A most eventful month. Since I wrote last, I've spent two weeks listening to company presentations on campus, one week in Bangalore, three days of which was spent touring nearby places in an over-filled Qualis, another week in Bombay spitting distance from the sea, and through it all agonising agonisingly over my future and where it lies.
About the travel, many a tale waits to be told. "I hope I die before I grow old". I'm wondering why, my tea's grown cold, even. Whatever. I'm literally out of bed to write this, as I have just had a sudden, and rare, burst of inspiration.
Before I begin, the usual motley set of caveats: I've been very recently running through the jungle; this is not likely to be a very remarkable insight; it may get involved and, I fear, boring.
But that's not bothered you before, has it? I thought not.
Okay, so forget the travel until a later post. Forget the job-hunting until a later post too. I'm still in the middle of it, and so far there's been nothing but presentations. Oh, and a deeper understanding of the dark innards of a Corporate Entity. Oh, and an idea of what shit there is in the world to do, with only some money as reward.
But let's not get carried away. The point of this post, and I hope to keep it overwhelmingly short, is that I've found myself a nice little abstract yet maddeningly interesting and potentially useful niche in economic theory to submerge and waste my life in, should I choose to go that way.
A quick summary:
Economists are basically a bunch of bored old chaps who try and write about everything they can think of, and some things that they cannot. So they have encroached upon the poor once-independent fields of political science and behavioural psychology, converting those encroached bits into extensions of their own discipline, changing the language and jargon, and stealing ideas for applications. (Sounds a bit like Israel, doesn't it? Or Pakistan? Shh, never mind.)
One of these little contrived subsets calls itself social choice theory. In other words, it is the study of how societies of individuals with certain characteristics arrive at decisions over alternatives that lie before them, and what properties and characteristics those eventual decisions have.
A natural way to go about this is to assume that individuals have complete preferences over alternatives (that is, given any two alternatives, individuals can rank them in terms of which one they prefer). This, along with certain other consistency assumptions that they must satisfy, leads to a study of mechanisms which allow these preference relations of individuals to be aggregated into some form of collective rule. An example of such an aggregation rule is, say, if each individual in a society prefers government strikes to fall on weekends, then the society as a whole should prefer such strikes to fall on weekends as well. Such a rule sounds pretty fair.
The problem - and they realise it - is that their assumptions on individual preferences need not hold. We may not really be able to rank every possible pair of alternatives. Moreover, even if we can we may not be able to agree on a ranking, and obvious rules such as majority vote etc. too may fail to hold. The relaxation of these assumptions is what causes the overly mathematical approach to the subject, since conditions have now become weaker and therefore rules are more complicatedly manipulated.
A major derivative of this line of thinking is the study of trade-offs. Consider, for example, a case of two alternatives in which under one alternative I am a little better off and you are a lot worse off, and under the other alternative you are a lot better off and I am only a little worse off. Then maybe the second alternative is socially preferred, even though I may still prefer the first one. You may, of course, have to compensate me for my loss from choosing the second alternative, but that can easily be included.
Another, more famous and perhaps more popular, sub-field of economics is of course game theory. Various situations can be modelled as games (although the term is misleading since even very serious-sounding scenarios are also called games), and it is the study of how individuals and groups 'play' these games and what outcomes obtain. One part of game theory, called the co-operative part of it, deals with the study of coalitions and bargaining. It is the study of how, say, people within a group work together to achieve an outcome and, subsequently, how they agree on the split of the loot at the end.
The fun as far as I am concerned (and I use the term 'fun' loosely so don't poke too much fun at me) lies at the interface of these two subjects.
To model a situation as a game and to try and figure out what alternative is reached, particularly in the narrow context of one or a few groups trying to bargain over alternatives, is basically to take the rules of the game as given and see who wins. This is game theory.
On the other hand, to study individual preference and what properties they must satisfy, and to study what assumptions it makes on, and what implications it has for, collective decisions, is to try and figure out what rules to make in order to make a jolly decent game. This is social choice theory.
Although the teminology is overly non-serious and the self-image utterly serious, this stuff has some pretty useful applications. How the government allocates land use between the competing claims, say, of a group of farmers in Bengal and a new SEZ project, can be studied using this framework. How political parties campaign on the basis of what they perceive individual wants and needs to be, is another question that can be cautiously approached.
Basically what I am trying to say is that it is an area that pretends at having practical applications while still being theoretically respected. I can fool myself into thinking that working on this stuff may actually make a difference to some people's lives if things are ever applied, yet at the same time waste away forever behind a desk, scratching away at abstract theorems and formulas on what is best for society, while generally not being even one bit useful to that society.
And to top it all I find it fun. Arrrr.
Shh, never mind.
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