The Yossarian method

In Joseph Heller’s 1962 classic Catch-22, the main character is an air force officer called Yossarian. One day he decides that he will not take part in bombing missions any more.

“What would happen,” the squadron’s chaplain asks him, “if everyone refused to fly?” Yossarian’s response is classic. “Then I’d be a fool to fly, isn’t it?”

And that’s why I am writing this article: Because if everyone — and his donkey — is writing about the virus, I’d be a fool not to, isn’t it?

But jokes aside, Yossarian’s answer hides a well-known problem of good logic. It is that logical answers don’t always lead to the best solutions. The problem lies not only in the reasoning process but in the premise as well.

Thus, while calls for lifting the lockdown are perfectly logical, they lead to the wrong solution. So there is a need to wait until this whole thing no longer resembles going blindfolded down a narrow, spiral staircase with uneven steps on a pitch-dark night. 

It’s clear now that there are three options before any government. One is to not go down at all. That’s what a complete lockdown is. That’s what China did and it seems to have worked but we don’t really know. 

The second is to go down a few steps and stop because you stumble. That’s what Singapore has done and, if we aren’t careful, we too may end up doing so. This is a real possibility now. 

The third is to go down very, very slowly till you finally reach the bottom. It’s called the “better safe than dead” strategy. No one has tried it properly yet.

The virus and physics

To understand the infection problem, we must understand the concept of randomness. If you google it, you will find the parallel between what’s called Brownian motion and this infection.

Brownian motion is about molecules that jiggle around, colliding with each other. These collisions can be single or several times, which means a molecule can be hit from more than one side. 

That makes their motion completely random and that’s why the problem cannot be solved except very unsatisfactorily by probabilistic modelling. One such model was proposed by Albert Einstein. So it’s not all rubbish. 

In very broad terms what all this means is that you can’t predict molecular motion with any degree of accuracy. You can try but the chance that you are wrong, Einstein said, is 99.999999 … per cent. 
 

This is the infection problem but I shouldn’t stretch the analogy too far. The point should be clear. 

How to unlock

So given such a high degree of randomness, how should we approach a Yossarian type, least-risk solution to the economy problem? The equivalent to finding a vaccine in Yossarian’s case was the war ending.

A least-risk strategy consists in first understanding that the economy has three markets, each of which is hugely differentiated internally.

These are the markets for labour, finance, or capital, and products which can be physical and of course services. The question that the Modi government has to solve is not just which market to open first but which bits inside each as well. 

The labour market, for instance, has three broad types of skills: Highly skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled. The number of people in each category is self-evident. 

So here’s what I think: The virus problem varies inversely with each category, meaning the higher the skills, the lower the probability of infection. Capital intensity and skill, therefore, should be the criterion for the sequence of opening.

But the political problem is that compassion requires the opposite, never mind the higher risk. This is what the government must be mindful of.

Likewise, the market for money also has at least two broad components: One is for investment and the other is for not-investment. The latter has several components.

In what sequence do you open these up? This is the toughest question to answer. But the basic criterion should still be skills, in order to minimise the number of people who can, as it were, collide.

Finally, there’s the product and services market. This is the easiest because of the essential vs non-essential categorisation. The supply chain is also simpler for the former category, which comprises food, energy, medicine, etc. 

The real problem here is the mandis. The skills are low but the service is essential. So very strict and even sometimes very harsh policing is needed. The bleeding hearts can be asked to supervise the police personally.

And finally do remember: Governments are made up of politicians who run a high risk of losing their seats in Parliament if their party gets it wrong. So caution is baked into any solution. That’s our best hope.