Public Policy Review #4
Wicked Problems, One-child PolicyWTF, Sri Lanka, Climate Change and more
PolicyWTF: How to get old before getting rich
This section looks at egregious public policies. Policies that make you go: WTF, Did that really happen?
There are many PolicyWTF candidates this week such as Police can search premises for e-cigarettes without a warrant and the move for a countrywide implementation for a National Register of Citizens. But I’m going with something more time-insensitive: China’s one-child policy (一孩政策) and its unintended consequences.
Ask around you what India’s biggest problem is and there’s a high chance you’ll hear back ‘overpopulation’. Observe the metaphors used — population explosion, the ticking population bomb, a country bursting at the seams.
Some people will even cite how China managed to improve the fortunes of its citizens precisely because it implemented a draconian one-child policy three decades ago. So let’s focus on how the Chinese experiment panned out.
The Economist (Oct 31, 2019) documents the unintended consequences of this policy thus:
the median age of Chinese citizens will overtake that of Americans in 2020. China’s population over the age of 65 will more than double, from 12% to 25%. By contrast America is on track to take nearly a century, and Europe to take more than 60 years, to make the same shift. China’s pace is similar to Japan’s and a touch slower than South Korea’s, but both those countries began ageing rapidly when they were roughly three times as wealthy per person.
China’s one-child policy was both efficient and effective. So much so that even after it was discontinued in its entirety in 2016, birth rates continued to plummet (there should be a term for this - policy hysteresis perhaps). There are labour shortages, pension burdens, and a lot of emotional pain ahead — effects often discounted by governments obsessed with population control. China’s one-child policy is an all-time PolicyWTF contender.
More fundamentally though, framing the problem as ‘overpopulation’ itself is problematic. These lines from Mei Fong’s One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment are brilliant.
What we fail to understand is that China’s rapid economic growth has had little to do with its population planning curbs. Indeed, the policy is imperiling future growth because it rapidly created a population that is too old, too male, and, quite possibly, too few.
More people, not less, was one of the reasons for China’s boom. The country’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse could not have happened without aboundant cheap labour from workers born during the 1960s-70s baby boom, before the one-child policy was conceived.
In India as in China, a problem of under-governance still gets framed as a problem of over-population. It’s time we learn the cautionary tale from China’s PolicyWTF instead of blaming our population size.
India Policy Watch
Insights on burning policy issues in India
There’s too much negative commentary on the lack of climate change action. However, I submit that governments across the developing world have been relatively quick at acting on climate change. That these measures are not enough is well-understood. But why any action at all got done in countries like India, which have other unattended and possibly more urgent problems, hasn’t been understood at all.
Consider this. Just a decade ago, climate change was a textbook case of a wicked problem i.e. the problem wasn’t well-defined, the solutions weren’t clear, and there was no urgency in solving the problem either. In the framework below (Head, 2008), it ranked high on all three parameters for ascertaining ‘wickedness’ of a problem.
And yet, ten years down the line, things have indisputably changed. The problem is well-defined now. The urgency and risks have been communicated quite well through a concerted global effort. As a result, most nation-states across the world do have some climate change action plan in place. Admittedly, the divergence in viewpoints, values and intentions remains to be bridged but we have come a long way.
The glass is half-full. With that mindset, what more can India do, you ask? Here’s a chat with on our daily policy podcast:
A Framework a Week
Tools for thinking about public policy
A simple hack: a public policy problem is not a problem unless you have at least three mutually exclusive solutions to solve that problem.
One of the most commonplace mistakes in public policy is to sell our predetermined favourite policy solution as the only policy problem that needs to be solved. Since we have preconceived notions about solving public policy issues, we subconsciously tend to narrowly define the policy problem as the lack of our favourite solution. This prevents us from being open to more imaginative solutions.
For example, when asked to define a policy problem related to India’s primary education system, you might get a response such as: ‘Our government school teachers are paid less’. Now, this is a solution masquerading as a problem. It has only one solution.
A better way to define this problem would be to think of outcomes. Such as: ‘only half the students in class 5 can read textbooks meant for class 2’. When phrased this way, we give ourselves the chance to consider solutions other than our favourite one.
So, start broadly while defining policy problems. And think of outcomes, and not outputs or outlays (more on these three terms in another version).
This framework is based on this video by Lant Pritchett, a renowned development economist:
Matsyanyaaya
Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s victory in Sri Lanka has rekindled fears in the Indian foreign policy community about a return of Chinese influence in the island country. Serious analysts suggest this view is incorrect. Tino Xavier proposes four ways to make Sri Lanka pursue an India-first policy. Nitin Pai writes that since India and China are not good substitutes for each other, Colombo continues to have the rationale, reason and space for engaging both.
My point is this. India needs to tone down its worries on China’s presence in its neighbourhood. It is perfectly natural that smaller states will play India against the other powerful economy. That is precisely what every state is attempting under the cover of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As long as these states are mindful of India’s security concerns and economic well-being, India shouldn’t be overly concerned with China’s presence. Given China’s unenviable performance in smaller states elsewhere, it is likely to establish itself as a primary object of hate in these states soon. India must instead do enough to be the second-best option for every smaller state instead.
Way too much bandwidth is spent on how India can ‘win over’ countries in the neighbourhood. This approach is based on a false assertion that India cannot be a power of any consequence unless it has good relations with every state in its neighbourhood. Apart from being ahistorical, this view overplays the role of smaller states in India’s neighbourhood for the prosperity of Indians. I propose this: invert our foreign policy priorities. This means a reduction in its preoccupation with countries in the Indian subcontinent and a corresponding increase in engagement with other ‘neighbours’ outside the subcontinent.
HomeWork
Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters
A paper which finds that the high-tech industry in the US tends to be concentrated in a small number of expensive labour markets. Moreover, this concentration has only become stronger over the last five decades, pointing to the benefits of increasing geographical agglomeration for inventors.
A counter-intuitive finding on gendered representation in European parliaments, which shows that women’s preferences actually tend to be more accurately represented in parliaments than those of men. Who votes is more important than who represents for policy preference congruence.
Understanding wicked problems in public policy.
That’s all for the week, folks. Read and share. 再见 👋