Author: Atanu Dey

“Precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high. Men must use their own intelligence in imposing order on chaos, intelligence not in scientific problem-solving but in the more difficult sense of finding and maintaining agreement among themselves. Anarchy is ideal for ideal men; passionate men must be reasonable. Like so many men have done before me, I examine the bases for a society of men and women who want to be free but who recognize the inherent limits that social interdependence places on them.”[1]

Buchanan’s point is that there is no authority other than us humans and that there’s a tradeoff. Social interdependence cannot be avoided because we necessarily have to cooperate with other humans if we wish to enjoy the gains from trade and the division of labor that it entails. For that we have to arrive at some set of rules that we all agree to abide by through some process of negotiation. These rules will limit our own freedom of action but in exchange for that we will gain greater scope to exercise the freedoms and rights that we do retain. Continue reading “The Bases for a Free Society”

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING economist Douglass North observed that “economic history is overwhelmingly a story of economies that failed to produce a set of economic rules of the game (with enforcement) that induce sustained economic growth.”

A sound education system is the foundation of sustained growth. Yet, nowhere is the failure to produce a set of economic rules more evident than in the Indian education system. India’s literacy rate of around 60 percent places it in the company of countries such as Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Sudan, Burundi and Ghana. Broadly speaking, India accounts for 50 percent of the world’s illiterates even though India has only 17 percent of the world’s population. The failure of India’s primary education is predictably reflected at the higher education level: gross enrolment ratio is a mere six percent. Furthermore, the quality of Indian college graduates is poor to the extent that only about a quarter of them are employable.

Education in India is heavily controlled by the government both at the state and federal levels. Government agencies and regulations dictate every aspect of education, sometimes to the smallest details: who can run educational systems (generally only non-for-profit trusts can), who teaches, what is taught, who learns, what the fees and salaries should be, and so on. Most unfortunately, the entry barriers that the government imposes on the sector lead to such effects as high costs, low quality, and rampant corruption. Continue reading “This Policy, Alone – Part 8”

Nothing warms the cockles of this economist’s heart like seeing a market do its bit beautifully. As we say in the trade (pun intended), markets work and incentives matter. That sums up very neatly two of the fundamental insights of economics.

Consider this fact (from a Dec 2013 Quartz article): “Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day. By comparison, Walmart and Best Buy changed their prices roughly 50,000 times each in the entire month of November.”

Those numbers for Amazon must have gone up since then. Perhaps Amazon changes its prices 4 million times a day now. Continue reading “Amazon is Amazing”

Walter E. Williams insisted that the E in his name stood for excellent. He was excellent. He suffered no fools. He passed away today. About him, the wiki says:

Walter Edward Williams (March 31, 1936 – December 2, 2020) was an American economist, commentator, and academic. He was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author known for his classical liberal and libertarian views.

 

A few quotes: Continue reading “Walter E Williams, RIP.”

Of all the American holidays I like Thanksgiving the best. For starters, it’s a secular holiday. Secular in the true sense of the term — not religious — and not in the way that secular is understood in India where it means “not Hindu.” In India, Islamic or Christian is secular but Hindu is not secular. In India, Diwali is not secular but Christmas is secular. But in the US, Christmas is not secular but Thanksgiving is secular. That is an important distinction.

But the main reason I like Thanksgiving is that it represents something that should be our perrenial attitude — that of gratitude for what we have. Certainly we wish we had more of the goodies of life but let’s also frequently pause and give thanks for all the good things we already have. I pause quite frequently and observe the simple fact that things are pretty good as they are. I ask myself “Isn’t this good?” and answer, “Yes, it’s good.”

That’s what I learned a long time ago. In Hesse’s book Siddhartha, the protagonist says to his friend Govinda, “the world is perfect in every moment.” The same idea is expressed thus in Desiderata: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

I am always struck by the variations in human capacities. We humans are strikingly unequally endowed in physical and mental capabilities. Non-human animals of a particular species are generally very similar. For instance, individual members of the species common pigeon  are quite indistinguishable; if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. The pigeons from Germany are not that different from the ones in India. Can you tell which one is a German pigeon and which one Indian?

But we humans are different. The range of human physiology is vast even though all humans belong to the same homo sapiens species. People from different regions of the world look different and we easily distinguish between Germans and Indians. Not just across regions, individuals vary within regions too. That is not an earth shattering fact but it is worth noting.

I believe that the range of mental variations is much wider than physical variations among humans. We are seriously unequally endowed when it comes to brains. Most of us are sort of average but among us there are outliers who are a few sigmas above the mean. The outliers also are varied. There are geniuses in chess, and in music, and mathematics, and physics, … the list goes on indefinitely. Continue reading “Wisdom, Genius, Knowledge and Intelligence”