Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Where do they come from?

A few days ago, I plugged in a gizmo to this blog which keeps track of where the visitors of this blog come from. Here is the Clustermap for this site. Currently the site lists about 2800 visits in the last 5 days.

I am surprised to note that the US counts for the largest number of visitors to this blog. One solitary dot (1-9 visitors) for Canada; none from Mexico (Carlos Munos, I thought that you would visit your old officemate’s blog occassionally); a few dozen from the South American continent; moving east across the Atlantic, the UK and the western European countries are well represented (hi Marita, Ville, Courtenay, Alexis, …); the whole of Africa has a few dozens, which I find surprisingly high; more people from the Middle east visit than from Africa; I note a few Pakistani visitors even; then comes India, which I guess accounts for about 20 percent of the visitors — this I find really surprising because I thought visitors from India would outnumber others, c’est la vie; then the far east sends a few, including some from China; I note Singapore especially; moving east and south, I note that Australia and New Zealand (hi Gordon) send a few.

Well, that is about it. There was no real point to this post. Just a bit of curiosity.

Update: Navin says he is the big dot in London. Hi Navin. Jyoti says she is the BD in Texas. Hi Jyoti.

Confusing weddings and marriages

In response to my post about the KGB and Indian democracy, one reader responded by writing that “should we abide by your definition of democracy, there would be very few truely democratic countries around.”
Continue reading “Confusing weddings and marriages”

Puzzler #1

OK, if you thought that this blog has no mysteries associated with it, you are wrong. Here is a mystery for you to ponder. About a year and a half ago, I made an offer on this blog: I will send a gmail invite to anyone who emails me a request. I made it clear that sticking a comment at the end of the post asking for an invite will not get a response from me. One has to email me.

People started posting comments asking for gmail invites. Then I edited the post with additional wording in big bold red type saying don’t post a comment, just email me. Now I get about 10 requests a week posted as comments, most of which I delete and only keep the odd one for demonstration purposes.

Now here is the puzzler: what do you think these losers who post a comment asking for a gmail account are going to do with it anyway, considering that they lack basic reading comprehension skills and have the intelligence of a doorknob?

The KGB and Indian Democracy

It’s not surprising but it is still news to me that the KGB attempted to steer the Indian ship of state. I grew up hearing rumors of the CIA doing all sorts of nasty things around the world, of course. The KGB, as the other spy in the real life adaptation of the Mad Spy Versus Spy, was as active I conjectured. Clearly India had enough commies crawling around for the KGB to find willing agents. So when I read (via The Acorn) the TIMESonline of the UK report that KGB records show how spies penetrated the heart of India, I was a sadder but wiser man:

A HUGE cache of KGB records smuggled out of Moscow after the fall of communism reveal that in the 1970s India was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by Soviet intelligence.
A number of senior KGB officers have testified that, under Indira Gandhi, India was one of their priority targets.

“We had scores of sources through the Indian Government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the defence and foreign ministries and the police,” said Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence and responsible for monitoring KGB penetration abroad. India became “a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government”, he added.

Continue reading “The KGB and Indian Democracy”

Recall George W Bush

Bill Maher is funny. I always liked his politically incorrect stance. Here he is asking for a recall election for the president as they have in California. The open letter to GW Bush is priceless. Here is the link to the show.

From ‘Nehru Growth’ to Productivity Surge

It is common knowledge that the Indian economy which was securely imprisoned since independence in 1947 has undergone a radical transformation and has seen a departure from its dismal 3 percent “Nehru Growth” to a more respectable 6 percent and more since the 1980s. There is little room for debate on that fact. What observers appear to disagree on is what were the factors that led to the transition from the “Nehru Growth” to the present.

Very broadly speaking, here is a thumb-rule I use to figure out what factors led to the Indian economic growth 1980s onwards. List every policy—domestic, international, industrial, education, health, banking, etc—that Nehru and his descendents imposed on the economy. Systematically reverse the policy and as you do so, you see the economy accelerating. In other words, if your goal is to create a set of policies that would ensure economic stagnation and deepening poverty of a large economy, the shortest route for you would be wholesale adoption of all the Nehruvian policies. Conversely, the quickest method of figuring out what to do to for economic growth, is to take any component of the Nehruvian policy prescription and apply the reverse.

To the extent that Nehruvian policies have been reversed, India’s economy is prospering. If the economy has not attained its potential growth rate yet, it is because not all of the mindless Nehruvian (but I repeat myself) policies have been discarded yet. I have no doubt that the nation will become slowly wise eventually. How many hundreds of millions will suffer poverty in the meanwhile is a question that is best not contemplated.

What got me thinking about the “Nehru Growth” rate is a recent paper in “IMFstaffpapers: A journal of the IMF” by Rodrik and Subramanian “From ‘Hindu Growth’ to Productivity Surge: The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition.”
Continue reading “From ‘Nehru Growth’ to Productivity Surge”

Banning Plastic Bags

“What about the morons?”

“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”

“Which they are.”

“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”

That piece of dialog is from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Earlier in the dialog between Belbo and Casaubon, Belbo claims that “there are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics” and that a normal person is “just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

I am persuaded that politicians in India are not normal people in the sense Belbo means it. They are an unreasonable mix of the ideal types, mostly moronic. What got me thinking about this was the ban on plastic bags that is scheduled to go into effect in Maharashtra next week.

Here is what happened. End of July saw not only unusually heavy rains – a cloudburst, actually – in Mumbai, but also record high tides. Mumbai, never having an efficient storm drainage system, succumbed to massive flooding and millions lost property and hundreds died as well.

Now comes the moronic reasoning. You see garbage everywhere in the streets in Mumbai. Garbage has plastic bags. Uncollected garbage lying in the streets can block drains during a storm. So ban the plastic bags around the state of Maharashtra to avoid flooding in the city of Mumbai.

If you will permit me a brief digression at this point. You may ask, why are we ruled by morons? Sweetheart, we are ruled by morons and cretins because the vast majority of us are morons and Continue reading “Banning Plastic Bags”

Charity begins at home, privately

… no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

Earlier this month life for those who were unable to leave the city of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina struck turned decidedly Hobbesian. Take away the basic necessities of life from a bunch of people – water, food, shelter – and soon enough the struggle for existence reveals nature red in tooth and claw.

One can have all the political freedoms guaranteed by an enlightened constitution. But when survival is at stake, the law flows out of the barrel of gun, and if the gun is missing, knives and fists will do. The thin veneer of civilization is not sufficiently strong to withstand the primal drive for survival at any cost.

They dragged out the national guard to keep the desperate poor trapped in New Orleans. In a sense, it was no longer part of the United States of America. It was a Third World country and the people of that place had to be kept out of the US just as other intruders are. And like the Mexicans dying in the desert trying to cross into the US or the Chinese suffocating in the holds of illegal ships, the poor of New Orleans also died in the floods.

***********************

The government of the US and its various agencies failed in their duty, of course. The Bush’s ineptitude runs surprisingly deep. But Bush and his buddies are not idiots. They will make even more money as a result of the tragedy. They will pour billions in the re-construction of the city and all the contracts will be awarded to Bush’s cronies.

They did that in Iraq. They bombed the country with huge expensive bombs (paid for by the American taxpayers). Then they gave fat contracts to Bush’s friends’ firms – they made a killing again. Hundreds of billions have already been spent in the needless war in Iraq.

For the cost of the Iraq war, global hunger could have been eradicated. Perhaps malaria, that awesome killer in the tropics, could have been tamed. But the military industrial complex wanted blood.

There is always enough money for bombs. But never enough for the poor people in need. For the poor, charity is recommended. The US said it would accept foreign aid. As far as I can tell, the US does soak up a lot of aid every day by borrowing two billion dollars a day from the rest of the world. A little more would not hurt the world.

************************

Anyway, the Indian government in a gesture of grand magnanimity pledged $5 million for the US Red Cross for relief efforts. It also prepared to send an Air Force plane loaded with thousands of blankets and tens of thousands of meals. Good gesture.

Let me see. Five million dollars would buy lots of food and clothing for the people in need. But money is fungible. It can buy guns or it can buy butter. Of course, $5 million would not buy very many Patriot missiles – only five Patriot missiles, if I have my missile price correct. In an average night, they did shoot hundreds of those during the bombing of Iraq. Five more or less would not have significantly changed how much area was destroyed and how many people killed.

I think that in effect India contributed to the cost of five Patriot missiles fired in Afghanistan or in Iraq. Of course, India helped out in Afghanistan also by donating a fleet of buses which were probably destroyed by the missiles. Nice isn’t it: pay for the missiles, pay for the reconstruction.

********************

I am totally against the government of India sending public funds to the US as charity. Charity, in my opinion, should be private and not public. Each one of us has to decide for ourselves how much and to whom we will extend our help in time of need. A private citizen has the obligation and the right to give from his own resources as much as he wishes to the charity of his choosing. The government of India – or any other government – should not be in the business of charity.

The government of India should have trusted the people of India to make the necessary sacrifices to send the resources to the people of New Orleans. The Prime Minister, too, has the right to write his own personal check to whoever he wishes. But he should not be so generous with other peoples’ money.

Radio Economics

Dr James Reese, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate, is the producer of Radio Economics: An Economics Podcast – Telephone Interviews with Economists Worldwide. Here you will be able to listen to podcasts of some excellent interviews. There are so many doctors interviewed there that you would think that you were in a hospital. Seriously though, you should go there and as a side benefit you will learn all about podcasting and next thing you know you would have your own podcast ready to go.

Groucho Marx claimed that he would never be a member of a club that would have him for a member. I could take a similar perverse stance and say that I would never agree to be interviewed by anyone whose standards are so low as to interview me. But I am not Groucho and Dr Reese has interviewed honest to goodness great economists. So with a great deal of trepidation, I point you to an interview of yours truly on Radio Economics.

Chalo Dilli

Not that you would notice, of course, given my sporadic blogging in general, but I thought that I should let you know that I will most likely not be posting stuff for a few days. So if you land here and find nothing new, I suggest you don’t go away without checking some of the archives.

Where, you may ask, am I going? I am off to London to see the Queen. Just kidding. I am off to New Delhi to attend the “Annual Conference of the HUDCO Chair Institutes” Sept 8-9th. The topic is “Cities: Engines of Rural Development.”

You may know of my abiding interest in rural development. I have written a concept paper on RISC–Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons. It is rather long — about 40 pages. So I would not recommend it as casual reading.

Of late there has been some action on RISC. Vinod Khosla guest-edited a recent issue of The Economic Times and he mentioned RISC in it. Then I got to hear that he spoke about RISC to the Planning Commission. And now I am going to be talking to a bunch of academics (those are the Chairs of HUDCO institutes) and some government bureaucrats (I guess from rural development departments and such.)

It has been a while since I was in Delhi. Last time in mid-February, I spent a few days meeting with people in connection with my interest in education. That is my day job–think about enabling education. My idea is to use the power tools of information and communications technologies (ICT) to make education more effective and efficient. Technology, as any economist will tell you, is labor substituting. Whenever a factor of production is expensive (labor for instance), you substitute it with a less expensive factor (capital for instance.) Since teaching labor is very expensive in India, use technology which is cheap these days.

Crazy, I hear the cry go out. How in the name of god almighty is teaching labor expensive in India? The fact is that good quality teachers are extremely–let me repeat that–extremely scarce. Scarcity implies high price. Therefore the cost of high quality teachers is prohibitive. We cannot afford high quality teachers because they are a luxury. Not just that, even if we had all the money, there is an acute shortage of teachers required. We need millions of teachers. We simply don’t have them. Hence my insistence that we have to find a substitute for good teachers and that happens to be the tools that ICT provides very inexpensively.

That’s it for now.