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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Hi from Singapore

Hi from Singaore, one of my favorite cities. I am writing this from the Overseas Family School (OFS) during a break in my meeting with David Perry, the man who founded OFS.

Ah, yes, the weather. The regular afternoon downpour occurred on schedule around 3:30 PM. It rained cats and dogs. David says that these days they have monsoons round the year. Climate change is definitely evident in Singapore. We did not get into whether it is anthropogenic climate change or not.

What I like about Singapore is that the city is neat and clean. Some say that it is sterile. Maybe so. But I would take sterile over disease any day of the week. Of course, fertile trumps sterile. I am convinced that there is a way to get to fertile from sterile. I think that the transition from disease to fertile has to go through the sterile phase. Cleaning up is not a very attractive job but at some point one has to do it.

Laters.

Pune DeCi

“Pune DeCi” is a designer city started in 2010 and completed by 2016. Just 30 kilometers outside the old city of Pune, about 100 square kilometers of land was acquired. The government of Maharashtra, the state where Pune is located, was a partner in the “Pune DeCi Development Authority” and had a stake of 20 percent in the project for which it supplied all the land which was basically non-prime land. Long term bonds raised the approximately $1 billion initial investment required for the first improvements.
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Land Development

When I first moved to the US, I was struck by the phenomenon of shopping malls located far away from the city, about an hour along some highway. Land, it occurred to me, was cheap outside the city and what they did was to build these huge malls that were in some sense islands of urban activities in the middle of rural areas.
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The Decline of Violence

If you are in the mood for some thought-provoking hope-giving reading this weekend, I recommend Steven Pinker’s essay “The History of Violence“:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

[Hat tip: Yuvaraj.]

The Importance of Agriculture in GDP

[Repost of a July 2003 article.]

A head’s up from Rajesh Jain on an article Asia Times Online titled Why India’s Economy Lags Behind China’s got me thinking once again about popular misconceptions about development matters. Journalists are particularly susceptible to some of these. An example appears in the article. Continue reading “The Importance of Agriculture in GDP”

Background Brief: Iran

Every now and then, suddenly things make a lot of sense when one gets to know the background story. Keith Hudson’s latest dispatch on the Iran situation is one such succinctly described brief. Here it is for the record.
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Coordination of the Factors

Cities are engines of growth because they “manufacture” wealth. That is why rich economies are predominantly urban, and those economies that are largely rural are poor. Therefore the transition from a poor economy to a rich one depends on the transition of the majority of the population from being rural to urban. The scale and quality of the basic habitation unit determines the success of an economy. A large number of small villages is sufficient for poverty; a number of large cities is necessary for prosperity. Economic growth is both a cause and consequence of urbanization, as can be seen anywhere around the world.
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Of Buffaloes and Children

The basic law of economics, of supply and demand, is a bitch. Like gravity, it is all-pervasive and you would have as much success overturning it as overturning the law of gravitational attraction or inventing the much sought after perpetual motion machine. It is primarily ignorance of basic physical conservation laws that makes designers of perpetual motion machines attempt the impossible. A similar lamentable ignorance of economics also impels people to act as if the iron law of supply and demand can be ignored.
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