Author: Atanu Dey

Counterfactuals are generally instructive and entertaining. But in some cases, it can be deeply distressing to consider them. Those leave us sadder although wiser. And at times they provoke us to anger and outrage because we finally understand what might have been. That outrage could motivate us to act and thus change what we can. As Omar Khayyam, the lovable old wino and polymath wrote about the sorry scheme of things, “Would we not shatter it to bits and remold it nearer to our hearts’ desire?”
Continue reading “Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 5”

There comes a time in every endeavour when it becomes imperative that one does a bit of arithmetic. As the late John McCarthy used to say, “Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense.” Doing a bit of arithmetic is important not only to avoid nonsense but also to get a feel for what we normally would miss since our brains are not naturally attuned to figuring out the state of the world without the help of numbers. In this piece I lean upon a few sums to help me understand the broad implications of one facet of economies — their growth rates.
Continue reading “Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 4”

Different parts of the world have different degrees of prosperity, as is clearly evident if you look around even cursorily. Indeed that fact is so obvious, persistent and ubiquitous that it is not the least surprising to us. It is almost as if it is an unalterable feature of nature and therefore there’s nothing we can do about it. But why is it so? Why do some groups of people do better than other groups? What are possible factors that determine the fate and fortunes of various groups?
Continue reading “Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 3”

Economic prosperity is neither impossible nor inevitable. There are scores of examples on either side of the prosperity divide. From these we can learn quite a bit about what it takes to be economically successful.

Prosperity eludes some countries while others flourish — but not because of some deep, dark, mysterious reasons. Economists know what works, what doesn’t work and why. Here I present some basic bits related to the subject from a personal perspective.
Continue reading “Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 2”

Why are some countries poor while others rich? That’s a more complex question than the question why a particular person is rich and another poor. The difficulty in the latter case arises because an individual is at the mercy of factors out of its control, while in the case of a collective, the collective determines its destiny through the choices it collectively makes.

There’s the problem of endogeneity when one considers the collective: society determines the environment, which in turn determines how the society functions. In this series, I will explore one simple idea, and it is this. Societies that steal are less able to produce the good society in contrast with societies that are in some sense honest.

The good society is one which is at the very least, not materially impoverished. I believe that theft is a factor in the poverty of societies. If indeed it is so that stealing is implicated in the poverty of nations, then it is possible for us to figure a way out of the problem. That we will see in the end.
Continue reading “Stealing is a Bad Thing — Part 1”