A question for democracy

As the country goes into the 15th Lok Sabha elections, I am musing about a rather fundamental question about voter behaviour: In the General Elections, should one vote on local issues or national issues. I have thought about this long and hard and found arguments in support of either case. It is really difficult to decide which option is right. I hope someone is able to enlighten me by offering the right logic. 

On the one hand, there is the case where you vote for a large national party keeping in mind the government that you want to see at the centre. You would vote based on macro-issues such as inflation, unemployment, trade, new investments, education, defence et al. On the other hand there is the case where you vote on local issues keeping in mind the performance of your local MP and the record of the other candidates for your constituency. Here it boils down to more local issues such as local infrastructure, local schoools and colleges, local investments and the like. 

There are plausible arguments in favour of either option. Let's take the first case first - Voting on national issues: In a multi-party democracy like India where there are a large number of regional players, it is difficult to keep track of the agenda of each party. The smaller the players, the narrower the issues that they fight elections on. So when you're voting to put a government up at the centre, shouldn't you vote for parties which contest on national issues and possess the wherewithal to run a nation? Also, if you're voting for a local party or an independent, you are more likely than not to be contributing to a fractured mandate and a hung parliament at the centre.

The second option - Voting on local issues: After all, it's your local leader who is responsible for your development. He/She is the individual who is allocated the funds for your constituency. It is the local MP who has more hands-on knowledge about the problems that you face at the local level and can represent your voice accurately at the national level in the lower house. Local investments and infrastructure projects may be initiated by this individual. Moreover, there is the 'Wisdom of crowds' theory of James Surowiecki which states that for the decisions of a large group of people to be accurate it is important for those individual decisions to be independent. Hence, every constituent of a crowd should vote based on his needs and interests, without considering how the rest of the crowd behaves or in this case votes. 

I have been racking my brains over this issue and have found no definitive argument that would tip the contest in favour of either of these choices. I need to come across a sound rational logic that would convince me of the superiority of either of these cases. It is an important question - one that deserves to be mused upon and answered. Even if I do not ultimately find an answer to this question, I am sure I will be wiser at the end of the day. I will have understood the nature of  democracy and the importance of having a representative government. Being a part of the largest democracy in the world, this is the bare minimum I owe the nation - and more importantly, myself. 

A chance to discard the old

Every threat is also almost always an opportunity. Nowhere could this be more relevant than in current conditions. The global economy is in the doldrums and experts worldwide have been proposing stimulus package after ineffective stimulus package to jumpstart the stalling economic machines of the world. What if we're following an incorrect approach in the first place? What if were are simplistically trying to treat the symptom instead of treating the disease? 

The current economic crisis is the result of impaired financial assets, which were overvalued due to complex speculations by greedy and obtuse bankers. Now we are happily trying to correct the problem by bailing out these bankers. What we are NOT doing is trying to understand what they were doing. They were, in a very rudimentary sense, betting on the cash flows from risky financial instruments. But money or wealth should be based on an underlying commodity or product or service. What if these underlying entities themselves are not sound? Maybe we should rethink the origins of our wealth. 

If you come to think of it, the current global economy is constituted, mostly, by old world wealth - fossil fuels, obsolete manufacturing and aging technology. The only relatively new source of wealth in the economy is the internet firms which have truly innovated to create wealth. Maybe we should focus our efforts on creating new wealth instead of trying to fix the old sources of wealth. Maybe the General Motors and Fords of the world ought to be allowed to fail in order to make way for new firms and new sources of wealth which are based on new ideas which are relevant to our times. It will be a more painful and drawn out recovery. But we wont have an encore of the current crisis for a long time to come. 

All major periods of wealth creation in our history have been based on real innovation and new thinking. Be it the industrial revolution, the space race or the internet. New technology leads the way for wealth creation as a natural progression. Any other way of tinkering with wealth is simply playing with the controls without fixing the circuitry. Maybe we need another revolution in technology which is driven by new ideas - green energy, affordable public healthcare, for that matter any new idea with the potential to transform the economy by driving out the obsolete. 

World leaders are myopic by compulsion. They have vote banks to anwer to. But academics are independent. What has surprised me over the last few months as this crisis has unfolded is that every Ivy League B-School professor has simply gone on record to speculate on the duration of the crisis and the origins of it. No one has proposed a concrete plan for recovery based on anything which is different from a rehashing of the old-world thinking. 

Now, I believe is our big chance to discard the old. If change has come, then let it come big. Let us go the distance and fix things once and for all instead of prescribing lame measures. Let us alter the patient's lifestyle instead of supporting his failing heart with yet another bypass surgery. I don't think crises of such magnitude deserve to be tackled with half measures. I hope someone is listening.