Enabling Sustainable Economic Growth

Creating economic growth centers is an important step in promoting overall well-being of the country or a state. Economic grown spurred by any given sector in a region, creates a virtuous cycle of growth by attracting other forms of businesses and also improving economic indicators of the neighboring regions. 

For instance, Bangalore's meteoric growth over the last 25 years spurred by the IT industry, also enabled other forms of businesses like construction, hospitality, transport, etc. to also flourish. Similarly, it also created an impetus for growth in real estate and other businesses in the neighboring districts as well. 

However, complex systems do not just respond to specific initiatives, but they also tend to generate their own dynamics often acting in ways that can negate the earlier gains obtained. This is called the law of unintended consequences, often due to the emergence of perverse incentives. 

For instance, when I was a student in the 1990s, it took us 3 hours to commute between Bangalore and Mysore on the narrow 2-lane road connecting the two cities. In early 2000s, this narrow road was widened to create a well paved 4-lane road with a median between the two. Initially, this brought great benefits-- cutting the travel time to 90 minutes. But soon, by early 2010s, it took us 4 hours to commute between Bangalore and Mysore! This is because, this one good road attracted a lot of traffic and in turn, a lot of businesses, and in turn, a lot of housing projects along the highway-- soon saturating the capacity of the highway. 

When we have one growth center, it leads to a virtuous cycle and promotes more growth. But it also soon saturates, and the cost of maintaining the growth center slowly overtakes the benefits it brings. The chart below shows a typical trajectory of an intervention that brings about economic growth in a region. The initial impetus creates a favorable environment, leading to a rapid growth. But over time, the system saturates and costs starts mounting. Eventually, the system autocorrects to some extent to settle down in an equilibrium, which would be higher than where we started out (which makes the whole initiative a success), but lower than the initial promise. 

Coming back to the story of Bangalore, even after more than 25 years of IT-led growth, Bangalore has not created natural incentives for other growth centers to form in the state. The figure below shows district-wise percentage contribution to state GDP in the state. Bangalore Urban alone contributes 37.8% of the state GDP, while its immediate neighbor-- Bangalore Rural-- contributes just 1.6%! Today, Bangalore Urban that contributes most to the GDP of the state has one of the most congested traffic, acute water crisis, and a high cost of living. The benefits of economic growth are getting fast outpaced by its saturation crises. 

Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bengaluru/comments/1fgfp0h/district_wise_gdp_contribution_of_ka/?rdt=55134

Most unitary initiatives to promote economic growth suffer from the problem of saturation-- where the very success of the initiatives leads to its eventual downfall. 

So, how do we strategize for economic growth that does not become a victim of its own success? In this regard, about 11 years ago, I had proposed a model called Development in pairs. I would recommend the reader to read through the earlier post separately. 

The primary idea behind this is to promote not one, but at least two (more than one), growth centers simultaneously. Each growth center needs to be far apart enough so that they don't merge into one big center, and near enough so that each offers a veritable alternative to the other. These centers should be connected with high-speed transit like RRTS and should enable free movement of people and businesses between the two. However, each center needs to be administered independent of the other in a "coopetitive" fashion. That is, while each center competes for businesses, each of them are promoted cooperatively as part of a larger plan. 

Not only does each growth center counter-balance the other, and bring about stability, we can even mathematically show that a paired setup gives better expected returns to its citizens. The approach to this proof is an adaptation of a famous experiment in Game Theory conducted at the University of Sussex, where a group of researchers threw breadcrumbs into a pond from two different ends to see how the population of ducks in the pond divide themselves. (This work is described in the book "A Beautiful Math" by Tom Sigfried).

Representative image generated by AI

Suppose there are N breadcrumbs and m ducks in the pond. And suppose that these breadcrumbs are thrown from only one end of the pond. If there is only one location with m population, the following will be the utility function:

Utility = (1/m)(Payoff from location) + (1 - 1/m)(0)

Let us say that there are two growth centres A and B with equal potential and let the population in each centre be m/2. In the broadest sense, for any agent in say, location A, the following recursive utility equation would apply:

Utility_at_location_A = (2/m)(Payoff from location A) + (1 - 2/m)[Utility_at_location_B - cost_of_moving_to_B]

The second part of the equation will in turn have its own second part where the agent shifts back to location A. The above should be solved using power iterations. If the second part is greater than 0, then this will be more than having a single location. If the term (1 - 2/m)(cost_of_moving) is less than 1, then this term vanishes over iterations.

We can also see that the former case of only one growth center can be modeled as a pair of growth centers, with the other growth center having a resource pool of zero. As we divide the resource pool between the two centers in different proportions, we see that the disparity in expected outcomes keeps lowering, with this reaching its lowest point where expected payoffs become equal between the centers. 

This is what I would call a sustainable growth center, with each center counter-balancing the other.  

So, will this pair of growth centers too saturate at some point? Surely, it will. And to address this, we can address the same strategy at a different granularity level by connecting two pairs of growth centers and organically grow a megaregion. 

Understanding deprivation

Deprivation is considered to be one of the primary factors leading to social strife and human suffering. The United Nations (UN) defines deprivation as the inability of a social group to effectively participate in the larger society and sustain their livelihoods. One of the primary sources of deprivation is poverty, where extreme poverty is defined as living below US$1.25 a day. 

Several initiatives under goal 1 of the UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) are underway across the world, to identify deprived sections of the society and to bring them into the mainstream. 

In this post, I would like to argue that, deprivation is a result of two kinds of factors, and it is important to distinguish between the two. 

The first form of deprivation occurs due to lack of equity within a given paradigmatic framework. Such forms of deprivation is well addressed and well understood. For a variety of reasons, several social groups get excluded from relevant opportunities that can enable them to pursue their needs and exercise their agency. Such forms of deprivation are a result of inadequate social mechanisms that can recognise deprivation within a society and implement affirmative actions to mitigate deprivation. 

There is however, a second form in which deprivation manifests, which makes things more complex. This is what I call paradigmatic dissonance. In this form of deprivation, a social group appears greatly deprived when their lifestyle is interpreted through the lens of what is considered the "mainstream" worldview, and when the mainstream tries to mitigate this deprivation through its lens, it causes more harm than good. 

As an extreme example, consider the Sentinelese tribe in the Nicobar islands. This tribe has maintained a lifestyle that goes back to more than 60,000 years. Their primary avocation is hunting and fishing, using tools like bows and arrows that are considered to be very "primitive" in the mainstream worldview. There have been several attempts to integrate the Sentinelese into the mainstream, but all such attempts have been met with immense hostility from the tribe. The most recent incident was in 2018, when the tribe killed a missionary from the US who attempted to "save" the tribe by converting them to Christianity. Such has been their resistance to "modernity" that this tribe is now protected by Indian law, and people are prohibited from approaching them. 

The tribe is clearly very deprived when seen from our mainstream lens. They still use primitive tools for fishing when they could have easily integrated into the mainstream and have opened a fishing industry on their island. They don't have electricity, running water, Internet, or any of the necessities that are needed in the modern world. 

Yet, during the 2004 tsunami where close to 300,000 people lost their lives in different countries of the world, not a single casualty has been recorded from the Sentinelese. The tsunami devastated the coral reefs surrounding the islands where this tribe lives that even destroyed the places where the tribe usually went fishing. Yet, there is no discernible change in their population or their lifestyle. 

It is not just this "primitive" tribe that knew how to survive the tsunami. There are several accounts of animals that moved to safer locales on the day of the tsunami, well before the huge waves hit. In contrast, in the mainstream civilisation, when the sea receded suddenly in places like Phuket, many tourists at the beach resort, instead of running to higher ground for safety, ventured out into the barren seabed, without realising that this is the last thing they will be seeing in this world. 

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While the Sentinelese may be an extreme example, what we often fail to realise is that human civilisation has had multiple paradigms and world-views with which it has interpreted the universe, and built its lifestyles. But when a few of them get into a "saviour complex" and actively tries to digest all other paradigms into what it considers the mainstream, we run the risk of losing important knowledge that may be critical for our overall survival. What we consider "mainstream" is typically the result of the most dominant paradigm that has become dominant primarily because it interpreted the world in a predatory fashion and actively sought to consume other paradigms within itself. 

In some of our initiatives to bring Internet connectivity to remote villages in India for example, we were met with resistance and hostility, rather than an eagerness to get out of their "deprivation" and become integrated into "modernity." In one case, the villagers had welcomed us with a sarcastic song that they had composed specifically for our workshop. The song basically went something like, "Do not try to impress us with your www-dot-com, which is of no use to us. Will your www-dot-com draw water from the well, tend to the fields,.." 

Objectively, one might argue that the "www-dot-com" can indeed help the villagers in drawing water from the well by connecting an IoT based pump water pump, etc. etc. But the main point of their sarcasm was not that. Their main concern was that this integration into the mainstream will deracinate them from their traditional and familiar way of life, in which they had learned to not only survive but also maximise their agency and express themselves in myriad ways. 

An IoT based water pump may increase efficiency in drawing water from wells, but it also gets them into a liability loop where they will need to manage subscriptions and payments, and see their lives increasingly getting controlled from somewhere else. 

This is pretty-much what we see happening today as we try to integrate the world and bring everyone onboard in our attempts at inclusion. Even when the mainstream includes something, it does so by "scooping" the other into its structure, and not by treating it as a peer and establishing a sensible relationship with it to collectively achieve some shared vision. 

In the mainstream worldview today, traditional Indian culture is all about meaningless and "primitive" rituals of expression, and the debates centre around the symbolism of these rituals. But once upon a time, these practices were not mere rituals, with only symbolic value. These practices were deeply ingrained into what was then the mainstream practice and the way of interpreting the universe. 

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For the last few centuries, the "mainstream" culture that is based on the industrial revolution and the factory paradigm, developed in a outlandishly predatory fashion, where it pretty much scooped the entire world into its framework. 

However, by the 1990s the predatory forms of interpretations had run its course with multiple dominant  world-views clashing with one another, and faintly realising that perhaps predation and might need not equate to insight and truth, after all. In these times, we saw a glimmer of hope where technology development focused on decentralisation and open architectures, rather than on ownership and dominance. It is in these times we saw the rapid growth of the Internet and the world wide web. 

But these technologies whose design principles were based on a philosophy of plurality and decentralisation are now once again dominated by few very powerful players who not only control the technology, but also the narrative; and influence how we interpret the world. 

And even in the mainstream universe these days, there are a lot of disillusioned thought leaders who understand the dangers of predation on a very powerful network like the Internet, are now pushing for "re-decentralisation" of our connected world. 

While inclusion is a noble goal to pursue, it is also important for the mainstream to preserve hermeneutic plurality (not just plurality in superficial things like dress sense, food, etc.) and really understand how to build sustainable pluralistic societies. 

Engineering as intervention

Engineering today, is dominated by what may be called "creation science." Much of what we study in engineering is in the form of creating something-- be it a machine, software, structure, etc. Most of our effort goes into designing our creation and implement it in a way that makes it effective. 

But every engineering deployment is actually an intervention into an existing live system. Be it creating a building, a bridge, a car, a software, a gadget, or whatever, we are not only creating something, but this creation is intervening into an existing system and affecting the way it functions. 

Of course, by creating something, we wish to affect the way something functions. Like for example, by creating an automobile, we are affecting the way people commute. But for every creation, there is an intended affect, and many forms of unintended or collateral affects. 

In many cases, our created solutions can be so good that it can become a victim of its own success. For instance, suppose a brand new road is constructed to link two parts of a bustling city. This new road passes through relatively less populated areas, and hence, vehicles can zip through these to reach the other end of the city very fast. The very success of this brand new road, will now cause the land adjacent to the road to go up in value, and attracts many new businesses, residential properties and industries. Each business locating themselves there would use this brand new road as their locational advantage. Soon, this area becomes so crowded that any time advantages obtained earlier is lost. 

When we only focus on the design of our creation and its intended affect, and not really understand how systemic intervention works, we get into situations like these. 

If we want to bring about changes in a sustainable fashion, we need to change our perspective of engineering, from creating a solution, to designing interventions. 

The axiom of sustainability: One of the key things to understand about systemic interventions is the axiom of sustainability. Essentially, this states that any bounded system of being, when perturbed, strives to reach a state of "low energy" or stability. In Indian thought, this has been called the principle of dharma, since several thousands of years 

An atom for instance, is organised into "low energy" configurations, where electrons occupy specific orbits around the nucleus. When we excite an electron by giving it some energy, it may move up to a higher-level orbit. But very soon, it would shed its excess energy and come back to its low energy state. Similarly, if we intervene in an atom and knock out an electron, it becomes ionised and unstable. This causes phenomena like static or lightning, where the system that is the atom is trying to reach back to its low energy configuration. 

Similarly, what we call as solids, are actually intricate and tightly knit patterns of atomic interactions. When we try to deform a solid by pulling it out or pushing it in, it strives to come back to its original low energy configuration. This is what we call elasticity. 

Similarly, all biological creatures settle down into optimal states of being, where it has the maximum health, strength and pleasure that it can afford, given its circumstances. This is called homeostasis. When we perturb homeostasis (like for instance, illness or injury), an elaborate biological system kicks in, to bring the being back to homeostasis. 

This is one of the most fundamental axioms that we need to consider, when we're intervening in an existing system. Be it building a new road, adding a new train track, creating a new web service, building a new car, or bringing a new mobile device into the market, we will need to consider how will this intervention perturb the system and where the system is likely to settle down. 

The engineering solution may provide the intended outcomes soon after its deployment. But over time, the system responds to the intervention, and the state it settles down may be very far from what was intended. 

Intervention science-- dealing with understanding how complex systems respond to engineering interventions, is something that is not taught in engineering curriculum today. There is a dire need to develop this science systematically, and introduce it in our engineering curricula. 

The Sustainability Paradigm

In today's formal education, creativity is a primary virtue. The initial rote learning, compliance and discipline that students are subject to, are eventually meant to make them creative "self actualising" individuals. 

Creativity takes on various forms. It could be in the form of creating a piece of technology, or creating artistic expressions. 

But regardless of the nature of creativity, in order to be creative, we need to get into a frame of mind, or "paradigm" that promotes creativity. We need to "see the world differently" or imagine possibilities, and so on, in order to become creative. 

Oftentimes, we are not even aware of the paradigm that drives our thinking and it takes a lot of introspection to discover how our thoughts are structured, and what other paradigms could there be. 

Creativity, as a paradigm, has specific characteristics. In order to get into a mindset of creating something that is not there, we need to be fundamentally unhappy or dissatisfied with what we have! Indeed there are schools of thought, that believe that creativity stems from suffering, and in order to be truly creative, we need to suffer! 

Given that creativity is a virtue, and a virtue is something we need to advocate to the world at large, we are in effect-- in our institutions and homes, encouraging everyone to suffer-- so that they may become creative! 

Creativity is also fundamentally minimalist as a paradigm. Creation is goal-oriented, where at each step, we evaluate and optimise our resources and efforts towards the end goal. Anything that is not helpful towards the end goal of creation, are useless, and are discarded. Hence for instance, if our end goal is to create a mango orchard, anything that does not contribute to this end goal, becomes extra baggage and needs to be weeded out. For instance, suppose our mango orchard in the making, has a number of tomato plants. In this paradigm, unless these plants can be shown to be useful to achieve the end goal of producing more mangoes, they are useless, and are weeded out. In this paradigm, suppose we need to use a fertiliser that maximises our mango yield, but which would be harmful to the tomato plants, we would go ahead with it, because mango is our fundamental goal-- not tomatoes. The fact that tomato is a legitimate plant in itself has no bearing in our goal-oriented approach.  

One who has internalised the creativity paradigm tends to become elitist, and view society in terms of "higher" and "lower" classes. Even in the Maslow "hierarchy" creativity or actualisation comes at the "top". In an internalised paradigm of creativity-- creativity itself is the goal, and the objective of our lives is to work towards achieving this goal. Clerical activities that "merely" support creativity are considered lower in the hierarchy than creativity. The character of Sheldon Cooper from the TV series "The Big Bang Theory" where he grants a "high honour" to his friends by getting them to drive him to work, portrays this stereotype well. 

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Traditional Indian culture based on the concept of dharma or "sustainability," has a fundamentally different paradigm. Here, creativity or self-actualisation is not an end in itself. All forms of pursuits-- be they creative or service or clerical activity-- are rooted in a paradigm of sustainability. 

Sustainability as a paradigm is fundamentally different from creativity. Sustainability aims to preserve or sustain what is there, rather than create what is not there. 

Sustainability, by its very definition is not "goal-oriented" approach. It is a "state maintenance" approach. State maintenance has no end goal. We need to maintain a desired state (of life, society, etc.) for as long as possible-- knowing fully well that, nothing can sustain eternally. 

The pursuit of sustainability may need us to become creative, and invent stuff that. is not there. But creativity is not a goal in itself. It is an element of a larger pursuit towards sustainability. Similarly, creativity is not "higher" in some pecking order than other forms of non-creative, clerical activities. Sometimes, clerical bookkeeping may be more critical towards sustainability, than creative outputs. 

Sustainability or preservation is also fundamentally "maximalist" in nature. The very definition of preservation urges the sustainability paradigm to aim to preserve everything-- unless there are specific reasons not to do so. Sometimes, preserving something may adversely affect the sustainability of everything else in its vicinity, in which case, it makes sense to let it go, to maximise sustainability. 

For someone who has internalised the sustainability paradigm, efforts like "save the tiger" makes no sense. Sustainability does not focus on a single entity in an ecosystem. Sustainability aims to "preserve the forest" rather than "save" a specific species. Sustainability also doesn't agree with the concept of "keystone" species-- where one species (typically a predator) is considered to be the keystone, that keeps the entire ecosystem running. The idea of a keystone represents a hierarchical or linear relationship between species, which is not the case. The dharmic mind knows that a forest comprising of all prey (like deers) and no predators (like tigers) can sustain, but a forest comprising of all predators and no prey, cannot sustain. 

The sustainability paradigm requires us to think "holistically". We cannot focus on one entity and its sustenance. We need to promote sustainability of everything. 

In the sustainability mindset, "growth" is not an end in itself either. The dharmic mind knows that nothing can grow forever. Growth saturates and is subject to diminishing value of returns. Like creativity, promoting growth is important-- but not as an end in itself.

The wonder that was India

 Once upon a time, philosophers-- men and women alike-- observed systems of interacting elements, and noted that the system as a whole, can be in different "states of being." They also noted that some states of being are more "stable" and "sustain" against perturbations. It is in these sustainable states, we can nurture life. The entire ecosystem of our planet, they noted, is just a sustainable state of being.

They called this phenomenon of sustainability against perturbations, as "dharma".

Sustainability is not a binary. Some states are more sustainable than others. They also noted that regardless of how sustainable was a state of being, every physical system eventually collapsed. Nothing in this physical world, they noted, is in a state of eternal dharma.

This prompted them to embark on a quest for "eternal sustainability" which is called "Sanatana dharma".

Physical systems are trivially not eternally sustainable. They hence called physical reality as "Maya." Eternal sustainability, if it exists, needs to be in the realm of prajna or consciousness, they noted. Even here, they saw that not every element of data, information and knowledge, represented eternally sustainable assertions. For example, an assertion that "summer is hotter than winters" is mostly true, except when there have been exceptions.

They then noted that, as long as assertions connected with physical reality, they can't be eternally sustainable. But then they saw that no matter how much they tried to go meta, some connection to physical reality remained. But some of them managed to get into a state of consciousness, that was completely unconstrained by physical reality.

They called this, the universal consciousness or Reality or Brahman.

They then went on to create a vibrant civilization that was based on this quest for experiencing the state of eternal sustainability. They saw that, when the core inquiry of the population is on eternal sustainability, we can derive notions of ethics, fairness, harmony, freedom, and other elements of humanities, fairly easily.

This in a nutshell, was the wonder that was India. Not the drivel meted out by Indology experts in high citadels today.