In Praise of Idleness

It makes good sense for the slave master to persuade his slaves that idleness is a sin and he’s doing god’s work when he flogs the slaves to work harder. The harder the slaves work, the more the master can take for himself. But of course the real motive has to be concealed and clothed in moral raiment.

“Work hard, you b*tches, and stop complaining.” That’s what Mohandas Gandhi meant but put it so very piously by saying, “Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.” See what I mean? Continue reading “In Praise of Idleness”

Government as the Overlord

Even though I know precious little about the formation of mass psychology, I am certain that how the citizens of a nation collectively view the world must have a causal relationship with the fortunes of a nation.

As individuals we are singularly powerless to alter the environment we grow up in. We have to take that as a given, outside our control, exogenous. How we view the world is not of our choosing. Our mental models are formed largely unconsciously, and shaped contingently. It is an enormous intellectual challenge for us to critically examine our conditioning — and in most cases plain old-fashioned brainwashing by state institutions  — and change our perception of the world.

Most critically, how people perceive government and governance matters. The what, why, and how of government differs from nation to nation, and those differences are consequential. To change how the collective’s conception of government and governance is to change its destiny.

This line of thinking is motivated by an email that my colleague Rajesh Jain received, and forwarded to me. I include the full text of the email and my response, for the record. Continue reading “Government as the Overlord”

The Peculiar Case of the Somali Shilling

Sudipta, a dear friend in the Silicon Valley, asked me to comment on a March 2013 article titled “Orphaned currency, the odd case of Somali shillings.” The piece is about how the Somali shilling continued to circulate even after the Somali central bank was literally destroyed in the civil war around 1991. The bank notes were “orphaned.”

When Somalia collapsed into civil war in January 1991, the doors of the Central Bank of Somalia were blown apart, its safes were blasted, and all cash and valuables were looted.* But something odd happened—Somali shilling banknotes continued to circulate among Somalians. To this day orphaned paper shillings are used in small transactions, despite the absence of any sort of central monetary authority.

I will leave you to read up that article before continuing here.  Continue reading “The Peculiar Case of the Somali Shilling”

Winter Solstice Greetings

The Winter Solstice began yesterday at 5:23 PM Eastern Time. It was the shortest day of the year and the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere. Around here (Latitude: 39.68N Longitude: 75.75W) the length of the day was approximately 9 hours and 21 minutes. Happy Winter Solstice.

Here’s a track from George Winston on the Windham Hill label. Continue reading “Winter Solstice Greetings”

Economic Growth, Population and Poverty Numbers

I normally don’t do numbers. But in this post, I will have to refer to numbers because wealth and poverty have to be understood quantitatively too. So let’s do the numbers.

It is an amazing fact that extreme poverty has fallen both in absolute and relative terms. The world’s population living in extreme poverty has dropped from 42% in 1981 to 11% in 2013. The world population was 4.5 billion in 1981, and 7.2 billion in 2013. Therefore in absolute numbers, extreme poverty numbers dropped from 1.9 billion to 0.8 billion. Over one billion people climbed out of extreme poverty, mostly in China. Good job, China. Continue reading “Economic Growth, Population and Poverty Numbers”

The British are Gone but the British Raj Lives on

“It was [in India] the British learned the art of imperial power. … India was decisive. It gave Britain the resources, the market, the manpower, and the prestige to build a world-wide empire. And in the years to come they worked feverishly to secure that prize.”  Continue reading “The British are Gone but the British Raj Lives on”

Strangling the Politicians

In my last post, On the Distress of Farmers, I wrote “that Indians will never be free until the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.” I was echoing the European Enlightenment figure Denis Diderot (1713-1784) who wrote:

La nature n’a fait ni serviteur ni maître;
Je ne veux ni donner ni recevoir de lois.
Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,
Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.

Which in English is:

Nature created neither servant nor master;
I seek neither to rule nor to serve.
And its hands would weave the entrails of the priest,
For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings.

[Source: Did Diderot say that.]

Isn’t that a most apposite quote in the context of politicians (the masters) and the people (the servants)?

On the Distress of Indian Farmers – The Introduction

Of the three major sectors of any economy, agriculture is the primary sector. It is prior in time and naturally enough forms the basis for the other two sectors — manufacturing and services. Without a solid foundation provided by an efficient agricultural sector, no society can prosper.

Everybody — factory workers, quantum physicists, doctors, programmers, musicians, writers, politicians — needs food. Farming is the oldest occupation and all civilizations begin as essentially agrarian societies. Agricultural success is the necessary precondition for the advancement of civilization. Without an agricultural revolution there can be no avenues for social, technological, and economic development.

The claim of this essay is that India has not had a comprehensive agricultural revolution. All the other problems that India faces derive from that failure. The good news is that India has the opportunity to have an agricultural revolution. It has always had that opportunity. Primarily because of plain idiocy — let’s not sugarcoat this bitter fact — India has failed in progressing much beyond subsistence agriculture. India’s abysmal poverty follows relentlessly from that fact. Continue reading “On the Distress of Indian Farmers – The Introduction”

Does capitalism destroy jobs?

If by capitalism one means “free market exchanges and production through the use of privately owned capital”, then indeed capitalism destroys jobs — those jobs that are made redundant by increasing the productivity of labor.

Imagine an economy which only produces food, and the only input to food is labor. Further imagine that the productivity of labor is such that on average, one persons’s labor produces only one’s person’s demand for food. In that economy, all the jobs will be in food production.

Now imagine someone invents a machine (that’s capital — a produced means of production) that doubles the productivity of labor. Let’s call it the Great Invention. Now only half the workers are required to produce food for everybody. That’s destroyed half the existing jobs in our economy,

After the Great Invention, half the labor of the entire economy can now make clothes. Clothes were not available to anyone before the Great Invention. Now the clothes makers can trade some of their clothes for food. There are jobs for people making clothes, and on average the consumption bundles includes both food and clothes.

More great inventions follow that make both food and clothes production more efficient. Further loss of jobs from food and clothes production. But now some labor can be devoted to making shelters. Fewer jobs in food and clothes production but more jobs in shelter construction. You get the picture.

The main point is that it is not jobs that we are primarily interested in. What matters is production. And production matters because we are interested in consumption. Were the world so that everything we need fell like manna from the heavens. In that world, we wouldn’t need to work at jobs. We’d spend our time like the lotus eaters of Greek mythology.

The Industrial Revolution released the power of human ingenuity and created wealth (stuff that we value) unimaginable to our ancestors. Untold number of old jobs were lost, and in exchange we gained leisure, and all manner of stuff what we enjoy — from smartphones to air travel to medical services and comfortable homes. That’s capitalism working its magic.

Here’s how rich we have become:

That per capita GDP growth becomes all the more astonishing when you consider that the world population has exploded around 20 times what it was in the 14th century CE.

That, ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues, boys and girls, is the amazing truth about the world we live in. Three cheers for capitalism.