National unity has found itself as one of the goals to be pursued under the Third Outline Perspective Plan (OPP3). It is indeed a worthy ideal, but one wonders if it is going to be pursued honestly, and practically.

National unity is essential. That is undeniable. But, at times, this is forgotten, and we vacillate between emphasising national unity and at other times emphasising Malay unity.

It is not that the two unities are mutually exclusive. The manner in which the discourse on unity is constructed, at times, makes it appear as if one unity must be sacrificed for the other.

It is necessary to assess the situation and make a decision on how we want to model unity. It appears that there are at least two ways of doing this.

One model declares that the primary objective is to achieve Malay unity, first. That being achieved, the second step is to achieve national unity.

The second model claims that the objective function is the maximisation of national unity, all other racial unities being subsumed under this category.

It must be deeply embedded in our minds that there is no hope for economic progress if national unity is not achieved, and kept in place. To constantly switch between models, depending on our audience, is to invite uncertainty and fear.

We do not have to look very far to see what happens if national unity is not safeguarded. A country with fragile race relations welcomes fear and drives away foreign investment.

Political games

Why, then, do politicians play this game of distinguishing between varieties of unity, taking care to match a particular unity before a particular racial audience?

I suspect it is because politicians are trying to maximise their utility. They probably see society as being differentiable into a number of different segments. Each segment has its own preferences, its own welfare function.

Working on the assumption that segments are separable, i.e. what is narrated in segment one will not reach segment two's ears, then a politician can try to match each segment's preferences.

This is a good game to play so long as information is kept intact within each segment or community. If we relax on that assumption, then we start to tread on an edge, with the risk of falling into the fires of Hades.

In reality, information can never be kept in air-tight compartments. People share information, they talk about their neighbours, they confide, they eavesdrop and finally, we have a pool of information that is shared. Game theorists call this pool of information, common knowledge.

The trick of appealing to your target segment will surely work in the short-run. With the passage of time, it will not. If you repeatedly play the same strategies in a game, your moves will become predictable.

Similarly, if you repeatedly play the same game of narrating a different story to match a different target audience, you will come to be seen as being opportunistic.

Opportunism of this sort invites distrust. Distrust is not a good, solid foundation for unity of any sort.

In the interest of long-run national gains, it seems more profitable to declare one's intentions, and to declare the mechanisms that will be employed in allocating resources in a manner that will foster national unity.

Following Rawls, one could use the following thought experiment. Imagine that you find yourself being born as an economically disadvantaged person next year. If that is a distinct possibility, then you would want to ensure that you receive some endowments once you come to occupy that disadvantaged position.

Practical situation

Let us now apply this in a practical situation. We shall try to device a procedure to alleviate the poor, and yet not sacrifice national unity.

One possible procedure is to select the least advantaged strata in society. This strata will include Malays, Chinese, Indians and Others.

Step 2. Arrange the groups by some acceptable order of priority. We could use a decision rule, for instance, which says that Malays deserve the highest priority because they have the largest percentage of poverty, followed by this racial group, and so on.

Step 3. If one person is distinguishably poorer than the next, the poorer person receives a pre-set basket of endowments, regardless of race. If two persons are equally poor, then the Malay will receive a larger share of the pre-set basket and the other poor person will receive a smaller share of the basket.

A smart social choice theorist will come out with variants to this procedure. Perhaps even suggest better decision procedures.

I see it as important that national unity be preserved without disregarding the disadvantaged in any ethnic group. Some procedures for allocating resources are patently inadequate. One can, for instance, rank the different ethnic groups on the basis on some criterion, say, poverty.

Next, one can attempt to make payments to all the disadvantaged persons in that group, after which one moves on to attend to the next most disadvantaged racial group.

Devil's workshop

This is an unsatisfactory procedure. While group A is being attended to, the disadvantaged in community B may start to feel alienated.

The disadvantaged and alienated make splendid tools for the Devil and his workshop. Discontent can ferment into anger and violence, both of which can destabilise an economy.

Amartya Sen's research on famines gives valuable insights. One of his observations was that in some of the catastrophic famines many people died. They died not because there was not enough food available in the country at that time.

Rather, they died because their entitlements were limited, although there were adequate resources in the country. These resources, if distributed properly would have averted death.

The disunity that arises because of supposed scarcity, if Sen's work can be extended, I feel can be avoided.

Politicians must be convinced that serious, honest and transparent discussions on this matter are necessary. It is time for them to recruit hard-thinking economists into the fray.

For a start, politicians can learn a little from those economists who study the way firms work. Firms that are interdependent do not benefit by undermining their rivals.

If one firm tries to cheat its rival by lowering the price of a product, the rival will try to do worse, and, ultimately, it is the customers who will gain from the fall in prices.

If one political party initiates a move towards a sub-optimal solution, the rival party will try to do worse. In this case, the winner of the game will be a political party that inherits a divided nation. There can be no glory in such a victory.

SHANKARAN NAMBIAR is an economics lecturer at a private institution in Penang.