Where my interest begins
I am currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Computer Applications, but my real fascination lies elsewhere—in economics and in the architecture of business and political systems. What draws me in is not any single policy debate, but a simpler and stranger question: how do systems continue pursuing their goals even as the people inside them are rotated out, removed, or simply leave?
Governments change hands, executives are replaced, employees come and go—and yet the system itself often continues moving towards whatever it was built to pursue. That persistence is what drives my fascination with economic and business systems.
On Steve Keen
I want to give credit here to the economist Steve Keen, known for his critiques of mainstream economic modelling and his early warnings about the dangers of rising private debt. Among those diagnosing what is broken in today’s economic systems, I think Keen offers some of the sharpest analysis and strongest use of data.
But diagnosis is not the same as a cure, and this is where I part ways with him: I do not think his conclusions about how to fix these problems are the right ones. What follows is my own attempt at a different answer.
Two systems, two trade-offs
Look at China and the United States side by side, and a pattern emerges. China has built substantial economic freedom without political freedom. The United States has built both economic and political freedom together. But, in doing so, I believe, it has gone too far in two specific ways: pushing capitalism further than necessary, and allowing welfare spending and the financialisation of the wider economy to grow well beyond the point of being productive.
What welfare should actually mean
My own view is narrower than either side of the usual welfare debate. I do not think welfare should be a broad, sprawling category of spending. I think it should be concentrated on three things, and those three things should be done well, everywhere:
- Public education — genuinely good, from primary school through higher education, reaching rural areas as well as urban ones.
- Public healthcare — genuinely good, with strong public hospitals reaching rural areas as well as urban ones.
- Housing — built at real scale as a dedicated public programme.
These three, in my view, are the foundations on which a welfare system should actually be judged. Everything else is secondary.
The opportunity
Put these pieces together, and I believe there is a real opportunity being missed. Rather than choosing between China’s model of economic freedom without political freedom and America’s model of both freedoms stretched thin by excess capitalism and unproductive welfare spending, there is a third option: combine political freedom with something closer to China’s economic discipline and focus, while keeping welfare tightly scoped to education, healthcare and housing.
That combination—political freedom paired with a more focused, disciplined economic model—is, I believe, a genuinely available and largely unclaimed opportunity.
Anant Tripathi is a student of Maharishi University, Uttar Pradesh. Views are personal.
Also read: The algorithm knows what you want before you do