Yesterday’s Empires into Dust
The Buddha’s enlightenment was centered around the realization that the universe is characterized by impermanence (called annicha in Pali) and change, that nothing abides eternally. That event occurred when he was intensely meditating under a tree 2,500 years ago in a grove. That place is known today as Bodh Gaya, a small town in the state of Bihar. There is a certain aptness to the Buddha’s realization about impermanence when one considers Bihar.

Being lost is worth the coming home, as Neil Diamond observed in his song “Stones” many many years ago. Traveling to Delhi and Patna was worth the leaving behind of those places, I feel. Now I am back in Pune, the weather is awesome, and I am fully charged up with all sorts of interesting tales to tell. Well, if not to tell, at least to contemplate at leisure since for the past ten days I have been extremely busy. For every hour of observing I do, it takes me …

If you have been wondering whatever happened to yours truly, wonder no more. The last few days I have been in Mumbai, attending the Sun Technovate ‘07 — “INDIA — the Next Big Idea.” Got a chance to see Scott McNealy, chairman and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Scott and three others students at Stanford University, including our very own Vinod Khosla, started Sun. (SUN — Stanford University Network!)

From the article How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories: “MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems and online documents for educational purposes. And, in most cases, each success story also has served as a springboard to create more open source projects.”
The information exists out there. The challenge is to make it accessible — both physically and mentally. Physical …

Everything has a cost and this arises from the basic fact that we are mortals. We are given a finite amount of time. Time is the limiting constraint, not money or stuff. The more stuff out there that clamors for our attention, the more acutely we wish “had we but world enough, and time.”[1] Aside from material stuff, we are also drowning in information. They call it the “attention economy.”[2] The result of a surfeit of things to attend to is the premium on attention.

The hang drum looks a bit like a flying saucer from some ’60s science fiction B-movie. But it does sound very nice. While the clip is loading, read below the fold about the hang drum.

[Previous post: Part 9.]
The liberalization of the education sector in India, that is, allowing free entry – especially for-profit firms – will result in increased supply of educational services. Here I will explore the predictable consequences of this. We begin by recognizing that education is not an undifferentiated homogeneous good; there are distinct levels within it, from basic primary education to post-secondary and tertiary levels. Each level has different pay-back periods for the “return on investment.” Furthermore, different people have different abilities to pay for the various levels of education.

I came across this site lee-kuan-yew.com which appears to be a portal with information on Lee Kuan Yew, his speeches and his writings. I am pretty pleased that right up there is a link to one of my favorite series of posts on this blog: Lee Kuan Yew on India. Read it but be warned that it is a bit long and it is not a pretty picture. But then, when it comes to what I write about, it ain’t pretty anyway.

Freedom
By liberalizing the education sector I mean that it has to be made totally free of government control and involvement. Whoever wants to provide educational services must be free to do so, be it domestic or international, for profit or not for profit, at the primary, secondary, or tertiary level. What would be the expected benefits of doing so?
The supply of educational services will increase, the quality will improve, and prices will come down. These are all everyday first-order efficiency effects of letting markets work. The second-order effects will …

I was born in India. Most of the time I am quite content that the land of my birth is not a hell-hole. But every now and then I am rudely awakened to the fact that to a very large extent, it is ruled by a bunch of slaves, criminals and myopic morons. I read Taslima Nasreen’s heartfelt question “What is my crime?” with rising disgust and distaste for what India appears to be at times — a pathetic Third-world country with the morals of a bottom-dwelling creature and the …

Scarcity
Consider this list: cars, scooters, telephone service, airline ticket, seats in schools and colleges, electricity, and railway tickets. Think of the year 1980. Notice the common feature of the list: shortages. Now consider the list in the year 2007. Notice some things on the list are no longer scarce. It cannot be mere coincidence that only those items which the government has released it stranglehold on are no longer scarce. Could it be possible that if the government lets go of its vise-like grip of schools and colleges, that shortage …

Alan Blinder claims that “Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me” in a Washintonpost.com article. He has dug up an old 2004 US election issue. He begins with
I’m a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I’m being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of …

So what do you know — Christopher Hitchens has become a naturalized American citizen. That’s simply great. I can prove syllogistically that Hitchens doesn’t think he is god. Here’s how:
1. Hitchens thinks he is great. (I agree.)
2. God is not great. (According to Hitchens as the title of his latest book is God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”)
3. Therefore, Hitchens doesn’t think he is god. Q.E.D.
(Proving Hitchens is allah is left as an exercise for the interested reader. )
Here’s Hitchens speaking with Lou Dobbs on CNN.

Markets Work
Imagine for a bit what it would be like if education were provided by private sector firms. Can it be done? Would a socially optimal amount, variety, and quality of education be provided? Would there be market failures? If so, how can those market failures be corrected? Can one devise mechanisms to correct those failures?
The answer to whether the private sector can provide education is clearly ‘yes’ because around the world for a very long time private firms have provided education very successfully. Both private sector for-profit and not-for-profit …

It’s been a while since this blog has visited Bush, the POTUS. Here’s Bill Maher psychologically analysing Bush at Crooksandliers.com. It is hard to comprehend the mentality of a population which voted for a stupid person like Bush not once but twice. Words defy me. Oh that reminds me, here’s a google video titled Words Defy Me by the incomparable Jon Stewart.
And talking of stupid people and their stupidity, read the Story of Stupidity at whereelse but stupidity.com. To get a quick feel for the book, I would …

One of my favorite obsessions is information. Naturally so considering that I am an economist, and markets and information are inseparable. Information is the lubricant that keeps the huge big machinery of the market humming. Which is of course why information and communications technology (ICT) is so critical today as the modern world is a huge marketplace where stuff gets exchanged. Globalization (which I define as the integration of markets on a global scale) and the explosion of ICT are conjoined twins.

Incentive Matters
Alistair Cooke in his weekly radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4, A Letter from America, once explained the theory of public choice to his listeners as “the homely but important truth that the politicians are after all just the same as the rest of us.” It is an accessible, though incomplete, definition of what public choice is about. You could read James Buchanan, who in 1986 won the “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” (popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics) “for …

One underhanded way to scare a neoclassical economist out of his wits is to creep up on him and shout “monopoly power.” Economists regard monopolies with the same mixture of dread, contempt and fascination as biologists regard cancer. They recognize the awesome virulent power of monopolies to wreak havoc on their world of mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges. Monopolies, whether public or private, lead to social welfare losses. At the other extreme, perfect competition leads to maximization of social welfare, subject to some reasonable conditions often approximated in the real world.

“Can India Afford its Villages?” is the title of an opinion piece in today’s livemint.com (a joint HT and WSJ newspaper). The subtext says, “The answer to the problems of our rural economy paradoxically lies in urban development.” If you have been reading this blog for a bit, you would immediately suspect that I wrote that piece. Partly so. I co-authored the piece with Reuben Abraham.

The absence of universal basic literacy and education is a constraint on present economic performance and future growth. Doubtless, education is costly but the opportunity cost of not having an education is even higher. The old adage about a stitch in time saving nine holds with special force in the case of basic literacy. Here’s the argument. At most one generation requires help in becoming literate; the children of literate parents are overwhelmingly literate; and the children of illiterate parents are more likely to be illiterate compared to those of …