Announcements
This week’s class is on Friday - same time though: 7:00 PM IST.
Video of Session II
Notes from Session II
Only wicked minds solve wicked problems. That's the primary premise on which Socrates is based. And there are tons of wicked problems in the world. Climate change is perhaps the wickedest. The primary framing of the climate change problem in the Indian context, is what we call ‘India story, climate grammar,’ which is to say that we want to imagine a flourishing India and we want to do it in such a way that our response to climate change is built into it.
This is an outsider's perspective: I'm not a politician. I'm not a climate scientist, either. But in some ways, we are trying to understand the many facets of the wicked problem of India's future from the perspective of climate change. And the fact is that we have a system in crisis. If you've been living in India, you know that we face immense challenges. It wasn't always so by the way, the kind of intertwined system that you have today is a relatively new feature. The Roman historian Arrian, writing in the early Christian era about Alexander's campaigns in India says that you would have people fighting battles on one corner and farmers are going around about their business just as if nothing else is happening in their own corner. And that kind of separation of responsibilities made, I think, India a very unequal and yet stable society.
And that's an interesting historical phenomenon which is no longer true. Especially after colonial rule, the fate of farmers and the fate of soldiers has been intertwined in a way that has never happened before, and so we need governance systems that engage with everything. We have to deal with farming, we have to deal with defense, we have to deal with foreign policy, we have to deal with economics all at once. The institutions we have created to have this kind of universal capacity are creaky institutions. And climate change is going to make all of those challenges harder.
The Elephant - India as a Wicked Problem
This is what we call the blind men and the elephant problem - one elephant, but it's being felt as a different thing by different parties. If you're a farmer, you may say that the survival of agriculture and your capacity to make a dignified living is your primary view of the elephant. If you’re a businessman, you might think creating a financially profitable business is the right way to perceive the elephant. We have to somehow try to understand the elephant as a whole, while keeping these different views in mind. In other words, India itself is a wicked problem - many, many stakeholders, many conflicting needs. And there are many interconnected parts.
A wicked problem has both moral and material complexity. India has the most undernourished children in the world and that's a moral problem. It should not be acceptable in the 21st century to have half of your population undernourished. The systems you need to prevent them from being undernourished are material systems - you have to be able to distribute nutritious food at scale to hundreds and hundreds of millions of people. So whether it is midday meals or NREGS, however we do it, there is a combination of material and moral complexity that arises. In the new reality we inhabit, all our institutions and systems are constantly contested.
And that is where we need new mental tools to address our incapacity to address wicked problems, to create the wicked minds who will solve them. So what I want to give a brief introduction to is a series of you could say mental or cognitive capacities that we can use to address complex problems. I call them mental hooks. A hook by its very nature is something that allows you to just get a toehold on the world. It's not an accurate representation, but it gives you some purchase, and you need to be able to cultivate the right kind of mental hooks.
Mental Hooks
So what's a mental hook? It's either a mental model or a mental frame. A mental model is what you use to understand the world that exists independent of you, it’s a representation of the situation you’re interested in and the relationship between the various parts of that situation. And the contrast with the model is what I call a frame. A frame is something that you impose on the world to isolate what is it that is worth grasping in the first place. So for example, if you have a political frame, then everything that you're going to see in the world is going to be charged with politics. Even corporate buying decisions, you might say, oh, there's some political calculation behind it. And so framing is what you impose on the world.
A good mental hook can be either a good mental model or it can be a good mental frame. Because the world is complex, we can't just let our untrained capacities lose on a complex world. We need a trained mental hook, and we need to be able to design good mental hooks - if you are capable of designing the right mental hook for the problem in front of you, you're more likely to do something good. And the more hooks you have, the more likely it is that you have a good heuristic. So let’s be generous in accepting as many hooks as we can.
In the session, we covered two mental models and two mental frames.
Mental Models
Model One: confirmation bias. All of us are much more likely to see aspects of the world that confirm what we already believe. The recently concluded US election is a great example. Some people think that fraud is unthinkable, that the US electoral system is incorruptible, that there are very few instances of voter fraud. Meanwhile, the other half of the population believes that Trump's election was stolen; they see one illegally cast vote and think the whole election is flawed. How do you manage this confirmation bias?
Model Two: moral hazard - people who make decisions are often not the people suffering from the consequences of those decisions. A great example is what happened in India with the lockdowns earlier this year. Because the IAS officers and others who are making decisions aren’t the migrant laborers who are going to suffer from its consequences. And so you have a huge problem of people, especially in power, being insulated from the consequences of their actions. And that leads to incentives for them to take risks on behalf of others which is always an issue. The opposite of the moral hazard is what's called ‘skin in the game,’ which is that you actually have direct interest in the outcome. Politicians have skin in the game while bureaucrats rarely do because their jobs are secure. Sometimes it's good to have people who have skin in the game and sometimes it's good to have people whose livelihoods are not threatened by future consequences - you want judges to be impartial and not have skin in the game!
Mental Frames
Now for the frames: a very important frame is the Overton window, the set of policies that are acceptable in the mainstream at a given time. Policies that lie outside the Overton Window are not even acknowledged. Consider the nationalization of banks. 50 years ago, it was something that everybody thought was the right thing to do. And it did happen in India. Today, the same policy would be unthinkable - the politics of India has changed in such a way that nationalization is no longer an acceptable policy. Overton windows and changing them is a huge part of what politicians and political movements try to do and we would want to do the same when it comes to climate action.
Frame Two: The second frame is what's called the veil of ignorance, from the political philosopher John Rawls who was designing an ideal society. It’s a way to prevent moral hazards from happening. Let's say, you want to have a policy that favors Group A over Group B, but you don't know whether you're going to be in Group A or B. For example, Group A is men and Group B is women, and there's a policy that tacitly or explicitly will discriminate against women - happens all the time in India, right? If you don't know, as a policymaker, whether you would be born as a man or a woman, then you would be very different in your policy making than if you knew what gender you're going to be.
John Rawls’ brilliant idea was that when you are making a policy, you should do it in such a way that you don’t have access to any knowledge about who you are. And of course, you may say, how is that possible? How can you not know who you are? But the veil of ignorance is ‘as if’ - just as judges are supposed to pretend as if they're fully objective, even though no one is perfectly fair, the veil of ignorance is an ideal we should aspire to, a guiding principle.
So that's a brief introduction to the mental model-mental frame - mental hook methodology. Good hooks give us purchase on the world and we have to be clever about knowing when to use the right hook. If you look at the dial between bureaucracy and politics, India has made a principal decision that politicians are the ultimate authority. And bureaucrats ultimately have to follow political orders. Other parts of the world aren't like that. If you look at China, for the most part, China is ruled by bureaucrats. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? We have made the decision that the political framing of society is better than the bureaucratic framing of society.