The business of business is profit. That’s the whole point in doing business. If a business is following the rules and legally making a profit, it is discharging its social responsibilities. I wrote an opinion piece in today’s Mint arguing that corporations are not responsible for solving social problems.
Here’s the text of the article.

Some years ago I came across a single-panel cartoon which showed a statue of a figure on horseback. It was clearly the statue of Shivaji Maharaj, the great Maratha hero. Standing in front was a little kid with an adult. The kid was asking, “But what was the statue called before it was renamed Shivaji Maharaj?”
In Mumbai, the trend is that everything gets renamed after Shivaji. And in the broader context of India, everything gets named after Nehru and his clan. Naming things is easy in India. “Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal, …

Back in September 2005, the government of Maharashtra had decided to ban plastic bags. The problem they were trying to address was of trash clogging up the storm drains in Mumbai resulting in the flooding of the city during the monsoons. Yes, the city does get flooded but banning the plastic bags was not the right response. A little bit of reasoning would have revealed that the proper thing to do is to charge user fees for the plastic bags — that would let the market solve the problem and …

“Will the Indian mind ever get decolonised?” is the question that R Vaidyanathan asks at the end of his column titled “The colonial conquest of India by Cambridge varsity” in DNA today. (Hat tip: Raja Shekhar Malapati.) It is about the government of India giving Cambridge University Rs 26,00,00,000 (US$ 6,500,000) to support the ‘Jawaharlal Nehru Professorship of Indian Business and Enterprise.’ That professorship is to mark the centenary of Nehru’s arrival at Cambridge.

Saraswati puja is done on Basant Panchami — which is the fifth day of the start of spring (Basant). Traditionally people fly kites and wear something yellow.
I did not know that today was Saraswati Puja until my sister called this morning to tell me to go and attend a puja today. As I am new to this area, I did not know where to go. If I didn’t find a puja, there’s always the old standby of bowing to a book.
Around noon, I heard the sound of a …

I know that outsourcing things to India is all the rage in the world today and how the world is getting to be flat (thanks, Tom Friedman, what would we do without your wisdom) but this is getting a bit ridiculous. Apparently Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wants to outsource the idea of how the legal system should be run in a democratic state to India. His idea is that the state should recognize sharia, the Islamic legal system, for those who profess Islam in the UK. India discriminates …

Ever wonder what it takes to make it possible for you to visit gazillions of websites? I suppose we wonder only when there is a disturbance in the web, as it happened a few days ago when five undersea fiberoptic cables mysteriously snapped and some parts of Middle East and India were affected. So I did a little futzing around the web and found a pretty good write up on one cable system — the FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Across the Globe. The report is really really long and really …

[Someone's avatar.]

Richard Dawkins summarizes Darwin’s big idea in one sentence: “Given sufficient time, the non-random survival of hereditary entities (which occasionally miscopy) will generate complexity, diversity, beauty, and an illusion of design so persuasive that it is almost impossible to distinguish from deliberate intelligent design.”
Dawkins remarks on the amazing explanatory power of the idea of natural selection. I find reflections of that sort of explanatory power in Adam Smith’s idea that markets work and lead to social welfare gains.
It is interesting that it takes many years of internalizing of a big …

I had arrived at the hypothesis that Nehru was a dictator not from a careful reading of history but rather a careful observation of contemporary reality. First, I saw that Nehru was clearly considered one of the greatest leaders of India — so much so that his descendants were considered by a very large segment of Indians to be natural born leaders. Second, Nehru’s name graced too many institutions for my comfort. It reeked of idol worship. Third, he appeared to be a person of very limited intelligence and even …

Only recently did I become aware that there is a local politician in Mumbai named Raj Thackeray and that he has been inciting people to violence to stop non-Marathi speaking people from migrating to Mumbai. The man, in my considered opinion, is a certifiable idiot and an evil one at that. But then there is nothing particularly remarkable in Raj Thackeray’s quest for votes through divisive politics. The British quite successfully implemented it and ever since political independence, politicians across the spectrum have been dividing India along regional, caste, and …

Emergic: Rajesh Jain’s Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets is back on the air after a hiatus of a few months.

Imagine getting to New Delhi from Mumbai by train in less than 4 hours instead of the 18 hours it currently takes?
France unveiled the successor to the TGV, the AGV — Automotrice Grande Vitesse, or “self-propelled high-speed” train. It’s top cruise speed will be 360 km/hr. The TGV has two engines, one at each end of the train. The AGV has motors under each carriage and is lighter and more energy efficient. The TGV holds the speed record for conventional rail when it touched 575 km/hr last year in April. …

This is a follow up to the previous post on Knowing Basic Microeconomics where I had claimed that micro theory is essentially codified common sense and that it is never too late to learn a bit of microeconomics. Many people have written to me (and some commented on the post) that they would like references to some work that makes micro theory accessible to the lay person.
I am not familiar with what is available and therefore I am not qualified to answer that question. I have read a few …

Enclaves of Private Luxury
Just off the expressway from Mumbai, on the road leading into Pune, you see huge billboards advertising new housing developments with fancy names like “Whispering Pines” and “Orchard View” crowding each other, promising idyllic lifestyles of lavish comfort. They convey very urgently a palpable sense of how rapidly the market for private luxury dwelling is blossoming thanks to increased salaries and easy housing loans.
These billboards reflect the increased aspirations of the growing upper middle-class in India. Curiously, one set spoke to a deeper and disturbing reality. …

Yesterday, the Indian Express carried a column by me on the OLPC, a favorite topic of mine. There’s nothing new in there for those who have read my views on the OLPC before. The text of the column below the fold.

Smart people think alike. Or at least they reach similar conclusions. Take Charlie Munger and me. We reached the same conclusion about the importance of microeconomics. Seriously though, I think it is a crying shame that people in general don’t have even a nodding acquaintance with the basic principles of microeconomic theory.