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No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempts to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future. —- Ludwig von Mises
Indian policy makers’ optimism is matched only by their short-sightedness when it comes to dealing with matters of national security. To recount all the instances when they have been caught with their pants down would require a book-length treatment, not a short few paragraphs on a blog. But I cannot pass up the latest blunder in the making. I hope that I don’t have to say I told you so in a few years’ time. I hope I am wrong in my analysis but I am afraid that I will be proved right.
Continue reading “The Iran-India Pipe Bomb”
From The Acorn an important message:
Indian taxpayers are paying for the security of a man who is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Indian soldiers, and through his sponsorship of terrorism, for the deaths of thousands of Indian civilians. Far from showing any remorse, he is brazenly unapologetic about the whole thing.
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Years ago I used to watch a British comedy series called Bless Me, Father on public television. The setting was a church in a small town in England and the stories revolved around the parish priest and his young curate. In one of the episodes, the curate asks, “Father, why do you spend so much time with the rich in our parish? Don’t you think that the poor need our help more than the rich?” The father replies: “No, the rich need us more. They don’t even have the comfort of the illusion that money is the answer to all their problems.”
Ethan Zuckerman invited me to join in a Global Voices Brainstorm on Tuesday 29th March at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. It was a great opportunity for me to meet with many people associated with Global Voices:
Global Voices is an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard.
Check out the Global Voices Manifesto when you get a chance.
Economic change is a process, and in this book I shall describe the nature of that process. In contrast to Darwinian evolutionary theory, the key to human evolutionary change is the intentionality of the players. The selection mechanisms in Darwinian evolutionary theory are not informed by beliefs about the eventual consequences. In contrast, human evolution is guided by the perceptions of the players; choices — decisions — are made in the light of those perceptions with the intent of producing outcomes downstream that will reduce uncertainty of the organizations — political, economic, and social — in pursuit of their goals. Economic change, therefore, is for the most part a deliberate process shaped by the perceptions of the actors about the consequences of their actions. The perceptions comes from beliefs of the players — the theories they have about the consequences of their actions — beliefs that are typically blended with their preferences.
From Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton University Press, 2005.
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)
A few days ago, I wrote about sequencing of interventions for development. Now it is time to ponder the question of leapfrogging, a buzz word very much favored by some who write about emerging economies. For instance, there is the claim that India can leapfrog into a service economy from an agricultural economy without the intermediate stage of a manufacturing economy. I have delved into this matter in the development path of economies and agriculture and development. My position is that India cannot leapfrog from an agricultural to a service economy: it has to have a robust manufacturing sector as well.
Leapfrogging is possible but mostly it is restricted to technologies. For instance, areas of India which had absolutely no telecommunications infrastructure don’t have to go through the sequence of first getting telegraph and then wired telephones and then move on to wireless: they can leapfrog the now obsolete technologies and go directly to wireless. It is always possible – indeed necessary – to leapfrog technologies because advanced technologies are cheaper.
Advances in technologies provide the same functionality at a lower cost and reduced complexity for the user. Consider the VCR. When it was first introduced, they used to have little tuning wheels which needed to be fiddled with before they worked. Later models became plug-and-play.
Unlike technology, you cannot leapfrog the various stages of development. A century ago, to be educated, one had to be literate and numerate. Same holds for today even though we have digital gizmos and computers. Indeed, to be able to effectively use the products of high-technology, literacy is an absolute necessity. Functional skills required for using high-tech all involve the ability to read and reason. I grant that illiterate idiots can use a cell phone, but that is not what I would call the effective use of high technology.
The so-called “digital divide” cannot be bridged by simply installing lots of PCs in areas where they don’t exist and connecting them up to the internet. If the people are unable to use them, they serve no purpose other than to enrich the peddlers of hardware and software. Furthermore, there is the opportunity cost of spending limited resources on useless high-tech gizmos.
You cannot leapfrog development. It cannot be done at an individual level. And it cannot be done at a societal level. Although development paths may differ, the sequencing within a path cannot be radically altered because there are strict dependencies. Basic functional literacy is a pre-requisite to pretty much anything that one does. The use of high-tech depends on literacy and therefore if the population is illiterate, even gifting them with free hardware will not make a difference. The pre-condition for bridging the digital divide is therefore the bridging of the literacy divide.
Of course, there are those who will argue that high tech be used for bridging the literacy divide. In a conference that I had attended some time ago, the question “Can ICTs be useful for rural and remote areas of developing countries, especially the poverty-stricken regions?” was seriously asked. I wrote:
We need to examine that question for a moment. At one level of analysis, it is hard to not answer that question in the affirmative. At another level, it is a meaningless question. Merely because it is syntactically correct does not imply that it has any content. Consider the question:Can magnetic levitation superfast monorail transportation systems be useful for rural and remote areas of developing countries, especially the poverty-stricken regions?
Clearly, yes. Not just magnetic levitation superfast monorail transportation systems, but an almost unending variety of things would be useful for the development of poverty-stricken remote areas. Not merely for those areas, all of those unending variety of things would be useful for the development of not so remote and not so poverty-stricken areas of any developing country. Thus that question is actually content-free.
I think that the fundamental problem of development is one of sequencing, of prioritizing. It is the same question that one has to ask in one’s own personal development: what is the important next step?
A bunch of Indian bloggers are getting together on Saturday 2nd April in NY, NY for lunch. Details are at Seshu’s Tiffinbox. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, as the song goes.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 