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May 13, 2006

Doubting Thomases for election promises

I went to a talk by Jon Bentley yesterday, where he covered a lot of interesting material on quick back-of-the-envelope estimations. I was certainly inspired by the doubting Thomas skepticism it aroused in me. Soon enough I got a chance to put it into action with none other than my Dad.

If you thought American politics were bad enough, consider an election promise made by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu: two acres of land for everybody if they get elected. As it turns out, they did just get the mandate to form the state government. My Dad thought it wasn't that far fetched a promise. So will everyone receive their two acres? Let's see if the basic techniques of estimation I took home from Bentley's lecture would let me make a determination as to the feasibility of implementing this promise.

My data sources were limited because not a whole lot of information about the demographics of Tamil Nadu is online. I went to Tamil Nadu's Wikipedia page and learned that it has just over 62 million people in an area just over 130,000 km². I looked up the conversion factor from square kilometers to acres to considerable accuracy at the usual handy source. 130,000 square kilometers corresponds to approximately 32 million acres. 32 million acres for 62 million people translates to just under half an acre per person in Tamil Nadu--off by a factor of four from the promise.

Then my Dad said, 'It's clear they meant to give these two acres only to those who need it--the farmers.' I countered by saying that this modified version of the promise would be fulfilled only if no more than a quarter of Tamil Nadu's population were farmers. The DMK movement has traditionally had socialist roots in sympathy with those that work the fields of Tamil Nadu. There was no way it was going to win a plurality with such an obviously agro-favoring electoral promise if its electoral base was no more than 25% of the population. In other words, the chance of 'everyone', whoever that refers to, getting two acres of land from the government was as much as the chance of a snowball surviving intact in Alabama.

Boy, was that a fun estimation exercise! Thanks Mr. Bentley! If only the electorate in Tamil Nadu had a few more skeptics...

Posted by Vishy at 01:24 AM | Comments (0)