Have you ever wondered why cricket matches are getting shorter – from test matches to one-day matches to T20 and now T10?
There are two possible reasons – either people can’t stand so much cricket, or it’s not cricket’s fault. Perhaps, people can’t stand anything for that long.
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Evidence suggests that the latter is more likely to be true. With a plethora of services and information to choose from, young Indians are falling short of one critical and finite resource – attention, cognitive space.
Herbert A Simon, a psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate, coined the term’ attention economy’. He noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.
In 1997, theoretical physicist Michael Goldhaber postulated that the international economy is becoming attention-based rather than material-based. Goldhaber added that while information is not scarce, attention is.
With shrinking cognitive spaces, consumers prefer door-to-door services and apps that reduce their active involvement in a task.
For instance, the proponents of autonomous cars support the idea with two benefits: crash risk reduction and commuter productivity. By outsourcing driving, commuters free up their cognitive space.
What is cognitive load, one might wonder?
Pioneered by Australian educational psychologist John Sweller in 1988, cognitive load theory suggests that the working memory of individuals can hold between five and nine chunks of information.
Sweller said that since working memory has a limited capacity, it shouldn’t be loaded with information that doesn’t directly contribute to learning.
Similarly, with the chaotic abundance of information and limited space in working memory, it is likely that, if given a choice, humans would outsource some of the “passive” and “lacklustre” tasks, such as commuting, to an app or another person.
This practice may be both good and bad for sustainable transport. On the one hand, commuters don’t want to go through the “nightmare” of finding a rickshaw for the last mile of their trip. On the other hand, driving on congested streets and finding a parking lot is a cognitive load.
However, this outsourcing varies across geographies and socio-economic backgrounds. For instance, a team of researchers from the University of Kentucky found that ride-hailing services have had a drastic impact on public transit use across the United States.
Whereas, in India, the impact of the ride-hailing platform is felt by the automobile sector, as shared by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in 2019.
In both cases, apps do take the cognitive load of ride-hailing off the commuter’s mind. They plan the trip from point A to point B, removing everything that goes on in between the trip.
However, considering ride-hailing apps to be a panacea to urban transport problems, such as congestion and pollution, might be myopic and even naïve.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, Uber’s ride-hailing trips resulted in nearly 69 per cent more climate pollution on average than the trips they displaced.
There exists a maxim in transport: “If everybody drives, nobody moves”. Most four-wheelers are not utilised to their full capacity. The average occupancy of a four-person car is just 1.15 person. If shared mobility doesn’t focus on increasing occupancy, it runs the risk of increased cognitive load in the form of congestion in the future.
A paradigm shift might be in order. Planners must stop pegging transport aggregator apps and public transport against each other. Indian cities need systems in which public transport and paratransit complement each other and are presented to users – Indian cities need MAAS (Mobility As A Service).
MAAS is the integration of various forms of transport services into a single mobility service accessible on demand. To cater to the commuter’s need, MAAS provides a diverse menu of transport options, such as public transport, taxis, car or bike sharing, and car or taxi rental.
For the user, MAAS can offer added value using a single application to provide access to mobility, with a single payment channel instead of multiple ticketing and payment operations.
MAAS shouldn’t be confused with on-demand mobility, where the supply and demand for transport are managed through feedback control, for example, Uber and Ola. MAAS entails integrated mobility solutions, often offered through subscription.
MAAS is the future for depleted cognitive capacities because it reduces the cognitive load of trip planning, multiple payments, waiting, parking, and congestion. With their working memory freed up, commuters can exercise agency on what they wish to put in their minds.
However, MAAS mobility is a long way off for India.
The challenges to the introduction of MAAS primarily pertain to regulatory barriers. For instance, even sustainable practices like motorbike taxis and carpooling are not legal in India.
Additionally, many businesses have tried to enter the public transport space, only to halt their operations due to the contract carriage versus stage carriage licensing dubiety.
Only if innovations like MAAS are encouraged can they be made safer for the public through regulation.
There exists a lack of coordination between the government and private players. A clearly-chalked-out data-sharing policy and revenue-sharing model can come in handy to make sure the two can work together.
First, government agencies need to define ‘public data’ in urban mobility and make it available for private operators to build solutions.
Second, arriving at the fair-calculation method, such as fixing the upper and lower limits, might impact both the commuter uptake of these services and incentives for private operators to enter and stay in the market. The terms of collaboration between the two can support or weaken the future of MAAS in India.
Governing the attention-poor requires attention. Paying close attention to MAAS in India could be the way forward.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.