One of my favorite obsessions is information. Naturally so considering that I am an economist, and markets and information are inseparable. Information is the lubricant that keeps the huge big machinery of the market humming. Which is of course why information and communications technology (ICT) is so critical today as the modern world is a huge marketplace where stuff gets exchanged. Globalization (which I define as the integration of markets on a global scale) and the explosion of ICT are conjoined twins.
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Day: Monday May 7, 2007
The Indian Education System – 6
Incentive Matters
Alistair Cooke in his weekly radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4, A Letter from America, once explained the theory of public choice to his listeners as “the homely but important truth that the politicians are after all just the same as the rest of us.” It is an accessible, though incomplete, definition of what public choice is about. You could read James Buchanan, who in 1986 won the “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” (popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics) “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making.” But Cook’s version is adequate for our needs to explain why the Indian educational system is a disaster.
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