A Public Goods 101: Or, All About Some Facial Hair
2012 was a less prolific year for me, bloggingwise. I did marginally worse than in 2011. So here is a start for 2013, hoping that the Goddess Muse will smile more benignly on me this year.
Belated New Year Greeting to all of you.
All About Some Facial Hair: That sounds like a pretty lame topic to write on, I agree. Clearly the title is two centuries too old. The last time someone probably used such a title was perhpas AG Gardiner when he wrote that essay All About A Dog, a piece of beautiful literature that was turned into a field of grief for many unsuspecting students who schooled in their vernacular. The topic is lame for another reason. And that is the subject. It is about my beard. I am sure zillions of guys, including those who matter and those who dont, such as me, have written about their own beards or those of others. So at best this is just another addition to the floatsam of verbiage on beards.
I have made several attempts at growing a beard. The very first time I tried I was a young project officer at a bank, lending money to large industrial projects. Within a few days of my endeavour a grave looking paternalistic boss convinced me that we were all supposed to look like the banker in PGW's conception, who could look at the person across the table in the eye and tell him why he was not creditworthy in his opinion. For some reason in my boss' opinion a beard was not appropriate for a countenance that had to deliver such grave messages. A clean shaven visage, it would appear, would help one carry that sense of honesty of purpose that went with denying credit however well deserved it was.
Many years later I tried growing a beard again. This was soon after my marriage. Now I have to bring in the other villain of the piece - villain only so far as the matter of my beard goes: My wife. She admired the thick dark beard. She admired the way it made me look like many of those men of letters of Kerala who have forever have an underfed look that goes well with their constant obsession with poverty, deprivation and sorrow in some order or the other. Like the character El Lute, in one of the Boney M albums, it would appear that these litterateurs "had only seen the dark side of life". As the young wife of a upcoming venture capitalist she somehow felt the beard did not help the lack of urbaneness in my looks. Caught between the desire to grow a beard and the compulsion to keep a job in investing, which I had landed through one of the rare and benevolent quirks in my life, the beard lost out.
And then started the third attempt after I sought shelter in academe. My flight to academe as I shall explain in a later post was purely in search of a lifestyle. The freedom to grow facial hair and tonsure cranial hair as I pleased was one of the possible attractions in that lifestyle. And this time around I did manage to let the hair grow and remain for much longer than in my earlier attempts. The passing of years had turned my beard into a salt and pepper act of pure indolence. My wife who had by now grown to tolerate far more serious instances of deviance in my behaviour let it be perhaps because she felt that the beard was one of the less disagreeable of my many perversions.
But then resistance appeared from a new quarter, as it happens in many a decisive battle that turn the tides in the affairs of men. My sixty year old elder brother and eighty four year old father were convinced that the beard on my face did not go well with the clean shaven Brahamanical tradition that every member of my family was expected to uphold.
Many interesting moral and ethical concessions were revealed to me in the process of making a case for removing the beard. For example, imbibing I was told, was not exactly kosher but then unless one turned oneself into an inebriated spectacle no one would notice it. Something similar could be said about smoking and the consumption of meat. But facial hair in any form, be it a moustache, a French goatee, a Stalinist handle bar or a Bulganin beard constituted visible apostasy. And so the campaign persisted for close to six months.
The proverbial last straw that broke the back of determination to keep the beard was this persistent questioning by others around me, from within the family and outside as to what the new look was about - even though a casual fleeting look at the beard was enough to say that it was no longer a new look, now that the beard had been allowed to grow for several months.
As I fielded these questions, stretching my naturally parlous endowment of witticisms and excuses, I learned one important lesson: I may think that my beard was my private affair. But everyone around me including those with whom I had less than a nodding acquaintance thought it was what economists might describe as a public good. A public good is non excludable - no one can be stopped from using it, just like fresh air, the most common example that text book authors love to flog. Nearly everyone around me seemed to think that they had an unfettered right to enquire about or comment on my beard. That included many colleagues ranging from "seniors" that I could not bring myself to snap at, let alone bark. Secondly, use by one does not reduce the availability of a public good to others. That many others had asked me about my beard did not seem to matter to the others in asking me about the beard months after I had started growing it. Thirdly, public goods often have unintended negative side effects that economists refer to as externalities. That externality in the case of my beard was my growing annoyance and disenchantment with these questions.
So one rainy evening, when everything around me looked sombre and gray, in a fit of sheer exasperation I locked myself in the bathroom and emerged about thirty five minutes later, looking like a "plucked chicken", to borrow a metaphor from my late maternal grandfather, rather unrecognisable for a few minutes to even my wife and sons.
It is not without wistfulness that I think of this somewhat clandestine assault on what I believe is my fundamental constitutional right as a citizen. I was reminded of what I read in Michael Trebilcock's Limits of Freedom of Contract. Social forces denied me that rudimentary right to grow facial hair. They turned what is essentially a private indulgence into a public good.
So here in lies yet another opportunity for a mathematician to turn my failed attempt at growing a beard into a string of Greek alphabets in the form of an economic theory. Or, going by the the many arcane issues they have dealt with, someone possibly has done so already. Who knows? In any case who cares?
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
2012 was a less prolific year for me, bloggingwise. I did marginally worse than in 2011. So here is a start for 2013, hoping that the Goddess Muse will smile more benignly on me this year.
Belated New Year Greeting to all of you.
All About Some Facial Hair: That sounds like a pretty lame topic to write on, I agree. Clearly the title is two centuries too old. The last time someone probably used such a title was perhpas AG Gardiner when he wrote that essay All About A Dog, a piece of beautiful literature that was turned into a field of grief for many unsuspecting students who schooled in their vernacular. The topic is lame for another reason. And that is the subject. It is about my beard. I am sure zillions of guys, including those who matter and those who dont, such as me, have written about their own beards or those of others. So at best this is just another addition to the floatsam of verbiage on beards.
I have made several attempts at growing a beard. The very first time I tried I was a young project officer at a bank, lending money to large industrial projects. Within a few days of my endeavour a grave looking paternalistic boss convinced me that we were all supposed to look like the banker in PGW's conception, who could look at the person across the table in the eye and tell him why he was not creditworthy in his opinion. For some reason in my boss' opinion a beard was not appropriate for a countenance that had to deliver such grave messages. A clean shaven visage, it would appear, would help one carry that sense of honesty of purpose that went with denying credit however well deserved it was.
Many years later I tried growing a beard again. This was soon after my marriage. Now I have to bring in the other villain of the piece - villain only so far as the matter of my beard goes: My wife. She admired the thick dark beard. She admired the way it made me look like many of those men of letters of Kerala who have forever have an underfed look that goes well with their constant obsession with poverty, deprivation and sorrow in some order or the other. Like the character El Lute, in one of the Boney M albums, it would appear that these litterateurs "had only seen the dark side of life". As the young wife of a upcoming venture capitalist she somehow felt the beard did not help the lack of urbaneness in my looks. Caught between the desire to grow a beard and the compulsion to keep a job in investing, which I had landed through one of the rare and benevolent quirks in my life, the beard lost out.
And then started the third attempt after I sought shelter in academe. My flight to academe as I shall explain in a later post was purely in search of a lifestyle. The freedom to grow facial hair and tonsure cranial hair as I pleased was one of the possible attractions in that lifestyle. And this time around I did manage to let the hair grow and remain for much longer than in my earlier attempts. The passing of years had turned my beard into a salt and pepper act of pure indolence. My wife who had by now grown to tolerate far more serious instances of deviance in my behaviour let it be perhaps because she felt that the beard was one of the less disagreeable of my many perversions.
But then resistance appeared from a new quarter, as it happens in many a decisive battle that turn the tides in the affairs of men. My sixty year old elder brother and eighty four year old father were convinced that the beard on my face did not go well with the clean shaven Brahamanical tradition that every member of my family was expected to uphold.
Many interesting moral and ethical concessions were revealed to me in the process of making a case for removing the beard. For example, imbibing I was told, was not exactly kosher but then unless one turned oneself into an inebriated spectacle no one would notice it. Something similar could be said about smoking and the consumption of meat. But facial hair in any form, be it a moustache, a French goatee, a Stalinist handle bar or a Bulganin beard constituted visible apostasy. And so the campaign persisted for close to six months.
The proverbial last straw that broke the back of determination to keep the beard was this persistent questioning by others around me, from within the family and outside as to what the new look was about - even though a casual fleeting look at the beard was enough to say that it was no longer a new look, now that the beard had been allowed to grow for several months.
As I fielded these questions, stretching my naturally parlous endowment of witticisms and excuses, I learned one important lesson: I may think that my beard was my private affair. But everyone around me including those with whom I had less than a nodding acquaintance thought it was what economists might describe as a public good. A public good is non excludable - no one can be stopped from using it, just like fresh air, the most common example that text book authors love to flog. Nearly everyone around me seemed to think that they had an unfettered right to enquire about or comment on my beard. That included many colleagues ranging from "seniors" that I could not bring myself to snap at, let alone bark. Secondly, use by one does not reduce the availability of a public good to others. That many others had asked me about my beard did not seem to matter to the others in asking me about the beard months after I had started growing it. Thirdly, public goods often have unintended negative side effects that economists refer to as externalities. That externality in the case of my beard was my growing annoyance and disenchantment with these questions.
So one rainy evening, when everything around me looked sombre and gray, in a fit of sheer exasperation I locked myself in the bathroom and emerged about thirty five minutes later, looking like a "plucked chicken", to borrow a metaphor from my late maternal grandfather, rather unrecognisable for a few minutes to even my wife and sons.
It is not without wistfulness that I think of this somewhat clandestine assault on what I believe is my fundamental constitutional right as a citizen. I was reminded of what I read in Michael Trebilcock's Limits of Freedom of Contract. Social forces denied me that rudimentary right to grow facial hair. They turned what is essentially a private indulgence into a public good.
So here in lies yet another opportunity for a mathematician to turn my failed attempt at growing a beard into a string of Greek alphabets in the form of an economic theory. Or, going by the the many arcane issues they have dealt with, someone possibly has done so already. Who knows? In any case who cares?
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
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