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.

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]

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? (1995) 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 …

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 till we …

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 situationis dire.

In my last post I claimed that the fundamental role of ICT is reduction of transaction costs. What, you may ask, is transaction costs? The answer is this: pretty much everything is transaction costs, with a little bit of physical stuff thrown in.
In California, you can buy a loaf of bread for about $2. The basic materials that go into the making of the bread — wheat, primarily — is about $0.07. Then there is some energy required for baking it and transporting it. Add …

It is worth pondering this question: What exactly is the role of ICT in any economy?
This week, I would like to address myself to that question in detail. The answer can be succinctly stated as: It reduces transaction costs. It will take a pretty long time to explore that answer. But first a few personal experiences to set the stage would be appropriate.
Today I called up a local store which sells “white goods” (major appliances such as washing machines, etc.) …

Dear Chief Minister of West Bengal Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya:
I have come to learn that there is some possibility of renaming Park Street as Mother Teresa street and erecting her statue.
I think this is a very bad idea. The image of Kolkata has been forever tarnished as a result of Mother Teresa’s activities. For greater details on why this is so, I would urge you to read what some neutral observers have to say about the lady. I have a few articles on the subject and I recommend a book …

I keep waiting for the real monsoons to show up in Mumbai. Do they have any thunder and lightening and huge downpours around here or does this anemic occassional rain showers pass for the monsoons? Thank goodness that I went to Lonavla last weekend with a bunch of guys from work. As we entered the Western Ghats, we passed through the mother of all rain storms. Waterfalls by the hundreds cascaded down the rocky cliffs at the edges of the Mumbai-Pune highway. When we reached Lonavla, the downpour had created …

In a collection of essays called The Origin and Evolution of Intelligence (Scheibel and Schopf, eds.), Steven Picker’s article Evolutionary Biology and the Evolution of Language starts off with the assertion In Biology Uniqueness is Common and then immediately proceeds to give a stunning counterexample of that claim.
The elephant’s trunk is 6 feet long, 1 foot thick, and contains 60,000 muscles. Elephants can use their trunks to uproot trees, stack timber, or carefully place huge logs into position when recruited to build bridges. They can …

As the song goes, I was born under a wanderin’ star. Lately my wandering has been confined to attending ICT for development shindigs around the country. But it gets mighty tiring. So I thought that it is about time to go see the world at large and renew my credentials as a truly homeless person. I suppose I am a gypsy at heart, a gypsy from a strange and distant land traveling on eternity road in search of … well, one can never be sure, can one?
This time …

A couple of weeks ago, I had discussed A Matter of Rights in connection with the population problem and had concluded that post with
Does a person have a right to inflict pain and suffering on another person? If my action were to lead to immense suffering, and I plead that if you do not allow me to freely act you are impinging on some basic right I have, would you allow me that “right”? Or will you circumscribe my “right” to act as I please because otherwise it …

Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas had remarked that once you
start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think of anything
else. What are the causes of economic growth and how can the process
be enabled is a question that has obsessively occupied some of the
best minds in the world of economics and commerce.

The question takes on an unparalled urgency and importance when applied
to the rural Indian economy because it presents an enormous challenge,
and, consequently, presents an equally great opportunity for making a
difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of …

This is a followup to the comments on my post on Gandhian Self-sufficiency.
It is more than a bit unfortunate that we have a tendency to immediately label any criticism of any person as a sign of disrespect. Any person whose image cannot withstand the harsh glare of honest criticism says something about the fragility of that image. The image takes on a aura of such holiness and awe that any hint of possible flaws is taken as sacrilegious. Taken to an extreme, this …

I am somewhat familiar with the concepts of Satyagraha and non-violence that Gandhi preached and sometimes practiced. They are interesting tools and can be employed effectively in some circumstances. But, like all tools, they too can’t be employed in every case; they are not easy for mere mortals to employ even under favorable circumstances. In fact, they have severe limitations in that they are not general purpose tools but are rather special purpose tools. The interesting thing is irrespective of whether …

Yesterday I started writing about the ICT for development meeting I was at held at ICRISAT at Hyderabad earlier this week. The usual suspects were in attendance. I had met many of them at the MS Swaminathan Policy Makers’ Conference at Chennai a few months ago. One face new to me was Prof Ken Keniston of MIT who gave an opening address.
He made five cautionary points which are worth noting. They are:

Do not get seduced by ICT
Localize, localize, localize
Do realistic …

I have been neglecting this blog because I have been traveling to places exotic. Well, maybe not all that exotic since it was just Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. I had gone there to speak at a conference on ICT and development.
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