My blog name reads Cognitive Resonance which is the opposite of Cognitive Dissonance.
Psychology defines Cognitive Dissonance as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.
Am in financial industry for more than last 5 years and have met people who run the companies. Would not like to address them with the jazzy term 'Promoter' for a reason. I have always been awed by these people who run the show because they had the grit and belief some decades back to think that they can do it.
And then I stare at my notepad wherein I am trying to analyze what they do. I am the analyzer and they are the doers.
If we try,we can bifurcate all the professions in two categories - Doers and Analyzers.
So bankers, consultancies, ratings analyst, equity researchers, PE, etc are the analyzers. (hardly an exhaustive list though).
While a doer can be anyone - whoever is adding value to the way we live - manufacturers, product developers, teachers, mechanic, taxi driver or even your garbage collector.
If we analyse (since that's what we do best) the pay difference between the doers and analyzers, we know that analyzers get rewarded much more heftily for analyzing the work mostly which doers do. How? To elaborate, consider an eg. Ola Cabs. Built by bringing together thousands of drivers which are together called as Ola.
This is exactly wherein my Cognitive Dissonance stems from. We can argue that specialized services command premium. We can also argue that even analyzers are adding value to the ecosystem though indirectly. But ultimately truth is, we are not rewarding doers for the amount of value addition done by them.
There is no dearth of brilliant minds in India. But the skewed nature of brilliance following only analytical fields is not something which we as a nation can afford, I feel.
P.S: I acknowledge I was a banker earlier and now a ratings analyst. I do acknowledge that the work I do may be important but is NOT the most important work in the world .
Disclaimer: Even I don't have an answer as to how can a driver be rewarded more than an equity researcher. This is what we are used to seeing and believing. I am just questioning the rationale of not rewarding doers as much.
