Without having experienced/researched it, it is not easy to appreciate the extent of apathy the governing structure in India exhibits towards its people. From the perspective of someone living in a developed country, its tempting to view this as a reasoned and logically approachable problem between different interest groups. That approach works well when the underlying institutions and the people embodying them are functioning well and functionally logically. When the people responsible for governing are simply not, well governing, then we don't need to go much further in unravelling why there is status quo. The status quo here is not because of a strategic/organic deadlock between two parties but rather because one of the parties is not doing its job.
Why isn't the government doing its job? I think it takes time for large democracies to come to age. I was talking about this to a friend who made the same point and asked me to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#Politics to get a sense for life in the US during a similar stage of its economic development as India is in today. The section Politics is especially resonant.
In America the democratic governing institutions have had time to mature over 237 years. Even with its flaws, it is the best governance humanity has been able to achieve at scale. It has had its rite of passage, from the early days of Indian removal, slavery, the mexican war, expansion, the civil war and many other wars plus thing like Women's suffrage. Indian government is merely 66 years old. And its not starting afresh in a "new land". Its trying to govern huge masses of people whose separate histories go back a long long time. India needs to go through its rite of passage and I guess one of those alleys is full of shit.
Except M.A.D worked. It's an example of a beneficial Nash equilibrium because the stable state was a military stalemate.
If one side had the bomb and the other didn't you get Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again, and if neither had the bomb you'd get a conventional WW3.
For a truly insane value of "worked" - running terrible (and largely unnecessary) levels of risk for decades hardly has much to recommend it.
The risk was far less terrible than, say, a few dozen tactical nukes used by one of the sides in a third war across Europe, as the status quo of warsaw pact borders wasn't that acceptable to both armies, and only MAD ensured that the cold war didn't become hot.
MAD was the only possible strategy. However, the insane level of weaponry that was actually in place was, in my view, completely unnecessary. If your opponent is deterred by one level of force then having a hundred times this level does not make you safer.
[NB In case anyone interprets my position as somehow being in support of the Soviets - they were, as far as I am concerned, a criminal regime just as "evil" in their own ways as the other nightmares of the 20th century. However, the level of strategic threat they posed was wildly overstated for political ends.]
They certainly did contemplate that as valid military options - they had even placed nuclear "mines" (underground room-sized nukes) in [less] populated friendly areas, planning to detonate them below enemy divisions if/when they are forced to retreat. So even nuking your own civilians was considered as an acceptable cost in case of a hot war.
One UK political leader has had the courage to admit that even if the UK had received a nuclear attack from the Soviets he would not have launched a retaliatory strike. After all, if your deterrent fails - what exactly is the point in using it? [Not something you can admit at the time, of course.]
Would a West German political leader really have agreed to nuclear land mines being used? Most of the weaponry in the Cold War was there for posturing - no political leader ever expected to use them. Even Khrushchev (who was clearly a hard bastard) could only cope with the thought of nuclear weapons by accepting the fact that they would never actually be used - it was all a bluff.
True if you ignore the externalities of a huge military build-up. A better solution would be both sides agreeing to not have nuclear weapons and not start a conventional WW3.
The people in the slums probably know that it is bad, but the facilities available to them are so shit-house (literally and figuratively) that they choose to defecate onto the ground.
An entity that isn't tempted to defect from a boycott:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom
> Milgrom, together with Barry Weingast and Avner Greif, applied a repeated game model to explain the role of merchant guilds in the medieval period (Greif, Milgrom and Weingast, 1994). The paper beings with the observation that long-distance trade in the somewhat chaotic environment of the Middle Ages exposed traveling merchants to the risk of attack, confiscation of goods and unenforced agreements. Merchants thus required the assistance of local rulers for protection of person, property and contract. But what reason did rulers have to provide this assistance? A key insight from the paper is that neither bilateral nor multilateral reputation mechanisms can support the incentives of a ruler to protect foreign merchants as trade reaches an efficient level. The reason is that at the efficient level the marginal value of losing the trade of a single or even a subset of merchants—in their attempt to punish a defaulting ruler—approaches zero. The threat is, thus, insufficient to deter a ruler from confiscating goods or to encourage their expenditure of resources or political capital to defend foreign merchants against local citizens. Effective punishment that will deter rulers' bad behavior requires more extensive coordination of effectively all the merchants who provide value for the ruler. The question then becomes, what incentives do the merchants have to participate in the collective boycott? Here is the role for the Merchant Guild, an organization that has the power to punish its own members for failure to abide by a boycott announced by the guild.
The parallels between this scenario and the one we're talking about are obvious: Any company big enough to cause serious damage by its pollution is not going to be harmed by a boycott unless nearly everyone in India participates, but the value gained from defecting (in game-theoretic terms) from the boycott is too large for that to happen. So, instead of forming a guild to punish defection, which just increases the misery in the world, we institute government agencies to punish polluters directly instead of trying to use boycotts to punish them. Say what you will about the morality of such a system, I can go outside today and see green grass, clear skies, and breathe the air without damaging my lungs.
> It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out.
Except in this case, this do-it-yourself strategy has been demonstrated to not work.
More to the point, they need an entity that is both powerful enough to force change and not bound by the same incentives that the polluting companies are.
It's down to a Nash equilibrium, which is the stable strategy that obtains when everyone makes the best decision possible for them knowing what everyone else has decided. There's no way for anyone to unilaterally change their minds without losing something, which is why the strategy is stable even if it is completely insane.
In this case, the stable strategy is to pollute and not invest anything in cleanup, because the first company to unilaterally invest in cleaning up will lose profits relative to all of its competitors who aren't cleaning anything. That isn't acceptable. Therefore, Mumbai has brown oceans and Beijing has brown air.
The only way out is for some powerful entity that isn't bound by the same Nash equilibrium to step in and force a new equilibrium state by imposing penalties on the polluters. That's something that, realistically, only the government can do.
(What happens when governments get locked in a bad Nash equilibrium? Well, you get the Cold War, where Mutually Assured Destruction prevailed despite nobody really wanting to end the world in nuclear flame.)