It was in the year 2001 that Joseph Eugene Stiglitz shared the Nobel Memorial prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to the theory of “Information Asymmetry”. I had first come across this term (as it is intended to be come across for an economics grad) in my 3rd year of university when I was doing a course on Money Banking and Financial Markets (and of course in Microeconomics). This is one concept which, if understood deeply, can change the way we live and approach life. This is precisely what LMK (letmeknow.in) is doing. It is breaking the information barrier, and for good reasons. There are a lot of wonderful things which we experience, very often, but just don’t realise the underlying economic/social principle; be it the classic “The market for Lemons”, where even the value of perfectly good quality commodities tends to go down or, the moral hazard problem which has been used to explain the behaviour of the financial giants (also referred to as “Too big to fail” firms) in the recent economic downturn. This, I feel is the power of Information-it can explain every phenomenon that happens to us.
If I had to name a few takeaways from my four years of campus/hostel life, one of the first would be the “respect” I developed for Information. For some this may sound ridiculous, for a few, this may not be new and for a select few, this maybe utter rubbish. I can quote many examples of how information dissemination brought about desired (and sometimes surprising but not unwanted) results. I cannot explain the “hows”, “whys” and “whens” for my adoption of the philosophy “Information is Wealth”, but I can simply attribute this to an invisible hand (could be the same ‘hand of god’ the Argentine great-Diego Maradona believes played a role in his goal against England in 1986). I was a participant of some of the most enterprising brainstorming sessions in my last four years. A few from my social circle termed it a waste of time, because it was too random and headed nowhere. But I always liked it because it was a chance for all the people involved in the session to discover new facts, share knowledge and gain exposure to what was until then unknown. I treat information as religion, embrace it, and not dodge it like it was bullets. It is not surprising to find out that as a result of any research going on around the world in different labs or universities, the end inference is nothing but information. Human are already on their quest to gather information, information about our past, our future, our very origins!
Sometimes I feel Information is not given its due. I found out that Information is an uncountable noun and I also observed this:
“When I type ‘indian’ on Microsoft Word, I get a spell check error or Word auto-corrects it to Indian; when I type ‘hindu’, again it does one of the above (corrects it to Hindu). But when I type ‘information’, MS Word does nothing!” As a tribute to Information, we have to start to start it with a capital ‘I’. The point I want to drive home is that Information has to be treated as something that is divine and profound, for the simple reason that it has the power to bring all of humanity closer and make it wiser too! A close look at what Internet or Information Technology has done to us would reveal that they brought us closer to information. In other words, they pioneered “Information Dissemination”. As a result of Google or Twitter or Facebook (for that matter, LMK too!) or the new buzz word “Social Media” we are a becoming a close knit community, with information as the head of the family! It is because of all the Information emitters (Google/LMK et al.) life has become simple, simply because we are more informed now and decision making was never this easy.
This information explosion has started a long chain of events for the world to reach a stage where it is possible to make one person better off without making someone else necessarily worse off! In economics terms, we can reach a ‘Pareto Optimal’ state, this is possible because information is non-exhaustive, and it is not a ‘normal’ good!
Some say god is the one who knows everything; some call him as the one who oversees everything…….
All of this points to the fact that even God is actually God only because he knows everything, which simply means that ‘He has all the INFORMATION’. And maybe, someday when we have access to just the right amount of information then we might come to a conclusion that Information is equivalent to God and all of us who dwell on information would be called as devotees of a single God.
So, here it is-3 cheers!
To all the devotees of information. Let us continue the devotion and spread……you know what!!
Let us hope for a world where there is no Information asymmetry which I believe would, ultimately lead to prosperous co-existence of Humans (and, if we attain the right information in the future, other forms of alien life elsewhere in the universe too!)
PS: All the ‘coulds’, ‘woulds’ and any other term which represent certain amount of uncertainty could have been avoided if I had all the background information which can explain the phenomenon.
(I am sorry for the fact that I had to use a ‘could’ even in the Post Script! In a way, lack of information leads us into a vicious circle of uncertainty!)
I am a student and will be one till July 2011.Currently, doing my masters in Economics and Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus. I do some NPO stuff and I indulge myself in some activities that involve percussion and any of its allies.
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