5 ms·

>You can't blame the government Of course you can. And you should. This is all about terrible - and in many cases non-existent- governance. Widespread public p

>You can't blame the government Of course you can. And you should. This is all about terrible - and in many cases non-existent- governance. Widespread public problems this this cannot be solved by individual citizens or organizations. They need the power, money and resources of a government. > the country is so populated that it is extremely hard to make this drastic of an imposition and follow through with it. Population is oft quoted as the root cause of most problems in India. Perhaps it is. But population certainly doesn't explain why these problems don't get addressed or get the attention they deserve. That again is because the government of India does not effectively govern and manage the country. Elected officials rule over their subjects via institutions and political systems whose goals are more aligned with keeping them in power than the welfare of citizens. They lack a fundamental understanding that their job as an elected official is to govern and address issues of their citizens. Problems like this can only be resolved with effective governance from which springs awareness, policies, infrastructure, funding and programs. But what happens when the people governing simply don’t care for their people?

derleth 13y ago
> Widespread public problems this this cannot be solved by individual citizens or organizations. They need the power, money and resources of a government. More to the point, they need an entity that is both powerful enough to force change and not bound by the same incentives that the polluting companies are. It's down to a Nash equilibrium, which is the stable strategy that obtains when everyone makes the best decision possible for them knowing what everyone else has decided. There's no way for anyone to unilaterally change their minds without losing something, which is why the strategy is stable even if it is completely insane. In this case, the stable strategy is to pollute and not invest anything in cleanup, because the first company to unilaterally invest in cleaning up will lose profits relative to all of its competitors who aren't cleaning anything. That isn't acceptable. Therefore, Mumbai has brown oceans and Beijing has brown air. The only way out is for some powerful entity that isn't bound by the same Nash equilibrium to step in and force a new equilibrium state by imposing penalties on the polluters. That's something that, realistically, only the government can do. (What happens when governments get locked in a bad Nash equilibrium? Well, you get the Cold War, where Mutually Assured Destruction prevailed despite nobody really wanting to end the world in nuclear flame.)
- sakbhatn 13y ago
  What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? Neither can the government be blamed entirely nor can people just wash their hands off saying we are not powerful enough.In a city like Mumbai there is a wide diversity of income classes. There are people who see open defecation everyday on their way to work but they do nothing about it. The least they can do is go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad and how they should avoid it. It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. It is not just the slums that are suffering, diseases can be easily caught by anyone else who does use proper toilets and sanitation.
  - Heliosmaster 13y ago
    True only if the masses care. And (worldwide) they don't (otherwise there would be ~99% participation in voting, and so on)
  - zizee 13y ago
    > go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad The people in the slums probably know that it is bad, but the facilities available to them are so shit-house (literally and figuratively) that they choose to defecate onto the ground.
  - derleth 13y ago
    > What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? An entity that isn't tempted to defect from a boycott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom > Milgrom, together with Barry Weingast and Avner Greif, applied a repeated game model to explain the role of merchant guilds in the medieval period (Greif, Milgrom and Weingast, 1994). The paper beings with the observation that long-distance trade in the somewhat chaotic environment of the Middle Ages exposed traveling merchants to the risk of attack, confiscation of goods and unenforced agreements. Merchants thus required the assistance of local rulers for protection of person, property and contract. But what reason did rulers have to provide this assistance? A key insight from the paper is that neither bilateral nor multilateral reputation mechanisms can support the incentives of a ruler to protect foreign merchants as trade reaches an efficient level. The reason is that at the efficient level the marginal value of losing the trade of a single or even a subset of merchants—in their attempt to punish a defaulting ruler—approaches zero. The threat is, thus, insufficient to deter a ruler from confiscating goods or to encourage their expenditure of resources or political capital to defend foreign merchants against local citizens. Effective punishment that will deter rulers' bad behavior requires more extensive coordination of effectively all the merchants who provide value for the ruler. The question then becomes, what incentives do the merchants have to participate in the collective boycott? Here is the role for the Merchant Guild, an organization that has the power to punish its own members for failure to abide by a boycott announced by the guild. The parallels between this scenario and the one we're talking about are obvious: Any company big enough to cause serious damage by its pollution is not going to be harmed by a boycott unless nearly everyone in India participates, but the value gained from defecting (in game-theoretic terms) from the boycott is too large for that to happen. So, instead of forming a guild to punish defection, which just increases the misery in the world, we institute government agencies to punish polluters directly instead of trying to use boycotts to punish them. Say what you will about the morality of such a system, I can go outside today and see green grass, clear skies, and breathe the air without damaging my lungs. > It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. Except in this case, this do-it-yourself strategy has been demonstrated to not work.
justastat 13y ago
The government in a developing country like India is responsible for this, but they can't help it, unless they make it a national focus, followed by their vote bank. In reality, this problem is so widespread that the government needs a truly non-trivial amount of money to fix this, over an extended period of time. No democratic government in India can afford to fix this. This is the reason why people in the third world hate poverty, and would do anything (like 'jugaar'[1]) to get out of that mess. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
You don't want too much Government in that department. But, it really is easy to fix by a simple Government regulation. Folks in Singapore used to litter a lot. Like really a lot. The place used to be extremely polluted too. So polluted and littered. We're talking about 1960s. At that time Singapore probably didn't look better than Mumbai looks today. Simple regulation: fine of $100 or more per each piece of paper you drop. Great income for the city, so hell yeah they would make sure to enforce it. And don't give me "cultural" differences stories because Singapore has rather large Indian population and they had to adjust to this too. How to get rid of pollution? Look at the UK. You know how Thatcher famously solved problem of pollution coming from big factories? She passed a law that said that the factory had to have its water input right below its waste water output. And factories need really clean water to operate and not waste water. In other words if the factory didn't invest in the top-of-the-line water treatment plant they could as well go out of business. Because waste water would enter the factory processing machines and probably brake them. You see, simple solutions work. Especially those that bring financial hardship on offenders. Hundres of buraucrats with their political agendas will just make matters worse.
- mailshanx 13y ago
  >> Simple regulation: fine of $100 or more per each piece of paper you drop While you are right about the fines imposed on Singaporean society, the Singapore government's policies had far wider scope and were coupled with efficient execution. The fines were augmented with large scale awareness campaigns. Even today, you can see posters in many different places in the city exhorting citizens to not litter. Garbage bin density is so high, that you can mostly find one within 10 minutes of wherever you are. Of course, the various awareness campaigns were part of a much larger nation building effort which include a conscription system (all males serve ~2 years in the army), a compulsory national savings system, policies to maximize home ownership, and so on. The Singapore bureaucracy itself quite a unique system in it's own right. The best students are awarded scholarships to study in Oxbridge, and they are expected to return and serve in the civil service. Considering all of this, i'm sure solving these problems entails good governance, and is certainly not a "simple" matter of imposing fines.
  - 13y ago

derleth 13y ago

> Widespread public problems this this cannot be solved by individual citizens or organizations. They need the power, money and resources of a government. More to the point, they need an entity that is both powerful enough to force change and not bound by the same incentives that the polluting companies are. It's down to a Nash equilibrium, which is the stable strategy that obtains when everyone makes the best decision possible for them knowing what everyone else has decided. There's no way for anyone to unilaterally change their minds without losing something, which is why the strategy is stable even if it is completely insane. In this case, the stable strategy is to pollute and not invest anything in cleanup, because the first company to unilaterally invest in cleaning up will lose profits relative to all of its competitors who aren't cleaning anything. That isn't acceptable. Therefore, Mumbai has brown oceans and Beijing has brown air. The only way out is for some powerful entity that isn't bound by the same Nash equilibrium to step in and force a new equilibrium state by imposing penalties on the polluters. That's something that, realistically, only the government can do. (What happens when governments get locked in a bad Nash equilibrium? Well, you get the Cold War, where Mutually Assured Destruction prevailed despite nobody really wanting to end the world in nuclear flame.)

sakbhatn 13y ago
What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? Neither can the government be blamed entirely nor can people just wash their hands off saying we are not powerful enough.In a city like Mumbai there is a wide diversity of income classes. There are people who see open defecation everyday on their way to work but they do nothing about it. The least they can do is go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad and how they should avoid it. It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. It is not just the slums that are suffering, diseases can be easily caught by anyone else who does use proper toilets and sanitation.
- Heliosmaster 13y ago
  True only if the masses care. And (worldwide) they don't (otherwise there would be ~99% participation in voting, and so on)
- zizee 13y ago
  > go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad The people in the slums probably know that it is bad, but the facilities available to them are so shit-house (literally and figuratively) that they choose to defecate onto the ground.
- derleth 13y ago
  > What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? An entity that isn't tempted to defect from a boycott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom > Milgrom, together with Barry Weingast and Avner Greif, applied a repeated game model to explain the role of merchant guilds in the medieval period (Greif, Milgrom and Weingast, 1994). The paper beings with the observation that long-distance trade in the somewhat chaotic environment of the Middle Ages exposed traveling merchants to the risk of attack, confiscation of goods and unenforced agreements. Merchants thus required the assistance of local rulers for protection of person, property and contract. But what reason did rulers have to provide this assistance? A key insight from the paper is that neither bilateral nor multilateral reputation mechanisms can support the incentives of a ruler to protect foreign merchants as trade reaches an efficient level. The reason is that at the efficient level the marginal value of losing the trade of a single or even a subset of merchants—in their attempt to punish a defaulting ruler—approaches zero. The threat is, thus, insufficient to deter a ruler from confiscating goods or to encourage their expenditure of resources or political capital to defend foreign merchants against local citizens. Effective punishment that will deter rulers' bad behavior requires more extensive coordination of effectively all the merchants who provide value for the ruler. The question then becomes, what incentives do the merchants have to participate in the collective boycott? Here is the role for the Merchant Guild, an organization that has the power to punish its own members for failure to abide by a boycott announced by the guild. The parallels between this scenario and the one we're talking about are obvious: Any company big enough to cause serious damage by its pollution is not going to be harmed by a boycott unless nearly everyone in India participates, but the value gained from defecting (in game-theoretic terms) from the boycott is too large for that to happen. So, instead of forming a guild to punish defection, which just increases the misery in the world, we institute government agencies to punish polluters directly instead of trying to use boycotts to punish them. Say what you will about the morality of such a system, I can go outside today and see green grass, clear skies, and breathe the air without damaging my lungs. > It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. Except in this case, this do-it-yourself strategy has been demonstrated to not work.

justastat 13y ago

The government in a developing country like India is responsible for this, but they can't help it, unless they make it a national focus, followed by their vote bank. In reality, this problem is so widespread that the government needs a truly non-trivial amount of money to fix this, over an extended period of time. No democratic government in India can afford to fix this. This is the reason why people in the third world hate poverty, and would do anything (like 'jugaar'[1]) to get out of that mess. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

LekkoscPiwa 13y ago

You don't want too much Government in that department. But, it really is easy to fix by a simple Government regulation. Folks in Singapore used to litter a lot. Like really a lot. The place used to be extremely polluted too. So polluted and littered. We're talking about 1960s. At that time Singapore probably didn't look better than Mumbai looks today. Simple regulation: fine of $100 or more per each piece of paper you drop. Great income for the city, so hell yeah they would make sure to enforce it. And don't give me "cultural" differences stories because Singapore has rather large Indian population and they had to adjust to this too. How to get rid of pollution? Look at the UK. You know how Thatcher famously solved problem of pollution coming from big factories? She passed a law that said that the factory had to have its water input right below its waste water output. And factories need really clean water to operate and not waste water. In other words if the factory didn't invest in the top-of-the-line water treatment plant they could as well go out of business. Because waste water would enter the factory processing machines and probably brake them. You see, simple solutions work. Especially those that bring financial hardship on offenders. Hundres of buraucrats with their political agendas will just make matters worse.

mailshanx 13y ago
>> Simple regulation: fine of $100 or more per each piece of paper you drop While you are right about the fines imposed on Singaporean society, the Singapore government's policies had far wider scope and were coupled with efficient execution. The fines were augmented with large scale awareness campaigns. Even today, you can see posters in many different places in the city exhorting citizens to not litter. Garbage bin density is so high, that you can mostly find one within 10 minutes of wherever you are. Of course, the various awareness campaigns were part of a much larger nation building effort which include a conscription system (all males serve ~2 years in the army), a compulsory national savings system, policies to maximize home ownership, and so on. The Singapore bureaucracy itself quite a unique system in it's own right. The best students are awarded scholarships to study in Oxbridge, and they are expected to return and serve in the civil service. Considering all of this, i'm sure solving these problems entails good governance, and is certainly not a "simple" matter of imposing fines.
- 13y ago