Acemoglu and team have authored a set of influential papers arguing that colonial experience has had a lasting influence on the growth rates of countries well after colonisation through the lasting impact they have had on institutions. Apart from very neat econometric estimations testing of their hypothesis and evaluating them against a variety of alternate thesis, they also draw attention to a host of historical literature on this subject. All this is very impressive.

They make a spirited argument that countries with extractive institutions have done poorly in terms of growth. This is where their work starts getting under-defined and under-theorised. They implicitly define that there is extraction when property rights are violated, but this is problematic.

Let’s say that a group of people produce a product together. They bring different things to the production including let’s say land, labour, skills, capital, etc. Production is done and it’s time to divide the fruits of joint production. There would be expropriation would be when some party gets unjustly more than what is their due. Expropriation cannot be understood without a notion of just division. As Jean Baudrillard shows cleverly in Mirror of production, Marxism or political economy or neo-classical economics will apply different norms making different divisions just. This has huge implications for what expropriation is.

Property rights are assignment of ownership of resources. This could be just or unjust based on the normative basis of our assessment. In other words, expropriation cannot be understood merely as violation of property rights; property rights in itself could involve expropriation. For example in Colonial origins of comparative development they talk about ‘forced labour’ as extractive. The classic forms of forced labour included slavery and bonded labour can be described in terms of property rights. Slaves were a property, and bonded labour is typically related to some unjust contract. Abolition of slavery in their case will involve violation of property rights of slave owners – and is thus extractive. Protection of slavery in turn would be non-extractive.

Their broad argument is that where there is expropriation, there is less incentive for people to be productive and this affects growth. Colonialism involved setting up more extractive institutions in some places that have suffered from growth, presumably because bulk of the population did not have the incentives to stay productive. I feel that the incentives people have cannot be merely captured by the degree of violation of property rights, that too in a highly abstract fashion.

Statistically, they have established a close relationship between settler mortality and current growth rates. This is interesting but can lend itself to a variety of arguments. Drawing from history, they have made a reasonable argument that these institutions have persisted – but this needs qualification. They have also argued reasonably that disproportionate power of the state and of elites can be counterproductive. What they have not done adequately is to theorise this well, and instead they have fallen on a Northian conception of protection of property rights. This theoretical shortcut undermines the beauty of their statistical work and the lessons it may have for us.

There is something in this relationship that’s worth pursuing…but the theoretical framing in this paper lends itself to protection of slavery and forms of forced labour that they stand clearly against. This will be so until expropriation is defined or clarified in clear normative terms.

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Book: The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
Author: William Easterly

The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly reviews various theories of growth and the consequent efforts by World Bank and IMF. As the title indicates he looks at how these approaches ‘failed’ and traces some reasons for their failure. The book is interspersed with live accounts of little cases (“intermezzo”) from the field to animate the discussion.

Useful review of evolving thinking in IMF and World Bank over 50 years

He starts by discussing why growth matters and offers a straightforward reason – “to help the poor”. The first chapter briefly traces some reviews of growth and its impact on poverty. This is followed by sections on “panaceas that failed” and the theme section “people respond to incentives” (see table of contents below for more details). Considering that the book is written by an insider (Easterly worked for the World Bank) the book offers interesting insights into the debates within the Bank and an episodic view of development thinking within the institution. It perhaps reflects the currently growing priority for getting institutions right to get the incentives right – a radical movement from ‘getting the prices right’ discourse. In the process the book offers a good insight into shifting thinking in these institutions for almost half a century.

Easterly criticizes the interventions of WB and IMF and claims that they have failed broadly. This is where the critical nature of the book stops. Underlying the book are narrow notions of “Good Policy” and a growth fundamentalism that gives no room for any measure that would deviate from the infamous Washington Consensus.

Growth and nothing else: how useful insights go awry

Needless to say, the book is focussed on ‘growth’ and the world view is presented by comparisons between ‘rich countries’ and ‘poor countries’. He uses this comparison to make an important point that growth often contributes to reduction in poverty and improvements in other standards of living (education, nutrition, health, etc.). What he misses to do though is to look at the wide array of patterns among poor and rich countries that are contributed by other measures. As Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze have argued on many occasions, policies focussed on human development need not always be inconsistent with concerns for growth. And growth very often happens without human development, specially when they are accompanied without any policies focussed on these issues. His world view based on rich/poor dichotomy is a significant weakness of the book.

Unquestionable “Good Policies”

There is an undercurrent of ‘good policy’ Vs. ‘bad policy’ through the book and much of the ‘good policy’ is what could be called the Washington consensus. He is rarely critical of the policy prescriptions and attributes their widespread failure to half-hearted implementation. I am not making an argument that Easterly sticks to Washington consensus (WC) in this book – that is far from true. But he does tend to give WC the hallowed ground and a part of the discussion is about getting the incentives right so that these get implemented.

Covers education, health, corruption and many other topics but with a narrow perspective

The book covers a wide ground by looking many pressing issues (population, human capital, health, etc.). Each of these chapters present interesting insights. May be given the limitations of discussing so many themes the discussion merely touches the surface of most topics. This would not be a shortcoming of the book but for the fact that what is discussed stays well within the framework of mainstream economics that is inadequate to understand phenomena. I have elaborated this in a separate post with reference to his cash for condoms chapter. The unfortunate tendency to ignore the rich context in which we live and make decisions persists through the book. My verdict about the book: useful insights, poor prescriptions.

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE: THE QUEST
Why Growth Matters
To Help the Poor
Intermezzo: In Search of a River

THE PANACEAS THAT FAILED
Aid for Investment
Intermezzo: Parmila
Solow’s Surprise: Investment Is Not the Key to Growth
Intermezzo: Dry Cornstalks
Educated for What?
Intermezzo: Without a Refuge
Cash for Condoms?
Intermezzo: Tomb Paintings
The Loans That Were, the Growth That Wasn’t
Intermezzo: Roumeen’s Story
Forgive Us Our Debts
Intermezzo: Cardboard House

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES
Tales of Increasing Returns: Leaks, Matches, and Traps
Intermezzo: War and Memory
Creative Destruction: The Power of Technology
Intermezzo: Accident in Jamaica
Under an Evil Star
Intermezzo: Favela Life
Governments Can Kill Growth
Intermezzo: Florence and Veronica
Corruption and Growth
Intermezzo: Discrimination in Palanpur
Polarized Peoples
Intermezzo: Violent for Centuries
Conclusion: The View from Lahore

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Critique of ‘unwanted babies thesis’

The key theme of The elusive quest for growth is ‘people respond to incentives’. This is a statement that will find broad agreement – but the devil is in the details. In a chapter titled Cash for Condoms? Easterly discusses efforts by World Bank to contain population growth in various countries. He criticises the ‘cash for condoms’ programme by arguing that the is assumes ‘unwanted babies’ that people could not prevent since they did not have access to condoms. He trashes this argument saying condoms cost much less than babies do – and people have the incentive to choose condoms over babies if babies were ‘unwanted’. The fact that poor people go for babies is because it is profitable for them to do so in part because their low incomes mean they value their work less and can choose to do parenting and in part because they prefer the extensive earnings from many children than investing heavily on a few. Based on this he argues that ‘development [read growth] is the best contraceptive’ and thus reverts to the argument for ‘good policy’. While the insights above are broadly agreeable, understanding people’s choices solely with these trivialises the complex social, cultural, political and economic factors that govern decision making about having children.

Some states in India have achieved Total Fertility Rate (TFR) below the replacement rate. These are by no means the richest states in the country, and the poor in these states are very much a part of this demographic transition. Studies that look at this phenomenon argue that this was achieved with women’s empowerment (that enabled them to make choices about having children), literacy & information, access to reliable health facilities to exercise contraceptive choices, among other things. These are concerns that cannot be derived from an incentive approach.

Can all incentives be deduced from macroeconomic parameters?

That takes me to my main critique of Easterly’s work. One could argue that women have less incentive to choose contraception if they fear a social backlash or if health systems are ‘far away’ and costly, and thus internalise the above arguments into the incentive framework. All we are saying by people respond to incentives is that people take meaningful actions based on their self-interest within the social context in which they live. Our understanding of their actions depends entirely on how rich our understanding of the social context is, something that is sorely lacking in The Elusive Quest for Growth. As a result some of the analysis he presents is rather distorted. For example, he attributes the growth in population that accompanied the industrial revolution to the changing incentives for people to have babies: first it paid to have more babies but as earnings increased it paid more to invest in fewer children. There is no reference what so ever to growing medical knowledge or to public health measures!

I believe that it is possible to understand people’s choice to have children from the incentive framework. But this cannot be done without having close contextual information – social consequences of women’s choice of contraception, availability of safe contraceptive facilities, child survival rates, among other things are affected by social and cultural factors. More importantly for this argument, the presence of reliable and cheap public health facilities makes an important difference to the cost of contraceptive choice. The incentive to have more babies cannot be understood without understanding all these ground level information. Unfortunately, Easterly does not even pay lip service to these complex issues. Instead he ‘derives’ the incentive argument from the overall productivity of the economy. In the process he makes a strong argument for growth (and thus, ignoring complexities is a smart political choice), but trivializes options for controlling population.

This becomes dangerous when we look at it within the subtext of the “Good Policy” that he argues for through the book. The Washington Consensus mindset works against meaningful investments in public health, education and other public investments. Contraception is not equal to condoms and long term contraceptive choices often require safe, reliable and cheap public health systems in low income countries. The problem is that the growth fundamentalism that underlies his analysis combined with an unquestioned allegiance to conservative policies make a case for not investing in public health systems. If it does so, the practice of “Good Policies” can end up undermining the objective instead of achieving it.

Qualifications of my argument

My criticism needs careful qualifications. To begin with Easterly does not argue explicitly for a reduction of public health facilities. It is my deduction that his tendency to look at growth as the cure-all of every social problem combined with an almost unquestioned support for conservative policies makes a case for lowering public health budgets. If one were to go by policy debates in India and other countries by growth fundamentalists, I believe that my concern has a reasonable ground. Secondly, I do not argue that World Bank and IMF interventions always result in reducing public health spending. In some cases, I believe that they have led to significant interventions. I do not linearly link growth focus with low priority for public health. But one can make a strong argument that this framework works against public investments.

This does not dilute my critique that Easterly trivializes the complex phenomenon that demographic change is. If policy choices were made with this kind of information and approach, I am doubly sure that we cannot address the issue of population growth or any other social issue for that matter.

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Book: Anthropology and institutional economics

Editor: James M. Acheson

This volume is one of the rare collection of papers I found looking at Anthropology and institutional economics. Surprisingly, though the two have a large scope for collaboration, there is very little work happening between these two disciplines, to my knowledge. This volume provides a useful introduction. The book starts with an introduction about Anthropology and Institutional economics by James Acheson. This is followed by an essay on New Institutionalism by Robert Bates. The best part of the book is made up of case studies divided into three sections (1) Transactions cost, individual decisions & econoimc performance (2) Institutions and the state (3) Institutions and credit. Finally there is a section on theoretical issues concerning institutional economics. The book is an outcome of a meeting of society for economic anthropology at UC Irvine. The volume provides a strong flavour of how the two disciplines can collaborate. Among these, I especially liked, “Individual choice and institutional constraints: the new organization of health care in USA” by Melissa Rehfus and Christiana Gladwin. While most articles are informative, they left somethnig wanting in how things are theorised.

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In this very entertaining talk, Ha Joon Chang argues against mainstream trade theories. He argues that most of the success stories, including the USA followed practices that are rejected by the current trade theories and that those who followed the policies have actually not done well. Ha Joon Chang argues this from an institutional perspective and makes a case for “infant industry argument”. While these arguments themselves are not too new, he brings in a lot of historical information that were new to me and gave me many “ah ha” moments. This entertaining and passionate talk is also delivered with a good sense of humour. It’s a great watch.

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Someone who has an interest in understanding the role of institutions in development, or institutional change will find it difficult to go about the task by ‘decoding’ the rules of the game and analysing them. The sheer mass of rules in any society will be overwhelming and will not be amenable to such analysis. Even that would be of limited help in understanding on how they operate. A more profitable approach would be to look at formative influences of institutions that are likely to have widespread influence. In this post, I look at some essential constitutive influences.

Nature of collective

Institutions are tools to regulate a collective towards collectively chosen ideals. Such a collective could be a caste, class, race, club, nation, economy, religion, etc. Many such groups will of course overlap across each other. Understanding the nature of the collective, their constituents, their goals, the nature of inequalities, and other sociological understandings will be crucial to understanding institutions and change. For example, a lot has been said about institutional change in the West, especially in England since 1600s (constitutional government, etc.). These institutional changes are best understood by looking at various groups within and the power struggle between them. Understanding English society at that point will help us understand how institutions broadly evolved during civil war with lasting impact over centuries.

Collective aspirations & goals

Plato famously suggested a city with a philosopher king, a community of wives and other institutions. His suggestions cannot be understood without looking at the goal that the collective was supposed to pursue – moral perfection. His institutions will make no sense seen from the current preoccupation of institutional economists with growth. Similarly, institutional prescriptions from the perspective of growth will not make perfect sense if ‘development’ were the preferred goal. The nature of goals and priorities will have a significant impact on how institutions are designed, and this of course is related to the nature of society and whose voices matter.

Understanding of human behaviour

Since institutions are supposed to regulate human behaviour towards attaining certain collective goals, there is always some understanding of human behaviour that goes into constituting institutions. These conceptions can be thin or thick, one-dimensional or multifaceted, etc. These are at times captured by ideas such as state of nature, homo economicus, Marxian conception of class struggle, etc. Understanding conceptions of human behaviour held by various groups at the time & place of our interest can yield rich insights into what institutions are valued and what changes are sought. Those of us interested in institutional change have to go beyond our preferred conceptions and make an effort to understand what went on in the societies that one is interested in.

Conceptions of justice

For an idea to become an institution, it is important that it is accepted widely. This is more likely to happen and is likely to sustain only when such institutions are widely accepted to be just. Notions of justice are constructed and are prone to change, especially when they are taken up widely by social movements. Understanding how justice is articulated and how it is challenged will help us relate to institutions and anticipate institutional change in a society.

Techniques of control

Not all institutions are sustained because they are widely accepted. Many are sustained by the use of force. Even if rules enjoying widespread legitimacy (e.g. rule stipulating that one should not steal) have to be enforced, it requires a system of control. These systems of control and who handles them can provide rich insights into what rules can be enforced. During my fieldwork, it was clear that the severity of social controls over people, especially from the lower castes, had gone down in Tamil Nadu over the last few decades. This has a remarkable impact on how caste rules can be enforced – and thus on the freedoms of these people. The techniques of control come in rich varieties including urban design, social practices, software, databases, military technology, etc. In her memorable book, Death and life of great American cities, Jane Jacobs writes about how a system of community surveillance happens when people sit in porches or when there’s traffic all the time – and how this was destroyed by “tower-and-park” design and single purpose neighbourhoods. There are many fascinating accounts on this subject by Michael Foucault, James Scott, Jane Jacobs and many others. Unfortunately, these remain outside the pale of institutional economics or other fields that relate institutions and development.

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Book: Development as Freedom

Author: Amartya Sen

This is a world of unprecedented opulence, which coexists with remarkable deprivations. Overcoming these deprivations is central to development. Sen argues that individual agency is key to addressing these deprivations, but it should be recognised that agency is constrained by social, political and economic opportunities. Sen argues for “integrated analysis of economic, political and social activities involving a variety of institutions and many interactive agencies”. In my opinion Amartya Sen offers the most sophisticated view of institutions and their relevance for development; Development as freedom is the culmination of many decades of his work.

Evaluating development

Sen argues that ‘growth’ or ‘income’ focussed assessments of development are limited and do not give us a full understanding of what is happening. For example, he points out that though African-American men in USA tend to have higher incomes than poor people of Kerala, China or other parts of the world, they have a significantly less life expectancy. If we concentrate only on incomes, we would make an unqualified judgement that the African-American man is better off than the poor person. Increasing the ‘informational base’ of our judgements will enable us to have a fuller view of development – and he argues that looking at development as freedom provides us with a much better informational base than contending theories of development.

Instrumental and intrinsic importance of freedoms

Freedoms from hunger, illiteracy, etc. are valuable ends in themselves (and are intrinsically important) and these freedoms enable people to pursue (instrumental importance) other things that are valuable to them. In this approach ‘individual agency’ is central to promoting development, but our understanding of agency is conscious of the institutional context.

Sen, institutions & development

In my view, Sen’s most important contribution to institutions & development lies in his conception of individual agency as central to development. Individual agency is situated in the institutional framework – and thus institutions have a bearing on what freedom people have, and what how they are able to pursue other freedoms. For example, he points out that slavery and bonded labour are noting but an unfreedom on the part of these people to access the market institutions for their labour (here the institution of labour market is evaluated by the fact that it does not allow certain people to participate). To take another example, Sen points out that no country with democratic institutions and free media has ever had a substantial famine. In other words, the freedom to participate in governance through democratic institutions ensures that people can get their governments to respond to an urgent need.

Sen’s portrayal of development enables us to evaluate institutions firstly by looking at how free they are to access for different social groups, and secondly by seeing what freedoms these institutions promote. In shifting from development as growth to development as freedoms, Sen changed the fundamentals of decades of work in institutional economics that have solely focussed on the role of institutions in promoting growth.

No institution has a bearing solely on growth. In the last few decades when economists championed certain institutions, they did so by focusing on growth, completely ignoring what impact these institutions may have on other aspects of development. This is one reason why there have been such strong protests against the so-called reforms, even when they were well-intentioned. If the role of institutions in development is reconceptualised taking into account a broader view of development, I am certain that ID will be able to make major advances in the times to come.

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Any course on the role of institutions in development has to cross disciplinary barriers. Since most social sciences have something to say on this topic, there are a lot of resources to borrow from. This page presents a collection of syllabi from different universities that can inform syllabus design on institutions and development. This is an expansive list for exploratory purposes. A concise list with my ideal syllabus will be developed elsewhere.

Institutions, policies & development

This course combines development theories and institutional theories and offers a broad selection of topics on institutions and development. When I reviewed courses in 2008, this was one of the most broadly defined course, something that I strongly recommend.

Course blurb: ‘The quality of institutions’ is now said to exercise a crucial influence on the prospects for development, and this course aims both to interrogate this claim through analysis of different paths of economic growth and change across the developing world, and in regard to public administration and development management. The course examines development policies and institutional theories, the politics of institutions and state formation, and the relationships between political systems, institutions and patterns of development. Topics to be covered are: Arguments About Development: the Washington Consensus and After; Stories about Economic Growth; Ideas about Institutions; Institutions and Economic Development; Politics and Institutions; State-Building and Public Management; Democratisation; Democracy and Development; Decentralisation; Social Capital, Democracy and Development; States and Development: Case Studies.
Link: http://www.sfu.ca/internationalstudies/id_outlines.html

Field exam readings on political science

Department of political science, Yale University has posted the required readings for field exams in political science. These reading lists are well organised and comprehensive. Since they have a good selection of canonical readings on many important topics they offer an excellent starting point on political institutions. The lists cover political economy, philosophy, democratic theories, comparative politics and other topics.

Link: http://www.yale.edu/polisci/grad/readings.html

Institutional economics

Courses on institutional economics emphasise on different issues like institutional change and economic performance, economic history, game theory, transaction costs, organisational behaviour, international development, political economy, etc. A good collection of courses is available here.

Collective action

In my opinion collective action is the most important driver of institutional change. Collective action and social movement theories draw from many social science disciplines and so offer a rich perspective. Further, a lot of multimedia resources are available that can be used in teaching, which should make the course interesting for students. I recommend the syllabus by John Burdick for a quick introduction to collective action theories. The readings are easily accessible and cover many perspectives.

Course blurb: Drawing from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, and other disciplines, this course will help you understand why, when and how collective action for social change occurs. The course will place a special emphasis on how collective action is generated by and reshapes culture at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. A key part of the course is participation in an activist campaign role-play that develops over the course of two months.

Social choice and welfare

Institutions are fundamentally about social choice and collective goals. Amartya Sen has made seminal contributions to issues of social choice. A course he offers with Foster at Harvard University offers an excellent introduction to basic issues in social choice.

Course blurb: A basic course in social choice theory, its intellectual foundations, and its applications, particularly in welfare economics

Link: http://www.isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k40139&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup61561

Sociological theories

Ideas of social theorists like Weber, Marx, Durkheim and Foucault have shaped thinking about institutions pervasively. It is impossible to escape their ideas. This course by Jackie Orr provides an introduction to social theorists who have shaped ideas in social sciences fundamentally. Unfortunately, the course does not cover theorists like Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and a few others who have been highly influential in ideas about institutions.

Course blurb: This course is both an advanced introduction to the animating concepts and questions in sociological theory, and an intellectual history that situates theories of society within concrete political, cultural, and economic contexts. Both these aims constitute impossible tasks for a single semester’s syllabus. So this course is a necessarily selective and incomplete attempt to be broad-ranging and comprehensive. Our focus is primarily limited to the works of European and North American authors over the last 150 years. Questions we will bring to the readings include: What role do ‘science’ and ‘objectivity’ play in the theoretical imagination of sociologists? What theoretical stories are told about the relations between individual bodies/experiences, and broader social structures or forces? How is power theorized? How does the theory address (or ignore) gender, racial/ethnic, class, sexual, or national differences? How are such differences theorized in relation to structures of power or the production of knowledge? What are the epistemological assumptions of the theory: what gets to count as ‘real,’ ‘true’ or ‘valuable’ knowledge, and why? What aspects of the social world does the theory make central and visible, and what aspects does it exclude, erase or render invisible? Finally, how can contact with this intellectual history usefully influence our own practices of research and sociological storytelling? And how do we begin to name the political and economic, cultural and historical, biographical and embodied contexts shaping our own theoretical desires?

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Economists have done numerous studies trying to relate the institutions of a country to economic growth there. This has been used to argue that institutional quality of a country matters for its growth. Is a country the relevant unit of analysis? Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the world should be taken as one system. Interestingly a spate of recent works by mainstream economists begs us to take this approach seriously.

Colonial impact on institutional set up

A series of recent works in institutional economics have looked at the colonial impact on institutional formation. Based on a dataset of mortality of European soldiers in colonies during 1842-57, these studies point out that there’s a strong correspondence between soldier mortality and growth rates of these economies. The low mortality countries have grown rapidly and the high mortality countries have grown slowly. Following this, they have argued that where colonisers were safe, they set up “good institutions” and where they were dying rapidly, they set up extractive institutions that were not conducive to long term growth.

What is implicit in this argument is that colonial powers were able to form institutions in these countries successfully and without any reference to local context (society, politics, etc.). It is also implicit in this argument that these institutions were put in place for the benefit of the colonisers. The term “extractive” is transparent. But even where “good institutions” were put in place, the argument is that it would enable the colonisers to extract more from the colonies over a long time if these countries were enabled to produce more. These two arguments are essential for the conceptual infrastructure of the studies that looked at the role of soldier mortality.

If colonisers put certain institutions in place in these countries for the benefit of imperial nations, should we not understand the growth of imperial nations by institutions elsewhere as well? In other words, can we understand British growth by looking at institutions within Britain alone? Should not the institutional structure put in place by the British in India and its other colonies be assessed to understand British growth? This is what Wallerstein would argue in his World Systems Approach.

World as Core & Periphery

The world systems theory argues that we should look at world as a system, divided into Core and Periphery. The world has an unequal institutional structure designed in a way that it transfers wealth from the Periphery to the Core. The notion of “extraction” by institutional economists fits squarely into this theory.

The relevance of this distinction can be question by some in the post colonial world. By and large, most of us will agree that the institutional structure today continues to be unequal and this is maintained with military and political strategies (putting puppet regimes in place, restricting the scope of redistributive policies within countries, bribing political elite & supporting their power etc.). While I subscribe to the importance of unequal international relations in understanding economic performance of nations, I feel that it would be a mistake to see them solely from this lens.

Categories & Understanding

Categorising are indispensible in social theories given that comparisons are central to our reasoning. The process of categorising has enormous implications for analysis. For example, merely dividing the world as Core/Periphery structures our understanding of the world and of institutions therein. Dividing the world in terms of nations effectively enables us to ignore the role of imperialism (I do not think that it precludes such analysis, but it does enable us to ignore imperialism and this has been done extensively even by those who have used the soldier mortality argument). All too often in the social sciences, arguments are about which view should be chosen at the expense of others. In my opinion, no categorisation can capture all aspects of reality. A good social scientist will look at the world from different perspectives. While adopting different perspectives increases our understanding, it has an inherent quality of making our understanding and analysis unsure. Such uncertainty undermines the authority of an analysis. In the academia that thrives on a show of authority, there is every incentive to sound sure and be wrong rather than sound unsure and be better informed. It is only likely that the practice of seeing the world in singular perspectives will continue for a while to come.

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Concepts like social cohesion and trust have been central to the study of institutions in politics and in economics. It has been argued widely that a society that is more cohesive (or where people tend to trust each other) tends to perform better. This argument has been used in explaining economic growth, political stability, industrial productivity, functioning of markets, among other things. I subscribe to the idea that widespread trust or forms of social cohesion are important both for its own sake and to enable us to pursue our goals. But I have been troubled by a dominant idea that people sharing different identities cannot coexist peacefully or trust another.

Elegant statistical estimates have been made to prove this point. A series of papers used the construct “ethno-linguistic fractionalisation” (the probability that any two randomly picked individuals in a society will share the same language and ethnicity) to establish that “cohesive” societies (i.e. where this probability is high) tend to have higher economic growth. Abhijeet Banerjee et al wrote about the role of caste in preventing collective action and as a result fractionalised regions in India tend to have a lower incidence of public goods. These studies have their point, but they have deeply entrenched problems as well.

Frozen identities

My objection to these studies stems from two concerns. One, they select a narrow set of identities (caste, language, ethnicity) and freeze them forever. This ends with a dire result that societies are either cohesive or not and those that are not cohesive are doomed forever. An implication of this view is that societies can escape this predicament only with drastic measures such as purging certain identities or dividing communities into separate nations. These terrible routes have been taken as recourses resulting in form of ethnic cleansing, aggressive Hindu nationalism, and division of nations (as Joe Biden is reputed to have recommended for Iraq). Secondly, this formulation assumes that any difference is conflict and conflict exists in a binary form (i.e. it exists or it does not). In my view, this is a gross and a costly distortion of reality.

Differences need not be conflicts, and conflicts need not be frozen in their intensity. When I read sociological accounts of caste, I did not understand this point well. Many sociologists argued that caste system and differences based on caste existed well before the British rule, but colonisation ossified this and made the differences rigid. Seeing the conflict in Iraq I see how this could have happened.

Many Iraqi intellectuals have argued that sharp differences did not exist among people of various identities (Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, et al) before the invasion. Cordial relationships between the groups existed and sectarian warfare was not heard of. Following colonisation and “de-Bathification” a power vacuum was created intensifying conflicts to capture power. Proliferation of weapons and calculated murders to intensify conflicts has become the order of the day. American response in the form of separating populations (best exemplified by the Bagdad wall) and arming tens of thousands of local militias will now solidify these identities and separate people so much that hatred and mistrust are only bound to develop. These are beautifully captured in a 30 minute documentary called “The other side of surge” (Part 1) (part 2).

At one point the narrator interviews a father grieving over his son’s grave and says, this murder represents everything that has gone wrong in Iraq. The boy, a sunni had gone to meet his best friend who was a shia. When they were having a friendly chat a shia militia caught them. His friend was left alive since he was a shia and he was shot dead. It represents too a reason why we should not capture the fate of societies with simple ossified indices.

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