I have previously observed here that India has what I call a “cargo cult democracy.” In India’s neighborhood that is not a distinction. The entire Indian subcontinent suffers from that malady. The short version is that around here democracy as practiced is a simulation, a facsimile that should not be confused with the real thing that has something to do with informed choice based on differing perceptions of priorities that matter in the larger scheme of things.
Informed choice is not a matter that can be delegated to people who are …

One of the more irritating aspects of the change of calendar years is the increase in meaningless messages that land in one’s inbox. I love the internet and the world wide web, but that love is severely strained when I have to wade through gratuitous messages wishing “All” a happy new year. It’s a palpable sign of the Age of the Content-free Communications.

Time to take stock. It’s been a good year overall, but I am sure that 2008 is going to be even better. The trends are all good. Except in the US, thanks to George W Bush. No, I take that back. GWB is only the visible sign of decay, the festering pustule on the diseased political body of the US. I don’t see much hope in the inevitable change of administration post the 2008 presidential elections in the US either. It’s stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.
I …

Good riddance. “Those that live by the sword, die by the sword” as Jesus is supposed to have cautioned Peter according to Matthew.
And as they say in India, “Indian government, hai, hai.”

The Hubble Deep Field and the Most Important Image Ever Taken by Humanity.

Watch it and wonder. Wonder how insignificant our concerns are, how parochial our interests, how utterly immaterial even our greatest conflicts are. Watch it and wonder how ignorant the so-called sacred scriptures of humanity are. The visible universe is 78 billion light-years across. Our galaxy is huge — with about 5 billion stars, one of which is our sun. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Today’s Mint carries my opinion piece “Walking Around the Elephant” — a write-up on my conversation with Pranab Bardhan, professor of economics at UC Berkeley. The transcript of the conversation is also up on the Mint website under the title “Reforms do not address the anxieties of the general population.”

Go read Arun Shourie’s op-ed in today’s Indian Express. I agree with him. I think that passivity in the face of naked aggression is morally wrong. It encourages those who harm society. I have written about that in my post The Unbearable Silliness of Loving One’s Enemies. He touches on that principle.
At another point he mentions that India’s dismal economic growth pushed by socialists had been branded “the Hindu rate of growth.” I call that dismal rate of growth “the Nehru rate of growth.”
The main point is …

The Acorn explains why the US paid big money to Pakistan following a report in the NY Times that “Billions in Aid to Pakistan Was Wasted, Officials Assert” which begins:
After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped.
In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, …

The Acorn remarks (in the context of Narendra Modi’s electoral victory, no doubt) that voters have nothing against an incumbent government that is competent. He says, there is no such thing as anti-incumbency, only anti-incompetency. It is certainly a plausible explanation. But then, how do you explain the continuation of the communists in West Bengal, election after election? They are supremely incompetent and yet keep getting voted back.
I believe the answer is that it is not whether a government fails to deliver that matters — what matters is perception. Perhaps …

I think it was way back in 1999 that Michael Kelly in an op-ed in the Washington Post had asked fellow journalists, “Why does everyone loathe us so? Because, my little preciouses, we are so loathable. … Reporters like to picture themselves as independent thinkers. In truth, with the exception of 13-year-old girls, there is no social subspecies more slavish to fashion, more terrified of originality and more devoted to group-think.”
It appears to me that the above quote could apply to India–except for that bit about the everyone loathing the …

Mike Huckabee is a potential Republican nominee for the US presidential elections next November. “Who’s your favorite author?” asked 7-year old Aleya Deatsch. Huckabee said it was Dr Seuss. That surprised her because she thought that someone grownup should be reading at a higher level. Her favorite author she admitted was C. S. Lewis.
Huckabee is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, evidently. Here’s what he said on record: “I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought …

Winter solstice (Northern hemisphere) this year occurs around 6:08 UTC on Dec 22nd. Wish you all a Happy Winter Solstice. Happy Christmas as well.
I think this post is close enough to be the 1,000th post on this blog (give or take a few.) It has been a good run and thanks for your support. Perhaps it will see the 2,000th post one day.
Traffic Rankings for Business and Economics Websites lists this blog number 33 with 1753 page views a day for November. For comparison, the site notes …

Blowback. Backlash. Expressive words. They mean that sometimes the reaction to an action can be severe and unacceptable. Blowback is often associated with fire. You set a fire thinking that it will go that way but instead it goes this way. Ill thought-out policies usually suffer from blowback and backlash.
I observe with a great deal of trepidation the policies that Dr Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, is promoting. I think that with friends like Dr Singh, the minorities (as the pseudo-seculars like to call them) don’t need any …

The facts are pretty simple to state. A piece of land was sold by party A to party B for Rs 22 lakhs. The official price was Rs 7 lakhs, less than a third of the actual amount that changed hands. That means A received Rs 15 lakhs which he cannot account for. And it also means that B paid Rs 15 lakhs from sources which are also unaccounted for. Then parties A and B arrived at the land registration office to record the new title. The registration fee is …

[Continued from the previous post on Stuff and Ideas.]
Economic growth, development, progress—whatever you call it—is neither inevitable nor impossible. There are lots of examples of economies that continue to struggle with economic growth. And there are many examples of economies that have made rapid progress. What distinguishes the ones that that succeed from the ones that fail is economic policies. Again an operational definition of “good economic policies” will have to do: those that work.

I was reviewing stuff on my blog from way-back-when and came across a post “Education for a Nation” from October 2003. The post has aged well. Not bad at all.

1. Stuff Fundamentalist
Fundamentally, it is all about stuff. That’s what it is basically all about. The universe is stuff, of course. My thesis here is that the economy is also about stuff. Stuff and one more thing we will get into in a bit. At the very bottom of it all, the necessary ingredient for making an economy is people. Without people, you don’t have an economy. You can have the whole planet with trees and animals and fish and rivers and mountains and oil and land and rain and …

The future of education is going to be one of the most exciting things going on in the world. I see a revolutionary change occurring because of two specific reasons. First, the increasingly complex nature of our world. Change is accelerating and therefore to prepare people for that dynamic world, people need skills that were not needed previously. These skills cannot be imparted once and for all in the formal years of schooling. Therefore, what education has to do is to prepare people to be life-long learners. The schools have …

The Finance Minister of India, Mr Chidambaram speaks the truth, or at least that is what a certain communal newspaper reports. He was speaking at a TiE event in New Delhi. He said, “This country will hold together only if we give everyone in India a stake in the future of India … We cannot build an inclusive society, unless every institution of governance consciously sheds its biases and prejudices that work for every section of the people.”