Increasing Marginal Utility From Consumption of Equality & Equity

God, according to a simplistic interpretation of Adyavat of Santana (now referred to as Hindu) Dharma philosophical scriptures of ancient origin, is all prevalent, exits in everything - infinitely large or infinitesimal - that is there in the Creation that we know, discover and imagine, and is container of everything. It follows that each and everything is nothing but God and each and everything is equal and there is nothing iniquitous in this Creation or the Creator, irrespective of whatever we believe in as the origin of God.


Yet, physically each infinitesimal entity is not necessarily the one and the same thing as the other entity as we perceive from our senses: many things look different, tastes different, behave differently and interact with each other differently. This applies to human beings as well. But human beings urge for equality and injustice, especially if one happens to perceive that one is unjustifiably handicapped compared with others. So, there is demand from the God to make every thing identically equal. God has not cared to listen to these prayers and different things continue to maintain their different identities in terms of length, width, area, volume, force, capabilities, attitudes, mentality, tastes and preferences, etc.

This is a great problem. The religious leaders and spiritual leaders have tried to promote the concept of universal love to remove all perception of differences, inequality, inequity and distinctions: ignore the formal difference and love everything as being equal and part of the same identity of God. This makes people to believe and practice the knowledge of Unique Singularity in everything and forget formal differences. But these preaching have failed to ensure equality and equity in the world of individuals, groups, societies and nations. The scientists have not given the humans a technology that would ensure that from a specified date in future all human beings will be born as identical human beings in all respects and remain so throughout their uniform life: that would have ensured that after a later future date there would not be any scope for distinction between men and women, between higher and lower IQ, between tall and short, fair or dark skin, and so on. Because a single compulsory dose of medicine served at birth will ensure that the child could produce during its life time only x number of children without any need for sexual cooperation and all children produced by the medicated children at birth will be of identical configuration without any influence of parentage and genes. So, the medical solution to equality and equity in human race is not yet available.

But the cleverest of the human race, the politicians have found a great and sustainable business of distributing equality and equity. For they understood clearly that the demand for equality and equity will be the only permanent and perpetual: the want for equality and equity is essentially insatiable. If one gets to eat a sweet, delicious fruit, one will demand for another and after consuming the second will demand yet another. But the law of diminishing marginal utility will set in at some stage when the person will stop demanding another fruit to eat. Rather, the person will demand different item of consumption. Unlike this, the utility from consumption of the item called equality and equity is not afflicted by the law of diminishing returns. It is rather under increasing marginal utility rule.

Let us consider a recent example. The Government of a State made education from primary to higher secondary to college and university education completely free for students from poor families with income below a minimum cut-off level. People were all happy - a great decision by the Government, unlike the unchangeable, rigid God. This government produced good of equality and equity in education has a positive external effect: more educated people is expected to provide a better social and cultural environment besides contributing to economic growth by supplying more productive educated labour for industry, agriculture, trade and industry as also creating in the process a greater demand for all other goods and services in the country. Unlike the other method of generating equality/equity product through reservation of seats in education or jobs that reduces the supply of school/ college/ university education seats to the non-poor students and thereby leading to an external negative effect on consumption of equality/equity goods produced by the State, the direct supply of equality/equity goods through what some economists called entitlement / endowment/ empowerment approach is liked by both the direct consumers of the goods (the beneficiary students and the poor families they come from) as well as the others who has to procure the same education good at a cost besides giving taxes to the Government to fund the free distribution of education equality/ equity goods to students from poor families. Everyone is happy.

But the consumers of education equality/ equity goods demand more such goods because the consumption of these goods exhibit increasing marginal utility. Even after primary education was made free, many students from poor families did not regularly turn up at the school. So, free mid-day meals for students attending the school improved the quality of the education equality/ equity product and consumption of this product increased.

As soon as some students from poor families were promised free education at the university / college level because they scored very high marks in the Higher Secondary Examination, it was not only welcomed by all but some demanded an up gradation of this new education equality/ equity products. It was pointed out that these students are essentially of quality of students from rich families but will still suffer a handicap of lower nutrition food intake: so they need to be provided with the same food as the students of rich families get from their parents. Financial grants to such students would help improve the quality of the education equality/ equity product in university education.

But soon it would be realised that these poor student scholars with free university tuition and financial aid would still suffer a handicap in that they would have to face the consequences of family problems related to illiteracy and inadequate awareness of their parents as compared to the educational and financial strength of students coming from rich families in the cities and towns. For example, the richer students could afford special coaching by paid private tutors, personal computers and Internet connection at home and air-conditioned rooms at home along with more knowledgeable parents' help. So, the demand would be for free supply of computers, Internet broadband service and special coaching facility as part of the education equality/ education product. Problems would still remain to be solved: the poor students need to be supplied with knowledgeable parent-like loving guardians at the university and hostels so that they have a level playing field to compete with brilliant students from rich families in cities and towns.

Extending the same kind of logic, there would be demand for school children from poor families in rural areas to be supplied with rich pairs of adopted parents with proper educational backgrounds. The equality/ equity product improvement will have to be extended to parental gene levels. All engineering colleges have to become of equal standard Indian Institutes of Technology, all MBA schools have to be of the same quality Indian Institutes of Management, and so on.

The demand for improving the educational equality/ equity product will be never ending as the marginal utility from consumption of these products are characterised by the law of increasing utility. Governments, especially democratic ones, will have continuous growing business in selling these products at the cost of the tax payers. Equality and equity will improve as a result: but will the quality of education outputs improve?

Recently, I heard a few learned people discussing about international equality/ equity in teachers' promotion system in universities. A former Indian bureaucrat currently teaching in government funded private management institute complained that Indian teachers in Indian centers of higher education with record of publication in international / foreign journals get higher scores than those Indian teachers who publish their articles in Indian journals. This according to him and some others was discrimination against one's own country and probably reflected the mentality of slavery to the foreigners. Everyone knows that Indian research journals have not been able to get international recognition of their quality simply because international scholars do not find it worthwhile to publish articles in Indian journals. But the State has not been able to figure out how Indian scientific research journals can become accepted by the international community of researchers. So, there could be a demand for education/research equality/equity product that would remove the handicap the large section of Indian teachers who cannot get their papers accepted by internationally recognized research publications vis-à-vis the small section of teachers who can. What could be the essential design features of such a product by the government? One product could be like this: a special financial reward for each publication of any teacher/researcher in internationally recognised journal if that article is followed up by another publication in internationally recognised journal, which is co-authored by an Indian teacher employed in an Indian education/research centre who had not earlier been able to publish any article in an internationally recognised journal. The provider of the education / research equality/equity products, namely the Governments of poor countries surely should be highly innovative in designing such products, given the immensely high business potential in these countries for these products. But will the quality of the talent pool of Indian teachers and researchers improve as a result to bring India to the frontiers of education and research in at least some fields of knowledge that the World is pursuing?