Senile Sen & dotty Dreze have just published this in Telegraph, India.
Many people in India, rich and poor, long for greater accountability in public institutions.
Nonsense! They don't want accountability. They just want efficiency. It isn't the case that billionaires and beggars enjoy reading audit reports on public institutions.
The widow who has no news of her pension application,
Wants a fucking pension- not 'accountability'.
the sanitation worker who has not been paid for months,
wants to be paid. Greater accountability may only show that the public institution in question is bankrupt. It has no money to disburse. You can't shut it down because Government servants can't be sacked just because they are useless.
the helpless victim of an inflated electricity bill,
has legal recourse, more especially from a private sector provider. Not accountability but the enforcement of a legal remedy is required.
the truck driver who is held to ransom by corrupt tax officers
There is no such truck driver. What these two nutters mean is 'truck drivers from whom money is extorted'. The remedy is provided by the Courts or the Lok Pal. Evidence of a crime has nothing to do with accountability. It is a police matter not anything of concern to auditors.
— all share a common desire to see public employees and institutions being held accountable for fair execution of their duties.
No. They want bad actors to be punished. That was why there was such a big Lok Pal agitation. The solution is draconian money laundering legislation and swift action by the Enforcement dept. in the case of big fish, while local ombudsmen go after the small fry. If people simply record corrupt officials on their smartphones, evidence is secured.
There has been much discussion of this issue, and some action too. In 2005, the Right to Information Act made a major contribution to greater accountability in public authorities by setting new standards of transparency, enforceable in court. Some states have also put in place improved grievance redressal facilities — and even new laws.
In other words, India already has plenty of fucking accountability. What we want is efficiency.
During the last ten years, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.
i.e. Modi is Devil. Did you know his real name is Hitler Mussolini?
The powers in New Delhi have shown far more interest in holding citizens accountable to them than the other way round.
Did you know corrupt officials are citizens? Hitler Mussolini isn't a citizen. All BJP members are actually Israeli billionaires. Deport them immediately!
Many public institutions have also been turned into pliable servants of the government.
In West Bengal- sure. This is because non-pliable servants of Mamta get beaten to death.
Reviving efforts to bring more accountability in public institutions would certainly be
a complete waste of time.
useful.
Wanking may be useful. Demanding the repetition of shite that failed long ago isn't useful. It is a mark of senility.
But accountability has its limits as a means of ensuring that public institutions function for the common good.
The evidence is that it is useless. Efficiency matters. Accountability does not. Shitty enterprises should wither on the vine and be replaced by ones which deliver the goods. What these two cunts don't get is that Congress was corrupt, incompetent and totes shitty. That's why it has lost power at the centre and in many states. Sadly, Mamta's goons may be able to kill and rape and beat her opponents and so West Bengal will continue to suffer under her rule. The solution is for a Students movement to beat her goons to death. Then she will run away the way Hasina ran away.
Essentially, accountability works by creating a system of penalties and rewards for pre-specified duties of public employees.
No. That's 'incentive compatibility' and is 'mechanism design' not 'accountability'. Sadly, if you can't sack or jail corrupt public employees in a timely and cost-effective manner the nuisance continues. Take my old pal, IAS officer, Sanjay Pratap Singh. He was caught red handed and did spend some time in custody in 2015. Then the endless process of appeals and judicial delays began. By 2018, he was compulsorily retired but appealed the decision. This was dismissed but, seven years later, the disproportionate assets case, Sanjay Pratap Singh v CBI is still pending before the High Court. Not yet more accountability but swift and sure punishment is the need of the hour.
However, many actions of public employees are difficult to micro-manage in that way, and even if it is possible, it may not be helpful to pre-arrange a system of tasks and fulfilments.
Public employees have managers who do micro-manage them till they are able to do their work independently. But this is true of any type of enterprise- provided it is efficient. Some Government departments are efficient. Others aren't which is why corrupt nutters like Sanjay are dumped there.
Further, the carrot-and-stick approach tends to work within a restricted and pre-understood domain, without tapping the employee’s own initiative and creativity.
Nonsense! If there is a carrot for doing the job better, initiative and creativity are directed towards that end. As I said, the good people go to the good Departments. You can't sack the bad people but you can send them to the shitty Departments.
To illustrate, there is no great difficulty in monitoring the attendance of a school teacher,
the difficulty is in sacking them more particularly if they are politically connected or belong to specific castes.
but how does one ensure that he or she teaches with dedicated energy and enthusiasm?
The private sector can do so by sacking the teacher. This is why parents, even in affluent countries, prefer to send their kids to private schools.
One crude answer, advocated by some, is that teacher salaries should be linked to pupil achievements.
How very crude! Money is so vulgar. Please don't talk about it to me. Teachers should not be motivated by money. They should teach because they want ALL children to understand the importance of the capability of the accountability of the assessment of the evaluation of the advisability of compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual men.
A school, however, is not just a coaching centre. Quality education is also concerned with children’s well-being, abilities, behaviour, values and all-round development.
In particular, kids should learn the importance of assessing the evaluation of the capabilities of accountability with reference to compulsory gender reassignment surgery for dudes who stick their dicks into vaginas- which is totes gross.
Some accountability mechanisms can foster quality education, but all of them have their limits.
More particularly if teachers are both absent and illiterate.
For one thing, it is difficult for an external observer to assess what a teacher does, let alone the relation between a teacher’s actions and their possible outcomes.
More particularly if that external observer is on the planet Pluto.
We must recognise that accountability is only one
wholly unimportant
aspect of a much broader
wholly useless
concern for responsibility.
What about the concern that insufficient importance is being given to the assessment of the evaluation of the capability of accountability with respect to chopping off the dicks of heterosexual men?
A teacher may act responsibly because she is accountable to others, but also because of her own motivation for being a good teacher and helping students to develop their capabilities.
Sadly teachers who don't get paid stop being teachers. Accountability and Motivation don't matter. Getting paid does.
To invoke another example, it is not accountability that led countless doctors, journalists and relief workers in Gaza to continue treating the wounded, reporting the events, and feeding the hungry even as bombs rained around them (sometimes even on them).
Nor was it accountability which caused Hamas operatives to spend a lot of time raping and decapitating and kidnapping Israelis. Killing them may curb their activities. Nothing else will do.
Most of them must have acted out of their own commitment to the people of Gaza or to the ethics of their profession.
But stopped doing so after being killed. Not till the Grim Reaper is brought under the purview of the RTI act and becomes subject to much greater accountability can Death diminish as a scandal for the Capabilities Approach.
The distinction between accountability and responsibility is
the distinction between Agent (who is accountable) and Principal (who holds responsibility but is not otherwise accountable for the actions of his agents).
important for at least two reasons.
It is only important in law. Nowhere else.
First, a sense of responsibility can be an immense force for social progress.
Not if you feel you have a responsibility to prevent 'social progress' by killing those who defy long established customs.
Accountability can induce people to do what someone else wants them to do, to the extent that it can be monitored.
Only if they can't be sacked till their account has been examined and rejected in a 'due process' manner. This is why accountability is not conducive to efficiency. On the other hand, the right to dismiss employees without having to provide any justification does promote a lively sense of responsibility and is conducive to efficiency.
Responsibility, on the other hand, includes what people themselves want to do in the public interest.
In which case there is no need to pay them. They are not public servants. They are volunteers- e.g. members of the RSS.
This self-motivation can be a great source of initiative and creativity, well beyond the realm of accountability.
It is irrelevant when it comes to the public, as opposed to the voluntary, sector. But voluntary organizations are not accountable in any way. A Court can't ask Mother Theresa's Sisters of Mercy why they keep banging on about Jesus Christ. Okay, we get that you all think you are married to him but kindly show cause why that dude should not be prosecuted for bigamy under Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code.
Indeed, the development of a culture of responsibility has played a key role in the emergence of well-functioning public institutions around the world — not only schools but also hospitals, libraries, museums, courts and parliaments.
But all these things exist even in places where there was never any fucking culture of responsibility. Whether or not they are efficient depends on rewards and penalties. Dreze & Sen are ignorant cunts. They don't know that Parliament in England rose in power precisely when there was no fucking culture of responsibility. Walpole's England was as corrupt as fuck. But so was the East India Company when it began to expand its territorial power. South Korea at the beginning of the Sixties was more corrupt and had crappier leaders than India. Yet, by listening to Irma Adelman and doing sensible things, it rose and rose. Yet, till recently, the South Korean oligarch's heir behaved very badly to employees. By contrast, Tata and Birla and Adani and Ambani scions are very affable and humane to their employees.
I was once at a dinner for the late Biki Oberoi in a Tata owned hotel in London. We were astonished when the great man ran off to shake the hand of a Nepali waiter. Apparently, he recognized him from twenty years previously when the young man was training at an Oberoi hotel in Calcutta. It is no wonder, staff at Oberoi hotels went the extra mile for guests. The example had been set by the heir to the fortune himself.
Second, accountability and responsibility also differ in terms of the means that can be used to promote each.
Neither can be 'promoted' or demoted save by the law. Either they exist or they don't. The CEO of a publicly listed company is accountable to his board and has a type of 'command responsibility' in law. A billionaire may wholly own a limited company under professional management but is not accountable or responsible for it in any way.
Sometimes, accountability measures also help to promote responsibility.
No. What these two cretins mean is something like the 'Hawthorne effect' (except they are too ignorant to know about it). People may show more interest in their job if they feel they are being observed. It shows what they are doing is important.
For instance, a habit of punctuality at work
is just a habit of punctuality which will be displayed in other fields.
may be easier for someone to sustain when she knows that everyone is expected to be punctual.
In which case we are not talking about a habit but something volitional- perhaps arduously so. You may have to break the habits of a lifetime to be punctual at work.
This is a case in which accountability and responsibility complement each other.
Or when they compliment each other and braid each others hair.
But it is also possible for them to move in opposite directions. For instance, a hierarchical environment may promote accountability even as it saps responsibility by demotivating those in subordinate positions.
This environment saps both accountability and responsibility because you can always blame the other guy. All relevant files are always 'pending' somewhere or the other and so nobody needs to do anything.
Similarly, centralisation may promote accountability even as decentralisation may foster responsibility.
Why are these two nutters pretending they have MBAs rather than PhDs in useless shite? Centralization is desirable because it creates clear lines of command and permits 'enterprise wide' risk management and unified financial strategy. Decentralization can result in different branches doing opposite things. Thus, Ratan Tata inherited a conglomerate where different satraps were pursuing conflicting goals. It was an arduous task to restore organizational coherence and uniformity of strategy.
Despite frequent complementarities, accountability and responsibility have their own domain.
They are legal concepts. Stupid economists merely shit over these 'terms of art'.
Jaipal Singh Munda,
an Oxford man who briefly served in the ICS
the leading spokesperson of Adivasis in the Constituent Assembly, provided an interesting example of the value of promoting responsibility without invoking accountability measures. One of his first initiatives as sports minister of independent India was to convene a cricket match among members of Parliament of all parties. This seems to have had the effect of creating a better rapport among them. As Jaipal Singh himself observed: “The match, the lunch at the National Stadium and the dinner, achieved a great thing. They brought together all political parties and a friendly atmosphere developed in both Houses of Parliament.” His intention in promoting this “friendly atmosphere” was not just to make life more pleasant in Parliament but also to enable Parliament to function better. Alas, little is left of that atmosphere today.
No doubt, these two cretins think that if only Lord Wavell had organized a nice cricket match in 1946 Partition would have been avoided. However, even if this were the case, this is a story about fostering good will and camaraderie. It has nothing to do with accountability or responsibility.
As this anecdote illustrates,
Dreze is as senile as Sen.
responsibility often has a cooperative aspect.
Only if you are responsible for running a cooperative.
A principled individual, of course, may act responsibly whatever others do — like the pedestrian who insists on waiting for a green light to cross the street even as others troupe forward.
Such a pedestrian is stupid to wait if he can clearly see there are no cars coming towards him. 'Jaywalking' is only an offense if it is done 'without regard to traffic' and is 'unsafe'.
But most people find it easier to abide by responsible behaviour when others do the same.
The same goes for highly irresponsible behaviour. Why do these two cretins mention the topic?
This basic observation
is basically as stupid as fuck
has far-reaching implications.
It has none.
One of them is that irresponsibility can take the form of a ‘social trap’ where people reciprocate each other’s irresponsibility even as they would all prefer to be part of a responsible environment.
But thinking you are responsible for stuff for which you aren't (e.g. thinking you could do something to stop kids dying in Gaza) is also a 'social trap' which causes you to babble Sen-tentious nonsense like the above.
Many Indian
and non-Indian
schools look like they have fallen into a trap of this sort.
Sen & Dreze created the trap of virtue signalling stupidity into which they fell.
The other side of the same coin is that collective efforts to escape the trap may be rewarding:
they are more likely to be a waste of time. Collective efforts to abolish death have been useless.
there is also a self-sustaining state of affairs where different people’s responsible attitudes reinforce each other.
Free-riding is more likely. That is why Econ. has a large 'preference revelation' literature. The reverse game theory of 'mechanism' or auction design is useful. What isn't useful is morons gassing on about capability and accountability and responsibility.
The literature on social norms
is Kaushik Basu level stooooopid
includes many examples of ‘multiple equilibria’ of this kind.
Social norms are disequilibria phenomenon because Society doesn't have a Noetherian. It is dissipative. The problem with mathsy masturbators isn't they don't know enough math.
It is often forgotten that the entire edifice of electoral democracy rests on
winner take all. If you have a majority you can tell the opposition to go fuck itself
a simple act of cooperative responsibility: voting.
Why vote if the winner doesn't take all. Canvassing for votes isn't 'cooperative'. It is competitive.
Every voter knows that his or her vote makes no difference on its own,
my cheering for my football team won't change the outcome of the match. Yet I do it. Why? The competitive spirit is essentially thymotic, not 'peace & lurve' cooperative.
yet many people — often a large majority —– do vote, sometimes in difficult circumstances (say, walking long distances or queuing for hours in chilly weather).
They also do this to witness a wrestling match
Voting has many possible motives, but quite likely, many people simply think of it as an act of responsible citizenship.
None do. It is a matter of defeating x or giving victory to y even if you don't care about either x or y. It i just that you like election contests for the same reason that you like cock fighting.
The critical role of responsibility for a healthy social life has been well discussed by many
boring shitheads
eminent thinkers over the ages, including a number of leading economists. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, emphasised that what we do is influenced not only by our own goals but also by “general rules of conduct” that emerge from introspection about how our actions are likely to be viewed by others.
For example, if we manage to catch a bunch of darkies and transport them across the ocean and sell them a profit, we can return to Scotland with lots of money. Everybody will be very friendly towards us. Pretty girls will give us the glad eye. The Lord Mayor will invite us to tea.
Alfred Marshall,
who was a bit of a Lefty and a feminist in his youth
often seen as the founding father of neo-classical economics, began his magisterial Principles of Economics with an extended discussion of the power of “unselfish service” and even wrote that “the supreme aim of the economist is to discover how this latent social asset can be developed.”
He was lying. The supreme aim of the economist is to figure out ways to economize on the use of scarce resources and to promote 'general purpose' productivity improvements.
B.R. Ambedkar considered that liberty and equality “could not become a natural order of things” without
his marrying a nice Brahmin medical doctor.
“fraternity”, a strong form of responsibility that “leads an individual to identify himself with the good of others”.
Unless they are Brahmins, in which case Ambedkar abused them in vicious terms. Buddhism, which spread untouchability was all right. Brahminism was evil though Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables whereas Japan has no Brahmins.
Ideas of this sort may have taken a back seat in mainstream economics today,
as has the idea that saying 'it's nice to be nice' is deserving of a PhD
given its enchantment with ‘homo economicus’,
i.e. a species which has no access to a magical money tree
but they have not lost their relevance.
to vacuous, virtue signalling, nutters
What early economists knew, we can know too.
Economists know that raising 'general purpose' productivity is the only thing which benefits society. Scolding Manmohan Singh for forcing very hungry and very ill India people to go and work in factories so that India could become an economic super-power was not productive. He was a good man but lacked the power to curb the corruption of his colleagues. Thus, his government fell. Modi became PM. Since then nobody listens to Sen & Dreze. Still, if Mamta wants Sen to attack Modi- that is what he will do.
What this article is really saying is 'Hitler Mussolini (which is Modi's real name) has not been held accountable for killing and eating trillions of disabled, transgender, Lesbian Muslims. Chief Justice Chandrachooth (real name Joseph Goebells) was responsible for total failure of the Bench to sentence all Hindus to death. If India is to make any real progress towards Accountability, Responsibility and the responsible accounting of the evaluation of the assessment of the capability of the functioning of the right to compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual Hindu males. Mind it kindly. Also, don't forget, it is nice to be nice. Have a nice day!
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