Sports Minister Gary Hunt has been getting a lot of stick for his remark that ’you can’t put a price on national pride.’ Leading commentators like radio talkshow host Anil Roberts have pointed to the fact that the $2 million spent on a giant Trinidad and Tobago flag could have paid for an operation to save the life of a nine-year-old girl in Sea Lots, whose mother is trying to raise money to get the child an operation overseas. Retired diplomat Reginald Dumas stated bluntly in a TV6 interview that he had ’never heard such rubbish coming from a Minister of Government in this country or in any other country for a long time.’
But nobody has noted that Hunt is also wrong. Socialists and other spiritual people like to badtalk capitalism because it puts a price on everything. But this is, in fact, capitalism’s great virtue, and the reason why it is a more effective socioeconomic system that any others which have been tried from time to time. Communism was an economic failure because, by dictating prices, it distorted the signals about what the populace really wanted (or, put another way, Communism failed to listen to the people).
Prices, you see, reveal what human beings value and how much they value it. And, if we extend the concept of price to include expenditures like time and effort, we can find out what people’s real priorities are, as compared to what they claim their priorities are. In behavioural economics, this concept is called ’revealed preferences’, but it’s really just a modern version of the old saw that ’actions speak louder than words’ (something everyone should bear in mind when listening to Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday).
Once you have a large enough data-set, you can put a ’price’ on anything. Take love. Analysis of Internet dating sites in the United States has yielded all sorts of information about men’s and women’s preferences for a mate (and this data should be generally applicable to all societies).
For example, younger and slimmer women get more dating offers, as do higher-income and taller men. This has nothing to do with how men and women have been socialised, as feminists like to claim, but with evolutionary economics: a younger woman has more child-bearing years ahead of her, and so is a better investment for the man’s sperm. A richer or high-status man has more resources to nurture their children, and so is preferred by women. In fact, economists have even been able to calculate that a short man would have to make US$175,000 extra a year to be as desirable as a man of average height.
Now the calculations people make are quite unconscious, and romantics who argue that love should not be analysed are correct to the extent that stating reasons for your attraction to another person can reduce your passion. But this does not change the fact that human beings make these cost-benefit analyses all the time in all areas of life, even if they are not aware of doing so and, indeed, would vehemently deny making such calculations if it were pointed out to them.
For example, I am sure most people would claim to be very concerned about the high murder rate in T&T. And another leading commentator, senior counsel and Sunday Express columnist Martin Daly, continually takes the Government to task for its seeming indifference to this issue. But the fatal stabbing of 15-year-old Darrion Duncan after an Intercol football match two Fridays ago shows that the Manning regime is politically correct in not treating murder as a crucial problem. This is because politicians only need to take seriously what voters take seriously, and Darrion’s murder was not greeted with any initiative to cancel Intercol.
The school principals involved either did not consider such a call, or considered the option and rejected it. In either case, the message sent is quite clear: football is more important than a boy’s life. Had the Principals’ Association or TTUTA insisted that all remaining matches be stopped, this would have signalled that killing is unacceptable.
In recent years, there have also been incidents of persons being fatally shot and stabbed in fetes, and in every case the music played on. So the politicians have correctly calculated that murders do not sufficiently arouse citizens’ ire to affect votes. Indeed, one might argue that fewer than 9,000 persons in T&T are truly concerned about murder since, in the 2007 election with the homicide rate already at 30 per 100,000, the PNM received only that many less votes compared to 2002.
A country’s murder rate, in my view, is a much better measure of national pride than a giant flag. And, like Hunt’s statement that ’In time people would understand the value of what we have done’, it proves that we have little or none.
-kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
