Ant and Grasshopper Part II:
The other version of the story..
The story in the previous post goes on till the grasshopper makes mistakes and pays for it. Then what happens?
Ants in their next season start to work hard and accumulate more wealth. They now have the capital and thrive with a combination of hard work and capital. The capital helps them to grow on a larger scale and perform only the smarter tasks. With in few generations, they become affluent group in the society. In the mean while, the grasshoppers suffer for all the mistakes committed by their forefathers. The ants get high quality education and get to do high value work. They employ the grasshoppers to serve them and work in their fields or at home. As more time passes by, the grasshoppers were made to believe that they were always inferior to ants and their primary duty is to serve the ants and get good name from them. The ants teach their children about new things and they frequently come in contact with other societies and update their skills. Ants are now a greatly networked society and they get guidance and help from other affluent ants. Ants shape their own life and dream big. Consider even a poor ant which does not have the kind of money that his fellow ants have. This ant’s kid’s role model is her uncle’s close friend’s brother (another ant) who is highly educated, has great deal of knowledge, has great reputation, earns lot of money and has travelled to different places and countries. The kid ant dreams of becoming like him and move forward. However the grasshopper does not even know of any one who he can aspire to become. Sad part is that he doesn’t know that he needs to dream**. All he hears from his community is about his great grandfather who worked very hard in the fields and won the appreciation of his employer ants. At the best, he aims to become like his grandfather and to serve his masters (the ants) better.
After many generations forward, few of noble ants realize the inequality among the ants and grasshoppers (notice that it takes an ant to realize that there is inequality). They undertake the social cause and try to improve the standard of grasshopper’s life. These affluent ants initiate social change and provide education to the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers that are now enrolled to school find it extremely difficult to learn. After all, with 20 generations of doing coolie work, their brain cells have stopped developing and this has passed through genes across generations. They are not able to cope up to the requirements of learning and are not able to compete with the ants. Seeing this, the altruistic ants proposed reservation for grasshoppers. The reservation process kicks of well and around 5-10% of the grasshoppers get benefited. In couple of generations, these 5-10% grasshoppers are out of ignorance, have a great standing in the society and are out of their community. They see new world, network with ants and see no differences between them and ants. But they still enjoy reservation in the system. These grasshoppers exploit the reservation system and take it for granted. They successfully prevent the other 90% grasshoppers from getting higher education. They also take strong political positions and try to keep their reservation status.
The majority of ants see reservation as injustice and find their way out of the country. Be it poor or rich, the ant community is well informed and find opportunities abroad and leave to freedom land. They scorn the government policies and vow not to come back. However, the 90% grasshoppers have no way leaving the country or finding new opportunities. They still remain ignorant without knowing their purpose of existence.

** - Acknowledgement of contribution from Srinath Rajaram, my friend at ISB who made me realize that underprivileged people do not know how to dream.

Ant & Grasshopper:
Below is one of the interesting forwards I got from a friend at ISB. It is true no doubt and one of the prime reasons why any socialist or communist country failed in the modern times. However, I am planning to another version of the same truth soon.... Watch out for that post also....

The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold. Modern Version
The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering Grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to a video of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the Ant's house. Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other Grasshoppers demanding that Grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter. Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticizes the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the Grasshopper. The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the Grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance). Opposition MPs stage a walkout. Left parties call for "Bharat Bandh" in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among Ants and Grasshoppers. Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath '. Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the ' Prevention of Terrorism against Grasshoppers Act' [POTAGA], with effect from the beginning of the winter. Arjun Singh makes 'Special Reservation ' for Grasshoppers in Educational Institutions & in Government Services. The Ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, it's home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the Grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV. Arundhati Roy calls it ' A Triumph of Justice'. Lalu calls it 'Socialistic Justice '. CPM calls it the ' Revolutionary Resurgence of the Downtrodden ' Koffi Annan invites the Grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly. Many years later... The Ant has since migrated to the US and set up a multi-billion dollar company in Silicon Valley. 100s of Grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India ... As a result of loosing lot of hard working Ants and feeding the Grasshoppers, India is still a developing country!!!

Progression of Human life: How far can that go?

Around the third term at ISB, I got fed up hearing about, ‘India is growing growing n growing’ almost every day. I was honestly not sure of what this growth translated into or what it is supposed to do since we are pursuing it very actively. The biggest question now become, ‘what does growth or development mean?’ Does it mean we become more intelligent and life becomes convenient? Another way of saying this is, we become more loaded with information and need to stretch a lot (urban life) or we become lazy.
Since there was always the other side of the growth, I began to wonder what it means in plain terms. Luckily, there comes Shiva Kumar to teach GSBC who defined growth from the eyes of the citizens of the world and showed the millennium goals. This made sense. They need to have economic freedom, access to health care, proper sanitation, basic education, equal rights etc. He said giving all human being the choice or the opportunity is termed as human development.
We all started as farmers, became industrial workers (remember Chaplin’s ‘Modern times?’) and now knowledge workers. The goal of this knowledge revolution is based on removing information asymmetry and providing everyone (at least a large fraction of them) access to all knowledge in the world. Though IT has changed our lives for ever, we can still see that there is great deal of penetration that is still required. Do I have the expert system that can respond with accurate information that I need to build my career path? How many times, we use the combination of Google, research databases and despair that we do not precisely get the information we need. Does RFID create the most perfect supply chain? Still information gaps exist in large scale. Information is either in people’s minds or becomes too difficult to track. Long way to go! As we moved along, division of labour became the key. When more people are empowered with knowledge, generalists are hard to survive. In future, even companies may have to specialize and even CEO of these companies may need to be some kind of specialist (these trends have started appearing in technology industry).
Assuming we reach a stage, where there is perfect information in the world, perfect organic solidarity in terms of division of labour, and all millennium goals have been achieved, what next?

I am trying hard to predict the next wave of human progress or growth. But unfortunately nothing comes to my mind. Couple of things that lingers in my mind: This ultra-modern man will be very sophisticated at the same time tied up to machines (Am I cynical here?). We did not remain as farmers. We moved ahead and became industrial labourers, managers, scientists and innovators. So I guess there will be new roles created for man when the appropriate time arrives. I wish I foresee the future man.

Coordination failure: I keep hearing that markets to fail at least sometimes the biggest one so far seem to be the global warming and pollution effects on the earth.

There have been two schools of thought one that says that humans can self-regulate themselves provided they are trained and educated and the other which asserts that Humans basically can never be trusted. Hence the society needs strong institutions to sustain itself.

This is a story from one of my friend studying in a premier B-school in US. They had a situation that showcased that strong institutions are needed even in places of highest form of elitists and coordination failures are set to occur when there is information asymmetry in an unregulated market. They seemed to have a take home exam for one of their courses. They were given one week time to complete the exam but the exam should be taken in a continuous stretch of two hours (without break). The course participant is not supposed to see the question paper before he begins his 2-hrs exam. No one will monitor the person taking the exam. It was agreed that the students should not disclose or discuss the questions with each other.

Before the exam was distributed, the professor proved using game theory matrix that cheating in the exam was the dominant strategy for a student irrespective of whether other students cheat or not. Hence a self-utility maximizing rational being will always need to cheat. But he trusted everyone and expected us to prove that institutional control is unnecessary and that every one acting responsibly will produce a collective gain.

But what happened? Coordination failure.

After the papers were evaluated, the class average was abnormally high for such a tough paper. My friend said that the evaluation was lenient. For the few people who got marks way less than average, the professor called them and had asked them to rewrite the exam and awarded them grace marks to pull them closer to average. It was a nice gesture (face saving?) to save the people who honestly followed his instructions.
My guess is that the Prof is authoring some paper on institutions and society and who knows if he is going to use this experiment to support his point! After hearing this from my friend, I have started believing that when the incentive systems are not fair, don’t expect individuals to be fair. If at all people behave different from this thesis, it can be because they were ingrained with these beliefs by their culture or schools or parents or due to the environment they grew up in. Not because of their (Human) Nature? I don’t know.