Loss of Strategic Focus at The Maanga

There was a time when The Maanga used to focus on puking and used to puke very well. Sadly, by mindlessly diversifying its portfolio, it has lost focus.  By trying to mix puking with intelligent commentary, it has ended up doing neither.

A puke is like a surgical strike. To be successful, it has to be well-planned. You have to not only injure the target, but devastate it in the first attempt. Once you are done with it, you should be back in safe, well-defended territory. If you fail at these,  your battle is apt to go awry.  Your alternatives will be to call in reinforcements to defend a weak position or to stage a difficult retreat.  Neither choice is pretty.

A case in point is Avataram declaring that Ajay Shah is a moron  and then following it up with a search for reasons to back up his point.

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My Country, My Lies

L K Advani’s memoir reminds me of the Yes Minister  and the Yes Prime Minister books. In particular, it reminds me of the preface to the latter, which starts something like:

Hacker’s unexpected ascension to the Premiership, which happens towards the  end of the first chapter of his volume, created almost as many problems for historians as it did for the country. Hacker was determined to portray his term in office as a series of triumphs, a task that would have defeated a far more skilled diarist…

There is much more in those fine books that would be appropriate to quote. Unfortunately, I do not have the volumes with me here and my memory fails me as much as it did Advani.

Virgina Postrel Echoes Me

On Barack Obama

Obama’s glamour also accounts for some of his campaign’s other stumbles. Plenty of candidates attract supporters who disagree with them on some issues. Obama is unusual, however. He attracts supporters who not only disagree with his stated positions but assume he does too. They project their own views onto him and figure he is just saying what other, less discerning voters want to hear. So when Obama’s chief economic adviser supposedly told a Canadian official that, contrary to campaign rhetoric, the candidate didn’t want to revise NAFTA, reporters found the story credible. After all, nobody that thoughtful and sophisticated could really oppose free trade.

Unlike Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, the two glamorous presidents who shaped 20th-century American politics, Obama has left his political philosophy a mystery. His call for “a broad majority of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents of goodwill—who are re-engaged in the project of national renewal” is not a statement of principles. It’s an invitation to the audience to entertain their own fantasies of what national renewal would look like

Like any candidate, Obama of course has position papers on specific issues. But even well-informed observers disagree about whether he represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic party or something more market-oriented and centrist. As the NAFTA flap demonstrates, his supporters can’t even decide what the candidate really thinks about free trade. His glamour makes it easy to imagine that a President Obama would dissolve differences, abolish hard choices, and achieve political consensus—or that he’s a stealth candidate who will translate his vague platform into a mandate for whatever policies you the voter happen to support. (The Peril of Obama)

The link may not stay valid for long, but Postrel is using “glamour” in its  original sense, when it meant “Magic spell”. (That also accounts for the odd spelling of the word – odd, that is, if you are an American.)

The 13th Pragati

It has been exactly a year since Pragati was launched, an event that Nitin has strangely not remarked upon. The April 2008 issue of Pragati is out, and. It focuses on the budget, and as usual contains many excellent articles. I particularly like the one on the Debt Waiver by Salil Tripathi.  There is no article by me this time, but Nitin has kicked me upstairs to make me an editor, along with him. Editing was a much scarier experience than writing, so let me know how it turned out.

How Do Animals Learn About Sex?

Has anyone done research on this vitally important topic? Do animals need to learn how to do it or do they pick it up instinctively?

I wish to assure my readers that I have a perfectly scientific interest in this topic.  It appears that human animals need to be taught. We hear stories of conservatively brought up young men and women entering adulthood perfectly ignorant of the granular details of the sex act, often with embarrassing consequences. These stories led me to the question I have posed.  Mammals other than humans without the benefit of our cognitive capacity or our capacity for language and communication seem to manage just fine. Then why is it that only humans have this problem?

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Risk Management

The crisis in the US reminds me a bit of my own personal finances. Till last year, I was managing my money rather badly. I used to  to maintain large amounts of money in my savings bank account. My investments were all ad hoc and I was not doing a whole lot of long term planning.

Last year, I decided to pull up my socks. I drew up an investment plan. I answered a questionnaire to find my risk apetite, used the 100 minus age rule to decide how much I ought to invest in equity and systematically put money into index funds. When the NAV went up I congratulated myself on my choice and when it went down, I decided that I was in there for the long haul. I also forecast my cash flows and moved the funds I needed as buffer into short term debt funds.

I had three bank accounts that I needed to maintain to pay my home loan, car loan and other recurring ECS mandates. I moved most of my funds into one account and set up reminders to ensure that I would move funds to the others only when needed. This, I decided, was better than keeping too much idle money in multiple accounts, making it difficult to manage. Then one day, the home loan reminder went off, I was in a hurry and I transferred money to the wrong account. The ECS instruction bounced and I was hit with a charge of 500 bucks.

Barack Obama and Rajiv Gandhi

I have not been following the ups and downs of the American primaries very closely because there isn’t much profit to be had from it.  I am sure that the internal workings of the US presidential elections are as interesting as those of the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser,  but the result will be the same.  So I am only dimly aware of the Barack Obama phenomenon (and before you ask, I was completely uninterested in the Ron Paul phenomenon.)  But from what I understand, he is like the Rajiv Gandhi of 1984.

There are many reasons why the dynastic system finds favour with people. A minor one among these is that every generation a new scion of the ruling family descends on the scene and makes a bid for a top post. Chances are, he will be a relatively young person among more senior contenders. Youth always attracts people – they associate it with freshness. They also instinctively associate it with a rapid rise, achievement and talent, even when they should know better.  Because this person is  from the ruling family, chances are that he has not had to fight his way to the top, has not had to make ugly compromises and does not have a history that gives some people a reason to hate him. His “clean past” is an empty vessel into which people can pour their hopes and aspirations, whatever they are, however unrealistic they are. So it was with the Rajiv Gandhi of 1984. With absolutely no basis in his track record, nay with no track record  people had decided that he was the one who would lead the country into the 21st century. The dream took around 2 years to end.

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Response on Harvard

Commenter Froginthewell says:

I don’t understand – Harvard is a private university, right? And this controversy is about propriety and not rights?

Well, yes. Harvard is a private university, but in this non-libertarian world, they are subject to various anti-discrimination laws which may or may not mandate or prohibit reserving a few hours for women in their gym.  I am not aware of, and I am not really very interested in the details of those laws, but start from The Volokh Conspiracy  if you are interested.

 Secondly, my point was a defence of the libertarian position, which starts from the presumption that owners should be broadly free (legally) to do what they wish within their property. If you agree with the libertarian position, then what you are saying makes sense. We can agree that Harvard should be legally free to do what it did, and then debate the propriety of that decision. Those libertarians who think that Harvard’s decision was improper would still be free to protest that decision through non-violent demostrations, signature campaigns or boycotts.

But my argument, naturally enough, was not directed at those who agree with me. It was directed at those who do not hold the libertarian position, which means that they are open to enforcing their sense of propriety through legislation, i.e. it was directed at precisely those who do not agree with the distinction that Froginthewell’s comment is drawing. I am not aware of just how many people fit that definition, but I am confident that the proportion is high enough that I can say that I was not attacking a strawman.

Finally, it so happens that I do not  agree with the view that this issue is about propriety. I think that this is, or ought to be,  a pragmatic decision, based on costs and benefits, best made at the local level on a case-by-case basis. Having a law for this is bad, but even making this into an issue of “propriety” is unwise. There is no need to bring out the heavy artillery of religious freedom, “discrimination”, women’s rights, etc. I was pointing out that this libertarian “dogmatism” on property rights is what enables us to be non-dogmatic about everything else, while those who do not agree with our dogma have no choice but to turn every issue into one of law or propriety.

There is Still Time to Repent

Those who keep criticising us libertarians for being too dogmatic about our insistence on property rights as the source of other rights, look upon the weird controversy over reserving a few hours for women at the Harvard gym, and repent.

For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.

An employee who belongs to an orthodox Jewish faith wants to cut a Friday evening meeting short, because he cannot be in a car when Sabbath starts at sundown. Should we accommodate his request? Muslim employees request some changes in meal timings during Ramzan. Should we accommodate them? Obviously, all such requests will cause some inconvenience to others.  Is the cost too much? Are the beneficiaries a few or many? Are the the benefits worth it?  Are the beneficiaries willing to make other accommodations to compensate?

To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.

Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases.  There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!