Losing Illusion

"Its a hard day today, got a presentation to make in front of the biggest client of my company. I will impress him and blow the audience off their heads..I will make the biggest break for my company.. Yeah, this is the biggest break, I can ever have.. I will make the most of it, the best of it. My boss is going to love me for this.., Its the biggest break he will ever have too, all because of ME" 

Haven't we heard this before, be it a presentation, or making an impression on the lovely neighbor or while getting big marks in a competitive class. Its a common situation for the today's professional (or to be). For some, it comes daily while for many, it comes regularly. What makes us think this way? To answer this, one probably has to look at evolution of mankind.

Gorillas Chimpanzees, Orangutans and Humans all are a derivatives from the family of hominidae (Great Apes) . There are a lot of similarities when these species are compared among them. Gorillas have exhibited "group life", sign-language, protectionism, leadership, Intelligence, tool-usage, bipedal locomotor adaptation (walking on two legs) and in fact even face-face sex (once thought unique only to humans). In its natural habitat, the babies are always protected, instructed, nurtured, groomed and touched by the mother. This is true to all the four extant genera. However, the apes from the green forests do not have the concept of homes. They are always travelling with the group but very territorial about their current location. The leader protects the group and also assist the others in localizing to the location until they all decide to move on to a new one. 

Big Cats or the genus Panthera, comprise of Lions, Tigers, Jaguars and Leopards species. Having no physical similarity from the humans, these cats exhibit behavioral similarities. Living in Groups (Prides) and also as Nomads, these cats live together in the pride area. These cats exhibit sociality in a very pronounced way. The lionesses hunt in teams and exhibit team work, strategy during the hunt, while playing various other roles (permanently & temporarily) of raising the cubs. The hunters are given a priority over the non-hunters with the meal sharing and the hunters share the catch by dragging the cadaver to their pride area. Also exhibiting other qualities like kin selection (better to share food with known than with a stranger), protection of young and weak, leadership, maintenance  of territories. 

Homo Sapiens (Humans) though originate directly from the primates and share a considerable number of similar qualities with the other great apes, He has also evolved over time, developed a much larger brain and grabbed many useful qualities from other families like that of the Big Cats. Building on his strengths like intelligence, grip, tool-making and using abilities, he manipulated his weaknesses, his reduced stamina, the lack of a natural hunting build into very effective traits to hunt, to kill, to conquer and to control. While doing all this he did one more thing which becomes very important in this context, He developed an illusion, an illusion of "being in control" and "being free"...

...To be Continued

Blog Type

I read this article in the Business week about this Swedish research on analyzing blogs based on data gathered over several years. I decided to give it a shot. I was amazed to see what it came up with about me and my blog..

This is what the exact result was:

Hmm, I kind of like it... Duty Fulfiller!

There was also another link to analyzing the archetype through the blog which was quite fascinating to read too... Here is the result..

I tend to agree with it to a very high degree of about 90% with the result...

The actual article goes something like this, quoted from BusinessWeek:

What Your Blog Says About You

Posted by: Rachael King on March 22

Click here for the complete Article

What is your blog's personality type? A new Web site called Typealyzer will analyze your blog and tell you what it says about you. Typealyzer is a research project that looks at how language reflects a person's psychological type and his or her motivations and interests. The site was created by Mattias Östmar of PRfekt, a Swedish research and development company focused on media analysis

Feel free to test it on your blogs as well.

There is a link to a personality test as well in the article which does a test on the 4 Temperaments for a person based on a few questions about personalities, testing the Extravertness, Intuitiveness, Feeling, Perception (ENFP) of a person. These were the results I got. 

More surprisingly, the suggested Careers for these scores were in Social Services, Professional Writer, Public Relations, Marketing and Education. Surprising these are the bits and pieces of the few things that I am currently doing and love to do. Blindly without a second wink, Let me say "Great, I am on the right track in life.. (at least in a career sense)" A sense of comfort.. Well, let me get back to work now..  

Economics and Maya

Present times, its become a common phenomena for every government, irrespective of its ideological slant, to get committed to sparking a stimulus. Nothing illustrates this better than the breathtaking rediscovery of John Maynard Keynes' body of work in economics by governments and government-sponsored economists. And, as Milton Friedman, the high priest of neoliberal economics, said in 1965, "We are all Keynesian's now." Its time to sing the song again. Keynes' work, laid the ground for a concerted effort by governments across the world to save capitalism from its own excesses. More specifically, it contained prescriptions for governments to lay the basis for a sustained economic revival. Government spending, Keynes famously argued, that this Government spending has a multiplier effect on the economy. A bout of spending in round one, by translating into the expansion of incomes, consumption and investments has a cascading effect, resulting in a further boost to incomes in round two. Simply put, a rupee spent now, will cause incomes to expand by a multiple of one rupee.

Any stimulus package is also critically dependent on the import intensity of an economy. Other things remaining the same, an economy with a greater import intensity is likely to experience a larger "leakage" across its borders. This is because a part of the stimulus will be used to import goods and services resulting in benefits from the package being leaked outside the country.

Is this going to come back to haunt us in the future?

The impact of countries to engage in protectionism seen in this context (this is not the only reason why countries indulge in protectionism) is what is running in the minds of all the economists and analysts around the world. However the increasing Protectionism and Government spending produces an expansion in output, an expansion in consumption, However it also has a significant deterioration effect on the trade balance and the real exchange rate. [1] [2]

The Keynes multiplier effect can be has been constantly debated by the monetarists big and large, However the enormous Government Spendings, bailouts and other stimulus packages certainly mean higher tax rates in the times to come. It certainly is a thin line of ice on which we are playing these games.

Is this a spiral that we are all sucked into?

It is clear, that just as the world is going round and round, these economic activities are going in circles too. However, constantly the economies are shrinking or expanding. Thus instead of just moving in circles, there is a tangential effect from the pull or push from the economies resulting in a spiral movement. Tragically most of the economies the world over, are currently shrinking and due to the inner pull, we are being sucked deep in the spiral. All the major powers are trying to find an equilibrium on this rotating spiral..

Well, jokingly one of my good friends [3] says, it is all 'maya ' and best thing to do is to come out of the spiral, get detached from these economic forces and to get back to spirituality.. In fact, this humor from him is what motivated me to write this piece.

Well, the solution to the economic crisis, being currently signaled to be 'over' definitely does not lie in just government spending and saying 'Buy American!' and 'Only Americans in Jobs' alone.

References:

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13328.pdf

[2] keynesian-model-positives-negetives

[3] Nishith Parashar, My classmate at EDM in XLRI, Singapore.