AGENDA. Collective action

For roughly 200 million Indians, or the top 15 per cent of the population, the post-liberalisation period has been a journey from decades of scarcity to an abrupt abundance. Like hungry, caged animals set free by the new economy, we have devoured everything in sight for the last quarter century. Now we have overeaten. Now we are sick. Having turned our cities into gas chambers, we don’t give a damn.

As Mihir Sharma recently put it in a Business Standard op-ed, “Only the Indian elite would rather not breathe than be ordinary.”

The lukewarm response (or ridicule) to the road-space rationing plan in Delhi shows up the car-owning Indian elite for what we are: a self-involved, defeatist set, who don’t want to clean up our own mess. Just like we throw our garbage on the streets to keep our homes sparkling.

And we have immense faith in our own mendacity. A corrupt, inefficient police force will be monitoring the odd-even enforcement in the city with India’s worst traffic offenders. How can this idea even succeed?

“I request all citizens to start 2016 with the truth and not to lie about being sick,” is what the chief of Delhi Police had to say on implementing the odd-even scheme, which the city’s drivers will undoubtedly try to cheat, just like they cheat at red lights. BS Bassi sounds more like a jailor speaking to his set of prisoners, though politely. The belief in each other’s crookedness is so strong, that he can say that without offending anyone.

Delhi’s VIPs, the icons and celebrities who are supposed to lead the way through example, have already got their exemptions. Every lobby from doctors to journalists to lawyers will seek exemptions too, driven by their own sense of importance, in India’s most self-important city. Politicians will squabble in TV studios, like the city’s drivers do on the streets, creating enough chaos and pollution to keep India’s capital a consistent urban hellhole by global standards.

From Paris to Beijing and Sao Paolo, large cities around the world have shown that, if properly implemented and supported by the public, road-space rationing does have a big impact in reducing emissions and cleaning up the air. Apart from the data, just the before-after pictures of Beijing (whose emission levels are closest to Delhi’s) show a dramatic improvement. Assuming that most of Delhi’s car-owners can see the pictures (if not read the data), it makes their opposition to the odd-even rule even more venal.

But why does the new Indian elite behave like this, irrationally, ultimately harming our own health, reducing our lifespan and our children’s? It’s partly because we have taken the wrong lessons from the ‘capitalism’ of the last quarter century. We have imbibed the most simplistic (and wrong) interpretation of modern capitalism: that the best results for society are achieved only when each woman and man is competing with the other for pure self-interest.

Evolved capitalist societies, unlike India’s, are smart enough to understand the benefits of collective action: that best results for the individual and society can be achieved if we cooperate with each other for collective benefit, not just compete.

Delhi’s drivers are a prime example of the pitfalls of unadulterated self-interest overriding any collective action. In their eagerness to cut corners, jump lights and sneak ahead of the next guy, most of them cause more chaos and delay their own ride, apart from others’. What each driver thinks is a smart decision driven by self-interest, harms them individually, and all drivers collectively. While with collective action, by following lane driving, they would all reach their destination quicker and with little swearing.

In a famous scene from the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind , a group of women walk into a bar, led by a striking blonde, who is the only one fancied by all the men in the bar. At one table, a group of men, all graduate students of economics, start bantering over who will get lucky with the blonde.

“In competition, individual ambition serves the common good,” says one, quoting Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism. “Every man for himself,” says another.

But the eventual Nobel laureate John Nash, played by Russell Crowe, looks beyond the obvious. “Adam Smith needs revision,” he exclaims. He goes on to posit that the best result for the male group can actually be achieved through a sort of collective action: by all of them ignoring the blonde (and not getting in each other’s way), while getting lucky with her more achievable friends.

For a better life, India’s neo-elite has to ignore the blonde (pure self-interest) in favour of more sustainable collective action. Living in gas chambers is not a rational economic choice.

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