Prized competition
Competition – embraced by biologists and economists alike – is the fundamental building block of efficient societies. From the days of Darwin to those of Friedman, rational men and women knew the basic fact that one cannot drive complex systems with simple prescriptive rules and forecasts. For many decades now, those seeking better societies by decree have been pursuing designs, construed and implemented by a few for the apparent benefit of all. However, prescription almost always resulted in a decline in innovation, advancement and aggregate wealth. Yes, it is true that the alleviation of pain is vastly superior to incremental wealth to the comfortable, and such an asymmetry should favor policies in this direction. However, this is not sustainable in the long run and the challenge is to design policies where individual and group incentives are well aligned with societal utility in the long run.
It is in this context that one should analyze polices from the macro – where aids are given out to the regimes guided by those who apparently did not know they were autocrats for over three decades in power to those who have split personalities on either side of the mountain. For some, it has resulted in pain and dislocation of significant proportions and for others, these policies have held them prisoners to competing ideologies who take no prisoners. As some lock up minerals in underdeveloped lands for strategic reasons and others send up rockets to well known destinations to boost its own sinking ego and yet others fight one war in the daytime and another after sunset, one has to wonder how competition will change it all. In the land of the plenty, a young president with visions of the future, has been running well trodden paths – doling out resources to those who raise their hands with no results to show. His proximity to the centers of education, where competition was clearly shown to be the undisputable mechanism to improved productivity, hasn't had much effect. It is important to use competition as the guiding principle in policy making.
Thus, it is time to terminate grants and handouts and convert all such awards by governmental and non-governmental agencies to prizes set forth for solving tangible problems. From the recently concluded prize for discovering a measurement mechanism for the progression of the disease - ALS, to reaching the space economically by private crafts, the prize of competition has shown to be vastly superior to handouts. This is a tough message as most of the economy is now conditioned to expect forced nourishment in the false belief that such policies are civil. As these policies are concocted by the generation of the past – unable to cope with the accelerating pace of global integration and knowledge - one has to wonder if the governance systems of the last century are appropriate for the present. In the centers of high democracy from the biggest country in the West, the largest population in the East, many small ones in the middle and those who do not care for it, policies have become stale and unimaginative as they are made by those who should have taken themselves out of the reckoning many decades ago. On the face of exponential changes in technology, one has to question the norms for age restrictions for the voting public and the lack of it in elected officials.
It is important that the relevant generation leads and makes policies in the present. It is equally important that the fundamental building block of policy making and resource allocation is competition and not handouts.
