Function of trust in an economy

The occident is different from the orient and it is the orient where the intangibles used to work well till the occident came to the conclusion that they were the ones that could deliver the way that they wanted to and in the process have a series of satellite countries in the economic imperialism that they were want to flaunt in such a blatant manner. Time and again I am asked why the hate and love relationship with the west and why the visible demonstration of hate. The only aspect I know is that the intangibles do not work well in the cultural system. The factors of trust, of respect, of affection and such other elements are missing. The west is used to dealing in an impersonal manner.

Imagine the confusion that is noticeable in the system at the moment and consider the governance system? Take any interaction with the international agencies or for that matter the selection procedure where the selectivity has to be in terms of merit and where the internalization is such that the selection process is done on the basis of ethnicity or any kind of connectivity. One of the main reasons for the debacle in our games is that the selection of players is done in a manner that is not conducive to making honest mistakes. When the team whether in the governance structure or any game selection knows that the selection has not been on merit the foundations for poor performance is laid down.

In the economy it is laid don in the relationship between the various players that constitute the economy. It is in the relationship between the sugarcane farmers and the sugar mill owners, it is between the markets and the wheat growers and the governments. It is in the regionalism of the commodity markets. Imagine how the arhti has made a mockery of the various transaction costs that the economy has had to pay for the way that they have behaved and the listless manner of handling the development of the market. The time has come where the understanding has to take into consideration not the greed but the selfishness of those who are supposed to be in the company of trust in he economic system. That is the problem of the economists that have been here in the past and that are now talking through their hats.

It is the censorship in the transactions that come via the intangibles that makes or mars the countries on their march to becoming a worthwhile nation. All other interventions are meaningless and worthless. The issue then is how to limit the ego of the insightful person and the connection between the tangible interventions of the west and the intangibles of the east. That is where I have had deliberate and direct dialogue with the international agencies. Wherever there is, in public service, any transaction that involves monetary considerations, whether direct or indirect, there is bound to be failure especially if the integrity of the individual is in question. Every time that a western educated economist [and all of them are] speaks of saving-investment equation or of inflation one knows that he is in an untenable situation because the causes are different in this country as compare to another western country and the analysis based on the economic structure of another country is not applicable. The other day I was witness to the survey and the analysis of the push-pull factors. What did the surveyors not realize was that the roots of inflation are present in the Capital itself and if reasoned checks had been done a simple analysis would have done the trick. Instead we got the usual mumbo-jumbo and nothing in between. As someone from the cricketing world would have said that all this was up the creek. No benefit and no pleasure either. The poor continue to suffer. Come back to the early fifties and sixties before the advent and the birth of the Planning commission all of us would realize that the world was ordered through a different system of values and attitudes. The grandmothers and the grandfathers were really grand in as much as the satisfaction level was based on humanitarian grounds. The world around each one of us was a caring one where the slightly better off looked after the worse off. What was wrong with that kind of thinking? What was wrong with the economy then? If I were to rate the finance ministers then the uninitiated in this subject and those that had based there decisions on common sense top the list. So is the case with the best decision makers. I had consciously wanted to see how decisions were made. I saw complicated decisions taken based on the conscious local will and the formation of a basis for decision making that would surprise Herbert Simon who received his Nobel Prize on administrative decision-making.

How do the farmers, the ordinary and the poor, list the government? What is the worth of the government when it comes to this kind of listing? I recently had a discussion on corruption in the government and this excellent friend told me the dilemma of a minister of a province. Apparently for everything the going rate is 12.5% and the minister would not take any and his dilemma that was posed to him was ‘that x amount is collected, x/2 is the minister’s share and the other half is shared between the other members of the secretariat. The good minister had denied himself access to this looted money. How long can he resist. Move from here to the bureaucracy and any bureaucracy. Are they saints? Was Shaukat Aziz a saint? Was his economic team a saint? Were the perpetrators in Islamabad honest dicks, of course not? So let us get back to the working of the economy based on the intangibles. The finance ministers have to learn to trust those that deliver and distinction has to be made between the doers and he wasters. The Planning Commission would do well to understand the implications of what I am stating. The whole gambit of the sixties has to change. Unfortunately when the stagnation sets in and when policy takes on the colors of dogma and doctrinaire it is time to move to another domain. Who trusts which government? Give an honest answer not to me but to yourself. The trust factor and all these intangibles have very super trump cards in their repertoire and eventually emerge winners. One does not have to be clever in the computer sense. How is intimacy with intangibles built? This intimacy is only possible when the individual policy maker realizes that the two are part of the same personality-the intimacy and the trust. What the policy maker has to come to terms is the ability to resolve the paradoxical matters in such a manner that there is a dialogue between the head and the heart-the impassionate with the passionate. Has any one written a letter to the heart emerging from the head? Gone bonkers in the modern world, some one is bound to say. Yes, bonkers is right. But have you tried to muster reasons against yourself? How silly because in Pakistan no Pakistani has ever done anything wrong let alone a burglary. Honest ‘sheedas’ [distortion of Rashid]? You bet.

Go to those that live at the margin and see how they are tying to eke out a living and do not transfer them to statistics. It was statistics that took us where we are today? It was in East Pakistan and now in the peripheral borders of Pakistan that we will meet our waterloo only because we have forgotten the message of trying to be true to ourselves. I can go on for these intangibles are many and work in many different ways. Can you embrace a dalit or one of the lowliest of our society, can you eat with him from the same plate, and does he not have the same ways that the almighty gave you and him? It is difficult to be human? It is more difficult to have a humane economy and even more difficult to have an economy based on the injunctions of Islam? Difficulties never should bother. They are there for a better, not a bitter, response. Don’s be pushed by namedroppers-they are selfish brutes. They have unnecessarily politicized something that they have been responsible for perverting in the first place. Go for the jugular when things do not look that good for the economy. Might as well have a bash when the things are not so good and cancer has spread far and wide. Try to do good by others except those that have perverted matters? They cannot be forgiven-the Punjabi, the Sindi, the Baluch and the Frontier person-no one should be safe from paying their due that has left the country in dire states. Look after yourself-there is much to do and many mountains to climb, many dead rivers to ford?