Consider this scenario. Someone you know imprisons his grown up children and does not allow them to go out and do jobs that they are fully capable of doing. He also locks up his productive assets and prevents his children from using them. Then he goes around begging his neighbors for help with feeding his family as he does not have any income. The words that spring to mind upon considering this man’s behavior are words like contemptible, immoral, stupid, pathetic, pitiable, and sad.

Sunita Narain’s article “Missing Details” in the Feb 26th edition of Business Standard talks about the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). (Hat tip: A Sarda.)
Creating productive assets such as forests and reservoirs is good for the economy, and should be done in any case. The goal of providing some income to people in financial distress in rural areas can have the valuable side-effect of the creation of productive assets. But when even that side-effect is forgotten and only employment is the goal, then there is a problem. It really …

Saakshi toasts the achievements of the UPA government [via The Acorn.]
Let’s also raise a toast to the Indian voter for having chosen so wisely. The UPA and what it has achieved cannot be evaluated without reference to the wisdom of a sizable portion of the Indian voters who voted them to power. If it is a bitter harvest, the seeds were deliberately and voluntarily planted.
It’s all karma, neh?

From the Chicago Graduate School of Business magazine a brief talk with Gary Becker, “one of the first economists to study topics traditionally considered the purview of sociologists including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction. His work on those subjects earned him the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1992.”
Becker is big on human capital. He talks about the importance of human capital in organizations. Economists consider human capital to be critical to development of economies. Education is therefore directly implicated in development. Here are a few quotes …

Even after living more than half my adult life in the US, I am constantly amazed by the profligacy in consumption of people in the US. What is even more remarkable is how the ultra-consumption is not limited to native born Americans; many fresh off the boat immigrants quickly take up the habit of mindless waste.
I have arrived at a generalization: Americans are extremely efficient in production and (perhaps as a consequence) are extremely inefficient in consumption. They can afford to be wasteful because they are rich. Conversely, I …

My friend, Arun Mehta, has some advice for the public sector telecom providers. They are losing customers. Arun believes that their approach is wrong and that they should see the opportunity in using their last mile access for affordable internet connectivity. I reproduce (with his permission) his recent contribution to the india-gii mailing list.

Go. Profit from exile. To see, listen, walk, pause beside wisemen; question savages and madmen; and listen to stories. It is always pleasant and, sometimes, improves you.
I have neglected the blog for most of the last few weeks because I have been busy. I have listened, walked, and paused beside the wise. Though I did not question savages and madmen, I did have an experience which I can only term as transformational. I had glimpses of instant satori. Putting that in words is obviously impossible. So I will not even …

“When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.” That’s what George W Bush said in a press conference on May 2nd. The NY Times reports:
In response to the president’s remarks, a ranking official in the commerce ministry, Jairam Ramesh, told the Press Trust of India, “George Bush has never been known for his knowledge of economics,” and the remarks proved again how “comprehensively wrong” he is.

Whenever I come to Boston, I recall the song by Dave Loggins (I like the Joan Baez version best)
Please come to Boston for the springtime
I’m stayin’ here with some friends and they’ve got lots of room
You can sell your paintings on the sidewalk
By a café where I hope to be workin’ soon
The weather is rainy and cloudy. I am staying with friends in Acton, MA.
What else? Read the commencement address by PJ O’Rourke, “Fairness, idealism and other atrocities: Commencement advice you’re unlikely to hear elsewhere” from the LA Times …

(Click on the picture to go to the Picasa album with larger images.)
I got a master’s degree in computer science from Rutgers University. Visiting Rutgers was a trip down memory lane. Mega dozes doses of nostalgia.

Google says it is building the Indic web. Now they support transliteration in 5 languages — Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. I checked out their automatic English to Hindi translation. I typed “What is your name” and got back “kya aapkay naam” — not terribly impressive.

Someecards are funny. I like the way they put a tiny label on top of the ads. The top banner ad says “Some advertising” and the side banner ad “Some more advertising.” And at the bottom of the page:
Someecards.com is possibly to probably the best site on the Web for free, funny ecards. We have greeting cards for every occasion – from important to utterly pointless. Send greetings for apology, birthday, baby, breakup, congratulations, encouragement, farewell, flirting, friendship, get well, sympathy, thanks, thinking of you, wedding, workplace, and holidays …

How much would you spend on your home if your net worth was estimated by Forbes a few months ago to be around $43 billion? If you were Mukesh Ambani, you would spend a couple of billion dollars on a place you’d like to call home. Sounds reasonable to me. For most people, their home is the most valuable possession, often accounting for a very significant portion of their net wealth. Mukesh Ambani is spending a very small — almost insignificant — part of this wealth in building a home.

Ramesh Menon’s article “India’s Talent Crunch” in DNA makes shocking reading but is news only if one has not been in touch with the reality of the desperate situation that employers face in India in their search for employable people.

A few pictures from Chicago. I was there 30th April — May 3rd.

Mouse-over the picture to see the controls. Clicking on the second icon from the left at the bottom shows the picture captions. Note especially the Art Institute of Chicago building where Swami Vivekanand gave his famous talk in 1893. What looks like a huge drop of mercury is The Cloud Gate:
Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of …

It is easy to argue that energy is the binding constraint that faces all of humanity, not just the developing economies. Of course, given the projected increase in demand and the decline in the supply of fossil fuel energy, the price of energy will continue to move up–with predictable adverse effects on the growth prospects of the emerging economies.