Givvup Only Are There

Has anybody made the connection between genes and the principal-agent problem? Richard Dawkins wrote a whole book about how we are but machines to reproduce genes, and in Genome, Matt Ridley quotes Bill Hamilton saying that the genome is like “a company boardroom”. But I haven’t ever seen the analogy being made explicit, so I’ll go ahead and do it right now.

The way to think of your genes is as principals, and yourself as the agent. Their objective is to make copies of themselves. To accomplish this, they create you as a vehicle to make more of themselves. So far, the analogy is genes=shareholders, you=management, and genes increasing their presence=return on investment.

What’s missing? Incentive alignment! In the corporate world, this is done through executive compensation, and will theoretically work best with stock options. How do our genes make sure that we’re keen and eager to achieve their objectives? A whole bunch of things that make the process of gene propagation enjoyable – making sex fun, making babies look cute, so on and so forth.

So when Skimpy goes on and on about finding a long-term gene-propagating partner, he’s putting the cart before the horse. It is not the end-result of our genes getting propagated, but the actions we take to do so that make us happy¹. The purpose of sex is not to have babies, but to have orgasms². So when you have the orgasms without the babies, you get to act like the CEOs who give themselves executive jets while shafting the shareholders and driving down the share price. It’s an awesome life.

You might feel a sense of responsibility, and be tempted to propagate your genes keeping in mind all that they have done for you. Resist the temptation! Whatever they have done is for their selfish ends. The fact is, your genes are bastards. They don’t care about you. Some of them are actively trying to make you suffer a painful and agonising death. Yet others are trying to make other people suffer painful and agonising deaths, and as such are responsible for the ills of society. So if the selfish little buggers are too stupid to align incentives properly and they make it possible for you to get the benefits without delivering results – for example, by having sex with contraceptives, cooing over other peoples babies, or even puppies instead of babies – then they’re only getting what they deserve. Go ahead and behave like a 1980s American conglomerate vice-president – you know you want to.

¹: This is remarkably Bhagavad-Gita-ish. Honestly, you could see the Bhagavad Gita too as an exploration of the principal-agent problem, with Krishna as the principal and Arjun as the agent. After trying to align incentives for seventeen chapters, Krishna finally reveals his vishwaroopam and tells Arjun clearly who the principal is, who the agent is, what the objective is, and that Arjun had better get cracking. You know, I should get down to reading Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good.

²: Or as Laurensolivius would put it: “Orgasms! Orgasms! We want orgasms!”

written by Aadisht \\ tags: aligning incentives, arjuna, bhagavad gita, bill hamilton, contraception, cosmic form, executive compensation, executive jet, gurcharan das, krishna, laurence olivier, laurensolivius, long term gene propagating partner, matt ridley, orgasms, orgies, richard dawkins, selfish gene, sex, skimpy, stock options, teldar paper, vishwaroopam, we want orgies

For small or mid-sized companies in India, especially manufacturers, it’s impossible to avoid government interference. Whether it’s the town and country department, or the electricity board, or the state industry ministry, or the central ministry which is in charge, everyone will demand some sort of cut or speed money or the other. It is a chronic pain in the corporate arse.

On the other hand, as Sainath keeps pointing out, if you’re a huge company like Reliance, then the government bends over backwards to please you for fear that you won’t invest and generate employment. It gives you free land, builds a road to your factory or airport, gives you excise holidays and suchlike.

The implication is that at some specific turnover between 100 crore rupees and 5000 crore rupees, the government stops harassing you and you start harassing the government. The exact figure is something that needs to be researched, but for obvious reasons, I think it should be called the Yakov Smirnoff turnover.

written by Aadisht

Tata Docomo’s advertising tagline is “Why walk alone when we can dance together?”

I think the Tata group is mocking Rabindranath Tagore and Ekla Cholo Re. This is to get back at the Bongs for what they did to Tata Motors at Singur.

written by Aadisht

I mean, what tops Le Royale? Le Imperiale?

Wikipedia to the rescue. The Angus Third Pounder is not sold outside America and Canada (where it is called an Angus Deluxe in Ontario). No clarification, however, on whether this is because the rest of the world has the metric system, and wouldn’t know what the fuck a third pounder is.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: Angus Third Pounder, check out the big brain on brett, le big mac, le royale, McDonalds, quarter pounder with cheese, they got the metric system there

Last week, the Planetizen news feed on urban planning posted a link to how contrary to predictions, retiring baby boomers were moving not to cities but to the rural countryside in Oregon (Planetizen summary, actual news story).

The very next link on the feed was titled Not So Fast and linked to another story from San Jose which said that seniors were in fact very much moving from suburbs to cities (Planetizen summary, actual news report). What explains these two contradictory trends?

I think the answer lies in the small population (by Indian standards) of America and particularly Oregon. Oregon has slightly under 4 million people. It has as many people as Ahmedabad in an area the size of undivided Uttar Pradesh. With that kind of population density, the number of people who need to do something to make it a trend is very small indeed. (Warning! Reckless Exaggeration ahead!) If three people do something, it seems like a trend. If twenty people do something it begins to look like an independent subculture.

Now, let’s extend already reckless exaggeration even further. Along with the high productivity, resulting leisure time, and huge capital base, maybe the reason the West is ahead in the creation of new subcultures and alternative lifestyles is simply that their population is so small that far fewer people have to be doing the same thing for them to stand out. If twenty people start dressing in black clothes and heavy eyeliner in Austin, Texas (population: less than 700,000) they become a Goth movement, but in New Delhi, India (population: more than 10 million) you would need 20,000 people acting in the same way for a subculture to get attention; let alone traction.

The implications of this are actually very alarming. What if existentialism achieved its name and fame just because Jean-Paul Sartre was good at socialising in cafes and a group of twenty chelas in a city of less than 3 million looked like a major movement. If Skimpy had been grown up in similar circumstances, perhaps philosophy students would today be studying studs-and-fighter-ism.

So basically this is a reason to support Atanu Dey’s plan for 600 new mid-sized designer-cities in India. It will give us cities that strike a happy balance between being urban enough to generate subcultures, and small enough for subcultures to get noticed.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: alternative lifestyle, diversity, existentialism, fighter, population, population density, productivity, stud, subculture, urban living, urbanism

I honestly don’t care about the Commonwealth Games (or any sporting event that doesn’t involve Dwayne Leverock for that matter). But if Commonwealth Games are what it takes to give Delhi better roads, a better airport, and Metro connectivity up to Green Park, I am all for them. I mean, it would be nice if the Kaangressi sarkar built infrastructure for the Delhi-ites who have to use it everyday, but as long as we get to use it eventually it’s okay if they build it for athletes and delegates.

As far as the Commonwealth goes, I wish it would do something more useful than giving Delhi better infrastructure as a second or third order effect. A good place to start would be to make travel between Commonwealth members visa-free. As a citizen of a former British colony, why the hell do I have to pay 10,000 rupees for a British visa?

written by Aadisht

Ayyo! Alas! Alamak! My post on ideological violence in Delhi and other cities has provoked controversy in the comments, with various people accusing me of saying that everyday violence provides catharsis, or that I was trying to use twenty years of peace to play down the anti-Sikh riots, or that I was saying that Delhi was better than everywhere else or that Delhi was worse than everywhere else.

People, I was not trying to imply anything with that post. It was purely an observation, and I threw it out in a short blogpost. I did not give much thought to the why’s and wherefores of this. I am now paying the price for writing like Dilip D’ Souza and not stating what is a premise and what is a conclusion. So, to clarify things:

• I don’t think that the everyday violence necessarily acts as catharsis or prevents large scale violence from happening. The presence of everyday violence and lack of ideological violence in Delhi probably spring from two different reasons.
• One thing I didn’t write in the original post but mentioned in the comments was that there is mob violence in Delhi but it’s not ideological. Just yesterday a mob ransacked a police station and thrashed the policemen after they gangraped someone inside. In fact the thrashings by mobs happen regularly everytime some rich wanker runs down a kid. And back in the 1990s, when power cuts would go on too long, entire neighbourhoods would get together and start stoning transformers or Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking offices. So yeah, the catharsis thing is definitely untrue – there is mob violence – but it’s retributive, not ideological.
• I am not trying to say that a high murder and rape rate makes Delhi preferable to places where these are lower but there’s a riot every six months. Or vice versa. That’s just stupid.
• I am not trying to play down or be apologetic for the anti-Sikh riots.

Now that I’ve given some thought to this issue – I think the reason there’s very little ideological violence in Delhi is that in the other states ideological violence is usually caused by different identity groups jockeying for power and access to government machinery  - or if not directly to grab power, as a show of strength or threat on behalf of political parties.

In Delhi, everyone has access to someone in government somehow. A neighbour or relative or some connection will be anything from a political party member to a minor clerk to an IAS officer. There’s hardly anybody who’s totally excluded from the administrative or political process, and so nobody needs to join a mob to grab the spoils of government. Delhi’s corruption is very democratic. In other states, government servants’ class, caste or language biases could mean that they won’t do your work even if you’re ready to bribe them.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: democratic corruption, desu, division of the spoils, leverage, mammaries of the welfare state, mob violence, riots

I think that if you are unlucky in your genetic makeup or your early development, then your heart, liver, lungs or kidneys will probably fail by the time you’re in your sixties or seventies and you will die at that age. But if you are blessed with good health, then you will survive these dangerous decades and live into your nineties.

Basically the people who survive into their nineties do so because they are obscenely healthy and so stay obscenely healthy even at that age. And so they may have hearing aids or walking sticks or be on medication, but they aren’t bedridden or perpetually in and out of hospital.

This very unscientific theory is based on seeing all the 80 and 90 year old relatives at my 74 year old great-aunt’s chautha last week.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: lots of experience at not dying

Last year, metal and punk fans ran amok in Mexico beating up emo fans. It got so bad that the emo kids had to get police protection. It seems that the metalheads got so pissed off at the emos constantly talking about how life sucked and suicide was better that they decided to help them along:

Via the Austin American Statesmen, several postings on Mexican social-networking sites, primarily organising spot for these “emo hunts,” have been dug up and translated. One states: “I HATE EMOS!!! They are not even people, they are so stupid, they cry over meaningless things… My school is infested with them, I want to kill them all!”

Another says: “We’ve never seen all the urban tribes unite against one single tribe before… Emos, their way of thinking is for crap, if you are so depressed please do us all a favour and kill yourselves!”

The whole thing has two important implications.

The first is that Richard Dawkins is wrong. Do you remember how after 9/11 he had an essay which said that religion is a convenient label for identity formation and so drives violence? But alas, identity formation doesn’t depend on religious indoctrination by your parents. People find ways to choose their own identities (metalhead, punk, goth, emo), and then cheerfully slaughter each other over them. So it goes. (Kunal also helpfully points me to this pertinent Penny Arcade quote: “Policing the output of our cultural apparatus for wrongthink is a pleasant occupation for young men with surplus energy.”)

The second implication is that we in India have dodged a major bullet. Can you imagine if the Lata Mangeshkar/ Asha Bhosle rivalry had spiralled out of control? If it was fought not between O P Nayyar and Naushad but gangs of fanatical fans, ready to spill blood (their own or others) over the issue of who had recorded more songs or whose pitch was more controlled? The result would have been sheer carnage.

Even more horrifyingly, it would eventually have resulted in a Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story sort of situation. A guy from the Lata didi fan club would fall for a girl from the Asha tai fan club. After five acts, they would both die, but not before Bappi Lahiri too perished in the violence, shouting “A plague o’ both your houses!” with his dying breath. Then finally the two fan clubs meet and their differences are mediated by a Kishoreda fan. But unfortunately by that time the plague would have incarnated as Himesh Reshammiya.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: a pox on both your houses, asha bhosle, bappi lahiri, emo, himess, identity, lata mangeshkar, mercutio, metal, metalhead, mexico, naushad, o p nayyar, penny arcade, pogrom, prince escalus, richard dawkins, riot, romeo and juliet, saaz, the god delusion, violence, west side story, wrongthink

This morning I realised something. Delhi is probably the most violent metro in the country when it comes to stuff like general rudeness, road rage, sexual harassment and rape, and beatings and brawls. But it has the least ideological violence.

So although Bombay, Bangalore and Chennai are more easygoing in general, they all have these bouts of ideological or political party sponsored violence. In Bombay you have the MNS beating up anybody who isn’t a Marathi manoos, in Bangalore the Kannada Rakshana Vedike goes about rioting against Tams and outsiders, and in Chennai you have regular outbreaks of either caste violence or anti Sri Lanka riots. If you insist on calling Calcutta a metro, they have Bangla bandhs.

Apart from the stain of the anti-Sikh pogrom twenty four years ago, Delhi has mostly been free of organised rioting and violence.

written by Aadisht