Here’s a problem…

You have ‘n’ people with individual goals. There are degrees of achievements of goals and each degree corresponds to winning a reward by the person proportional to the degree of goal it achieved. Unlike real world, it is a fair system and rewards ARE awarded.

Now people are people and thus they behave selfishly, i.e. everyone wants to maximize their own reward. However, their individual goal sometimes contradict with each other and sometimes if they collaborate on their goals, there is a possibility that they might achieve a greater individual reward.

The problem is how do you design a system which caters to the selfish behavior by every individual but still manages to achieve a maximized cumulative utility with every individual achieving a minimum utility?

Solutions?

What do you do when you hit a wall ?!

Suppose, well just suppose, you are the person who is to fix all the problems of Pakistan – or as a matter of fact, take any developing Asian country – the whole nation looks up to you and actually you are sincere enough to want to get to solutions.

But what happens when you go in to the convolution of problems? You start hitting walls, if you try to fix education, social disparity creeps in, if you go on to fix that, the political and economical injustice starts acting up, if you shot on to solve that, the corrupt bureaucracy shines up. You keep trying that, and you come back to education or any one of the major problems above.

You simply hit a wall.

How do you solve problems when they are convoluted and complex and intricately inter-woven?

My ex-boss used to say: “Piece-by-Piece, Part-by-Part”.

How would you want to fix it, or would you want to fix it at all?