Author: Atanu Dey

Life is a random draw. Much of life is contingent and it’s like a random walk with many unpredictable twists and turns. Many unforeseen events have taken me down roads that I had no inkling about even a few months before I embarked on an adventure. One of those lucky turns happened around 33 years ago.

I was at the Sunnyvale Public Library, waiting in line to check out a few books. SPL was close to home. I would go there a few times a month. While waiting to check out books, I randomly picked up a book from a sorting cart. It was titled “Micromotives and Macrobehavior.” I glanced at a few paragraphs and decided to borrow the book.

That evening, I started reading the book. In a day, I had read the book. I found it fascinating. The author, it turned out, was someone named Thomas Schelling. He was an economist. It dawned on me for the first time that I was an economist. Until that point, I had not only not known what economics was but I had no idea that I was actually an economist.

A few months later, I was telling about that to a friend of mine, VA, in Palo Alto. He said, “Hey, I think you should get a Ph.D. in economics!” That planted a seed. Continue reading “Thomas Schelling”

I am impressed by AI models. They are amazing. We’ve come a long way from Eliza. If you’ve never heard of Eliza, it makes my point that we’ve come a long way. What’s Eliza? Let an AI answer.

“ELIZA is a pioneering AI program created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. It was designed to simulate human-like conversations using simple pattern matching and substitution techniques. ELIZA’s most famous script, the DOCTOR script, mimics a psychotherapist by rephrasing user statements into questions, creating the illusion of understanding. Despite its limitations, ELIZA captured the imagination of users, leading to a phenomenon known as the Eliza effect, where people felt emotionally connected to the program, even though it was not genuinely intelligent. ELIZA laid the foundation for modern conversational AI and continues to influence the development of AI technologies today.” Continue reading “AI’s view of this blog”

Thanksgiving day is special because unlike Diwali or Christmas, it is non-religious. It has a special appeal to me because the motivating emotion is one of gratitude.

I have a ritual which I do several times a day: I pause for a minute and focus my mind on how fortunate I am for all the unearned blessing I have. I thank the universe for conspiring in my favor. Certainly things could have been better but it could have been a lot worse too.

But today’s special. I can be specific about what I am grateful about. First of all, I am thankful for my friends and family. I don’t have many but those that I have are wonderful. They give without measure and I do my best to reciprocate. You know who you are. Thank you. Continue reading “Happy Thanksgiving”

Civilizations self-destruct. The English historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, wrote, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” That goes for cities and countries too.

The West is facing an existential threat that is mainly brought on by a mix of suicidal empathy and collective guilt. Both of those are consequences of ignorance of history and stupidity. That said, I will not write off the West yet. The West has successfully triumphed over evil before. The West will defeat Islam too. I think the darkest hour has come but dawn is about to break.

What gives me hope? The young. Here’s one: @kiyahwillis. Her X profile says she is “Ex- Woke Leftist, Ex-Nonbinary | Current advocate for the secular liberal right | Fellow @ObjStdInstitute, Contributor @FreeBlckThought”

She posted the following on X: Continue reading “New York City”

We all understand what price means — whatever we have to pay for it. We also know that the price has something to do with the cost and we often use the two words interchangeably. But it is not clear what precisely is the difference between them.

For example, when we buy a widget for $5 — the price — but it could very well be that its cost of production and distribution was above or below that price. But generally, on average the price of stuff closely tracks its cost. If the revenue obtained from sales is below cost, the product or the firm is forced out of the market.

Where does cost arise from? Here I argue that the cost of anything is ultimately the cost of the energy that went into its production and distribution. Therefore, prices fall when energy costs fall, and vice versa. Continue reading “Cost”

I find planes fascinating. Those humongous machines are capable of flying thousands of miles at speeds just below the speed of sound, cruising over  35,000 feet above MSL, with hundreds of passengers in comfort and safely at prices that billions of people can afford.

If in the year 1900 — that wasn’t too long ago — you had told someone that traveling at 500 miles per hour would be commonplace by the year 1970 (the year the jumbo jet Boeing 747 entered service), they would worry about your sanity. Furthermore, if you insisted that people would be traveling around 7 miles above the earth while crossing continents, they would have you committed to a lunatic asylum.

It’s hard enough to get up to 7 miles above ground. But on top of that, to move at 500 miles per hour? That’s two impossible feats at the same time. That’s unbelievable squared.

I often meditate on the fact that these commercial jetliners evolved from their ancestral form around the year 1900 in less than half a century. Their progenitor was built out of wood, fabric and wires by a couple of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, OH. They started with experimenting with gliders for several years, and then having figured out the physics of flight, added an engine that they built in their shop. The first powered flight was on 17th December 1903 in Kitty Hawk, NC. Continue reading “Energy Matters”

Among contemporary historians, I rate the American historian Stephen Kotkin (Ph.D, UC Berkeley) at the top of a very short list. He focuses on Russian and Soviet politics and history, communism, global history, authoritarianism, and geopolitics. I learned a lot from him on the Stalinist era, and the life of Joseph Stalin. I couldn’t possibly read his biography of Stalin (three volumes, each 1000+ pages) but fortunately his talks and conversations provide what we non-specialists should know.

Another historian I like happens to be a farmer and a scholar: the classicist Victor Davis Hanson. He’s a conversative and comments on contemporary politics. VDH is an expert on military history, ancient warfare, ancient agrarianism, and the classics. VDH divides his time between Stanford University and Fresno, a small town in the Central Valley of California. He works on his family farm which has been with them for six generations.

Continue reading “On Bullshit”

In general, everything everywhere is getting cheaper all the time. This claim is counter-intuitive because in our experience, with a few notable exceptions, we see prices going up all the time. Economists have a word for that: inflation. It’s a broad increase in the prices of goods and services, which decreases the purchasing power of money. While inflation is a reality, it is not the whole story.

It is useful to distinguish between the “real” and the “nominal.” The sticker price is the number of dollars you pay at the store. That’s the nominal price. Inflation is an increase in the nominal price level. Price level refers to the nominal prices of a very large collection of goods and services. Inflation is a universal phenomenon, although it varies greatly in time and place. 

 It is also true that on average, the real prices of most goods and services are falling all the time. Evidence for that is not hard to find. Continue reading “Cheaper All the Time”