Actually nobody “won” any Nobel prize in anything ever. Nobody wins a Nobel prize in anything simply because “to win” implies a contest that participants engage in. Nobel prizes — and other prizes of that nature such as the Indian “Bharat Ratna” — are awarded to certain people or institutions based on the judgement of a select group of people. This process of selecting an awardee is more subjective than say the process by which we decide who won the 100-meter dash in the Olympics in 2004 because in the latter uninvolved bystanders can agree whether or not Charlie crossed the finish line ahead of the other sprinters. In the case of Nobel prizes, people outside the selection committee can — and do — disagree with the judgement of the committee.
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Day: October 12, 2015
India Needs a New Constitution
Human societies are rule-based. Rules not just define human societies but rules also differentiate between societies. Sufficiently large collectives of of people (say 100,000 or more) are indistinguishable in terms of their endowments because we all belong to the same species and we are just random draws from the same gene pool with minor variations. IF that is so, then what’s the origin of the inequality we observe in the wealth of nations? Why is Burundi not as wealthy as Sweden? The answer is that different societies follow different sets of rules, and the outcomes differ. Out of all the rules, norms, customs and traditions of a people, the formalized high-level set of rules is called the constitution.
In the following piece, co-authored with Rajesh Jain, I argue that India needs a new constitution. It was published today in Quartz. Here it is, for the record.
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Life is a Random Draw 