Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The "Game theory" of entitlements

India is much advanced in its innovation of entitlements compared to the other democracies in the world.Our politicians, mostly illiterate or semi illiterate, are masters of this entitlements game and irrespective of the party or ideology all of them agree unanimously in this regard or at least no one would dare oppose any entitlement policy.They know where they are putting their monies.

The Karnataka state govt has apparently come up with one such entitlement plan that you can read about here[ Link ], though this time they are addressing their core voters. Some argue that there is nothing wrong in this as the money is going back to those who are contributing to the temples, all these days this money is spent only on the foreign pilgrimages of so called religious minorities in India.
The YSR govt of Andhra had already come up with one such plan for a trip to Jerusalem and the CM himself has utilized the plan after his emphatic win.
The new corporate affairs minister of the central govt is also batting for one such entitlement plan, this time he is asking the corporates to oblige[ Link ]again, no corporate would dare say NO to it, they might say it should be volunatary blah blha blah.

In any of the above three cases, you don't see opposition parties raising their voice against such policies.Simple game theoretic equilibrium, you satisfy your core voters and your oppostion can't oppose it. It's such an effective weapon.


But, we have witnessed our "caste leaders" ( Lalu Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Sharad Yadav etc) vociferously opposing women reservations bill in the parliament. I sometimes wonder, why are these affirmative action champions are so dead against women reservation bill.

The logic is simple here, if the women reservations bill is implemented, the sitting MPs have to vacate their seats.Each of them has to vote for vacating his seat, as the seat allocation is not decided yet. If we change the game a bit, that all the MPs know which all seats are becoming women seats then we can see those losing their seats voting against it and those not losing seats being indifferent to or for the bill.

If we forget for a moment whether the women reservations bill is good for the country as such, we can see that our politicans clearly support anything that gurantees them votes, irrespective of whether that has to do anything with the country's benefit. It's not only true for out politicians but it's true for most of the Indians. We play our own little games in our lives and do things which benefit us, it could be while voting for a party or voting against a party.
May be it's true that Indians are individually smart but collectively dumb as the ex-IIMA prof put it here
"In the first chapter of my book, I describe what I believe Indians are like by offering 12 canons of "Indian-ness." For example, one of our traits is "low trustworthiness." By that I mean we are most likely not to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma kind of situation. Privately, Indians are reasonably smart - in fact, we are as smart as anybody else - but publicly we are dumb. Our ability to understand the need for cooperation is very low. We believe that cooperation and selfishness
cannot go together- which is not true. We also tend to be very fatalistic in our outlook. We give excuses such as, "What can I do alone? Everybody else is looking out for himself, so why shouldn't I?
"
The problem with these entitlements is that , similar to time, they are irreversible. Whoever may come to power in the future, will not have the gall to reverse these socially inefficient policies.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The second coming of Los Galacticos

It was
-Zidane
-Beckham
-Figo
-Ronaldo ( the fat one)

Now it would be
- Kaka
-Ronaldo ( the womanizer)
-Ribery??
-David Villa??
-Xabi Alonso??

Real has not progressed beyond the knock out stages of UCL in the recent past and they are no where near what they used to be.But, the return of Galactico era?No, puhleeeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzz........Florentino Perez is back to destroy the great club again.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Professional tennis and gender discrimination

I grew up watching Pistol Pete and Stefi Graf ruling the tennis world. Naturally I loved the grace of Sampras and the versatility of Stefi, though I always respected Navratilova for her grit and greatness, my heart was always rooting for Stefi.
I still dispise french open and don't consider it an equal to other grand slams for all those matches I had to watch Pete beaten by some worthless tennis player.He simply was reduced to a mere mortal ,nay, worse than that on that Roland Garros slow and dead clay court.
I almost stopped watching and following tennis after the retirement of Pete and thought there would never be a player of his league.But I was proved wrong.
When I saw Federer for the time first time in Wimbledon , he looked more like another Carlos Moya with his pony and that deforemd nose. As I started following his game, I started liking his game as it is the same grace that has made a come back to the tennis court.And contrary to many other Pistol Pete fans, I have become a fan of this man and his game.His game is simply poetry, it just flows with grace.
I should mention here that I like players who use single hand for their returns and shots. I dislike thos who grunt and use both the hands to play tennis.Even though I have no respect for French Open, Roger made me follow it for four consecutive finals to root for him. But, the butcher from Mallorca was always there to nail him in the finals. Nadal has become unbeateable on clay and slowly bettered his "effectiveness" on other courts, which was proved in 2008 Wimbledon final.
Nadal has been a successful and a winning star but his game is boring with no grace and no elegance. I respect him for his attitude and his toughness but he can never come in the league of Pete and Federer.
After the recent Frecnh Open win of Federer, there were many people who said that Federer could win it just because Nadal was not there in the finals.The say that one has to beat the reigning champion to become the king of the game.May be they are unaware of the term called "bogey man" and are too biased towards Nadal.Should we talk about someone who failed to come to finals??
Many tennis professionals and former players around the world have declared Roger Federer as the greatest ever, Pete himself has said that if he wanted someone to beat his 14 grand slams record, it was Roger.But, are 14 slams that great?? Does it become a bench mark just beause no "man" could do it till date?
Why should we not lookt at those players who are not "men" and have won much more than this "14"?
Stefi Graf had won 22 grandslams, Navratilova won 18 and Chris Evert had won 18.Why the game is so different for men and women?Ofcourse women play 3 setters and win less prize money than their male counter parts.But, isn't competition much harder in women, look at all those "novas" from Russia?Isn't randomeness higher in a 3 setter than a 5 setter?Anyone on their day can win a 3 setter and winning a 5 setter takes a lot of consistency.So, someone who keeps wining those 3 setter for almost a decade must be really much better than the rest in the game.
Stefi is the only player till date to win all the four grand slams four times each, she is the only player to win a Golden Slam and I don't think anyone can beat her 22 grand slams record in the modern era.She could play on any surface and she was a complete player. She played the best tennis that we have seen so far.
Some people attribute her success to that unfortunate incident which happened to Monica Seles. But, if we look at the record
"In head-to-head matches, Graf never had a losing record versus Seles at any point in her career, and prior to 1990, Graf was undefeated versus Seles in three encounters. Seles, however, won four of the seven matches they played from 1990 through 1993, including a 3–1 advantage over Graf in Grand Slam tournaments. From the start of 1991 until the April 1993 Seles stabbing (i.e., the period of Seles's dominance), Graf lost nineteen matches but only two of these were to Seles (while defeating her three times). Graf retired with a 10-5 lifetime record over Seles, including a 6–4 winning record versus Seles in Grand Slam singles tournaments and a 3–2 winning record versus Seles while Seles was ranked World No. 1 in 1991-1993"Link

That period of Grafs career when she lost her No: 1 ranking was more to do with her personal and injury problems than the dominance of grunting Seles.

I think we should have a tournament b/w the tope 3 male and female seeds every year and crown the player as Champion of the year.But, during the last decade women's tennis has beocme more of a glamour show than the game of tennis.That is the reason we don't see any more Navratilovas and Stefi Grafs. The "novas" come and go but I don't think we are fortunate enough to see another great player like Stefi.She is the best and greatest ever.

Monday, June 01, 2009

Aam Aadmi Economics

The Aam Aadmi is a peace loving person. He is just a simple dude who wants to live by himself and a benign person.
But, when there are too many Aam Aadmis ( 100-200), they generally get bored of each other and start destroying public property. Does the Aam Aadmi know that public property is his property and the property is bought with the taxes he pays?This would open a pandoras box whether every Aam Aadmi pays tax. That's a different question altogether.

May be the Aam Aadmi is an economic genius. In these times of economic slow down, he devised new ways to improve the country's GDP. He destroyed some 7000Crs worth public property in Punjab recently and now some 100 Crs worth in Bihar.This would make the otherwise reluctant UPA government to spend money on reacquiring these assets. This would boost the economy of the country and create jobs.
I think the social scientist Ashis Nandy is going to agree with me on this.Please have a look at thislink to know why I quote Ashis Nandy here.