From Economics to Freakanomics




Imagine on a fine Monday morning, you wake up to find that when you walk towards the kitchen, it not only has an entry but an exit too; Curious like most humans naturally are, you walk out of the exit to find anew room and you are even more surprised to find a n exit again. You continue your journey until you find out that you are in a room that has an exit and you don’t remember how many rooms you have crossed. Gosh! That’s so difficult even to imagine that you start questioning your senses or whether you are still dreaming. And if it is true, you may just need to do something about it!!!!!!!

That’s what is precisely required because the rules of the game have changed. I am talking about the nations that have not only have doors to the outside world but which broken down their walls and borders all together. We now live in a borderless world!
But to save ourselves from total chaos, we may just have to redefine our laws, our ways of reasoning and our outlook.

Economy is a relatively new science, because although Economics has long existed, the laws have been relatively set later than most other sciences. No wonder Economics was lately (1960’s to be precise) introduced as a Nobel Prize category too.
But is it a science? Because a science must be always answerable and accountable to Ecology. But sadly Economics is not. And I am surprised why it is not?

Capitalism is no doubt a boon for our modern society, but are not we bringing the same to the threshold of a curse? Why are we letting the lapse of accountability lead to a crisis?
And it is the same borderless world that I was talking about which is accelerating the rate of this crisis. We all know about how setting up enormous factories has led to pollution and depletion of the ozone layer. So I will save this article from that discussion. But there are a couple of things I am more worried about and they are not transparent enough to be seen easily. So I thought I will scrape some of the surface for you people.

Einstein quotes “I don’t know what the third world war would be fought with, but the 4th one would be definitely fought with sticks and stones.”
It may require a German genius to coin this quote, but does it require more than a common citizen to understand and decode these 25 words of caution??
Bringing out a clearer picture, the so called Nuclear energy which is deemed to be the future of the world energy needs is more than a hazard. Today the mention of a nuclear hazard may remind you of Chernobyl or say Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but how many of us know that the nuclear weapons that countries like US possess are a 1000 times more destructive than the former one! Leave alone the arms race, the same amounts of energy are also stored in the energy powerhouses, or so called Nuclear reactors.
Although the US may convince the world of the security and the safety of these reactors but the fact remains that the chances and risk of a disaster can never be eliminated as long as the human factor is involved. And it is no secret that the H factor will never and can never be eliminated.
And in absence of a disaster too, these reactors are leaving back huge remains of Plutonium waste that will haunt the Human race forever.
The arms race, the reactors and enormous wastes have not threatened not only us but the generations to come. The question I want to ask is “WHAT RIGHT DO WE HAVE TO PUNISH THEM, CHASTISE THEM IN SUCH A MANNER THAT THEY MAY NEVER RECOVER?” The extinction of the dinosaurs reminds us that life and ecology has to co-exist. We don’t want other species to dig out human fossils a 1000 years from now!!!! Or do we??

But there is one more opaque factor and a bigger disaster and that is related to Agriculture.
Technology in agriculture has always been shown as a boon in developed countries, but how many of us are aware, that it is the economics game at play again. The oil companies and the fertilizer companies have found out who their biggest customers are from their base. They have done the world good by educating them about the benefits of this revolution, but what about the other side of the coin? I will try and do the needful.

The year round different crops were grown before the green revolution and as pests generally affect only a particular variety of crop, growing different crops led to the elimination of these pests. Also soil fixation was naturally done by the earthworms. But this natural rhythm has been disturbed completely and today the farmers are producing a single crop throughout the year with the help of great fertilizers and chemicals and fertilizers are used for the purpose of fixation too. But this is only making the pests immune to these pesticides slowly but surely. And more importantly we are leaving behind traces of and huge traces of deadly chemicals in the Bio-cycle that will ultimately lead to disaster.

And coming back to Economics, if you doubt any of these facts, go back and look back at the various US oil companies that have started to foray into fertilizer and chemical business and Vic versa.
Now that’s what I call Freakanomics!!!!!!!!!!


Dhimant Negandhi