Atanu Dey on India’s Development

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Entries from January 2004

Agriculture and Development

January 30th, 2004 · 6 Comments

Rajesh Jain writes on Indian outsourcing:
Outsourcing is good for India - but it will only provide a few million jobs at best. What’s also needed is for Indians to come up with innovations to raise the incomes of the rest of India - the 700 million in rural India. Only then will India […]

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Tags: Development

Why don’t they feel the pain?

January 21st, 2004 · 11 Comments

Ever wonder why poor nations are poor and rich nations are rich? I don’t. I believe I know why the poor stay poor and the rich get rich. Consider this from The Wall Street Journal of Jan 19th. The report is titled India and US to Improve Ties. Here is an excerpt:
Washington also […]

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Tags: Conflict · My Favorite Bits · Why is India Poor?

Interesting Games

January 17th, 2004 · 5 Comments

Here are two interesting items. The first is from Burkhard Schipper, an economist at the University of Bonn. He created a game where you play as a firm against other firms and find out how you did against the computer and how you stand relative to other players. It takes about 5 minutes.
Talking of internet […]

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Tags: Fun Stuff

Knowledge and Information

January 16th, 2004 · 4 Comments

One of my basic convictions is that symbol manipulation ability is what distinguishes intelligent entities from non-intelligent ones. For manipulating increasingly larger chunks of symbols, we create higher level symbols which encode a number of lower level symbols. Vocabulary is then that set of symbols. I would define an […]

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Tags: Information and Communications Technology

Numbers – 5

January 13th, 2004 · No Comments

The Business Standard of 12th Jan 2004 carries an item on page 3 with the heading 33 million more Indians in poor list in 2001-02. The percentage of people below the poverty line is estimated to be around 25. That is, India has about 250 million people who are so unimaginably poor that […]

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Tags: Population

Numbers — 4

January 10th, 2004 · 1 Comment

No one reading this is likely to be suffering from malnutrition, illiteracy, lack of health care, lack of drinking water, and any of the marvels of modern technology such as digital gizmos and jet travel. That is so because we are sitting on top of a very large pyramid at the bottom of […]

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Tags: Population

HMS Titanic — 4

January 10th, 2004 · No Comments

In the last few days I have been trying to understand what caused the Titanic to sink. To belabor the obvious I must admit that I consider the sinking of the Titanic to be a metaphor. There are important lessons that I would like to draw from it.

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Tags: My Favorite Bits · Population

Used cars and used computers

January 10th, 2004 · Comments Off

From Rajesh’s Emergic weblog an item on second hand Japanese cars in the third world. I am reproducing my comment on Rajesh’s blog here for the record.

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Tags: Alternative Viewpoint

Numbers – 3

January 7th, 2004 · 1 Comment

Joel Cohen’s book How Many People Can The Earth Support should be required reading for Indian policy makers. Here is more from the introduction:
The unprecedented growth in human numbers and in human power to alter the Earth requires, and will require, unprecedented human agility in adapting to environmental, economic and social problems, sometimes […]

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Tags: Population

HMS Titanic — 3

January 7th, 2004 · 1 Comment

Those in charge of the Titanic disregarded the warnings. And those who were not in charge were blissfully unaware of the fact that those in charge were not fully competent.
The Titanic had sealed its own fate by the cavalier disregard to those ice warnings by their Marconi operators. Particularly the last two, […]

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Tags: Population

Numbers — 2

January 5th, 2004 · 1 Comment

A few years ago, my college at UC Berkeley was searching for a dean. Prof. Joel Cohen was invited to check out the College of Natural Resources. I asked him about his book How Many People Can the Earth Support? over lunch.
A few years ago, he said, a journalist had called him […]

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Tags: Population

The Convent and Cloyne Court

January 5th, 2004 · 2 Comments

As a graduate student, I decided to spend my first term at UC Berkeley at the University Students’ Cooperative Association (USCA). The USCA is the largest student housing cooperative in North America modeled after the Rochdale Principles. The USCA is student run and student owned. In all we had about 20 houses and 4 apartment […]

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Tags: Poverty

HMS Titanic — 2

January 5th, 2004 · No Comments

The HMS Titanic was a giant of a ship. It was doing 21 knots that fateful night.
Now it was 9.40pm, and still the ice warnings came. At no time had Captain Smith or the senior officers ordered a cautionary reduction in speed, or had gone to the trouble of having extra lookouts posted, something which […]

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Tags: Population

Numbers

January 5th, 2004 · 1 Comment

Exponential growth can be a terrifying thing. We all know the story of the king who was foolish enough to grant a boon to one who was familiar with the concept of exponential growth. To recount, the king said, “Ask and I will grant it to you.”
The man said, “All I want is […]

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Tags: Population

The HMS Titanic

January 3rd, 2004 · 1 Comment

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
What an absolutely evocative expression. I cannot get that out of my head every time I muster up enough courage to read the newspapers. Most of those out there on the top deck are busy with something trivial while below decks the situation is dire.
It was […]

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Tags: Population

The Rationality of Underdevelopment

January 2nd, 2004 · 3 Comments

Dorothy L Sayers took a rational view of the world and stressed the causal nature of the universe. She wrote:
War is a judgement that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe…Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of […]

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Tags: Development

Please Visit India in 2020

January 2nd, 2004 · No Comments

This is from the NOT A VERY BRIGHT IDEA Department. Mr. Ram Narayanan sent out an email reporting that a US Congressional delegation was going to visit India. Quote:
Congressman Crowley said, “…With over 300 million citizens considered middle class and with a burgeoning economy and geo-political role, strengthening US-India relations is more important […]

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Tags: Alternative Viewpoint · Random Draws

The Land Grant Colleges and Universities of the US

January 1st, 2004 · 1 Comment

The development of an economy is a natural consequence of the shift of labor from agriculture to manufacturing, and subsequently from manufacturing to services. Note that the shift refers to the labor; agriculture has to go on still but with fewer people.

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Tags: Development · Rural Development