From productivity to proximity

" When these institutions systematically help privileged groups to escape accountability, they provide incentives for individuals to get proximity to power rather than struggle for competence, creativity or productive capacity. In such a system, people rationally adapt their behaviour to the existing institutional structure.

Instead of asking, "How can I contribute to society? " they increasingly ask, "How can I acquire enough influence to remain protected from accountability? " This produces an institutional path dependency in which privilege reproduces privilege, because those who benefit from the existing rules have little incentive to reform them.

Pakistan's crisis is not simply a conflict between an oppressor class and a victim class; it is an institutional equilibrium in which economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital can be converted into authority; authority can be converted into protection from accountability; and protection into further social prestige. Why does this happen?

This occurs when governance lacks meaningful accountability. When institutions cannot effectively question privileged groups, accountability becomes unequal. Power therefore becomes valuable not merely for what it enables individuals to contribute, but for the protection and social credit it provides.

Why are many middle-class parents so eager to see their children join the civil service? The answer may have less to do with public service itself and more to do with what they have seen about institutional power throughout their lives.

Being close to an influential position can bring social respect, authority, and, in some cases, protection from accountability. The disproportionate preference for PSP and PAS over services such as Foreign Service, Accounts and Audit, and Office Management may reveal the symbolic value attached to coercive and administrative authority.

These services are perceived not merely as careers but as positions through which individuals can exercise influence, command institutional resources and acquire social status. The attraction, therefore, may lie partly in the perceived monopoly of authority rather than solely in the opportunity to serve.

Instead of investing in productivity, innovation, entrepreneurship or expertise, individuals may invest in access to the state because access generates rents. This creates a rent-seeking equilibrium: individuals invest not necessarily in creating economic value but in acquiring access to institutions capable of distributing opportunities, permissions, contracts, exemptions or protection.

Where institutional access produces higher returns than productive activity, rational individuals redirect their ambitions accordingly. The middle class can therefore become both the critic and reproducer of institutional privilege. How can all of this be resolved?

Institutions must become responsible and responsive to the principle of accountability for everyone. Once the accountability of everyone is genuinely questioned and enforced, two patterns will emerge. First, the organic process of creativity will increasingly emerge from ordinary people, particularly the middle class, because social mobility will no longer depend exclusively on proximity to institutional power.

Second, the obsession with government services will gradually detach from the pursuit of privilege and protection.