Kota and suicide

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a transcript as part of the course titled Critical Writing: Mind, Society, and Behavior.

The writing on the wall

About two hundred and fifty kilometers to the south of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, lies a town that has captured the imagination of the Indian middle class like no other. In 1985, an engineer by the name of Vinod Kumar Bansal, then working at J.K. Synthetics Ltd. set up a small coaching institute by the name of Bansal Classes to train high school students to crack the extremely competitive and highly prestigious Joint Entrance Examination, or JEE, the condicio sine qua non of obtaining admission into undergraduate programmes at the Indian Institutes of Technology.

In less than three decades, more than forty coaching institutes sprung up in the town and made it the de facto coaching hub of the country. Currently, more than one hundred and fifty thousand outstation students reside in Kota for an average duration of 2-3 years with the hope of cracking some of the most difficult examinations on the planet: the JEE, the NEET-UG, and AIPMT. Kota alumni are a considerable fraction of the student body at various premier institutes in the country and the toppers of the aforementioned examinations are almost always students who have spent at least a couple of years in this town.

Kota Factory by TVF

It wouldn’t be a hyperbole to suggest that Kota has an almost mythical status amongst parents and students aspiring to study at top institutes. It is viewed as a panacea that it will change the fortunes of the financially struggling families and provide them with social prestige like no other. It has also managed to carve a niche for itself in popular culture, featuring prominently in blockbuster novels such as Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 and web series’ such as The Viral Fever’s Kota Factory.

Yet behind its ostentatious image lies a dirty, open secret. Apart from being the coaching capital of India, Kota also has the dubious distinction of being the suicide capital of the country. In the year 2014 alone, there were 45 cases recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau; an astronomically high figure when considered in tandem with the rest of the nation.

This essay is an exploration of factors (both sociological and psychological) that play a role in the deteriorating mental health and high suicide rates among students at Kota. Subsequently, it is also an investigation into what drives individuals into making decisions that are abhorrently irrational. This essay is divided into three sections. The first examines the reasoning behind financially struggling parents sending children as young as thirteen to Kota despite its high suicide rates, low success rates, and astronomically high fees. The second delves into the circumstances that drive students to commit suicide. Finally, the third section looks into the phenomena that contribute to synthesizing a mythical image of institutes such as IITs and AIIMs and how coaching institutes use this to continually exploit parents and students, both mentally and financially.

An Extremely Poor Bet

Why Kota Kills, a documentary by The Quint

In a short documentary by The Quint, we see a young boy by the name of Surjeet speaking about his aspirations to crack the AIPMT. His family had to take out a loan to fund his studies and put his mother’s jewelry as collateral. When the reporter asks him what his plan is if he fails to get in, he visibly breaks down; he has no answer.

Ranjan Kumar is a government employee who has enrolled his son at the Allen coaching institute at Kota. His son is only 13. And by the time he completes his studies, Ranjan is expected to spend a sum which is more than ten times his family’s annual income.

It isn’t uncommon in Kota to find students whose families have risked their entire financial wellbeing to place a bet on them that they would make it to a premier medical or engineering institute and turn the fortunes of their families around.

However, the fact remains that despite the hullabaloo created by Kota’s coaching institutes about their success stories and their ability to send ‘even a farmer’s son to an IIT’, the success rate at Kota is less than 1%. In other words, the gamble that these families make are extremely irrational bordering on the obscene. So what psychological factors lead to people making these decisions?

Financial illiteracy by Gerd Gigerenzer

The first has to do with risk illiteracy and the inability of people to differentiate between relative and absolute risk. In a TEDx Talk at Zurich, the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer spoke about an advertisement that stated that taking a third generation birth control pill increased the chances of thrombosis by 100% (in comparison to a second generation pill). In absolute terms, however, the risk had increased from 1 in 7000 to 2 in 7000. Stating the facts in relative terms caused paranoia among women and lead to over 13,000 more abortions in Europe. Concurrently, there was also a huge spike in teenage pregnancies on account of non-usage of these pills.

There are strong parallels that can be drawn between this story and that of Kota’s ability to make students succeed. It is a common adage that Kota increases your chances of getting into the IITs and AIIMS by ten times. While in relative terms, it may be true that Kota students experience higher success rates than the rest of the nation, the fact remains that the absolute success rate is still abysmally low. Risk illiterate parents simply cannot get their heads around this fact, creating a huge gap between expectations and reality.

The second factor has to do with availability bias, a judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by its availability. In other words, people tend to place more weight on events that are readily imaginable or available.

Billboards in Kota

The coaching institutes in Kota do an exceptional job in marketing themselves as the hub of admissions success. The entire town of Kota is draped with billboards and standees displaying the success stories of students who came to this town to make their educational fortune. Parents, however, are not exposed to the majority of students that end up not succeeding. The availability of only success stories leads them to falsely associate a monumental correlation between attending a particular coaching class and succeeding in the entrance exams when, in reality, this correlation is much lower.

In tandem, there is also confirmation bias at play which is, as annotated in psychological literature,  the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations or a hypothesis in hand.

Confirmation bias makes parents only pay attention to those students that attended Kota’s coaching institutes and passed out with flying colors. The majority that did not qualify are simply ignored. Also, as seen in multiple documentaries and news reports (such as the ones cited earlier), parents have a tendency to think that their child is ‘different’ and ‘gifted’. A decent result in the significantly easier class 10 examinations leads them to believe that their child is destined for great things.

Fault Attribution Error, Calvin and Hobbes

Concurrently, this is also a reason why parents often don’t seem too worried about the rising suicide rates in Kota. They strongly showcase an example of the fault attribution error, attributing suicides to the weak mental state of the victims rather than the circumstances under which they are forced to function.

Killer Factory

In 2016, 17-year-old Kriti Tripathi received her JEE Main results. She had secured 144 marks out of a possible 360 and had comfortably cleared the cutoff of a 100 marks to be eligible to appear for the JEE Advanced. However, it was still not good enough. And before she could appear for the exam she had been preparing for, for the last couple of years, she chose to end her life by jumping off a five-story building. She left behind a five-page suicide note that captured national attention for the kind of insight it gave into the mental torture faced by an average Kota student.

In her note, Kriti blamed her parents for making her bear gigantic expectations that she realized she could probably never live up to. The previous sections of this essay have established that parents, on account of numerous biases and cognitive errors, tend to place erroneous bets. And it is the children that have to bear the brunt of the expectations. There have been numerous articles and documentaries this decade that have tried to cover the case of Kota suicides. And they have all unanimously arrived at the same conclusion: students are simply not able to live up to the expectations that parents have of them.

This is also a common explanation given by most coaching institutes who are desperately trying to wash their hands off any responsibility. Another reason cited has to do with the students being teenagers and their minds wavering off towards ‘unhealthy’ activities such as watching movies, playing video games and having a romance. Most coaching institutes, including Bansal and Allen, have large posters in their classrooms and hostels warning students of going down the ‘wrong path’ and facing inevitable destruction.

However, the problem is deeper than this and this section of the essay will argue that there are systems in Kota at play that are inherently anxiety-inducing and a catalyst for depression.

A day after Martin Luther King Jr., a pioneer of the American Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated, a third-grade student, intrigued by what he had seen in the news asked his teacher what ‘racial segregation’ meant. The teacher, Jane Elliot, decided to conduct an experiment to show her students just that. She told her students that blue-eyed children were inherently better than brown-eyed ones and starting meting out preferential treatment to them. They were given better lunch, more recess time, made to sit in the front row and were showered with more attention and appreciation. The brown-eyed children, on the other hand, had their privileges reduced to a bare minimum and were castigated for performing the slightest of mistakes.

Jane Elliot

Elliot noticed that the performance of the brown-eyed students dropped drastically whereas the opposite was observed for the blue-eyed. A few days later, Elliot came to class and stated that she was mistaken and that it was actually the brown-eyed children who were superior. Her treatment of the two groups was reversed. She also noticed that this time, the performance of the two groups was the vice versa.

While not among the more problematic lines of race or gender or caste, Kota’s coaching institutes have a strong system of segregation in place. Students are placed in classes from 1 to 8 depending on their performance in the tests. The ones in the first class are given access to significantly better hostels, better faculty, and additional resources to ensure their well-being. The creme de la creme are given flats and liberty to call any faculty 24×7.

On the other hand, the ones at the bottom are mostly ignored and only serve as a cash cow that can be used to fuel the few at the top. And knowing the results of Jane Elliott’s experiment, it is easy to see why students in the bottom half of classes tend to experience significant dips in self-esteem and academic performance.

In an experiment conducted in Great Britain involving consultants from a top tier management consulting firm, the researchers established that the subjects experienced status anxiety when they were made aware of their relative position in the company and promotion of an ‘elite identity’ was encouraged. Kota is guilty of this too. It constantly strives to ascribe a mythical status to students it believes are potential candidates for their next set of billboards.

Although the coaching classes promise a better class if performance improves, the truth of the matter is that mobility is extremely low. In that way, Kota personifies the evils one tends to attach with capitalism and its role in creating income inequality; the best students keep getting better but the worse off ones keep getting worse. This can have drastic effects on students leading them to take drastic steps. In The Quint documentary mentioned earlier, when students were asked reasons for why their peers were committing suicide, they pointed out this system as a major reason.

One of the biggest reforms that coaching institutes are strenuously trying to avoid is to instill a system of cashback. Although these institutes leave no stone unturned in boasting their success stories and success rates, they are extremely careful in not offering a guarantee. In other words, if you as a parent have spent tens of lakhs of rupees on your child and s/he still fails to get in, the money you’ve invested is lost forever. There is no mechanism to recuperate that investment no matter how soon you realize your folly.

A lot of students realize they’re not cut out to be a student at a premier institute. But the parents refuse to let them drop out on account of a sunk cost fallacy. Since they’ve already invested lakhs of rupees on their child, they believe that it is the child’s duty to try harder and in this belief, they end up investing lakhs of rupees more.

But again, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, it is the children that bear the brunt of this sunk cost. And they see absolutely no way out, except perhaps death. To put it concisely, it is the economically irrational decisions of parents combined with the segregation and elitism practices of the coaching institutes that work in tandem to amplify student depression and suicide.

Marketing Frauds and Geniuses

When Vinod Bansal started out, he had eight students who studied at the dining table of his house. In less than three decades, his practice of coaching students for entrance tests exploded into an industry worth a staggering 1500 crore rupees (or $214 million).

As stated in a prior section, coaching institutes have a tendency to fully ascribe blame on the parents for enrolling them into classes they are incapable of coping with. This section will argue that Kota’s coaching classes are guilty of practices that effectively ensnare and coax unassuming parents and students into making unwise judgments.

The outlier bias which the tendency to overweight the effect of outliers on correlations between two variables. In an experiment, using the difference in estimates for nearly identical scatterplots differentiated only by a single outlier, a  Princeton researcher discovered that participants tended to overweight the effect of outliers on correlations and held a positivity outlier bias in which they were especially influenced by outliers that strengthened the correlation.

The coaching institutes tend to be acutely aware of this. Every year, the top ones tend to indulge in unethical and borderline illegal practices of poaching high performing students from a rival institution by paying them gargantuan sums of money, in order to be able to publish names and pictures in their success stories. Additionally, institutes every year participate in a race to produce an examination’s topper and a greater share of students in the top ten, top fifty and top one hundred ranks.

Probabilistically speaking, the odds of a student getting into an IIT or AIIMS given that he is attended a particular coaching class is not remarkably affected by the number of toppers the institute produces (or poaches). In fact, aspiring to be a topper in these highly competitive examinations, written by millions of students, is often impractical. But this doesn’t stop parents and students from ascribing supernatural correlations between success and attending these coaching institutes in the face of billboards oozing with the best of the best.

In a landmark paper by Joe Henrich and J.F Gill-White, the authors, developing on the Boyd and Richerson theory of Cultural Evolution introduced the term ‘prestige bias’; a phenomenon due to which individuals were more likely to imitate cultural models that they perceive as having more prestige.

India, a country with the largest youth population on the planet, has a severe shortage of quality higher institutions. There simply aren’t enough seats in colleges to cater to the nation’s bright minds. What this results in is obscene, deathly competition, quite literally. And in the face of such competition, it becomes easy to overestimate the value of the prize. Scarcity does not equate quality.

Kota’s coaching institutes have played a significant role in exploiting this and mythologizing the state of the IITs. I am a student of an IIT myself and my Kota peers always pointed out how disappointed they were with what an IIT actually was. They were promised dreamlike institutions with world-class facilities, incredible professors, obscenely high paying jobs upon graduation (and copious amounts of feminine attention). The reality is much tamer.

IIT Roorkee

The contribution of an IIT to the success of its students is relatively minimal when compared to institutions worldwide. This statement is substantiated with the abysmal rankings IITs tend to receive in critical areas such as research, faculty, and citations. It can be argued that in a nation of a billion people, the top 0.001% that crack the JEE are so mentally sound that they would succeed no matter which institution they attended.

In other words, there is an exclusivity bias at work. If there is a group that introduces an artificial barrier of entry and only admits certain ‘desirable’ people while making little to no contribution to enhance their desirability; with time, the outgroup will tend to causate the desirable qualities of the in-group with the fact that they are part of the group, which in turn increases the desirability of being in the in-group. The IITs benefit immensely from this. It is home to some of the most successful people on the planet despite playing an arguably and relatively minimal role in shaping them.

An increase in the desirability of the IITs directly leads to an increase in demand for coaching institutes and opens an even larger Pandora’s box. The situation at Kota is grim. Yet the coaching institutes are experiencing a period of ever-increasing growth. There is a ‘second Kota’ that has taken birth in the city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh and is in a position to overtake the former in terms of revenue. Reforms and regulations in this sector are an urgent need of the hour.

At the legislative level, there should be laws that criminalize rampant false marketing, segregation, and poaching practices that most institutes tend to involve themselves in. The government should also seriously consider making authorization mandatory for coaching institutes and ensuring they follow similar guidelines as schools do.

Coaching institutes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And they have a moral responsibility to ensure the mental well being of their students. These institutes must invest more in mental health and abolish practices that take a mental toll on the students. They should also consider introducing mechanisms that help financially challenged parents to recuperate their poor investments.

Finally, there need to be reforms at a behavioral level. Parents need to be told about the objective possibility of their children attending a top institute. There must also be a sensitization towards other fields of study not considered ‘prestigious’, such as commerce and the humanities. There is an urgent need for society to shift focus from things that make a child successful to things that make a child happy and content. The solutions are numerous and the time very little. As I write this essay, there are thousands of students in a small town in Rajasthan trapped in a mental cage with no escape. A significant number of them are contemplating suicide. A few will even go through with it. It is high time we saved them.

Bibliography

1. Mishra, S. (2009, October 21). How Kota became coaching factory for cracking IIT. Retrieved from https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/how-kota-became-coaching-factory-for-cracking-iit-58936-2009-10-21
2. Johri, D. (2015, November 26). Kota coaching factory – Panic calls: 14-hr days, morning nightmares. Retrieved from https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kota-coaching-factory-panic-calls-14-hr-days-morning-nightmares/
3. PTI (2017, January 20). Medical aspirant hangs self in Kota, no suicide note recovered. Retrieved from https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/medical-aspirant-hangs-self-in-kota-no-suicide-note-recovered/515881/
4. Why Kota Kills [Television broadcast]. (2016, May 4). The Quint. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VeS98YYtWY
5. Gigerenzer, G. (2013,  December). Risk literacy: Gerd Gigerenzer at TEDxZurich [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4op2WNc1e4
6. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (n.d.). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Judgment under Uncertainty, 163-178. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511809477.012
7. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
8. Poonam, S. (2017, April 25). Why 57 Young Students Have Taken Their Lives In Kota. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/06/01/life-and-death-in-kota_n_10232456.html
9. Stewart, T. L., Laduke, J. R., Bracht, C., Sweet, B. A. and Gamarel, K. E. (2003), Do the “Eyes” Have It? A Program Evaluation of Jane Elliott’s “Blue‐Eyes/Brown‐Eyes” Diversity Training Exercise. Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
10. Gill, M. J. (2015). Elite identity and status anxiety: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of management consultants. Organization, 22(3), 306–325.
11. Bellman, Eric (30 September 2008). “India’s Cram-School Confidential: Two Years, One Test, 40,000 Students”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
12. Rogers, M. (2015). DataSpace: The Outlier Bias: A Disproportionate Influence of Outliers in the Perception of Correlations. Retrieved from http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp012v23vw74w

 

Does social categorization inevitably lead to social hierarchy?

Although social categorization leads to social hierarchy and has been witnessed multiple times in history, this result is not always inevitable. Since the prompt states that social categorization is a sufficient condition for hierarchy, this premise breaks down on providing social psychology principles and related counter-examples which suggest the contrary.

According to the stereotype content model, stereotypes can be arranged along the warmth-competence dimension. Groups with high competence and high warmth experience an emotional prejudice of admiration whereas groups with high competence and low warmth experience envy. Research from the field of Social Comparison theory also shows that there is an innate desire for social groups to achieve a superior relative position which in turn leads to competitiveness. Additionally, this comparison can corrupt the comparer, envy and humiliate a certain social group and make them feel ashamed of their own inadequacy.

Thirty Years War

This essay will now apply these principles to instances in history to come up with the first argument in opposition to this prompt. Throughout the Middle Ages to the present-day, Europe has been inhabited by groups that differ in culture, language, ethnicity, prosperity, religion and scientific advancement. However, most of these groups tended to have similar levels of competence but differing levels of warmth. Whenever this took place and there was the genesis of a social hierarchy, the group associated with envy tended to engage in conflict with the ones associated with admiration and separate. This has been observed in several cases, such as the Thirty Years War, which was essentially a war between Catholics and Protestants and led to the formation of new countries such as the Dutch Republic.

The Spanish Armada

Therefore, these ‘groups’ eventually formed smaller nations that were constantly at war with one another on account of trying to establish a superior relative position. However, even today, it is not possible to objectively declare one European Nation to be superior to another. It is not possible to produce an ordered list of nations which are superior in all regards. The Spanish Armada was the most powerful fleet in the 16th and 17th century. The British Empire was so huge that the sun never set on it. Nazi Germany arguably had the most powerful army in the world which they built in a staggeringly small amount of time. All these groups rose and fell before a clear hierarchy between these competing nations could be established. The Nazis had claimed such superiority in the decades between 1930 and 1940. However, their ideology was met with severe resistance and ultimately, they suffered defeat in war and their vision.

In other words, continuous conflict ensured that groups with similar competence couldn’t be placed into one uniform hierarchy. The struggle to achieve a superior relative position was continuous but since the groups were more-or-less evenly matched, a definitive result could not be reached. This prevented humiliation, envy, and discrimination of any one social group (which, it can be argued, would have most definitely happened if Europe was a single nation).

The second example concerns the India-Pakistan partition in 1947. The Muslims were a minority in India and they feared that when the nation got independent and started operating under a democracy, their interests wouldn’t be protected as much as those of the Hindus. In other words, they would be characterized by envy and the Hindus by admiration.

They feared the categorization of the continent based on religion would ultimately lead to social hierarchy with the Hindus, on account of being the majority, enjoying a superior position and using this to humiliate and subjugate the Muslims. However, the Muslims, with the aid of the Muslim League, was in a powerful enough position to demand separation from the British. Since they had the political clout to carve out an entire nation for themselves, the majority of Muslims in the subcontinent were able to avoid the perceived hierarchy they thought they would have to live in. This event is completely justified if the principles stated above are assumed to be true.

Therefore, we can conclude that social hierarchy arises from social categorization only when one group is (politically and economically) more powerful than the other. In cases where two groups wield comparative amounts of power, it leads to separation and sometimes, conflict. In other words, if there is a group that tries to establish and declare itself as superior to others, it only leads to hierarchy if the other groups are not powerful enough to engage (and possibly defeat) the former group in conflict or if it is not feasible for the group declared inferior to separate. Separation and/or conflict were possible in both the examples above and the social groups chose these over a uniform social hierarchy where one group would face the brunt of discrimination and prejudice.

Additionally, the prompt’s premise fails in the social and political environment of today. Our civilizations have advanced to the point where we are self-aware of our prejudices and discrimination capabilities. Therefore, most countries (especially the ones with democratic governments) have laws that prevent a hierarchy from forming and introduce corrective measures to uplift those that they think are disadvantaged.

Apartheid

In India, there is a reservation policy in place that ensures the most downtrodden of communities have representation in politics and government jobs in proportion to their population. South Africa, fresh from its independence of the Afrikaans, have a strong constitution that eliminates any possibility of apartheid or other race-based discrimination. Software companies in Silicon Valley have special events, competitions and hiring sprees for women in order to correct the gender gap in the technology industry. In all these cases, it is legally not possible to have a hierarchy. It is no longer possible to claim that a Brahmin is superior to a Shudra. Or that Whites are superior to blacks. While prejudices still do exist, the scope of acting on them is significantly lower than what was possible just a century ago.

Added to this is the fact that such cognitive interventions can address the psychologically destructive consequences of negative social identities. Additionally, there is research that suggests that exposure to diversity can increase pro-sociality or helpful behavior among people belonging to different social classes and can decreases instances of discrimination. Increasing interactions between out-groups can also transform civic cultures with one social group adopting ‘desirable’ characteristics and practices of another.

With laws that protect the marginalized groups and provide affirmative action policies to uplift their socio-economic status, these groups are in a much better position to yield higher political and economic power and in turn, have a greater sense of self-worth. They become more competent and the laws ensure that legally, there is a comparable level of ‘warmth’. Also, since they attend the same institutions and work in the same jobs as people of ‘higher’ social groups, exposure to diversity reduces the tendency to discriminate and form hierarchies. It also leads to both groups exchanging practices and traits, thus ensuring more homogenization and a shared identity characterized by tolerance and acceptance.

Finally, let us continue to consider this argument through social networks but this time, from a nationalistic perspective. While it is possible to rank countries based on their economy, GDP per capita and military might, it can be argued that it is still not possible to establish a clear hierarchy based on this. It might be true that the Americans are the most powerful people on the planet but there is little they can do to act on it and more importantly, own up to it. The concept of a hierarchy is pointless if the supposed superior group cannot act upon it and inflict damage on the supposed inferior groups.

Increasing the density of social relations can also improve the civic culture or “social capital” of a community. Today, even the smallest of nations are part of military alliances and pacts and an attack on them would automatically lead to a declaration of war by its larger, more powerful allies. Organizations such as the WTO ensure that larger countries do not bully the smaller ones when it comes to trade. The United Nations was founded on the idea that large, powerful nations cannot become aggressors without being met with opposition from the rest of the world. These agreements prevent hierarchies from forming or at least, render them impotent to a point where it does not inflict as much damage anymore. Prosocial behavior also indicates that the formation of these groups tends to make the members hold its leaders to a higher standard of caring, which in turn increases the potency of such groups.

As the stated principles demonstrate clearly, it is human nature form groups which may engage in competition with other groups and try to dominate them. However, if the competing groups wield a similar amount of power, it leads to separation instead of hierarchy. Additionally, we have learned to overcome our biological instincts and the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude to establish laws and rules that protect those groups which may be considered at risk. Finally, there are also alliances and agreements with powerful groups that give smaller groups protection and save them from the wrath of their immediate, powerful enemy.

Bibliography

1. Durante F, Capozza D, Fiske ST. The Stereotype Content Model: The Role Played by Competence in Inferring Group Status. TPM Test Psychom Methodol Appl Psychol. 2010;17(4):187-199.
2. Garcia, S. M., Tor, A., & Schiff, T. M. (2013). The Psychology of Competition. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 634-650. doi:10.1177/1745691613504114
3. Fiske ST. Envy up, scorn down: how comparison divides us. Am Psychol. 2010;65(8):698-706.
4. World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. (2014). doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0342-0
5. Nuthalapati, R. (2010). Mismatched filtering of chaotic codes. 2010 International Waveform Diversity and Design Conference. doi:10.1109/wdd.2010.5592337
6. Muramatsu, N. (2003). County-Level Income Inequality and Depression among Older Americans. Health Services Research, 38(6p2), 1863-1884. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6773.2003.00206.x
7. Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

On Fear

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a transcript as part of the course titled Arts of Communication.

 

Picture courtesy New York Times

 

At fourteen, I was giving a speech in front of some of the country’s finest debaters. There was also a girl in the room who I had taken a fancy to. My team was pro guns and let’s just say our arguments were as weak as gun control in America.

A minute into my speech, my opponents raised an objection that this debate was about real guns and not stun guns about which I had been speaking until then.

I didn’t know what to say. I was expected to speak for eight minutes, I could only do one. It was the most humiliating moment of my life. Additionally,  I knew that women really weren’t fans of climaxing prematurely. So on that front too, I was devastated.

After this debacle, I felt that no one would take me seriously. I felt like I had nothing more to lose. On stage, I started speaking what I had in mind, sans any fear. That year, I emerged as one of the best speakers in Chennai and was called to a training camp to represent India. I didn’t get the girl though.

In college, I had the opportunity to perform in front of the most estrogen starved place on the planet. I was holding hands with my co-actress in the first scene and she had that dreamy look in her eyes. The audience went wild hooting. And then she said. Papa…

Embarrassing. Inappropriate. As an actor, I got used to this. And when I subjected myself to these emotions, I didn’t feel the fear of experiencing them anymore.

At twenty, my girlfriend told me that I was the love of her life, that we’d be together forever, that our love would transcend time and continue to live even when we ceased to exist. Two months later, she dumped me.

I was devastated. Getting over her was one of the hardest things I had to do as I had never been so emotionally intimate with anyone before.

I thought I had hit jackpot with her. And now, she had bruised my ego. How dare she? I would keep trying to get back together with her but to no avail. And then, I decided to stop. It was excruciatingly painful. Even after the breakup, she was my support system. And now I was alone. Naked. Vulnerable.

But it was only after I had exposed myself to this vulnerability and had acknowledged the true nature of my helplessness that I began to heal. It was hard but it was done.

Embarrassment. Rejection. Loss.

These are things that evoke powerful emotions in us. But it is the fear associated with them that affects us more than the feeling themselves.

I believe it is important that you expose yourself to these emotions and feel it’s complete breadth.

The only way you can truly overcome fear is by succumbing to it. Gibran had said that the mightiest characters are seared with scars. It is important that you scar yourself. That you frighten yourself so much that you feel fear no more.

When you succumb to fear, you become naked. Your facade is destroyed. And it gives birth to a new person sans any apprehensions. Yes, a person without apprehensions is a fool. But let me tell you this.

Only when you are fool will you find someone who’ll love you unconditionally.
Only when you are fool will that company you’re applying to recognize your genius.

And only when you are a fool will you walk up on stage, narrate the most embarrassing moments of your life and trust that the audience will have it in their heart to love you despite the extraordinarily stupid things you’ve done.

Employing Behavioral Economics to tackle Air Pollution

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as part of the Critical Writing course on Mind, Society and Behavior.

In the World Development Report 2015- Mind, Society and Behavior published by the World Bank Group, the team of authors led by Karla Hoff and Varun Gauri try to establish the incredible need of governments and policymakers to be aware of human irrationality and using this understanding to develop better policies. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Thinking Automatically’, the report states that there are two principal systems of thinking: automatic and deliberative. Next, supported by evidence from various studies, they try to show how the automatic system is responsible for making the bulk of our decisions despite being extremely error prone and biased. Finally, the chapter seeks to explain the various predictable cognitive biases that our automatic systems are prone to and how to use these biases to frame and design better choice architectures that could nudge people towards making better decisions.

The chapter begins by noting the seminal works of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which led to the foundation of the field of Behavioral Economics and the understanding that humans don’t always evaluate all information and choices equally before making their decisions; a central assumption of the Standard Economic Theory. Although such a deliberative system does exist, it is extremely slow and resources hungry. Therefore, humans prefer employing a faster, although the error-prone, automatic system of thinking that generates simpler models using limited information and leads to faster decision making.

The chapter then goes to explain various biases in assessing information that arises on account of using the faster, automatic system. The first is framing, where individuals tend to give more weight to information that is of little or no relevance. Governments are aware of this particular kind of irrationality and there are examples that exist that show them actively trying to counter it (For example, the ban on leading questions in a court of law). It is indeed possible to use framing to counter climate change behavior among individuals. Running advertisements and posting billboards detailing graphic damages caused to individuals will go a long way in sensitizing people about the magnitude of the problem.

The second effect is that of anchoring where the automatic system tends to cling on to a piece of irrelevant information in order to interpret a choice context; sometimes extremely erroneously. Examples of this include the tendency of people to bargain to reduce the price of an auto ride by 10 rupees but forego similar bargaining activity of even the order of, say a thousand rupees, when buying a car worth more than a lakh.

The anchoring bias also sheds light on something called the ‘peanuts effect’ wherein people tend to ignore the consequences of small monetary transactions as they are viewed as being worth ‘peanuts’ or effectively nothing. However, when added up, these ‘peanuts’ become of immense value and could lead to non-trivial benefits if they were not ignored in the first place. This particular effect is of great significance to climate change policies as well. When individuals pollute the environment, they rationalize their actions by telling themselves that their small act is ‘peanuts’ or of little significance to the magnitude of the total pollution in the environment. Therefore, it is important that people be made aware of the total mess they create, on average, in a year as a result of ignoring these small but numerous acts.

The next section of the chapter focused on biases that arose on account of assessing value. The two primary effects described were the potency of default options and the phenomenon of loss aversion. In the former, people are extremely prone to taking the default option presented by their choice architecture. A study in the United States found that the number of colleges that high school students applied to increased from three to four when the number of free test score reports increased by the same value. Such a minute change, the report demonstrated, had extremely far-reaching consequences.

In the context of air pollution, this effect has potentially far-reaching consequences. The objective of a policy must be to present default options that are environmentally friendly and introduce greater inertia in switching. For instance, making public transportation cheaper, comfortable and more readily available will lead people to make it their default, more convenient choice over personal transportation. Similarly, introducing a ‘firecracker permit’ for consumers will severely deter them from applying for such a permit and in the process, buying firecrackers too.

The phenomenon of loss aversion is rooted in the idea that people are more averse to losses than they are to gains of similar magnitude. This effect has been observed and studied in various circumstances such as improving the performance of school teachers and their classrooms. Although the proponents of nudge strongly believe that their methods are ethical and do not interfere with free will, loss aversion policies prove to be an exception. Loss aversion tends to be principally rooted in fear and manipulating people’s fears to achieve results, no matter how beneficial they are,  is an inherently unethical thing to do. That being said, policies rooted in this bias may prove to be immensely effective. During festivals such as Diwali, the lower income groups tend to burst a disproportionately larger number of firecrackers. It is, therefore, possible to introduce a policy where the Government provides a ‘gift’ to everyone in the lower income group but with the condition that they stand to lose their claim if they burst firecrackers or obtain a permit as explained earlier.

The final sections of the chapter explain the intention-action divide wherein individuals, despite being in possession of complete information and knowledge of the right action, tend to act in a manner that is counter-intuitive. Various policies such as SMS Reminders and Cash Awards in a variety of fields have proven to be effective in bridging the intention-action gap. In the context of air pollution in Delhi, it would be extremely useful to apply the aforementioned principles in deterring farmers from burning their crops just after harvest.

People tend to think automatically and in the process, employ biases and make suboptimal decisions. This review carefully analyzed the various biases and their natures and how they can be used to effectively combat the pollution in a high-risk city such as New Delhi. The Government must make it a point to dispel the peanuts effect and educate how small actions lead to extremely large consequences. It could also introduce banners and ads that explicitly describe what air pollution can do to their health. Its policies regarding environmentally harmful products must always be attached to providing better options to the point where it becomes the default and introducing inertia and artificial supply shortages to environmentally problematic ones. It could also look into policies that offer conditional rewards and exploit the effect of loss aversion. Finally, it can take steps to bridge the gap between intention and action by notifying perpetrators (such as crop burners) of their harmful activities on time.

Populism and Rise of the Far-Right

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Globalization on Trial.

This essay attempts to illustrate that the world order tends to oscillate between globalism and populism. Globalism is always preceded and succeeded by populism and vice versa. Additionally, this essay argues that a shift from globalism to populism is almost always influenced by cultural factors rather than economic ones.

Twenty-first-century politics has witnessed an alarming rise of populism in the United States and Europe. The first warning signs came with the UK Brexit Referendum vote in 2016 swinging in the way of Leave. This was followed by a stupendous victory by billionaire Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States in November 2016. Since then, Europe has seen a steady rise in populist and far-right parties that have capitalized on Europe’s Immigration Crisis to raise nationalist and anti-Europe sentiments. Some instances include Alternative for Germany (AfD) winning 12.6% of all seats and entering the Bundestag, thus upsetting Germany’s political order for the first time since the Second World War, the success of the Five Star Movement in Italy and the surge in popularity of neo-nazism and neo-fascism in countries such as Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Austria.

Brexit poses some real problems for the United Kingdom in the event of a no-deal

This rise of the far-right has also, quite obviously, resulted in the decline in popularity of the left and the center-left. The Democratic Party suffered perhaps its largest upset in American Political History when its Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton was handed a defeat by Trump despite being a clear favorite in the polls. The center-left SpD party of Germany has, for the first time, garnered fewer votes than the right-leaning AfD. The Socialists and the Labour Party in France and the Netherlands respectively also have suffered heavy defeats in parliamentary elections, resulting in significant losses of seats.

With this concise introduction in hand, in the following section, the essay will attempt to illustrate as to why this isn’t a startling phenomenon and instead was extremely predictable given the passage of human political and economic history. As mentioned earlier, the world always oscillates between populism and globalism and one is always preceded and succeeded by the other. To prove this point, this essay will present several instances from world history that clearly illustrate this trend.

As a first example, this essay will consider the Thirty Years War fought in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. The war, one of the deadliest in human history, recorded over eight million casualties. The political and economic atmosphere of Europe, prior to the seeds of the aforementioned conflict being sown, had many similarities with a globalist ‘state’. A large part of Europe came under the Byzantine Roman Empire and it was relatively alien to the concept of nation states. Since this was an empire, there was a free flow of people and goods. Most importantly, the Protestants and the Catholics, the two major schools of belief in Europe, were free to practice their faith.

The Thirty Years War

Tensions arose when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose Roman Catholicism upon all his subjects. The result was a bloody war that lasted over three decades. The Thirty Years War validated the rise of the nation states after the end of the war. It led to the creation of the Dutch Republic, which was finally freed from Spanish rule (barring Southern Netherlands and Luxembourg). It established the dominance of France and the Bourbon Dynasty as well as facilitated the rise of the Swedish Empire.

This illustrates very clearly how a cultural clash (in terms of intolerance of a particular school of belief) triggered the shift of European political order from resembling globalism to nation states.

The following period, starting mid 17th century, saw the rise of East India Companies. The Thirty Years War was immediately followed by the Dutch Golden Age, a period facilitated by the Dutch East India Company, which went on to become the most valuable company of all time. This period also saw the beginning of British conquests into the eastern lands of India, China and Mesopotamia.

Continuing this trend into the 18th century, the European nation states colonized almost the entire known world. Aided by the Industrial Revolution starting in 1760, the world experienced globalization at a pace unparalleled until then. There was free (albeit controversial) flow of goods, people and ideas across continents. Thus, the European nation states built empires with lands spread across the world and brought in another era of globalism. In this way, the circle completed itself.

The Industrial Revolution

The next example follows the chronological timeline set by the previous; it starts its examination from the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The late nineteenth century was characterized by free trade between European Powers and their colonies (albeit at the expense of the colonies).

However, victories in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and the 1870 Franco-Prussian war established Germany as a dominant power in Europe. This created tension with the British and French Empires and there was a constant struggle in Europe to ensure a balance of power. The balance broke with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 which plunged Europe, and eventually the entire world, into war.

The defeat of the Triple Entente (comprising of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) to Allied Powers led to the rise of populism and the far-right in these countries. Starting the early 1930s, the Nazi party, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, turned Germany into a far-right dictatorship. Italy witnessed a similar populist uprising in the form of Benito Mussolini. Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum and the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race led him to conquer Poland in 1939, which led to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Adolf Hitler

The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in human history, with over 50 million fatalities. An Allied victory ensured the decimation of the far-right in Europe. The end of the Second World War thus marked the beginning of another shift from nation states and populism into globalism.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed some amazing developments from the perspective of globalization. The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945 to maintain international order and ensure that conflicts such as the Second World War didn’t take place again. The European Union was formed in 1957 with the ambitious plan of politically and economically uniting the entire continent of Europe. Economic Liberalization took place in the two largest countries in the world (by population): China, in 1978 and India, in 1991. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to regulate international trade.

But perhaps the most aggressive agent of globalization has been the dawn of the Information Age. The invention of the internet and the exponential increase for the demand in IT and software has connected the world like never before. The world has truly become a global village with everyone in the vicinity of communicating with everyone else.

If the aforementioned two examples are anything to go by, it suggests strongly that this wave of globalism will be followed by populism. This is exactly what is being witnessed in the global political landscape today. Therefore, two facts can be concluded beyond a reasonable doubt: globalism and populism operate in a cyclical manner and the preceding decades of globalism have ensured a rise of populism today.

The following sections of this essay will attempt at answering why globalism is succeeded by populist movements (usually by the far-right) by critically analyzing the economic and cultural effects of globalization. The essay will attempt to demonstrate that the latter plays a far larger and significant role than the former.

With the political climate shifting towards the idea of the nation-state (or nationalism), there have been fears of a decline in the popularity of the ideas of globalization, free trade, and open borders. Globalization has come under fire and has been castigated by populist governments worldwide. Some of the most audible dissent to globalization are economic, with the loss of jobs to immigrants, outsourcing and the dying of the manufacturing sector on account of trade and decentralization of production. Donald Trump secured a significant portion of his voter base by appealing to these sentiments. His campaign, with the tagline of Make America Great Again, promised stricter immigration laws, preferential treatment to American production and priority to jobs for Americans. Since becoming president, he has imposed trade tariffs worth hundreds of billions of dollars on countries such as Canada and China in an attempt to correct America’s trade deficit, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement to save the dying coal mining industry and removed the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a bid to further isolate the US from global politics and pump the budget inward.

Henry Hazlitt

The economic arguments against globalization are, however, extremely weak and lack statistical backing. The Economist Henry Hazlitt attempts at distilling the entire field of economics to a single principle:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Globalization almost always leads to creative destruction; the phenomena of loss of livelihood to superior technology, innovation or automation. It happened with the Industrial Revolution, it happened with colonization and now, it’s happening with the advent of the Internet.

Phenomena associated with globalization such as automation, free trade, decentralization of production and the internet have led to the loss of livelihood for many people, especially those employed in blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

However, this has also ensured that more output is created with lesser input thus driving down prices and increasing the variety of goods and services available to consumers. In its essence, this is the duty of an economy: to produce as much as possible at the lowest cost. Productivity is the only thing that should count. Lower prices of goods implies consumers have more disposable income in their hands. This stream of extra money, therefore, has the potential to create new industries and jobs for goods and services that people can afford now with the extra money. With Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand argument, it can be shown that the displaced people can actually move to these industries, thus returning the economy back to a stable equilibrium.

Therefore, it can be seen quite clearly that, in the long term, globalization affects all groups positively even in the face of creative destruction.

It is indeed true that globalization displaces some communities in the short run. However, the number of people displaced is dwarfed by the number of people reaping economic gains. It doesn’t make any economic sense at all to discard globalization for its minimal short term side effects. For instance, there are 135,000 works in the US Apparel Industry and 45 million Americans who live below the poverty line. It doesn’t make any economic sense to increase the price of clothing for millions of poor Americans (by banning clothing imports) to ensure a few hundred thousand get to keep their low income, low skill jobs. Following Hazlitt’s principle, it is in the greater interest of a society or country to only produce those goods and services it has a competitive advantage over and imports the rest. Globalization facilitates this and thus ensures stronger economies.

Finally, it is a misconception that the financial crisis created by globalism led to the rise of populism. Many associate the 2008 Economic Crisis as the starting point of Trumpism. However, by the time Americans were voting in 2016, the economy had fully recovered. Also, contrary to what Steve Bannon had claimed, a Gallup poll showed conclusively that non-supporters of Trump were just as likely as the supporters to be unemployed. Shifting our focus to the east, there is almost zero correlation between economic prosperity and the rise of the far-right in Europe too. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and Finland, all have right-wing populist ruling parties in spite of being some of the most economically prosperous countries in Europe. Therefore, it is imperative that we search for a stronger, alternate reason to explain these shifts.

Apart from economic crises, another school of dissent against globalization comes from cultural homogenization. Since globalization, by its very nature, results in the migration of people from one place to another, it also leads to the transport of cultures. More often than not, tensions arise as a result of the clash of cultures and this leads to the creation of nationalistic sentiments, often at the expense of the immigrants.

Migration is often cited as one of the biggest problems of globalization. However, the economic argument against migration is extremely weak. Take the United States, for instance. Only 33% of Americans hold college degrees and there are simply not enough Americans available to fill in for high skilled jobs. This availability gap is often filled by immigrants. Immigrant communities from India and China are significantly more prosperous, wealthy and educated than the average American.

The phobia against migration stems from xenophobia. Humans are, anthropologically speaking, xenophobic by nature. It is a trait that has allowed mankind to survive and eventually dominate the planet. Humans tend to form communities around ideas or traits and this sense of community is amplified when it comes in conflict with a rival community.

The Syrian Civil War

The Syrian Civil War resulted in one of the biggest refugee crisis of all time. This European Refugee Crisis is one of the main reasons for the rise of the far right in Europe. Most of the refugees from the Middle East were Muslims and the integration of Islamic values and traditions at such a humongous scale was the seed of conflict between the immigrants and the largely Christian natives.

Populism, therefore, is fed by xenophobia and racism. It stems from an inherent fear of the European natives for a loss of their culture and identity. Islam is seen as a direct threat to their culture. Harmonic multiculturalism, although a novel concept on paper, is extremely difficult to witness in practicality.

This fear is amplified by a fear of security. Since the starting of the refugee influx into Europe, there have been several, large scale terrorist attacks in major European cities with refugee perpetrators. France witnessed attacks in Nice and Paris in 2015 and 2016 that resulted in hundreds of death. Great Britain, too, has had its share of violence in the form of the Manchester Bombing in 2017 and semi-regular instances of refugee violence in London.

These attacks have led people to associate all refugees as terrorists, rapists, and haters of Europe; although an extremely negligible fraction of them are involved with extremism. Similar rhetoric was used to great success by Donald Trump through his stance on immigration and the wall on the US-Mexican border.

As we have already seen, cultural factors usually are the trigger for the genesis of populist movements. The Thirty Years War started when Catholicism was forced on the people. World War 2 occurred largely in part of Hitler’s goal to establish Aryan dominance and decimate any race that he thought inferior.

Therefore, it can be stated that globalism leads to multiculturalism which in turn leads to a clash of cultures and idea. These clashes form the breeding ground for chauvinism and populist movements and play a far greater role in the shift than economic concerns.

In conclusion, this paper has illustrated through historical examples, how globalism leads to populism and vice versa. They are states through which global political order regularly oscillates between. Finally, the paper demonstrated how cultural and not economic factors played a larger role in aiding shifts from globalism to populism.

References

1. Galston, William. 2018. The rise of European Populism and collapse of the Centre-Left. Brookings.
2. Marr, Andrew. 2013. A History of the World. Pan Publishing
3. Polišenský, P.V. 1954.  The Thirty Years War. 31-43 in Past & Present. Oxford University Press.
4. King, Stephen. 2017. The pendulum swings between Globalisation and the Nation State. Financial Times.
5. Kothari, Rajni. 1995. Under Globalisation: Will Nation State hold? 1593-1603 in Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 30 No. 26. Economic & Political Weekly
6. Shuster, Simon. 2018. The Populists. TIME Magazine.
7. Suter, Keith. 2018. The Future of the Nation-state in an Era of Globalization. 32-38 in Cadmus Journal Volume 3 Issue 4. Cadmus.
8. Roth, Kenneth. 2017. The Dangerous Rise of Populism: Global Attacks on Human Rights Values in World Report 2017. Human Rights Watch.
9. Cox, Michael. 2018. Understanding the Global Rise of Populism in Strategic Update, Feb 2018. LSE Ideas.
10. Hazlitt, Henry. 1946. Economics in One Lesson. Harper & Row Publishing.
11. Cramer, Kevin. 2007. The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century. 18-19 in Studies in War, Society, and the Military. University of Nebraska Press.
12. Greg, IP. 2018. No, the Financial Crisis didn’t Spawn Populism. The Washington Journal.
13. Argandona, Antonio. 2017. Why Populism is Rising and How to Combat it. Forbes.
14. Malets, Olga. 2017. Globalization, governance and the nation-state: An Overview. 16-24 in Economic Sociology Vol. 18 Iss. 2. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne.
15. Mitchell, Deborah. 2000. Globalization and social cohesion: Risks and responsibilities. The Year 2000 International Research Conference on Social Security.
16. Tierney, Stephen. 2015. Which Pluralism? 186-203 in Nationalism and Globalisation. Bloomsbury Publishing.
17. Kauffman, Eric. 2004. Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. 40-57. Psychology Press.
18. Lund, Susan and Tyson, Laura. 2018. Globalization is Not in Retreat. Council on Foreign Relations.
19. Sides, John; Tesler, Michael, and Vavreck, Lynn. 2018. Identity Crisis: The 2016 Election & the Battle for the Meaning of America. Princeton University Press.
20. Eckman, James. 2017. Globalism vs. Nationalism: The Ideological Struggle of the 21st Century. Wall Street Journal.
21. Haidt, Jonathan. 2016. When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism. 46-53 in The American Interest Vol. 32 No. 3. The American Interest.
22. Cuperus, Rene. 2007. Populism against Globalisation: A New European Revolt. Kalevi Sorsa Foundation.
23. Spannaus, Andrew. 2018. Regime Change and Globalization Fuel Europe’s Refugee and Migrant Crisis. Consortium News.

Irrationally Yours

 

It takes a certain amount of audacity to openly challenge the merits of a theory that has earned its creator a Nobel Prize in Economics. But that is exactly what Dan Ariely does in discrediting Gary Becker’s Simple Model Of Rational Crime (SMORC) in his book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. I became a fan of the former MIT Professor’s writings, theories and experiments when I read his book Predictably Irrational a few weeks back (See Human Behavior and Irrationality). I was a little skeptic about reading his later works. For one, they had lower ratings on Goodreads and I had a feeling I wouldn’t experience nearly as many ‘Aha!’ moments if I read them. Going through more all of Malcolm Gladwell’s major works, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow and Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, I thought I had covered the majority of ideas existing in the nascent field of Behavioral Economics. I was wrong.

The Upsides of Irrationality seemed like a sequel to Predictably Irrational. And unlike many of the ‘sequels’ in non-fiction, it had a set of ideas that were novel and different from its predecessors. And although this opinion is not shared by the majority of the 50,000 plus readers that rated Ariely’s books, I thought this was actually better than Predictably Irrational. But I’m probably being biased because of the kind of topics he covered. Ariely’s research on how online dating works and its failure to act as an effective medium gave  me a lot of insights into how to actually approach the concept of social discovery, something that I intend on working on as a long term goal.

As I had done with Predictably Irrational, I am going to summarize the major ideas presented by the book so that the reader (and later on, I) can look it up quickly when necessary.

• Although it may sound counter-intuitive, handing out large bonuses to senior executives decreases their performance. This is because performance v/s rewards follows an inverse U curve. Rewards entail higher performance only up to a certain point and then proceeds to actually hamper it.
• Even though people in the workplace work for money, it is incredibly important that they believe that what they are doing is meaningful and beneficial to a certain group of people. If made to do meaningless tasks, people will slack and perform below expectations, even if they are being paid for performing the task.
• We tend to overvalue the things we create or have believe had some part in its creation. This is probably the reason why we tend to love products which we have customized or had a small role in building (such as IKEA furniture).
• Similarly, we tend to think of ideas that we have generated to be vastly superior. This happens even if the ‘original’ idea has been subconsciously planted in our heads. Conversely, we have a hard time accepting the novelty and brilliance of the ideas of others, especially rivals. This is one of the reasons Sony refused to create its own version of the iPod and chose to stick, rather unsuccessfully, to its rapidly out-dating Walkman.
• We tend to exact revenge even if it ends up resulting in an economic loss to us. The rational economic model effectively disappears in the face of a scorned man/woman. We also tend to turn a blind eye towards who we are exacting revenge on i.e we are unable to differentiate between principal and agent.
• We adapt to happiness and pain faster than we think. Although this may sound counter-intuitive, it is best to experience pleasure over spaced intervals and pain all at once in one shot.
• The parameters on which dating sites match people or which we think are important are effectively useless in fostering happy, long lasting relationships. What people want in their partners and what they say they want are different things. A more effective method of online dating would be having prospective couples experience something on the internet (such as art, music or movies) together and see how they like spending time with each other virtually.
• We tend to be more responsive to pleas which have an emotional connect than statistics. People are more likely to donate for a little girl having cancer than donate for a tsunami relief fund which has claimed the lives of over 10,000 people.
• We tend to make bad decisions when in an unstable emotional state and that bad decision persists and eventually turns into bad habit as humans tend to recall past activities but not past emotional states.

Illustrative of couple representing online dating

Ariely’s third book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty had him explaining man’s constant struggle towards balancing a cost-benefit analysis of every situation (as suggested by the SMORC model) and his efforts to maintain his self-image of an honest, wonderful person.

What may come as a severe blow to the SMORC model and traditional economics in general is the fact that humans don’t tend to be more dishonest in the face of a larger gain or if the probability of getting caught is reduced. Alternatively, it depends on a variety of psychological factors such as the ability to rationalize, the distance from cash, altruism, moral code reminders etc. I must confess my love for the field of Behavioral Economics increases by the day. I’m pretty sure I’ll be picking up more books on the subject in the near future. It has this uncanny ability of making you feel powerful, of giving you an image of yourself as a person who understands the other far more and far better than the vice versa.

The Struggle For Meaning

 

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1948: Viktor Frankl and his second wife Eleonore, Photograph, Around 1948 (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Viktor Frankl mit seiner zweiten Ehefrau Eleonore, Photographie, Um 1948]

I was blown away. Viktor Frankl’s semi-autobiography, Man’s Search For Meaning is probably the most moving book I’ll ever read. In fact, I’d be incredibly surprised if I came across a book, in my life, which inspired me as much as this one did. At the age of thirty seven, Frankl was imprisoned by the Nazis in the world’s most deadly and infamous concentration camp at Auschwitz. And as he narrates his experience there, he tries to convince us that the greatest suffering, the greatest pains could be borne if we could carve meaning out of it.

Frankl invented an entirely new field of psychoanalysis which he called logotherapy. The second half of the book explains logotherapy to the general audience. Unlike the existing schools of philosophical thought which stated that man’s life is centered around deriving pleasure (Sigmund Freud) or power, logotherapy states that it centered around meaning. We spend our entire lives trying to find the significance of our existence. And this significance changes from time to time but it is what makes us human. It is what keeps us alive. To quote Nietzsche,

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.

There are three possible sources of meaning: in working for something you feel is significant to your life, in loving another person and in courage during suffering that you cannot avoid. Frankl was one of the very few who was able to find meaning from the third source. In fact, it is what, he says, that allowed him to survive in a place where the chances of coming out alive were 1 in 28.

Some of the book’s quotes are hauntingly beautiful. In conclusion to this post, I’m going to list down the ones I’ve made notes about on my Kindle. For those reading this post, I would seriously recommend you get this book and give it a read. It’s short, will take no more than 3 hours to complete. But it will, more often than not, end up changing the way you look at life.

• The salvation of man is through love and in love
• Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases to be of importance.
• Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death
• No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same
• There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings
• What you have experienced, no power on Earth can take from you
• Suffering ceases to be suffering, at the moment it finds a meaning

 

Pop Psychology

 

I had stumbled upon Gladwell when I spotted his Outliers, as one of the few recurring books in most Business books lists on Goodreads. As a result, I ended up giving it a try. And as I had mentioned in The Secret of Success, it was a thoroughly interesting read. The book make me look into his bibliography and try out his other books as their themes were something I thought I’d be deeply interested in. Fortunately, my intuitions weren’t wrong.

Gladwell’s books effortlessly covers a variety of different fields such as Psychology, Marketing, Economics and Sociology to give us intriguing stories and novel insights into the human behavior. Some have branded his writing as pop psychology because of the kind of reach he has despite writing on a subject that is relatively lesser known. His David and Goliath was an ode to all the underdogs who overcame great difficulties to triumph over their Goliaths. The story of how dyslexia actually helped Gary Cohn become the president of Goldman Sachs and how Frierich’s troubled childhood was majorly responsible for him pioneering an approach towards the treatment of leukemia shows us how our perceived weaknesses can often be turned into our greatest strengths. Everyone saw David’s size as his weakness. But his size gave him his speed which turned out to be the deciding factor in Bible’s most famous battle.

FILE – In this Aug. 15, 2014, file photo, a lighted sign marks the Goldman Sachs trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Goldman Sachs reports quarterly financial results on Thursday, July 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Blink! strongly reminded me of the concept of System 1 proposed by Daniel Kahneman in his magnum opus, Thinking Fast and Slow. Essentially, Gladwell tries to educate us about the extraordinary power of subconscious cognition and how we can learn to control and use its power. Through case studies of the FACS, Blink! tells us of the remarkable story of Ekman and his lifetime effort to categorize facial expressions. By the time he was done, his subconscious could recognize with incredible accuracy as to whether a person was lying, flirting, had malicious intentions, faking etc. This, to me, was the zenith of the power of human intellect. Blink! also made a strong case about how our unconscious also tends to stereotype and create prejudices that lead to ugly outcomes.

The latest book I read, The Tipping Point, was an attempt at explaining the cause of social epidemics. Often, we are amazed by the meteoric rise of a product or a person over an extremely short period of time. Gladwell’s theory that epidemics rely on 3 phenomena: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context gives a very compelling explanation towards understanding epidemics. Personally, I feel this is one book every person in marketing must read. The insights into some of the biggest hits such as Hush Puppies shoes, Sesame Street and Airwalk will definitely serve as a good guide as to how to go about marketing a particular product. The last few chapters strongly reminded me of Freakonomics as The Tipping Point went about trying to understand the intricacies of suicide and smoking. Overall, these were books I thoroughly enjoyed. And I’ll have to admit that few books have given me so many novel insights and theories as this one has. It is genuinely refreshing to read something that surprises, especially when you’ve read most of the popular literature of that particular genre.

Summer Reading II: Non-Fiction

 

In the previous post, I had listed down books which predominantly fell into the fiction genre. In contrast, this post will focus primarily on non-fiction. However, before I start listing down my favorites of the genre, I’ll be doing a short section on contemporary fiction first for the sake of achieving a sense of completion.

Contemporary Fiction

To be honest, I haven’t read a lot of contemporary fiction. I haven’t all the books listed over here. I’ve included them purely on the basis of the recommendations of the online community as well as a few credible friends.

• The Fault in Our Stars- John Green
  Two terminally ill teenagers meet and fall in love. This books is an absolute favorite among my female friends. Get ready to get all teary eyed.
• The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseni
  Set in modern Afghanistan, The Kite Runner chronicles the lives of two young Afghan boys as they witness the fall of the Afghan monarchy, the Soviet intervention and the rise of the Taliban regime.
• Q&A- Vikas Swarup
  The book on which the Oscar winning movie Slumdog Millionaire is based on, Q&A offers us a glimpse into the dark, macabre lives of children in Mumbai’s slums. After reading the book, you’ll genuinely happy and content with the quality of life you’ve got.
• The Book Thief- Markus Zusak
  Few books have left me in such a maelstrom of emotions as The Book Thief. Set in Nazi Germany and narrated by Death Himself, it is the story of 13 year old Liesel Meminger as she struggles to find happiness and meaning through books.
• Midnight’s Children- Salman Rushdie
  When a book wins the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in both the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize, you know it has to be something spectacularly good. Set in post-colonial India, with its magical realism, Midnight’s Children is just that. A must read for every literature aficionado.

Poetry

• The Prophet-Khalil Gibran
  The magnum opus of my favorite poet, The Prophet is filled with timeless advice on everything imaginable: love, work, family, children, relationships, hate. And the lines are so beautiful that they are bound to strike a chord with your heart.
• Gitanjali- Rabindranath Tagore
  This work by Tagore made him the first non-European in history to win a Nobel Prize. And it wasn’t without good reason. Even though I read the translated version, I found his verses to be overwhelmingly euphonious.
• 20 Love Songs and a Song of Despair– Pablo Neruda
  The champion of passion and unrequited love, Pablo Neruda has given words to the ardor of countless lovers across the globe. This is a collection of some of his very best (See Twin Geniuses: Tagore and Neruda).
• Essential Rumi- Coleman Barks
  The translated works of 13th century Sufi mystic poet Rumi, Essential Rumi is a treasure trove of wisdom imparted by the mystic almost over a millennium ago. Like Gibran, Rumi’s lines will definitely manage to reach the deepest centers of your heart.

I realize that the poetry I’ve listed are all translated works. If you want to read ‘pure’ English poetry, look for the works of William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T.S.Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Edgar Allen Poe.

Biography

• Steve Jobs- Walter Isaacson
  What sets Walter Isaacson’s biography apart is its unapologetic honesty of the man who founded the most valuable company on the planet. Halfway through the book, I hated and loved Jobs at the same time. Very few books will give you such honesty.
• The Man Who Knew Infinity- Robert Kanigel
  My favorite biography, Kanigel’s account of Indian genius Ramanujan is probably the most comprehensive account you will get of the great mathematician’s life.
• The Accidental Billionaires- Ben Mezrich
  Although not a biography per se, Mezrich’s tale of the rise of Facebook and a bitter legal battle that ensued shortly after its launch makes it an exhilarating read.
• Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!- Richard Feynmann
  The autobiography of one of the most eccentric physicists of the twentieth century, this book is an account of the craziest adventures and discussions undertaken by Feynmann.

Art, Culture and History

• Natasha’s Dance- Orlando Figes
  Russia has given some of the greatest authors in history. Russian novels and stories can pierce your heart like no other. This book is an account of the cultural history of Russia that gives us an insight into the kinds of developments that took place that led to the rise of the Russian arts.
• The Story of Art- E.M.Gombrich
  This introduction to art gives us an account of its history from cave paintings to experimental art of the 1960s.
• On Writing- Stephen King
  This semi-autobiography of King is an ode to the art of writing and the struggles and delights of being a writer.
• The Diary of a Young Girl- Anne Frank
  The unintentional autobiography of Holocaust’s most famous victim, The Diary of a Young Girl gives us a surreal glimpse into the lives of the Jews hiding in Nazi Germany.
• Unbroken- Laura Hillenbrand
  This collection of stories from World War 2 gives us accounts of survival, resilience and redemption showcased by civilians and armies alike.

Technology, Math and Startups

• Zero to One- Peter Thiel
  A collection of the notes of the class taught by founder of Paypal and Palantir, Peter Thiel, Zero to One is widely regarded as the bible of starting up.
• The $100 Startup– Chris Guillebeau
  This book is about micro-businesses and roaming entrepreneurs and how it is actually feasible making a living out of doing something that you love (See Microbusiness and Travel)
• The Code Book- Simon Singh
  One of my favorite non-fiction books of all time, The Code Book narrates the little told story of the art of security and secret writing.
• Fermat’s Last Theorem- Simon Singh
  This book is an account of a three centuries long struggle to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem; a proof which Fermat claimed not to have put on paper because it required too much space.
• God Created The Integers- Stephen Hawking
  With commentary from Hawking, God Created the Integers highlights the biggest mathematical breakthroughs in the history of mankind which went to shape human civilization as we know it.

Science

• A Brief History of Time- Stephen Hawking
  Arguably the most famous science book of all time, A Brief History of Time gives the layman a glimpse into the wonderfully complicated universe that we live in and our struggle to understand it.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything- Bill Bryson
  This book on Big History gives us an account of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the present day (See Big History)
• Chariot of the Gods- Erich von Daniken
  A bold hypothesis of how human civilization was shaped by extra terrestrial beings who visited Earth a long time ago, Chariot of the Gods is the quintessential account (and possibly proof) of panspermia and intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
• What If- Randall Munroe
  In this book, former NASA scientist and founder of xkcd comics Randall Munroe answers absurd questions regarding the world and the universe (See Of Science and Comic Books)

Philosophy and Religion

• The God Delusion- Richard Dawkins
  The bible of atheism, The God Delusion argues how the probability of a supernatural being existing is almost zero if the theory of evolution is to be believed.
• The Dhammapada- Anonymous
  The Dhammapada is a collection of the Buddha’s teachings and gives us a glimpse into the teachings and principles of Buddhism.
• History of Western Philosophy- Bertrand Russell
  History of Western Philosophy is an account of every major philosophical thought from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present

Economics and Psychology

• Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics- Steven Leviit and Stephen Dubner
  The craziest economics books you can find, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics tell us about the hidden side of everything. Why do drug dealers live with their moms? Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance? How did legalization of abortion lead to a drop in crime rate in the US? Read the books to find out.
• Thinking Fast and Slow- Daniel Kahneman
  The bible of Behavioral Economics, Thinking Fast and Slow is one of the best books you’ll read on the subject (See Revisiting Psychology)
• Predictably Irrational- Dan Ariely
  Like the previous book, this too gives us an insight into the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of human behavior. A must read for anyone who plans on starting a business or is in marketing or public relations (See Human Behavior and Irrationality)
• Economics in One Lesson- Henry Hazlitt
  A champion of the Austrian School of Economic Thought, Hazlitt tries to explain the problems with traditional economic principles through a series of well known historical cases.
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat- Oliver Sacks
  A brilliant account of the strangest cases encountered by Sacks in his medical career, this book is a must read for anyone with the slightest interest in Clinical Psychology.
• Interpretation of Dreams- Sigmund Freud
  One of the pioneers of the field of Psychology, Freud sets out to explain how our dreams can tell us much about our deepest desire, passion, pain and ambition.

And I shall stop here. I think I have covered a majority of the major fields of interest. Yet, I understand that one person’s experience with books leads to the creation of a relatively skewed list. Again as before, this list is in no ways exhaustive of any kind. There are plenty of amazing books I haven’t listed or have missed out on. Please feel free to list them in the comments.

Human Behavior and Irrationality

 

After reading Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow (see Economics in One Post), I became a fan of Behavioral Economics. The branch conveniently combined two of my favorite social sciences: Economics and Psychology. So, I decided to revisit the topic again by picking up a couple of books that were highly regarded, at least in the Goodreads community.

The first was SuperFreakonomics, a sequel to the hugely popular Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. And although the authors promised a better book in its preface, I thought the original was better. The case studies and questions answered in the book were not as flabbergasting or surprising as the ones contained its predecessor. Freakonomics enthralled me in its very first chapter by establishing a direct link between the legalization of abortion and declining crime rates in America. In contrast, some of the things mentioned in the successor such as prostitution being profitable because of it being illegal and an elaborate explanation of the bystander effect wasn’t all that fascinating. Maybe I do injustice to the book as I had already read extensively about a majority of what had been presented. To its credit though, I found the last chapter and the epilogue particularly interesting. The story of IV, its fight against global warming and the extremely wrong notions we hold about the dangers of climate change had me hooked. The epilogue on Capuchin monkeys being taught the concept of currency made for a good ending to a ‘freak’ book. When the monkeys learnt the value of money and how to use it, what is it that they first discovered?

Prostitution.

Maybe the Bible was right about it being the oldest occupation after all.

The second book by MIT Professor Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, is easily one of the best books I’ve read, almost matching the brilliance of Thinking Fast and Slow (Which makes me wonder if I’m such a huge fan of the aforementioned books because they are really that good or maybe because I simply love the subject). In my opinion, it is one book every person who wants to understand human behavior and improve their interactions must read. The premise of the book, as is the premise of the entire field of Behavioral Economics, is that humans aren’t inherently rational. We tend to make decisions factoring in our social, economic and cultural backgrounds, something that traditional economics doesn’t account for. And once we know about the anomalies in our behavior, it would benefit us immensely to correct it and act rationally (like the homo economicus) in the long run. I was so impressed by the lessons imparted in the book that I distilled them into the following points which I believe everyone must be aware of (and hopefully try to change).

• We judge everything relatively. So, if we are able to judge one product A to be clearly superior to another product B, we are more inclined to choose the former even in the presence of another product C with which comparison may be more difficult.
• We are extremely vulnerable to anchoring. Once we adjudge or are told of the price of a commodity to be X, we are likely to accept it and bargain only in very close proximity to X even if the good or service provided is not of that value (in direct conflict with the supply and demand theory).
• We respond irrationally to free incentives. When something is given out for free, we are extremely inclined to accept that offer even if it results in a net loss.
• There are two different set of norms we abide by: market and social. One needs to know which norm to appeal to and when. An intersection of the two norms will almost always lead to disaster. For example, you don’t offer to pay for the dinner your mother-in-law host for you.
• In a state of passion and sexual arousal, we tend to make decisions and harbor opinions that we might not abide with in a non-aroused state. This explains the myriad of teenage pregnancies despite extensive sex education in schools.
• We are less likely to procrastinate if we set deadlines that we cannot avoid or turn our backs on.
• We tend to value the things we own at prices which are abnormally high by traditional economic standards.
• We tend to live much better lives and be happier when we have fewer major options to choose from.
• The Placebo Effect is extremely powerful. It can make dubious surgical procedures seem like successful treatments. We are more likely to be cured of our illnesses when we intake costly medication as compared to inexpensive ones.
• We are more likely to cheat and steal in kind than in money. People find it easy to rationalize fraud which does not directly involve cash.