Month: April 2007

Random Act of Violin

Senseless Beauty

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears it . . .

Go read the wonderful essay titled Pearls Before Breakfast in the Washington Post. It will make you wonder.

A Forest Fire

Flashback (Part 2)

“It began with a simple realization that no one is as smart as we are. That is, a collection of very smart people is smarter than any one person however smart. Experts and expertise matters, and therefore amateurs and novices cannot be as good in figuring out the choices that confronted them. The collective wisdom of a group of smart people articulated a vision and an associated roadmap.”
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Wireless Broadband in Singapore

Singapore gets it. I am at the Funan Center, a shopping center, for lunch. Besides lunch, I also get to check mail on the wireless broadband provided gratis by the city. I flipped open my laptop, connected to wireless@sg and here I am blogging away.

The availability of public goods increases the utility of private goods. It is also true that one has to sometimes compensate for the lack of public goods by a greater investment in private goods. Places like Singapore are to some extent rich because the efficiency of private goods is high because public goods are efficiently and optimally provided.

This place is good.

The Future Past

Flashback

The year is 2020. For nearly 12 years, India has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 12 percent more than quadrupling the per capita GDP from US$500 in 2008 to $2000, placing India in the league of middle-income economies. Stark poverty is a thing of the past. In much less than a generation, the population transitioned from being 70 percent rural to being less than 20 percent rural. Agricultural labor is only 15 percent of total labor participation, down from 60 percent in 2008. Farm incomes are six times what they used to be. The $3 trillion economy shows no signs of slowing down.
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Hi from Singapore

Hi from Singaore, one of my favorite cities. I am writing this from the Overseas Family School (OFS) during a break in my meeting with David Perry, the man who founded OFS.

Ah, yes, the weather. The regular afternoon downpour occurred on schedule around 3:30 PM. It rained cats and dogs. David says that these days they have monsoons round the year. Climate change is definitely evident in Singapore. We did not get into whether it is anthropogenic climate change or not.

What I like about Singapore is that the city is neat and clean. Some say that it is sterile. Maybe so. But I would take sterile over disease any day of the week. Of course, fertile trumps sterile. I am convinced that there is a way to get to fertile from sterile. I think that the transition from disease to fertile has to go through the sterile phase. Cleaning up is not a very attractive job but at some point one has to do it.

Laters.

Pune DeCi

“Pune DeCi” is a designer city started in 2010 and completed by 2016. Just 30 kilometers outside the old city of Pune, about 100 square kilometers of land was acquired. The government of Maharashtra, the state where Pune is located, was a partner in the “Pune DeCi Development Authority” and had a stake of 20 percent in the project for which it supplied all the land which was basically non-prime land. Long term bonds raised the approximately $1 billion initial investment required for the first improvements.
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Land Development

When I first moved to the US, I was struck by the phenomenon of shopping malls located far away from the city, about an hour along some highway. Land, it occurred to me, was cheap outside the city and what they did was to build these huge malls that were in some sense islands of urban activities in the middle of rural areas.
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The Decline of Violence

If you are in the mood for some thought-provoking hope-giving reading this weekend, I recommend Steven Pinker’s essay “The History of Violence“:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

[Hat tip: Yuvaraj.]

The Importance of Agriculture in GDP

[Repost of a July 2003 article.]

A head’s up from Rajesh Jain on an article Asia Times Online titled Why India’s Economy Lags Behind China’s got me thinking once again about popular misconceptions about development matters. Journalists are particularly susceptible to some of these. An example appears in the article. Continue reading “The Importance of Agriculture in GDP”