In yesterday’s musings on whether education promotes development, I had promised to outline a proposal for making India 100 percent literate within three years. Here is the modest proposal.

Back in February I had examined the matter of why education is underprovided in India. My insistence that basic education was a necessity for development prompted Alok Mittal to ask about the connection between economic development and education.

“My uncle died sadly due to his habit of drinking tea?”
“That’s amazing! I have heard of people dieing because of alcohol. But tea?”
“Yes, tea lead to his death. He was crossing the road to get himself a cup of tea, and a bus ran over him. Tea caused his untimely demise.”

You may think it’s funny. But wait till you see the conclusion drawn from the following. This is from a report by my friend Priya Ganapati of rediff.com:
Jhunjhunwala cites a case where …

Suhit Anantula forwarded an open letter to Krugman from Arnold Kling. In it, Kling told Krugman that he (Krugman) was using too many M type arguments (M for “motivation”) and not enough C type arguments (C for “consequence”) when Krugman argues for or against certain policies. I think that Kling’s letter is worth reading. And I believe that Kling is mistaken.
Kling takes Krugman to task saying that he should eschew M arguments and concentrate on C arguments to make his point. Economists, Kling claims, …

Prashant has raised a very interesting point. And one of the more important statements he makes is “… several religions of the world preach that material belongings are unimportant.”

I have been writing this blog for a year. I have learnt a bit and I hope that it was not a waste a time for those who visit it occassionally. About 100 unique visitors show up every day on the average, and every day a few write in with comments or an email to me. Thank you all.
On reviewing the archives, I note a glaring omission. The blog needs some humor. Sure the topic is extremely serious. But one can definitely make a serious point with humor. So …

It is said that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. I would go one step further and say that one should not ascribe to malice or stupidity what can be explained by basic self-interest. In other words, the power of incentives. Incentives matter and just like you can explain all sorts of natural phenomena by understanding the law of gravitation, you can explain all sorts of diverse economic puzzles by asking what are the incentives.
Consider this. BBC News on Sept 3rd …

I was pondering outsourcing yesterday and ran out of pondering time. Now that I have some pondering time, I thought I would continue with my pondering of outsourcing. {“ponder”: interesting word, isn’t it? Perhaps I should look it up… Here is what one source on the web says:
To weigh in the mind; to view with deliberation; to examine carefully; to consider attentively.
Syn: To Ponder, Consider, Muse.
Usage: To consider means to view or contemplate with fixed thought. To ponder is to dwell upon …

Via Rajesh Jain, I came to know of NY Times report on Paul Samuelson’s essay in an upcoming issue of JEP. I am probably one of the very few who have not read Samuelson’s celebrated book on introductory economics. That is so because I never studied undergraduate economics. My introduction to economics was at the graduate level and the first books on economics I read were Hal Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis and Bhagwati and Srinivasan’s Lectures on International Trade. I learnt undergraduate economics later while teaching …

The internet is huge. It is bigger than one can imagine. We are fortunate that we have access to the internet. And I feel for those who do not have access to this astounding wealth of information and possible source of wonder, amazement, delight, instruction, and possibly enlightenment.
Take for instance a website such as number27. You can spend so much time getting informed and getting entertained at the same time. Check it out sometime. [Thanks to Sonal's blog for the link to number27.]
How do we bring down the barriers …

A friend of mine, who was a fellow grad student at UC Berkeley, gave me as a gift Michael Bishop’s How to Win the Nobel Prize [Harvad Univ Press 2003]. “In 1989 Micheal Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery tha normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer”. I’d like to quote from the chapter, People and Pestilence, because it is relevant to my obsession with India’s population problem.

Every now and then, I screw up enough courage to read the newspapers. I am faint of heart and avoid newspapers because they generally report such stuff that nightmares are made of, such as Islamic terrorism killing a few hundred in Russia (recently but around the world with sickening regularity.) But occasionally they report news from a surreal world and my morbid curiosity wins over my basic distaste of horror stories. A few days ago, I came across an item that gladdened my heart: Sibal plans GPS project to help …

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoe–and ships–and sealing wax– Of cabbages–and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.”
An item titled the economics of software caught my eye on Rajesh Jain’s blog. Rajesh quotes from an article by Bryan Cantrill which begins with:
Software is like nothing else in the history of human endeavor unlike everything else we have ever built, software costs nothing to manufacture, and it never wears out. Yet …

In response to my recent post on the priorities of the Indian judicial system, Venkat commented in jest:
Hey Atanu! Seems like you are passing the bucks too much to karma? Jus’ joking.
He was obviously refering to my closing line, “It is all Karma, neh?”. Although he did not mean it seriously, I think that there is a pervasive misconception about the concept of karma which we need to remove seriously.
The word “karma” does not mean ‘fate’. It means “work or …

Well, now we can all sleep soundly. Justice and reason have triumphed against the formidable forces of evil that had threatened to undermine the very basic fabric of our millenia old civilization. Our future is assured, our children can now grow up in a land of milk and honey, we can walk the streets without fear and with our heads held high. We can now proclaim with pride Mera Bharat Mahan and truly believe that India is Shining.
For those who have not heard the momentous news, let …