Kumar Ayush

As a side-effect of enrolling in a PGP on public policy, there is a lot of framework talk in my life recently. And I find all of them very entertaining and very useless at the same time. They are like horizontal curriculums. As in, they are tools to organise things we would know about a topic but rather than a vague progression of depth, you lay out the interconnected components of things that you ought to know about a topic on a horizontal plane, or you know, a frame.

The bulletin board with pins and threads, that's a framework for solving crimes. Or planning a vacation, or sorting out your relationships. That's one of the good things about these frameworks, their applicability is often more about the applicator than the application. That means you can apply whatever framework you'd like to any problem. If I were in charge of fire safety regulation in a city, my regulatory framework would involve giving negative points to restaurants having their menu on a tablet because those things can explode, they're a hazard.

It is exhausting to think how to think when you have to think. I can tell you a lot about how cycles work, but I am not sure I can do that while I am riding one. Humans are strange, there is an astonishing lack of clarity in how we take decisions.

If I need to order food right now, here is how I shall go about it. I am going to categorise all places that deliver to me within 30 minutes because that is my hunger threshold at this point. Then, I am going to find out the cuisine that I had least recently, because I have a goal to balance them out. Then, I shall pick the best options among them. Now, I am left with two butter chicken places. Turban Darbar has it for 200 INR and is rated 4.3, and Haveless has it for 250 INR and is rated 4.5. To decide if the marginal utility of +0.2 rating points is worth 50 INR, I will need to do some modelling over all butter chicken places available.

Look, frameworks are useful. Everything is useful. My annoyance perhaps stems from the belief that there is greater utility of such tools in recommending decisions than taking decisions. As the famous Kierkegaard line goes, "Life must be lived forwards, but explained backwards".

The framework which the food delivery apps follow to rank and sort the restaurants available to me is certainly useful to them in being a good tool to help me decide what to eat, but only to the extent that I am ordering from their application. I also have a choice to make some maggi instead. Do I use a framework to help me decide if I should eat dinner at all? I can, I absolutely can. The point is not if it is useful, or if I can do it, but if I do do it. This is my karmabhoomi. Actions and well, the decisions to take those actions are all there is to my life. It is not feasible, to use that heathen economic word in my euphoric rant, to think how to think about everything. The quantum of a decision itself has poor causality. Plenty of our choices are found in pursuit of avoiding repeats of past consequences or more trivially, a result of decision fatigue.

Why is this not true for several matters of public policy? The scale of everything is different, the stakes are higher, but your resources to take those decisions are also higher. It is about accountability and collective decision making. In a position of making policy decisions, I am accountable to others. I am an agent. I have greater use for tools that help me ascertain that I've been a good agent. Frameworks are indeed more useful there, and that's the contrast. Their utility in taking better decisions is dwarfed by their utility in explaining those decisions.