India Needs Cities

Well, well, what do you know! Just as I had finished a series on why India needs to have cities for its economic growth and therefore development (see the last post in the series, Make No Little Plans), my friend Alok pointed me to a Scientific American report dated 17th April by Nikhil Swaminathan titled “If You Can Make it There… Cities Are the Greatest Generators of Innovation and Wealth.” He writes of a study that “finds increased social interaction of urban life fuels leads to a more productive populace.”

I take the risk of quoting that report in full just in case one of these days it goes behind a subscription wall.
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Where have all the leaders gone?

Lee Iacocca asks that question in his book.

His concern — correctly, in my opinion — is with the lack of leadership in the US. But with some substitutions in the names and a few other changes, he could as well been talking about India. At least, the US is fortunate enough that it has an 82-year old ex-CEO to tell it like it is. Where are they in India?
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Rambling on about Seatbelts

To get back to Pune from Mumbai on Saturday, since I had some luggage, I took a cab instead taking a bus or a train as I usually do. Later, on the expressway, I regretted not taking the bus as I feel safer in a bus on Indian roads. As the car entered the highway, I reached for the seatbelt. Yes, the seatbelt was there but the end into which to plug it in was nowhere to be found. It was trade-off time: should I continue to sit the backseat without wearing a seatbelt or move up to the front seat and be belted in. I continued to sit in the back and hoped for the best. The driver, however, promptly took off his seatbelt. I asked him why. He said that they ticket people only in Mumbai for not wearing seatbelts, not on the expressway.
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Life is Cheap

Very cheap in India. Alistair Pareira, a 21 year old, in a fit of drunken driving, ran over a bunch of sleeping people a few months ago in Mumbai. He successfully killed seven (including one pregnant woman and two children) and injured eight others.

Those who died were poor. The judgement was that it was a case of rash driving. The judge Ajit Mishra ruled that the drunken driver was not guilty of culpable homicide but was just guilty of rash driving.

The driver is a rich kid. It is amazing how badly the police mess up an investigation when rich people are invovled in a crime.
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Make No Little Plans

Think Big

There is something in the nature of the world that it is sometimes paradoxically more difficult to make small changes than to make big ones. Logically consistent big changes are more likely to succeed because of the interconnectedness of the world.
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Random Act of Violin

Senseless Beauty

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears it . . .

Go read the wonderful essay titled Pearls Before Breakfast in the Washington Post. It will make you wonder.

A Forest Fire

Flashback (Part 2)

“It began with a simple realization that no one is as smart as we are. That is, a collection of very smart people is smarter than any one person however smart. Experts and expertise matters, and therefore amateurs and novices cannot be as good in figuring out the choices that confronted them. The collective wisdom of a group of smart people articulated a vision and an associated roadmap.”
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Wireless Broadband in Singapore

Singapore gets it. I am at the Funan Center, a shopping center, for lunch. Besides lunch, I also get to check mail on the wireless broadband provided gratis by the city. I flipped open my laptop, connected to wireless@sg and here I am blogging away.

The availability of public goods increases the utility of private goods. It is also true that one has to sometimes compensate for the lack of public goods by a greater investment in private goods. Places like Singapore are to some extent rich because the efficiency of private goods is high because public goods are efficiently and optimally provided.

This place is good.

The Future Past

Flashback

The year is 2020. For nearly 12 years, India has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 12 percent more than quadrupling the per capita GDP from US$500 in 2008 to $2000, placing India in the league of middle-income economies. Stark poverty is a thing of the past. In much less than a generation, the population transitioned from being 70 percent rural to being less than 20 percent rural. Agricultural labor is only 15 percent of total labor participation, down from 60 percent in 2008. Farm incomes are six times what they used to be. The $3 trillion economy shows no signs of slowing down.
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