And God created division

When the Nobel prize committee awarded Prof. Gray Becker ( Chicago based Economist), their news release stated "Gary Becker's analysis has often been controversial and hence, at the outset, met with scepticism and even distrust." People who know a little bit about Gary Becker and his research are aware that starting from his graduate school days he had been focussing a lot on the economics of discrimination. Lot of people were sceptical;they thought Gary was doing sheer wastage of time! After all, how could a good economist work on discrimination? Is it an economic activity at all?!
Becker was lucky to have Milton Friedman as one of his mentors who continuously defended his(Becker's) work. Becker continued his work on discrimination and eventually produced a new generation of economists who actively took part in this type of socio-economic research. This young generation owes a lot to Becker and Friedman and of course to University of Chicago (Chicago's tradition of doing offbit research seems even wider these days - Steven Levitt is one example[even if you want just fun, I'll suggest don't try to understand his work only by reading "Freakonomics"...visit his webpage and go through some of his papers....those are amazingly wonderful!!])

It is true that gender, caste, ethnicity and religion are common examples of social constructs to which we belong and our sense of belonging or identification with a particular group affects our behavior; however, when we discriminate on the basis of these social constructs do we lose some economic efficiency? Well...you can come up with counter arguemts and can say that even social ties are needed for successful economic activites. This is a valid point but what if the loss from discrimination outweighs the gain from social ties? What if some members of our society remain excluded from socio-economic activities just because of caste or gender based discrimination!! For last 2 years I've been trying to understand the problems and challenges of caste/gender based discrimination from an economist's perspective - the subject being dynamic enough created a whole lot of hardship.However, persistent enthusiasm is always there to tackle everevolving new challenges. My theory suggested that caste/gender based discrimination was one of the root causes behind initial disastrous performance of "microfinance" transplanting programs in India. These days I've been searching for data to support my theory empirically. Data or no data - I truely believe that this theory is valid enough and not just a theory for theory's sake. But, a long journey is awaiting again to establish these view points firmly.

Anyway, are you getting the moral? - don't hesitate to say "wrong quote,wrong place" when someone fumbles from "Manusanghita" to give you some bullshit causality on a topic like this divine division!!!