My friend JP recently sent me a list of quotes from my book “Transforming India: Big Ideas for a Developed Nation.” I thought I would put them on the blog for the benefit of those who have not read the book. Just BTW, you can download a (free) PDF copy of the book at the book site (linked above.)
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Month: December 2012
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves
Act 1: Let me tell you a story about an old man who lived in a small village somewhere that does not matter. It all began when the man’s sons came to him and told him that some people from the neighboring village had stolen a chicken from their farm. The old man told his sons to go after the thieves and recover the chicken.
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Competition and Markets — Part 2
Competition in the market and competition for the market are substitutes, as I mentioned in the previous post on the matter. When firms can freely enter (and exit) a market, it is called a free market. In a free market, firms compete with each other and the outcome of that competition is that prices are driven down to the cost of production. When we have a large number of identical firms producing a homogeneous good competing with each other we have a perfectly competitive market.
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Happy Winter Solstice 2012
The precise time of the Winter solstice this year was at 3:12 AM Pacific Standard Time (which was 4:42 PM Indian Standard Time) today, Dec 21st. I was up and awake busy tweeting. The first day of Winter finds the weather here cloudy but not wet. The past few days have been pretty and sunny. Anyway, just wanted to say Happy Winter Solstice. The Christian version of the Saturnalia is coming up in the next few days. I loves me a good carnival. Happy Christmas and happy holidays.
Narendrabhai Modi — What’s Next
Narendrabhai Modi won for the third consecutive time the Gujarat State assembly elections. Like in the earnings report of a corporation that analysts expect to be the outcome, the market already incorporates into its calculations the results and therefore it does not alter the stock prices, the outcome of the Gujarat elections don’t throw up any surprises. When there are no surprises, there’s little of interest. But what’s going to happen next is an interesting question because there will be surprises.
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Recent Tweets – 1
Click on the image below to go to my twitter time line. The chaprasi referred to in here is Manmohan Singh. I like the Tao. Don’t you feel the overflowing love that Muslims have for Jews and Christians?
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On Competition and Markets
From a broad philosophical perspective, competition is encoded in the basic DNA of the universe. At every level of analysis, competing forces seek domination. At the largest inanimate scales, gravitational and electromagnetic forces constantly compete in stars. At the smallest scales, inside an atom, nuclear and electromagnetic force compete. In the biological world, living things compete all the time. It’s a constant battle between and among botanical and zoological species. Humans, as part of the animal world, are past masters of the game. We, like all other living organisms, are all descendants of ancestors who were successful in that competition at least long enough to have survived to reproduce.
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12-12-12
Today is 12-12-12. I suppose none of us reading this will be around for the next 12-12-12 when it rolls around in 100 years on 12th December 2112. It is a sobering thought. We’ll all be dead. You and I, and everyone we know will be dead by then. Sorry to rain on your parade. I wonder what it will be like in 100 years — and I am sure that no one knows today what it will be like, just as the people living in 1912 could not have imagined what it would be like to live in 2012.
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Minimum Wages — Follow up
Markets work, in general. That’s like saying, people are healthy in general. But people do fall sick. Similarly, occasionally markets fail. That’s when you need intervention, not otherwise. But it cannot be any random intervention. The treatment has to fit the etiology of the disease. So also, market intervention has to be specific to the kind of failure the market suffers from. We must therefore first be sure why the market failed and only then try to fix it. If legislating a minimum wage is the solution, we need to ask what the market failure is.
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Tamil Translator’s Preface to “Transforming India”
Mr S Krishnamoorthy translated “Transforming India” into Tamil. He wrote a translator’s preface to go with the translation. But of course that preface is in Tamil. Therefore, here is an English translation of the translator’s preface in Tamil of the Tamil translation of the English version of the book. For the record.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 