LITERATURE-LIGHT AND DELIGHT. 67. LIMITATIONS TO KNOWLEDGE AND ITS APPLICATION.

LITERATURE- LIGHT AND DELIGHT

67.LIMITATIONS TO KNOWLEDGE AND ITS APPLICATION

In a Tamil movie song over 55 years ago, a leading lyricist, Pattukottai Kalyanasundaram wrote about how important works were left unattended because people in responsible positions simply 'slept'. I have understood more since. Not only do they sleep, but even while awake, they ensure that others don't solve the problems,either.

When you are part of a hierarchy, you have three barriers or hurdles to face and cross: your superiors, peers and subordinates!

No superior will normally appreciate or tolerate a subordinate, except to the extent necessary for his own survival and advancement. Northcote Parkinson wrote about how the superior will ensure competition among his subordinates so that his own position becomes secure. Where he needs one, he will post two, so that they will keep fighting each other, and he himself will not face any threat from a more talented subordinate.

In the organisation, the superior will steal ideas from juniors and profit from them.( It happens in the University when research guides steal the ideas of their students.) One method is that when the junior records a brilliant note, the senior will not pass it on with his own comments, but replace it with his own note, with ideas taken out of the junior's! Another method is to call a meeting for "a free and frank discussion",later on called in management jargon " brain storming", gather all the good ideas and then approach the top as if they were his own. The juniors would participate enthusiastically, in order to impress the boss and it would be some time before they saw through the game. In many cases the juniors would have no choice, as they depended on the 'confidential report' or in management jargon 'performance appraisal'. In a govt or quasi-govt organisation, where there were often no objective criteria, this meant nothing more than recording one's impressions which were arbitrary! It was pure sham. Through all this game, who ever could think of a problem or its solution?

The peers were another problem. You could not offend your colleagues by being smarter. 

The subordinates were a clear brake on the system. They would resist all improvement- which for the management meant greater productivity, but for them meant job reduction or more work! In the late 60s and early 70s it was so difficult to work, with the leftists enjoying the support of Indira Gandhi, whose support she needed to assert her position after the split in her party, and with the Naxalites rising in influence. I have some bitter personal experiences but I cannot share them. In the 80s we faced serious problems from the Shiv Sena in Bombay, and the Dravidian outfits in Madras. If anybody thought of problem solving in such circumstances, he must surely have escaped from Kilpauk, as we used to say in the olden days.

The bureaucracy was not invented for problem solving! Especially, where we follow the British system of permanent tenure. A bureaucrat is a permanent liability and he cannot be got rid of! He can be given a change of dept, but it doesn't mean a thing. Bureaucrats like the IAS cadre are strongly entrenched, immune to all laws and discipline, and they don't eat each other! Their cadre cohesion is stronger than any trade-union bond! In fact, they are the strongest trade union: just see how they feather their own nest periodically, quietly and efficiently, through the Pay Commission while others like bank employees have to struggle- every time! The IAS cadre gets the largest rise with the least fanfare, for like their own cadre, they have invented a permanent system to butter their bread! Could any trade union achieve that? 

I keep my fingers crossed, when PM Modi tries to tackle them. He may succeed in cleaning the Ganga, perhaps, but he cannot touch the bureaucracy or tame them. This is my understanding from history. If he does, it may replace the Taj Mahal as one of the wonders of the world!

With such a bureaucracy, no improvement is possible in our public sector. This is an old lesson, which the British Labour party understood over 60 years ago, at the time of ideal and idealist Labourites! In the first wave of enthusiasm, the labour govt nationalised British Steel, Coal, Railways, Cable and Wireless, etc hoping that it would benefit the nation. But they found the govt could not run them through the bureaucracy, or through the Parliament. It became like a python swallowing an elephant! 

R.H.S.Crosman, their theoretician and Minister candidly admitted that 'the parliament was not invented to control the public sector'! 



Picture taken from http://cardiffeast.wordpress.com/2010.
Copyright status not stated.  Used here for non-profit educational purposes. That was the era when the politicians were honest, knowledgeable, hardworking. Later, Crosman recorded his experiences in his Diary. The govt tried to block its publication- in the UK! These diaries became the basis for the TV serial, "Yes,Minister".

The expectaton is that the public sector would make   profits for the govt, instead of private shareholders, but the experience is that once govt enters, profits disappear and they have to be sustained by tax money!

In the govt atmosphere, there are problems in acquiring knowledge necessary to solve problems, and also in applying that knowledge.

Every govt is ideologically bound and will not seek knowledge beyond its pale. Application of that knowledge is subject to political expediency, not theoretical correctness. The present form of democracy, with periodical elections severely limits the  time horizon even before a well-meaning govt, which cannot take its continuance beyond the next election for granted. This may not matter where the society has reached a broad consensus on vital issues cutting across party lines, but that has not happened anywhere, except on rare occasions.In India, policies will change with every govt- that is, things will be reversed. Not that it is necessarily bad, but that it makes things unstable and uncertain in the long run. 

The greatest problem before the society is the economic one; the real source of the difficulty is that there is no satisfactory solution to any economic problem. Some problems are simply intractable, no matter which party rules, which ideology is followed. Lord Keynes, the greatest economist of the last century, clearly noted in 1922:

J.M.Keynes. Caricature by Sir David Low, 1934.
Public domain.

The theory of economics does not furnish us  a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method, rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind,a technique of thinking, which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions

His own Master, Dr.Alfred Marshall had said in 1885:

Public domain.

Economic doctrine is....not a body of concrete truth but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth.

So. there is no magic in the so called economic solutions. As John Kenneth Galbraith said, economics is useful as a source of employment for economists! Every govt will find and favour its own set of economists, but the problems will remain just the same!



All countries follow economic policies to promote employment, reduce poverty. But the results are just contrary! Just yesterday (20 January 2015) there was a report that just 1% of the people  own more wealth than the rest of the population of the world and that just 80 persons in the world own more than the entire GDP of India! The present economic arrangements of the world are leading to more concentration of wealth in less hands, more unemployment, greater disparities in income and wealth. The very top is not bothered- the system benefits them. The bottom is not bothered, because politics will serve them. It is the middle class which will have to struggle to survive, pay the taxes to let the govt survive and serve the poor, and consume in order to sustain the system and let the millionaires accumulate even more! In the meantime politicians and bureaucrats syphon off  considerable amounts in the name of poverty alleviation schemes.

I will say that economic problems have only philosophical solutions, not economic ones.

This means we will have to understand and restate the nature of the economic problem.

Today, the whole world is looking up to the US as the ideal and wants to attain those standards. What are those standards?  5% of the world's population is consuming 35% of the world's resources, and dumping the consequential waste on the world. What will happen if the whole world tries to adopt this standard, and succeeds in it?

I therefore say that the basis of the economic problem is philosophical lunacy and it cannot be solved by any economic trick or technological fix. At the rate at which oil-just one resource is consumed, how long will the oceans of the world  last, even if all their waters are turned into oil by some modern Moses?

Economists are the merchants of this absurd modern dream.They have replaced need by greed (want) as the basis of economic activity. They have replaced natural limits by money. They have made greed the basis of life, and money its index of fulfilment. The corporate world is feeding on greed, and govts are merry printing money, now supplemented by electronic, invisible money- without any control or limit. How can any one deal with it?

The problem is deeper than our current state of knowledge can understand, or any imaginable technology can solve, or our present state of academic hubris will admit.