What do the last three years say about us? IRRATIONAL CHOICE
Contrary to what the headline suggests, this is not another column assessing the three years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. It is about us, our ability to judge a government that is obviously completely different from what we have seen or imagined so far. And that makes any three-year assessment perilous. We tend to forget our errors of judgement (the UP elections), mistakes in prediction (demonetisation), and our wide of-the-mark comments about the moves of a determined, secretive, and energetic government whose actions are hard to fathom from the outside. Our mind plays tricks. The flurry of assessments about the three years of the “Modi government” may be making the same mistake again.
Charlie Munger, the famous partner of Warren Buffett, gave a commencement speech at Harvard Law School exactly 22 years ago called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgement”. That speech is an important read for serious investors. But it is a wonderful blueprint to refer to about our dayto-day follies, including the most obvious one — an itch to predict things we don’t know much about. Munger has listed 25 “tendencies” that lead to errors. They include excessive selfregard, over-optimism, social proof, influence from mere association, pain avoidance, doubt avoidance, jumping to conclusions, and so on. These are wellknown and obvious. But Munger has talked about another interesting tendency that is lesser-known and may be fruitfully applied to us in our attempts to decipher the Modi’s government’s next moves.
Munger calls this the “Twaddle Tendency”. Several years after his Harvard speech, he explained the idea in a detailed note as follows: “Man, as a social animal who has the gift of language, is born to prattle and to pour out twaddle that does much damage when serious work is being attempted.” He then goes on to describe an experiment conducted by the famous psychologist BF Skinner on honeybees. A honeybee normally goes out and finds nectar and then comes back and does a dance that tells the other bees where the nectar is. The other bees then go out and get the honey. Skinner decided to find out what a honeybee would do with a handicap. According to Munger, Skinner “put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar a long way straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what she now has to communicate. You might guess that this honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but she doesn’t. She comes into the hive and does an incoherent dance. Well, all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee”. Are we acting like the incoherent honeybee while assessing the Modi government?
More interesting is what Munger goes on to write next. “And it’s a very important part of wise administration to keep prattling people, pouring out twaddle, far away from the serious work. A rightly famous Caltech engineering professor, exhibiting more insight than tact, once expressed his version of this idea as follows: The principal job of an academic administration is to keep the people who don’t matter from interfering with the work of the people that do.” I don’t know whether the Modi government knows about the Twaddle tendency but it certainly acts as if we are suffering from it. Unlike the Caltech professor, the Modi government is tactful; it does not say anything openly. But it certainly acts as though the many opinions about its regime are twaddle, while it is focused on remaking India.
Modi, his ministers, and party leaders appear to “keep the people who don’t matter” from interfering in the work of “the people that do”. That includes the media, the opposition, and domain experts. Communication is one-way, selective and on a needto-know basis. Why, even the cabinet ministers, we hear, don’t know about some of the important moves while the Reserve Bank of India seems to be kept out of decisions regarding banking.
Remember also that the government has made no attempt to explain the brazen U-turns on issues ranging from the Aadhaar, to expanding rural job creation schemes, to “minimum government”. It is silent on its economic ideology while pushing for a pragmatic form of socialism — even as commentators label the government right-wing. Even when it is clear that the government has made a horrendous blunder (such as demonetisation), an unknown set of factors have fortuitously come to its rescue, making a hash of sensible comments. Modi and Amit Shah have a kind of energy and courage that we have never seen before. Their ability to keep things secret is equally amazing. Against this backdrop, writing up millions of words or opinions on what the government has achieved or failed to achieve says more about us than about the government.