I don’t follow elections even though their outcomes dictate economic policies, which in turn determine the fate of economies. Given my interest in economic development, I should care about elections but I don’t. I also don’t follow the post-elections dissections of analysts mainly because I have better things to do but partly because I feel — incorrectly perhaps — it’s all a matter of opinion and conjecture. It feels like a lot of post-hoc rationalization.
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Month: May 2009
Economic Policies Matter
A short century ago the US and Argentina were rivals. Both were riding the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Both were young, dynamic nations with fertile farmlands and confident exporters. Both brought the beef of the New World to the tables of their European colonial forebears. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Argentina was among the 10 richest economies in the world.
That’s from a fascinating article by Alan Beattie in the Financial Times of May 23rd titled “Argentina: The superpower that never was.” The article continues with —
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Keeping Afloat in a WWW-world
I received an SMS just moments ago: “A thirteen-year old’s day in Surat: school 7 to 2. Daily tuitions 4:30 to 7:30. Saw ICSE standard 8th textbooks. Detailed and depressing. What a state!”
No surprise to me as I have observed the same sort of insanity in the case of the children of friends and family.
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Solution to India’s Greatest Failure
In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “India’ Greatest Failure,” Paul Beckett writes about T.S.R. Subramanian who retired as India’s most senior civil servant in 1998. Beckett quotes from TSR’s book, “GovernMint in India” — “Since no part of the Establishment has an interest in punishing corruption, trying for a more sweeping solution quickly leads into the realm of blind hope.”
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Attempting to Censor the Press
The government of India is trying to gag people. You might object that that is as novel as the news that the Pope is Catholic. I agree. A socialist government cannot but rest on an uninformed citizenry. Truth is as welcome to the corrupt government as sunshine is reputed to be to Count Dracula. I don’t mean to imply that the government of India sucks the life’s blood out of its citizens although that may well be true.
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On Making a Difference
We all want to make a difference. That comes effortlessly when one is dissatisfied with the current order of things. As the wise old dipsomaniac Omar Khayyam put it,
“Ah love, could thou and I with fate conspire,
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire;
Would we not shatter it to bits,
And remold it nearer to our hearts’ desire!”
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Wordly Wisdom According to Charlie Munger
The web is a wonderful place where if you have the required smarts, you can get yourself a pretty decent education. Just having a lot of information at the click of a mouse would not do. You have to know what to take and in which sequence. What you get out of a book — or the web — obviously depends on you. But we can safely assume that one is reasonably well educated and can reason effectively at some level. If that is so, then the task becomes one of having to choose which bits you will focus on. With gazillions of pages of information in the web, that is not a trivial challenge.
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Astonishing Gullibility
It is hard to reconcile poor governance with a population which is reasonably smart. The basic nature of reality does not admit such contradictions. The inescapable conclusion is that the population is not smart. Evidence of it is all around us to see but I would like to present an illustrative example — with a picture below the fold. It demonstrates the stupidity of some apparently educated — well, if not educated, at least literate — people which makes them so terrifyingly gullible. Never think that we collectively do not deserve the poor governance.
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Arun Shourie on the Indian Education System
The greatest scandal and the greatest failure of the Indian governments (all of them, and practically all of them have been Congress) has been in education. A great economy and a great education system go hand in hand — though it almost always starts with the education system supplying the fuel that powers the engine of growth and development. Any dispassionate observer of the Indian education system (and I am one of many) cannot but conclude that it is one of the most distressed. It has never been very good but successive assaults on it by the government has reduced it to a wreck that cannot do anything else but act as a road block to development.
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Rajesh Jain’s Advice for the New Government
My colleague Rajesh Jain writes to the about-to-be-formed new government of India in today’s Wall Street Journal and says, “Get us Involved and Lets [sic] get going.” He advices the new government (but I guess it will be the same old guys) that the areas where they need to focus on are, among others, education, transportation, urbanization, digital infrastructure, and good governance. Naturally I agree with Rajesh because that set of interventions is what is needed for India to develop and I have been saying as much on this blog.
I quote the article below the break, for the record.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 