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 will start to make the transition from an agricultural economy.
I agree that outsourcing is of limited value to the vast majority of Indians who cannot participate in it for obvious reasons. I …

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 sees India becoming a big buyer of U.S.-made arms. In the past two years, India has purchased roughly $200 million of American arms and is in negotiations to purchase P3 Orion maritime-patrol …

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 games, I came across something that is really spooky. I cannot figure this one out. I am pretty clever but that one has me totally puzzled.

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 extensive vocabulary as one with a large number of symbols, that is, the width of the vocabulary. Vocabulary can also be more or less intensive, depending upon the complexity – or depth …

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 they can’t cross the poverty line that is set way below what can be considered necessary for a human existence. For all the progress India is supposedly making, we have increased the absolute numbers …

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 which are the toiling thousands of millions. The top of the pyramid is mostly populated by the white people of affluent western advanced industrialized countries but they are not alone. The economic elite in poor …

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.

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.

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 all at once. The Earth’s human population has entered and rapidly moves deeper into a poorly charted zone where limits on human population size or well-being have been anticipated and may be encountered. …

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, from the Maseba at 7.30pm and the Californian after 11pm. Had they paid attention to them they would have seen they were heading straight into an icefield. Source
The passengers trusted that the …

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 up saying that he was doing a piece on world population and wanted to know from Joel how many people could the earth support. Joel told the caller that he could not answer that …

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 complexes housing about 2,000 students.
The house that I lived in is called Cloyne Court. It used to be a hotel and is even listed as a national historical monument. Cloyne Court housed about …

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 Captain Lord of the Californian had already performed before he called it a day and brought his own vessel to a halt in the ice. When you put-together the ice warnings Titanic had received that …

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 a few pennies. I want one penny on the first square of a chess board, two pennies on the second square, four pennies on the third, eight pennies on the fourth, and so on …

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 a cold and dark night on the 14th of April in the year 1912. The dead calm seas were lit only by moonlight as the HMS Titanic made its maiden voyage from Southampton to New …

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 thinking and living bring about intolerable situations.
It is important to understand the nature of war — that it is a rational response to intolerable situations which have been brought about by wrong ways of …

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 now than ever for trade and security. I commend the Confederation of Indian Industries for putting together this exceptional program to give the delegation a well rounded overview of the political, economic and cultural vitality …

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.