Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

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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Buildings Don’t Matter, Intentions Do

calI. UC Berkeley

My alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, is an extraordinary place. It consistently ranks among the top few universities in the world. The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked it fourth overall—behind Harvard, Stanford and MIT. It ranks world’s second best in science, and third best in engineering, and in social sciences.
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Minimum Wages

In response to my two earlier posts on “Understanding Economics” and its followup, the matter of minimum wages has come up in the comments. Some ideas have the peculiar characteristic that they appear to be good at first glance but lose much of their shine upon closer inspection. Minimum wages is one fine example of that set.
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Understanding Economics — Follow up

Here I reply to some of the comments to my post “Understanding Economics” of a few days ago.
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Hello Dolly

Yesterday at noon while driving to Mountain View to have lunch with a friend, I caught Dolly Parton on the radio. She was in conversation with Neal Conan, the host of Talk of the Nation on NPR (National Public Radio.) TotN is usually a delight to listen to but yesterday’s bit with Dolly was special. One gets the warm and fuzzies just listening to her talk. There’s something heartwarmingly genuine about her.
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“The immoral use of force is the source of man’s political problems.”

{This piece was published at NitiCentral.com last week.}

Ron Paul is retiring after serving in the US Congress for 23 years over a 36 year period. There’s a striking line in his farewell speech he gave on Nov 14th to the US Congress. “The immoral use of force is the source of man’s political problems.” It strikes me as the crux of practically all of humanity’s problems, not just political problems. All the manifest problems that we collectively face involve the immoral use of force or coercion. Look and you will find what lies beneath any problem is clearly an instance of someone or some organization using force to take what is not given freely.
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Understanding Economics

A while ago a non-economist friend who had read my book “Transforming India” said that as he did not understand economics would I write a book explaining some of the basic concepts of economics? It would be a “prequel” to the “Transforming India” book. That sounded like a good idea and over the last couple of months, I have spent some time on such a book. The working title is “Understanding Economics.” Not the most brilliant title but that will change to something more attractive by the time it is ready for publication.
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