Democracy is Too Nice

image from the brilliant Wisdom on Wheels

Democracy is too nice. Everyone has a say and everyone has a in on how to handle things. This, generally, is a very good thing. But when things hit a rut, and quick decisions are needed, democracy can fail spectacularly. Just take whats going on in the Euro zone right now. No one can foresee a proper decision coming out of the region in time to avoid an economic crisis of massive proportions. Cronyism in Europe was helped along by the state. The imbalances created by the Euro zone’s formation coupled with a free spending, free borrowing approach has landed some of its less well off countries like Italy and Greece in hot water.

If they (the Euro officials) had acted fast they could have maybe stemmed everything at the start. They had several options on what to do and arguably any one of them would have worked, the climate at the time just required any action, just something to bring back investor confidence, but instead its powers started bickering. And the Euro-bickering is still going on, with no end in sight. This has led Paul Krugman to predict a massive scale bank run and plenty of other apocalyptic financial predictions from virtually every corner of economic thought.

Or, if you think the Euro example does not quite relate, think back a few months to when people were on pins about the US debt ceiling. From the beginning it was obvious that the ceiling was going to be raised. The US could take no other possible route. But parliamentary opposition from the Republicans created a heavy battle over tax cuts and entitlement reductions. The conditions were ultimately agreed to and the debt ceiling was raised. But the political opportunism probably didn’t help the US one bit when it comes to planning out a viable future strategy to recover its economy from the doldrums.

Poor, third world, developing (you pick the name) countries on the other hand, are always in a rut. They continuously face challenges and opportunities that require quick and intelligent action to mitigate or make use of. They are mostly desperate for hand holds to grow and if properly motivated and managed can become powerhouses very fast. Cases in point are Singapore and Malaysia who rose to stratospheric success in a very short time. Both of the above had intelligent, strategic but autocratic regimes. China is currently a pseudo autocracy (meaning it’s an autocracy but you can’t say it out loud) and it has so far managed its economy remarkably well.

What Do The People Want?

Democracy encourages countries to do what the people want. but in countries urgently in need of development, what the people want and what the country needs can be entirely different. Take Sri Lanka for instance. What do people want? Ideally they want free education, easy subjects and a guaranteed government job. Oh and free food stamps, low transport costs and cheap fuel. They also want no taxes, more subsidies and higher pensions. All this of course cannot happen at the same time.

For the country to develop, conversely, everyone must work hard, and everyone must sacrifice a few things. French-style decadence can come later. When your parent’s generations have become fat on economic riches and you can afford to work just 30 hours a week if you feel like it, or spend your time in roadside cafe’s smoking and drinking coffee on a government dole if you don’t.

In Sri Lanka political parties basically do what people want and skim off the top. At least, this is what they’ve been doing for a while now. If they’re not reducing bread/fuel/fertilizer prices before the election they’re promising more government jobs or cutting taxes. In fact it can be argued that our model of democracy has actually held back progress, by people getting the politicians they deserve. If the people have no long term vision for growth, then it is hardly likely that politicians with a long term vision for growth will arise out of a democracy consisting of these people.

A more centrally powerful government can ignore the short term wants and needs of people and give them what is really needed for long term growth. It can cut government jobs, privatize, cut taxes and increase investment. It can invest more in education, training, transport infrastructure and gross domestic capital.

A strong state is a strong state whatever model it uses to get there. Going by the above hypothesis, stronger states in lesser developed countries are generally autocratic, meaning there is a trade-off between development and liberty. But this doesn’t mean people are necessarily oppressed. All states, even autocratic states, desperately need majority corporation to actually develop, provided development is a strong objective and so will try to please as many people as they can while they work around the ones they can’t please. To paraphrase Bob Marley ‘you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all of the time.’

Democracy is an ideal. It is never really completely achieved, always remaining in its purest form unreachable. But the world remains fascinated by its appeal and the very word is taken to be synonymous with freedom and development. But history has shown that not to be the case and a careful look at past experiences and current events tells us that maybe it’s time we started looking at and accepting the presence of more mixed forms of government that are geared for development, inclusive in their own way but constantly changing and adapting to conditions on the ground.

Un-Meritocratic Police

I have a friend who wants to join the police. He is about 22 and holds a high office in the student council of a local university. He is good in sports and has great leadership qualities. More importantly for him, he has a degree and that is something you definitely need if you, like him, are going to apply for the post of ASP. Assistant Superintendent of Police. He’ll have a 50k plus salary, house and car with driver and other significant perks that come with the job. Not bad.

But you might say hold on, can a twenty two year old actually aspire to such a high post in law enforcement fresh out of university? Apparently yes. You need no on the job experience or previous training. Any fresh faced graduate with a 34 inch chest and above average in height can make it in, theoretically. What happens to the police force here? Incentive structures get skewed. You’re average ralahami will not be inclined to stop taking bribes and clean up his act because he basically has nothing to look forward to, the maximum the majority of them can expect to rise up to will probably be the rank of sergeant.

OK, say the system works. Maybe the police need to make sure that their top echelons are qualified and refined. Intelligence and leadership skills guaranteed from a young age so that they can be groomed early to provide a refreshing effect. But selections here are again not based on merit but on political favor. My friend for instance considers his number one asset to be his political connections. All of the rest are basically secondary. Only around twenty to thirty get picked every three years, so you can imagine the level of wrangling involved. The politicians pick the cops, no going around that one.

Will i vote, wont i vote, will i vote, wont i

Stick it to the uncle (Reuters)

Will i though? That’s highly doubtful. yes i know all you democracy wonks love to vote. You think voting is the highest calling of citizenship. But taking pills is not the epitome of good health, staying fit is, when the body is sick, medicines dont matter, thats not the way to solve a problem. Medicine is for people in denial.

Its funny, i can’t seem to attach so much importance to voting anymore. The medicine i think will no longer work. The body has decided where to go, its sick and the doctors can say whatever the hell they want, its gonna go on doing what its doing. It refuses to take exercise. If democracy is the darling of the modern political aesthetic, then our system is the middle aged uncle dancing the baila in microscopic strokes to a beat hidden deep in the music that only few can hear. He’s obese and happy about it, he is a fat model in a world full of anorexic teenage girls.

This system might work. Old, fat uncles are probably good at many things that teenage girls aren’t. But you can’t put the same moves on both of them. That is assuming you want to put the moves on an uncle in the first place. Right now our system is more old fat uncle than teenage girl. Are you getting this? Am i coming through here? i suppose that’s too much to ask.

But yes, it is crunch time. I was anyway planning on being out of Colombo tomorrow but that might not happen. So there is a very real possibility that i will be within the city but still missing a purple stinky pinky. Oh yes, i’m real bad.

None of the candidates have impressed me really. there’s Moragoda with all his fancy marketing, but he’s tried that before, and Colombo fell into his lap. But then all he turned out to have is good PR. How will that be different this time around? I guess we can wait and see. The UNP, what the UNP is still around?, is barely around.

Instead there are flocks and heaps and herds and masses of career politicians emerging everywhere. They’re crawling out of the wet works. Every Lani, Pani, Ravi and his sister’s estranged husband wants a piece of the cake. You can see the gleam in their eyes. The polished speeches, the rote promises. They’re playing it safe, using the same old methods to dupe the poor people, why fix something that aint broke?

So I’m inclined to suspend judgement. I won’t participate in the process because i am ambivalent. I’m the guy who will go along with what everyone else decides because i plainly can’t see a difference between any of them, and there is no color it is all only gray. So I vote for gray, this better pay.

Obey the Giant and Colombo

Something i saw today got me thinking of Colombo, and does Colombo even have a ‘counter culture’ movement? Does Colombo have meme’s? Do we get taken up with random shizz that don’t mean anything in particular? Of course we do, various teledrama phrases spring to mind like ‘I know the law putha’ anyone remember that? Could that chap be Colombo’s Giant?

I think there is mass scale sick to deathness with political BS. Its always been there sure, but with the war over poor people are expecting to get richer, this is clearly not happening. I think people need to be woken up, the economics of their situation be made aware to them. I’m not saying the government isn’t trying, but it isn’t trying hard enough. Corruption is there, cronyism is there, Hambantotism is also there.

Andre the Giant Has a Posse was a poster/street art campaign that was started by Shepard Fairy. Was watching Exit through the Gift Shop and finally found the bloody meaning behind the Andre the Giant posters. My earlier suspicions were confirmed, it doesn’t really mean anything.

But it doesn’t have to actually. The fat face with the look of a man trying to size you up for dinner with the word OBEY written in big think lettters is nothing short of Orweillian. The concept behind it is really interesting. Fairy (far as i know that IS his real, not figurative, name) borrowed the picture off some tabloid and stuck the OBEY motif to it and then stuck it on several walls in an around LA. This took for some inexplicaple reason and soon thousands of people were sticker bombing the US with Andre.

To quote Shepard Fairy from the movie

“Even though the Andre the Giant sticker was just an inside joke and i was just having fun, i liked the idea of.. the more stickers that are out there the more important it seems, the more important it seems, the more people wanna know what it is, the more they ask each other and it gains real power from perceived power’.

An A the G movement site has this to say

The Giant project isn’t a sales pitch, it’s an experiment in phenomenology, prodding the collective psyche with something inexplicable, creating an illusion of a secret society…What Fairey hoped to get across was that Giant uses the same propaganda techniques that try to sell you cigarettes, movies and presidents.

Funnily enough, Fairy did use the same skill set to sell a president. And people bought it too. The Obama posters were probably some of the coolest pieces of election campaigning i’d ever seen, but like a lot of people now i think Obama was just same same, with marginally different skin tone.

So why get worked up over nothing? Its a psychological blip. Something constantly in your face that you don’t know the meaning of, that you’re driven by curiosity to get to the bottom of it sort of like one of those itches under the skin your nails can’t get at. Hopefully in the process you end up becoming a little more aware of your surroundings.

“Once you examine it, there’s nothing left but the aesthetics of a process. If people realize, ‘I was manipulated by that,’ then maybe, like the domino effect, they’ll say, ‘What else am I being manipulated by, that I’m not questioning?’”

The message is in the medium. All this is a very novel, surrealistic approach to social activism. You don’t point and shoot, you just sort of create a jarring affect and hope it leads to something.

…say, ‘Question Authority,’ or ‘Stop Racism.’ You just get a pat on the back from the people who agree with you already, and the people who don’t agree with you don’t even think about it. So for me it’s just about creating an individual dialogue process that can expand into people trying to interpret it, and asking someone else, and then there’s two people talking about it. Something just going on that people can’t pigeonhole along with everything else.”

Obey the Giant is a meme that came out of a counter culture movement. The anti corporate, anti commercial, anti paid advertising one. It slowly morphed into a subset of corporate culture anyway vis a vis the Obama posters and Fairy’s ‘Black Market’ graphic design firm.

There may be something there in Colombo for a potential sticker bombing campaign. But i’m thought bouncing I suppose. As the three wheel dudes know; Life is rainbow.

The Economics of Colombo Traffic

A Beijing subway map

Traffic in Colombo is not pleasant. Leaving home at the wrong time can ruin your whole day. Do this for a while, and soon cursing behind the wheel everyday will likely give you grey hairs and a prematurely weak heart.

Blame The Cars

Tax reform, low interest rates and possibly increasing middle class incomes have multiplied vehicle imports faster than road networks can expand. The UDA has been trying to keep up, they’ve extended Marine Drive to Colpetty, opened up Bullers Road and have generally tried to fix things like perennially bad maintenance. Traffic lights and police presence has been increased, but still cars pile up faster than hungry people at a dansala.

I drive down Galle Rd often and it used to be that i’d invariably try to take Marine Drive to avoid evening traffic, but now i steer clear because of the massive wait at the turn off back into Galle rd. Similar situations are playing out along all of the major exit-entryways to the city. Baseline Road, Negombo Road and Kandy Road are veritable nightmares in rush hour. Let’s not even go near Rajagiriya, literally, you want to stay away from there when other people exit their offices. There are just too many. freakin. cars bob.

Don’t Blame The Cars

But blaming the vehicles is moot. There are good reasons why people feel they need cars. People are worried about getting to work on time, they also need to get there smelling good. So will drive if they can afford it, or paradoxically take a tuk tuk if they cant. As traffic increases, drivers get more and more frustrated and will wish for alternative ways to travel. But aside from moving closer to the city (an unthinkably expensive option for most) they have no other alternatives. This is absurd, but that’s just the way things stand now.

Public transport is unreliable, too congested, and completely ruins the attire of your average executive, discouraging most of them from opting for it. The lack of a cheap taxi network is also a problem. Tuk tuks, even metre tuks, are overpriced.

Building Our Way Out

The Defense Ministry/UDA (whats up with that? no one even talks about it anymore) has followed a strategy to expand capacity and increase efficiency by improving roads, building flyovers and increasing police presence. But it has only worked so well. In fact, capacity is so limited that everyone breaks road rules when the cops aren’t looking to get ahead. Our roads are ganglands, whatever you can get way with is legal, Gehan has a good post on driving and its malcontents.

The situation poses some interesting problems for urban policymakers. Things have come to a point where even the bureaucracy must realise that there is no building our way out of this, at least not in the conventional add-em-as-you-go fashion.

Trains have worked remarkably well in other cities. But Colombo’s existing train lines only circle the city and do not venture inside, making them just feed lines to hubs just outside the city centre and that too only from the North and along the coast.

The bus networks are mass market. And probably already transport double the amount of people travelling in cars. The recently launched Executive Bus service has failed to spark much interest. Again due to unreliability, irregularity, coverage gaps arising from the fact that they only traverse a single main route, and did I mention unreliability, the bus service can only do so much too. The much touted ferry service is also floating about aimlessly if you’ll excuse the bad pun.

Innovative work policies can help. Firms can rethink employment policy and offer the option of working from home. Or offer flexible hours to enable employees to beat traffic to and from work, like my new workplace. Individuals can also avoid traffic if they decide to leave early because not everyone will do it especially here where being fashionably late starts half an hour after an appointment.

Bring The Commonwealth Games to Colombo

A subway system would be ideal, as indi says, a good subway system can completely eliminate the need for cars. The Delhi Subway system cost somewhere around 700 million USD. Peanuts in comparison to how much we are borrowing for other projects of dubious worth. Maybe the Chinese can help us out with a loan and even expertise, the Beijing subway lines are superb; and are an excellent way of getting around in an otherwise smoky, congested city.

Both the Delhi and Beijing lines were conceptualised and hurried up because of the 2010 Commonwealth games and the Olympic Games respectively. The need to show off and provide seamless transport to attendees forced these cities to consider building what is probably the most efficient urban transport mechanism invented by man.

Colombo is the centre of the country still, the heart that pumps out all the country’s logistics. The main arteries of it are now getting clogged. If hosting big international games can bring a city a subway then Hambantota might end up getting one. But Hambantota doesn’t need a subway system, Colombo does. So bring the Commonwealth Games to Colombo, and build something useful to the economy in the process.

This is a policymaker standing on a minefield

But the relationship between expanding capacity and reduced traffic is not always direct. This study done by USCB shows that when capacity expands and some traffic is diverted through other channels, latent demand clogs up the free space. Meaning when more drivers take buses, people who took buses because the traffic was too much will start driving.

Colombo being a very decentralized city doesn’t help. Public transport is simply not capable of reaching all the crannies where people need to go, most of the inroads can’t accommodate buses anyway. I work on Thimbirigasyaya Road and it’s barely wide enough for two cars. There is an expansion program going on but it had been in the works for over two years now, no results.

There is also mispriced congestion. Drivers don’t pay for the time loss they cause to others, and so will make inefficient decisions on when and how to travel. These ‘negative externalities’ are the social cost of congestion, and can result in little or no reduction in traffic.

Expansion in trains might divert commuters away from the bus service, because the latter is crap, while not affecting the amount of cars on the road. Deteriorating the bus service even further while causing no improvement to traffic.

So wuttudoo? Maybe an expansion in overall capacity, trains, roads and buses, thereby taking levels of capacity beyond ‘latent demand’. Together with innovative alternatives like carpools, office vans and flexi hours and urban planning focusing on centralized corporate space, these policies might help. What is really needed before anything else is a comprehensive study of the city by specialists (its much more complicated than it looks) followed by bottom up policy making to prevent us from arbitrarily building roads that lead to nowhere worth going slowly.

But all this takes intelligent policy making followed by quick implementation. And so far the Defense Ministry/UDA has only been implementing like mad, where the intelligent planning?

Milinda Moragoda has set out a manifesto here, in it he gives some vague outlines of a transport policy that are a bit vague. Aside form promising clean pavements it promises circular bus routes but fails to describe how they will be different from existing bus routes, which cover the city’s main highways pretty well.

The Way Of Kings

Cover Art by Michale Whelan

Or.. there is no escaping escapism, at least for me. The Way of Kings is one of the best High Fantasy books I’ve ever read. Its got the usual mixture of kings and court intrigue, heroes with special powers and weird magic systems. Elements so hackneyed that they can easily get boring in the hands of lesser writers.

But Sanderson works them like a man making extremely complicated looking pottery with clay. The clay the elements, the book the extremely complicated bit of pottery, just to make sure you’re with me here.

There are powerful shin warriors that walk on walls, float and are lifelong slaves to cruel masters. More slaves in the form of strange black and red marbled humans who are generally demure but who also sport a mysterious warrior like alternate community that wages war against a corrupt and power hungry human (and probably Caucasian) feudal power structure to bring on confusion and the emergence of chaos.

Add that to a mysterious past, strange talk of ‘Voidbringers’ and constant storms that are like tsunamis in the sky that strike without warning and bring strange visions along with them and you’ve got some curiosity going. Dying people say strange things as they give up their life, scholars search for answers in mouldy libraries and a general begins to realize that maybe the shit is just about to hit the fan. Anyway, just read the synopsis on the wiki page will you. Its the first book of a planned ten. Should be interesting.

This could also have been a post about Mahinda Rajapaksa (I was told specifically that his name ends with an ‘a’ and not an ‘e’) but what is there to be said? I’m kind of tired of Mahinda and the whole court politics arena. Mervyn’s been appointed into post that needs a lot of people skills, again. The man’s got people skills alright, just not with an ‘s’ most of the time.

I am also glad that taxes have increased on cable TV. Maybe the government has finally realized that TV is opium. But then again local TV is still tax free. Maybe its the brand of opium that matters. Ganna ape they, they said. Taxes for liquor and cigarettes are up. I’d probably be complaining about that too if i was a drinker. But This way the less gatherings i attend with alcohol in them the less slurred conversations i have to pretend to be interested in. Cigarette price hikes are not going to help me quit smoking, no, that struggle must be waged within. Give me a few moments while i clench my jaw and glare intensely at that spot on the floor for effect.

So does the mathata thitha policy mean that the president nor his brothers ever drink? That’s always been a burning question. It finally birned through my skull onto paper, and now its lying there like an ember.

Puppet Committee

The Lessons Learned Committee

The West wants a committee to investigate how the war was conducted; the people want a committee to investigate the root causes of the ethnic conflict and figure out ways of preventing it from ever happening again; but the Rajapakse administration, it seems, wanted a committee to investigate just how justifiable their own personal ‘war against terror’ was. And what the Rajapakse’s want, the Rajapakse’s get. And so the Lessons Learned for Peace and Reconciliation Commissionwas born.

At today’s hearing the former head of the Peace Secretariat Mr. Bernard Gunatilleke was testifying on the history of the peace and mediation process between the successive government’s of Sri Lanka and the LTTE. His basic consensus? The peace process was messed up. Numerous efforts failed and it was pretty clear that the LTTE was never too interested in prolonged peace.

To add to that, the assassinations of Rajiv Ghandi, R. Premadasa and an attempt on the life of Kumarathunga were results of LTTE misgivings against the peace process. The process initiated by the mutually antagonistic Ranil-Chandrika partnership was doomed to fail for many reasons, not least of which was prevalent political tension in Sri Lanka’s government. In addition, there was a ‘priority to get along with signing the agreement’ as fast as possible, and minimum attention was given to the fine print; another nail in the coffin of the peace deal.

By April 2006, the Tigers had violated the agreement more than 3000 times and the government roughly 2-300 times. Leaving no choice but to drop all semblance of friendship and start fighting.

Personally and in retrospect, i think the war was inevitable. The LTTE were too far gone to be viable partners in a peace agreement. They somehow seemed too bloodthirsty, too eager for power.  But far greater are my concerns of the underlying social factors that contributed to the ethnic conflict in the first place.

So imagine my surprise when Bernard Gunatilleke says that the conflict was ‘a military one, and not an ethnic conflict’. That may have been true perhaps during the latter stages of the war. But it cannot be denied that the root causes for the conflict lie deep in ethnic ill feeling.

The Committee, to their credit, appeared to dispute his judgement. But they asked several leading questions often loaded with judgement biased to the argument that the peace process was bunkum. So from my first impressions, I can’t really say they appear very objective. And i can’t really say if they are searching for anything useful. But, assuming that genuine reconciliation efforts sanctioned by the President’s office have a better chance of succeeding, i hope they are.

Mervyn Understands

Mervyn Silva probably gets the way our system works better than anyone else. I’m not condoning his action of recently tying a Samurdhi officer to a tree, but Mervyn in his act has revealed his understanding of one simple fact that motivates people; incentive.

The Sri Lankan people work just about the same way most other people work, through self-interest. The government services here are especially, and ironically, even more driven by self interest. large scale red tape and lack of accountability kind of ensures that workers can get away with just free riding off the system and going home early by shamming through their work.

The problem with a system like this is its incapability to tackle crises. Waiting for the lethargy to die out and action to be taken in background of a scenario like spreading dengue can be fatal for a lot of people. So it needs to be kickstarted, like by tying someone to a tree. After Mervyn’s fear tactics a discerning citizen of his electorate i overheard said that ‘people clean the roads now even in the night’.

It might not have been right, but i guess it got results. A paradox that scares when you look at the possibilities.

Kings for Bureaucracy

Looking at Sri Lankan politics and searching for a method to the madness let alone a science is no easy feat, and certainly it is beyond me; a mere armchair based channel flipper loath to immerse myself in everything but the juiciest of political gossip.

But as a representative then, of the vast majority of Sri Lankans I reserve the right to pass comment on our political sphere by virtue of my ignorance of it. That’s a neat little loophole I challenge anyone to disrupt. I am ignorant, therefore I am. Most of us are ignorant save for a few therefore it is us who are and you who are not. Us who are. Who are? Who’re? Whores.

People deserve the politicians they get. This is true. If the people demand salary hikes from an overly bloated government sector completely ignorant of the damage it will do to the country then they will only ultimately elect a person who can deliver what they need. And that person is a politician completely devoid of understanding of how to run a country. It fits nicely: the only thing completely and fatally under a free market mechanism appears to be democracy.

Suppose the people do elect worthy statesman by some luck then what the intelligentsia can hope for is that person be perpetually in power. But the majority is quick to catch on to what the intelligentsia want, mostly because intelligentsia can’t shut up about it, and is also very quick to become suspicious of what the intelligentsia says. The opposition catches on, and fuels this suspicion and takes down said statesman in next election.

So maybe what we really need is a benevolent dictator? Both in tune with the individual man to keep him happy in the present and also in tune with what the nation needs for economic development? History has shown that true development happens when governance is constant. Note that I didn’t say ‘government’ but ‘governance’.

The US changed governments pretty often. But they stuck by strong ideologies that dictated a constant direction to all their activities that they maintain to this day. More recently India: same. I.e., their system had constants that pushed them along. But some countries have hit the big time by more dubious means. By dubious I mean anti-democratic and we only have Churchill’s word that it is the best system discovered yet. China and Singapore for e.g. rose to staggering power through autocracy.

In Sri Lanka we just keep building up and then tearing what we built down to start all over again. As governments change and each pooh-pooh at their predecessor’s achievements. So in the face of a lack of a perpetual ideology/direction to governance, maybe our next best hope to hitting the big time is to have an autocratic leader with no incentive to engage in short-termist crowd pleasing development. Maybe what we really need is a king, of sorts, like a CEO.

But is Mahinda a Lee Kwan You or a Mao? The intelligentsia are not sure, neither are the people. Seems like a good start. Personally, I’d rather he be a Lee Kwan than a Mao, no cultural revolution for me thank you very much; a sound management of the country will do (lest we may all be forced to don amudeys and drive the buffalo along idyllic paddy fields). But as Spiderman will tell you; with great power comes great opportunities to enrich yourself. Or was it something else? Can’t seem to quite pin it down.

The Common Good (and other Fairy Tales)

Following is a brief synopsis of the history of economics as i understand it together with a subjective viewpoint on its inherently oppressive nature. This viewpoint as written below does not necessarily reflect my personal opinion on economics, it is simply a viewpoint, that should stand alone in its own right.

-The Raj

Since industrialization humans have focussed on getting more efficient, becoming more profitable. I shouldn’t say humans in this regard, for it is mostly the capitalists who expound such thought processes into practical application. Economics after all, cannot be taken away from the self interest of its proponents, and when brought into the fray of politics, self interest largely depends on who is in power. And, money being tantamount to nearly everything in entering politics, most modern democracies flout the interests of capitalism over ‘what is good for the masses’. Of course this is cleverly disguised, more so from the politicians themselves, but GDP is not a measure of quality of life. Getting richer as a country, with it’s complete wealth distributed according to the laws of the Pareto Principle, is questionable as a purpose of being. Most modern economies can be highlighted as examples.

The prevailing ‘what is good for the powerful is good for the economy’ philosophy can be easily illustrated with simple look at the history of economics. Initial feudal establishments (which were centered around the absolute power of the landowning class and its default omni-ownership of all capital) crumbled with the increase of trade and the appearance of ‘marketplaces’. This only exacerbated with colonialism and eventually led to the Merchant class surpassing in wealth the landowning overlords of feudalistic society. Eventually, the reign of Merchants was the norm.

Mercantilism

‘Mercantilism’ was their philosophy. Mercanltilists were of the opinion that to prosper, a nation must sell more than it buys. In other words, its exports must exceed its  imports. This kind of thinking will seem absurd in the modern day world with interdependencies among nations causing more deficits than surpluses. A system like that cannot survive, for the simple reason that were every country in the world to follow identical princples, trade would simply halt! leading to eventual collapse of the system. As it happened Mercantilism survived for a long while, primarily due to cheap resources readily available from colonized nations and also by oppression of its own country’s peasant class, and economies in that day were controlled more by guilds of merchants that functioned more like cartels; monopolizing trade and commanding prices. Not very good for the quality of life of your average peasant, I would say.

Moving on, the rise of capitalism happened when the industrialists got into the game. They were a class of people who believed in the use of capital to control the arena of trade. They would supply capital to small scale artisans and contract merchants to sell them. This practice formed the basis of what would become the modern company.

Capitalism

‘Capitalism’ full blown, had names like the Dutch and British East India Companies as its flag bearers.  They allowed joint stock ownership and modern share markets found their origin here. They used their vast capital and trade monopolies to import cheap and sell dear. Making their owners’ wealth increase to previously unimagined proportions. Along with the emergence of capitalism, the seeds of the destruction of mercantilism were sown. Some advantage was gained to the common man with the abolition of protectionist measures like monopolies. And free market systems ensured competitive prices but along with its advantages the market economy also increased the sense of work ethic. Previously idyllic lives were now to be spent slaving at factories and workplaces eking out a living.

This hasn’t changed much. In the world of globalization and international trade, corporate interest is the main driving force behind ‘growth’. Obama treads lightly with BP because Obama possibly knows who has a fatal but light grip on his balls. The ecosystem and the small people making a living off it are not really significant. And this is not really a one off example. Trade barriers, free markets, international trade agreements, multinationals etc are all ‘good for growth’ but not really good for the increment of the quality of life of the small man. At least, such increment does not make the betterment of the common good its priority. Leading us to question the validity of the whole system, and our perceptions of human nature.