The disparity in the wealth and poverty of nations is starkly evident and has been a perpetual source of puzzlement and inquiry for centuries. Why do some nations languish in heartbreaking poverty while others prosper? Is there a poverty trap that some fall into accidentally and are unable to get out of without external help? Can they be helped, and if so, how?
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Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
Sam Harris on “The Ten Commandments”
“If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.” — Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
On the Global Influence of Hindutva & the Long Hand of the RSS
Mr Digvijaya Singh, the general secretary of the Congress Party, sees conspiracy everywhere. What’s more, as he puts it, “the RSS hand cannot be ruled out.” I too have started noticing how big RSS’s hands are. Remember that kid in the movie The Sixth Sense, how he whispered, “I see dead people”? I can imagine Mr Digvijaya Singh saying in a whisper, “I see the RSS hand.” Here are two instances where I see the RSS hand.
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Subramanian Swamy — excerpts from a March 5th interview
I admire Dr Subramanian Swamy immensely. He is among a handful of people who have the guts, the intelligence, the commitment, the dedication and the stamina to fix what’s broken in India. I agree with him on all the substantive issues and where I do disagree, I am sure that there’s room for reasonable people to disagree on. I came across an interview of his on Hans India. Below some excerpts from it, for the record. (Image stolen from Hans India.)
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Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 8
Things change. That’s the nature of the universe we live in. There’s little we can do about that, and the change is not always to our liking. Still, we are better off with change. Had it been an unchanging world, we would not have been here. We are complex creatures and it takes time for complexity to arise from simpler beginnings. Change and with it increasing complexity has been around since the beginning of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. By now you would expect that we would have worked out the implications of this and become fully prepared to deal with it. Sometimes in our blindness to them, we fall into traps of our own creation.
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Shri Narendra Modi and India will Prevail
Any dispassionate observer of India would agree that India is underdeveloped in practically every sense of the term. What’s worse is that India has always had the potential to do much better. India’s failure to develop is a disappointing tale of how disastrous lack of able leadership can be. India does not lack any of the factors – material, social, cultural – necessary for development, and yet it consistently failed to reach an easily attainable goal. For decades on end, India has been on the verge of changing course but slides back into the status quo. One is forced to the inescapable conclusion that the political will to develop is missing.
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Anyone from Mumbai to SF Bay Area?
If you know of anyone traveling from Mumbai to the SF Bay area in the next week or two, I need a very small favor. Please get in touch. I am atanudey at gmail.com. Thanks very much. (This is a sticky post. I will remove it shortly.)
Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 7
People value freedom. Actually, not just humans, all sentient beings want to be free. But only in human beings does the impulse to enslave others find expression so widely across space and time. The desire to control others is a primitive instinct which I believe will be with us for a long time. That instinct lies at the foundations of organized religions and organized crime. It is also that same instinct that motivates the power-hungry to promote a command and control government.
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Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 6
There are two broadly defined systems of organizing the production and allocation of goods and services in a society. One system is called the market and the other command and control. We all have first-hand experience with both systems since childhood. As kids when we traded stuff with our friends, we were using the market. At home, we were under the command and control system of our parents. Both systems worked in the limited contexts of family and friends. Do they work equally well in when the context is a large, modern-day economy?
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Question the Assumptions
When you find that there’s a disconnect between expectations and reality, it is no use denying the reality. It may be time to question the assumptions that underlie the expectations.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 