Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapons are fear and …
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This one is too good to pass up. Myke sent me Jim Kunstler’s column about Pentecostals and evangelicals. The post is worth reading, including the many comments. For the record, here are the first and the last paragraphs of the post.
Last month media elder statesman Bill Moyers made a speech after receiving an award at Harvard in which he said that “born again” members of the Bush regime couldn’t possibly believe in the future if they …

I was pondering outsourcing yesterday and ran out of pondering time. Now that I have some pondering time, I thought I would continue with my pondering of outsourcing. {“ponder”: interesting word, isn’t it? Perhaps I should look it up… Here is what one source on the web says:
To weigh in the mind; to view with deliberation; to examine carefully; to consider attentively.
Syn: To Ponder, Consider, Muse.
Usage: To consider means to view or contemplate with fixed thought. To ponder is to dwell upon …

Via Rajesh Jain, I came to know of NY Times report on Paul Samuelson’s essay in an upcoming issue of JEP. I am probably one of the very few who have not read Samuelson’s celebrated book on introductory economics. That is so because I never studied undergraduate economics. My introduction to economics was at the graduate level and the first books on economics I read were Hal Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis and Bhagwati and Srinivasan’s Lectures on International Trade. I learnt undergraduate economics later while teaching …

Some time ago, I had posted a blog entry on the logic of outsourcing which quoted Russell Roberts of BusinessWeek Online. All very serious and good. I recently came across Dave Barry’s take on outsourcing and he does not disappoint.

I usually reserve my political views for my other weblog at Berkeley Life is a Random Draw. I am calling a time-out and I will post one personal opinion on a matter that is not directly related to economic development. I received a heads-up from Prakash Swaminathan about a rediff.com article Outsource to India, without compromising US interests by one Mr. John Laxmi.

In the Feb 24th edition of BusinessWeek Online, Russell Roberts comments on the benefits of outsourcing for the American economy. The article simply points out that the benefits of free trade — and the transition of an economy from an agricultural to manufacturing to a post-industrial economy — follow a logicalprogression that leads to a richer economy. Of course, politicians are often inclined to cater to the perceived anxieties of the voters and I am sure that the candidates in the race for the US presidential elections will …

These days one of the dangers of reading newspapers is that one is faced with yet another article on business process outsourcing (BPO) and how there is a backlash from specific sectors in the developed countries. It makes for breathless copy and many of these articles are mere regurgitation of rehashed articles on the same subject. What is the broader context in which to locate all this talk of BPO?
Let’s step back a bit and look at an economy from a macro viewpoint. Economies are usually …