Even more admission nonsense

This follows from More Admission Nonsense (http://directindia.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-admission-nonsense.html). Apparently, the normalisation math goes thus: 'The average of the top 10 scores in a particular board is calculated; the scores of a student from the same board is then divided by this average; the number is then multiplied by 100 to arrive at the student's normalised score.'

At least that's what yesterday's (26 Aug 08) Times of India says.

If there is any logic to this, it escapes me.

The top students of any board score almost full marks these days. So the whole exercise effectively becomes multiplying a student's score by 0.99987 or some figure very close to 1. 

Anyway, since when did these outliers become representative of a board? Shouldn't they be looking at the median, mean or mode, or some such central measure? Why don't they simply ask boards to give all their marks, whereupon one call easily calculate each student's percentile (with a OTS software)? What do other boards do?  

Seeing beyond Stage One

As often, I open with a rather lengthy quote, this time from Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell: “Both excellent service and terrible service can occur in the same country, when there are different incentives, as a salesman in India found: ‘Every time I ate in a roadside cafe or dhaba, my rice plate would arrive in three minutes flat. If I wanted an extra roti, it would arrive in thirty seconds. In a saree shop, the shopkeeper showed me a hundred sarees even if I did not buy a single one. After I left, he would go through the laborious and thankless job of folding back each saree, one at a time, and placing it back on the shelf. In contrast, when I went to buy a railway ticket, pay my telephone bill, or withdraw my money from a nationalised bank, I was mistreated or regarded as a nuisance, and made to stand in a long queue. The bazaar offered outstanding service because the shopkeeper knew that his existence depended on his customer. If he was courteous and offered quality products at a comparative price, his customer rewarded him. If not, his customer deserted him for the shop next door. There is no competition in the railways, telephones, or banks, and their employees could never place the customer in the center.’”

Dr Sowell is a Stanford professor. His main purpose of writing this popular economics book is to instruct us on ‘looking beyond Stage One’, that is, what is immediately visible. 

He repeatedly holds up the Socialist India economy as an example of what goes wrong when naive politicians decide policy; post-reform India illustrates how the market sets things right. 

The comment above is typical. In fact, I’ll go a step further, to complain that it is typical of how most western authors (and Indians writing for Westerns) that I’ve read tackle India – through illustrative examples rather than inclusive overviews. 

But that’s a different story. Let me try to apply what I have learnt from Dr Sowell’s books and go beyond Stage One on this comment.

Let’s take a closer look at the dhaba first. 

First, more likely than not, it’s illegal. It pays no taxes; it breaks all laws regarding hygiene, safety and labour regulations; encroaches on public land; steals electricity and water; bribes officials of every type; and keeps law-abiding entrepreneurs away through a mixture of muscle power and undercutting. 

Not surprisingly, there are no restaurant chains in India that come anywhere near the ones in the US in terms of number of outlets, leave alone turnover. 

Dr Sowell’s salesman doesn’t bother to see these. Or he thinks that all laws, taxes and rights (especially labour rights) are bad. If it’s the latter, that’s a totally twisted interpretation of the ‘free market’. Perhaps he wants a ‘free-for-all economy’, which is what exists in much of the Third World. Fat lot of good it does us.  

Our observant salesman also turns a blind eye to the hyper-exploitation brought about by hyper-competition. Or he would note that the waiter who gets him his rice plate and hot rotis is wears rags, is half-starved, and sleeps on the kitchen floor with the rats. Beside leftovers, he gets only a pittance from the dhaba owner, and is sometimes treated with demonic cruelty. 

Because he cannot send any money home, his sisters become prostitutes, spreading every type of STD among the truck drivers he serves. His brothers may take to petty crime, and, who knows, terrorism. 

There are enormous costs of all these, but these are beyond Stage One.

Let’s come to the saree shop now. Everything one says about the dhaba more or less holds true for the shop. It may be legally somewhat better, but you can be sure that it cheats heavily on taxes and payment for utilities. 

Also, it doesn’t strike our salesman that the shopkeeper who shows him hundreds of saris without making a sale is wasting his time. If businesses should treat all customers well (and profitable customers, better), doesn’t quid pro quo demand that customers return the favour by respecting the business’s time? Can one imagine wasting a lawyer or doctor’s time like this, or an economics professor’s? Would our selling friend treat his Western counterpart as callously as he treats his Indian cousin? How is it that (supposedly) wasting rupees makes all planners socialist fools, while wasting time paves the way to customer service heaven?

Of course, he doesn’t think it worthwhile to ask how much the weavers get on those sarees. And if that is a fair price, by which I don’t mean a simple thing: Would he had been ok if he were the weaver?  

Finally, let’s stop by the nationalised bank, the railway station and the phone company. 

As a loyal customer of the Bank of India, I can vouch that I have hardly ever faced any problem with the bank’s employees. Instead, I have found them most helpful, across branches and cities, in spite of having to serve several times the number of customers that MNC banks do. In fact, several nationalised banks run ad campaigns that talk about the excellent relation they have with their clients. Are they, and their (private sector) ad agencies, mad to show the opposite of real life?  

All the MNCs are interested is the HNIs or High Net-worth Individuals, that too in big cities. I don’t begrudge the choice. They have the right to their profits. 

However, they are under legal obligation to provide services to anyone who can produce a certain minimum deposit. MNC banks just don’t do that, mainly by behaving abominably with the ‘common man’. Would this discrimination be allowed in a developed market economy? 

Denial (more so, of something one is lawfully entitled to) is the worst form of customer service. Yet this denial goes unnoticed.  

For sure, the salesman’s experience may have been very different, but then he was the exception rather than the rule. It’s a pity that his comments are being used to tar a entire section of the banking industry. 

As for the ticket counter at the railway station and the phone exchange, the salesman was at the wrong place. 

Both these services are heavily subsided and essentially meant for the poor. That doesn’t mean they are out-of-bounds for the relatively well off, but it does mean that their standards are set to deliver a bare minimum. 

Would you expect taste and nutrition if you were standing in a soup line? Then why expect smiles and courtesy from these vastly over-extended services? 

Also, regular travellers will tell you that railway ticket clerks are not consciously rude. Besides, their work is boring, thankless, and futureless; and working conditions, plainly wretched.

I am not armoured by Indian Railways and BSNL. Nevertheless, who am I to judge them? Their main customers are probably grateful that they exist at all. 

Are salesmen’s rants and selective data (‘India voted so many times against the US at the UN, in spite of accepting so many million dollars in aid.’) enough for figuring out the choices and changes of a nation that houses every seventh human being? Are we being ultrasensitive if we dare suggest that that some coins may have other sides? Will great good come out of labelling everything from pre-Manmohan Singh days as wasteful Socialist populism? (Give a dog a bad name and hang him.) Are we sure that the West that seeks to open our eyes keeps its own eyes open? Finally, who loses most when they refuse to see beyond Stage One, they or we?

More admission nonsense

The front page of today’s Times of India announces that Percentiles favour SSC students hugely: Data, and the article argues, “Now there is statistical evidence to prove that the percentile system has given an unfair advantage to state board students vying for junior college admissions with ICSE and CBSE students. 

Just a handful of students from the non-state board have made it to the premier colleges this year, reveal figures submitted by the state government to the Bombay high court. 

In fact, the data submitted after the close of the second round of admissions shows campus composition has altered dramatically this year.” 

This goes on and on, without sparing a thought that the evidence may actually be showing the exact opposite of what they claim, that is, the percentile system is fair to SSC students. And non-SSC board students had an unfair advantage all these years when their marks were not converted into percentiles.

Either knowingly or unknowingly, ToI is oversimplifying a complex issue, that too one that’s sub judice.  

What saddens me most is that the world’s largest selling English newspaper can publish this tripe without checking with a statistician. I can’t imagine how one worth his salt would have let it pass without adding an encyclopaedia of qualifiers.  

Extreme nonsense

An article titled Dump theory, act on facts, the Mumbai Mirror (July 31, 08) reports the counsel for the ICSE board arguing in court that the percentile system of evaluating students marks (introduced this year for admissions to colleges in Maharashtra) is not justifiable because 'this year the ICSE topper got 98.29 percent and the SSC topper 97.84 percent. The difference is hardly 0.4 percent.” 

Was he deliberately misleading the judges or is devoid of commonsense, not to speak of the preliminaries of statistics? Either has to be true. Or why would one quote the maximum marks? 

To do so here is no different than arguing that the Dutch (average height 6' 0.8" for men) are no different from the Chinese (men's average height 5' 4.9") because the tallest Dutch (7' 7.33") is shorter than the tallest Chinese (9' 5.39"). 

The idea, as far as I know, is never to look at the extremes but the middle measures (mean, median, mode) while comparing two groups, and then ask if they are dissimilar enough, and if they are, which one is exceeds the other on average.  

(I got the heights from the Net, and they are probably as wrong as the lawyer's logic.) 

Highly suspicious

During the recent Vote of Confidence in the Lok Sabha, quite a few members' (54?) votes couldn't be counted electronically, and they had to be issued paper slips. 

TV commentators found this very funny. One remarked on the irony that while 60 million people voted without a glitch using electronic voting machines during the general elections, their representatives were having trouble with the (relatively) few machines in parliament. He suggested that Infosys be brought in to better the situation.

Just a thought: How can we be so sure that all those machines worked perfectly during the general elections? What if many of them malfunctioned? Who'd know? The illiterate voter? Or the literate voter who couldn't care less? Or the callous election official? 

The fraction of eligible voters who vote was always low, and is becoming abysmally low (I have never voted, for anything). Can malfunctioning voting machines have something to do with this (not everything; something)? 

While we're on the confidence vote, there's another, completely different, matter: representatives' educational qualifications.

A few days before the vote, I was eavesdropping on a debate at my office. The unanimous conclusion seemed to be that all legislators should be, at least, graduates. 

Today morning paper gave a list of cross-voters, members who had disregarded their parties' whips, and abstainers. Conventional opinion maintains that these are the worst of the lot (I wish one could say that these were the most moral, and they followed their consciences). 

Of the 28 (including 6 absentees and abstainers), only 5 hadn't gone to college. There were, incidentally, 6 lawyers, 2 doctors, and an engineer. 

More to the point, which us understands anything about the nuclear deal? 

The interpretation that comes out in the popular press and TV channels is so simplistic, it's bound to be misdirecting. 

And Frontline, the Communist mouthpiece, writes Latin. Even if its argument is right, it's so badly written that it's impossible to decode. I wonder if even the authors of these pieces understand them. 

The best one can hope for is, probably, to have a multiparty team of experts in international law go into the intricacies of the various documents involved and reach a consensus.  

An alternative would be to give law students the task of translating the public documents into everyday language as an exercise, have an all-party panel of lawyers evaluate their work, and release the documents on the parliament's website, perhaps with dissenting arguments and counter-arguments.

That way the interested layman would be able to make out more or less what the ruckus is all about.  

But then who's an 'interested layman'? We're either indifferent, illiterate or ideologues.  

Not inferior, murderous

In The Armchair Economist (1993) Stephen Landsburg, while explaining 'why he isn't an environmentalist', writes, “In the current political climate, it is frequently taken as an axiom that the U.S. government should concern itself with the welfare of Americans first; it is also frequently taken as an axiom that air pollution is always and everywhere a bad thing. You might, then, have expected a general chorus of approval when the chief economist of the World Bank suggested that it might be good thing to relocate high-pollution industries to Third World countries. To most economists, this is a self-evident opportunity to make not just Americans but everybody better off. People in wealthy countries can afford to sacrifice some income for the luxury of cleaner air; people in poorer countries are happy to breath inferior air for the opportunity to improve their incomes. But when the bank economist's observation was leaked to the media, parts of the environmental community went ballistic. To them, pollution is a form of sin. They seek not to improve our welfare, but save our souls.”

While Dr Landsburg has taught me many things through this book and its successor, More Sex is Better Sex, I do think he does need a few pointers on basic biology on this one.

Many of the industries exported to Third World countries like India are not just polluting: They are banned in the West. One prominent example is certain types of shipwrecking; another is asbestos. 

All pollution kills, but some kill very quickly and cruelly, more so when the victim is a dirt poor worker with no protection while working and no medicines when ill. Such a person is employed for a couple of years or so, becomes an unemployable and infirm dependent on his family for the next decade, and is dead thereafter. It's not 'inferior air'; it's 'murderous air'.

And there is no trade-off. The Third World labourer doesn't take up a killing job knowing full well that he's going to die. The employer doesn't tell him; the media has better things to do; and NGOs have their head blown off if they open their mouths. He is not even choosing between immediate death, from starvation, and death a few years later, from work-related disease and with a great deal of pain.  

Also, from the Americans' point of view, clean air shouldn't be a luxury but a right. Just as clean water or edible food is. Polluted air kills. So how is clean air a luxury? I suppose a degree of severity matters, even in economics. (Taking your money via trade is not the same as taking it via theft.) 

The environmentalist, at least here, is trying to save lives, not souls.  

While accusing environmentalists of hysteria, our economist needn't be cynical, need he?.

Why we should pay bribes

I have a car. You are a pedestrian, and poor.

I knock you down.

The policeman runs in as fast as his pot-belly will allow. He offers to let me be if I give him a bribe. As a mark of his esteem for me, he’ll threaten you so that you don’t bother me about your broken kneecap. 

It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. I have the money. You don’t.

Bad? No, good.

By paying the bribe, I avoid journeys to the police station and the courts. And keep doing productive work. 

By being threatened, you admit that the game is not worth the compensation. You get neither money nor the satisfaction of seeing me punished for the harm you suffered (You’re sure it’s my fault). Had you cared enough, you’d have disregarded the policeman’s threats and allowed him to crack your other kneecap. Obviously, you’ve better things to do.

The policeman gave us a closure at a far lower cost, in terms of both time and money, than any utopian judicial process could have. 

Yes, lawyers and judges get less work, my competitors get more competition from me (because I’m at my desk rather than in a courtroom), and you stay as careless as ever (because you never realise that it was all your fault all along and just feel sorry for yourself). Many other things, that would have happened had the policeman and I been honest, don’t happen. 

On the other hand, think of the payment the policeman will make to the whore, and the whore to the grocer, and the grocer to the wholesaler, and the wholesaler to the farmer, and the farmer to the temple collection box… 

But let’s not complicate matters.

You’re horrible; I’m relieved; he’s happy.  

The existence of laws and morals is merely an excuse for the world to turn this little crisis into an economically productive activity. 

Multiply this a million times and you have the Third World.

So why do Westerners complain about corruption, especially when every bribe one pays keeps the cost of doing business in and with the Third World low? 

Just imagine how much it’d cost to run an efficient and fair show here, that values all users, including pitiable Third World blokes, in the same way. And where would that money come from other than more taxes, costlier raw materials and higher salaries? The entire benefit of our breeding like rabbits would disappear if we become honest.  

And I’m not being cynical. We need some recompense. 

I’m sure though that I’m being stupid. So what loss am I not counting?

Why we should pay taxes

We often hear this argument: “Why should we pay taxes when the government does nothing for us? The roads are all dug up; the hospitals kill you; the schools teach you nothing; we get nothing that compares remotely with the social services that the West takes for granted, blah blah”

Fair enough.

But why should the same yardsticks apply? The West may pay taxes as payment for services rendered by the government; we don't. 

Our taxes are protection money, paid to politicians to keep the poor from revolting and slitting out throats. The quality and quantity of services provided by the government just don't matter.

Think of your neighbourhood market. The police is obviously inadequate to provide security. 

And if the shopkeepers were to pay the legal price for all the electricity, water and space they use, they'd go out of business. Because they'll need to pass on the price to you. And you won't buy. You'll switch to some totally illegal vendor selling off the pavement somewhere else. So the shopkeepers break laws all the time. 

Enter the neighbourhood goon and his henchmen. They offer you protection from the law and themselves, in return of protection money. That is passed on to you, but it is lower than what you'd have to pay if (a) the shopkeepers paid legal rates and (b) hired adequate security, either from private contractors or from the state (by paying higher taxes so that the state has a police force worth its name).

The henchmen are unemployable, because (a) they are stupid and illiterate and (b) they are too many of them. 

Any attempt to resist is bloodily dealt with. No leader can co-exsist with the don.

Do notice that the very rich shopkeepers probably don't pay 'in proportion', that is, the protection money is a flat rate, not indexed to each shop's income. He gets away with this because he pays for his own security. And has his own 'connections'. He can make his own rules, at any rate, some of them.

Now, expand this to the power N, and you have a corrupt politicians, an under-taxed super-rich class , and millions of idle hands ready to strangle you. 

The politician control those hands, and extracts his protection by having you give him free rein over how he uses the taxes you pay. He pay keep mistresses, start business, stash away ill-gotten wealth in numbered accounts, or do whatever else meets his fancy. 

From time to time, he gets those idle hands to cut off some necks in riots, sending the unsubtle signal: “Next time it can be yours.”

The bottom line is that we should shut up and pay our taxes. Or we'd pay with our lives.

Keep Bombay Clean

Last evening my wife and I walked all the way from our home near Siddivinayak to Shivaji Park and once around the park – a distance of over 2 km - without seeing a single garbage bin. She had a banana peel and I had the core of an eaten apple. Finally, we found a make-do bin near a road-side stall. Man, we'd love to keep Bombay clean. But how? 

Forgotten Sins

In Forgotten Armies, Bayly and Harper write: “…Mountbatten was… apprehensive that if the Burmese revolt went ahead early and succeeded in liberating a large area of the country, the incoming Allies would be faced with a fully fledged, and probably communist, Burmese provincial government which they would then have to unseat. In fact, this is exactly the scenario which the British were to face in French Indo-China and in Indonesia.” So the Supremo let the Burmese rot for some more time under Japanese occupation.

Strangely, when Stalin did the same thing to General Bór-Komorowski and the Poles, he became the devil incarnate. I wonder if any historian has drawn the parallel.

Taylor certainly drew the one between the Germans getting Yugoslavia into the War and the British getting Egypt in: Both surrounded the royal palace with tanks.