Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic

Diogenes with his lantern and faithful dog
Diogenes looking for an honest man

Diogenes of Sinope lived in a tub in the marketplace. Since it was a long time ago, around the 4th century BCE, the details are few. He is also known as Diogenes the Cynic. I feel a certain intellectual kinship to Diogenes because I too am a cynic. He must have been a remarkable man, going by the stories told about him.

It is said that he sometimes walked around with a lamp even in broad daylight. When asked why, he replied, “I am looking for an honest man.” A cynic to the core.

He lived an austere life, and claimed (correctly, I believe) that man’s needs are basically simple. He had few possessions and lived in a tub, and I suppose lived on handouts and charity. He must have been like the bhikshus that hung around the Buddha who, one must remember, lived a century before Diogenes.

During a sea voyage in his old age, he was captured by pirates and brought to a market in Crete to be sold. When asked for what he was capable of, he answered, “I can govern men; so sell me to someone who wants a master.”

Xeniades, a rich man of Corinth, heard this and bought Diogenes and gave him his freedom. Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia.

What would you do if one of the most powerful men in the world sent word that he would like to meet you since he has heard so much about you?

Not Diogenes, though.

Diogenes told the Alexander’s messenger, “Go tell your emperor that Corinth is as far from Macedonia as Macedonia is from Corinth. So if your emperor wants to see me, he can come and find me here.”

Irrefutable logic and infinite self-assurance. The last bit can only come from someone who really does not need anything from anyone however high and mighty.

Alexander surely was not used to being turned down. But I suppose being a warrior, he admired courage. So he went to Corinth to meet Diogenes. Diogenes was sitting in his tub and enjoying the morning sun when Alexander showed up on his high horse with a whole bunch of soldiers.

After a brief introduction, Alexander proudly offered to give Diogenes anything that he needed. “Is there anything I can do for you, Sir?” asked Alexander. Diogenes replied, “Yes, you could. You are blocking the sun. Please stand aside.”

Just step aside, said Diogenes
Just step aside, said Diogenes

Alexander was a megalomaniac — you had to be if you wanted to (and indeed did) conquer a massive part of the world. So impressed he was with Diogenes that he later remarked, “If I had not been Alexander, I would have liked to be Diogenes.”

One more favorite story about Diogenes.

One afternoon, one of the emperor’s ministers was passing through the town square and saw Diogenes in his bathtub, eating gruel. The minister said helpfully, “Diogenes, you would not have to eat gruel, if you only did one thing. If you were friendly to the emperor, you’d be able to feast.”

Diogenes replied, “If you learned how to eat gruel, you would not have to grovel before the emperor.”

{PS: Also see this post from Sept 2009 about Diogenes, “Learning to Eat Gruel.”}

A Modest Proposal — Part 4

Given half a chance, people cheat. Basic human nature. There is little gain in believing otherwise. Taking undue advantage of something to get ahead is part of the basic human DNA. (I admit to being an unabashed hardcore dyed in the wool cynic. Among my all-time heroes is Diogenes. More about him here.) So one has to plan ahead and design mechanisms that account for that fact. Ravikiran asked in connection with my proposal to make India 100 percent literate: What stops the NDS from colluding with the testing centre and making off with the money?. Continue reading “A Modest Proposal — Part 4”

A Modest Proposal — Part 3

This is a continuation of my modest proposal for making India 100 percent literate within three years, Part 1, and Part 2.

I am a firm believer in the use of technology for development, including information and communications technologies (ICT). There is an urgent need for economic growth and development and unless we use the best possible tools available anywhere in the world, we are unlikely to solve the problems which confront us.
Continue reading “A Modest Proposal — Part 3”

Now for something entirely different

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Oh, alright. I was getting tired of posting only development related stuff. So I thought that I would intersperse stuff that I write with stuff that I like written by others. Here is a perspective piece written by a Canadian and published by a Canadian newspaper. (I hope that I am not stepping on too many copyright toes.)

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Source: ‘The Province’ (Tuesday, May 1, 1990)

ADOLF HITLER IN GOOD COMPANY

by Crawford Kilian

My Lawyer friend Nick Mephisto took me out for a celebration lunch yesterday, which worried me. He is a Devil’s advocate, the infernal version of a Queen’s Counsel. What he likes to celebrate usually appalls any normal person.

‘It’s the 45th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death,’ Nick explained. ‘My client has been hosting him-and roasting him-since April 30, 1945.’

‘I suppose your Client is very proud to have such a monster,’ I said.

‘Oh, Hitler was no monster.’

‘What! The cause of World War II, the author of holocaust, not a monster?’

‘Don’t forget my client has known them all. Hitler was just a garden variety politician.’

‘Absurd! He was inhuman.’

‘Well, what was his big offence? He believed in racial and cultural superiority. And he thought superior races and cultures were entitled to invade other people’s countries, enslave them, and even exterminate them.’

‘I said he was a monster.’

‘But isn’t that exactly what other Europeans have been doing since Columbus? In the 80 years after the Spanish conquered Mexico and South America, the native population fell by 90%. That was about 40 or 50 million people. Hitler was faster, but he wasn’t responsible for any more deaths than Spaniards were.’

‘Aw, come on Nick-‘

‘The French conquered parts of Africa and South East Asia, not to mention Quebec. The English thought they deserved to rule what Kipling called ‘the lesser breeds,’ all over the world. The Belgians ran the Congo like a big concentration camp. The Dutch and the Portugese-‘

‘Sure, the old colonial empires were bad, but they weren’t as bad as the Nazis.’

Nick Mephisto shrugged. ‘The Europeans believed that their supposed superiority justified slavery, massacres, deportations and suffocating of other people’s cultures. And Europe has flourished on that basis for centuries. In my client’s opinion, Hitler made just one mistake.’

‘Which was?’

‘He picked on Europeans.’

‘True enough, but-‘

‘If he’s massacred native Indians, African blacks, or Asians, his neighbors wouldn’t have minded much. After all, they’d all done the same thing. But treating his fellow-Europeans that way was simply unforgivable.’

‘That’s enough! If Hitler had won, we’d have centuries of horror.’

‘Just as native Indians have had since 1492, and the Africans for almost as long. Oh, my Client gives full marks for effort, but he saves his real respect for the successful conquerors, the ones who commit genocide and become national heroes.’

‘So you are saying that we’re as bad as the Nazis?’

‘Tut-tut, we’re much more genteel. My Client does point out, though, that Canadian defence policy is based on inflicting nuclear genocide on any nation that threatens to keep us from shopping in the mall of our choice. And the vast majority of Canadians frimly support that policy, no matter how many peace marchers turn out in Vancouver every year.’

Something began to dawn on me. ‘Does this mean Hitler has a lot of company?’

The Devil’s advocate grinned. ‘Plenty, and more coming all the time. You wouldn’t believe the housing crisis created by dead racists. It’s absolute hell.’

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Update (Jan 25th, 2006): See this article by George Monbiot “How Britain Denies its Holocausts“

A Modest Proposal — Part 2

Today I continue exploring my modest proposal for making India 100% literate. One may exclaim “How can a proposal which seeks to spend $60 billion be considered modest!?” It is a modest proposal considered in relation to the task at hand. We have around 400 million (give or take a hundred million) illiterate humans living in this day and age within the boundaries of India. It is not a small number. Educating one person at the cost of $200 is not an extravagent sum. What I am outlining is a way to use the modest amount efficiently and effectively so as to lay the foundation for a true transformation of India. Continue reading “A Modest Proposal — Part 2”

You might be a third world country if …


Reading some of the more outlandish claims about how India is an IT superpower is a surreal experience. The chest-thumping, right from the highest offices in India to the lowliest journalistic office, is a sight to behold and marvel at. Don’t know why they have to do it. Perhaps they are plain ignorant or perhaps they feel that if they repeat a lie often enough, it will become true in the real world. Their naivete is touching and pathetic.


If you put on airs about being an information and knowledge superpower when about 351,587,482 (more than the combined populations of US and Canada) of your citizens are illiterate, you might be a third world country.

A Modest Proposal for Making India 100 Percent Literate within Three Years

In yesterday’s musings on whether education promotes development, I had promised to outline a proposal for making India 100 percent literate within three years. Here is the modest proposal. Continue reading “A Modest Proposal for Making India 100 Percent Literate within Three Years”

Does Educational Spending Promote Growth?

Back in February I had examined the matter of why education is underprovided in India. My insistence that basic education was a necessity for development prompted Alok Mittal to ask about the connection between economic development and education. Continue reading “Does Educational Spending Promote Growth?”

Misplaced Conclusions

“My uncle died sadly due to his habit of drinking tea?”

“That’s amazing! I have heard of people dieing because of alcohol. But tea?”

“Yes, tea lead to his death. He was crossing the road to get himself a cup of tea, and a bus ran over him. Tea caused his untimely demise.”

You may think it’s funny. But wait till you see the conclusion drawn from the following. This is from a report by my friend Priya Ganapati of rediff.com:

Jhunjhunwala cites a case where an email was sent to a number of government officials including the chief minister about a possible breakout of the small pox epidemic in a certain area.

Though the email was ignored by many, it finally did reach the right official and prompt administrative action to prevent the epidemic was taken.

“In Attapatti village, Veermani, a man with disabilities was unjustly dismissed from his job. He wrote an email to many government officials, one of whom finally took note and he was reinstated,” Jhunjhunwala points out.

You may not believe it but one is supposed to be persuaded that the above examples argue for IT-enabling of Indian villages. A moment’s consideration is all that is required to see that the conclusion is as asinine as blaming tea for the uncle’s release from this mortal coil.

If you substitute postcard for “email” in Priya’s report, then obviously the conclusion would have to be that what is required for rural development is a postal system. But wait!! We do have a postal system, don’t we? So what exactly does an email do that a postcard does not do?

Someone should clue these people in: emails and postcards are the means of conveying a message. Emails don’t suddenly make caring people out of apathetic government bureaucrats. The failures of government is not a technological failure and producing technical fixes for that is as effective as casting spells to fix a broken car.

One may say, “Well, emails are faster. And you can send it to a zillion officials.” Sure, you can. But so when everyone and his brother is sending a zillion messages to thousands of officials, the officials will also learn to file those emails under “T” for trash. You would be back to square one with the only difference being that money that could have helped with development ends up in the pockets of Bill Gates, HP, and Intel.

The bottom line is very simple. We need to ask where the failure is in the above examples. Then figure out a solution. And if in that solution we find that the use of IT tools is cheaper than any other method, we should use IT tools. Until then, all who are IT-trigger happy should sit on their hands and contemplate the universe.

{Deja vu? Indeed, this one is recycled 🙂 }

The Power of M-type Arguments

Suhit Anantula forwarded an open letter to Krugman from Arnold Kling. In it, Kling told Krugman that he (Krugman) was using too many M type arguments (M for “motivation”) and not enough C type arguments (C for “consequence”) when Krugman argues for or against certain policies. I think that Kling’s letter is worth reading. And I believe that Kling is mistaken.

Kling takes Krugman to task saying that he should eschew M arguments and concentrate on C arguments to make his point. Economists, Kling claims, have always employed C arguments to evaluate public policies and that is what Krugman should stick to.

Here is what I believe. Public policies are made by humans. Humans are motivated by self-interest. It is therefore important to understand the motivations of the humans involved in policy making to comprehend why a certain policy was advocated. In most cases, the consequences of a policy are not completely known a priori and there is considerable uncertainty in the actual outcome of a policy. Depending upon the motivation of the policy maker, the policy maker has the freedom to claim that a particular consequence would necessarily follow. By identifying the motivation of the policy maker, one can control for the biases in the claimed benefits of the policy.

My position is not that C arguments are worthless when evaluating policies. It is rather that C arguments are not sufficient when it comes to understanding why a certain course of action is actually taken from a menu of choices.

To take a specific example, consider the so-called US “war on terror”. Suppose one were to make the C argument that “invading Iraq would not stop terrorism, but instead would intensify terrorism by inducing more Islamic terrorism.” Would that argument be sufficient to deter those advocating the invasion of Iraq? It would be if those people were indeed ignorant of the possibility of inducing more Islamic terrorism and having heard the C argument, would change their minds. But those who pushed for the invasion of Iraq are not stupid. They would have already worked out C argument for themselves, anyway. Yet, if inspite of understanding the consequences of their chosen policy, they still go ahead of with the invasion of Iraq, then one has to ask what their motivations are for doing so. If one finds that the benefits of an invasion (to the policy makers) is greater than the cost of the war (which the policy makers do not bear), then one can explain comprehensively why the invasion was undertaken.

In a purely academic environment, debating the pros and cons of a specific policy is best undertaken with C arguments. But in the real world, people are motivated by self-interest and have a certain amount of control over what course of action to take, rather than being dispassionate observers of a world that they don’t have any control over.

A diverse set of issues — from why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, to why worthless expensive PCs are foisted on poor rural Indians — can be better understood by the simple device of following the money and asking what is in it for the advocates of a particular policy and how it benefits them.