Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

“The CBI on Monday told the Supreme Court (SC) that it has in its possession 5,851 call recordings, many of them 30-40 minutes long, of corporate lobbyist Nira Radia with various people,” says DNA. I propose that these recordings be published on the web immediately. Why?
Continue reading “Release the CBI tapes to the Public Domain”

I got to know of a seminar today at UC Berkeley. “Bioengineering Advances for Economically Disadvantaged Societies” by Prof Boris Rubinsky. The title of the talk bugs me no end. In what way is “economically disadvantaged” an improvement on the plain English word “poor”?
Continue reading “Being PC to the Point of Idiocy”

[Previously in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.]

There’s a saying in Hindi. “Raja vyapari toh praja bhikari.” If the ruler involves himself in business, the citizens are reduced to begging. Good old fashioned down to earth practical wisdom. Astonishing isn’t it that a people whose ancestors include Kautilya are reduced to such a sorry state that they allow the government to mess around in business and they don’t even understand that to be the cause of their immiserization. It’s something of a mystery. Well, not really. There are plausible explanations of how this came to be. For now, let’s look at the telecom scam and the press has been reporting on it. If you know the details already, there’s nothing new for you in this post.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams — Part 5”

[Previously in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.]

To the rather distinguished list of superlatives about India — the largest democracy, etc. — we can add “India is the largest banana republic in the world.” The Wikipedia notes that “the purpose of a banana republic is commercial profit by collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, whereby the profits derived from private exploitation of public lands is private property, and the debts incurred are public responsibility.” Generalize “public lands” in there to mean “public resources” and you have a pretty good description of what we have going on in India.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams — Part 4”

[Previously in this series: Part 1, Part 2.] Human behavior is complex and appropriately so since humans are complex entities. It is hard to analyze, understand and predict how people will behave in general. Compare that to inanimate matter. Basic laws of thermodynamics, a few laws of motion, a few conservation laws — and you pretty much know what to expect. Still there is one useful generalization about humans which goes a long way in explaining how we behave: we respond to incentives. Most simply (and perhaps simplistically) stated, carrots and sticks matter.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams — Part 3”

[Follow up to Part 1.] We will examine two issues now. Who actually pays for the spectrum? And, the nature of competition in the market as opposed to competition for the market. Later we will examine the notion of multiple equilibria and what the social welfare consequences of multiple equilibria are.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams — Part 2”

The news is that the telecom minister in appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet finally resigned. The charge against him is that he sold off some spectrum at prices that brought in $X in revenues to the government, which is about Rs 1,70,000 Cr (~$40 billion) less than $Y which would have been the revenue had the spectrum been sold using some other method such as an auction or whatever. Time for me to inject some sanity in the insane figure of Rs 1.7 lakh crores being bandied about by the media.
Continue reading “The King of All Telecom Scams”

And now to sit down and consider the comments made on the three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of “A Tale of Two Countries.” I hope to consolidate all the comments into major themes to keep this as short and succinct as possible. First let’s address a basic question. Who is responsible for the state that India is in? Is it the people or is it the leaders? The short clichéd answer is “it takes two to tango.” Ok, you will say, but who started it? It is hard to determine that to everyone’s satisfaction. Did the chicken come first or was it the egg? Putting the blame on one party leaves the matter in a Zen-like quantum indeterminate state of the sound of one hand clapping. (Ponder that for a bit if you will.)
Continue reading “Takes Two to Tango”