Category: Uncategorized

J. B. S. Haldane had gloomily observed that “the world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.” The world is overflowing with wonders, and yet we take them all for granted, seldom stopping to marvel at them.

Fortunately we have the means literally at our fingertips to learn about them and how they came to be. I spend a good deal of time on the internet (Youtube channels, particularly) appreciating the advances humans have made in science, technology and engineering that made the wonders possible.

The economics point of view is particularly helpful in understanding how the modern world works. Except for the most recent dozen or so generations, all previous 10,000 generations of our ancestors lived lives of extreme poverty and deprivation that we cannot even imagine. We are the fortunate ones. Continue reading “Humans”

My dear friends F and D in India have two teenage sons. The older one is an undergrad in a reputed art college in Paris, and the younger one, in high school in India, is aiming to become a professional drummer. I mention this as a contrast to the career choices open to me when I was a teenager in Nagpur so many decades ago.

Born in a middle-class family in a tier-two city in India, I was limited to studying either engineering or medicine. Since I could not stomach the sight of blood or any pain and suffering, I chose engineering. Becoming an artist or a musician was inconceivable. Economist? I didn’t even know such a discipline existed.

But times have changed. In the last half century or so, career options have exploded, and not just those related to computer technology and the internet. Jobs exist in every field today, surely in hardware and software, that one could not have imagined a generation ago. Continue reading “Happiness”

Conflict is an universal feature of the living world. It arises from the struggle to survive. All living things struggle to overcome the natural world which, it would seem most of the time, is trying to kill them: droughts, floods, fires, earthquakes, asteroids, pandemics and the sort.

Then there’s the struggle against other living things — the prey versus predator variety. Add to that, there’s the competition against one’s own kind for food and mates. Nature is, as often described accurately, red in tooth and claw.

For us humans there’s the universal struggle against nature, and the competition against others of our own kind. There’s one additional dimension: the struggle of man against himself. That’s the toughest of all. The great philosophies of the world have addressed that final bit — particularly the Sanatana, Buddhist and Jain dharmas. Continue reading “Conflict”

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States (1981 – 1989) was a hard act to follow. His last speech as the POTUS is emblematic of who he was. With all his faults and mistakes, he was a true American hero.

As a side note, I think Vivek Ramaswamy is the kind of American that Ronald was talking about — the children of immigrants who lead the country of their birth.

We humans are puzzle solvers. We get a certain joy out of solving puzzles. Richard Feynman spoke about “the joy of finding things out.” We are not Nobel Prize-winning geniuses like Feynman but still we do like solving puzzles.

Given that we differ in our preferences, we choose different puzzles we attempt to solve. Charles Darwin wanted to know what was the mechanism that drove biological evolution; Adam Smith wondered about the nature and causes of the wealth of nations; Newton wanted to figure out (among lots of other things) what the nature of light was; Einstein wanted to know what it would be like if one moved at the speed of light, etc. Continue reading “Puzzles”

I am convinced that freedom is an acquired taste, somewhat like dietary preferences. People brought up in a vegetarian households are likely to prefer vegetarian food. People brought up free tend to prefer freedom, and those brought up under command structures, prefer that. Muslims apparently prefer the stifling, humanity-denying strictures of Islam that non-Muslims generally find horrifying. Continue reading “Freedom”

I’ve refrained from posting because I heed George Eliot’s caution that “Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.” I have nothing to say.

Although in conversation I am never at a loss for words, it is not easy for me to write something meaningful without a prompt. I feel that if I write something unprovoked, it had better be worth reading. This is not one of those instances. This time I write just to see if I can still write. You’ve been cautioned.

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I had the worst flight of my life a couple of days ago. The flight time was nearly 18 hours, non-stop from SFO to BLR. Of the hundreds of international flights (most of them between the US and India) and hundreds of domestic flights I have taken, I would rate this one as the worst I have endured. For the record, Finnair, which I took between Dallas TX and Mumbai the previous visit to India in November 2022, was the second worst. Continue reading “Last time”

In a July 18th post, I had shared a video of two kids offering to shovel someone’s driveway for $20. Go there to get the context of this post.

As I wrote in the post, I would be happy to point out why [the video] delighted me. A reader obliged and asked what was so special about it. Therefore here is why that brief video warmed my cold, economist’s heart. It’s a mix of enterprise, innocence, trust, and division of labor — all things that go into the creation of wealth in a society. Continue reading “Trust”