Category: politics

War, Terror and Leaderless Protests

A while back, I’d written on this blog that the phrase “war on terror” is incorrect since terrorism is not a war (actually I have written two posts on this topic. Here is the second one). A war is a staged human conflict with the aim being a political victory, and wars inevitably end in a political settlement, which in chess terms can be described as “resignation, rather than check mate”.

The issue with terrorism is that it is usually a distributed method. There is no one leader of terror. You might identify one leader and neutralise him, but that is no guarantee that the protests are going to end, since the rest of the “terrorist organisation” (a bit of an oxymoron) will keep the terror going. With a distributed organisation like a terrorist outfit, political settlements are impossible (who do you really settle with), and so the terrorism continues and there is no “victory”.

It is similar with spontaneous leaderless protests that have become the hallmark of the last decade, from Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 to Occupy Wall Street to the recent anti-CAA protests in India. To take a stark example with two protests based in Delhi, the Anna Hazare protest in 2011 was finished in fairly quick order (it started two days after India won the World Cup, and finished two days before the IPL was about to begin), while the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act have been going on for nearly three months now.

The difference between these two Delhi protests is that the first one (2011) had a designated leader (Anna Hazare, and maybe even Arvind Kejriwal or Kiran Bedi). And the protestors effectively followed the leader. And so when the government of the day negotiated a settlement with the leader, the protest effectively got “called off” and ended abruptly.

The Shaheen Bagh protests don’t have a designated leader to negotiate with (at least there are no obvious leaders). The government might try to negotiate with or round up or be violent to a handful of people who it thinks are the leaders, but the nature of the protest means that this is unlikely to have much effect since the rest of the “decentralised organisation” will go on.

In that sense, protests by “decentralised groups” are attritional battles where no negotiation is possible, and the only possible end is that the protestors either get bored or decide that the protest is pointless (that’s pretty much what happened with Occupy). Each member of the protesting group takes an independent decision each day (or night) whether to join the protest or not, and the protest will die down over a period of time (how long it will take depends on the size of the universe of people participating in the protest, overall interest level in the protest and how networked the protest is).

From that point of view, a leadered protest (like the Anna Hazare protest) can end suddenly (so everyone can go watch the IPL). A leaderless protest dies slowly and gradually (stronger network effects among the protestors can actually mean that the protest can die a bit faster, but still gradually).

There are claims on social media and WhatsApp groups that the communal violence in Delhi on Monday and Tuesday was designed in part to intimidate the Shaheen Bagh protestors to stop the protests. Even the violence was “successful” in achieving this objective, the leaderless nature of the protest will mean that it will only end “gradually”, more like a “halal process” rather than with a “jhatka”.

Distribution of political values

Through Baal on Twitter I found this “Political Compass” survey. I took it, and it said this is my “political compass”.

Now, I’m not happy with the result. I mean, I’m okay with the average value where the red dot has been put for me, and I think that represents my political leanings rather well. However, what I’m unhappy about is that my political views have been all reduced to one single average point.

I’m pretty sure that based on all the answers I gave in the survey, my political leaning across both the two directions follows a distribution, and the red dot here is only the average (mean, I guess, but could also be median) value of that distribution.

However, there are many ways in which people can have a political view that lands right on my dot – some people might have a consistent but mild political view in favour of or against a particular position. Others might have pretty extreme views – for example, some of my answers might lead you to believe that I’m an extreme right winger, and others might make me look like a Marxist (I believe I have a pretty high variance on both axes around my average value).

So what I would have liked instead from the political compass was a sort of heat map, or at least two marginal distributions, showing how I’m distributed along the two axes, rather than all my views being reduced to one average value.

A version of this is the main argument of this book I read recently called “The End Of Average“. That when we design for “the average man” or “the average customer”, and do so across several dimensions,  we end up designing for nobody, since nobody is average when looked at on many dimensions.

External membership of unions

The ostensible reason for the violent crackdown on protesting students at Alighar Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia last month was the involvement of “outsiders” in these protests. In both cases, campus authorities claimed that student protestors had been joined by “outsiders” who had gone violent, which forced them to call in the cops.

And then the cops did what cops do – making the protest more violent and increasing the damage all round, both physically and otherwise.

I’m reminded of this case from a few years ago from some automobile company – possibly Maruti. The company had refused to recognise an employee’s union at a new plant they were starting, because of an argument on the membership of non-employees in the unions.

The unions’ argument in that case was that external (non-employee) membership was necessary to provide the organisational and union skills to the union. If I remember correctly, they wanted one third of the union to consist of members who were not employees of the firm. The firm contended that they wouldn’t want to negotiate with outsiders, and so they wouldn’t recognise the union with external members.

I don’t remember how that story played out but this issue of external membership of unions, whether student or employees, is pertinent.

At the fundamental level, unions need to exist because of the balance of power – the dominance in favour of an institution over an individual employee or student is too great to always produce rational outcomes in the short term (in the long term it evens out, but you know what Keynes is supposed to have said). The formation of unions corrects this imbalance since the collection of employees or students can have significant bargaining power vis-a-vis the institution, and negotiations can result in more rational decisions in the short term.

The problem I have is with external membership of unions. The problem there is that external members (who usually provide leadership and “organisation” to the unions) lack skin in the game, and the union’s incentives need not always be aligned with the incentives of the employees or students.

Consider, for example, the protests in the universities last month which became violent. The incentive of the protests would have been to peacefully protest (to register their dissatisfaction with a recent law), and then get back to their business of being students. The students themselves have no incentive to be violent and damage stuff in their own institution, since that will negatively impact their own futures and studies at the institution.

External members of the unions don’t share this incentive – their incentive is in making the union activities (the protest in this case) more impactful. And if the protest creates damage, that can make it more impactful. The external members don’t particularly care about damage to the institution (physical and otherwise), as long as the union’s show of strength is successful.

It is similar in organisations. It is in the interest of both the employees and the management that the company does well, since that means a larger pie that can be split among them. The reason employees organise themselves, and sometimes go on limited strikes, is to ensure that they get what they think is a fair share of the pie.

The problem, of course, is that negotiations aren’t that simple, and they frequently break down. The question is about what to do when that inevitably happens. Each employee has his own threshold in terms of how long to strike, and at what point it makes sense to back down and accept the deal on the table.

In an employee-only union, the average view of the employees (effectively) guides when the strike gets called off and the negotiations end. External members of the union lack skin in the game, and they have a really long threshold on when to back down from the strike. And this makes strikes longer than employees want them to be, which can make the strikes counterproductive for the employees.

One infamous example is of the textile mills in Mumbai in the late 70s, and early 80s. There was massive union action there in those times, with strikes going on for months together. Ultimately the mills packed up and relocated to Gujarat and other places. The employees were the ultimate losers there, either losing their jobs or having to move to another city. If the employees themselves had controlled the union it is likely that they might have come to a settlement sooner or later, and managed to keep their jobs.

In the automobile case I mentioned earlier, if I remember correctly, the union demanded that up to 33% of the membership of the union be comprised of outsiders – a demand the company flatly refused to entertain. Now think about it – if external members control a third of the union, all it takes is one fourth of the employees, acting in concert with the union, for something to happen. And there is a real agency problem there!

The Ramanamurthy Spectrum

The basic point of the protests ongoing throughout India opposing the recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act is that it doesn’t follow the “Ramanamurthy Principle“. Let me explain.

The Kannada classic Ganeshana Maduve (1989) is set in a cluster of houses owned by one Ramanamurthy, where all houses apart from his own has been let out to tenants. His battles with his tenants is one of the running themes of this comedy.

One notable conflict has to do with whitewashing. Ramanamurthy decides to get his house whitewashed, but his tenants demand that their houses be whitewashed as well. After a long protracted hilarious battle (starring a dog, also named Ramanamurthy), the tenants come to an agreement with Ramanamurthy – that if he gets his own house painted, he has to get the entire cluster painted.

In other words, the conflict between Ramanamurthy and his clients had only two permissible solutions – all houses are painted or no houses are painted. All solutions in the middle were infeasible. This gives us what we can call the “Ramanamurthy spectrum”.

Here it is visually.

 

 

The protests against India’s citizenship amendment act can be summarised by the fact that the act fails to follow the Ramanamurthy Spectrum. The act, as it has been passed by parliament, uses an arbitrary criterion (religion) to determine which incoming refugees will be given Indian citizenship.

And the protests against that come from both ends of the Ramanamurthy spectrum. In Assam and the rest of the North East, areas that will be most adversely affected by the act, they want the solution that Ramanamurthy finally adopted in the movie – “I won’t get my house whitewashed as well”. They don’t want any of the incoming people to be given citizenship.

Elsewhere in the country (now I must admit I haven’t been able to follow this crisis as closely as I would like to, since it is very difficult here to separate news from “reaction to news“), the protests seem to be at the other end of the Ramanamurthy spectrum – that everyone should be let in.

In any case, the incumbent government has utterly failed in recognising this important principle of politics, and going ahead with a regulation that is neither here nor there in terms of the Ramanamurthy spectrum.

No wonder that the whole country is rioting!

Baskets of deplorables

OK this is a political post. You might infer something about my political leanings from this, and you might classify me as a “deplorable”, but I run that risk.

I don’t like the way our politics is turning out nowadays. You are free to interpret “our” and “nowadays” in whatever way you want. What I don’t like is that people seem to wear their political beliefs on their sleeve, and think it is okay to shame and cut contact with people who don’t share their beliefs.

I don’t know when exactly this started – but it was surely sometime between 2013 and 2016. The culmination of this attitude was US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton describing her opponent Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables“. And that attitude seems to be being taken forward by people of various political dispensations three years on.

I long for the days when people treated their political opinions like their private parts – stuff that existed and was put to good use when required, but not put on display. Nowadays, though, trawl through any social media platform, and you find people making political statements all the time. If you aren’t in a filter bubble, you will surely be seeing flamewars. And a difference in political opinion is no longer just a difference in opinion – you consider someone with differing views as despicable.

I’m friends with a lot of people who hold strong political opinions, and whose opinions might differ from mine. I don’t care about it – since there is plenty to them otherwise that makes them valuable to me, and so I continue to hang out with them.

Some people, on the other hand, don’t think like this. According to them, some political positions are so horrible that anyone who endorses that position is necessarily a horrible person, and not worth engaging with. For them, their political axis is fundamentally uni-dimensional – the world doesn’t exist outside of the dimension that they consider to be a dealbreaker.

As a consequence, any stand endorsed by a politician who endorses their dealbreaker position also becomes a dealbreaker. Political commentary and evaluation is based on who takes the stand, rather than the stand itself. Everything is seen through a political lens, and anyone who disagrees with them is worthy of ridicule.

It is sad that politics has taken over our lives so much, and people consider other people’s political opinions as such an important part of their lives. And the way social media and feedback loops work, I see no way out of this.

Mass marketing and objective journalism

This is a fascinating essay by Antonio García Martinez on the history and future of journalism (possibly paywalled). The money paragraph is this:

The bigger switch happened as a national market for consumer goods opened after the Civil War, when purveyors like department stores wanted to reach large urban audiences. Newspapers responded by increasing the number of ads relative to content, and switched to models that went light on the political partisanship in the interest of expanding circulation. This move was driven not exclusively by lofty ideals but also by mercenary greed. And it worked. Newspapers used to make lots of money. Mountains of money.

Basically, the move to objective journalism came in the late 1800s when advertisers such as Macy’s wanted to take out full page ads, and wanted to do so in newspapers that served the largest sections of the market. And when a newspaper had to reach a large section of the market, it inevitably had to tone down the partisanship, and become more objective.

Over the last decade, we have been witnessing (across the world) the decline of objective media. All media is “#paidmedia” based on which side of the political spectrum you stand on. There aren’t that many truly objective papers around, and social media is bombarded left and right by extremely politicised reporting that goes as “news”.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this period has coincided with a time when print circulation has been dropping steadily (in the developed world at least), and where online advertising can be highly targeted.

In theory, mass marketing is inefficient. When you pay to put up a hoarding somewhere, you’re possibly paying a small amount for each person who sees the hoarding, but not all of them might find it interesting. Consequently, this reflects in a depressed per-person price of the hoarding implying the owner of that real estate can’t make as much as she could if the hoarding were to be more “targeted”.

When you can target your advertisements more precisely, everybody wins. You as the marketer know that your advertisement is only being shown to your intended audience. The owner of the real estate where you put your advertisement can thus charge you more for your advertisement. Even the customer will be less pained by the advertisement if it is highly relevant to her.

Another way of seeing it is – an advertisement shown to a customer who doesn’t want to see it is wasted. The monetary cost of this waste are borne by the owner of the real estate and the advertiser, and the non-monetary cost is borne by the customer (being forced to see something she didn’t want to see). And so one of the biggest technological problems of today is on how we can target advertisements better so that we can minimise such costs – and in the last decade and half, we’ve made significant progress on that front.

The problem with greater efficiency, however, is that it comes with the side-effect of biased media. When Nike knows that it can precisely target an advertisement at American leftwingers, it makes an ad with Colin Kaepernick and shows them to American leftwingers to sell them more shoes.

This doesn’t however, mean that Nike only sells to left-wingers. The same company can make another advertisement targeted precisely at right-wingers and use it to sell shoes to them!

So now that you can make left-wing and right-wing ads, and you have the ability to target them, you want to cut the waste and place the ads so that you can target as best as possible. In other words, you want to place your left-wing ads in places that only left-wingers want to see, and right-wing ads only in places that right-wingers will see. And so you prefer to advertise in CNN and Fox rather than in a hypothetical “broad market” media outlet.

And the reason you created the politically charged ads in the first place was because there were some outlets (Facebook, for example) where you could precisely target people based on their political orientation. And so you see the vicious cycle – that you can target in some places means you want other places where you can target and that creates demand for more polarised media.

It was the opposite cycle that took effect in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was no way brands could target (also, when you make physical advertisements, with 1900s technology, each advertisement is costly and you don’t want to make one per segment) too effectively, and so they went mass market in their communication.

And this meant advertising in the outlets that could get them the maximum number of eyeballs. When you can’t discriminate between a “right” and a “wrong” eyeball, you pay based on the number of eyeballs. And the way for media organisations to grow then was to cater to everyone. Which meant less less bias and more objectivity and more “features”.

Sadly that cycle is now behind us.

Volatility and price differentiation

In a rather surreal interview to the rather fantastically named Aurangzeb Naqshbandi and Hindustan Times editor Sukumar Ranganathan, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has made a stunning statement in the context of agricultural markets:

Markets are far more volatile in terms of rapid price differentiation, than they were before.

I find this sentence rather surreal, in that I don’t really know what Gandhi is talking about. As a markets guy and a quant, there is only one way in which I interpret this statement.

It is about how market volatility is calculated. While it might be standard to use standard deviation as a measure of market volatility, quants prefer to use a method called “quadratic variation” (when the market price movement follows a random walk, quadratic variation equals the variance).

To calculate quadratic variation, you take market returns at a succession of very small intervals, square these returns and then sum them up. And thinking about it mathematically, calculating returns at short time intervals is similar to taking the derivative of the price, and you can call it “price differentiation”.

So when Gandhi says “markets are far more volatile in terms of rapid price differentiation”, he is basically quoting the formula for quadratic variation – when the derivative of the price time series goes up, the market volatility increases by definition.

This is what you have, ladies and gentlemen – the president of the principal opposition party in India has quoted the formula that quants use for market volatility in an interview with a popular newspaper! Yet, some people continue to call him “pappu”.

Government and markets

It’s been a while since I wrote a post like this one – I remember a decade ago, I used to flood my blog with such stuff.

In any case, last week, in response to the “10yearchallenge” meme, Nitin Pai of Takshashila wrote an Op-Ed in the Print on how India has changed in 10 years. While he admits that the country has grown and the lives of people has improved in some ways, the article leads with the headline that India should be be ashamed of what has happened in the last 10 years. This paragraph is possibly representative of the article:

While individual Indians seem to have done well over the past decade, India is more or less where it was. Worse, politics and policy priorities seem to have regressed to 1989.

Reading through the article (I encourage you to read it, it’s good – never mind the headline), I found a clear and distinct pattern in the kind of things where things have gotten better in India and where things have gotten worse.

Everything where markets function, or where the government doesn’t have much of a role, things have changed significantly for the better. Everything where the government has an outsized role, either because it is the government’s job or the sector is overregulated, things have gotten worse. So our cities have gotten more crowded. Infrastructure has gotten worse. Law and order has regressed. And this has had little to do with the party in power – whatever the government touched has regressed.

Looking at it in another way, Indians seem to be highly capable of making their lives better by coordinating using the invisible hand of the market. However, we seem incapable of making our lives better by coordinating using the government process.

From this perspective, there is one easy way to progress – basically reduce the government. Get rid of the overregulations. Get the government out of things where it shouldn’t be. Give a freer hand to the market.

Unfortunately, ahead of general elections this year, we see most parties taking a highly statist line. This is a real tragedy.

When Jayalalithaa Ruined My Birthday

As the Babri Masjid was being brought down, I celebrated.

I had come up with this line a few years ago, and said that whenever I write my autobiography, I’m going to begin it this way. And while I’m not as certain nowadays that I’ll write an autobiography, in case I write one I’ll still use this line to open it.

This line could also be used in a logic class, the kind of lectures I delivered fairly frequently between 2012 and 2016, illustrating logical fallacies. For this one might induce the correlation-is-causation fallacy in your head, and you might think that if I celebrated while the Babri Masjid was being brought down, I must be a Muslim-hating bigot. So here is what will be the second line in my autobiography, whenever I write it:

It was my tenth birthday, and there was a party at home.

There is something special about your birthday falling on Sundays. The first time that happened, in 1987, was also the first time that my parents organised a birthday party for me. I’m too young to know how many people came, but there were a lot of people filling our house that evening. We had professional catering and I got so many gifts that I got to using some of them (such as Enid Blyton story books) several years later.

Maybe I read some of the books around the time my birthday fell on a Sunday once again, which happened in 1992. That also happened to be the next time I had a party at home, and this one was different, with less than ten guests, with all of them being my classmates in school.

My mother had done the cooking that day. We played cricket and hide-and-seek, and some other party games (which I don’t remember now). And then later that evening, news on television told us that the Babri Masjid had been brought down that day and riots had started.

 

The only thing that registered in my head then was that there would be no school the next day, and I didn’t know when I would distribute the chocolates I had bought for the customary school distribution.

The long term impact, though, was that my birthday got inextricably linked to the Babri Masjid demolition.

So over the years, when people have searched for an anchor to remember my birthday, they’ve inevitably used news of the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition. This morning, for example, I got a message that said “Happy birthday. Babri Masjid article came up somewhere 🙂 “. Another friend messaged me to remind me of what I’ve written to being this post.

A couple of years back, a friend messaged me later in December apologising for missing my birthday, adding that he had missed it because there wasn’t much news about the Babri Masjid anniversary. This must have been in 2016, which was among my worst birthdays because beyond close family, hardly anyone wished me that day.

And I blame former Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa for that, for after a rather prolonged illness, she had passed away the previous night. And that meant that the news waves in India on the 6th of December 2016 were filled with news of Jayalalithaa’s demise, with any Babri Masjid anniversary stuff being pushed to the backburner.

The situation got rectified last year with it being the 25th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, so the number of people who wished me went back to “normal levels”. And perhaps with elections being round the corner again, and without an important death to distract the news, I’m guessing that Babri Masjid has made enough news today for enough people to remember my birthday!

I must also take this opportunity to thank certain entities who unfailingly wish me on every birthday.

Oh, and I discovered this morning that today is 6/12/18. And my wife helpfully added that I turned 36 today.

Now I feel really old!

The market for gay relationships

The market for homosexual relationships is an interesting one from the analysis perspective. Like the market for heterosexual relationships, it is a matching market (we are in a relationship if and only if I like you AND you like me). Unlike heterosexual relationships, it is not a “bipartite” market, since both the nominal “buyer” and the “seller” in a transaction will come out (no pun intended) of the same pool (gay people of a particular sex).

The other factor that makes this market interesting (purely from an analysis perspective – it’s bad for the participants) is that there is disapproval at various levels for homosexual relationships. Until today, for example, it was downright criminal to indulge in gay sex in India. Even where it is legal, there is massive social and religious opposition to such relationships (think of the shootout at the gay bar in Florida, for example).

Social disapproval has meant that gays sometimes try to keep their sexuality under wraps. Historically, it has been a common practice for gays to enter into heterosexual marriages, and pursue relationships outside. In fact, there is nothing historical about this – read this excellent piece by Srinath Perur on gays in contemporary hinterland Karnataka, for whom Mohanaswamy, a collection of short stories with a gay protagonist, was a kind of life changer.

Organising a market for an item that is illegal, or otherwise frowned upon, is difficult, since people don’t want to be found participating in it. If I were a gay man looking for a partner, for example, I couldn’t go around openly looking for one if I didn’t want my family to know that I’m gay. So the first task would have been discovery – “safe spaces” where I would be happy to expose my sexuality, and where I could also meet potential partners.

When demand and supply exist, buyers and sellers will find a way to meet each other, though often at high cost. One such “way” for homosexual people has been the gay bar. Though not explicitly advertised, such bars act as focal points (I have a chapter on focal points in my book) for gay people.

They also act as an “anti focal point” (a topic I HAVEN’T covered in the book, for a change!) for heterosexual people who want to stay away because they don’t want to be hit on by gay people (thus reducing market congestion – another topic I cover in my book). Similarly other cultural activities have acted as focal points for gay people to get together and meet each other.

Like in heterosexual relationship markets (this is the link to a sample chapter from the book), the advent of dating apps has revolutionised gay dating, as apps such as Tinder and Grindr have provided safe spaces where gays can look for relationships “from the comfort of their homes”. There are studies that show that Grindr has changed the nature of relationships among gay men, and how these apps have “saved lives” in places such as India where homosexuality was criminal until today.

Today’s Indian Supreme Court ruling will have a massive positive impact on gay relationships in India. For starters, there are still millions of people in the closet – while apps such as Tinder and Grindr allowed more people to participate in these markets (since this could be done without really “coming out”), that gay sex was a criminal act would have led to some people to err on the side of caution (and deprive themselves of the chance of a relationship). Gay people who were worried about criminality, but not that much about social sanctions, will now be more willing to come out, leading to an increase in the market size.

Barring congestion (when “bad counterparties” prevent you from finding “good counterparties”),  the likelihood of finding a match in a market is generally proportional to the number of possible counterparties. Since gay relationship markets are not bipartite, we can say that the likelihood of finding a good match varies by the square of the number of market participants (and this brings in the Indian Prime Minister’s infamous 2ab term). In other words, it not only allows the people now coming into the market to find relationships, but it also allows existing players to find better relationships.

Then, there is the second order effect. Decriminalisation will mean that more people will come out of the closet, which will mean more people will find homosexuality to  be “normal” leading to better social mores (to take a personal example, I used to use the word “gay” as a pejorative (to mean “uncool”) until I encountered my first openly gay acquaintance – someone with whom I share on online mailing list). And as social attitudes towards homosexuality change, it will lead to more people coming out of the closet, setting off a virtuous cycle of acceptance of homosexuality.

In other words, today’s decision by the Indian Supreme Court is likely to set off a massive virtuous cycle in the liquidity of the market for homosexual relationships in India!

PS: It is a year since my first book was published, so we are running a promotional offer where you can buy the Kindle version for one dollar (or Rs. 70).