Author: Atanu Dey

[Previously in this series: Part 1, Part 2.] Human behavior is complex and appropriately so since humans are complex entities. It is hard to analyze, understand and predict how people will behave in general. Compare that to inanimate matter. Basic laws of thermodynamics, a few laws of motion, a few conservation laws — and you pretty much know what to expect. Still there is one useful generalization about humans which goes a long way in explaining how we behave: we respond to incentives. Most simply (and perhaps simplistically) stated, carrots and sticks matter.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams — Part 3”

[Follow up to Part 1.] We will examine two issues now. Who actually pays for the spectrum? And, the nature of competition in the market as opposed to competition for the market. Later we will examine the notion of multiple equilibria and what the social welfare consequences of multiple equilibria are.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams — Part 2”

The news is that the telecom minister in appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet finally resigned. The charge against him is that he sold off some spectrum at prices that brought in $X in revenues to the government, which is about Rs 1,70,000 Cr (~$40 billion) less than $Y which would have been the revenue had the spectrum been sold using some other method such as an auction or whatever. Time for me to inject some sanity in the insane figure of Rs 1.7 lakh crores being bandied about by the media.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams”

And now to sit down and consider the comments made on the three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of “A Tale of Two Countries.” I hope to consolidate all the comments into major themes to keep this as short and succinct as possible. First let’s address a basic question. Who is responsible for the state that India is in? Is it the people or is it the leaders? The short clichéd answer is “it takes two to tango.” Ok, you will say, but who started it? It is hard to determine that to everyone’s satisfaction. Did the chicken come first or was it the egg? Putting the blame on one party leaves the matter in a Zen-like quantum indeterminate state of the sound of one hand clapping. (Ponder that for a bit if you will.)
Continue reading “Takes Two to Tango”

{Previously, Part 1 and Part 2.}

Economic development – the main concern of this blog – is neither impossible nor inevitable. India, most unfortunately for the hundreds of millions of Indians who live lives of desperate poverty, is finding it nearly impossible to achieve any meaningful measure of development. Only in comparison to its own past does the India development story become somewhat palatable, but compared to other nations big and small, India does not fare well at all.
Continue reading “A Tale of Two Countries — Part 3”

Happy Carl Sagan Day. Today it would have been his 76th birthday. So off I go to watch some favorite episodes of COSMOS on Hulu.com. Episode 10 is one of my favorites: The Edge of Forever. See below for the video.
Continue reading “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe”

An Admirable Evasion of Whore-master Man

I believe that a person is at his most pathetic when he makes excuses for his failures and justifies them saying that they are primarily due to circumstances beyond his control. It is not merely an abdication of responsibility but what is worse, it precludes the possibility of corrective behavior. If it was not his fault, there’s no reason for him to change. He believes that when circumstances change, he will not fail.
Continue reading “A Tale of Two Countries — Part 2”

I have a Google alert configured which informs me when something I wrote appears on the web. I noticed that a post of mine has been republished in its entirety on another blog.
Continue reading “On Quoting Bit from Others’ Works”