Diwali Post

Firstly .. I wish you all a happy diwali and i hope you have seen Ra.One! .. :D

This post has  nothing to do with Diwali except for the fact the date seems to match. So i finished another set of exams yesterday and like it happens .. happened to read so much yesterday that i had my own “aaha” moment. So this post is just to remind myself of the good stuff i read and also spam the internet about it.This “good” stuff might induce sleep in some of you.. some of you might have slept already ! .. That’s the way the world is sadly .. every damn thing is subject to the variation in the likes and dislikes of people ;) .

#Reader Alert: This is a very very information heavy post ! :)

Though by now a lot of people who know me have stopped asking me this question .. some still do, so for the benifit of them i think i should post this confession up here.. “Why do i read all this? What do i hope to do by reading all this stuff?” . I read this stuff because i get a lot of questions about socio-economic systems and inequality around me :P … and unless i find answers i get restless. So to find answers i read books. That may not be the best possible way to go about it .. but saves both time and money for me ;) . So that is it .. read  such books if you have questions .. by reading relevant books a lot of times you would find answers or paths towards answers. If you do not have any questions at all.. then go watch Ra.One :P (Okie this will be the last Ra.One joke! ) .

#Recruiter Alert: Oo and btw if any prospective recruiter is reading this .. “Don’t worry i have a split personality who doesn’t philosophise over the rights and wrongs of things and can slog like anything for whatever my master commands!” .

So all confessions done .. let me finally start with the post :).

The thing about “Trade”:

So it was in this post last month that i spoke about Distributism first. Now i am sort of trying to understand the model better.

Before that i wanted to write about something i read for the “Global Political Economy” course which was some sort of a trigger for all this reading. I happened to read this part of the “International Economics” textbook by Paul Krugman and Maurice obstfeld about “The gains from trade”. This part of the book talks about Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson‘s theory about “how international trade makes a society potentially better off than it would be if restricted to autarky“ (“potentially” was kept in italics deliberately) . Btw as per wiki Paul Samuelson was instrumental in setting up IIM-C .. very interesting piece of info this ;)

Now, i am not an economist.. so obvly i didn’t understand the whole thing (Actually MBAs are just supposed to act like they know everything ..  they need not necessarily know… when challenged .. we delegate :D ) .. but i sort of got the essence of what he was trying to say. The only reservation i had was that .. all this was some sort of an anti-thesis to what i spoke of in the last post .. the stuff spoken by E.F.Schumacher about Local production-Local consumption .. the stuff spoken by Gandhi or JP about Village-Economy or Tagore’s whole Samavaya Niti/Co-operative principle thing or the co-operative model proposed in M.N.Roy’s New Humanism. My only argument was that .. obvly these people are not fools .. they would have said what they said only based on some assumptions/logic. So i wanted to understand that stuff better. That is really when i sort of ended up with a small research on the whole “Distributivism” thing.

The third way: Distributivism/Distributism/Distributionism: (I dont care for semantics frankly speaking :P)

So this distributivist stuff as we know it today has been mainly proposed by Hillaire Belloc and G.K.Chesterton early in the 1900s. It has its roots in the Papal teachings before. But i think more or less this was  a practice at varying levels of intensities in many societies across the world prevly.

Anyway, so the whole funda is that … Socialism and Capitalism both suck in the sense that they end up creating what Belloc called as “The Servile State” .. the only way forward is to promote private property .. and by private property they do not mean the mercantilist capitalism mode that we see today but the ideal vision of private property for all. So the system is infact for much more “free” in freedom than the “free” in free markets.

Now there are enough criticisms which dismiss this whole thing as utopian/way-too-romantic. But i somehow find it logical and convincing enough.. and there are ofcourse some systems where the co-operative thing did work big time. So i refuse to accept that this idea is impractical. It is just the lack of intent that makes it less popular..

Anyway .. like someone once said.. no one can be against capitalism.. they can only be against Crony-capitalism.. similarly .. people do not like Crony-socialism.. as of now i am not sure if there is something called Crony-distributism.. so i am as of now okie with it :P. But like it happens i may soon start hating it .. you never know :P

So this was one post that did do rounds amongst the distributist society folks as i understand during the “Occupy wall street” times.The 12 point program suggested in the prev link has some real crazy and outright stupid things.. so no point debating about them. But some of the points do make sense. Like everything else in life .. it has to be read with a “pinch of salt”.. perhaps more ;).

So for a primer on distributism .. i think this  link is good .. the link by some course in Notredame university here is also good enough.

PS1: There is this article in one of the above mentioned links about how Adam Smith is very widely mis-understood by many. I sort of liked it. Partly because a lot of us like to quote Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory and other stuff for all the goods and bads of the economy  today in the world without actually reading his writings. I myself tried twice till now but never really could i make significant progress… mainly due to the heavy language i’d say. Anyway this article .. “The forgotten Agrarian: On re-reading Adam Smith” is very interesting. One of the profs here at IIM-L also spoke about this particular misinterpretation of Adam Smith so i am not doing any further research on the rights and wrongs of the author and accepting it on a as-is basis ;).

PS2: Another discovery that made me really happy was the stuff i read about Appropriate technology. This one again is pretty much what the Gandhian and Schumacherian school of thought says about “Technology”. Some of the examples quoted in the wiki link and plain mindblowing :).  There is a very interesting Lucknow link to this part of the research which is the work of Mansur Hoda and Surur Hoda ..and the establishment of Institute of Appropriate technology and Rurul Development near Lucknow. I am trying to find some whereabouts and contacts regarding this so that i could perhaps make a visit to that institute to understand what this is all about. Lets see.

PS3: Some more stuff i read was about the good work done by Schumacher Center, Delhi 

PS4: Interestingly there is a post on the blog of New Economics Foundation on October 19th i.e., 7 days ago titled “The strange rebirth of distributism” . So i think my very own small little research is very much in sync with times :P .So as much as some friends like to believe.. i am still not as ancient as i appear to be :D

PS5: More on the work done on the lines of appropriate technology can be found here. Again “Practical Action” also was founded by E.F.Schumacher .. simply amazing stuff being done there. Like they have written in the “History” page .. ” …  there should be a shift in emphasis towards ‘intermediate technologies’ based on the needs and skills possessed by the people of developing countries” . I like !

PS6: I stop here for now. So a lot of my questions about development-inequality-systems of production and consumption etc are being answered slowly like this. I hope all this learning can translate into action soon. Even if it doesn’t i am happy that i did search for answers. Ideally ofcourse if all this translates to action it would help. Like Vijay Mahajan says here.. “If the best management brains in the country only sell shampoos and soaps, there’s no way India can progress” . Very true Sir ! .. infact i can add a couple of other professions as well to that line :P .. but a lot of us B-School students are basically “timid” and “insecure” .. our 10lakh+ loans/invested money also is some botheration for most of us :(.. The article is a bit dated but has some very interesting stories :). Like the HUL CEO Nitin Paranjpe said the other day while addressing a gathering of students at IIM-L  .. “I can accept pessimism from any other group of students .. but not this one. You are India’s Tomorrow” . Indeed ! :P .. and on that hope i sign off hoping for a better tomorrow and hoping that a lot of us at some point of time in our careers work towards bettering it :)

PS7: I still have truck loads of information pending from my last reading rush .. that will be coming soon.. don’t go away ! :P .. thats pretty much like Don-2 coming after Ra.One :P (Did i say i will stop Ra.One jokes ? .. okie i think i did.. sorry :P)

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