Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

I was delighted to hear Javier Milei’s address to the 2024 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. He was absolutely devastating in his support of free-market capitalism and his opposition to big government. After becoming the president of Argentina last month, as a committed libertarian he wants to set his country on a path to economic growth by reducing the size of the government. Continue reading “Javier Milei”

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”