My attention to this topic was drawn by something very interesting that I saw - a statement by a minister of Kerala. The backdrop of the statement was this - several states in India amended their labour laws to essentially grant fewer rights to workers. The argument was that strict labour laws forced companies to think twice before setting up industries in these states. The Kerala government however refused to follow this trend and said there are better ways of attracting labour than by denying them rights. And several people applauded this stance.
I am not an expert in this topic and I have also read a counter-view - that in fact the lack of industry in states has nothing to do with the labour laws. And economics is a topic I'm always afraid of saying anything due to my own ignorance. It's a topic I never understand even from a layman's perspective.
This however was an interesting point - the laws brought in to protect labour ended up causing a lack of demand for labour, allegedly. Why I found it interesting was that the state which was being hailed as the one who stood by the workers (ie. Kerala) is also the state whose young workers are willing to toil in the heat of the deserts of the Arabian peninsula where they are not guaranteed even human rights under theological monarchies, so labour rights are a far-cry away. Surely, if they had a chance to work in decent conditions back in their home state, with this high level of protection of labour rights, they would have chosen this? Or maybe we know nothing about human nature and people are just willing to jeopardise their health, futures and lives at the prospect of making a lot more money. Either way, a law on the books clearly does precious little other than allowing a government to thump its chest.
Take the example of the house I'm living in. The landlord is an extremely environmentally conscious individual. All the lights are low-electricity consuming lights, heating is switched on only at some hours during the winter. One of the measures along with these is the installation of water-saving shower heads. These shower heads partially block the flow of water and so it forces you to use less water while taking a shower. One doesn't need the full pressure flow to take a shower.
Alas, there is a problem with this. For the hot water to maintain a continuous flow, it needs the water to be running continuously. In usual circumstances, if you turn on the hot water tap, switch it off and then turn it on again, you get cold water and you've to again wait for a couple of minutes for the water to heat up. What the water-saving shower head does is that due to its blocking effect, the hot water flow keeps getting blocked and so even if the shower is kept open continuously, the water keeps getting cold. To call this a slight inconvenience is a gargantuan understatement. A nice shower of hot water is what keeps spirits of a tropical boy up in the (admittedly mild) Roman winter. There are two solutions to this - remove the shower head, which allows unobstructed flow of water, or to open another tap of hot water at a low speed to ensure the continuous flow. Either solution causes a huge amount of wastage of water and I end up using way more water than I would with a normal, high-pressure shower-head.
Let us say you want to increase the tax-revenues of a state or a country. What is the way to go about it? Of course, you increase the tax-rates. However, it could happen that when you increase the tax-rates, more people will work harder to evade the taxes and you end up pouring all your resources into chasing after tax evaders rather than just enjoying a larger inflow of tax. In fact, you might end-up hurting your tax revenue though at the surface level, you increased taxes.
An apocryphal tale from the British Raj about snakes. Due to the menace of cobras in Delhi, the British-Indian government announced a reward for those catch these snakes. This led to a bunch of enterprising Indians to start breeding cobras to claim the reward money. When the government got wind of this scheme, they discontinued the reward and so the cobra breeding reward-hunters had to release all their cobras, thus increasing the total count of cobras in Delhi.
I don't really have a point with this blog. It has been a while since I've published anything. And I found these examples to be really cute and with the potential to completely change the way we think - not just a linear jump from action to consequence, but hundreds of steps in between which can turn things any which way. At least it made me look at the world in a very different way.