PhD In Common Sense

Amit, in a thought-provoking post, worries about secular-right parties not resonating with Indians.

Today, politics throughout the country, especially in the heartland, is fought on the basis of identity, mostly caste. Ideas don't matter -- and even when they do, classical liberal ideas are deeply unintuitive. For example, if prices rise beyond what a poor man can afford, it is natural for him to believe that it is in his interest for price controls to be imposed, and for goods to be cheap enough for him to afford. When he sees the inequality in society, and rich men living in large houses with many cars, it is natural for him to believe that redistribution is just and will solve these inequalities. It is natural for him to welcome a move to give him free rice, and if he is a farmer, free electricity.

Most people are poor, of course, and ill-educated. The easy way out for politicians is to steer clear of economics, which they may not understand anyway, and stick to the things that win them votes.

At one level, this is true and daunting. We think the glass is more than half-full however.

Education, while obviously very important, is hardly a determinant for people seeing reason. Heck, even Pol Pot had emerged from Sorbonne.

This very-privileged blogger, even in his Ayn Rand spouting 20s, carried a lot of leftist baggage from all the years of Indian learning. Then, life happened and there's no cold shower more sobering than life herself. There is no way to describe the astonishment as layers upon layers of foolish thought were washed away.

Indians may not all have Ivy League credentials but they understand life. They are all micro-capitalists in their own lives -- they save, they bargain, they invest, they harvest, they buy, they sell, they barter, they protect their interests, they think about the future. This is India's vital, right-leaning, soil where the left has no business surviving. That they have is a mark of our failure -- something we must now correct. This is no time for lament, but one for fierce determination.

At B-school, we read about an economist visiting a Boston slum and asking a poor, single mom if the government should take away the riches of the more privileged and give them to her. She said no because, in her soul, she knew her son would grow up wealthy one day and she wouldn't want anybody to take away her son's hard-earned future wealth.

She hadn't been to Harvard and thank heavens for that because there she likely would have taken a tragic turn left. Instead, she'd earned her PhD in common sense from the school of life.

Why do we assume Indians aren't similarly sensible? Perhaps we haven't even tried engaging them out of our own fear of failure. We need to stop worrying about "educating" them on economics; instead, we need to start talking to them as our intellectual equals.