereas in the Arabari case, the formation of the groups did not
have this facility of free choice. Residential proximity to the forest area in
question had to be more important there.
Trade-rules get political support
8.4.2
V. I. Lenin The State and Revolution P. 92 “The question of control and
accounting should not be confused with the question of the scientifically
trained staff of engineers, agronomists and so on”…“The accounting and control
necessary for these have been simplified
(emphasis Lenin’s) by capitalism to the
utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations-which any literate
person can perform-of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of
arithmetic, and issuing of appropriate receipts.”
As
the elite starts to get considerable benefit from the exchange operations, they
do not object to the institutions needed to reduce cost of bargaining in
exchange. Laws of civil procedure, weights and measure, arithmetic, and written
word contribute to the reduction of cost of bargaining. Schools not only teach
the pupils but the diploma given by them as to the specific skill acquired by a
pupil help anybody in the society to use the skill with a lot of predictability
regarding the pupil’s capabilities.
Open Call
8.5.1
The market mechanism offered the first opportunity to everybody to reveal one’s
skill. This opened the floodgate of human talent. Its benefits got revealed
gradually. There is an open invitation to supply as also to use. Let us
consider the market for skill of coercion. An elite may want to recruit the
best fighters of the tribe as their soldiers. Now the fighting skill should be
objectively evaluated and one does not mind if he acquired the skill while
working for one’s adversaries. Now if some elite think they can arm some of the
common people with some ability to defend the polity without making them too
strong for the ruling coalition to feel secure, they can do so by giving the
open call to “defend the country”.
8.5.2
A modern comparison comes to my mind. Constitution of Peoples Republic of China
enshrines the protecting the republic a sacred duty as also a right of every
citizen. I do not know what this right imports if the head of the state turns
out to be a capitalist roader[75].
But if you take this literally, this secures the country by recruiting
patriotism in every citizen.
Democracy-3
“A
democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism.”[76]
We
found that democracy originated as one of the ways of reducing cost of
bargaining (or more apparently as one of the ways of reducing social cost of
conflict). Thousands of years ago, it was rather insignificant as a method and
was rarely adopted. As early as in the prehistoric age, adoption of market in
our economic activities started to propagate the philosophy of openness, which
tilted the balance in favour of democracy to become broad based upon universal
suffrage.
I
can in my own interest, try to convince you in the efficacy of some
governmental policy. If I am successful in selling my idea to a majority of
Indian voters, the government will adopt my policy. The word “majority” however
need not be taken literally; if you can have a prime minister from your party
on the strength of 26% electoral verdict; you can have a dam on the river in
your district funded by the centre on the strength of 0.2% determined voters
voting only on this issue because of logrolling defined earlier; provided that
there exists no determined opposition to it by, say, another 0.1%.
If
there was any forum, where you could place your views and logic, such forum
could be likened to a market. However, as you have only one vote in an
election; you cannot buy rice from one grocer and pulse from another; you have
to weigh a packet of promises against another packet. By my definition, the
market place of voting in any country is not enough capitalistic in any
country.
To
imagine a market simile of our electoral choice, one packet might contain 1 kg
of gobinadabhog rice plus 500 g moong
and another packet 2 kg of ratna plus 1 kg of lentil. Remember that you
are not allowed to sell or exchange. You have to consume what you get
If
all the voters of India are considered to form a coalition, all could get
immensely benefited by getting idea from any one of the compatriots about how
they could utilise their votes so as to get their optimal choice of political
goals. Gordon Tullock has dealt in detail why such a forum is not operating as
a market under perfect competition in his and I shall not delve into it.
Every
supply is not accompanied by an invitation of sacrifice in the way of price.
When I write a poem and mail it to a little magazine, I just want readers to
enjoy its beauty and I find enough profit from my enterprise by your satisfaction.
When the market is accepted in any segment of a
society, it offers a unique facility that in order to fight out a competitor,
one does not have to inflict injury upon them; because that is not the rule of
the game. One has to increase one’s own capability. Thus this is a conflict, in
which everyone except temporarily perhaps the competitors lose. Thus the
so-called consumers get to a position of the ruling coalition that ruled by
ruling out the counter-coalition, through the law prohibiting “monopolies and
restrictive trade practices” (Anti-trust law). In today’s political marketplace
however, we are finding strange bedfellows-collusion between avowed enemies;
the party I voted on the basis of its rhetoric against X, secretly colluding
with X after the results are out.
Consumerism
Another problem is there. I often buy curd on the
strength of other people buying from that stall. I argue to myself, if so many
people are buying, this stall must not be selling rotten product. That means I
utilise the externality of other buyers buying from there. I guess they must be
exercising some vigilance, which I may get benefit from. In exercising our
political right of voting as well, we tend to get on the bandwagon. Yester
afternoon, I witnessed a great procession of a political party and concluded
that when so many people were working for them, they must deserve support from
people like me. My discretion may be mistaken, but it is believed that the
mistakes made by a large number of people will mutually cancel and the outcome
will reveal the general direction whether it be in market of commodities or
services or be the market of coercion (politics, say, democratic politics). But
now a new thing comes about. These days I spend much less time with friends and
strangers in the teashops on the streets. I do not meet even my relatives. I am
not sure if I shall recognise the face of my cousin’s son, but I am sure I
shall recognise the face of some actor whom I daily see on the TV screen. I
think about the problems the TV asks me to think about, I learn the language
they speak in, and I see the processions they show. Do the media people have
any stake to show me the real world in true proportions? No. Then they may
create pseudo bandwagon for me. This may extend to my recognition of myself. I
may feel I am not a true Hindu if I am not an admirer of Singhal or I am not a
true Muslim if I am not an admirer of Osama; just as my son may feel that I am
wasting money on buying rasagolla, which he does not see to be relished
by people; (precisely because he does not see people these days except on TV)
and the money could be better spent on Coca Cola, which he has seen on TV that
happy young men consume in company of attractive girls.
Chapter 9: Concluding thoughts
There have been theorists, who have been politically
correct by assuming that government should be entrusted for poverty
alleviation, primary education, health for the poor etc. and they also believe
the statistical fables the governments circulate “because there is no other dependable
data”. There are other people clamouring for reform. These people did get the
most illegitimate facilities through their connection with their men in the
government. For them, the only pressure group that should be heeded to is of
theirs.
I fail to be so optimist as to think that the
philanthropic and moral people, who really constitute my target audience, will
be able to strengthen the objectivity of our institutions so much so that all
pressure groups could be defeated.
At this point, I feel my capacity for determining what
to do totally exhausted. Therefore, instead of telling you what you should do,
I finish my monologue by asking you what I should do. Whom should I side with?
Whose leadership should I follow?
You had heard that if one is not a revolutionary at
eighteen, one must be heartless; and if one remains a revolutionary at thirty,
one must be missing one’s brain. They did not say, what one should be at
forty-two. Then, tell me our agendum for combining heart and brain at any age.
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[1] If one doubts this, then the behaviour of one or two electrons under the influence of a field, or the behaviour of one or two gas molecules under the influence of a pressure gradient will also not seem to be amenable to scientific study. In your laboratory, you usually observe behaviour of a number of particles that is larger than the total human population on the earth. Moreover the number of variables in one human is also much larger. Still, when we study human behaviour under many a constraint, it becomes quite predictable. Alternatively when we study the group behaviour through the ages, the zigzag shows a certain directionality.
[2] A mother taking pride in her son studying science in the hope that science would enable him in adult life to get a nice job and earn a decent and trouble-free income (“Whether or not he would look after us in our old age”—as she would say) is however annoyed if her son starts to apply his newly acquired knowledge in her kitchen. If he insists on that the oven should be turned to simmer as soon as the pressure-cooker hisses, the mother would want to say, “This is not your lab. This is my kitchen.”
[3] I suspect that my abhorrence for Mathematics has something to do with my avoidance of morality. Bertrand Russell once ironically wrote (must be in Marriage and Morals or Conquest of Happiness, because I have read his only these two books) the only moral thing could be the multiplication tables, which presented no fear of the pupil learning any immoral thing. Neither Vajpayee nor Osama will find anything immoral in any mathematics.
[4] We presume that the cost of bargaining among them high. We shall come to the point repeatedly in the subsequent chapters.
[5] Gordon Tullock Private Wants, Public Means P.49
[6] Gordon Tullock Private Wants, Public Means(New York: Basic Books Inc.1970) Page 9
[7] Ibid P.79
[8] Ibid P.79
[9] Really most of the amenities that my town offers are not for free and I go to town for enjoying the externalities. Even after I no longer need to go to town to see a dentist; I have to go to town to buy books for my daughter. The bookseller is really a native of my village but he has opened his shop in the town because he will not find enough customers for the books in the village. Another amenity I go to town for is the proximity of different amenities. I could go to see a doctor 2 km to the north in another village, but I prefer to go to 4 km to the south to the town because I am not sure that the medicines the doctor would prescribe would be available either in that village or in my village
[10]This is a somewhat idealised version of what really happens. If you are in the habit of reading the district news, you must have read about minor clashes between villages over construction of an earthen dam or over the control of a sluice gate. Clashes usually remain minor because the people involved are peasants, not professional fighters. The most pertinent question here is what would happen if there emerges no leadership, which can reduce the cost of bargaining among the people. The answer is ‘it would remain prohibitive.’
[11] I cannot help mentioning the name of Pannalal Dasgupta. He could, in his closing years, after all persuade the state government to release fish spawns in the rivers. Our rivers constitute hundreds of square kilometer of water area that has immense nutrition for fish. He had another idea, which he tried to preach. It was needless expenditure for us to erect walls around our homes or around our gardens or around our campuses. Protection against theft should be arranged by society by collective effort and not by construction of private walls. I support him also for a quite different reason. I have somewhat scrutinised the reports of burglary and robbery and found that on all occasions, the walls gave no protection to the residents and gave protection rather to the burglars, when the villagers happened to surround them. It was my conclusion that the walls were raised to help the ego of the house-owners and not to give them protection. For government departments however, cut-money from civil contractors are more important than ego.
You need not however give much credence to my admiration for Pannalalbabu. I had reasons to have sort of personal attachment to him, though I never could manage to meet him. His Trail of Communist Movement in India was my first reading material after I did the nursery rhymes. This book was theoretically banned at the time.
[12] Gordon Tullock Private Wants, Public Means P.82
[13]Ibid P. 55
[14] Ibid P.55
[15] For the author of this essay, the reader definitely is still the king. All the labour is meant to convince you to discover the means of reducing cost of bargaining which remain still prohibitive.
[17] ibid P.47 and P.48
[18] Karl Marx wrote this originally in English on 10 June 1853 under the title The British Rule in India. This was printed in New York Daily Tribune of 25 June 1853 and included to Selected Works-2nd Vol. Published from Moscow.
[19] ibid
[20] Gordon Tullock The Economics of Income Redistribution (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publishing) Page18“The myth of a group of people getting together to collectively decide on an organization to generate public goods is a myth, but a myth that is of great value for certain types of political and social analysis.”
[22] Thus there are two obvious justifications for you invading my hut—if the huts are not similar (mine being better) and if your might is fairly greater. In history, India was invaded for both these reasons.
[23] 100 years back, it was the “law” in almost
every society that the wife should do the chores, cooking and nurturing the
baby. Will you be offended if I present a funny example? As women’s lib came
about, a gentleman observed, it was man’s duty to earn money and to do all the
“manly” things—equality comes only at the time of setting mosquito-net, “You
and me, each alternate day”. The process of realignment of rights and
responsibilities may not however always remain funny.
Even a couple on honeymoon have fences between them as well as rules regarding how much one can punish the other in case of violation of the fence.
[24] Gordon Tullock Private Wants, Public Means P.52 “what is meant by property is characteristically a governmental decision. In fact, the government may be said to do more reducing of externalities by maintaining a law of property than by all its other activities put together.”
[25] Ibid P.39
[26] Kiranmoy Nanda will not agree.
[27] Ibid P.65-66
[28] Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1981Market failure and control of labour power:towards an explanation of ‘structure’ and change in Indian agriculture Vol.5 Part I:201-228, Part II: 327-350 One may refer to the worldwide study by International Labour Organisation, Hague, reported by Bhalla.
[29] Gordon Tullock The Economics of Non-Human
Societies (Tucson, Arizona: Pallas Press) Page 11
[30] Coalition is a group formed with the reciprocal understanding to use one’s coercive power to be used in another’s need.
[31] On an average over many twins, it is true. For an individual case, a decrease below threshold may rule out survival, whence, further decrease would not decrease utility, which has already become zero. However in case you consider that by helping a sibling to survive it may serve its own utility, going below zero is possible
[32] Gordon Tullock The Economics of Nonhuman Societies (Tucson, Arizona: Pallas Press) Page 11
[33] In the evolution of species, we found that the mutations work often in a zigzag way. That is to say, suppose a particular change in the environment caused a specific change in the generation; but in case, the change in the environment is reversed, the earlier change will be either reversed or neutralised in subsequent generations. In the evolution of society as well, such phenomena happen. Suppose that in a generation, elders’ role in mitigating conflicts among younger members remains to be a significant part of the social organisation. You may hope that these will remain an important part of social life, in case the social environment does not change significantly.
Let us consider examples. The institution of marriage has remained somewhat unchanged throughout our historical period; but at least for the last two millennia and a half, civilisations world over have remained confused what should be done regarding the prostitutes or the brothels. Time and again, they have been outlawed and relegalised. If by banning them, or by some other measure, the society became better at least in one respect without becoming worse in any other respect, this confusion would have not persisted.
I have tried to trace the consolidation of human society any time anywhere. Those who are interested in importing peace and tranquillity in a society, reintroduce again and again the needed institutions (including the institution of property) after the earlier generation(s) corrupted it by anarchy (some times supported by some rival theory). The institution of property is redefined, annulled, and reintroduced continually everywhere. Whenever it is annulled some benefits disappear, when it is reintroduced those benefits reappear. The zigzag nature of social change is obliterated by the unidirectionality of the technological advancements, which can by no means prove that society has advanced. Taliban used weapons of much higher technology but that did not prove that they created better society than Nazibullah. This also explains why I often use the present tense (that Marx also uses) even while narrating the human evolution. I have more justification than Marx has, because Marx considers the evolution of society to be unidirectional, which I do not. I do not enter into the debate whether our biological evolution has been settled; nevertheless, we are being constrained to suffer from anarchy and in order that we might get out of it, we are having to rediscover the institutions that our primitive ancestors discovered. The social situation in a modern university does not vary in a great way from a primitive tribal perspective of 20000 years ago despite the availability of your Internet and apparent amenities.
On this issue I differ with Professor Tullock, who, like many others, thinks that our present social interaction being too complicated, we don’t retain traits of our prehistoric ancestors. We have made our social interaction complicated not to make our individual life miserable, but in order that our individual lives are simpler. We have built the institutions that have made our social experiences predictable. We all know that at present most of us use a small fraction of our brain capability and manage to live a decent life with it. Say, twenty thousand years ago, our forefathers had no less capability (Tullock also admits that), moreover they had to use it. They could not afford to leave it idle—that could be the only evolutionary justification for creation of the very complex human brain.
[34] A professor (then in Boston) of English Michel wrote that language was not created for saying, “It is raining.” I cannot remember anything else except that the book was full of puns and thoroughly enjoyable for mischievous people like me. It was dedicated to the authorities of a university that spelt “writting” in its prospectus for students.
When you say, “it is raining”, you possibly mean, if I go outside, I shall be drenched. But you might have also meant, even if I do not irrigate my paddy field now, there would be no harm. The perspective has to be included to the spoken words.
[35] Seeing from the sophisticated database of a modern research facility, the experiment that was carried out by generations of illiterate farmers may seem no better than just a random walk. Confirmation of correctness of the discoveries that Indian farmers made, say, regarding the sowing time, through centuries of experience, took only few years by modern scientists. But the fact that, after all, such discoveries were ever made, reminds us of Mao’s saying that one should learn from the masses, absorb it and then go to teach the masses.
[36] Reading Karl Marx or reciting an occasional quotation from his work was fashionable for leftist intellectuals some time past. Marxist parties have been ruling West Bengal for a quarter century now. This year I visited the State central Library at Kolkata to read his Selected Works. The very courteous staff searched for the book for half an hour and regretted their inability to locate it. Then I suddenly came across the card-catalogue, got the number and an elderly peon gave me the book. I am sure that the book was never needed by anybody since 1977.
[37] An electric field is fully defined by a three-dimensional vector. Yet you could solve its problems with a scalar potential. Money is like the potential. Different factors may be considered to be multidimensional quantities‑‑obeying, nevertheless some kind of addition-rule; the sum being a constant. That gives an opportunity to allocate the constant sum (my resource in general, in particular, it is money)
In the present case, I could, if I were concerned with nutrition, take the somewhat mutually independent dimensions as carbohydrate, protein and so on. Subhuman species (and our children till a very little age) have been found to make very optimum distribution of their ‘limited’ resources (definitely not money in their case, but perhaps toil) for the best mix of nutrition. The experiment is however, in the way of Nature, random.
[38] I remember at least one case in which there was objection in appointing an M. Sc. as a school teacher because he was “too dark”- though the objection was overruled.
[39] Too simple! A beautiful man can father many more children than a beautiful mother can.
[40] Shall I drop names? The oldest fossil evidence reported is more than 6.0 myr (60 lakh years) old. 4.4 myr old is Ardipithecus ramidus; Australopithecus anamensis and Kenyanthropus playops are 4.2 myr old, 3.8 to 3.0 myr old are Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus bahrelghazali, Australopithecus africanus and perhaps australopithecine to survive till last Australopithecus garhi; the robust australopithecine Paranthropus aethiopicus, who were there when the first Homo species came. It is not possible to say exactly which among them were or were not our ancestors. The term “Australo” has no connection with Australia. In Latin this simply means “south”. The fossil to be discovered first was of Australopithecus africanus in South Africa in 1924.
[41] Though from an ethical point of view one might not agree to call these improvements
[42] Gordon Tullock The Economics of Income Redistribution P.18
[43] Noticeably, Musharraf can not. He is not in a position to have parliament and remain immune from its jurisdiction.
[44] A pregnant cow will not entertain a bull’s demand for sex.
[45] Chinese proverb quoted by Mao
[46] Gordon Tullock The Economics of Non-human Societies Page 9 ‘In the baboon species, suppose that we have
two alleles of the same gene, one of which leads males to go out and defend the
group against leopards and the other which leads them not to do so. We shall
call them the heroic and the cautious. Those baboon tribes which had a fair number
of heroic genes in them would tend to be preyed upon less by leopards than
those than those that had mainly cautious genes and so would tend to flourish.
On the other hand, within each of these tribes, the
individual baboon that had the heroic gene would tend to be killed by leopards
while those which had the cautious gene would tend to flourish under the
protection of the heroes. The baboon tribe would be selected for a high
percentage of heroes within it and individual baboons would be selected for cautious
genes.
… biology does not select what is best for a whole
species, it selects for individual gene successions.’
[47] V. I. Lenin State and Revolution (higher phase of communist society will not be) made of the run-of-the-mill people we find today
[48] Gordon Tullock The Roots of Order included in Toward a Science of Politics-Papers in Honor of Duncan Black (Blacksburg, VA: Public Choice Center, VPI and State University ) P.121
[49] To insist on that I am not perverting family, money comes last.
[50] Needless to say, many foreigners believe they would be hounded by beggars or be eaten by tigers in Kolkata; but then they would not come over to visit this city.
[51] Man is not exactly reputed as a visionary of the far away. But we can recognise colours whereas our nearest cousins are colour-blind.
[52] Mostly omega-3 (docosahexaaenoic acid) and omega-6 (arachidonic acid)
[53] Hunting of big animal dates back hardly to 3 or 4 hundred thousand years. It may be that incest taboo became already in force by that time. But this will not disturb our principal line of reasoning
[54] Though initially it was hardly a principal source of food and it is suspected it never became.
[55] Gordon Tullock The Economics of Special Privilege and Rent Seeking (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers) Page 94
[56] The jargon changes from zone to district and state as also from one district to another. If Marx or Lenin (or Gandhiji or Shyamaprasad) were to attend one of those meetings they would have hardly any better luck.
The state-level leaders in West Bengal, both in government and in party live fairly austere lives compared to their cadres in the districts and towns. I am reminded of the times of Emperor Aurangzeb. “The pomp and grandeur of the imperial army stood in sharp contrast to the rather austere lifestyle of the emperor.” I estimate there are at least a thousand (or may be, ten thousand) power brokers throughout the state to utilize their connections in the party to earn more than several times the combined income of our chief minister and the state secretary of CPIM. So far these two chair holders have never conspired to loot public money. But I do not know what “checks and balances” exist in the party to prevent any such eventuality. What I know from what happens in the other states is government has no such mechanism.
[57] Seems so; if we think different races branched out subsequently. Investigation to prove racial inequality of brain capability has always given negative result.
[58] That is to say, Gordon Tullock rediscovered it much later. Then we have also to say that Nature discovered Gravitation as a good means to organise its scheme of things much before Newton.
[59] Again it was not necessary for the man to understand this and to consciously follow this course of action. The men who did it by chance (or to please his wife, as Bertrand Russell presumed in his Marriage and Morals) got more survivors.
[60] Recent, that is, in the historic period, several serious efforts have been made to veil the woman. The religious or social leaders have tried to reduce tension in an individual man and conflict among men by veiling the woman.
[61] This is an extremely approximate value. It may be anywhere between 80,000 and 40,000.
[62] Gordon Tullock The Organisation of Inquiry P.61 “So far as we can see, the primitive caveman had as good mental equipment as the modern man, and some of the cavemen certainly had the inherent equipment to become Nobel Prize laureates.” The present author wants to add that some other cavemen had the inherent equipment to become V. I. Lenin or L. K. Advani.
[63] The Roots of Order Page 125
[64] Ibid 126
[65] Karl Marx British Rule in India
[66] Different members may falsify in mutually cancelling directions, which is hopefully the positive aspect of democracy. When these falsifications are superimposed, later day historians call it mass hysteria.
Lastly, the bargaining time may be supposed to yield better result exponentially (A – B exp –t/l) with time. But in case mutual communication is better, l will be small which means small value for l will give rise to better performance of the gang.
[67] Experts from School of Tropical Medicine let us know that they have found 170 ppm Coliform in the “safe” drinking water supplied by municipalities around Barrackpore. In the district of Malda the count at Harishchandrapur, Namo and Mohanpur is about 1800 ppm, whereas the safe level is below 10 ppm. (News source is Sangbad Pratidin:03 November 2002)
[69] Vincent A. Smith Akbar, the Great Moghul
[70] Let us single out her reign for minute recapitulation. When “Buddha smiled” for the first time in Pokhran, Indira Gandi proclaimed it was for the peaceful use of Atom Bomb and intellectuals started to discover mine-fire-extinguishing and its other peaceful uses. Once newspapers carried her declaration that she would no longer bear with any power broker in her party. Local Congress leaders whispered among themselves, “that means she wants to be the only power broker in the party.” When autocrats at the top feel that rule of law and democracy were the best things to bring in efficiency, they may promote it. These should however, persist sufficiently down under, it should never go upwards to annoy the top boss. Indira Gandhi did everything to curb the power of the High Court and the Supreme Court but she did nothing against the lower courts. But calculations may go wrong. Manning important positions by shame less sycophants may back fire. Indira Gandhi reduced the Congress party organisation to cipher and her subedars indiscriminately used police to silence their factional opponents in Congress at the state levels. When this damaged its fighting power in the elections; another group of her sycophants, this time in her dear RAW (meant really for defence intelligence) reported she was still so popular that people were hanging her portraits in their shops and no one spoke against her in the open. In reality all these were caused by fear psychosis. We hang portrait of Ma Kali to keep the bad omen away and people then hung PM’s portrait to keep the police away.
[71] Nawaz Sharief knew best that by refraining from retaliating India’s test of Atom bomb, Pakistan got to be immensely benefited. Nevertheless, in order that he might save his prime-ministership, which he could not ultimately save, he had to retaliate by exploding Bomb.
[72] Like the skinning of a cabbage or an onion.
Somebody reported Chairman Mao once called for such a hard core.
[73]James Greenwood No Guns, Big Smile In this enchanting travelogue, this British young man thought that the bribe he had to pay to an Argentine traffic constable would get deposited to the latter’s bank account in a Swiss Bank. No James, Swiss banks are only for people of my status.
[74] Many theories sprouted about the strangeness of half-known societies throughout the last centuries. Some time back, there was separate discipline as Indian economics as if India were outside the applicability of the general theories of economics. For that matter as far as I have noticed I have never found a tribe outside the applicability of the general rules and I always conclude there is none. I had read something in my support in the writings of the great Indian biologist J. B. S. Haldane.
[75] During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao labelled Head of the State Liu Shao Chi as the capitalist roader.
[76] V. I. Lenin State and Revolution Page 15 Second Revised edition 1965 Sixth printing 1969.
