“Ah love, could thou and I with fate conspire,
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire;
Would we not shatter it to bits,
And remold it nearer to our hearts’ desire!”

But interfering in a world one does not fully understand is dangerous. “Let me save you from drowning,” said the monkey to the fish and put it up on a tree. Too many monkeys trying to save fish from drowning leads to the sorry scheme we see around us. Monkeys do make a difference; it’s only that they make it worse.

Here’s Thomas Sowell on making a difference, for the record:

Sowell: I think in the U.S. and in most of the world the public understanding of economics is abysmal. But it’s one thing not to understand something. I don’t understand brain surgery. It’s another to want to form policies on things on which you are ignorant. I hear the wonderful phrase “I want to make a difference” when it comes to policy. I would be horrified if I wanted to make a difference in brain surgery. The only difference is more people would die on the operating table.

Also see related post on Banning Child Labor on this blog.

Your thoughts?

As far as I can tell, all the assumptions above are to a large extent false, if not entirely false. Just because something is illegal does not make it harmful. Conversely, the legality of something does not imply that it is harmless. What is legal depends on the time and place. What is declared illegal at a particular time and place may have to do with the power structure of the society.

There are drugs that harm the user. Nicotine is a perfectly legal drug that causes immense harm, for instance. So also, alcohol ingested immoderately and over extended periods of time will definitely cause harm. But should a person who chooses to use alcohol in moderation in the privacy of his own home and does not harm another be prohibited from doing so? If you believe in the sanctity of the principle that a person owns himself, then you cannot support such a prohibition. It boils down to self-ownership. If you deny that, you are on the road to slavery and serfdom where others have the power to dictate what you are allowed to do to yourself. There be dragons.

One can arrive at the conclusions that illegal drugs are not unconditionally harmful, that they can be used without imposing social costs or negative externalities, that the wholesale prohibition will not work, that attempting prohibition will lead to immense costs through increased crime, etc, by simple reasoning alone. The case against criminalizing of drugs and the subsequent “war on drugs” gets really compelling when emprical evidence supports the theoretical conclusions.

We assume certain things to be true, which upon closer examination may turn out to be false, as I said before. Some people have spent a lifetime dealing with the issue of drug use and drug wars. They have had the time and opportunity to actually see what happens on the ground. All we have to do is to examine what they report and perhaps test our own assumptions. I once heard the police chief of (my one-time hometown) San Jose, California, Dr Joseph McNamara lay out the case for de-criminalizing drugs. A good starting point is Cops Against the Drug War. Here is a brief except from an article called Stop the War from another good site, Shaffer Library of Drug Policy, written by McNamara and published in the Washington Post in 1996.

A year ago, some of the nation’s top law enforcement officials gathered at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for a two day seminar to ponder the drug problem. They concluded that the drug war was a failure and that more education and prevention would be better than more arrests and prisons. They recommended that a national commission be appointed to study the harm that the drug war causes and to consider alternative approaches to discouraging drug use.

. . .

It is difficult enough to motivate youngsters in these areas to stay in school and find jobs in the few legitimate businesses in the inner cities. Easy drug money and glamour associated with the trade are creating well armed and vicious teenaged gangsters just as Prohibition did during the days of Al Capone.

Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, doing a comparative analysis with homicide rates during Prohibition, estimated that as many as 10,000 murders a year are caused by the illegality of drugs. In addition, corruption of law enforcement, the legal profession and even the armed forces related to drug money is spreading.

The police chiefs are calling the drug war senseless and have been calling for the de-criminalization of drugs for years. Surely, they must be in league with drug lords, one might ask. Actually, the truth is that only the drug lords will be against the de-criminalization of drugs. Decriminalize drugs and the profits disappear.

By now you may be wondering what the war against drugs in the US has anything to do with the problem of India’s development. I was coming to that.

The reason I took up this issue was to illustrate the point that even reasonable people can hold views that are wrong and harmful if action is based on those views. A nation like the US suffers as a consequence of wrong-headed policies undertaken either out of ignorance or out of greed. But they are rich and they can afford to be stupidly wasteful of their wealth. A poor country, on the other hand, does not have the luxury of being able to afford wrong-headed policies.

Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, it is precisely because of a large set of wrong-headed policies pursued over a sufficiently large span of time that ultimately impoverishes a nation. For over half a century, India has followed an astonishingly stupid set of economic policies. Each individual policy may not have been catastrophic but when undertaken in a concerted fashion all together, has resulted in a rather pathetic nation of extremely poor people.

Is there a litmus test which one can apply to figure out which of our policies are likely to be flawed? Here is what I use. Is the policy being advocated by the communists? If yes, there is a 99 percent probability that it is extremely harmful. Will the policy result in more regulation and increased government intervention? If yes, then it is almost certain to be bad. Is the policy ostensibly “pro-poor”? If yes, then it is 100 percent guaranteed to promote poverty.

Like the people of the US have been brain-washed and scared into supporting a needless and wasteful war against drugs (and recently a war against Iraq), Indians have been brain-washed into believing that the government can create wealth through messing around in all sorts of businesses from running transportation systems to higher education to bakeries. It is time for more of us to understand the situation for what it is and de-governmentize society. And in doing so we will end up de-criminalizing the government as well.

It is all karma, neh?

Hey Atanu!
Seems like you are passing the bucks too much to karma? Jus’ joking.

He was obviously refering to my closing line, “It is all Karma, neh?”. Although he did not mean it seriously, I think that there is a pervasive misconception about the concept of karma which we need to remove seriously.

The word “karma” does not mean ‘fate’. It means “work or action, and the consequence that arise thereof.” Karma does not mean predestination or predetermination. In fact, it means precisely the opposite. Karma means that it is our actions that determine the future, that what we do matters and has consequences. The concept is a general formulation of the fundamental law of action and its consequences, a specific instance of which are Newton’s laws of motion. Therefore it is the ultimate statement of “The Buck Stops Here.” And so when one says, “It is all Karma”, one is acknowledging that what we do matters and we are ultimately responsible for what we enjoy or suffer.

Damn, now I know what was preventing me from bonding emotionally with people — my fear of technology. Now that Simputer is here, I will get over my fear of technology and bam! I will be bonding emotionally with people. Now I will finally get a life!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My point is rather pedestrian. One should try to be somewhat realistic about the scope and nature of a technical product. Inflated rhetoric about how it can lead to god-realization and enlightenment is foolish. It is useful to remind ourselves that technology directly solves technical problems. A handheld computer’s utility is limited to storing, retrieving, managing, and communicating data. It will not solve an interpersonal relationship problem no matter how user-friendly an interface it has. If electronic gizmos could have solved ‘bonding’ issues, then the US would have been one of the most friendly societies on earth and not need the battalions of shrinks it has. If having a Palm-pilot clone is all that is preventing people from bonding, then we have all our problems licked.

Whether one likes it or not, solutions have to be consistent with the nature of the problem. Interpersonal problems cannot be addressed by technical solutions anymore than transportation problems can be addressed by cardiac surgery.

The development of a child is accompanied with growth. The growth of an adult is not necessarily a good thing. It could lead to obesity. Growth gone haywire is what cancer is all about.

Carrying the distinction over to the economic sphere, we can say that poor countries need both growth and development. But beyond a certain point, growth can be detrimental to development.

For India to develop, we do need growth in some areas and in some other areas we need a cessation of growth. We need to increase economic output but we need to check the unsustainable population growth.

“Yes, tea lead to his death. He was crossing the road to get himself a cup of tea, and a bus ran over him. Tea caused his untimely demise.”

You think that that is funny. But wait till you note the conclusion drawn from the following. This is from a report by my friend Priya Ganapati of rediff.com:

Jhunjhunwala cites a case where an email was sent to a number of government officials including the chief minister about a possible breakout of the small pox epidemic in a certain area.

Though the email was ignored by many, it finally did reach the right official and prompt administrative action to prevent the epidemic was taken.

“In Attapatti village, Veermani, a man with disabilities was unjustly dismissed from his job. He wrote an email to many government officials, one of whom finally took note and he was reinstated,” Jhunjhunwala points out.

You may not believe it but one is supposed to be persuaded that the above examples argue for IT-enabling of Indian villages. A moment’s consideration is all that is required to see that the conclusion is as silly as blaming tea for the uncle’s release from this mortal coil.

If you substitute postcard for “email” in Priya’s report, then obviously the conclusion would have to be that what is required for rural development is a postal system. But wait!! We do have a postal system, don’t we? So what exactly does an email do that a postcard does not do?

Someone should clue these people in: emails and postcards are the means of conveying a message. Emails don’t suddenly make caring people out of apathetic government bureaucrats. The failures of government is not a technological failure and producing technical fixes for that is as effective as casting spells to fix a broken car.

One may say, “Well, emails are faster. And you can send it to a zillion officials.” Sure, you can. But so when everyone and his brother is sending a zillion messages to thousands of officials, the officials will also learn to file those emails under “T” for trash. You would be back to square one with the only difference being that money that could have helped with development ends
up in the pockets of Microsoft, HP, and Intel.

The bottom line is very simple. We need to ask where the failure is in the above examples. Then figure out a solution. And if in that solution we find that the use of IT tools is cheaper than any other method, we should use IT tools. Until then, all who are IT-trigger happy should sit on their hands and contemplate the universe.