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Universally applicable

Though Gresham’s law relates to economics, it can be extended to all walks of life where bad things are adopted faster than the good

Universally applicable
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For the uninitiated, Gresham's Law is a law of economics propounded, as the name might suggest, by Gresham. Put simply, the law states that bad money drives out good money from the market. More specifically, if two or more coins have the same value as legal tender, but contain metals of different value, the coins made up of the cheaper metal will be used for payment, while those made of more expensive metal will be hoarded or otherwise disappear from circulation.

In all likelihood, Sir Thomas Gresham, who lived in 16th century England, himself never realised the full import of his momentous discovery. Actually, as we shall see, the application of his law is by no means limited either to the use of money as legal tender or even to the field of economics alone. The impact of the basic principle underlying his law that bad drives out good is nearly all-pervading in our daily lives, and truer today than ever before.

Consider for instance the phenomenon of fake news. A recent study on rumours and false news stories circulating on Twitter over 11 years, conducted by scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that bogus news travelled faster and reached more people than true news. Bogus news stories were 70 per cent more likely to be re-tweeted than true stories, and it took true stories around six times longer to reach people. Furthermore, while true stories were rarely shared beyond 1,000 people, some of the most popular false news stories could reach up to 1,00,000! If this is not a manifestation of the principle underlying Gresham's law, then what is it?

Perhaps nowhere is the effect of the law more evident than on 24-hour TV, with channels vying with one another to adopt the latest worst practices in the industry, and attain the lowest common denominator in the fastest possible time. The Kitman's Law, which can be seen as a light-hearted variant of Gresham's law, is spot on when it proclaims: "On the TV screen, pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel". Creative fiction and dramas have long since yielded space to reality shows driven by the voyeuristic urge to find enjoyment in the discomfiture of others. Prime-time debates are slanging matches that specialize in generating a lot of heat without throwing any light on the subject at hand. Everyone has an opinion, a rather strong one at that, but no one has the relevant facts. Decibel always triumphs. Open name-calling is not out of bounds either. On occasion, the debate ends up in an outright brawl in the very studio. For all those who value their sense of balance and proportion, the solution perhaps lies in emulating Groucho Marx who remarked with the characteristic cynicism only he is capable of: "I find television very educational. Every time someone turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

But then, literature itself is no exception to Greshamite logic. That inferior literature drives out better literature is intuitively known to everyone whoever concealed a comic book inside their textbook as a child. During late adolescence, the comic book in turn often ended up yielding ground to other printed material of a more unsavoury kind, barely masquerading as 'literature'. Clearly, Hardy was no match for the bawdy. Proof of application of Gresham's law to literature comes in other ways too, for instance from the fact that 'Mein Kampf' still outsells 'My Experiments with Truth'.

And what of bad music? Remember that crass Bollywood pop number with utterly pedestrian lyrics that kept on playing in, or rather 'preying on' your mind for over three days in an endless loop? Experts call it the "stuck song syndrome". More commonly though, they are just called "earworms" which is what they truly are. Try replacing that pesky earworm with a magnificent Khayal or Bhajan sung by a maestro of classical music. Fat chance! In fact, as age starts catching up, you can't seem to remember either the lyrics or the tune of a song unless you truly hate it from the bottom of your heart!

You may spend long hours painstakingly tending to the plants in your garden, only to find them withering away and dying. And yet, lush green weeds will appear out of nowhere each passing day under your very nose. Evidently, they require no care at all. In fact, they say if you are someone who has difficulty telling garden plants from weeds, one of the surest ways to accomplish the task of distinguishing them is to uproot them all. The ones that grow back would be the weeds!

That junk food trumps healthy food is a no-brainer. "Parsley is gharsley", declared the ever-intuitive Ogden Nash, the master of light verse. A recent study conducted at Johns Hopkins University found that junk foods like potato chips or candy, are twice as distracting as healthy food. And when it comes to junk food, our own street food is no pushover. The humble bread-pakoda (preferably deep-fried in re-heated oil) will boldly go where bran fears to tread.

Gresham's law might also explain a host of other contemporary phenomena, including why civilized debate quickly deteriorates into acrimonious bickering and partisan position-taking in social media groups that are otherwise thought to consist of "like-minded" persons, why online humour is dominated by noisy slapstick rather than subtle satire, why the first few words that you learn of a new language are always swear words rather than pleasantries, why the longest queues are always witnessed outside liquor shops rather than at the grocer's or the medical stores whenever a lockdown is announced, or even why the little sparrow has disappeared from the cities. Promising areas for further research of the 'Freakonomics' kind perhaps.

Views expressed are personal

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