The Dark Ages come to Denmark in broad daylight, as a Pakistani man murders his sister in a public street …
Calmly and methodically, big brother stoops over his little sister while shooting one projectile after the other into her. Her spouse, affected by several shots to the abdomen, can only look on helplessly, while his wife is executed by her own family.

“Fossil fuel is dead,” declared CJ.
CJ likes to make those kinds of superficially profound statements. We were meeting after a long time. I was in Delhi for a conference and caught up with CJ at the Taj Mansingh Hotel coffee shop. We were discussing the spike in the gas prices.
“Dead or not, seventy dollars a barrel for crude was bad news for India considering that India imports about half of its energy needs. Will slow down the economy a bit, won’t it?” I said.

Nothing new about the communists being pro-poor. They make people poor whereever they find a way. Today India is suffering the effects of commie policies. Today, 29th Sept, the commies have struck again in India crippling the transportation system. One day’s loss of production and productivity will add about a few million people to the ranks of the poor. How so you may ask? Simple, there are people at the margin. When the country grows poorer by a little amount, the people who were at the margin suffer the consequences …

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Science paper The Tragedy of the Commons introduced many to the problem implicit in open access to common-pool resources. I believe that every thinking person must understand the tragedy of the commons because living in a world which is getting congested, we have to know the causes of our problems if we have to have a chance at solving them.
Here is Hardin within in his book Living within Limits:
… Professional publicists know there is always a good living to be made by catering to the public’s …

{via Navin Jaganathan}

So what else is new?
And truth be told, Bush is the worst disaster to hit the world, not just the US.

Or What Economists Do
What the heck do economists do is a question that does not baffle many people because they “know” what economists do. I know it did not baffle me. I was not taught economics in high school, and had an entirely forgettable few lectures ostensibly on economics sometime during my undergraduate in engineering. Given this ignorance, I had a vague notion that economics had something to do with money. I think I conflated economists with finance people and accountants. But I was not baffled because I was too …

Saturday silliness follows. Apologies to those who don’t know Hindi.
Windows Commands in Hindi:
Khidkiyan version shoonya bindu shoonya ek (0.01)
Phile = File
Kholo = Open
Bandh Karo = Close
Naya = New
Khatara = Old

A friend recently asked me for some advice on how to improve his understanding of economics. I asked my favorite advisor CJ to take a shot at it. Here is what he wrote, for the record:
Each of us has a unique learning style, of course. Here is mine.
Learning economics better requires reading. But here is the rub: one could read disjointed stuff on the web all day long and still not understand what it is all about. In fact, reading too much on the subject which is more in the …

The Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (REGS) has the word guarantee in it and whatever else it may or may not guarantee, it certainly guarantees greater overall poverty than would be the case without the REGS.
In brief, REGS does not increase the aggregate production of the economy, nor does it increase productive capacity; it merely redistributes incomes by giving money to those in the rural areas. The first order effect of this diversion of resources is that other projects which have the potential to increase production and increase productive capacity do …

Guess who said the following and about whom?
“Throughout the 20th century small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.”
See the comments for the answer.

Some events have the power to imprint themselves on one’s memory. One morning about four years ago, my roomie Wayne knocked on the door at the ungodly hour of 6 AM to say “you may want to watch this.” In the living room, the TV was on. His mother had called from the east coast to tell him to turn on the TV. From then on to about 2 PM I stood transfixed watching the towers fall down. If I hadn’t had to teach that afternoon, I would have been …

What is the real story behind the disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose? Why should we–60 years after the event–care about what happened? Who was he and does it really matter?
I think that there is a deep mystery and the solution of that mystery may have profound implications in our understanding of our own history. Only recently I have started to learn something of the issue and I wrote about it last month. Desh Kapoor recently pointed me to a site that could serve as the starting point for …

A few days ago, I plugged in a gizmo to this blog which keeps track of where the visitors of this blog come from. Here is the Clustermap for this site. Currently the site lists about 2800 visits in the last 5 days.
I am surprised to note that the US counts for the largest number of visitors to this blog. One solitary dot (1-9 visitors) for Canada; none from Mexico (Carlos Munos, I thought that you would visit your old officemate’s blog occassionally); a few dozen from the South …

In response to my post about the KGB and Indian democracy, one reader responded by writing that “should we abide by your definition of democracy, there would be very few truely democratic countries around.”

OK, if you thought that this blog has no mysteries associated with it, you are wrong. Here is a mystery for you to ponder. About a year and a half ago, I made an offer on this blog: I will send a gmail invite to anyone who emails me a request. I made it clear that sticking a comment at the end of the post asking for an invite will not get a response from me. One has to email me.
People started posting comments asking for gmail invites. Then …

It’s not surprising but it is still news to me that the KGB attempted to steer the Indian ship of state. I grew up hearing rumors of the CIA doing all sorts of nasty things around the world, of course. The KGB, as the other spy in the real life adaptation of the Mad Spy Versus Spy, was as active I conjectured. Clearly India had enough commies crawling around for the KGB to find willing agents. So when I read (via The Acorn) the TIMESonline of the UK report …

Bill Maher is funny. I always liked his politically incorrect stance. Here he is asking for a recall election for the president as they have in California. The open letter to GW Bush is priceless. Here is the link to the show.

It is common knowledge that the Indian economy which was securely imprisoned since independence in 1947 has undergone a radical transformation and has seen a departure from its dismal 3 percent “Nehru Growth” to a more respectable 6 percent and more since the 1980s. There is little room for debate on that fact. What observers appear to disagree on is what were the factors that led to the transition from the “Nehru Growth” to the present.
Very broadly speaking, here is a thumb-rule I use to figure out what factors …

“What about the morons?”
“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”
“Which they are.”
“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”

That piece of dialog is from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Earlier in …

… no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
Earlier this month life for those who were unable to leave the city of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina struck turned decidedly Hobbesian. Take away the basic necessities of life from a bunch of people – water, food, shelter – and soon enough the struggle for existence reveals nature red in tooth …