In a New York Times editorial titled “Secretary Clinton Goes to India” published 17th July, the writer makes the case that “it is time for India to take more responsibility internationally.” I completely concur. The editorial spells out what India should do. For instance, it points out that India has to ” constrain its arms race with Pakistan and global proliferation.” Excellent advice — but for one small little inconvenient detail. Who exactly is the one that fuels the arms race in the Indian subcontinent?
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Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
Microsoft’s Project TUVA
As my friend Rajan Parrikar wrote when he sent me the link to Microsoft’s Project Tuva, “What times we live in that all of this is now at our fingertips.”
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Here We Go Again
Is China really going to attack India before 2012? Yes, says Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, according to rediff.com
Why? Out of nervousness and to divert attention from its own problems.
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It’s San Andreas Fault
It is just a few months short of the 20th anniversary of Loma Prieta earthquake: “a major earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. local time. Caused by a slip along the San Andreas Fault, the earthquake lasted approximately 15 seconds and measured 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale.” [Wiki] I will always remember the exact moment it happened. I was at a trade show at the San Jose convention center, and everything started to shake and things came crashing down. Now I am back in the bay area for a few weeks. Is the ground going to shake?
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Happy Fourth of July
Happy Fourth of July!
On this day in 1776 the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress which announced that the 13 American colonies were no longer part of the British Empire. That was the culmination of the American Revolution.
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Policy Brief on Higher Education in India
India’s higher education must reflect the dynamics of its economy and the diversity of the needed human capital for powering its growth in an increasingly competitive globalized world. The circular causation between an effective higher education sector and the economic growth makes the sector especially amenable to positive feedback effects – once the process is initiated, the system automatically builds up capacity to keep the growth of the sector to match the growth of the economy. Policy choices dictate the initial conditions and kick-starting of this virtuous process.
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Complete Video of Islamic Terror in Mumbai
I got the following link in a posting on India-gii (hat tip: Iqbal) on the Islamic terror in Mumbai past November. Click on this link at Atlas Shrugs only if you have a strong stomach because the pictures are disturbing. The title of the post — “THIS IS A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND UNBELIEVERS, WE ARE THE PEOPLE GOD HAS CHOSEN TO DEFEND AGAINST THE UNBELIEVERS” — is as stark as the images of the dead bodies of the innocents murdered in accordance with the religious duty of jihad.
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We cannot ignore what we don’t know
Too often I see this quoted.
“Per laws of aerodynamics, the “bumble bee” cannot fly. Its body weight is not the right proportion to its wingspan. Ignoring these laws of science, the bee flies anyway.”
It is one of those seemingly profound statements that is actually devoid of the slightest shred of sense or meaning.
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Hans Rosling: 200 Years that Changed the World
I am pretty convinced that one can learn practically all subjects from easily accessible content available for free on the web. This summer I am teaching a development economics course at University of California at Berkeley, Econ171. I will use the web extensively.
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Minsky on Words
Marvin Minsky of MIT is a cognitive scientist and an artificial intelligence pioneer. I recently came acros his 1981 paper on “Music, Mind, and Meaning” which I found informative and profoundly thought provoking. Here’s an extended quote from it, for the record.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 