Category: My Favorite Bits

The Dollar Auction: Some Figures

I have maintained for a while that the reason that Pakistan gets propped up by the US and its allies is that India and Pakistan are engaged in a dollar auction game and therefore anytime Pakistan is about to go bankrupt (and therefore be unable to continue the game), the US and its allies rush to prop it up. How much money is involved in keeping Pakistan alive so that it can continue to wage jihad against India? Here are the figures from an article, “Fail, then reap rewards,” by Brahma Chellaney in the Deccan Chronicle. Continue reading “The Dollar Auction: Some Figures”

Lee Kuan Yew

I came across this site lee-kuan-yew.com which appears to be a portal with information on Lee Kuan Yew, his speeches and his writings. I am pretty pleased that right up there is a link to one of my favorite series of posts on this blog: Lee Kuan Yew on India. Read it but be warned that it is a bit long and it is not a pretty picture. But then, when it comes to what I write about, it ain’t pretty anyway.

Information Overload

One of my favorite obsessions is information. Naturally so considering that I am an economist, and markets and information are inseparable. Information is the lubricant that keeps the huge big machinery of the market humming. Which is of course why information and communications technology (ICT) is so critical today as the modern world is a huge marketplace where stuff gets exchanged. Globalization (which I define as the integration of markets on a global scale) and the explosion of ICT are conjoined twins.
Continue reading “Information Overload”

On Being an Armchair Intellectual

A comment on this blog is worth highlighting because it is too important to be buried among the comments. It is from Gulab Singh who wrote:

What have you done to amend the situation, oh armchair intellectual ? Cribbing about the status quo is pointless, if you don’t follow it up with action. If you don’t have a way to put into practice the ideas you espouse, then your ideas are not practical. You seem to have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about “what should be done”, but what have you really done?

I cannot respond to the accusation of being an “armchair intellectual” because I am not sufficiently vain to call myself an intellectual, armchair or not. However, I would like to speak in defense of armchair intellectuals first, then admit that I am basically an armchair critic, then argue why critics are important in the overall scheme of things, and finally explain what I am doing to move beyond just being a mere critic. Continue reading “On Being an Armchair Intellectual”

Thoughts on Freedom of Expression

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” — George Bernard Shaw

Here is a thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a commercial jetliner cruising at 500 knots 37,000 feet above the earth’s surface. Who on earth created the contraption which gives you the ability to do something so awesome? Humans. And out of what? Stuff that came out of the earth. You can trace every bit of that plane to its origin, the earth. The metals, the glass, the plastics—you name it—every bit of that aircraft was once in the earth. The raw material has been around for billions of years but only in the last few centuries have humans developed the ability to work the raw materials into sophisticated shapes and forms that extend the reach of humans in unimaginable ways.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Freedom of Expression”

The Lights to Navigate By

In a comment to the post on political parties launched by entrepreneurs, “Seven Times Six” wrote:

I don’t think renunciation and self-sacrifice is necessary for a nation to prosper. What is required is the exact opposite — a strong avarice and ambition to promote one’s well-being.
Continue reading “The Lights to Navigate By”

The Ownership Society

“It is all about power, isn’t it?” said CJ.

I was on the phone with CJ, discussing a series of columns that the Indian Express newspaper has been running called “India Empowered” which as the newspaper puts it, “if there’s one engine that’s today driving a changing India, it’s empowerment. Empowerment of the individual, the family, the neighborhood, the community – and, hence, the nation.”
Continue reading “The Ownership Society”

The Future of Energy

“Fossil fuel is dead,” declared CJ.

CJ likes to make those kinds of superficially profound statements. We were meeting after a long time. I was in Delhi for a conference and caught up with CJ at the Taj Mansingh Hotel coffee shop. We were discussing the spike in the gas prices.

“Dead or not, seventy dollars a barrel for crude was bad news for India considering that India imports about half of its energy needs. Will slow down the economy a bit, won’t it?” I said.
Continue reading “The Future of Energy”