Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Do the Taliban have Buddha Nature?

Here we go again. In March of 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. These statues had stood there since the early 6th century. Symbols of universal compassion, these were in the eyes of Islam something that had to be destroyed.

Full marks for perseverance, though. “When Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Afghanistan and part of west India in the 12th century, the Buddhas and frescoes were spared from destruction though Buddhist monasteries and other artifacts were looted or destroyed. Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor distinguished for his religious zeal, employed heavy artillery in an attempt to destroy the statues. Nadir Shah, too, had cannon fire directed at the statues. But over the centuries the statues had largely been left untouched.”
Continue reading “Do the Taliban have Buddha Nature?”

Necessary and Sufficient

Amit wrote in a comment:

Atanu, when you have time, I’d invite you to do some research on food production and malnutrition, and write a post on it – whether lack of food is because of insufficient production, or asymmetrical distribution and inefficient use of crops/food. Because it’s a very popular sentiment that’s paraded out every time a case is made for biotech crops – that it is the solution to world hunger. Would be interesting to read your take on it.

Sorry but it is unlikely that I will find the time to do the suggested research any time soon. But for now, here’s one common trap that we sometimes stumble into: the inability to distinguish between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions.
Continue reading “Necessary and Sufficient”

Happy Diwali

Deepavali Greetings! May Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, be a welcome visitor to your home and workplace.



[The WordPress software is putting a “Japonophile” watermark on the pictures. I will have to figure out how to disable that one.]

Transgenic Cotton

Technology, in economics jargon, expands the production possibilities frontier (PPF). In simpler terms, you get more stuff by using technology by using resources more efficiently. Which in turn means that you have less waste produced as a by-product of the production of useful stuff.

A recent column by Gurcharan Das titled “Let Biotech Crops Bloom” notes how the introduction of transgenic cotton has doubled India’s cotton production in the last five years and is second largest cotton producing country (after China.) He laments the fact that Indian farmers don’t have access to transgenic rice, soya, corn, etc, because they have not been approved. He puts the blame on “misguided activists, timid bureaucrats, and apathetic politicians.”
Continue reading “Transgenic Cotton”

Comment Policy

In the past, I used to try and respond to all comments. Time constraints do not allow me that luxury any more. I sincerely appreciate the comments, however, and my thanks for those thoughtful comments. Some comments which call for a clarification or further elaboration of the subject, I will respond in subsequent posts.

I generally don’t censor comments and I don’t remove comments, however irrelevant to the post, unless it is pure spam. Some comments test my resolve about not removing comments. Those are the type which clearly indicate that the commenter has not bothered to read my post carefully, or has read it with sufficient prejudice that my point has been utterly misunderstood. Those comments are pure bullshit and against pure bullshit, even the gods struggle in vain, leave alone a mere mortal.

Usual rules of courtesy apply. Consider reading someone’s blog akin to visiting them at home. You are a guest and generally welcome. If one wishes to abuse the host, one should have the decency to leave the place, and do the abusing from a different place.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Hell’s Angel

Teresa the Merciless
Teresa the Merciless

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the will and the means to wreak havoc and cause misery. The Catholic Church is exhibit A. It has a shining history of centuries of wholesale murder and it has not deviated one bit from that unholy crusade to this day. Its most celebrated foot-soldier — nay, general — in its war against decency and humanity was Mother Teresa. Christopher Hitchens called her (among other things) the Ghoul of Calcutta. I call her Teresa, the Merciless.

Here’s Hitchens (from one of his live debates): Continue reading “Hell’s Angel”

Model Based Thinking

A brief reminder is in order here because from time to time, I do resort to very simple economic models. The utility of simple models in assisting thinking about complex matters is under-appreciated by most of us whose professional interests do not require model-based thinking. In the hard sciences, physicists and cosmologists commonly use models to clarify their thinking and illuminate the essential features of the complex theoretical subjects they study. Where the search space of a solution is unmanageable large, simulations based on simple models come in handy, such as in meteorology.

Elegant models are amazing things. That is why economists do it with models. The study of the real world would be too confusing if it were not stripped of all inessential details. The hard part lies in figuring out which bits to retain and which to discard while creating the model. Model building is an art and the product is often a thing of spectacular beauty and elegance. They illuminate and enlighten; they capture the imagination and make accessible features of the real world that would otherwise be lost in a haze of misapprehension. It seems to me that learning simple models has to be part of a well-rounded education. Children should be exposed to simple models and then taken through the logical deductions that the assumptions imply. But I will not digress into models and our education system for now. What I want to do is quote a passage from Paul Krugman, an economist whom I especially admire for his clarity of thinking and exposition, about how serious economics is done.
Continue reading “Model Based Thinking”

LOSADS!

Law of Supply and Demand

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the law of supply and demand is a bitch. Stripped of all details it basically states that the price of something is determined by the interaction of the quantities supplied and demanded. Therefore (1) an increase of the quantity demanded, holding the supply constant, will increase the price; (2) an increase in the quantity supplied, holding the demand constant, will decrease the price; (3) a decrease in the quantity demanded, holding the supply constant, will decrease the price; and (4) a decrease in the quantity supplied, holding the demand constant, will increase the price.

Sing pretty songs, if you please, or dance nimbly invoking the gods, or pass sincere legislation to suspend the effects of that law. You would have as much success doing that as you would have in suspending the law of gravity and legislate against it effects. The law of supply and demand is not quantum mechanics and can be taught to the average 6 year-old with ease. Ignorance of the law should be a matter of shame, and willful disregard of the law by policymakers should be punished through public floggings.
Continue reading “LOSADS!”

Moving Mountains

Golf, not Chess

Economic growth in a sense, and to a much larger extent economic development, is more akin to a game of golf than a game of chess. In golf, the opponent’s moves matter very little; you may as well play by yourself and later compare scores if needed. In chess, your move depends on how your opponent has moved and how he is likely to respond to your move. In other words, chess is a strategic game while golf is not. All this is very broadly speaking, naturally. I don’t mean to imply that there are no dependencies among economies as they grow; what I mean is that, especially for a large economy like India, how much it produces and how determines how materially prosperous it is and is independent of how other economies are growing. For strictly benchmarking purposes, one can glance over at the neighbors. And if one is smart, one can learn from the experiences of those neighbors. Still, when it comes to economic growth, it is largely the case that you are playing against yourself.

Here I want to glance at India’s large northern neighbor and recently a strategic competitor in the fiercely competitive game for control of scarce resources. China has been moving mountains — quite literally as you will soon note — for quite a few years for growing its economy. From an Indian perspective, it is a chilling reminder that there are no shortcuts to economic growth and that it takes something special in terms of will and perseverance to overcome the ill-effects of flawed economic policies and failed leadership. It is also a story of hope and the indomitable human spirit, a story of almost superhuman striving by mere mortals.
Continue reading “Moving Mountains”

The Celestial Teapot

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

That’s Bertrand Russell holding forth on the idiocy of revealed religions. I am quoting him here because I feel it is time I paid more attention to what is going on with the mad monotheists (I know, redundant) are doing to wreck the world.