I found through Swami, an essay by Bertrand Russell where he wants everyone to work less, so that others would have a chance. He wants people to spend more time on ‘leisure’. He claims that the only reason why there were still poor people was that the rich were sitting on their asses, consuming, but not working.
Early twentieth century Britain seems to have been filled with such philosophers with too much time on their hands wondering what poor people would do when they had a lot of time. Russell had Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Orwell to name just a few, for company.
There are, however, two problems with the idea of everyone working less.

Firstly, when you indulge in leisure, it creates work for someone else. Preparing idli was a hard grind (No pun intended. If you don’t know what an idli is and didn’t get the pun, forget it) for your grandma(Assuming that your grandma did prepare idli. Mine did.) If your grandpa was rich, he would have hired a cook to make those idlis. Now that idli mixes are available, your wife (or you – adjust according to gender/ distribution of household work) has much less work. It takes very few people to manufacture those idli mixes, and so probably your cook’s grandson is unemployed. And your wife too has started working. Probably you should be working just four hours a day so that the cook’s grandson whom you have displaced can work?
But the cook’s grandson is not unemployed. He is working as a waiter at the restaurant you frequent now that you have lots of leisure. Or probably he is the ticketing clerk at the movie hall. Or something. You find that you and your wife have to work the full eight hours to pay for your leisure, and that your leisure ?ime activities have ended up creating lots of work for a whole lot of people.

Then there is the second problem. How are you going to stop people from converting their hobbies into work? A 19 year old guy has a hobby. So does he sit quietly and indulge himself? Oh no. He goes and starts a company. (Then he creates work for a whole lot of people. And the stock market goes up, but that is another story ).

Russell philosopher though he was, fell for what economics knows as the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. He assumed that there is a fixed amount of work which everyone has to share. The mistake was understandable. The Britain of his time was hidebound and rigidly hierarchical. He was a prisoner of such a society without realizing it. He could not imagine a dynamic and continuously changing society and his aristocratic disdain for work shows up in his socialism.

Back when I was in college, the TV in my hostel lounge always ran Channel V. No it wasn’t the most popular channel. Everyone had his own preference. Some liked Star TV, others liked Star World. A few serious ones would have liked to watch news channels, and there were also a few weird characters who followed serials on Zee.
But the everyone had a violent dislike for everyone else’s first preference. The Star Plus guys hated ‘The Bold and Beautiful’ on Star World, Star World guys were supremely uninterested in current affairs, and so on.

But it turned out that no one minded Channel V. It was everyone’s second preference. So V it was all the way.

This is how people ‘come to a consensus’. This is also why the quality of a decision invariably suffers when taken by consensus. When large numbers of people are involved, every alternative has at least a few opponents, so the only thing that people can agree on is to maintain the status quo. Because no one is happy with the status quo, a ‘consensus decision’ ends up dissatisfying everybody.

This is the problem Arun Shourie is facing when he is trying to get everyone to agree to sell off our PSUs. He will never get everyone to agree to do it. It is better to make a few people happy (so that they can vote for you) than to leave everyone dissatisfied.

Swami’s post on Truth and Provability has generated some interesting comments. My thoughts on the subject are rather longish, and I thought they deserve a post here.
Truth is different from provability.To explain why I think so, I need to resolve the surprise quiz paradox, which goes like this:

On friday, the professor tells his students that he was going to set a surprise quiz the next week. A student thinks “If on friday, the professor has not yet set the quiz, I’ll come to know that the quiz is on friday. So the quiz has be held on or before thursday.
But then if he doesn’t hold a quiz monday to wednesday, I’ll know that the quiz is on thursday. So the quiz can’t be on thursday either.”
So by elimination, Swami (for that was the student’s name) decides that the prof was bluffing about the quiz, and there wasn’t going to be one.
Thereupon the professor surprises Swami with a quiz on Monday morning, jolting him out of his weekend blues.

Where’s the catch? Did Swami prove that there wouldn’t be a quiz? Think again. The professor had said that he would set a surprise quiz. Model this statement logically and you have two premises:

1. I will set a quiz this week.
2. You will not be able to predict the day on which the quiz will be held.

Given these two conditions, could Swami have proved on friday morning that the quiz would be on that day? Any candidate proof would immediately violate condition 2. But would he know on thursday night that the quiz would be held on friday? A computer would hang if we tried to model a set of impossible conditions and asked it to solve for the result. Swami, who is presumably a human (unless he is an automated blogger trying to pass the Turing test) would find it possible to get at the ‘truth’ beyond provability.

Following the puzzling tradition, I thought I’d post a puzzle. A real probability puzzle. I have constructed it just now, so you can’t google for the answers.
But first the background. I read here that ” Short women [are] more successful with men”

“The average height for a British ?oman is 1.62 metres (5 feet, 4 inches). But those who were between 1.51 and 1.58 metres were most likely to be married and to have children by the age of 42. This relationship held true even after accounting for social class.
The study also found that women prefer men who are taller than average. A man of 1.83 metres (6 feet exactly) was more likely to have a partner and children than a man standing at the average height of 1.77 metres (5 feet, 10 inches).”

Er.. Did the study really find that women “prefer men taller than average”? Or did it just find that they prefer men taller than they are?
Anyway, here is the problem:
Suppose that human beings come in 5 sizes: 4′ , 4′ 6″, 5′, 5’6″, 6′. Assume that initially, the height distribution is even among both men and women (i.e., 1/5th of people are 4 feet tall, 1/5th 4 1/2 feet and so on).
Each person meets 10 people of the opposite sex, at random in his or her lifetime. Of these 10 people men will not consider any woman taller than they are, and women will not consider any man shorter than they. Among those that remain, there is a 10% chance that the man and woman will hit it off and marry.
Once they marry, every couple has 2 children. One of them(boy or girl – doesn’t matter) will have the husband’s height and the other the wife’s height.
Problem 1 Find out the height distribution among men and women after 5 generations.
Problem 2 Is there an ‘equilibrium’ height distribution, and if so, after how many generations will it be achieved?
Advanced Problem: We have assumed that men are neutral to a woman’s height as long as the latter are shorter( i.e., a 5 1/2 feet man is equally likely to marry a 5 feet woman as he is likely to marry a 4 feet woman.) Suppose that this is not true. Suppose that there men are biased in favour of women one size shorter, and women biased in favour of men one size taller. How much of this bias is required to eliminate the tendency towards shortening of women and lengthening of men?

I liked the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Unfortunately that puts me in the august company of nut-cases like Bin Laden of Al Qaida (which means ‘Foundation’ or ‘Base’ in Arabic) fame and the Aum Shinrikyo sect.
They liked the idea that a small band of highly talented people can by making a small start, rescue the world from engulfing decadence. I, on the other hand was interested in the idea that the events in society can be predicted statistically if we are talking of a sufficiently large number of people.
I realized later that this idea was flawed. Technology tends to have an unpredictable effect on society. Say that you have two societies at war with each other. They still fight with bows and arrows. If one of them invents gun powder, it immediately wins the war. But invention of gunpowder is a random, unpredictable event. If you have no idea what gunpowder is, you have no way of figuring out what a lethal advantage it provides to the society that invents it.

So enetation says ‘comment server busy’ and netcomments says ‘commenting temporarily unavailable’, and now I have no way of knowing what people think of what I write, if they read it at all.
This is how a fracture turns into a failure. One commenting system fails and everyone shifts to another one. The other one collapses under the load and the hordes move over to a third one… Soon the net will collapse under the combined load of bloggers moving from one commenting system to another.
I think I’ll rig up a system of my own rather than follow the masses.

He had worked his way through the ranks of the textile industry in Bombay and now he is the works manager at the factory. He is also a sad and forlorn man now, for he will soon be unemployed.
“We had a final meeting with the GM. He wants to carry out the inevitable as soon as possible. He has assured us of a good VRS. But that will be possible only if he sells the land quickly. If land prices fall, our VRS will also evaporate.
“No. There was no way we could compete. Our plants are much less productive than the ones coming up in the North and in the South. Plants are coming up at the rate of one per month in places like Thirupur. They also have some rather ‘innovative’ labour practices. They really exploit workers over there.”
“How?”
“Just one example: They hire young girls – some as young as 18 years old. They are paid 25 rupees a day in the first year, 30 in the second and 35 in the third. The mill owners have built hostels in the factory premises, so that they stay all the time there. In their spare time, they are taught useful skills like sewing etc. In the third year, they are paid 25000 bucks and laid off. That’s no problem for them, because with this money, they can get married. And their livelihood is assured because they have useful experience.
“And of course those plants are really modern. They are worked three shifts. We tried to compete using temporary workers, but where can you get skilled temporary workers in Bombay at 125 rupees a day?”
“Who gives them jobs if all mills are closing?”
“Some have moved to Bhiwandi. Others ?ork as watchmen. Even watchmen get more than that these days. How’s your factory doing?”
“Tough. Chinese imports are making life difficult for us. We are finding it difficult to compete. Just yesterday I was looking for a drilling machine. Normally it costs 5000 bucks. I got it for 500 rupees. Can you believe it? Assembled in China.”
“You bought it?”
“Of course.”

A feel-good article from Thomas Friedman titled ‘India’s secular success’
“..50 years of Indian democracy and secular education, and 15 years of economic liberalization, produced all this positive energy.
Just across the border in Pakistan — where the people have the same basic blood, brains and civilizational heritage as here — 50 years of failed democracy, military coups and imposed religiosity have produced 30,000 madrassahs — Islamic schools, which have replaced a collapsed public school system and churn out Pakistani youth who know only the Quran and hostility toward non-Muslims.
No, India is not paradise. Just last February the Hindu nationalist BJP government in the state of Gujarat stirred up a pogrom by Hindus against Muslims that left 600 Muslims, and dozens of Hindus, dead. It was a shameful incident, and in a country with 150 million Muslims — India has the largest Muslim minority in the world — it was explosive. And do you know what happened?
Nothing happened.
The rioting didn’t spread anywhere. One reason is the long history of Indian Muslims and Hindus living together in villages and towns, sharing communal institutions and mixing their cultures and faiths. But the larger reason is democracy. “

Question: What if in a democratic country the majority votes a fascist government into power? If Gujaratis vote back Modi as Chief Minister (chances are they will) does it mean that he has a right to restart the shameful pogrom?
The answer is that democracy is not sufficient. Other institutions are needed – a free press, judiciary, etc. Which also means that a democracy should not be able to overturn by a majority vote the constitutional protections that make democracy possible. Which is why Hindus cannot vote a theocracy into existence in India even if all Hindus vote for it.
Which is why a plebiscite cannot be held in Kashmir.

Dilbert: Do you think you might be abusing your power?
Wally: What would be the other reasons to have power?
Or, adapted to India:
Q: Is there corruption in the petrol pump allotment system?
A: Why else was the system designed?

Here is the dilemma.
Governments function on the basis of rules. If the rules are broadly defined and leave a lot of scope for interpretation, someone will move in and exploit these loopholes.
If the rules are tight and detailed, they fail to take into account contingencies. They constrict initiative and hamper decision-making.
Perhaps we could tackle this problem by giving government officials a set of broad guidelines, the freedom to choose how to achieve them, and enforcing accountability for results? This is called ‘Management By Objectives (MBO) and has worked in the private sector.
Unfortunately, in the public sector, it is very difficult to enforce this kind of accountability. Remember that we have just one vote which we can use once every five years to express our views on every issue ranging from Ramjanmabhoomi to the Mumbai Urban Transport Project. What are the chances that the issue of how petrol pumps are alloted will ever be a factor in the next general elections?
But of course, if there is a scam -either real or imagined, it will stay fresh in our minds.
So an honest official has no incentive to ever do good work – it will never get noticed.
There is really no other way – just privatize!

Savita is a hypothetical woman whose hypothetical husband is a typical alcoholic, beating her every night and spending all the family’s earnings on alcohol. She has failed to convince her husband to give up drink. She has failed to get the family and community to put pressure on her husband to quit.
In desperation, she decides that the best way to get her husband to abstain is to persuade the government to stop alcohol from being sold to him.
Difficult as the task is, it is not enough for the government to sign the order. It has to be implemented. Unfortunately, implementing it requires the “co-operation” of a whole lot of people, much more that Savita individually or many Savitas together can ever manage to persuade. Toddy tappers have to give up their livelihood. Country-liquor shopowners have to close shop. Policemen have to enforce the ban. Excise inspectors have to stay uncorrupt. MLAs have to resist the temptation to interfere.
Does Savita stand a chance? Mohini Giri, chairman of the National Women’s Commission, thinks so. I was watching an episode of “The Big Fight” two weeks back in which she was calling for total prohibition to be reimposed on India.
Stories like the (hypothetical) Savita’s tug at heartstrings. Opposing prohibition seems at worst an act of cruelty and at best a concession to pragmatism. Supporting sale of alcohol by citing individual rights and personal responsibility will bring forth a snigger from people like Ms. Giri. Savita’s illiterate and ignorant husband is hardly in a position to look after himself. But why do people assume in the face of overwhelming evidence that the government can fit into the Patriarch’s role?

(Warning: I have managed to make this post rambling as well as cryptic at the same time. Will probably post a full length article on this. )

I tried to add my site to the open directory project. The open directory project aims to be the definitive catalog of the web. It is being built by volunteer-editors Once my site has been approved, you should be able to find it under Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Personal .

Or should it have been Society: People: Personal Homepages?
Or perhaps Regional: Asia: India: Maharashtra: Localities: Mumbai: Society and Culture: Personal Homepages? I may make a lot of posts about economics and technology so perhaps I should put my site either here or here?
The problem is not that the people at the open directory project have chosen categories badly, but that it is impossible to come up with a classification to satisfy everyone’s mind.

People have fought wars over issues of identity and classification. Are Ahmediyas Muslims? Who is a Hindu? Can an Italian be an Indian at the same time? Is it possible to be an Indian and an American simultaneously?
These problems arise because reality is too complex to be categorised using language, but the human mind is somehow able to cope with this complexity. Because of this, we are always dissatisfied with any classification.
So when someone mentions ‘Sachin’, an Indian mind does not go: Sports – Cricket – Cricketers – Indian players – Current. He immediately knows who Sachin is. This classification ability is adaptive as well as dynamic. Two months ago, to locate ‘Surajlata’ an Indian might have had to go through a similar process as above. After the Indian women’s hockey team’s performance, the categorisation will perhaps be swifter. For that matter, twenty years ago ‘Sachin’ would have meant someone completely different – (a famous child actor).
The human mind can adapt to changes in reality much faster than any formal classification system can. The rather strange classification of weblogs (Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Personal ) in the open directory is perhaps a historical legacy. Once a structure has been hardcoded, it is difficult to change.
It is to the credit of Tim Berners Lee that he designed the hyperlinked web as something that would closely mirror the way the mind thinks.
Now, the web is chaotic, with free-format text all over the place. One way to help a machine make sense of this chaos is to write web documents in machine readable format. This is the XML approach. This is unlikely to work outside a tightly defined context for the same reasons the open directory project is confusing. A more interesting approach is that of ?he semantic web. Google has gone a frighteningly long way in constructing tools for the semantic web. Google glossary and google sets are attempts to extract ‘sense’ out of the structure of HTML pages. If they succeed, they will be in line for a machine that passes the turing test. A machine that has access to the entire internet and has developed ‘understanding’ would be a direct competitor to God.

Some strange things happened yesterday.
I woke up early on a holiday. I sat in a stupor watchi?g Doordarshan (another strange event) and I saw the Prime Minister giving his Independence Day speech in a foreign language loosely based on Hindi. That lulled me back to sleep.
Here is the really strange thing. The Prime Minister has the reputation of being an orator. Doesn’t he realise that ‘Aparadhik tattvon ko chunaav prakriya se door rakhenge’ (We shall keep the criminal elements out of the election process.) sounds much less euphonic than ‘Aparadhiyon ko chunav nahin ladne denge’ (We won’t let criminals stand for elections)?
The whole of his speech sounded as if he did not realize what he was talking of.
He talked about the need to move away from a ‘scarcity mentality’ to a mentality of plenty. Good point. The Public Distribution System in India was built on the premise that we are short of food, and that it has to be rationed. When we have overflowing godowns and a drought where people are starve because they cannot buy food, the solution should be to open up the godowns and send food to wherever it is needed. This requires an overhaul of the entire PDS. Was the Prime Minister thinking of that? Did he realize the practical implications of his statement?
I don’t think so. Vajpayee is a poet and is used to thinking in broad emotionally tinged concepts, rather than in action points. He is completely out of touch with implementation. So he regurgitates whatever bureaucrats feed him. He announced that 55,000 crores are going to be spent on the ‘golden quadrangle’. Now, citizens want results. Bureaucrats want budgets. The fact that after 2 years of announcing a project, the Prime Minister thinks we will be happy to hear about the budget instead of how much road has been built indicates how out of depth he is.
We need a new Prime Minister. No, not Advani. It took a young Alexander to see that the Gordian knot had to be cut, not disentangled.