Love, Discipline and Mo
This Morning’s 10km trot
Love and Discipline
The best part of my day is the morning hour or two I spend in the outdoors, swimming, cycling, running, or walking in the hills. The joy and rhythm of that time is a delight in itself, but it also sets the tone for the rest of the day, when I’m both relaxed and alert.
Every year, I linger a little longer over my morning coffee, take more time to stretch my limbs, and fumble a bit more to get my gear organised. If I have to make it out the door by seven, I now have to be up well before six, and, working backwards, I’ve gotten into the habit of being in bed by ten. This makes me something of a party pooper, but good friends now know that. For those who don’t, my wife steps up to the plate, and makes my excuses for me.
“You’re very self-disciplined”, is a phrase I’ll often hear in response. I’m sure it’s meant as a compliment, but it doesn’t sit well with me. I go to sleep early because I like to enjoy my time in the outdoors. Going to bed early is an act of selfishness, of safe-guarding what is truly valuable to me.
This week, I read a book called Best Loser Wins, by Tom Hougaard, an equity trader. While I learned a lot about behavioural aspects of trading, it was a paragraph about discipline that leapt out at me. These are words I wish I had written about getting up early, so I can be outdoors before the noise and the heat and the business of the day take over:
“I am often told I am very disciplined, This is not true. The word itself is an oxymoron. Discipline implies the use of force and will. My action flows from a love of what I do. Those who are self-disciplined don’t think of themselves as self-disciplined. They are just expressing themselves in harmony with their own dreams and goals and desires.”
Too Much Money
Government teachers are overpaid.
And constables, and food inspectors, and virtually every kind of entry-level job in government.
It’s not me who’s saying that - it’s the markets. The price is right when demand and supply are matched.
When 4.8 million candidates apply for 60,000 jobs in the U.P. constabulary*, you know there is a serious imbalance between the demand and supply of entry-level government workers. The Vyapam** scandal in Madhya Pradesh, though best known for industrial scale cheating in pre-medical tests, exposed a deep rot across the entire recruitment system of the Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal of the state, and led to at least 40 ‘unnatural’ deaths, among them the son of an earlier Governor of the state.
We see the movie of over-supply every year, with those who want to become school teachers in Bihar, food inspectors in Madhya Pradesh, or railwaymen across the nation. Econ 101 says that the easiest way to shrink the supply of job-seekers is to offer them a lower wage.
How much lower, I can’t say, but very simple experiments could be designed to determine an optimum wage, one that would ‘clear the market’ in the jargon of economics. Those who run budget private schools pay their teachers between one-fourth and one-half of government salaries, and study after study has shown that the learning outcomes of their students is at least as good as of those taught by overpaid government employees.
Last week, I heard that the going ‘fee’ to secure a permanent job as a college lecturer in Uttar Pradesh is 40 to 50 lakhs. That’s a serious amount of money, and had me running the numbers. A junior lecturer makes 10 lakhs a year, but from that you have to subtract the cost of getting the job. If you assume that the cost of borrowing money in the informal sector is 12% per annum, the annual cost of a 50 lakh ‘fee’ is 6 lakhs. You could get that amount every year without having to prepare for classes, stand in front of a blackboard, or grade exams. The additional income you get for that work is only 4 lakhs a year, less than half of what the government pays.
This is a broad brush with which to paint the entire government sector, but it passes my sniff test - government peons and drivers, teachers and inspectors, constables and postmen, could all be paid less than half of their current wages, and there would be no shortage of willing candidates. The Agneepath scheme of the defence forces is a tacit recognition of this reality, and while the specifics of military recruitment warrant debate, the broader point is clear - entry level wages in the government need to be sharply reduced. It’s your money that will be saved, and mine.
The only downside of such a rationalisation is that it would seriously weaken a rich eco-system carefully nurtured and protected over decades, of favours and patronage, of bribes and nepotism. I guess we will have to learn to live with that.
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyapam_scam
But as the old truism goes, "if you pay peanuts, you attract monkeys" might also occur which means that the most incompetent end up either having responsibility of future generations (as teachers) or being the overlords of citizenry (as police officers). That is a scary prospect.
When my father was a government servant in the BMC (Bombay Municipal Corporation), his employer hired the best and brightest of engineers to run the city. These were mostly toppers, highly educated, very upright, and (mostly) incorruptible. More importantly, they were competent in doing their job. (This old guard met Bob McNamara when he came as head of the World Bank to review the use of WB funding in Mumbai.)
How on earth would you attract a high-competency requirement job - such as being top officials of the MCGB- as BMC is now called - to run a city that is the size of many countries if you hire on the basis of low wages rather than merit/competence?
Thanks, ZachS yes.