The Anna Scam

Centralization/Top down decision making increases chances of corruption and malpractice. Decentralization/Bottom-up decision making reduces them. That is because 1) There is greater chance of moral hazard within a centralized system. Too much power in too few hands. 2) In a centralized system there is insufficient information. In small systems e.g. Municipalities, informational problems are not that big. 3) Centralized systems, rigid and goal oriented that they are, suppress errors. That makes them fragile. They remain calm till wild variations fracture them. Thus centralized systems, in the present complex and uncertain world, are dangerous (e.g. Soviet Russia, Maoist China, American foreign policy, Jan Lokpal) (e.g. of small & decentralized – Switzerland, Muhammad Yunus, Esther Dufflo) (You can find the original arguments in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's writings)

The entire Lokpal deal reeks of top-down centralized imposition of justice. That is naive utopia. At that level, two authorities will turn out the same as one. What any such movement requires is a bottom-up approach. Many small and autonomous units. But that is not the lokpal movement. On the contrary it prides itself on presenting one coherent approach to a deep-set problem like corruption. That is folly. There is greater chance that if implemented, the Jan Lokpal bill will increase corruption in the long run. It will put to much power into too few hands. It is also the most impractical, given its judgement time-frames, and will have to make decisions with incomplete information and will suppress discontent as the failure begins to show. The Lokpal will not only damage, it wont even know it is damaging.

India is a messy land. And no amount of pretend-coherence or centralization will help. It will just repress further. Anna is projecting, in a more secular fashion, his old RSS ideas of 'one central solution' (maybe unaware all the time). And a mostly consumerist middle class is embracing it. It shows, at best, a simplified and flawed conception of the complexity of this land. In his arrogance, he thinks that he can conceive of one solution (however geographically spread out) for this deep-set malaise affecting 1.2 billion people who mostly do not identify with each other, except for a conception of nation-state only 60 years old. And so he creates a media event out of it, waves the flag, and we run to change the world! Had Gandhi been buried, he'd be rolling in his grave.

I fully agree that we have to 'do' things. Yes to positive change too. But it is essential to know what change we are talking about. It cannot be this top-down imposition. It has to be bottom-up. Please refer to the work of Esther Duflo, the development economist, and her approach. They are called the ‘randomistas’. They follow a system of randomized trials similar to the ones followed for medicine/pharma. They do small things for a group and then observe whether it is working compared to another group, which is the placebo group. Then they widen it a little to see if it is still working. I hope you can see what I mean by bottom-up tinkering. I think these more humble and cleverer methods are a way better choice. They have their shortcomings, like how to set up a fair trial. But those shortcomings are nothing compared to Lokpal’s punish-the-kid-if-he-misbehaves.

Most people do not know that before Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus had tried out another project (original story in Tim Harford's Adapt). I think he borrowed money for farmers to buy high-yield seeds. It failed. Then he came up with the idea of giving these small loans to women in villages. And it worked. Yunus, through simple bottom-up experimentation was able to transform the lives of so many poor Bangladeshi women, and thus families. He was experimenting. And his model may not work equally effectively everywhere (Afghanistan), but what he has done for the poor in Bangladesh, and other impoverished countries, cannot be questioned. All through small, grassroots trial and error. He did not assume he knew how to solve the problem. He experimented.

The important thing here, as you can see, is that Yunus failed once. But it didn't hurt the system as a whole. It hurt only him and a few businessmen. And he was there to try again. But if the Lokpal fails, it will hurt millions. Most importantly, once instituted, you wont be able to do away with it. For it will simply be too powerful. Do you think, if it is not performing well, those who are running it will stand up, put up their hands and walk out? No. They will keep trying. And covering up. That is the way large institutions work.

We need hundreds of Muhammad Yunuses and Esther Duflos out there trying and failing for a better life for the impoverished. Not some rigid, naive, media-savvy, pseudo-revolutionary like Hazare. I too would like to believe that it is possible to bring slightly greater well-being to this cluttered and complicated land. But I cannot, for that very reason, let my emotions get the better of me.