Economic Behavior

Today on my way to the airport to pick up my father, I again encountered a traffic jam. On a stretch of a mere 100m, I ended up wasting nearly 30 min.

Studying at MDI, I just learnt an obvious fact of India: It is in India that individual rationalism leads to collective irrationalism. This reminded me of the Noble laureate John Nash. How true was he when he contradicted the theory of Adam Smith, that was imbibed in everybody since then.  Adam Smith said that a successful group occurs only when all the individuals of the group act in their own interests. John Nash contradicted it by saying that the best result emerges from a group only when the individual members act in the best interests of themselves and the group.

How true in this particular case. But then when this is true why don’t we all follow it. Why don’t we allow and wait for the other person to go and then follow. Why do we always try to cut things short and race the car to any vacuum that is created in the jam.

Well I feel that the answer lies in the people tolerance. Over time, the tolerance power of people is going down. People are just not ready to let the other person go forward. It does not matter to them how much ever time they wait, but they can’t see the other person going before them.

Hence I feel that even if the infrastructure of India improves, even if there were better roads, we would still face the problems of jams. Till we do not the change the way we think, I don’t see a solution to the problem.

The next question arises as why is this so?

Again I feel that it is in India’s education system. Note that all the people who were on that stretch were well to do people with sufficient education. Even then?

Education in India is only defined by competition. How the student is, is judged primarily by the grades of the person, regardless of other attributes. Are marks and grades the only way to judge a candidate. In the recent placements at my college justified the fact. It is in this that all of us only try to outwit and outsmart the other person without having a thought of self. This is not the case with US. There the students decide the college they want to go to and the education they seek. Though grades do play a role, so do many other things.

I feel it is this that needs to be mended in our country and imbibe this learning in our system