Biological luck - III

Apparently, the Russian oligarch Mikail Khodorkovsky said before his fall from grace, "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it." Every one had the same starting conditions? This guy must have been hallucinating when he said that. "Man is born free ...", said Rousseau. "All men are created equal" is found in the United States Declaration of Independence. All people are neither born free nor created equal. They are constrained by the interaction between the genes they inherited and the environment they were born into. Babies are already different by the time they are born. 

Environment doesn't begin at birth, it begins at conception. The biggest source of these influences of the pre-natal environment is what’s in the maternal circulation, — levels of a huge array of different hormones, immune factors, inflammatory molecules, pathogens, nutrients, environmental toxins, illicit substances, all which regulate brain function in adulthood. If the mother is poor, nuroimaging studies on fetuses have shown that the fetal brain is more likely to be bathed in stress hormones from her circulation which delays aspects of brain maturation. 

This means that there is increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood. Lots of androgens in your fetal circulation (coming from Mom; females secrete androgens, though to a lesser extent than do males) makes you more likely as an adult of either sex to show spontaneous and reactive aggression, poor emotion regulation, low empathy, alcoholism, criminality. A shortage of nutrients for the fetus, caused by maternal starvation, means there’s increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood, along with a variety of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. Your mother's socioeconomic status is already beginning to influence what kind of brain you're going to have as an adult. Biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.

That what kind of environment your womb was has all sorts of lifelong implications is shown by The Dutch Hunger Winter. This lasted from the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945. Europe was devastated by four years of brutal war. Western Netherlands was still under German control. A German blockade resulted in a big drop in the availability of food to the Dutch population. At one point the population was trying to survive on only about 30 per cent of the normal daily calorie intake. Over 20,000 people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945.

The terrible shortages and suffering of this time also created a remarkable scientific study population. The Dutch survivors were a well-defined group of individuals all of whom suffered just one period of malnutrition, all of them at exactly the same time lasting about three months. Because of the excellent healthcare infrastructure and record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine. Their study had unexpected findings.

The effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that terrible period showed interesting variations. If a mother was well-fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. If, on the other hand, the mother suffered malnutrition for the first three months of the pregnancy only (because the baby was conceived towards the beginning of this period), but then was well-fed, she was likely to have a baby with a normal body weight. The foetus seemed to have ‘caught up’ in body weight.

Foetuses do most of their growing in the last few months of pregnancy so this doesn’t seem surprising. But epidemiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades and what they found was really surprising. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. For forty or more years, these people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. 

Even more unexpectedly, the children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy, had higher obesity rates than normal. They also had a greater incidence of other health problems as well, including certain tests of mental activity. Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.

Even more extraordinarily, some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, i.e. in the grandchildren of the women who were malnourished during the first three months of their pregnancy. So something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children. Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood in the Netherlands during the famine and despite her later wealth she had lifelong medical problems like anemia, respiratory illnesses, and œdema as a result. Subsequent academic research on the children who were affected in the second trimester of their mother's pregnancy found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in these children.

Biological luck - II

Why do different childhoods produce different adults? The reason is that the brain that you have as an adult was influenced during its construction by various childhood experiences. For example, lots of childhood stress damages construction of the frontal cortex, producing an adult less adept at helpful things like impulse control. Lots of exposure to testosterone early in life makes for the construction of a highly reactive amygdala, producing an adult more likely to respond aggressively to provocation. 

The names are not important. What is important to appreciate is that there are areas in the brain that are very important to us deciding what counts as the right thing to do and all brains are constructed differently depending on their life experiences. Every aspect of your childhood, factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have. Childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse and also impairs learning and memory. There is also a greater chance of their indulging in antisocial behaviour, including violence; and being in relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood. 

Some studies demonstrate that by age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the thinner the frontal cortex and the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control. Thus, if you are born in a poor family, your odds of success are automatically lowered. Some of the reasons why poverty reduces your chances of success are human specific — if you’re poor, you’re more likely to grow up near environmental toxins with the neighbourhood having more liquor stores than playgrounds; you’re less likely to attend a good school or have parents who can spend qualify time with you. 

The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or “ACEs,” quiz asks a series of questions about common traumatic experiences that occur in early life. It is an indication of how lucky your childhood was. It will ask about things like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. For each of these experienced, you get a point on the checklist, where the unluckiest have scores approaching a ten and the luckiest being around zero. It is found that for every step higher in one’s ACE score, there is roughly a 35 percent increase in the likelihood of adult antisocial behaviour, including violence; problems with impulse control; substance abuse; increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety disorders, poorer health and earlier death. 

The opposite happens if you a have a high RLCE (Ridiculously Lucky Childhood Experiences) score. As a child, did you feel loved and safe in your family?  Was your neighborhood crime-free, your family mentally healthy, your socioeconomic status reliable and good? Well then, you’d be a high-functioning adult. Children who have suffered from abuse or neglect in their early years grow up with a substantially higher risk of adult mental health problems than the general population. Often, the child grows up into an adult at high risk of depression, self-harm, drug abuse and suicide.

All these factors indicate adult potential and vulnerability, not inevitable destiny. There may be all sorts of problems in childhood. It has been found that childhood abuse increases the odds of being an abusive adult; witnessing violence raises the risk for PTSD; But despite such problems many individuals turn into reasonably functional adults with the childhood adversities seeming to have left no permanent scars. What explains such resilience?

What is important is the number of times a child suffers the whips and scorns of time and the number of factors that protects the child from trauma. If a child has been sexually abused OR has witnessed violence, the chances of it leading a normal adult life is better than if it had experienced both. If a child has experienced poverty, then the future prospects of the child are better if the family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. The more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy adulthood.

What happens when everything goes wrong — no mother or family, minimal peer interactions, malnutrition, etc? Take the example of the Romanian institution kids. In the 1980s the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu banned contraceptives and abortions and required women to bear at least five children. The result was that institutions soon filled with thousands of infants and kids abandoned by impoverished families. Many intended to reclaim the kids later when their financial situation improved. The kids thus lived in overwhelmed institutions, resulting in severe neglect and deprivation.

The story became widely known after Ceauşescu’s 1989 overthrow. The resulting  international attention led to some improvements in the institutions and many kids were adopted by Westerners. Since then, all categories of children - children adopted in the West, those eventually returned to their families, and those who remained institutionalized - have been studied.

As adults, all these kids had low IQ, poor cognitive skills, problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic, anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis. When their brains were studied, they were found to have decreased size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Only the amygdala - a small, almond-shaped structure in the brain, one of its key functions being to control fear and anxiety - is enlarged. 

An enlarged amygdala indicates an anxious and depressed child. Children with autism, ADHD or OCD tend to have an enlarged amygdala. So improved conditions later in life doesn’t reverse certain brain regions that developed during a traumatic childhood. Adverse consequences can be reversed to a greater extent than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.

Biological luck - I

People are obsessed with finding out the secrets to success. Many take great pride in describing themselves as self-made. They will assert that it was their individual traits — talent, skill, mental toughness, work ethic, persistence, optimism, etc. that helped them reach where they are now. Parents keep telling their children that if they try hard enough, they can achieve their goals. Self-help books will keep telling you that you, alone, are the solution that you seek. They ignore the fact that their success was entirely due to the initial conditions that they found themselves in which benefited them greatly.  

It is difficult to see that society's wealthiest and most successful individuals are simply the lucky ones. I had thought luck was important but not to the extent that I now think it is. How important the luck you had in where and to whom you were born only recently became clear to me after reading and listening to Robert Sapolsky who teaches neuroscience at Stanford University. The genes you inherited, foetal environment, childhood experience, the culture you were born in, all contributed to shaping the construction of your brain. 

Choices, efforts, intentions, will power, all of which influence our behaviour, are themselves biological phenomena. You are lucky to have them. Basically, our present state is the result of our cumulative biological and environmental luck. A misguided notion that many have today is spelled out by the nihilist, Bazarov, in Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons: 

I assure you, studying separate individuals is not worth the trouble. All people are like one another, in soul as in body; each of us has brain, spleen, heart, and lungs made alike; and the so–called moral qualities are the same in all; the slight variations are of no importance. A single human specimen is sufficient to judge of all by. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch–tree.

Most people will agree that our natural attributes like height, which make you good at playing certain games, or fast twitch fibres, that enable you to run fast, are biological. Then they will say that what really matters is what do you do with those attributes - whether you work hard to take advantage of those gifts or whether you waste these blessings. But this ability to work hard doesn’t come out of thin air. It's that brain of yours (and more specifically, a part of the brain called the frontal cortex) that decides if you are going to show impulse control or whether you give in to the slightest temptation. 

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved brain region. The human frontal cortex is bigger and more complex than in other apes. It has a wide portfolio of functions including working memory, gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, impulse control, among others. Sapolsky groups these functions under one heading: "the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do." It is the last brain region to fully mature, with people being in their mid-twenties by the time it is fully functional. 

The frontal cortex, and even more specifically, a part of it known as the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), is critical for making tough decisions in the face of temptation. This explains why teenagers do things that adults find daft - their PFC is not yet firing on all cylinders. And everyone doesn’t have the same PFC (and other parts of the brain). The enormous varieties of adolescent experiences will help produce enormously varied PFCs in adulthood. And this PFC is responsible for what you characterise as grit, character, backbone, tenacity, strong moral compass, etc.

Your adolescent experiences of trauma, stimulation, love, failure, rejection, happiness, despair, etc. all have played a very important role in constructing the PFC that you are using as an adult to decide whether to practice now or to skip it and watch a movie instead. It is difficult to appreciate that the same neurotransmitters, receptors, or transcription factors are involved when considering feats of willpower as is the case when regarding fast twitch fibers. Most people seem to have to have no idea how lucky one must be to be both talented and hard working. Your admirable self-discipline has much to do with how your cortex was constructed when you were a foetus and your childhood and adolescence.

You can’t will yourself to have more willpower. The factors that can affect willpower include blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress; whether you’re in pain; if you have had a stroke in your frontal cortex; if you suffered childhood abuse; how much of a cognitive load you’ve borne in the last few minutes; if you’re infected with a particular parasite; if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture, among many others, most of which are beyond your control.

Blood glucose levels affect willpower because of the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. A real- world example of this is a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings. What best predicted whether a judge granted someone parole versus more jail time? It was found that the longer it had been since judges had eaten, the less likely they were to grant a prisoner parole. There was overall decline over the course of a tiring day with essentially a zero percent rate just before judges ate. This shows that there are situations when biology can affect our behaviour. 

What was causing this behaviour? As the hours since the last meal kept increasing, the PFC was finding it more difficult to focus on the details of each case, the judge became more likely to choose the easier default option which is to send the person back to jail. This is the easier option than giving careful thought to whether the criminal in front of you has some potential for change. This idea is supported by a study in which subjects had to make judgments of increasing complexity. As the task progressed, the PFC became more slow during deliberating and the subjects became more likely to opt for the easier decision. Of course judges will give various philosophical reasons for rationalizing their decisions rather than say that they were caused by hunger. 

Ignaz Semmelweis

Ignaz Semmelweis was born in Budapest in 1818. He received his doctor’s degree from Vienna in 1844 and was appointed assistant at the obstetric clinic in Vienna and devoted his life to the health of babies and mothers. His is a name you have probably never heard of. He has probably saved more lives than any other person in the medical profession. 

Rich women delivered at home. But poverty, illegitimacy, or obstetrical complications forced many woman to seek hospitalization. The mortality rates ranged as high as 25–30 percent. Various ideas were floated to explain the high death rates. Some thought that the infection was induced by overcrowding, poor ventilation, the onset of lactation, or miasma. Semmelweis too proceeded to investigate its cause although his chief objected because he thought that the deaths could not be prevented. 

Semmelweis started observing hospital routines. He noted that pregnant women were admitted to one of two obstetric wards. The only difference between the two wards was that one was staffed exclusively by midwives, while in the other ward, medical students and doctors were in charge of deliveries and conducted autopsies on dead women in the nearby room. He observed that mortality was much higher in the latter ward. 

The death of a friend and colleague of Semmelweis provided him a clue to solve this puzzle. The friend developed a condition resembling the fever in the obstetrics ward staffed by doctors following a scalpel laceration while supervising an autopsy. This made him suspect that the higher mortality rate in the ward was due to the contamination of the hands of medical students and doctors with something during autopsies. He began to suspect that doctors were bringing the infection to the patients. 

The idea that many diseases are caused by germs is only about 150 years old. In Sommelweis' time, doctors often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to examining mothers in the maternity ward. He suggested as an experiment that the doctors wash their hands before touching the mothers not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. Chlorine, as we know today, is about the best disinfectant there is. Semmelweis didn't know anything about germs. He chose chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by those little bits of corpse on the doctors' hands.

And when he imposed this, the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically. You'd think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren't thrilled. For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women. How dare he make such a suggestion to his social superiors? He was a nobody who kept on asking his colleagues to wash their hands. And Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies. Eventually the doctors in his clinic refused to listen to him and gave up the chlorine hand-washing. He lost his job.

Semmelweis kept trying to convince doctors in other parts of Europe to wash with chlorine, but no one would listen to him. At the time, it was argued that diseases resulted from imbalances among four humors, and that each disease was unique because each person was unique. Doctors said that a healthy person had a perfect balance of the four humors of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Semmelweis's findings that disease resulted from unhygienic practices contrasted with the theory of humors. Historians have argued that Semmelweis's Jewish and Hungarian origins contributed to the dismissal.

Without a job, Semmelweis left Vienna and returned to Pest, Hungary. There, he continued to implement his hand washing procedures. In 1851, He became the head physician at the Szent Rókus Hospital in Pest. When he implemented his policies, the rate of childhood fever plummeted. In 1855, Semmelweis became head of obstetrics at the University of Pest. When he implemented the chlorine washing procedure, infection rates at the university hospital fell. Throughout the 1850s, Semmelweis wrote papers on childhood fever and, in 1861, he published his book on the subject. 

Semmelweis's mental health began to deteriorate after the publication of his book and he suffered from severe depression. By 1865, his abnormal public behavior started affecting his professional life and his wife and some of his colleagues committed him to an insane asylum in Vienna, Austria. After trying to leave the insane asylum in August 1865, he was beaten and put in a straitjacket. After two weeks in the asylum, Semmelweis died on 13 August 1865 in Vienna, Austria. His autopsy revealed that he had died from blood poisoning in a wound that could have been sustained during the beating.

Semmelweis’s doctrine was subsequently accepted by medical science. Semmelweis was a pioneer in scientific risk assessment and in identifying the source of transmission, including conducting an effective intervention. Subsequently, it might be said that he has saved millions of lives, including, quite possibly, yours and mine.  

Are good institutions enough? - V

Humans have always struggled with the question of how to design institutions that make self-interested individual action result in the welfare of society. This situation is sought to be achieved by market institutions. But there is a large sphere of behaviour that is not governed by legislation. 

Around 1919, a man named John Fletcher Moulton, an English mathematician, barrister, judge, and Member of Parliament, gave a speech which was transcribed verbatim by someone in the audience. It was published in The Atlantic in 1924 with the title "Law and Manners". There was no transcript of the speech and if someone in the audience had not written it down, it would have been lost. (It was published after his death. I came to know about this speech from this episode of the podcast econtalk) 

In the speech, he says that there are three great domains of human action. First comes the domain of positive law, where our actions are prescribed by laws which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of free choice, which includes all those actions in which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two domains there is a third large and important domain which doesn’t get much attention these days. 

Here there is no law which tells us what should be done, and yet we feel that we are not free to do whatever we feel like doing. The freedom of action that we have will vary from case to case and will depend on our discretion. It grades from a consciousness of a duty nearly as strong as positive law to a feeling that the matter is just a question of personal choice. This is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. "The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself."

That is a brilliant phrase - "obedience to the unenforceable". Moulton gets at the fact that if you take the idea of a "free debate" literally, the debate will be destroyed. The assumption regarding a "free debate" is that you don't actually say whatever you want because that destroys debate. A "free debate" is not totally free. You have to recognise that there are unenforceable obligations of self-governance.   

If you have a set of norms surrounding speech, where people are given freedom and there's very few formal restrictions and we rely on obedience to the unenforceable, then it is better to leave it alone. But once you fail to be obedient to that unenforceable obligation, creating that obligation is very difficult.  If everyone else is talking too long and you respect this norm, then you feel like a sucker. You start to say, : "I'm a fool. Doing what's right is foolish." And then you've lost that norm.

Moulton's analysis suggests that we have a set of impulses which, over time, we can either cultivate or we can desist from doing. So, if I have the right to do something and I always do it, then I am cultivating a habit of vice. But, if I say, 'No, I shouldn't do that: that would be wrong, even though I can do it' then I am cultivating habit of doing the right thing. So, if a situation comes along that happens to be in the third domain of Moulton's framework, I know what the right thing to do is even though it is unenforceable because I've made it a habit. 

If we all cultivate that habit, then the society that we live in is much better for everyone. If I'm the only one doing that, I'm a chump and it won't work. If everyone else does it but I don't do it, I start to corrode their commitment to those habits. So, it really is important that when I look around, I see everyone else doing it.

The modern trend is to expand the scope of what Moulton calls law to prescribe things through the power of the state. But things that are legal are not necessarily things that should be done. And similarly, many things that should not be done perhaps should not be illegal. They should just be part of what Lord Moulton was calling manners or "obedience to the unenforceable". Many things should not be enforced through the state but through our social interaction. Many people underestimate the importance of moral strictures that we obey because they are the right thing to do. This is what Moulton emphasised when he used the term "obedience to the unenforceable". 

Adam Smith thought that over time, human beings both individually and collectively, were capable of perfecting a kind of self-governance. Much of our behaviour would actually be governed by the reactions of others, represented by the impartial spectator, which we had internalised to a great extent. He says in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that my desire for your approval and your desire to avoid my disapproval, is the foundation of civilisation.  It pushes us in a direction of doing the right thing.

He's aware it doesn't work all the time and that sometimes laws are necessary, but there's an impulse toward being a decent human being even when you don't want to be, because you don't want to lose the respect of the people around you. But modern economists will say that these are all principal-agent problems and all we have to do is design a set of rules and impose those in order to solve them. 

Thus, the eagerness and willingness to "do the right thing" has been eroded. This puts pressure on the state to use the power of the state to enforce the things that were once unenforceable. This, in turn crowds out the natural impulse of norms and institutions to emerge that would enforce these without the state. This back and forth between our imperfection in creating a demand for government intervention and then that government intervention crippling our ability to solve these problems is a positive feedback loop that is difficult to arrest once it begins.

A lot of what's disturbing about the world right now is the erosion of those norms. We are left with  disobedience to the unenforceable and facing the choice of having to legislate improvements.

Are good institutions enough? - IV

Bureaucracies ­display large differences in their capabilities. In third world countries especially, bureaucracies are regarded as corrupt and bureaucrats are regarded as cogs who surrender their discretion to politicians. In Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India, Akshay Mangla investigates why some bureaucracies perform more effectively than ­others. He investigates the delivery of primary education in rural north India, an unlikely setting for public services to function well. Some states in the Hindi belt perform far better than expected, while others show sluggish and uneven progress. 

India’s failure to provide quality public services is not for want of resources or an absence of political will.  With economic liberalization in the 1990s, state control of the economy receded, but social programming expanded substantially in some areas. The Midday Meal Programme provides a free daily meal in more than 2 million government schools. The 2010 Right to Education [RTE] Act places a legally enforceable duty on the state to guarantee free and compulsory education for all children of ages 6 to 14 years. Not all developing countries have such progressive social legislation. Yet, there are wide variations in educational achievements between states. 

In the Himalayan region, Himachal Pradesh stands out as a leader in primary education within India. It lags only behind Kerala. HP’s educational achievements are even more remarkable than Kerala’s in many ways. HP’s mountainous topography, harsh climate and low population density make the administration of services far more challenging. At independence, Kerala had a substantial lead in literacy (47.2 percent) over the rest of India, whereas HP (at 8 percent) was among the least literate states in the country. Since the 1980s, HP has surged ahead of other states, with educational gains broadly shared by women, lower castes and tribal populations. This is in contrast to the adjacent state of Uttarakhand, which has similar economic and sociocultural characteristics to HP. It performs much worse in primary education, even though it had a substantially higher literacy rate (19 percent) around independence.

You will be given explanations for such variations. It will be said that modernization and economic development lead to improvements in public service delivery. As an economy develops, the state accumulates resources and citizens acquire new abilities to demand primary education. You will be told that there is a virtuous cycle between growing affluence and good governance. Economic growth leads to increased social spending as well as improvements in bureaucratic quality. 

Although social spending in India increased significantly in the 1990s, implementation of social programs is uneven. Several lower-income states in India have made substantial gains in primary education and other aspects of human development, outperforming wealthier states. An economic laggard like UP made notable gains in enrollment and infrastructure provision, while performing quite inadequately on other dimensions of implementation. Services in UP’s more affluent western belt is similar to that in poorer parts of the state. Economic development alone doesn’t explain these differences. 

Another common argument will concern geography - villages further away from urban centers perform worse on many dimensions of governance. There is also an urban bias in development. But HP performs better than other states despite comparatively low urbanization and population density, scattered settlement patterns, unfriendly climate and terrain, making it costlier to provide services. On the other hand, Uttarakhand performs markedly worse than HP despite similar physical characteristics.

Another common argument is about the type of institutions present -  the formal structure of constitut­ions, electoral systems, rules of federalism and executive power. Yet, formal institutions cannot account for variation in the performance of different state  bureaucracies since they all operate under a common legal, fiscal and electoral framework. 

It is also argued that different types of colonial institutions produce lasting effects on economic performance. So the author compares districts of HP and Uttarakhand having similar histories of direct British rule and military recruitment, but different contemporary patterns of education service delivery. He also examined districts of UP with different colonial land tenure systems, but similar implementation patterns. 

The above factors – economic development, geography, formal institutions and colonial administrative legacies – are important, but they do not fully explain variation in how states in northern India implement policy.  He finds that this difference depends on the informal norms that guide bureaucratic behavior. These norms guide public officials on how to interpret the instructions of their political masters and take appropriate actions. These norms influence how officials interact with individuals and groups in society which influences how the public views the bureaucracy. 

As ­citizens gain exposure to the local state, their experiences condition future expectations and the collective monitoring of schools, impacting the quality of services. Bureaucratic norms have evolved differently across Indian states even though they have common political, legal and administrative institutions. He finds two types of bureaucracies - “deliberative” and “legalistic" - which have different mechanisms for policy implementation.

Deliberative bureaucracy encouraged flexibility in the interpretation of rules. Lower-level bureaucrats learn to discuss problems collectively with senior officials, transmitting local knowledge throughout the system. This enables officials to undertake complex tasks and adapt policies to varying local needs. It includes rural women, lower castes and other marginalized groups in the decision-making process which yields higher quality services.

In contrast, legalistic bureaucracy, encourages officials to strictly follow the rules resulting in a rigid interpretation of policy. Lower-level officials treat policy rules as binding constraints and show no personal initiative on how to apply ­policies in particular cases. It results in poor implementation of projects that require repeated state–society interactions. It creates administrative burdens for marginalized groups and tend to reinforce inequalities. Thus legalistic bureaucracy leads to uneven policy implementation. 

These distinct types of bureaucratic norms produce very different implementation patterns and outcomes for primary education. 

Are good institutions enough? - III

Democracies need not always die because of military coups. Democratic governments may die at the hands of elected leaders. They may be killed quickly as at the hands of Hitler, or they may erode slowly, in barely visible steps that nobody will notice. The latter is more probable since the end of the Cold War. Most democratic breakdowns now are caused by elected governments themselves by slowly  strangling democratic institutions. Examples include Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia.

If constitutional rules were enough, then figures such as Perón, Marcos, or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas would have been one-or two-term presidents. But this did not happen. All of them came to power under what were thought to be well-designed constitutions which contained an impressive array of checks and balances that should have reined them in. The constitutional and legal safeguards can be easily manipulated by a determined authoritarian leader. Why? 

Constitutions, no matter how well-designed, will always have countless gaps and ambiguities. No set of rules can anticipate all possible contingencies or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances. The rules can only be general and are subject to different interpretations by different people. What does “advice and consent” or “crimes and misdemeanours” mean? If constitutional powers are open to multiple readings, they can be used in ways that their creators didn’t anticipate. Also, the written words of a constitution may be followed to the letter in ways that undermine the spirit of the law. 

When electoral route is used to throttle democracy, you don’t get the usual signals about the death of a democracy like the president being killed or sent off into exile, the constitution being suspended, tanks in the streets etc. On the electoral road, constitutions and other well-known democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. All the outward show of democratic processes will be maintained. 

Each individual step that seems to undermine democracy seems minor — none appears to truly threaten democracy. Elected autocrats will tell you their efforts are aimed at making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. There will be nothing that will set off the  alarm bells of a majority of people. Those who protest against government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. 

Government actions to subvert democracy often seem legally correct and will be approved by parliament and the supreme court. Key players who might threaten the government like opposition politicians and  business leaders who finance the opposition are bought off or enfeebled. Would-be  autocrats often use security threats — wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures. For such leaders, a crisis represents an opportunity to begin to dismantle the inconvenient constitutional constraints. Over time, what was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

Institutions alone are not enough to check elected autocrats. Whether the autocratic leader subverts democratic institutions or is constrained by them will depend on democratic norms. Norms are shared codes of conduct that are widely accepted within a society. These norms are what make a constitution work smoothly for a long time. Because they are unwritten, they pass unnoticed and we can be fooled into thinking they are unnecessary. But their absence can prove dangerous. These norms prevent political parties from acting in such a fashion that the whole system is endangered. One such norm is that rival political parties don’t regard each other as enemies. 

Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not work. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. The courts and other neutral agencies are packed with their sympathizers, the media and the private sector will be bought or bullied into silence. In the electoral route to authoritarianism, the very institutions of democracy will be used to kill it. With the courts packed and law enforcement authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity. In How Democracies Die, the authors give four warning signals, any one of which indicates danger: 

when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,

2) denies the legitimacy of opponents,

3) tolerates or encourages violence, or

4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.