Competition on the supply side is good if you are on the demand side, and competition on the demand side is good if you are on the supply side. Otherwise competition is evil. That is why governments of third world countries limit competition on the supply side — the better to extract rents from the economy.

Some good stuff gets buried in all the trivia. Here are a couple of posts from December 2007 that I feel makes a bit of sense.

India is very widely celebrated as having a democratic government. India’s government can also be accurately described another way. A kakistocracy is defined as government by the most corrupt and the least principled. As India’s case clearly demonstrates, the two are not mutually incompatible.

I have maintained for a while that the reason that Pakistan gets propped up by the US and its allies is that India and Pakistan are engaged in a dollar auction game and therefore anytime Pakistan is about to go bankrupt (and therefore be unable to continue the game), the US and its allies rush to prop it up. How much money is involved in keeping Pakistan alive so that it can continue to wage jihad against India? Here are the figures from an article, “Fail, then reap rewards,” by …

Go read Tubular Belle if you have a few minutes to spare.

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.

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.

Hauled from the archives: India’s Cargo Cult Democracy.
Yes, I do like that post. So sue me

A comment on this blog is worth highlighting because it is too important to be buried among the comments. It is from Gulab Singh who wrote:
What have you done to amend the situation, oh armchair intellectual ? Cribbing about the status quo is pointless, if you don’t follow it up with action. If you don’t have a way to put into practice the ideas you espouse, then your ideas are not practical. You seem to have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about “what should be done”, but …

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” — George Bernard Shaw
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a commercial jetliner cruising at 500 knots 37,000 feet above …

In a comment to the post on political parties launched by entrepreneurs, “Seven Times Six” wrote:
I don’t think renunciation and self-sacrifice is necessary for a nation to prosper. What is required is the exact opposite — a strong avarice and ambition to promote one’s well-being.

“It is all about power, isn’t it?” said CJ.
I was on the phone with CJ, discussing a series of columns that the Indian Express newspaper has been running called “India Empowered” which as the newspaper puts it, “if there’s one engine that’s today driving a changing India, it’s empowerment. Empowerment of the individual, the family, the neighborhood, the community – and, hence, the nation.”

“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.

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 …

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 …

Over the weekend, spent some time with old friends in San Francisco. P was visiting from Delaware and B from North Dakota. Beautiful weather after the exhilarating storms that passed through a few days before that.

Visiting Singapore is both an exhilarating and a depressing experience for me. To observe the transformation of a mosquito-infested swamp full of poor people into a vibrant developed nation of prosperous people in a brief span of 40 years is exhilarating. Comparing Singapore to India from an Indian’s perspective is depressing: how did we–given all the advantages we had in 1950 compared to Singapore–squander it all and end up being a poor misgoverned over-populated country? That is the depressing bit.

The phrase that comes to mind when I consider the move from movabletype to wordpress for this blog is disruptive change, that phrase so beloved of those worthies who write those content-free fat management books. I think the change is nice but it has disrupted all kinds of things. Links internal to the blog are no longer functioning and one gets the highly informative 404 error message. So I have had to spend hours manually fixing broken links and categorizing posts. While doing that I re-read bits I had …

Bestsellers touting the benefits of globalization are a regular feature of our times. Case in point: Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. The title is supposed to shock the reader. “Damn! I thought the world was round. Thanks Tom, you are a bloody genius.”

Years ago I used to watch a British comedy series called Bless Me, Father on public television. The setting was a church in a small town in England and the stories revolved around the parish priest and his young curate. In one of the episodes, the curate asks, “Father, why do you spend so much time with the rich in our parish? Don’t you think that the poor need our help more than the rich?” The father replies: “No, the rich need us more. They don’t even have the …