Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

Instances of mass hysteria, herd behavior, and financial bubbles may seem to be modern afflictions though actually they have been around for hundreds of years. In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay investigated them and published his findings in his 1841 book “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”

His conclusion: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

MacKay wrote about sociological and psychological panics such as witch hunts across Europe that led to the horrifying deaths of thousands. His book has important lessons for economists and psychologists. It provided the early framework for understanding irrational exuberance, cognitive bias, and speculative contagion. Continue reading “Mass Hysteria and Popular Delusions”

We can date the beginning of the death of Islam at a specific date. This is unusual. The end of no other ideology can be so precisely dated. September 11th, 2001 is that date. That’s the date that Islam took on the Western world. And it is guaranteed to lose.  It signed it’s death certificate.

Western world did encounter Islam centuries before September 2001, and resisted it. September 11th attack should have woken the West to the danger. But it did not.

But now the West is ready. Islam will die. Islam will die in the next decade or so.

Islam will die soon. It’s true that there are two billion Muslims. But the moment they realize that it’s Islam that is imprisoning them into poverty, they too will reject Islam.

For now, I pay homage to those who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001. I was in Berkeley, San Francisco Bay area that morning, on the other side of the continent from NY city. I realized the implications of Islamic terrorism. Terrorism is almost entirely Islamic. Therefore the adjective Islamic is superfluous: no other ideology promotes terrorism; only Islam does. If you see terrorism, you can safely assume that it is Islamic. It’s not likely that Buddhists or Hindus or Jains have anything do do with the death and destruction. Only Islam motivates people to kill. Continue reading “Sept 11, 2001: the Death of Islam”

Economists use production functions to express the mathematical relationship between physical inputs and the total quantity of output produced. A commonly used one is the Cobb-Douglas production function which has the form Y = AK ^αL^β, where Y is total output, A is total factor productivity (TFP), K is capital, and L is labor. Output elasticities with respect to capital and labor are constant and given by α and β, respectively.(See Note 1 for a bit of history.)

I learned a lot of stuff in grad school that I never got around to using but I still recall after all these years. I have been pondering production from another angle, another type of production function. I don’t have a functional form for it but it doesn’t really matter for my purposes here. The factors of production are technology, energy and material: Y = f(T, E, M).

In functional notation, it says that production is a function (unspecified) of technology, energy and matter. Each of those three factors are essential and to some extent they are substitutable. Technology can make energy and matter more productive, meaning you can produce more output with less energy and less matter. Continue reading “Energy and Production”

The word guru in the dharmic traditions—namely Sanatana, Buddha and Jaina—refers to someone who dispels the darkness of ignorance. Because ignorance is the primary barrier to enlightenment or moksha, the guru is supremely important.

Today is Guru Purnima. Hindus believe that on this day Bhagwan Shiva became the first guru (adi guru) when he transmitted the knowledge of yoga to the world. Also that sage Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, was born on this day.

For Buddhists, Guru Purnima commemorates the day when Gautama Buddha delivered his first sermon at the Deer Park in Sarnath, setting in motion the Wheel of Dharma. For Jains, it is the day when Mahavira, the 24th tirthankara accepted his first disciple. These two events are dated to around 2,500 years ago. Continue reading “Guru Purnima Greetings”

Any sufficiently deep ignorance is indistinguishable from stupidity. You’d recognize that to be a riff on Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law (1968) which states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

While Clark’s 3rd law is about perception (how we perceive technology that we don’t understand), my variation is about outcomes: how severe ignorance results in outcomes that could have been motivated by malice or just plain stupidity. The intent may be to improve things but the impact is to make matters worse.

We all are abysmally ignorant about nearly everything. The saving grace is that our ignorance does not result in widespread socially destructive outcomes. But public policy is sadly replete with examples of gross stupidity arising out of ignorance. That’s so because bureaucrats and politicians are generally ignorant and therefore cannot formulate reasonable solutions to actual or perceived problems. Continue reading “Hydrogen is Not Green”

4th of July 2026 marks the 250 anniversary of the day Congress approved the text of the Declaration of Independence, and therefore the birth of the United States of America.

The Declaration was signed by 56 patriots. By putting their names on that parchment, they were committing what King George III and British law defined as high treason—a crime traditionally punished by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. In effect they were signing their own death warrants.

They risked their wealth, their families, and their lives on a military gamble. If George Washington’s army had failed, those 56 names would have served as an official British execution list.

The handwritten parchment wasn’t actually signed until August 2, 1776. Even then, not everyone was present; delegates continued to add their names over the coming months. The final signer, Thomas McKean, didn’t sign his name until 1777. Continue reading “Happy 250th”