Aria PN

Tulisan menarik dari Dani Rodrik (Professor Harvard) tentang pengembangan ekonomi. Sumber masalah dalam pengembangan ekonomi bisa dikelompokkan dalam 3 macam:

1. Kurang sumber daya. Solusi cepatnya adalah dengan mencari bantuan dan pinjaman luar negeri.
2. Kurang insentif yang menghasilkan kompetisi. Solusinya adalah bebaskan pasar lewat deregulasi dan privatisasi.
3. Kinerja pemerintahan yang tidak optimal karena berbagai hal, misalnya korupsi atau sistem yang tidak mendukung.

Saya melihat Indonesia memiliki ketiga macam masalah tersebut dan saling berkaitan. SDA perlu dikelola lebih baik dengan perbaikan pasar dan instansi pemerintah yang terkait. Pendidikan adalah kunci perbaikan SDM, walaupun akan memakan waktu panjang. Perbaikan SDM ini nantinya akan menghasilkan pemerintahan yang lebih baik.

Rodrik juga menulis tentang pendekatan baru dalam melihat permasalahan ini. Sesungguhnya kita tidak tahu di mana permasalahannya, apalagi apa pemecahannya. Kuncinya adalah eksperimen kebijakan. Di sini memang dibutuhkan kemauan politik yang besar, karena kebijakan yang diambil akan berpengaruh terhadap banyak orang.

Pemerintah harus selalu siap membatalkan suatu kebijakan kalau itu suatu kesalahan atau memperbaikinya. Kita bisa ambil contoh kenaikan harga BBM karena dicabutnya subsidi pemerintah. Pembuat kebijakan harus melihat apakah tujuannya tercapai, yaitu mengurangi konsumsi BBM dan menekan defisit anggaran. Apakah redistribusi subsidi lewat bantuan langsung tunai berhasil membantu?

Pendekatan seperti ini memerlukan kedewasaan rakyat terhadap pokok permasalahan dan pembuat kebijakan untuk meyakinkan.

ariapn Bahasa, Economics

Reading the Koran
By TARIQ RAMADAN
Published: January 6, 2008

For Muslims the Koran stands as the Text of reference, the source and the essence of the message transmitted to humanity by the creator. It is the last of a lengthy series of revelations addressed to humans down through history. It is the Word of God — but it is not God. The Koran makes known, reveals and guides: it is a light that responds to the quest for meaning. The Koran is remembrance of all previous messages, those of Noah and Abraham, of Moses and Jesus. Like them, it reminds and instructs our consciousness: life has meaning, facts are signs.

It is the Book of all Muslims the world over. But paradoxically, it is not the first book someone seeking to know Islam should read. (A life of the Prophet or any book presenting Islam would be a better introduction.) For it is both extremely simple and deeply complex. The nature of the spiritual, human, historical and social teachings to be drawn from it can be understood at different levels. The Text is one, but its readings are multiple.

For the woman or the man whose heart has made the message of Islam its own, the Koran speaks in a singular way. It is both the Voice and the Path. God speaks to one’s innermost being, to his consciousness, to his heart, and guides him onto the path that leads to knowledge of him, to the meeting with him: “This is the Book, about it there can be no doubt; it is a Path for those who are aware of God.” More than a mere text, it is a traveling companion to be chanted, to be sung or to be heard.

Throughout the Muslim world, in mosques, in homes and in the streets, one can hear magnificent voices reciting the divine Words. Here, there can be no distinction between religious scholars (ulema) and laymen. The Koran speaks to each in his language, accessibly, as if to match his intelligence, his heart, his questions, his joy as well as his pain. This is what the ulema have termed reading or listening as adoration. As Muslims read or hear the Text, they strive to suffuse themselves with the spiritual dimension of its message: beyond time, beyond history and the millions of beings who populate the earth, God is speaking to each of them, calling and reminding each of them, inviting, guiding, counseling and commanding. God responds, to her, to him, to the heart of each: with no intermediary, in the deepest intimacy.

No need for studies and diplomas, for masters and guides. Here, as we take our first steps, God beckons us with the simplicity of his closeness. The Koran belongs to everyone, free of distinction and of hierarchy. God responds to whoever comes to his Word. It is not rare to observe women and men, poor and rich, educated and illiterate, Eastern and Western, falling silent, staring into the distance, lost in thought, stepping back, weeping. The search for meaning has encountered the sacred, God is near: “Indeed, I am close at hand. I answer the call of him who calls me when s/he calls.”

A dialogue has begun. An intense, permanent, constantly renewed dialogue between a Book that speaks the infinite simplicity of the adoration of the One, and the heart that makes the intense effort necessary to liberate itself, to meet him. At the heart of every heart’s striving lies the Koran. It holds out peace and initiates into liberty.

Indeed, the Koran may be read at several levels, in quite distinct fields. But first, the reader must be aware of how the Text has been constructed. The Koran was revealed in sequences of varying length, sometimes as entire chapters (suras), over a span of 23 years. In its final form, the Text follows neither a chronological nor strictly thematic order. Two things initially strike the reader: the repetition of Prophetic stories, and the formulas and information that refer to specific historical situations that the Koran does not elucidate. Understanding, at this first level, calls for a twofold effort on the part of the reader: though repetition is, in a spiritual sense, a reminder and a revivification, in an intellectual sense it leads us to attempt to reconstruct. The stories of Eve and Adam, or of Moses, are repeated several times over with differing though noncontradictory elements: the task of human intelligence is to recompose the narrative structure, to bring together all the elements, allowing us to grasp the facts.

But we must also take into account the context to which these facts refer: all commentators, without distinction as to school of jurisprudence, agree that certain verses of the revealed Text (in particular, but not only, those that refer to war) speak of specific situations that had arisen at the moment of their revelation. Without taking historical contingency into account, it is impossible to obtain general information on this or that aspect of Islam. In such cases, our intelligence is invited to observe the facts, to study them in reference to a specific environment and to derive principles from them. It is a demanding task, which requires study, specialization and extreme caution. Or to put it differently, extreme intellectual modesty.

The second level is no less demanding. The Koranic text is, first and foremost, the promulgation of a message whose content has, above all, a moral dimension. On each page we behold the ethics, the underpinnings, the values and the hierarchy of Islam taking shape. In this light, a linear reading is likely to disorient the reader and to give rise to incoherence, even contradiction. It is appropriate, in our efforts to determine the moral message of Islam, to approach the Text from another angle. While the stories of the Prophets are drawn from repeated narrations, the study of ethical categories requires us, first, to approach the message in the broadest sense, then to derive the principles and values that make up the moral order. The methods to be applied at this second level are exactly the opposite of the first, but they complete it, making it possible for religious scholars to advance from the narration of a prophetic story to the codification of its spiritual and ethical teaching.

But there remains a third level, which demands full intellectual and spiritual immersion in the Text, and in the revealed message. Here, the task is to derive the Islamic prescriptions that govern matters of faith, of religious practice and of its fundamental precepts. In a broader sense, the task is to determine the laws and rules that will make it possible for all Muslims to have a frame of reference for the obligations, the prohibitions, the essential and secondary matters of religious practice, as well as those of the social sphere. A simple reading of the Koran does not suffice: not only is the study of Koranic science a necessity, but knowledge of segments of the prophetic tradition is essential. One cannot, on a simple reading of the Koran, learn how to pray. We must turn to authenticated prophetic tradition to determine the rules and the body movements of prayer.

As we can see, this third level requires singular knowledge and competence that can only be acquired by extensive, exhaustive study of the texts, their surrounding environment and, of course, intimate acquaintance with the classic and secular tradition of the Islamic sciences. It is not merely dangerous but fundamentally erroneous to generalize about what Muslims must and must not do based on a simple reading of the Koran. Some Muslims, taking a literalist or dogmatic approach, have become enmeshed in utterly false and unacceptable interpretations of the Koranic verses, which they possess neither the means, nor on occasion the intelligence, to place in the perspective of the overarching message. Some orientalists, sociologists and non-Muslim commentators follow their example by extracting from the Koran certain passages, which they then proceed to analyze in total disregard for the methodological tools employed by the ulema.

Above and beyond these distinct levels of reading, we must take into account the different interpretations put forward by the great Islamic classical tradition. It goes without saying that all Muslims consider the Koran to be the final divine revelation. But going back to the direct experience of the Companions of the Prophet, it has always been clear that the interpretation of its verses is plural in nature, and that there has always existed an accepted diversity of readings among Muslims.

Some have falsely claimed that because Muslims believe the Koran to be the word of God, interpretation and reform are impossible. This belief is then cited as the reason why a historical and critical approach cannot be applied to the revealed Text. The development of the sciences of the Koran — the methodological tools fashioned and wielded by the ulema and the history of Koranic commentary — prove such a conclusion baseless. Since the beginning, the three levels outlined above have led to a cautious approach to the texts, one that obligates whoever takes up the task to be in harmony with his era and to renew his comprehension. Dogmatic and often mummified, hidebound readings clearly reflect not upon the Author of the Text, but upon the intelligence and psychology of the person reading it. Just as we can read the work of a human author, from Marx to Keynes, in closed-minded and rigid fashion, we can approach divine revelation in a similar manner. Instead, we should be at once critical, open-minded and incisive. The history of Islamic civilization offers us ample proof of this.

When dealing with the Koran, it is neither appropriate nor helpful to draw lines of demarcation between approaches of the heart and of the mind. All the masters of Koranic studies without exception have emphasized the importance of the spiritual dimension as a necessary adjunct to the intellectual investigation of the meaning of the Koran. The heart possesses its own intelligence: “Have they not hearts with which to understand,” the Koran calls out to us, as if to point out that the light of intellect alone is not enough. The Muslim tradition, from the legal specialists to the Sufi mystics, has continuously oscillated between these two poles: the intelligence of the heart sheds the light by which the intelligence of the mind observes, perceives and derives meaning. As sacred word, the Text contains much that is apparent; it also contains the secrets and silences that nearness to the divine reveals to the humble, pious, contemplative intelligence. Reason opens the Book and reads it — but it does so in the company of the heart, of spirituality.

For the Muslim’s heart and conscience, the Koran is the mirror of the universe. What the first Western translators, influenced by the biblical vocabulary, rendered as “verse” means, literally, “sign” in Arabic. The revealed Book, the written Text, is made up of signs, in the same way that the universe, in the image of a text spread out before our eyes, abounds with these very signs. When the intelligence of the heart — and not analytical intelligence alone — reads the Koran and the world, the two speak to one another, echo one another; each one speaks of the other and of the Unique One. The signs remind us of meaning: of birth, of life, of feeling, of thought, of death.

But the echo is deeper still, and summons human intelligence to understand revelation, creation and their harmony. Just as the universe possesses its fundamental laws and its finely regulated order — which humans, wherever they may be, must respect when acting upon their environment — the Koran lays down laws, a moral code and a body of practice that Muslims must respect, whatever their era and their environment. These are the invariables of the universe, and of the Koran. Religious scholars use the term qat’i (“definitive,” “not subject to interpretation”) when they refer to the Koranic verses (or to the authenticated Prophetic tradition, ahadith) whose formulation is clear and explicit and offers no latitude for figurative interpretation. In like manner, creation itself rests upon universal laws that we cannot ignore. The consciousness of the believer likens the five pillars of Islam to the laws of gravitation: they constitute an earthly reality beyond space and time.

As the universe is in constant motion, rich in an infinite diversity of species, beings, civilizations, cultures and societies, so too is the Koran. In the latitude of interpretation offered by the majority of its verses, by the generality of the principles and actions that it promulgates with regard to social affairs, by the silences that run through it, the Koran allows human intelligence to grasp the evolution of history, the multiplicity of languages and cultures, and thus to insinuate itself into the windings of time and the landscapes of space.

Between the universe and the Koran, between these two realities, between these two texts, human intelligence must learn to distinguish fundamental and universal laws from circumstantial and historical models. This intelligence must display humility in the presence of the order, beauty and harmony of creation and of revelation. At the same time it must responsibly and creatively manage its own accomplishments or interpretations, which are sources of extraordinary success, but also of injustice, war and disorder. Between Text and context, the intelligence of the heart and that of the analytical faculty lay down norms, recognize an ethical structure, produce knowledge, nourish consciousness, and develop enterprise and creativity in all spheres of human activity.

Far from being a prison, or a constraint, revelation is an invitation to mankind to reconcile itself with its deepest essence, and to find there both the recognition of its limitations and the extraordinary potential of its intelligence and its imagination. To submit ourselves to the order of the Just One and of his eternity is to understand that we are free and fully authorized to reform the injustices that lie at the heart of the order or disorder of all that is temporally human.

The Koran is a book for both heart and mind. In nearness to it, a woman or a man who possesses a spark of faith knows the path to follow, knows her or his own inadequacies. No sheik is needed, no wise man, no confidant. Ultimately, the heart knows. This was what the Prophet answered when he was asked about moral feelings. In the light of the Book, he said, “Inquire of your heart.” And should our intelligence stray into the complexities of the different levels of reading, from applied ethics to the rules of practice, we must never forget to clothe ourselves in the intellectual modesty that alone can reveal the secrets of the Text. For “it is not the eyes that are blind, but the hearts within the breasts.” Such a heart, humble and alert, is the faithful friend of the Koran.

Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford and at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

ariapn Personal

From the August 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind

Is Greed Good?

Economists are finding that social concerns often trump selfishness in financial decision making, a view that helps to explain why tens of millions of people send money to strangers they find on the Internet

By Christoph Uhlhaas

Could you buy a used car online, sight unseen and without a test-drive? How about a plane? A vehicle changes hands on eBay Motors every 60 seconds, including one private business jet that sold for $4.9 million. Every second buyers collectively swap more than $1,839 for products through eBay, sending money to complete strangers with no guarantee that the goods they buy will in fact arrive, let alone in the condition they expect.

As a rule, they are not disappointed. To some economists, this is a borderline miracle, because it contradicts the concept of Homo economicus (economic man) as a rational, selfish person who single-mindedly strives for maximum profit. According to this notion, sellers should pocket buyers’ payments and send nothing in return. For their part, buyers should not trust sellers—and the market should collapse.

Economist Axel Ockenfels of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues have spent the past several years figuring out why this does not happen. It turns out that humans do not always behave as if their sole concern is their personal financial advantage—and even when they do, they consider social motives in the profit-making equation. As Ockenfels has discovered, a sense of fairness often plays a big role in people’s decisions about what to do with their money and possessions, and it is also an essential part of what drives trust in markets full of strangers such as eBay.

Ockenfels’s Equity, Reciprocity and Competition (ERC) theory, which he developed with economist Gary Bolton of Pennsylvania State University, states that people not only try to maximize their gains but also watch to see that they get roughly the same share as others: they are happy to get one piece of cake as long as the next person does not get two pieces. This fairness gauge apparently even has a defined place in the brain. On eBay, however, fairness takes the system only halfway, researchers have now learned; eBay’s reputation system is critical for augmenting the level of trust enough for the market to work.

Circumstance also sculpts behavior, studies have revealed, regardless of natural character traits or values. That is, whether a person is competing in a market of strangers or negotiating with a partner can make a big difference in whether fairness, reciprocity or selfishness will predominate. In fact, the ERC theory hints at ways to alter economic institutions to nudge people to compete—or cooperate—more or less than they currently do.

Playing Fair
Economists have long been studying volunteers in the laboratory to determine how and why they make financial decisions. In competitive markets, from the U.S. Stock Exchange to auctions at Sotheby’s, people generally act like Homo economicus, behaving in ways that maximize their own profits.

But inherent selfishness cannot explain behavior in other settings. Take a child who has been given a bag of jelly beans, which her left-out sibling is eyeing jealously. Many children would voluntarily share the candy just to be fair, even though that would mean fewer jelly beans for them. Mathematicians who practice game theory see something similar when they ask people to bargain in a test of social motives called the Ultimatum Game. In this two-player game, player A is endowed with a certain sum, say, $20, if he agrees to share some of it with player B. If B accepts A’s offer, the money is divided accordingly. But if B rejects the offer, both players end up with nothing.

In Ultimatum Game studies, researchers have found that the average offer is about 40 percent of the sum and that the most frequent split is 50–50, analogous to a child giving her sibling half or nearly half of the jelly beans she received. The recipient, B, usually accepts such roughly equal offers. When A offers less than one third of the total, however, B usually reacts with scorn and scraps the deal. This response seems nonsensical to someone who is only out to maximize profit. But it is more logical if people have a competing social concern: fairness. If individuals want a fair split, then accepting significantly less than that would mean forfeiting that objective.

A motivation for fairness also seems to be an important factor on eBay, in which the “Buy It Now” format—or an auction with just one buyer—resembles an Ultimatum Game; a seller offers an item at a price that a buyer can accept or reject. To test this hypothesis, Ockenfels and Bolton recruited 100 German university students with selling experience on eBay, divided them into 50 buyer-seller pairs, and asked the sellers to hawk $20 certificates (funded by the researchers) to their assigned partners on eBay.

Consistent with previous Ultimatum results, the most popular selling price was $10, which would result in an equal split of the experimental pot. All but one buyer accepted this offer. Prices above $17 were uniformly rebuffed as too greedy, and some also refused costs between $10 and $17, refuting the idea that monetary incentive alone governs the deal. On the contrary, in this bargaining situation an equal split maximizes profits, Ockenfels says, because buyers generally will not accept unfair offers and sellers seem to realize that. “Fair dealing pays off,” he concludes.

Different Strokes
In many cases, however, people will forgive a biased outcome if it comes about by chance rather than through a deliberate act. Ockenfels and Bolton recently asked volunteers to play an Ultimatum Game variant in which player A chooses to split the money either 50–50 or 80–20. If the choice was 80–20, 41 percent of recipients refused the offer. But only 7 percent rejected the 80–20 split when it came from a robot acting at random. This result, Ockenfels says, suggests many people will accept unequal deals as long as all participants have been given a fair chance.

Not everyone is the same, of course. The demand for such procedural fairness, in which people get equal treatment even if the outcome is unfair, may have a cultural component. Anecdotal evidence suggests, for instance, that Americans may be more concerned with procedural fairness than Germans are. Germans seem more likely to insist on equivalent outcomes, Ockenfels says. Individual differences matter, too. Some people are very sensitive to being cheated, whereas others are far less bothered, even nonchalant, when they receive unequal treatment.

That said, discerning values from behavior is often hopelessly confounded by circumstance, Ockenfels says. When he and Bolton asked people to compete for their $20 certificates in experimental eBay auctions with one seller and nine buyers each, they found that the selling price zoomed above $19, a far cry from the equal split that pervaded the previous one-on-one game. Homo economicus trumped fairness in the auction, because a fair player has no way to strive for equity in a situation in which each person must overbid the others to get anything at all. “In markets, all people behave selfishly, but that doesn’t mean they really are,” Ockenfels comments. “The institutions make you behave in certain ways.”

Building Trust
In the researchers’ experimental auction, trust was not a factor, because the (presumably trustworthy) experimenters vouched for the $20 certificates. Yet trust is a critical issue on eBay, in which sellers are anonymous and have little pecuniary incentive to actually ship the items they have sold.

To figure out why they ship anyway, Ockenfels, Bolton and Penn State business professor Elena Katok asked 144 university students to play a trust game that mimics the situation on eBay. In the game, a seller and a buyer each start off with the same sum, say, $35; that is the payoff when no trade takes place. The seller also has an item to be sold for $35, but its value to the buyer is $50, so a trade nets the buyer an extra $15. The seller pays the shipping costs here, $20, so a trade also nets the seller an additional $15. But if the seller fails to ship an item, the seller receives a $35 bonus and the buyer loses the entire endowment. If the buyer chooses not to take this risk, no trade occurs.

In this game, the outcome is fair after either a successful trade or no trade—but most advantageous to the seller if the seller fails to ship. Homo economicus would thus never ship, and no rational buyer would buy. But 37 percent of the sellers were willing to ship, the researchers found, suggesting that some sellers were motivated by an intrinsic sense of fairness and some buyers had bet on that. And in a modified trust game that endows the buyer with an extra $70 regardless of the outcome, the researchers predicted that fair-minded sellers would not ship, because that choice would equate buyer and seller sums at $70. As expected, many fewer sellers (only 7 percent) decided to send the fictitious goods, signifying that the main reason for trustworthiness is fairness.

Rumor Has It
Nevertheless, sellers must ship as much as 70 percent of the time for buying in such a game—or on eBay—to be profitable, according to Ockenfels. How does eBay boost trust to that level? The answer: feedback. On eBay, sellers and buyers can evaluate one another after a transaction has been completed, and these evaluations are made public for future buyers and sellers. “This reputation system functions like an organized rumor mill and replaces the gossip systems of the off-line world,” Ockenfels explains. Because a bad reputation scares off future buyers, even strategic and rational sellers have an incentive to be trustworthy.

To quantify the power of this rumor mill, Ockenfels and his colleagues compared market activity among strangers matched for 30 rounds of transactions without a feedback mechanism against a similar market that included feedback. They found that the feedback system elicited ­significantly more buying—56 percent—as ­compared with buying without it—37 percent. More shipping also occurred, rising to 73 percent—above the threshold for trust to be profitable—as compared with shipping for tran­sactions without the reputation system: these hovered around 39 percent. The results indicate that feedback can fill the trust gap in a market such as eBay’s, multiplying the impact of intrinsic trustworthiness.

But the feedback system is imperfect. About 98 percent of ratings on eBay are positive, according to Ockenfels, suggesting that some disappointed eBay buyers do not post negative ­ratings. Buyers may fear “revenge feedback,” when a seller retaliates for a bad rating with a negative rating of the buyer, claiming that the buyer paid late or with a bad check, for instance. Indeed, in Ockenfels’s experiments, many of those who are not happy with a trade do not give feedback at all.

This lack of feedback is obviously not good for the reputation system. So Ockenfels and Bolton, along with economist Ben Greiner, now at Harvard University, have been working with eBay to design choices that induce people to post truthful and detailed negative feedback. eBay’s revised format, Feedback 2.0, debuted April 30. It lets buyers rate transaction specifics such as accuracy of an item’s description, seller communication and shipping speed, in addition to the overall rating of positive, neutral or negative.

The extra detail increases the feedback’s value to future buyers. And to help allay worries of retaliatory feedback, buyers give their ratings anonymously. Furthermore, sellers can see the detailed ratings only after providing feedback of their own, preventing retaliatory feedback even if the seller later intuits which buyer posted a poor evaluation. What the new system cannot prevent, however, is one-time cheaters. Buying a car or plane online is still pretty risky.

Ockenfels is not about to do that. He visits eBay only occasionally, to buy things for his two children. And if you notice an auction with “aockenfels” as the seller, you have probably stumbled on an economics experiment.

ariapn Economics

Cerpen kuno.

“Okay everybody, that’s it for today”, kata Maryam yang kemudian membaca doa penutup. Aku lihat Maryam masih sibuk bicara dengan beberapa pengurus MSA Sister Comittee, jadi tanpa menyapanya lagi, aku langsung pergi. Aku lihat jam tangan, sudah jam 10 malam. Ramadhan tinggal 12 hari lagi, tidak terasa. Untuk acara setelah Idul Fitri, MSA Sister Comittee dapat tugas menyiapkan acara untuk anak-anak setelah sholat Ied. Jadi tadi selepas sholat tarawih semua pengurus komite rapat.

Aku masih jengkel saja rasanya, kalau teringat rapat tadi. Apalagi kalau ingat keputusan yang diambil Maryam. Jauh sebelum rapat, aku sudah menyiapkan berbagai bentuk perlombaan untuk anak-anak. Aku sudah coret-coret hadiah apa saja yang pasti menarik untuk anak-anak dan segala macam aturan lomba. Sebagian pengurus tidak setuju kalau anak-anak dilombakan, dan hanya yang menang yang dapat hadiah. Mereka maunya semua anak harus dapat hadiah, kan ini Ied, jadi semua anak menang.

Sebenarnya aku tidak keberatan kalau semua dapat hadiah, tapi lomba harus tetap jalan. Tanpa lomba, acaranya kurang menarik, dan anak-anak juga kurang bersemangat biasanya. Memang sih, anggaran akan membekak, karena selain beli hadiah untuk pemenang, MSA juga harus beli hadiah untuk anak-anak lain. Aku tadinya berharap, Maryam akan mendukungku, dan semua usahaku mempersiapkan lomba tidak hilang begitu saja. Maryam kan ketua komite, jadi keputusan akhir ada dia. Tapi ternyata dia tidak setuju dengan ideku, malah sedikit mengkritik, “Zahra, you should’ve talked to us first, before preparing anything on your own.” Akhirnya disepakati MSA akan melatih anak-anak mempersembahkan drama dan lagu, dan semua akan dapat hadiah.

Aku kenal Maryam sudah hampir tiga tahun, waktu kami masih tingkat satu. Kami sekelas di Biology 110. Waktu itu nama panggilannya masih Mary. Mary yang pertama kali mengajak aku kenalan, “you’re the first person I know who’s wearing a head scarf”. Sebelumnya dia tahu orang pakai jilbab hanya dari TV dan surat kabar. Kebetulan kami jadi partner di lab, jadi kami sering berdua. Mary banyak tanya soal Islam, dan sering pertanyaannya bikin aku gelagapan juga, karena sebelumnya tidak pernah terpikir olehku pertanyaan-pertanyaan itu. Akhirnya, aku bawa saja dia ke masjid, bertemu teman-teman di MSA.

Aku sendiri ikut banyak belajar dan aktif di MSA. Akhir tahun pertama, Mary memutuskan untuk masuk Islam. Tidak terkira rasa senangku waktu itu. Dan orang tua Mary juga sangat terbuka. Walaupun begitu banyak berita negatif tentang Islam di media massa, mereka membebaskan Mary menentukan pilihannya, dan percaya bahwa dia benar-benar serius. Sejak itu, Mary minta dipanggil Maryam, dan kami jadi semakin dekat. Tahun lalu, aku jadi ketua bagian sosial, dan dia ketua bagian dakwah. Kami sering merancang kegiatan bersama, biar “Da’wah is not too preachy”, kata Maryam. Jadi kami satukan antara kegiatan dakwah dan sosial. Biar orang mengenal Islam juga dari akhlaq orang Islam.

Tak terasa aku sudah sampai apartemenku. Aku masih teringat Maryam, dulu dia selalu memperhatikan usul-usulku. Tapi sekarang, sejak dia jadi ketua Sister Comittee, sering dia lebih memperhatikan usulan teman lain yang tidak jarang bertabrakan dengan ideku. Seperti rapat tadi. Sudahlah, batinku, nggak baik berprasangka buruk terus ke orang.

Paginya, selepas sahur dan sholat subuh, aku masih saja ingat rapat semalam. Puasa kok mikirin orang terus, keluhku. Cepat-cepat aku menyibukkan diri, mempersiapkan kelas-kelas hari ini. Ada beberapa bahan kuliah yang aku belum paham benar. Setelah aku baca bukunya, sekarang lumayan ngerti. Jadi nanti di kelas nggak bengong terus, nggak tahu dosen ngomong apa.

Jam tiga, kelas terakhirku adalah Prof. Roberts. Kelasnya susah, tapi Prof. Roberts sering memberi contoh yang membuat kelasnya lebih mudah dipahami. Hari ini dia berbicara soal kanker. Bagaimana kanker terbentuk dari sel-sel yang ada di tubuh kita. Aku kurang mengikuti apa yang dia sampaikan. “Harus baca buku nih nanti,” pikirku. Akhirnya, Prof. Roberts menutup kuliahnya, “Think of cancer as a bad cell. We have billions of cells in our body. But we may have cancer caused by a single bad cell. This one cell is bad because it cannot live with other cells, it cannot tolerate others.”

Aku langsung teringat hadits Nabi, “Orang mukmin bagaikan satu tubuh”. Masing-masih ibaratnya sel yang bersama-sama membentuk tubuh yang kuat. Jangan-jangan aku ini sel yang bisa jadi kanker yang merusak tubuh MSA. Aku bergidik mengingatnya. Selesai kelas, cepat-cepat aku pergi ke masjid untuk berbuka puasa. Aku tahu biasanya Maryam ada di masjid juga. Rasanya tidak sabar aku berjalan.

Begitu sampai di masjid, aku cari Maryam. Itu dia, baru selesai bicara dengan beberapa akhwat lain. Langsung aku peluk dia dari belakang. Maryam agak kaget. “What’s going on”, tanyanya terheran-heran. “Nothing”, aku hanya tersenyum-senyum saja. Maryam tertawa sebentar, tapi kemudian raut mukanya berubah agak serius, “I’m sorry for what I said last night.” Aku mengangguk, berbunga hatiku. Rasanya seperti sudah lebaran.

ariapn Bahasa

Rasanya uang tidak pernah terlepas dari pikiran kita (saya). Ketika membayar tagihan apartemen, bayar kartu kredit, belanja semua berhubungan dengan uang. Belum lagi kalau merencanakan sesuatu, dari sekadar rencana akhir pekan anak-anak sampai masa depan mereka.

Kalau uang adalah microcosm dari dunia ini, maka keterikatan kita pada dunia bisa dilihat sejauh mana uang membelenggu kita. Saya pribadi bersyukur masih bisa membayar zakat, dan merencanakan membayarnya setiap bulan sedikit mengurangi belenggu itu.

Hasil penelitian yang baru terbit di majalah Science, 17 Nopember menunjukkan bahwa belenggu ini cukup berpengaruh terhadap berbagai aspek kehidupan kita. Vohs, Mead dan Goode di “The psychological consequences of money” mengkondisikan sebagian peserta percobaan dengan berbagai kata-kata yang berhubungan dengan uang (misal: gaji tinggi) dan sebagian lain dengan kata-kata netral (misal: cuaca di luar dingin). Setelah ini kedua kelompok tersebut dan satu kelompok lagi yang tidak dikondisikan (sebagai kontrol) diminta melakukan berbagai tugas.

Salah satu tugas yang mereka kerjakan adalah menyelesaikan teka-teki, dimana kelompok yang sudah terkondisikan dengan uang memerlukan waktu hampir dua kali lipat dari waktu dua kelompok lain. Kelompok yang pertama tadi juga cenderung lebih enggan menolong orang lain dan memberi uang untuk amal lebih sedikit. Kesimpulan yang diambil penulis adalah kelompok yang terkondisikan dengan uang merasa cukup, lebih egois dan lebih suka bermain dan bekerja sendiri.

As with any other experimental research, take this result with a grain of salt. Tapi paling tidak ini mengingatkan kita pada ajaran salafus sholih untuk bersikap zuhud, dunia ada di tangan, bukan di hati kita. Dengan melepaskan hati dari dunia, mudah-mudahan kita menjadi lebih memperhatikan saudara kita yang banyak yang masih memerlukan. Kita menjadi lebih bersyukur dan kalau hasil percobaan ini benar, kita bisa mengerjakan hal-hal lain dengan sepenuh kemampuan dan hasil yang lebih baik Insya Allah.

ariapn Bahasa

Mr. Phelps, the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia, was yesterday awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for economics.

Dynamic Capitalism by Edmund Phelps in the Wall Street Journal: There are two economic systems in the West. Several nations–including the U.S., Canada and the U.K.–have a private-ownership system marked by great openness to the implementation of new commercial ideas coming from entrepreneurs, and by a pluralism of views among the financiers who select the ideas to nurture by providing the capital and incentives necessary for their development. Although much innovation comes from established companies, as in pharmaceuticals, much comes from start-ups, particularly the most novel innovations. This is free enterprise, a k a capitalism.

The other system–in Western Continental Europe–though also based on private ownership, has been modified by the introduction of institutions aimed at protecting the interests of “stakeholders” and “social partners.” The system’s institutions include big employer confederations, big unions and monopolistic banks. Since World War II, a great deal of liberalization has taken place. But new corporatist institutions have sprung up: Co-determination (cogestion, or Mitbestimmung) has brought “worker councils” (Betriebsrat); and in Germany, a union representative sits on the investment committee of corporations. The system operates to discourage changes such as relocations and the entry of new firms, and its performance depends on established companies in cooperation with local and national banks. What it lacks in flexibility it tries to compensate for with technological sophistication. So different is this system that it has its own name: the “social market economy” in Germany, “social democracy” in France and “concertazione” in Italy.

Read more…

ariapn Economics

[I]t is a uniquely modern belief that politics will totally change our lives and redeem us, or that the existence of the correct political structure can cure ‘the problems of society’. This belief in the salvational quality of politics, as has been noted by John Gray, is dying or already dead in liberal societies (to be replaced by the ‘cult of science and technology’ according to Gray). One can’t help but agree with Dr. Yahya Michot, when he said … that too many Muslims, having concentrated on politics to the exclusion of almost everything else, ended up “backing the wrong horse” in the 20th-century (especially if one considers that, according to Michot, economics has trumped politics). It is the modern idea of fascism that says the state must control and define all activities of its citizens: the economic, the political, the social, the legal, the cultural and even the metaphysical. It is people who reduce Islam to nothing more than a bid for power, a method and an end of governance, that will actually end up secularising Islam.

From Thabet. I hope I can elaborate more on this, for now this will serve as a place holder.

ariapn Economics, Politics

Dalam bertemu, berkumpul ataupun bergaul kita mengalami proses penularan ilmu, sadar maupun tidak sadar. Saya agak kesulitan mencari kata pengganti ilmu. Knowledge mungkin lebih tepat. Ilmu disini tidak selalu bersifat formal, tapi apa saja yang tadinya tidak kita ketahui, atau belum kita ketahui dengan benar/baik, atau belum kita endapkan.

Bagi yang sudah bekerja, proses ini bisa dijumpai secara formal dalam bentuk satu tim yang bekerja untuk suatu proyek. Anggota tim yang baru harus belajar dari anggota yang lain atau harus melihat buku petunjuk atau manual teknis.

Secara informal, proses ini banyak kita alami. Tentu saja terjadi pada interaksi keluarga. Dalam konteks organisasi, hal ini juga terjadi dalam berbagai pertemuan, berbagai rapat organisasi dan kepanitiaan, dan sebagainya. Proses pembelajaran ini sudah banyak diteliti dan juga diterapkan dalam berbagai bentuk teknik managemen proyek di berbagai perusahaan.

Permasalahan yang sering dihadapi dalam penyebaran ilmu ini adalah banyak ilmu yang sulit untuk diajarkan dan dipelajari secara ekplisit. Sebagian peneliti (Polanyi, 1966; Nonaka 1994) membuat dua klasifikasi ekstrem, ilmu yang tersurat (explicit knowledge) dan yang tersirat (tacit knowledge). Tentu saja sebagian besar ilmu ada di antara keduanya.

Tacit knowledge sulit untuk diungkapkan baik dalam bentuk tulisan maupun ucapan. Misalnya, seorang montir mobil atau dokter yang berpengalaman ketika mendiagnosa obyek mereka. Mereka sendiri sering tidak tahu bagaimana proses yang mereka jalani untuk mengambil suatu kesimpulan tertentu, apalagi untuk menuangkan proses tersebut secara ekplisit.

Tacit knowledge perlu diubah menjadi explicit knowledge supaya bisa diajarkan. Karena itu, seringkali untuk mempelajari tacit knowledge ini dilakukan kerja praktek. Dengan melihat dan meniru bagaimana pembimbing kita melakukannya, ilmu tersebut ditransfer lengkap dengan konteksnya, yaitu lingkungan tempat kejadian dan kepribadian yang mempengaruhinya.

Ini berbeda dengan jenis ilmu yang tersurat. Pengajar bisa dengan mudah memberikan fakta yang diperlukan dan instruksi yang harus dikerjakan. Kalau pengajar yang berbeda memberikan petunjuk yang sama, maka instruksi ini bisa dikodifikasi/didokumentasi untuk selanjutnya bisa dipelajari tanpa pengajar.

Dalam berbagai kerja dakwah, apa yang ingin kita sampaikan sering berbentuk tacit. Hal ini disebabkan karena pesan yang ingin kita sampaikan (seharusnya) sudah terendapkan dalam diri kita. Ketika kita menyampaikan makna syahadah, ketika kita menceritakan kisah ukhuwah sahabat, semua itu seharusnya sudah ada dalam diri kita.

Proses pengendapan ini adalah internalisasi dari apa yang kita dapat secara ekplisit lewat jasmani/indra kita menjadi bagian ruhani/bawah sadar kita. Termasuk yang explisit ini adalah apa yang kita baca, apa yang kita pelajari dari guru kita, apa yang kita dengar dari nasehat saudara kita. Semua explicit knowledge ini harus diubah menjadi tacit knowledge atau internalisasi.

Proses internalisasi ini tidak hanya mencakup seberapa banyak yang kita ingat waktu kita belajar. Tapi juga apa yang kita rasakan waktu belajar. Perasaan ini tergantung konteks kita belajar: kapan (dalam artian usia atau situasi yang ada, juga malam ataukah siang, sehabis makan atau sehabis sholat), di mana, siapa gurunya (gaya bicara, intonasi, emosi, dll), siapa murid yang lain (emosi dan hubungan kita ke mereka), apa yang sudah kita pelajari sebelumnya, bagaimana kondisi ruhiyah kita, dan masih banyak lagi yang tidak mungkin semuanya dituliskan secara tersurat.

Karena itulah berbagai pertemuan — walaupun yang dibahas terkadang serba mirip — memiliki andil dalam proses internalisasi ini. Semuanya memilki format yang mirip tapi konteks yang selalu sedikit berbeda, sehingga apa yang kita dapatkan-pun selalu lain. Seharusnya pertemuan menjadi proses pembelajaran yang berjalan terus menerus dan timbal balik.

Tentunya kewajiban kita tidak berhenti di internalisasi saja. Kita belajar dan mengajar, mengendapkan dan menyampaikan. Kewajiban untuk menyampaikan berarti kita harus melakukan proses ekternalisasi, mengubah tacit knowledge tadi kembali menjadi explicit knowledge.

Kalau eksternalisasi dan internalisasi mempunyai konteks yang mirip, maka akan jauh lebih mudah untuk menyampaikan apa yang sudah mengendap tersebut.

Sejarah dakwah di Indonesia cukup menjadi bukti. Proses internalisasi terjadi melalui interaksi yang kuat dan berulang dalam berbagai konteks yang sangat mendukung pengendapan. Pengalaman menjadi faktor penting dalam proses ini. Konteks yang kita alami, kita ingat kemudian kita endapkan.

Konteks ini kemudian kita jabarkan dan kita sertakan waktu kita melakukan penyampaian. Tanpa pengalaman tadi, apa yang kita sampaikan kekurangan konteks yang diperlukan untuk proses internalisasi generasi berikutnya.

ariapn Bahasa, Personal

That’s the solution I was proposing in my last post. Free market to get the most benefits and transfers to redistribute them accordingly. One important issue about redistribution is generality versus transparency. Do we redistribute the benefits universally or selectively but transparently? Will Wilkinson expands more on this. This problem in particular is really evident in Indonesia:

Part of the issue here is a big principle-agent/incentive compatibility problem between representatives and the citizens they represent. Politicians want to get re-elected. If they can subsidize interest group A at group B’s expense without group B really noticing due to the hidden transfer, then that will sound like a real winner to a politician. Which is just to say that the incentives politicians face encourage them to violate the very conditions of transparency and public justification that make their coercive powers legitimate.

ariapn Economics, Politics

Idealistic view of the world has bothered me a lot recently. But you’ll see why you can’t be without ideals. So let’s try another approach, or what I’d call “the” approach. Rather than looking at specific issues, we’ll just put them all in one basket and be super-solver for now.

Assume the idealistic view is right in that Indonesia has a lot of resources, and the realistic view is right in that we (or maybe “others”) have mismanaged the resources. The opposite assumptions are too disheartening; that somehow we are good managers, but don’t have the capital to work at. We’d rather be rich than competent right?

We have our problem: how do we manage our resources? There might not be a first best solution to this problem. I don’t care. Give me a second best then. Give me the most efficient solution possible taking into account all conditions.

Efficiency is measured in terms of utility. It’s efficient if you cannot increase the utiliy of one party without decreasing the utility of the other party. Utility is just economic term for ideals. It means your preference, your likes and dislikes, and ultimately your ideals, what you want and value the most. Without ideals, there’s nothing to improve or aim for.

If we start from this solution, the question is always about distribution, who gets the benefit (and how much) of that efficient solution. If I start from the other end, the question is about efficiency.

OK, the next step is to distribute the benefit so everyone can be happy. Wait, that’s not possible. Maybe we can try distribute it fairly, so no one can’t complain of injustice. (What? Did you say they can and will complain because they have different definition of fair and justice?) It doesn’t really matter, but I’ll just use Rawls’ arrangement of fairness (which is probably the view of the more idealistic camp). So, the least advantaged of the society should get the greatest benefit.

Let’s also assume away the details of actually implementing this principle, such as proportions, measurements, etc. So we want to give more benefits to some and reduce or take away from others. The latter will then lose some or all of the incentives to contribute efficiently. That means there’ll be less benefits to distribute. Even less than ideal, we might already have something better than what we have in the beginning. We might also we end up where we start, a very non optimal outcome.

I realize this has been rehashed before so many times, by so many people much more competent in this than me. I don’t have “the” solution. I’m just pointing out the realities. Knowing them, we won’t get carried away by too idealistic of a solution. Especially if it sacrifices a lot more benefits than what we have to.

We have rooms to improve. Often times we are afraid to improve, because the distribution will change. Don’t forget, once we get the benefits, we can always redistribute them if we wish so. Of course there’s always the price for being less efficient. It’s not perfect. Pick your poisons, and choose them wisely.

ariapn Economics, Politics