Roger Ebert 1942-2013

We spend a great deal of time in mostly trivial pursuits on the web. But the web has an enormous wealth of content that could be of value to us. However we have to invest time and concentration to take what we are given so freely. This talk by Roger Ebert is worth the time.

For many years I have enjoyed Ebert’s movie reviews on public television. Although I sometimes disagreed with his verdict, I found his insightful criticism always helpful. I find myself nodding in agreement with his 11th Hour talk.

Enjoy. And I mean it.

Watch 11th Hour “Roger Ebert” on PBS. See more from CPT12 Presents.

The numbers associated with the Pakistani army’s crackdown in East Pakistan, and the 9-month long war that ended with the secession of East Pakistan, are mind-numbingly horrifying: rape, torture, murder, displacement, death, disease. As you can imagine, the Hindus in East Pakistan suffered disproportionately. (Thankfully my grandparents escaped from East Bengal about a century ago.)

That war ended when the West Pakistani army surrendered to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, Joint Commander of Indian and Bangladesh Forces on Dec 16th, 1971. Wiki says–

Over 93,000 Pakistani troops surrendered to the Indian forces, making it the largest surrender since World War II. Bangladesh sought admission in the UN with most voting in its favour, but China vetoed this as Pakistan was its key ally. The United States, also a key ally of Pakistan, was one of the last nations to accord Bangladesh recognition. To ensure a smooth transition, in 1972 the Simla Agreement was signed between India and Pakistan. The treaty ensured that Pakistan recognised the independence of Bangladesh in exchange for the return of the Pakistani PoWs. India treated all the PoWs in strict accordance with the Geneva Convention, rule 1925. It released more than 93,000 Pakistani PoWs in five months. Further, as a gesture of goodwill, nearly 200 soldiers who were sought for war crimes by Bengalis were also pardoned by India. The accord also gave back more than 13,000 km2 (5,019 sq mi) of land that Indian troops had seized in West Pakistan during the war, though India retained a few strategic areas; …

The first of the present Gandhi dynasty, Mrs Indira Gandhi, was ruling India. I use the word ‘ruling’ advisedly. She decided that it was a great idea to give up a great bargaining chip — the 93,000 prisoners of war — and take nothing in return. War criminals, schriminals. Why bother trying them for war crimes! And what war crimes are we talking about anyway? The victims were largely kaffirs anyway. “The Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Pakistani military hatred,” TIME magazine reported in August 1971.

This is nothing new. Mohandas K Gandhi’s policy of turning the other cheek was applied. The people who died in the battle field fighting the Pakistani were not members of the Gandhi clan. So they don’t matter. Occupying the moral high ground is better than occupying some bit of land — never mind that soldiers laid down their lives in bitter battles for it.

The Bangladeshis repaid all the sacrifices that Indians made — the lives of soldiers, the economic hardship of feeding refugees — with enmity and aggression. The Bangladeshis don’t particularly dislike the Pakistanis these days. In fact, they provide Pakistani terrorists easy access across their border to India. The Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are brothers in arms, fighting a common enemy, the filthy infidels.

The trouble is that Indians don’t learn from their mistakes. They believe that being nice is a great big moral victory. Here’s a tweet that illustrates my point:

Maneckshaw exemplified India’s strength: liberating B’Desh but treating 90,000POWs humanely, not shamefully emulating Pak barbarism #Jammu

— Baijayant Jay Panda (@Panda_Jay) May 3, 2013

I don’t know what Maneckshaw thought of the matter of not trying war criminals but I find it hard to imagine that a soldier would allow war criminals to go unpunished.

Soldiers who fight other soldiers on battlefields should be treated with due respect and honorably. But soldiers who conduct a genocide of unarmed civilians are war criminals and must not be accorded the same treatment that good soldiers deserve. There’s no virtue but only shame in treating war criminals as if they were heroes defeated in war.

Justice and fairness have to be keystone virtues of a moral position. Justice and fairness demand that good deeds be rewarded and bad ones punished. The great moral teacher Confucius was asked what he thought of the precept, “Repay hatred with kindness.” Confucius replied, “Then how will you repay kindness? Repay hatred with justice and replay kindness with kindness.”

Pakistan keeps sending horribly tortured and mutilated bodies of Indian soldiers back to India. The mombattiwalas continue their celebration of peace with those monsters. While the jholawalas pontificate over their coffees and cigarettes, the poor soldiers die miserable deaths.

I have come to realize that the average Indian does not care too much for justice and fairness. If we did, we would not stand for the kind of treatment that Indian politicians and the enemies of India dish out to the people. Come to think of it, it is becoming hard to distinguish between the politicians and the enemies of India.

To have peace within the country and with our neighbors we have to be prepared to be ruthlessly just and fair. Repay hatred with justice and replay kindness with kindness. Anything else and we are complicit in the injustice that is sure to follow.

Related Post: The Unbearable Silliness of Loving One’s Enemy. Oct 2004. I argue that Gandhi’s “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind” is an astonishingly stupid notion.

To account for the stark differences, there have to be fundamental distinctions between the US and India. At their very core, they have to be different. That’s worth examining for a bit.

The foremost difference I note relates to government. The people of both countries choose their government in elections — which is a defining feature of democracies. But in the one they choose who is to rule over the people, while in the other they choose who is to be entrusted with the administration of those collective tasks that require coordination at the local, state or national levels.

This fact is revealed in the very vocabulary we unconsciously use. In the US, they say the “Bush administration” or the “Clinton administration”; in India, it is the “Congress rule” or the “BJP rule.”

Administration and rule are different functions. In the former, the government is a means employed by the people to achieve goals that are essentially set by the people. In principal-agent terms, the people are the principal and the government is merely their agent. In this scheme, the people invest the government with certain limited powers to achieve specific goals. The government is like the driver who gets to drive the car but where the car is going is decided by the owner of the car. The driver is only nominally in charge of the car but the person really in control of the car isn’t the driver.

In contrast to the “administration” type of government, in India we have the “rule” type of government. The government rules over the people. The people are restricted by the government to only specific tasks. The people obey what the government orders. While it’s true that people choose the government but the choice they have is the choice of a slave about whom to serve, not the choice of being the master. The reason for this is not hard to fathom. It is historical.

India was a colony of the British. It was the “British Raj.” The British were the rulers then, the Indians were subjects. The British departed but the entire framework they had created to rule over the subjects was left intact. No changes were made because they were not required. They were not required because the objective of the government remained the same: to rule over the subjects (now euphemistically called ‘citizens’) through command and control. The new rulers were people of darker complexion than the previous ones but from an operational point of view, skin color has never made much of a difference. The executioner’s ax does it job regardless whether it is wielded by a white or a brown person.

Post 1947, India came under what I call “British Raj 2.0.” It is also known as the “license permit quota control raj.” Nehru boasted (and rightfully so) that he was the last Englishman to rule India. I am not making this up. I am not that imaginative.

We should note in passing that the Americans fought and won a war of independence from the British. The first thing they did was to dismantle the old structure and put in an entirely new structure of government. The government was entrusted with a limited set of tasks and given a limited amount of power. The people restrained the government. Read the Bill of Rights, as the first 10 amendments to the US constitution is called. The first five words of the First Amendment sets the tone: “Congress shall make no law …” Those words reveal who the owner is and who is the driver of the car.

Compare that to the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution. It places restrictions on citizens (or should I say subjects.) It was Nehru who brought in that amendment — as noted previously the last Englishman to rule India.

The idea that a government rules over the country is deeply ingrained in Indians. It is part of the worldview of almost all Indians. Take, for example, this tweet:

To transform India, the rulers have to change. But to change the rulers, voters have to change their minds. But…. twitter.com/rubenmasc/stat…

— Utsav Mitra (@UtsavMitra) May 1, 2013

I don’t mean to pick on Utsav. I know him. He’s a decent, intelligent, nationalistic person dedicated to helping bring about positive change in India. But note how even he — a highly educated, worldly wise, global traveler — unconsciously refers to politicians as “the rulers” rather than people who serve the public’s interests.

Transforming India will have to begin by changing how we think about what the role of the government is, what the essential attribute of a free country is. At the risk of being labelled a lunatic, let me repeat once again that I don’t believe that India is free. Indians lack many things but the most important thing they lack is freedom.

If India truly ever becomes free, I am positive that the transformation of India will be as automatic as all development is. Development, whether it be of a person or a collective, cannot be wished. It is always a consequence of being free.

In the title of this post, I claimed that democracy is not all that India is. So I will get to that point now.

I have always had a particular fondness for vocabulary. That’s so because I like ideas and the only way to express ideas (and indeed to construct ideas in one’s head) is to know vocabulary. My one piece of advice I unfailingly give to kids is learn vocabulary. English is so powerful because it has a huge vocabulary. It just keeps acquiring words.

I suppose I learned the word “democracy” sometime during my middle-school days. Its meaning I must have learned during college days. It took many more years for me to understand the concept in its various instantiation across the world. All democracies are not created equal is the realization that I arrived at when I began to compare my two homelands.

A few years ago I learned the word “kakistocracy.” I immediately understood that India was a kakistocracy — rule by the least principled and the most corrupt. Unless you have been living under a rock for the last 50 years, I don’t have to go into the details of why that is true.

Here are some new words that I am slowly adding to my vocabulary. All the quoted definitions below are from the Wikipedia.

Aristocracy: “government by the best people.” India is definitely not an aristocracy.

Geniocracy: “Rule by the intelligent; a system of governance where creativity, innovation, intelligence and wisdom are required for those who wish to govern.” Not India.

Kratocracy: “Rule by the strong; a system of governance where those strong enough to seize power through physical force, social maneuvering or political cunning.” Could be true about India to some extent. Goonda raj, we call it.

Meritocracy: “Rule by the meritorious; a system of governance where groups are selected on the basis of people’s ability, knowledge in a given area, and contributions to society.” Nope, not India. Merit gets selected out.

Timocracy: “Rule by honor; a system of governance ruled by honorable citizens and property owners. Socrates defines a timocracy as a government ruled by people who love honor and are selected according to the degree of honor they hold in society … European-feudalism and post-Revolutionary America are historical examples of this type; …” No, India is not a timocracy.

Autocracy: “Rule by one individual, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for implicit threat). Autocrat needs servants while despot needs slaves.” India can be classified as an autocracy if you consider one lady and her blue-turbaned chaprasi (peon, servant).

Despotism: “Rule by a single entity with absolute power. That entity may be an individual, as in an autocracy, or it may be a group,[1] as in an oligarchy. The word despotism means to “rule in the fashion of a despot” and does not necessarily require a single, or individual, “despot”. Despot needs slaves while Autocrat needs servants.” Could be. Same reason as before.

Nepotocracy: “Rule by nephews; favoritism granted to relatives regardless of merit; a system of governance in which importance is given to the relatives of those already in power, like a nephew (where the word comes from). In such governments even if the relatives aren’t qualified they are given positions of authority just because they know someone who already has authority. ” I think we can call India a nepotocracy.

Kakistocracy: “Rule by the stupid; a system of governance where the worst or least-qualified citizens govern or dictate policies.” If Pappu gets to rule, the first bit of this definition will apply to India with renewed force.

Kleptocracy: “Rule by thieves; a system of governance where its officials and the ruling class in general pursue personal wealth and political power at the expense of the wider population. In strict terms kleptocracy is not a form of government but a characteristic of a government engaged in such behavior.” India has to the biggest kleptocracy the world has ever seen. The blue-turban has outdone himself.

Phobiocracy: “Rule by fear and hate; a system of governance where the basic organizing principles is the use of fear mongering to keep those being ruled in line…” Now this one for sure applied to India. The British started the divide the population and make each constituent element fear and hate the other. The UPA has perfected it.

So, there you have it. India is a democracy, but that’s not all that it is.

Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

= = = = = = = = = =

PS: Utsav, I will buy you a beer the next time you are in my neck of the woods for having partially motivated this post. Thanks.

Go check out the “The document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993.”

Here’s an image of the memo:

It helpfully explains in the introduction, “The World Wide Web, hereafter referred to as W3, is a global networked information system.”

It is wonderful that the organization, CERN, which operates the world’s largest particle accelerator is the birthplace of the amazing web. Shiva’s dance of creation and destruction — go read that post of mine from March 2012 in celebration.

At the CERN the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquarters they have a huge Nataraja. (Hat tip: @geffbeck)

Did you know that CERN had the world’s first-ever web server?

Click on the link in the last line above for details on the world’s first web server.

Today I read that the Bengal government is going to spend Rs 500 crores to compensate the victims of a chit-fund scam. The chit-fund scam is a crime but I believe it is also criminal to use public money to compensate the victims of fraud. I have argued against the use of public funds even in cases involving victims of accidents and crimes such as rape. I wrote the following for Quartz (March 13th, 2013).

Why the Indian government shouldn’t have given a rape victim’s family $90,000 in taxpayer money

Public tragedies are a certainty in a world of more than 7 billion people: suicide bombs, shooting massacres, mass transportation accidents. We accept them as we do the weather, even though mayhem is often caused deliberately or through incompetence.

We vicariously feel the pain and want to help and share in the loss, which is why people rally so much in the aftermath of catastrophe. This often involves some compensation from public funds handed out by some public authority.

Within three months of the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attack in the US, $7 billion of federal funds was distributed as compensation. On average, the injured received $400,000 and the families of those killed received $2 million. In addition to the government funds, $2.7 billion in private charitable contributions were received.

But sometimes, horrific events involve far fewer people and still prompt an outpouring—such as the fatal gang-rape of a 23-year old woman in New Delhi in December. Sexual assaults are a commonplace occurrence in that city, but this one captivated the globe. The victim posthumously received the “International Woman of Courage Award” from US Secretary of State John Kerry last week.

Meanwhile, the victim’s family has received considerable compensation (by the standards of a poor country like India) from both public and private parties. State governments in India gave around $90,000. Private contributions also came in, including $3,000 from Yuvraj Singh, an Indian cricket player.

How we deal publicly and privately with victims and their families deserves serious attention by policymakers and the civil society. Our response should be rational rather than idiosyncratic to these random but unfortunately increasingly common events. We have to grapple with hard questions that have public policy implications. For instance, should governments be handing out compensations out of public funds?

At first, the answer may appear to be a self-evident yes. But on closer examination it appears problematic. We have to remember that not all victims get public compensation. Some get nothing while others get a lot. Who decides and by which criteria who is deserving of compensation? Remember, governments are people too. So why should some people decide what others are deserving of? After all, the money being doled out is taxpayers’ money given out by a third party: the officials of governments.

There’s another problem, especially in the case of a so-called “developing” country like India. Many public tragedies are partly the result of government incompetence, negligence and, in many cases, sins of not just government omission but actual commission. Railway accidents in which innocent people lose life and limb are frequent in India, often the result of poor management and corruption. After each of these, the government routinely hands out what it calls “ex-gratia” payments to pacify the victims and to give the general impression to be doing something.

So also is the case of the frequent terrorist bombings in India. The usual response from the central and state governments is formulaic, by now: First a condemnation of the “cowardly act”, then a stern statement that the criminals will be brought to justice soon (they almost never are), and finally, the announcement of compensation from the public till.

Perhaps the public is not aware the government is buying the public’s silence with the public’s money. In effect, the people in government cover up their own ineptitude by stealing from the taxpayers. That’s adding insult to injury. This problem is certainly not limited to developing countries. Even in rich countries with relatively clean and efficient governments, policymakers feel the pressure to appear to do something to demonstrate their compassion towards the victims.

Some people recognize the problem. Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer who administered the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund said, “”Bad things happen to good people every day in this country and it’s not part of our heritage for the taxpayer to be an insurer. To give these people, on average, $2 million tax free flies in the face of American history.” It negates the civilized principle of equal treatment before the law.

I see it as a basic principal-agent problem. The government is the agent of the citizens who are the principals. Expediency rather than rational considerations drive a wedge between the agents’ actions and the objectives of the principal.

There is a way out of this problem: Essentially, citizens must directly be in charge of deciding how much compensation is just for victims of tragedies. Each one of us individually has to be the final arbiter of what each of us owes to the victims, our fellow beings.

Imagine, instead, if your neighbors were in charge of deciding which charities you should support and with how much. You would be justifiably outraged and resist the usurpation of your right to your property. It is no different when the people in government decide who gets compensation and by how much following a public tragedy.

Instead, each of us must be free to decide how much to give and to whom. The proper response by the public to public tragedies has to be one of compassion expressed through private charity. We must look within and have the freedom to decide who needs our help and to what extent. In this age of instant and easy communication, it is quite feasible for people to contribute whatever they wish to any cause they find deserving.

In other words, we as individual citizens must retain our independence and must not delegate our responsibility towards our fellow citizens to agents, the people in government.

But what if people don’t contribute? The objection may arise and is a fair one. There is no virtue in charity if it is coerced by others—not even if those who are doing the coercing are elected government officials. If government officials feel very strongly about compensating the victims, they are equally free to dig into their own (often considerably deep) pockets and give. But this does not happen. It is always other people’s money that government officials are so ready to distribute and seek approval.

The public is rightly outraged at the perpetrators of these crimes against the innocent. It should be equally outraged at the government’s action that inevitably follows: the theft from the public to cover up what is too often the government’s failure to prevent those crimes in the first place. It is both unethical and immoral. It should be vociferously condemned and strenuously resisted at every instance everywhere.

[Source: Quartz.]

I bow to the arihants
I bow to the siddhas
I bow to the acharyas
I bow to the teachers
I bow to all sadhus
This five-fold bow destroys all sins and obstacles
And of all auspicious mantras, is the first and foremost one.

Among the Indic religions — Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism — Jainism is the most life-affirming. It categorically teaches that one should not harm any living being. Killing is definitely out. If everyone were to follow that principle, there would be no terrorism, leave alone organized wars.

Not that there is much to be gained by comparing religions, but if you must, Jainism is one end of the spectrum that extends from the benign to the malignant. Sam Harris compared Christianity’s Ten Commandments with Mahavira’s teachings in his book Letter to a Christian Nation thus:

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.

I admit that I take enormous pride that I was born in the same land that gave birth to Jainism.

I bow in deep reverence to Bhagawan Mahavir and all other Tirthankaras.

Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina opens with the line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That observation about failed families, which has since been generalized as the “Anna Karenina principle,” also appears to apply to poor countries: countries are poor in their own unique ways.

There are multiple causes in any specific instance of the poverty of nations. They differ in the particulars but some generalizations are valid. For instance, the causes of poverty among small countries generally differ from that of large countries. Small countries are at the mercy of forces that are outside their control. Unlike large countries, they are easier to dominate militarily or exploit economically. Landlocked countries, which are likely to be small, have a harder time in the global economic game as opposed to countries with easy access to world trade.

Countries often suffer poverty for surprising reasons. Contrary to what one would expect, being richly endowed with mineral resources can actually be a curse rather than a blessing for a country. Intense and protracted struggle for capturing those riches can lead to widespread poverty instead of prosperity. Still others may have the disadvantage of geography. Tropical climates and their associated diseases are a burden while temperate climates confer a distinct advantage.

Of course, all small countries are not uniformly poor. Indeed some of them are extremely rich. It is useful to underline the fact that the prosperity or poverty of small countries arise from causes that are often enough outside their control. Large countries, in sharp contradistinction, are rich or poor for reasons that are entirely their own choosing.

Let’s focus on India, a very large country. As mentioned in the previous column in this space (“All Men are Created Equal but Nations are Not”), factors that could lead to persistent poverty are missing in India’s case. India is not starved of natural resources; its people are not lazy and stupid; invaders don’t repeatedly strip India of its wealth; massive periodic calamities do not level everything in sight; death and disease do not plague the land; it is not bereft of history, of culture or a deep civilization; constant civil strife between warring factions does not foreclose the possibility of any economic activity, and so on.

In other words, India is not doomed to be poor due to factors outside its control. Yet India is desperately, depressingly, chronically, and acutely poor. Why is that so and what is missing?

Before moving ahead, I should pause to say that every time I have made that depressing observation about India’s poverty, some people have vehemently objected and said that India is not a poor country at all. Clearly their evaluation of India differs from mine. I could point to depressing statistics but I will avoid doing that here. You either know it or you don’t. If you don’t, I don’t wish to go into them here. I will assume that it is there for the record.

That’s the bad news; and now for the good news. My fundamental argument is that India’s poverty is entirely man-made, self-inflicted and avoidable. The good news therefore is that India’s poverty is not irredeemable and unalterable. India can achieve its potential and become as prosperous as is possible for a large country with the natural and human capital it has at its disposal.

The primary cause of India’s persistent poverty is poor governance. Every other factor shrinks into insignificance when compared to poor governance as the causative agent for poverty of a large country like India. Even if all other factors of prosperity are available in plenty, the lack of good governance is sufficient to doom a country into grinding poverty.

Governance is what governments do. Governments are not accidents of nature. They are artifacts that have to be consciously and deliberately constructed. They come in various kinds: authoritarian, democratic, socialist, communist, et cetera. But they have one thing in common. Regardless of the type, if they fail to provide good governance, the country suffers.

So here’s a simple heuristic to figure out if you have good governance: if a large country like India is suffering, you don’t have good governance. You don’t have to be an expert on governance to know that if all other factors are quite fine, by a process of elimination you know that it must be bad governance that is root of all the misery.

Another simple heuristic for us is that a large government is more likely to fail to provide good governance. In the case of governments, small is not just beautiful, it is essential. If the government is attempting to do too many things, its primary failure will be in providing good governance. Why this is so can be traced to the fact that government comprises of people – just like you and me. People have their motivations and objectives. We are self-seeking people with bounded rationality and imperfect information. If we attempt to do too many things, the things that we should be doing get inadequate attention, and we end up doing things we should not be doing.

What is the most essential role of the government? It is to protect the rights and liberties of individual. Note it is not there to grant rights and liberties but rather to protect those rights and liberties that individuals have ab initio. Also note that the proper object of attention here is the individual. The life, liberty and property of an individual must be protected by the government from other individuals and also from the people who are in government.

If the government fails to perform that essential function, and instead does what it has absolutely no competency in, then you end up with poor governance and an impoverished society. India is a shining example of that failure.

There are endless examples of areas where the government interferes and does things that are unnecessary and wasteful. Let’s take just one example: running a commercial airline. There is absolutely no reason for the government to do so. It loses huge amounts of taxpayers’ money. The performance is abysmal and an embarrassment.

But of course there is a reason why the people in government want to have a government airline: it is their own private airlines that they get to play with while the poor people – people who will never see the insides of a plane – pay for it. A private airline that lost as much money as the government airline does would have been eliminated by the market. But the government is not subject to the discipline of the market. Or more accurately, the people in government are not subject to market discipline and therefore their fondness for the government encroaching into areas that is the natural preserve of the private sector.

The most pernicious effect of big government is that it breeds public corruption. Corruption is always bad but in the private sector, market discipline weeds them out. But public corruption – the kind only the people in government specialize in – has a side-effect that is hard to miss: it leads to bad governance.

So in summary, big government leads to corruption. Corruption leads to bad governance. Bad governance gives rise to mass poverty. Each of these links is worth examining, and which I will attempt to do in future pieces.

Written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, the United States Declaration of Independence asserts, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, . . .” The truth of that claim is by no means self-evident if one were to note that every individual is unique in his or her endowments. Equality is the last thing you will observe in any interpersonal comparison along any dimension, physical or mental.

But if you were to shift your focus from the individual to any sufficiently large collective, the assertion that all people are created equal is more tenable. No people are intrinsically superior or inferior compared to other groups in any significant way. Random draws that we all are from the same human gene pool, the averages even out the individual differences and every large collective has the same innate potential as any other.

Europeans, for example, are not as a collective more intelligent (whatever that means) than say Asians. The innate intelligence of individuals in both groups will be distributed as normal (Gaussian) curves with essentially the same mean, median and mode. We can easily estimate how many people in any collective will be born geniuses and how many morons, and find that there are no systematic deviations in any population. All populations are created equal – even though all populations don’t end up equal in any sense of that word. That’s a fact we have to admit and deal with. Potentially they are all the same but the outcome is distinctly unequal.

Potential is one thing but the expression of that potential is quite another. Nature provides the raw material but nurture acts on the potential and reveals the actual. How much prosperity or poverty a person enjoys over a life time is almost entirely dependent on another random draw: one’s place of birth. All countries are not created equal and one’s life trajectory is constrained by the country of one’s birth.

Which brings up the question that has engaged economists for ages: why are some countries rich and others poor? Adam Smith, the great granddaddy of modern economics pondered that question and addressed it in his magnum opus “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” which was published in 1776, incidentally the same year as the work cited above, the United States Declaration of Independence.

Smith was a moral philosopher and was interested in asking questions that bear upon human action and human welfare. What is the source of wealth? What can be done about poverty? Those are persistent questions that infect the mind. If you start thinking about them, it is hard to stop. Why are some nations poor while others rich? The particular variant of that general question that fascinates me because I am an Indian is why is India poor?

Looking for single causes of complex questions such as that is futile. There are too many variable with complicated interdependencies and circular causations that it is impossible to arrive at a simple, definitive answer. There are no ultimate causes, only intermediate ones. The best we can do is to note some of the causal dependencies and know that our answers will always be qualified and conditional.

One possible reason why a country is poor is that it lacks natural resources. Absent minerals that are economically valuable and required for sustaining economic activities, it is poor. Perhaps it is a desert with nothing of any value. In other words it is natural resource starved and therefore poor.

Another reason could be that even though it is rich in resources, it is continually being invaded by outsiders who strip it all of its assets and therefore it is poor. We would say it is poor because regardless of what it produces, it is being systematically robbed by invaders.

Still another reason could be that there is civil strife. Internal conflicts between different groups ruin any chances of the sustained growth of wealth. Civil wars, for example, bleed the country internally and people cannot produce anything while hiding to stay alive from continued conflict.

Perhaps a region or a country is neither poorly endowed or is not being robbed by external aggression or facing civil are but it is the victim of natural disasters. From time to time, huge natural calamities are visited upon that land and therefore it is poor. Earthquakes perhaps destroy all that the people have built, or maybe huge volcanic eruptions lay waste all that is created. Perhaps drought or floods engulf the region.

Spared natural disasters, perhaps the people are systematically stupid that they are unable to create wealth that is required for a decent life. They don’t have the human resources to create wealth. Lacking a good civilization, they are embroiled in domestic disputes that make it impossible to sustain a good society.

India’s evident poverty in modern times cannot be due to any of those reasons. Nature is not unkind to it, nor is it subject to periodic disasters. Though in the past, India has attracted unwelcome foreigners, it has not been invaded for at least a century. It is not being systematically invaded by foreign forces. There have been internal conflicts but nothing as devastating that can cause it to be impoverished.

Indians are not stupid. They are as talented as any other people on earth. Indians abroad have done quite well. As immigrants they have prospered more than their compatriots in India. One can argue that people who migrate are generally more enterprising and risk-taking, and therefore are more likely to succeed. That is true but still that fact goes to show that Indians as a people are not exceptionally stupid.

India has a deep history that goes back millennia. Its people are as talented as any other. So what can possibly account for India’s failure to prosper? We must address this question if we have to figure out how to get out of the doldrums that India is in.

[Continued in part 2 of this series: "India Suffers from Bad Governance"]

@atanudey Agree. If just the 800 odd Parliamentarians and 5000 odd MLAs read your works, India will transform in a decade. @agentsaffron

— Utsav Mitra (@UtsavMitra) April 17, 2013

I responded to Utsav’s generous compliment with a flat contradiction. I said he was wrong. Here’s why.

Economic prosperity is a consequence of good economic policies. It is a matter of choice, and if chosen wisely, the outcome is predictably obtained. It is something akin to good health. Generally speaking, if you have reasonable nutrition, adequate exercise, avoid the bad stuff, have sufficient rest, don’t suffer chronic stress, and are not burdened with inherited diseases, you are likely to be healthy. For most of us not born in dire poverty or living in a state of war, good health is a matter of choice. To be more precise, it is a matter of informed choice.

Maybe in the ancient times, the masses were ignorant of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle or were incapable of living that life. But things have improved. Today, most of us know what we need to do to enjoy good health. Yet merely knowing is not sufficient. The guidelines for healthy living are simple enough but following them is another matter altogether. That depends on our motivation. Motivation arises from our objectives. Our objectives determine our actions.

Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. What matters is the objective. If your objective is to be healthy, then it is almost a trivial matter (in today’s age of abundant information) to find out what you should be doing. Then it is up to you if you want to do it or not. In short, for most of us, we could be healthy if we want to be. If we are unhealthy, most likely it is not because of our ignorance but rather our objective and the resulting motivation.

Getting back to economic prosperity, India’s lack of prosperity is a matter of choice. More specifically, it is the result of choices made by the policymakers — the politicians and bureaucrats who determine economic policies. These choices derive from their objectives. Do they know what are good policies? Yes because good policies are known. It is not as if nobody knows what the necessary conditions are for development. Thousands of very smart people have shed copious amounts of blood, sweat and tears over long years in the empirical and analytical investigation of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Luckily for us, the results are easily available to anyone who is interested in knowing what has been discovered.

Not just that, the prescriptions of the worldly philosophers — including mine — are not complicated either. The broad outlines of what causes and what hinders economic progress is easy for anyone with even average intelligence to comprehend and appreciate, provided of course that the person really wants to know. Let me repeat that: if you are interested in knowing what is necessary for prosperity, you can easily find out with only a little bit of effort and comprehend it with a little more effort.

So it is hard to argue that good policies are not chosen because the policymakers don’t know about them. Even if they did not know, it is easy enough to become informed. So why don’t they choose good policies? That part of the story is also simple: because economic prosperity of the nation is not their objective. They can choose to adopt policies that promote prosperity — but they don’t. Through their choices they reveal that they prefer alternate policies, policies that don’t lead to prosperity. Their choice reveals their preference; their choices indicate that their objectives are different from the objective of economic development.

That brings me to the second lesson I have learned about development: the objectives of the policymakers matter in the choice of economic policies.

If the policymaker wants his own economic welfare, he chooses say Policy Set#1, and if he wants the economic welfare of the country, he chooses Policy Set#2. It is possible that Set#1 and Set#2 are not mutually exclusive, as there may be some overlap. But the disjoint elements of the two sets probably matter more than the common elements. Just to take an example, let’s consider the policy related to economic freedom.

Economic freedom belongs to Set#2 (good for the economy) as it leads to economic prosperity. Why doesn’t economic freedom belong to Set#1 (good for the policymaker)? Because under that policy, the policymaker has little or no control over economic activity and therefore is unable to enrich himself.

Government ownership of businesses and industries is a policy that belongs to Set#1. It helps the policymaker to reap the benefits of power. That policy does not belong to Set#2 since it does not benefit the economy.

The government owned Air India is an instance of the government ownership of a business that should rightfully be in the private sector. It costs the country billions (losses that are paid for by all the people) and the benefits accrue to the politicians: they get to use it as their own private airline to enjoy.

Now back to Utsav’s tweet. His sentiments are excellent. He wants Indian politicians to read my writing (like the book “Transforming India“, I suppose) so that they will know what needs to be done. But as I have argued, it is not the not knowing that is the problem. If you know what you want to get done, you can always find out the how. If the horses are not thirsty, even dragging them to the water will do no good.

This is not a counsel of despair. I think there’s hope, naturally since otherwise I would not be doing this. The fact is that it is not that the policymakers don’t know. They can find out the answers any day of the week since there are smart economists galore. The problem is that the general population does not know the basics of good economic policies. That’s the great challenge we face.

People need to know because if they did know, the policymakers would know that they cannot fool the public any more of their self-serving policies. That would bring about the conditions for the policymakers to choose good policies.

That’s the third lesson of development economics: the public determines what policies the politicians choose.

In other words, it is all politics, neh?

Elephants

Below the fold I quote a bit from the start of that post to lure the reader into the tent.

In his book, The Fatal Conceit, F A Hayek noted that “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” A study of development economics can be seen as a series of depressing lessons on how people afflicted with fatal conceit meddling in areas that they don’t understand end up making a mess, and the resulting needless misery and suffering of untold millions of absolutely innocent victims.

A proper study of economics teaches humility. We are limited beings: our rationality is bounded, our knowledge finite, our information local, our comprehension imperfect. Attempts at the grand design to reach the commanding heights are guaranteed to fail. Look behind any economy that has failed to develop, and you will see the dead hand of powerful ignoramuses throttling the living.

India figured prominently in the development economics course as a case study of how a potentially rich country has been engineered to be desperately poor. It is a demoralizing tale of how people are trapped into poverty because of their bad luck of having been born into system which is designed to be poor.

India’s poverty is engineered, it is by design.

Two fun facts about India stand out starkly. First, India is a very poor country, and second, India is a very corrupt country. But note that while the average Indian is definitely poor by contemporary world standards, the average Indian is not any more morally bankrupt than the average human. Although I don’t have any hard evidence, I am convinced that Indians are at least average when it comes to honesty, intelligence, diligence, social capital, and the rest of it. So how do one explain India’s poverty and corruption? Is one the cause and the other the consequence? Which came first? Or is there another hidden variable which is the cause of these two?

It is my belief that the hidden variable is India’s lack of freedom. The stress is on “hidden” — Indians don’t know that they are really not free. There is a lot of talk about India having attained freedom in 1947. But all that is really cheap talk. With regards to freedom, India is no more free than it was under the British Raj.

The evidence is overwhelming that India’s political leaders are almost uniformly corrupt. It cuts across political party lines. Public corruption is not contained in some specific geographic region. It is not bounded by linguistic or religious divides. The percentage of criminals in the various state and central legislative bodies far exceed that in the general population. What’s more, that percentage has been increasing with time. And the magnitude of the corruption has also been increasing. The average corrupt deal was in tens of crores of rupees a couple of generations ago — small change compared to the deals these days which is counted in billions of dollars.

If Indians are not characteristically uniformly dishonest, how is it that India’s politicians are so acutely dishonest? Perhaps the system selects the most dishonest and the least principled.

Here’s how it works. . .

Go read it all.

Objective

I responded. Here is a picture of that twitter exchange.

This post is in fulfillment of my promise to @ReclaimBharat.

There are two national parties in India: the Congress and the BJP. The other parties are regional and they don’t have a pan-India following. In the national elections — the Lok Sabha elections — one or the other of the national parties forms the government. The regional parties matter but they are supporting actors on the national stage.

The unfortunate fact is that the Congress party has been ruling India for most of India’s post-1947 existence, either as the sole party to form the government or as the leader of a coalition of parties. We all know what the consequence of that has been: persistent poverty and rampant public corruption. India desperately needs a change of direction. That can only happen if the Congress were to be removed from power.

My claim is that the necessary first condition for India’s progress is that the Congress does not have anything to do with ruling India. It is not sufficient but it is a necessary condition.

Therefore if you are really interested in getting rid of bad governance and corruption, you must not help the Congress to win any election. But if you vote for a party that is guaranteed not to be the ruling party, you are wasting your vote. You could have voted for a party that could have challenged the Congress in forming the government, but instead you are voting for a party that has no hope of ever forming a government.

If you vote for the BJP (instead of say the AAP), you strengthening the opposition to Congress. However, if you vote for the AAP, you indirectly are voting for the Congress because you help them win against the BJP.

I hasten to add that it is not that I have a great deal of love for the BJP — I don’t. But of the two national parties, the BJP is more likely to deliver good governance than the Congress. After all, in all likelihood, any Congress government will be led by the incompetent half-breed Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi and his corrupt lackeys.

Neither AAP nor its leader Arvind Kejriwal has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting more votes than the BJP or the Congress.

My opposition is to the Congress, which has over the last 60 or so years held back India. They have to go. Anyone who votes for the Congress, or indirectly helps the Congress by voting for small regional parties (parties that have no hope in hell of ever getting the votes to unseat the Congress) is in my opinion misguided at best or at worst an agent of the Congress.

I am unwavering in my opposition to the AAP mostly because at its very best, all it will do is to ensure that the Congress continues the rape of India. I think they are not just misguided but perhaps funded by the Congress to split the middle-class votes.

If you want to reclaim Bharat or whatever, make sure that you don’t help the Congress.

Below the fold, the text of my recent column at NitiCentral.com, “The Iron Laday who Fought for Freedom.” But first here’s Richie Havens in 2009 singing that song which he sang in the 1969 music festival held on Yasgur’s farm near Woodstock, NY.

After 40 years, the man still retains his voice. Watch him at Woodstock here.

The Iron Lady who Fought for Freedom.

Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist, is claimed to have said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Though the veracity of that attribution can be doubted, there is no doubt that all significant changes in the world are brought about by committed small groups of people or even just individuals. Not all who toil are rewarded by success but every successful change is claimed by many who had nothing to do with it. But, thankfully, sometimes it is easy to credit those individuals who actually worked hard and the world was much improved as a consequence.

I was reminded of this when I learned that Baroness Thatcher – former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – passed away on 8th April at the ripe old age of 87. What she did for the UK required fierce conviction, an iron will, unremitting labor and immense political savvy. She fought on the side of human freedom and fortunately for her people, she won handsomely.

In all our toils great and small, we always need the help of others. Everything of consequence we achieve is always rooted in ideas that we adopted from thinkers much superior to us. We are not so intellectually tall that we don’t have to stand upon the shoulders of giants to see where the path ahead lies. Thatcher’s accomplishments owe much to ideas of classical liberals who themselves toiled hard for freedom.

I should hasten to add here that “classical liberals” are cats of an entirely different breed from present day “liberals”. The essential difference between the two as I see it is this: the classical liberals valued human freedom and therefore promoted the idea that people should be free from coercion by others—including government coercion. Present days liberals lie on the other end of the line: they want the government to decide how people should live their lives.

Two classical liberals who had an impact on Thatcher are Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Born in Austria-Hungary, British economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek (1899 – 1992), who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974, is best remembered by the public as the author of the book The Road to Serfdom published in 1944. I consider it to be one of those books every person who has any claims to being well-rounded must read and understand. The ideas contained in that book, if properly understood and internalized by those who wield power over others, can prevent immense human misery, pain and suffering.

Thatcher steered the UK away from the socialist path – the road to serfdom – that it was on in the 1970s. Hayek’s work influenced her profoundly. In her book, The Downing Street Years, (1993), she had this to say about Hayek’s Road to Serfdom:

. . . Such books not only provided crisp, clear analytical arguments against socialism, demonstrating how its economic theories were connected to the then depressing shortages of our daily lives; but by their wonderful mockery of socialist follies, they also gave us the feeling that the other side simply could not win in the end. That is a vital feeling in politics; it eradicates past defeats and builds future victories. It left a permanent mark on my own political character, making me a long-term optimist for free enterprise and liberty . . .

She was a great proponent of human freedom. In her 1995 book, The Path to Power, she traced her ideas about freedom thus: “. . . all the general propositions favouring freedom I had . . . imbibed at my father’s knee or acquired by candle-end reading of Burke and Hayek . . .”

The Burke she refers to is the Irish statesman and political theorist, British Member of Parliament Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) who supported American independence. He believed in the benefits that arise from free markets. As an aside, we should remember that Burke pursued (unsuccessfully) the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785, for charges of corruption. Sounds very contemporary, doesn’t it? Which only goes to show that the Indian rulers of today are continuing a tradition of looting the land that goes back centuries. Borrowing the modern technology naming convention, I call the post-independence government of India as “British Raj 2.0.”

But let’s get back to Thatcher.

For centuries, the worldly philosophers (as Robert Heilbroner called economists) have been pondering the causes of worldly wealth and prosperity. The grand-daddy of them all in the Western tradition is the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith. His magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published 1776, launched modern development economics. Although very few people read that book (it’s too long, the language impenetrable), Smith’s ideas influenced powerful people, including our Baroness Thatcher. About Adam Smith, she wrote, “ . . . the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman.”

Which brings me to Milton Friedman. He was born in Brooklyn NY just over a century ago in 1912 to immigrants from Austria-Hungary. Must be something in the Austria-Hungary waters: first Hayek and then Friedman. Uncle Milton (as he is affectionately known by those who love him and his ideas) is credited to have started the “Chicago School” of economics. He won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.

Friedman influenced many world leaders. He tried but failed to get Indian leaders to pay attention. That’s another story for another day. In any case, he was a great guide to not just Thatcher, but to Ronald Regan too. He advised Thatcher’s government from 1979 to 1990. His formula was simple: limited government, economic freedom. When Friedman passed away in San Francisco in 2006, Lady Thatcher said, “Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of a dismal science.”

Thatcher accomplished a lot because she stood on the shoulders of giants. Thanks to them for pointing the way to freedom, and thanks to her for following the path and improving the lives of her people. As an Indian, I can only hope that one day India gets leaders who can appreciate the value of freedom.

Goodbye Lady Thatcher.

As of around Tuesday 9th April 6:30 PM IST

I am guessing that the numbers for Modi will drop and Pappu’s number improve on the rediff poll. The #twitterNREGA people have yet to get on the ball.

If you want to abolish terrorism, abolish poverty and create more employment: @katjupci #ReportingTerror

— The Hindu (@the_hindu) April 7, 2013

Katju, a former judge who now heads the Press Council of India, is one can short of a six-pack. Usually his remarks stink like a steaming pile of horse manure but he outdid himself with his claim that poverty is the cause of terror. He has demonstrated that he lacks the ability to reason. And to think that the man was a judge! Let me repeat what I wrote in another post dealing with the same kind of idiocy, “Blaming the victim“, but with Katju as the subject:

It is immoral, unethical, stupid and insane to pin the acts of barbaric savagery of killing innocents on the poor. The poor suffer enough and endure enough indignities without being also gratuitously blamed for acts of terrorism.

I am disgusted and repelled by Katju’s suggestion that it is the poor retaliating against the system by killing indiscriminately. Shame on you, Mr Katju.

The complete quote appears below:

Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living?

Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre (a keen enjoyment of living), their idealism – and their assumption of immortality.

As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan (enthusiastic and assured vigour and liveliness).

Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Appointed PM Dr Singh pondering

Referring to Raul/Rahul as “Pappu” is becoming popular. The name pappu (pronounced ‘pup-poo’) has a passing resemblance to ‘puppy’ but in many parts of north India, pappu is a term of endearment used for very immature little boys.

Our Pappu does not speak very often in public, a fact that helps generate much excitement among the media when he does. The paid media, generally dishonest, goes gaga over Pappu’s pronouncements but the social media is honest and rips into Pappu with glee. I follow the circus from the sidelines. One class act is @TheUnRealTimes.

In Pictures: The stories behind Manmohan Singh’s and Rahul Gandhi to India Inc speeches theunrealtimes.com/2013/04/04/in-… via @ashwinskumar

— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) April 4, 2013

I tweeted my approval –

My favorite panel from @theunrealtimes story on #PappuCII bit.ly/10eqKwD twitter.com/atanudey/statu…

— Atanu Dey (@atanudey) April 4, 2013

I admire Ashwin Kumar —

You must agree the really talented @ashwinskumar of @theunrealtimes is awesome bit.ly/XfVQDG

— Atanu Dey (@atanudey) April 4, 2013

Anyway, for a while, #PappuCII was trending on Twitter and not #RahulCII. That speaks volumes about how seriously Raul/Rahul is taken by people at least on social media like twitter. But even on traditional media, the word on him was not good. Here’s a blog post “Rahul Speaks” on The Economist

Attending a business lobby, in the midst of a sharp economic slowdown, when the confidence of Indian and foreign investors is plummeting, he should have come with a plan. Ideally he should have sought to bolster Indian businesses’ confidence, to get them investing, believing in rapid growth around the corner.

A sensible plan for the day would have been to reassure Indian business that promoting rapid economic growth is again a priority. Mr Gandhi could have spelled out two or three specific measures, ideally in some detail, that he would support—for example, getting an Indian-wide goods-and-services tax accepted; promoting investment in retail or other industries; or devising a means by which infrastructure could be built much quicker. If he were really brave, he might have set out thoughts on ending bureaucratic uncertainty over corruption, or on land reform.

Instead Mr Gandhi offered a range of thoughts, some earnest, many well-meaning, some apparently irrelevant and some waffle. He discussed India’s soft power abroad (evidence: yoga is popular in New York; Indian film stars are recognised in Spanish nightclubs), waxed at length on the virtues of Indian “complexity” versus foreigners’ “simplicity” and indirectly admitted that India is a terrible place in which to do business. At one point, to bemusement in the audience, he argued that if you can succeed in business in India then you will flourish anywhere, “even on the moon”. India, after two terms of Congress rule, evidently does not have the conditions right for its economy to flourish.

Rahul Gandhi was of course not speaking extempore. He was reading a prepared speech — no doubt written by someone for him. Which means that not only he is not smart enough to speak without notes, and not only is he incapable of composing a speech himself, he is also not capable of figuring out whether a speech written for him is good or not.

There are many comments to that Economist blog post. Here’s vkbaxi

What is his life experience beyond sitting on Mummy’s laps? It is sheer effrontery for a country the size and potential of India to be contemplating yet another Nehru / Gandhi, sans any education or practical experience, to be thrusted upon as its leader! Congress”men” (if that can be an acceptable description) and Congress party needs to grow up!

Here’s another comment from paisawalla

This guy is a complete joke.

Time and again he cries to get attention and when given the podium, falters pretty badly. Is this a quality of someone who wants to lead a country of 1.2 billion people? I hope, sure not.

Quote ” Indian film stars are recognised in Spanish nightclubs”. Unless Mr. Rahul Gandhi has personally visited these Spanish nightclubs, how does he know first hand about their fondness for Indian films? I am no alien to western culture, but stating something like this is just pure childlike thing to do. Doesn’t increase his stature either.

Why does the Congress party believe in dynasty leadership. This chap, having won the electoral seat from Amethi (stonghold of Congress since time immemorial) cannot justify his claims on the hot seat of prime ministership, let alone being the leader of a huge party.
It’s time Indians stop putting up with all this bullshit and invigorate their minds to take a wise decision in the next elections.

God bless India

A good point made by one RedRum:

Congress party leaders in India are known for trivializing the success of others. Congress bluntly says don’t talk about ‘development’ since we have given you ‘democracy’. When Narendra Modi spoke about development and economic success of Gujarat, Rahul Gandhi mocked him saying “Even Mao got development to china”. Gujarat doesn’t have any different laws when compared to India, but Rahul Gandhi wanted to make others believe that Gujarat is some sort of totalitarian state where there is no democracy or civil rights. Digvijay Singh, Rahul’s tutor has mocked Modi saying ‘Even Hitler spoke about development’. Congress uses ‘democracy’ as an excuse for its failures.

I have never met Pappu (mercifully) but I am guessing he’s not a bad guy; just an empty-headed playboy born in the lap of luxury, who has never had to think for himself nor do an honest day’s work. Those who support him for the prime minister’s post are guaranteeing India further disasters and not doing him any favors either. Who knows perhaps Pappu would rather be left alone to hang out with his boyfriends and girlfriends, and just live a life of gay (in the old meaning of the word) abandon.

Hey, Congress, leave that pup-poo alone.

PS: In case you mistakenly believe that I have some animosity toward Pappu, perish that thought. I have defended him way back in Jan 2010. See my post “In Defense of Village Idiots“. Here’s an excerpt:

If the people of the village, in the best traditions of the hallowed democratic process, elect the village idiot as the King and Supreme Ruler of the village, I cannot for the life of me bring myself to find fault with the village idiot. It’s not the idiot’s fault that nature dealt him or her a lousy hand in the random genetic draw of life. He’s a congenital idiot and makes no demands on being recognized as a paragon of wisdom and insight. Based on that principle, I indicted the American voter for electing — not once but twice — Mr George W Bush. I can see no reason for not applying that principle to India.

Rahul Gandhi, aka Rahul baba, is a decent enough chap. He didn’t choose to be born to the Gandhi family any more than he sat around selecting his genes from the human gene pool. It was a random draw. He cannot be held responsible for the actions of a fairly large segment of the Indian population who would in all likelihood have him as the ruler of India’s destiny in a short few years. India is a democracy, don’t you know, and the will of the people (admittedly a minority in all known cases) prevails.

Go read it all.

Infosys founder Narayana Murthy’s son wanted to do Computers at IIT. But didn’t get within 200th rank. Went to Cornell. Ivy League a backup!

— Kiran Kumar S (@KiranKS) March 29, 2013

That is, if you are unable to “do computers” at IIT, your backup plan B is to get into an Ivy league school. So if Ivy league schools are safety schools, imagine how much ahead of them must be the IITs.

I have been debunking that for a long time. See this an old post, “Imagine no Reservations” May 2006 (seven years ago — how the years fly by!):

The fundamental problem with the Indian economy is that the education system is one of the most flawed systems in the country. If there is one sector which is in dire need of reform, it is that education system. The most urgently required reform is to get the government out of it—lock, stock, and barrel. The recent move by the government to further increase quotas in the so-called elite institutions with a view to social justice is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. No, I take that back: it is akin to scuttling the lifeboats even as the ship is sinking.

I have heard the claim that the Indian education system must be wonderful because the IITs produce so many wonderfully successful NRIs (non-resident Indians), especially in the US. They bolster their argument with the specious reasoning that it is harder to gain admission into IITs than into Ivy league schools, and that Narayana Murthy’s son had to use an Ivy league school as a safety school.

Sure it is harder to get into the IITs than into the top American schools. That does not mean that the IITs are in any way better than those American schools. It is a Herculean task to get into a Mumbai local during commute hours, compared to which using the Paris Metro is a piece of cake. Congestion is not an indicator of quality. When supply is severely limited relative to demand, there will be a mad scramble to get some.

On average, fewer than two out of every one hundred who appear for the entrance exam for IITs get admission. If you were to choose the top two percent of any population, the average quality of that group will be a few sigmas higher than the population average. The IITs turn out good students because those who get in are good to begin with. Then for four years, these way-above average kids compete fiercely among themselves for grades. Finally, from this bunch of super-achievers, those with the highest grades and potential are snapped up by the best American universities. By the time these graduate out of the American universities, they are the crème de la crème who have self-selected themselves for intelligence, drive, ambition, and vision. We read about them as the Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires, and pat ourselves on the back for having a wonderful educational system.

That is most definitely not so. The dysfunctional Indian education system is the saddest and costliest example of governmental ineptitude and malfeasance. The solution to the problem of the Indian educational system has to have at its core getting the government to let go of its chokehold on the system.

While on the topic, here’s a bit more from a later post of Jan 2010, “Rethinking Entrance Exams“, which may be of interest.

I have discussed on this blog at some length the problems of higher education in India. To summarize briefly, the problem is one of scarcity of supply. This is what I call an “engineered scarcity” because it arises from the government control of the system. In free societies with free markets, scarcities are not a chronic feature. Why? Because any scarcity due to say sudden and persistent increase in the demand is met with increased prices which in turn increase supply and the scarcity disappears. For scarcity to persist for decades, the system has to be rigged such that the supply cannot be changed to respond to the demand.

The government of India depends on manufactured scarcity because socialism thrives thus: first create the scarcity through governmental control; then the government doles out the scarce thing to favored groups; the people are brainwashed into thinking that since the government is the source of the supply, it (the government) must be the benevolent entity in the economy; therefore all efforts must be made to keep on the good side of the government so that one is favored with some of the scarce good.

The Indian government controls the supply of education for two reasons. First, it can extract rents from it. Licensing is the mechanism. To get licensed, one has to pay a bribe — often in the hundreds of millions of rupees to officials who have the discretion to refuse the license. Rent seeking is one motivation for the government control. The other reason is related to India’s “democracy” — buying the allegiance of favored vote banks by discriminating for and against specific groups. If you belong to a specific religious group, you get special treatment, and therefore that religious group’s vote is guaranteed.

Manufactured Shortage

This is all old hat and I merely repeat it here for setting the context. The main thing is that education in India suffers from engineered (or manufactured, if you please) shortage. This leads to immense social welfare losses. I propose one mechanism to fix one small part of this welfare loss. I say “small” only because it is small relative to the aggregate set of problems, not because it is trivial. This small part actually amounts to billions of dollars worth of welfare losses.

Now on to the specifics. The problem I will address is one of selecting who gets to have the privilege of going to an elite publicly funded elite institution of higher learning such as the IITs.

FACT A: The demand far outstrips the supply. Why? First, because the education is subsidized. So you get more than you pay for. When something is under-priced, naturally more demand will be higher. Second, even if the education were priced at full cost, the life-time benefit of an IIT education far exceeds the full price.

FACT B: Because of fact A, people are willing to pay a high price to get into an IIT. How much would people be rationally willing to pay? Something approaching the difference between the private cost of an IIT education (tuition fees, food, rent) and the private benefit (the discounted net present value of an IIT education.) So if the discounted net present value of an IIT education is Rs 100 lakhs, and the private cost is Rs 16 lakhs (4 lakhs per year for 4 years), then people would be willing to pay upto Rs 84 lakhs.

But of course no one really pays that much to get into an IIT. For one thing, for Rs 84 lakhs, one can go abroad and get a decent undergraduate degree. The point here is that people are willing to spend a large amount of money to just get into an IIT. And they do indeed spend a lot in their attempt to do so. An entire industry exists just for that purpose. The coaching classes industry. The more successful firms in this industry charge more fees than the IITs charge. And people routinely spend more on trying to get into an IIT than they would spend if they ever got into one.

As I have mentioned previously in a post before, the more successful coaching classes, let’s call “1st order”, themselves have to select whom they will admit — which leads to the absurd situation that there are “2nd order” coaching classes — those that coach students to pass the entrance exams of the “1st order” classes. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan mentions this in his interview. But I’ll come to that in a bit.

Cost of Coaching

For now, let’s do the numbers. The figures say that around 300,000 students appear for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for IITs. These days it is not unusual for students to go to coaching classes for a couple of years before attempting the JEE. Assume conservatively Rs 1 lakhs per year as the cost of getting coached. Assume that around 2 out of 3 of those who appear for the JEE have attended coaching classes. That gives us an estimate of Rs 6,000 crores (2 lakhs x 300,000) for the size of the IIT coaching industry. (That’s approximately US$ 1.3 billion.)

That $1.3 billion is incurred every year and what is worse, it is amounts to a huge welfare loss since it is essentially a rent-seeking activity and therefore a dead-weight loss to society. The coaching does improve an individual’s chance of getting into an IIT but its aggregate social effect is nothing at all. It just intensifies the competition. It is an educational arms-race.

An analogy I find illuminating is this: if I stand up on my seat at a stadium to get a better view of the game, some others will also do so. Then in a short while, the entire stadium will be standing up and everyone will be exactly where one was in terms of visibility of the game while sitting down but now everyone ends up paying the price of watching the game standing up.

From the pool of 300,000 aspiring students who appear for the JEE, around 10,000 are selected. That’s one student out of 30. But is it true that the students ranked 10,001 to 50,000 are incapable or unprepared for studying in an IIT? Most likely, they are almost as good as those ranked above them. I am confident that if the capacity exited, 50,000 students could enter the IITs and do as well. We all know of people who failed to get into an IIT and ended up being very successful. Recently I learned that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan did not make the IIT grade but was good enough to win a Nobel prize in Chemistry. (That name once again!)

Changing the Rules

The rules of the game have to be changed. The best option would be to get the Indian government out of the life-blood-sucking control of education it has. But that is going to happen the day hell freezes over. The second best option therefore is to fix this welfare loss of competitive exams and make the whole business of coaching classes irrelevant.

Well, that’s it. Forced to recycle stuff every now and again because the canard that IITs are the cat’s whiskers just refuses to die.

All Indian citizens who want to learn about good governance principles and practices which are commonplace in the West, but almost entirely absent in India, are a suitable audience for this conference. Participants will learn about a range of intuitive (and some not-so-intuitive) solutions to India’s problems, enabling them to directly address such issues if they have a direct capacity to implement such solutions, or demand that such issues be addressed in India.

I regret that I won’t be able to attend as I am not in New Delhi on those dates. I wish IPI and Sanjeev great success in the event and the mission that he is on.

Let me start on an autobiographical note. I am what in common parlance is called a ‘non-resident Indian’, an NRI. I have studied, worked and lived in the US for over 30 years. Like hundreds of thousands of others from India (and from scores of other countries in the world), I had come to the US for higher studies – and stayed back.

It is hard not to like living in the US, a rich, developed country. Life is easy, the salaries are among the best in the world and one enjoys freedoms – economic, political, individual freedoms – that are generally hard to get in most parts of the world. I became an immigrant like millions of others who have made the US their home.

I loved living in the San Francisco Bay area. But the old country was never far from my mind. The question that bothered me was why is India so poor. It was a sufficiently important question for me that I even went to the absurd extent of studying economics to get a handle on the matter.

The ties that bind us are many but one of the most enduring must be the one that ties us to our motherland. Over the years I have met hundreds of Indians who have chosen to call the US their home. They all love being in the US but without exception they all have an inalienable connection with the country of their birth.

This is a universal feeling. Being the melting pot and a land of immigrants that the US is – particularly California – I know hundreds of people from around the world. They settled here for various reasons but no one can deny that their identity and their sense of who they are is inextricably tied to where they are from.

My Finnish friend could not be more clear when she says that she is Finnish even though she loves the US. This is not limited to the US, of course. A German friend, for example, who has lived in Paris for most of her adult life, was insistent that her loyalties lie with Germany.

Catch a flight from San Jose, California, and you will see thousands of Americans of Mexican origin going home to Mexico. At San Francisco airport, the flights to India are jam-packed with Americans of Indian origin going to India. The story is the same: People go back to their roots because that’s where they were born but however far they roam, the umbilical cord seems to stretch.

This is normal and understandable. I see it in myself even though I am not a sentimental person. Often when I arrive in India, I recoil from the dirt and filth that is pervasive in India. But never have I not felt the emotion that the Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) expressed so beautifully in his poem ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!

The sense of who we are is of tribal origin. We are nothing if not members of the tribe that nourished us in our childhood. We love the language we learned from our mother, the food that we grew up eating, the religion we were brought up in. Much like the DNA in every cell of our bodies which carry the legacy of all of our ancestors, our souls carry the imprint of our origins. Ineradicable and strong, they define us and our identities.

But circumstances sometimes lead some of us to foreign lands voluntarily or otherwise. Immigrants do love their adopted country but they have a longing for their old country that often surpasses that of those who never left their home country. It is as if they compensate for their having left their family and friends by becoming more attached to their old country.

For immigrants, if they have a soul at all, loyalty and love for the home country will always be a weakness. The matter of divided loyalties is a universal human failing. The US Constitution recognises that and bars people who were not born in the US from becoming the President of the US – the most powerful executive office is reserved for people who do not have divided loyalties. It is not humanly possible to not have divided loyalties when you are born in one part of the world and live in another.

Fortunately, the ordinary immigrant will never be faced with a choice that will demonstrate that divided loyalty. We just don’t matter. I will never be dictating US policy that may adversely affect India or be faced with a policy choice that may favour the US over India. I will never be in a position where I will have to rule against one or the other country.

Which brings me to the final point of this piece. I think that Indians generally don’t understand that putting a reluctant immigrant, a person who is born and brought up in a different country and naturalised almost against her will, in a position of power is a dangerous thing to do. The person does not have to be evil; just being human is enough. “We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation,” wrote Francois De La Rochefoucauld (1613 – 1618).

It is both unfair and unwise.

In India, Hindu sponsored terrorism is at its peak. As long as these Hindu terrorists exist, Kashmiris are not safe in any corner of this country. — Prashant Bhushan, Aam Aadmi Party

The English translation says,

“In India, Hindu sponsored terrorism is at its peak. As long as these Hindu terrorists exist, Kashmiris are not safe in any corner of this country.

Prashant Bhushan, Aam Aadmi Party”

AAP is Arvind Kejriwal’s political party. Bhushan is endorsing what Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party claimed — that the greatest threat to India is from “Hindu” terrorism. That’s not the surprising bit. The surprising bit is that some Hindus will certainly vote for AAP. This is part of the big pattern: Hindus acting against their own long-term interests. As long as this goes on, the future is bleak for Hindus — and for India.

(The video was posted on Sept 2012 on YouTube. I don’t know the date of the interview but it must have been during Modi’s Sadhbhavana Mission.)

English transcript:

Rahul Kanwal (RK) : People ask this question everywhere that God forbid a situation like that (Godhra riots) arises again what will Narendra Modi’s response be this time? Do you guarantee that something like that will never happen again.

Narendra Modi (NaMo) : Do you want to serve the country?

RK : Surely.

NaMo : Do you want to put in some honest effort? Will you do some work? Will you do it? I am asking Rahul.

RK : Tell me. Surely.

NaMo : You do this. 1984′s communal violence report, Bhagalpur’s communal violence report, 1969 Gujarat’s communal violence report, 1992 Mumbai’s communal violence report — all the reports are available, and Gujarat information is available. Across those five, use any parameter you like, and compare. If you realize that better work happened in Gujarat as compared to the other four, will you tell the world? Do this work and then come to me if you have any more questions.

RK : Good work is happening in Gujarat.

NaMo : No no, I am speaking about the communal violence. You asked me a hypothetical question that if riots happen what will Narendra Modi do.

RK : (Interjects) It is an important question.

NaMo : Important, everything is important for you or else why would you come from Delhi all the way here. Your bread and butter depends on it.

RK : True.

NaMo : So it is important. I don’t treat any of your question as less important and I must respect it. I don’t believe you are wasting your time (by asking this question). You are working sincerely.

What I am saying to the question you asked, can you do this much work for the country. Take these five communal violence instances of which four were during Congress rule and one Modi’s under BJP. In these what was the reason for the incidence, what was the response, what was the legal process – all the details are in the report.

Can you just take out the comparisons of all five (riots) and put it in front of the country. Just do this much and all your questions will be solved on their own.

It will be a cold day in hell when idiot journalists can actually do some real work instead of parroting the same old bs about the post-Godhra riots. I sometimes wonder if Modi is not being too indulgent of these lazy morons.

The specifics of the minor storm surrounding the Wharton India Economic Forum 2013 (WIEF2013) to be held March 22-23 are common knowledge. The organising committee first invited Chief Minister Narendra Modi to be the keynote speaker at the event and then a couple of days ago withdrew the invitation which Modi had graciously accepted. Predictably this led to much rejoicing among Modi’s detractors (they are legion) and much outrage among his ardent supporters.

Allow me to address one relatively minor matter first. As in all similar cases, someone or the other decides that this is a case of stifling of free speech. The speaker’s ‘right to free speech’ has been violated, goes the cry. Voltaire is immediately invoked and quoted as having said, “I disagree with what you have to say but I will defend with my life your right to say it.” Just for the record, Voltaire didn’t say that ever but that’s beside the point.

This is not a matter of free speech at all. By their action, the organisers of WIEF are not preventing Modi from speaking. They just don’t want him to speak at their venue. His ability to speak freely elsewhere is not compromised in any way. Freedom of speech means that the speaker is free to speak but it does not impose any obligation on anyone to listen. If WIEF people don’t want to hear what Modi has to say, they are well within their rights to not provide him a platform. So Modi’s supporters, well-meaning though they may be, should tone down their free-speech-violation outrage a bit.

Now to the more substantive matter of whether it is right to invite someone and then retract the invitation after it has been accepted. Under extraordinary circumstances one may be compelled to do so. It could be due to an honest mistake. For instance, you thought the speaker was a highly qualified doctor and therefore most suited to address your medical conference. But then you realise that he’s not a doctor of medicine at all but rather a doctor of philosophy. It’s embarrassing as all heck but not life threatening. You apologise to the invitee for your mistake and life goes on.

That’s not how it happened in this case. The WEIF2013 organisers – business school students at a prestigious highly-ranked US university – must have known everything there is to know about Modi, one of the most celebrated and prominent public figures in India. No new information about him could conceivably become available to them. They must have known that they would face opposition from those who hate Modi. So what happened?

The proverb ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune’ can provide some clues. Universities rely to some extent on external funding – from benefactors outside the state or alumni. Times are hard and one cannot afford to antagonise those who help one pay the bills. Wharton management perhaps found it was politically (and financially) imprudent to host Modi given that he has been declared persona non grata by certain influential groups with deep pockets. Remember: The Government of India and its agents have deep pockets, not to mention foreign bank accounts.

What the organisers of the conference did in retracting their invitation is understandable. It must be that on weighing matters, they decided that is better to incur the wrath of one camp rather than the other. Understandable but that does not mean that it is not churlish, spineless and lacking the courage of conviction. Besides, it may be terribly myopic. More about that in a bit.

Some consider the WIEF’s action to be an insult to Modi and indeed to India itself. It is nothing of the sort. First, Modi is a big man. For 10 years he has been the target of an unrelenting witch hunt by the Union Government and its agents in the mainstream media, various NGOs with questionable objectives, and foreign Governments who would like to see India embroiled in domestic discord. Yet he has not only survived, he has prospered and helped the people of the State of Gujarat prosper. He cannot be insulted by something as trivial as the retraction of an invitation to speak at a conference, however prestigious the venue.

Second, it is not an insult to India for different reasons. Modi is not India. An insult to Modi – which it isn’t as I argue above – cannot be an insult to India. The WIEF is too inconsequential compared to India for it to be capable of insulting India. What is indeed an insult to Indians is that India is an impoverished (meaning ‘made poor’) country, and it has been made so by bad governance. Lest we forget, India has been misgoverned by the Nehru dynasty and the Congress for most of its post-British Raj existence. The rape of India, not just figuratively, has intensified in the last nine years.

One indicator of India’s impoverishment – and there are too many to list here – is the dismal education system. India’s education system has failed because of bad Government policy formulated for the most part by the Congress and the Nehru dynasty. Not one university in this land of 1.2 billion people is ranked in the top three or four hundred of the world’s universities. Thus tens of thousands of Indians have to go abroad at enormous cost for higher studies. That is why Wharton Business School (like many others) have an annual ‘India Economic Forum’ conference and no Indian university has an ‘US Economic Forum’.

The fact is that India suffers from an on-going insult from its Government and nothing that a bunch of misguided business school students can do ever match the injury that the Nehru dynasty has inflicted on India’s wellbeing.

The WIEF matter is inconsequential in the larger scheme of things but it is significant in what it signals. It signals that Modi’s opponents are shivering in their boots. Modi’s address last month at Shri Ram College of Commerce, New Delhi, scared the living daylights out of the Congress-led UPA and its fellow-travellers. They could well imagine how much more damage Modi would do to them in a talk that would only amplify his voice even more. Modi has to be stopped at every corner, on every street, and with all they can muster. He kicked the hornet’s nest at SRCC and they are buzzing with furious anger.

The Congress-led UPA wants Modi stopped not because he is bad for India but rather because he is bad for those who have misgoverned India for so many decades. Modi is good for India. If Modi continues on the trajectory that he is on, he will transform India from an impoverished country to one that is prosperous and powerful. That would mean that those who have profited from India’s misfortunes – namely, the corrupt domestic Governments and enemy foreign Governments – will be forced to abandon their fiefdom.

India has the potential to be as powerful as a nation of 1.2 billion is capable of being. To realise that potential what India needs is leadership. Modi has demonstrated that he is a man with vision, determination, intelligence and capable of superhuman effort. Every weapon they have fired against him has made him stronger. He is, to borrow a term from Taleb, “antifragile” – the stress is like exercise, building a more resilient body. When – not if, but when – he becomes India’s Prime Minister, India will finally be on its way to fulfilling its potential.

And in the end, this sordid event will be just a brief footnote. The students of the IEF at Wharton are myopic. They will be gone in a year or two. But for years to come Wharton will pay the price of having needlessly antagonised so many Indians, Indians who would be far, far richer than they are today and would have contributed to its success.

But when it comes to Modi, their hackles rise. He’s incorruptible and they don’t bend. They become combative and confrontational. They raise poisoning the well to a fine art with their accusations against Modi. The great thing is how Modi responds to them so effortlessly. The man’s responses are devastating but I am not sure that his interlocutors quite get it. If they had been that smart, they would have known not to poke the lion. Here’s a “for example” for you.

For the benefit of those who don’t follow Hindi, I asked my friend Amit Malviya to help me with an English translation of the above video.

Navika: On the Godhra issue – But there have been comments that have come from senior leaders of the Congress saying that you should be actually hanged for what happened in Gujarat in 2002.

Narendra Modi: Congress spokesperson has said that if Modi was in any other country he would have been hanged. In a way this is Congress party’s authorized statement since their spokesperson has said it, which means it is Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s statement.

I am not surprised with this statement of Congress because those who import leaders from outside now also want to import law from outside.

Second thing is when they make such a statement, they make a grave allegation against the judicial process of India. They should understand that by making such a statement they have expressed lack of confidence in the Indian judicial process and it is not expected of a party like Congress.

Thirdly, They say if there were foreigners they would have hanged me. When we were fighting for independence, all the foreign judges used to sit here and our freedom fighters have been hanged to death then too and if it happens again then it doesn’t bother me.

And third point, May be they (Congress) think there is a law in Itlay which can hang me. I would like to request the Congress party that if it is their intention then let them put me on trial in Itlay and hang me. But I have a request to the Govt of the day that even if I am hanged, the process of hanging should happen in India because I want that in my last breath there should be fragrance of sweat of 100cr Indians.

Which brings me to one thing that puzzles me no end: how on earth does one compare Modi with Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi? Surely it is silly to compare a Lion from the Gir forest with a half-Italian rodent.

. . . as one of remarkable economic achievement coupled with social development over the past decade. Hard-nosed investors and cynical industrialists acknowledge the rapid turnaround witnessed by this State on account of radical policy initiatives and their implementation by the Modi Government. Yesterday’s global economic power houses fallen upon bad times today are making a beeline for Gujarat to try and hitch their fortunes to those of this State in the hope that it would lead to a miraculous recovery for them.

All this and more is there for all to see but our blinkered Left-liberal media, controlled by an overweening commentariat dependent on crumbs from the high table of a status quoist and thoroughly corrupt New Delhi Establishment, will just not take note of facts as they exist. Instead, newspapers, journals and news channels continue to peddle fiction that is of a piece with their jaundiced perception of reality. It is a command performance – the morally bankrupt Pied Piper of New Delhi leads; the intellectually bankrupt intelligentsia which dominates the Left-liberal media follows.

Kanchan’s piece is an elegant response to a poorly written, illogically argued, blatantly partisan piece of trash. Not being a respected journalist like Kanchan Gupta, I am unconstrained by niceties and have the freedom to baldly state that Lyla Bavadam is a brain-dead retard. Evidence: her piece titled “Mirage of Development.”

Let me take just one out of numerous examples of idiocy. At one point she displays a table that lists states ordered with decreasing child mortality. Gujarat appears at the bottom of that short list. She’s so stupid as to not understand that the lower in that list that a state is, the better it is. She’s an innumerate.

The hatred for Modi has reached pathological proportions among the Congress chaprasis and they are clearly deranged. I think it is a good development because their insanity reveals their impotence.

There’s hope for India.

{For the benefit of those unfamiliar with Hindi, ‘dhulai’ means a wash, and ‘dhobi ghat’ is where the laundry is done. Not only do you get informed about important happenings, but you also get language lessons. What a deal.}

You have to read the entire piece by Sandeep which is titled “Rohit Setalvad Owaisi Pradhan’s Perverse Communalism.” Below I just give you a sense of what it is about.

The embedded quotes in the excerpt are from Rohit Pradhan’s article in Outlook magazine, “What Makes Modi Unacceptable.”

. . . we shall examine the first of his several essay-length contradictions.

The strongest argument against Modi is…that he is seen as the face of 2002 riots. He is viewed as emblematic of India’s unfair treatment of its minorities; a thin veneer of secularism hiding an ugly face of Hindu majoritarianism.

Sure Modi is “seen” and “viewed” as all these things in just the same way that I “see” and “view” Rohit Pradhan as a dimwit who can’t make a reasoned argument; in the same way that I “see” and “view” Rohit Pradhan as a Hindu hater and in the same way that I “see” and “view” Rohit Pradhan as someone filled with baseless hatred against Narendra Modi who has appeased no caste or community or sect so far, and in the same way that Rohit Pradhan’s Institution is emblematic of Think Tanks’ misleading representation of their stated goals; a thin veneer of Indian National Interest hiding an ugly face of Muslim appeasement.

And then in the very next line, he says:

Now, it would be unfair to blame Modi entirely for this troubling state of affairs.

In which case, why does Rohit Pradhan characterize him as emblematic of Hindu majoritarianism? Does Rohit Pradhan even know what real Hindu majoritarianism would entail? It would entail the fair and even sympathetic treatment of Muslims by Hindu kings—even the iconic Krishnadevaraya had a copy of the Koran kept next to his throne as a symbol proclaiming that he treated Islam with equal respect. Like him, almost every Hindu king gave grants to and allowed Muslims to build mosques and practice their faith without fear. And as things stand, Muslims in Gujarat are much better off compared to Muslims in other states. Rohit Pradhan also needs to show us evidence of exactly one riot or criminal act against Muslims under Modi’s decade-long dispensation. Just one. (Tehelka’s doctored reports and fake sting ops don’t count.) And this in a state notorious for Hindu-Muslim riots, all of them under Congress rule. Indeed, a Vastanvi heaping praise on Modi says a lot.

This then seems to be the ire of the likes of Rohit Pradhan. Under the guise of criticizing an imaginary threat of “ugly” Hindu majoritarianism, they want Muslims to be mollycoddled; they want Muslims to be treated as second class citizens instead of as equals who can compete on the strength of their merit; they want Muslims to be afraid of Hindus and they want special privileges for Muslims because they’re minorities—aren’t minorities human beings?; they want the Indian state to tax the majority to subsidize the minorities; they want the Indian state to privilege one group of people at the expense of the other based not on reason or need but religion. Why?

Go read the whole article by Sandeep.

Thank goodness that there are alternative channels these days — blogs and such — that allow people like Media Crooks, Sandeep and others to challenge the tripe that magazines and newspapers (broadly speaking “paid media”) like Outlook, Tehelka, The Hindu, etc., carry.

Media Crooks sets the gold standard that very few observers are capable of achieving. Take his expert fisking today (link provided below) of Mr Katju, an ex-judge of the supreme court of India who writes a lot of politically motivated stuff and is often in the media spotlight. Katju deserves to be taken to the cleaners and MC does it with aplomb and ruthless precision.

Here’s an extended excerpt:

Despite being a judge who would be expected to care for facts JK [Justice Katju] still chose to peddle fake and unverified numbers of Muslims killed in Gujarat 2002 in his article. And, of course, he makes readers believe only Muslims were killed and not Hindus. If this is not political tinkering, what is? On February 18 in a chat with Rahul Kanwal and Meenakshi Lekhi on Headlines Today JK used more spurious nonsense to defend himself. He cited women’s bellies being slashed and ripped and burnt. This gory tale doesn’t come from anywhere but appears to be from Arundhati Roy’s wonder world of fiction. I had quoted the whole fake story of Suzy Roy in “SC exposes media’s clean shit” after the SC didn’t accept Zakia Jafri’s petition against Modi. For her bogus story in Outlook magazine, Arundhati had apologised but JK uses similar stories without an iota of evidence. Is he fit to be the PCI chairman? When told that Modi has been elected by people, JK nonchalantly says “we all know how elections are won”. Is he suggesting all elections in India are also spurious or is it only when it comes to Modi? The only major case of election-fraud in a court is not related to Modi but to P. Chidambaram.

In addition to the bellies-ripped story, JK also cites the killing of Ehsan Jafri as a planned attack. It took Meenakshi Lekhi to point out to him that leading the killers of Jafri was not a BJP man but a Congress MLA called Meghsingh Chaudhary . . .

I doubt anyone in the media or any observer would deny that the campaign against Modi was the biggest witch-hunt in India. The hunters who participated benefited financially, in position and in influence. There is no reason not to criticise Modi but it is the proportions and usage of spurious information and analogies that make JK look more like Teesta Setalvad or Mallika Sarabhai. . . In his interview with TimesNow Jaitley mentioned how as Law Minister he had experienced senior judges on the verge of retirement clamouring for post-retirement postings. He also mentioned that some judgements just around the pre-retirement phase could be affected by such lust. With his open political campaign that is intended to benefit the Congress party, JK now has people wondering about the conduct and motives of judges themselves. By his conduct and utterances JK has pushed people into wondering if judges are above political persuasions when they are in office. This is the dangerous lump on the breast that cannot be ignored. In my previous post I have not attributed any motives to JK’s biased, prejudiced and spurious articles and nor have any of his critics in the current episode.
. . .

. . . In my earlier post on this topic I had wrongly mentioned JK has an opinion on everything under Pluto. No Mr. JK, it seems your favourite planet is Uranus.

For all the corruption and scams that the Congress has been mired in, JK doesn’t have much to say about it. His conduct and frequent outbursts and outrage does make one worry about the conduct of our judges. In recent times SC judges have received postings on various statutory bodies immediately on retirement. There isn’t any cooling period post retirement anymore. Meenakshi Lekhi pointed another important aspect of JK’s behaviour and political persuasions. With so much of bias and prejudice against the BJP, particularly Narendra Modi, how can a member of this party who has a complaint to be heard by the PCI chairman ever expect him to be fair and impartial? This alone is good enough reason for JK to resign or to be sacked.

. . .

The awful truth also is that without the “justice” tag, without the “PCI Chairman” tag and most of all, without the “anti-Modi” tag JK wouldn’t be allowed to write in the media. Not just writing, being anti-Modi is like a license to write with spurious analogies and information. This time everyone called JK’s bluff. It looks like the cats may survive their nine lives but spuriousity certainly killed the Katju.

Go read the full article on spuriosity and Media Crooks’ previous article on the same topic of Katju, “Justice For 10000 Killed In Gujarat 2002“.

Also, the article that Katju wrote “All the Perfumes of Arabia” and Arun Jaitley’s response where he asks Katju to resign from his current official position as the chairman of the Press Council of India.

And do yourself a favor and follow @MediaCrooks.

“In Gujarat, Jamiat workers on the ground have told me that in several assembly segments, Muslims voted for Modi. There is a perceptible change and circumstances are different now, . . . Some Muslims have indeed voted for Modi primarily for two reasons — fear and that the alternative is not good enough either.

Madani’s statements are being quoted approvingly by many supporters of the BJP. I think they mistake it to be an endorsement of Modi or even just of the BJP. But that is patently mistaken. He is just signalling to the Congress. I read his statements thus:

Listen up, Congress and other secular parties. We are not getting enough stuff. We need more free stuff and more reservations based on religion. We demand more subsidies and more privileges for Muslims. We demand more appeasement. If we don’t get more attention from you, we will punish you by not voting for you. If we, your vote bank desert you in the next general elections, you know you are royally screwed. So listen up and listen up good. Get with the program. Give Muslims more stuff or your little game of looting India is toast.

I read Madani’s statement as a threat to the Congress. And in response I guess the Congress will deliver. What does the Congress deliver to the Muslims? What it has always done: make them dependent and enslaved. Whatever else the Muslims of India may or may not be, one thing is for sure and that is that they are not free. They have traded their basic freedom and dignity by accepting handouts for decades. They have been debased and disenfranchised. Lacking the freedom to seek their own fortunes, they have made a pact with the Congress: they are pawns in the sordid game of entitlements and are given what PJ O’Rourke calls “the rations of slavery.”

“Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the “right” to education, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

I hope that the Muslims of India one day soon understand that they have to fight for that basic human right: to be responsible for themselves.

I judge the people for how they behave, not what they fundamentally believe in. However, to lend support for my assessment of a certain ideology, I may have to point to specific actions by individuals or groups that acted in accord with the dictates of that ideology. I am given that opportunity by the actions of the followers of the ideology and is not something that I invent on a whim. If the facts I choose to highlight are in dispute, I’d like to be corrected. Otherwise I would like to hear an argument why the ideology cannot be judged, first, objectively without reference to actions; and second, by noting the consequences of the ideology as evidenced by the actions of those motivated by it.

The Importance of Making Distinctions

The ability to make distinctions and see differences is absolutely critical. Perceiving the universe as an undifferentiated whole with no boundaries or distinctions is a wonderful mystical Zen experience perhaps but in our daily living we need to distinguish the benign from the malignant, the useful from the useless, the healthy from the diseased. We do that as a matter of course since it is ingrained in our genes: like all other living things, we are the descendants of a very long line of ancestors each of whom was successful in making those distinctions long enough to mate and procreate.

We live in a World of Ideas & Ideologies

We humans differ from other living things in one significant way: we live in a world of ideas, not just a world of things. Ideas can also be broadly characterized as benign, malignant or neutral. The same can be done for an ideology which is essentially a collection of ideas.

An example is the theory of evolution — like all scientific theories, it is an ideology, just like capitalism, or communism, or any other ‘ism.’ Ideologies, like things, can be grouped and their characteristics examined. Any specific religion is an ideology. A group of related religions can also be examined as an ideology. Judging the goodness (however defined) of any ideology is no different from judging the goodness of things.

All religious ideologies are not created equal

They differ naturally because they were created by different people under different geographical and historical circumstances. Religious ideologies are contingent and don’t have any absolute existence, unlike say the ideology of the theory of gravitation. If you did the right inferences from observation, you would arrive at the same theory of gravity as someone who lived in a different land at a different time.

The major monotheistic ideologies were born in the Middle East and they share the same lineage. Their family resemblance is unmistakable. Judaism came first; the Christians acknowledge the Jewish bible and added their own two bits; then Islam came along and plagiarized bits from the preceding two and added its own twisted bits to it.

Monotheism is Evil

Every age and every place that has been touched by the monotheistic ideology has suffered profoundly from its malignant influence. It has killed, raped, burnt, pillaged, and destroyed whatever it can. Not content with merely killing non-monotheists, it has encouraged its followers to turn their rage against one another. Sibling rivalry, perhaps.

Gore Vidal put it thusly at the Lowell Lecture, Harvard University, April 20, 1992:

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved–Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal–God is the omnipotent father–hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.

The history books are full of rivers of blood shed by mutual hostility between Protestants, Catholics, Shias, Sunnis, and all of them at some point or the other against the Jews. Though Christianity and Islam are descended from Judaism, the Jews are held in special contempt by the followers of the other two. A Darwinist may explain that by saying that they all occupy the same ecological niche and hence the bitter rivalry.

Not Equally Vicious

But they are not equally vicious. The Jewish god is a monomaniacal savage but he does not command Jews to go out and kill the others. His world is restricted to the Jews and how he controls them. The Christian god is a much meaner god. He created a hell for non-believers and instructed his followers to go out and either convert or kill those who don’t follow him. A few hundred years later, the Islamic god upped the ante and instructed its followers to basically kill everyone who refuses to submit to him until the entire world is enslaved to him.

The sequence of origination ensures that the ideology which came later had the opportunity to revile the earlier one(s). Islam labels Jews and Christians monkeys and pigs; Christianity condemns Jews for having the blood of their savior on their hands. There is a progression of increasing violence in the three monotheistic ideologies.

Invented by Savages

One reasonable explanation for the savagery of Christianity and Islam is that they were invented by savages. They lived in a brutal and brutalizing environment. They lived in a dog eat dog world where worldly pleasures were few and far between. Their god is a reflection of that mentality that brutalizes humans and humanity. A brutalized male dominated warring society living in harsh conditions could not conceive of a god that was loving. The fantasies of a paradise which can only be described as an impotent man’s wet dream figures prominently in Islam.

How anyone can believe in a god of the monotheists is a fascinating subject. That god is literally unbelievable. This is widely recognized by the monotheists themselves — those who believe in the Islamic god vehemently reject the Jewish and Christian god, the Islamic god is unpalatable to the Jews and the Christians, and the Christian god is idiotic in the opinion of the Jews and the Muslims. Each comprehends the utter stupidity of the other two, and non-monotheists arrive at the logical position — the logical union of the three views — that monotheism is utter stupidity.

Supremacist and Triumphalist Claims

What distinguished monotheism from other religious ideologies is that it is supremacist, exclusivist, and triumphalist. That attitude finds it most extreme expression in Islam — it claims it is perfection in every sense, no other ideology can be permitted to exist, and it will ultimately conquer every human for eternity.

The non-monotheist religions are cautious and hesitant. Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism all claim to be correct but also make allowances that there are multiple ways and that different people will see the world differently. They are willing to accommodate other points of views, and other ways of living. But to the ideology of Islam, there is only one way and if you refuse to willingly submit to the dictates of Islam, you have to be subjugated and if need be, annihilated.

Motives Differ

The followers of ideologies are humans. Human action is motivated by a wide range of impulses and incentives, not just ideologies — religious or otherwise. It is not too difficult to determine what the prime motivation may have been for a certain action. The kamikaze bombers of the second world war may have been Buddhists but the Buddhist ideology was not the prime motivator for their suicide missions. It was not an adherence to the principles of Buddhism but rather their allegiance to the Emperor and the nation that moved them. Stalin and Mao murdered scores of millions for a political ideology and not for their being atheists. They were bad people doing what came naturally to them as followers of a certain ideology.

Steven Weinberg has said: “Without religions, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But it takes religion to get good people to do bad things.” I would generalize that observation: Without ideological motivations, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But to get good people to do bad things requires bad ideologies.

Religious Insanity and Economic Development

So why am I writing about religious insanity in a blog which is about economic growth and development? How is religion relevant? Let me elaborate on why I think religion matters and why more importantly the ideology of Islam matters to India’s development.

As I have said before, all ideologies are not created equal. Some are benign and can be safely ignored. The Pastafarians will not sic their Flying Spaghetti Monster god on me if I call them ridiculous for their ridiculous beliefs.

But never mind the FSM as it was meant to parody monotheism. How about if I call Buddhists a bunch of retarded egg-heads and call the Buddha a dried shit stick? Not a problem. At worst someone may challenge me to a dharma duel which I could easily win by smiling stupidly as I make some seemingly profound statement like “what is the sound of one hand clapping” or “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Violent Response is Hard-coded in Islam

These days you can mock all ideologies — religious or secular — except one: Islam. Scribble something on a piece of paper and, regardless of where you are and whether or not you have broken any local laws, Muslims (sometimes half way across the world) can and will take offense at what you have written. That is usually followed by some of the faithful flying into a murderous rage (which is different from murdering people by flying planes into buildings) and setting out to kill you.

I object to an ideology that responds to criticism with violence and murder. Islam has the response encoded within it. It is not the invention of the followers. By not allowing criticism, it forces a stop to human progress because it will not allow any idea — religious or secular — to survive if it is not consistent with Islam. This is why most countries where Islamic ideology is dominant do not figure in any area of science, technology, arts, and entertainment.

Limited Understanding of the World

Pretty much everything we know about the universe was discovered after the 7th century and therefore all that Islam could possibly know (and knows) was (and is) bounded by what was known by essentially ignorant people in the desert in the 7th century. So if Islam is allowed to dominate India today — today when it has finally emerged after a thousand years of servitude — it will be a disaster. What sort of disaster? Well, look at Pakistan and Bangladesh — those parts of the Indian subcontinent where Islam has triumphed.

Ideologies matter. Observe the differing performance of the differing ideological groups from the Indian subcontinent in Western nations. That is a natural experiment the results of which clearly demonstrate that Islamic ideology hinders the development of people because it prohibits precisely those freedoms that are most critical in human development and growth.

Islam in India: The Bloodiest Story in History

The ideology of Islam matters to today’s India and it has done so for around a thousand years. Will Durant, an American historian summed it up this way. “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in History. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown barbarians invading from without and multiplying within.”

The partitioning of India was based on that ideology of Islam. The Muslims of colonial India voted that they cannot co-exist with non-Muslims because their ideology did not permit that. The creation of Pakistan (and subsequently of Bangladesh) was the direct and unavoidable result of Islamic ideology. Thereafter, the constant state of war that exists between the three fragments can be reasonably traced back to the Islamic ideology of dividing all humanity into the land of Islam and the land of the kuffars.

Fighting the Jihadists on Empty Stomachs

The millions of lives lost over the centuries continue to be added to every year — sometimes in bloody wars and more regularly in a war of thousand cuts of random acts of terrorism. Resources that could have been used in alleviating the misery of its poverty-stricken population, India is forced to use instead to buy weapons from the advanced industrialized nations to deter Pakistan from declaring and fighting one more of the Thousand Year jihads.

Being in a constant state of war with Pakistan is without doubt one of the reasons that India is miserably poor.

I should hasten to add that it is not the only reason. Even without the existence of Pakistan, I am sure that some people would have figured out other ways of keeping India poor. And indeed they did. I have, for the same reason that it keeps India poor, opposed socialism and communism. But the Islamic specter haunting India is making the job that much harder. As the on-going conflict with Pakistan is religiously motivated — just like the partition of India was — I find it hard to evade the conclusion that India would have been much better off if it did not have to contend with Islam.

The Dharmic Traditions

Now what about violence by people who follow the dharmic traditions? None of them (Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism & Sikhism) lend the least support to violence against people merely because of what they believe in or profess. I would worry about it but I would not lose my sleep over it. It is neither urgent nor important in the overall scheme of things. I could rant and rave about it but there are more pressing things that matter to me.

I know that I have a bias which reflects my personal history and upbringing. For instance, I am a non-Muslim and therefore my view of Islam is that of an outsider — an outsider whom Islam considers to be a little less than filth.

As I was born to Hindu parents, I am a Hindu. As a Hindu I am quite familiar with the faults of Hindu society and I am critical of any bits of the ideology that is irrational and stupid. Fortunately, Hinduism is flexible enough that you can pick and choose the bits that appeal to you and reject the rest with nary a thought. For instance, I like the ideas behind the idols — the symbolic representation of the gods — even though I am not a theist.

I Know I am Biased

Not only am I biased but I know that I am biased. I am not an impartial observer. I am partial towards rationality and reason. I don’t think tales of people rising from the dead and people flying off on their horses to the moon make any sense at all. Only those who don’t really understand what the world is clearly understood to be can entertain such idiotic notions.

I think that anyone who seriously believes that the books that the monotheists follow were dictated by god — an omniscient eternal omnipotent being — is dumber than a doorknob. Heck, those books are so full of nonsense and factual errors, that even a reasonably educated person living a thousand years before they were written would have known better.

For instance, that the earth was a sphere was known since antiquity. Yet the authors of those books were clueless — they did not even have what was fairly common information. The so-called omniscient being apparent only knew what was known to ignorant desert nomads.

Sick of Pseudo-seculars

I have had it up to here with the pseudo-secularists blaming the victims for the harm that is ideologically motivated and is unacceptable in a civilized society. I realize that it will not make me popular with that crowd because what I wrote will stick in their craw since they cannot factually refute any of the statements I made above. Their position is generally a fine mixture of illogic and ignorance — the antithesis of what I stand for.

{This is an environmentally friendly post. It uses recycled electrons for getting this post to you. Not just that, the post itself is recycled. It is an edited version of a post from five years ago — March 1st 2008 — titled “Ridiculing Religious Insanity.” Reuse liberally.}

The Saraswati vandana goes thus:

The transliteration–

Yaa Kundendu tushaara haara-dhavalaa, Yaa shubhra-vastra’avritaa
Yaa veena-vara-danda-manditakara, Yaa shweta padma’asana
Yaa brahma’achyuta shankara prabhritibhir Devai-sadaa Vanditaa
Saa Maam Paatu Saraswati Bhagavatee Nihshesha jaadya’apahaa.
Shuklaam Brahmavichaara Saara paramaam Aadhyaam Jagadvyapinim,
Veena Pustaka Dhaarineem Abhayadaam Jaadya’andhakaara’apahaam
Haste Sphaatika Maalikam Vidadhateem Padmasane Sansthitaam
Vande taam Parmeshwareem Bhagavateem Buddhipradaam Shardam.

In Sanskrit / संस्कृत:

या कुंदेंदु तुषारहार धवला, या शुभ्र वस्त्रावृता |
या वीणावर दण्डमंडितकरा, या श्वेतपद्मासना ||
या ब्रह्माच्युतशंकरप्रभ्रृतिभिर्देवै: सदा वन्दिता |
सा मां पातु सरस्वती भगवती निःशेष जाड्यापहा ||
शुक्लां ब्रह्मविचार सार परमां आद्यां जगद्व्यापिनीं
वीणा पुस्तक धारिणीं अभयदां जाड्यान्धाकारापाहां|
हस्ते स्फाटिक मालीकां विदधतीं पद्मासने संस्थितां
वन्दे तां परमेश्वरीं भगवतीं बुद्धि प्रदां शारदां||

In Hindi / हिंदी अनुवाद:

जो कुंद फूल, चंद्रमा और वर्फ के हार के समान श्वेत हैं, जो शुभ्र वस्त्र धारण करती हैं|
जिनके हाथ, श्रेष्ठ वीणा से सुशोभित हैं, जो श्वेत कमल पर आसन ग्रहण करती हैं||
ब्रह्मा, विष्णु और महेश आदिदेव, जिनकी सदैव स्तुति करते हैं|
हे माँ भगवती सरस्वती, आप मेरी सारी (मानसिक) जड़ता को हरें||
या देवी सर्वभूतेषु विद्यारूपेण संस्थिता, नमस्तस्यै नमस्तस्यै नमस्तस्यै नमो नमः ||

And the English Translation

She, who is as fair as the Kunda flower, white as the moon, and a garland of Tushar flowers;and who is covered in white clothes
She, whose hands are adorned by the excellent veena, and whose seat is the pure white lotus;
She, who is praised by Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh;
O Mother Goddess, remove my mental inertia!

Let us conclude that whatever may happen to the GDP growth rate in the short run, we are not going to see a shift in policy towards high growth dynamics. Yet there is uncertainty in the air. Narendra Modi’s speech at the SRCC in Delhi has put development and governance at centre stage. While many will go on worrying about his 2002 record, we are beginning to discuss for the first time in many years the idea of reviving Swatantra—a Right-wing political party. Even now commentators say that given India’s poverty, no Right-wing party can be good for India.

But India has tried Left populism for 67 years now. In its first phase during 1947-1980, there was dismal growth, no discernible reduction of poverty and employment growth confined to the tiny organised sector. The next phase of the 1980s reluctantly tried to change direction but did not alter much. Since 1991 we have had higher growth but since 2004 there has been the growing burden of populist spending policies. There are no policies to take people out of poverty; only to keep them comfortable in their poverty, immobile in their constituencies so they can cast their vote for their masters.

This model has run out of steam. It would help India if someone articulated an alternative that made growth rapid enough to raise employment all around. This would require dismantling many regulations that still exist, improve the logistics of supply chains and remove barriers to the movements of goods and people. Western social democracy has been convinced that growth can only be achieved with a vibrant private sector, especially SMEs. There is not much hope yet that the Indian Left and even the rest can boldly articulate such a vision.

Narendra Modi may yet spell out how he could change economic policies. He is about to be saddled with Ram Mandir by the more stupid elements of his party. If so, we will have to wait till another leader who will have to change direction. [Emphasis added.]

Desai writes that the Leftist-populist “model has run out of steam.” Actually, it never had any steam to begin with. It was not an engine of growth and was not even meant to be. It was just a way of keeping the people dependent and poor. That that model has been discredited is not news at all. It has been tried in many regions of the world with the same dismal outcome: the widening and deepening of poverty.

The sad thing is that India is ruled by a bunch of self-serving goons. Deepening poverty does not bother them. They will abandon their leftist-populist policies the day after hell freezes over. Don’t hold your breath.

The bunch of thugs — also known as the UPA and its chaprasis such as the English language main stream media — hate Narendra Modi because he threatens their livelihood. He will give their leftist-populist policies a quick burial.

Being right is easy if that’s what you want to be. Getting the power to do the right things is hard.

Which brings me to the article by @MediaCrooks. It’s titled “Narendra Modi versus the Proxies.”

I click on the above link and find the message “This Site is Block [sic]“. I guess I will have to try to get to the article later.

And BTW, do follow @MediaCrooks.

Narendabhai Modi

A few people remarked that Modi’s ideas and mine are sort of similar. Chetan Aggarwal ‏@ChetanAggarwal tweeted

@atanudey should have just written elect @narendramodi in his Transforming India.

I think that’s quite right. How to transform India? Short answer: Vote Modi to power. Utsav Mitra ‏@UtsavMitra tweeted

“Minimum government, maximum governance”, “Government has no business of being in business”… Shri @narendramodi quotes @atanudey

Well, what can I say except that great minds think alike. But kidding aside, people thinking seriously about India’s development are bound to converge on a similar set of recommendations — just like those who wish to destroy India also see eye to eye on how it is to be accomplished.

“Fonske”

The picture on the right is known as “Fonske” shortened from the Latin Fons Sapientiae meaning “fountain of wisdom”. It shows a university student — Leuven is a university town — reading a book and knowledge flowing into his brain like water.

That picture is from the last time I was here in October visiting my friend Yoga. Then I was on my way from Mumbai to San Jose; now I am on my way back to India. A brief three-day stopover and then on to Mumbai. I am looking forward to visiting with friends and family in India. See you there if you are around. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

To a call Aaron Swartz gifted would be to miss the point. As far as the internet was concerned, he was the gift. In 2001, aged just 14, he helped develop a new version of RSS feeds, which enable blog posts, articles and videos to be distributed easily across the web. A year later he was working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, and others on enhancing the internet through the Semantic Web, in which web-page contents would be structured so that the underlying data could be shared and reused across different online applications and endeavours. At the same time he was part of a team, composed of programmers like himself (albeit none quite as youthful), lawyers and policy wonks, that launched Creative Commons, a project that simplified information-sharing through free, easy-to-use copyright licences.

Most of this he did for little or no compensation. One exception was Reddit, though he later sounded almost contrite about the riches showered on him and his colleagues by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and over a dozen other prominent lifestyle magazines, which bought the popular social news site in 2006. In any case, he wasn’t a good fit for corporate life, he said, and left a few months later—or, depending on whom you talk to, was asked to leave. But the cash did let him focus on his relentless struggle to liberate data for online masses to enjoy for free.

For although programming was his first love, campaigning was his true vocation. He co-founded Demand Progress, a group that rails against internet censorship and which played a prominent role in the online campaign last year that helped to scupper proposed anti-piracy legislation supported by Hollywood film studios and other content owners. His Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto of 2008 presaged—and perhaps inspired—recent threats by academics to shun journals that charge readers for access.

[The Economist also did an obituary on Jan 19th.]

People who worked with Aaron were devastated by his suicide. Tim Berners-Lee simply declared “Let us weep.”

Tim Berners-Lee: Let us weep

Three simple words: let us weep. You can feel the deep sorrow, the anguish, the pain in them. That was retweeted over five thousand times. Aaron’s death affected me very powerfully although I knew nothing about him and had only heard about him in passing before this. My tweet

“But I could have told you Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you”

Those words are from a song by Don McLean, “Vincent” about Vincent van Gogh. A beautiful sad song which goes

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they’ll listen now.

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.

Lawrence Lessig, professor at the Harvard Law School, was a friend and mentor to Aaron. He spoke with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org a few days after Aaron’s death.

In the second part of that interview, Lessig comes close to tears saying, “there were a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things . . . ” (5:50 time stamp) –

Lessig’s blog post of Jan 12th, “Prosecutor as Bully,” ended in anger and sadness. He wrote:

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

One word, and endless tears.

Lessig wrote another piece on Jan 18th, A Time for Silence, brimming with anger against the government prosecutor and sorrow for having lost someone he loved.

It is hard to comprehend a mind that at age 16 in 2002 write out instructions for what’s to be done in case he dies:

“If I get hit by a truck…
…please read this web page”

In 2008, Aaron wrote what he called a Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. His aim was to ensure that information that should be free must be easily and freely accessible to everyone who wanted it.

Governments Consider Reformists as Enemies

From an economics point of view, information is a good that is different from physical goods. Understanding that distinction is important in this age when information has a very critical role to play in society. The revolution in information and communications technology has brought about a structural change in how society functions. It has changed the economics of society and more critically how politics is done. Any structural shift creates winners and losers. Those who stand to lose from a structural change understandably fight against the change. Governments–or more accurately, the people who represent governments–predictably consider people like Aaron enemies of the state. This is true in advanced industrialized countries like the US and it is true in poverty-stricken countries like India.

An informed citizenry, said Thomas Jefferson, is the only true repository of the public will. Ostensibly the government is supposed to be responsive to the public will in a republic but in truth the government does what is in the interests of those who control the levers of the state. An informed citizenry is the last thing that the government wants because that will shift power to the people.

I know now why I found the Aaron Swartz suicide so depressing. It brought home very powerfully how even in an open society such as the US, the government is powerful enough that someone who has done so much good (and indeed had the potential to do much greater things) finally despairs to the point of killing himself. If this can happen in the 21st century CE and in a rich country, what about poor underdeveloped countries? There simply is no hope for the others.

Aaron was hounded because of what he was capable of doing. He had at least 50 years or more of active life left in him. He would have done things that could have fundamentally changed politics. He was a threat to the established order and therefore he had to pay. They tried to corner him in the past and he got away. Now they had cornered him once again and this time they were not willing to let him go.

I come back to the situation in India. There are people who are fighting against the government. So far, nobody has shown himself or herself to be a real threat. The government knows that all those popular movements — such as India Against Corruption — are passing fads and will not really bring about any structural change. If any of these movements had really threatened those in power, the leaders of those movements would been taken care of in short order. Nobody in powerful governmental positions is a fool to allow real threats to go unanswered.

Here’s a simple test to figure out if someone is going to bring about real and positive change to the system: if the government has not pitted the state’s power against the person, the person is not relevant.

Aaron is ultimately a symbol. He fought the good fight and in the end, tragically decided that he could not win. He gave up. I weep for him, not because I personally knew him but because of what he represented — one last hope that the individual can win against a powerful state. The state is all too powerful and that’s the tragedy of our age.

The rest is mere exegesis.

Links related to Aaron Swartz’s death here:

1. Letter to Aaron Swartz’s prosecutor Carmen Ortiz by Jesse Kornbluth.

2. Economist article of July 2010. Too many laws, too many prisoners. “Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little.”

3. “Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory to Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors.” Transcript of Aaron Swartz’s talk.

4. “The Death of Aaron Swartz,” by Peter Singer and Agata Sagan in the NY Review of Books. Jan 18, 2013.

5. Linus Torvalds on Aaron Swartz’s death.

6. The Truth About Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” by Alex Stamos.

The Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a new government for the newly independent United States of America. In other words, a convention to create a constitution for the US. At the close of the convention, as the delegates were leaving the building, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin (1706 – 1790), then 81 years old, replied without a moment’s hesitation, “A republic — if you can keep it.”

I take Franklin’s reply very seriously. First, not a “democracy.” Not a “democratic republic.” But a republic. Second, you have to work to maintain it in good working order as you would any complex instrument. If you neglect it, it will break and fail.

Democracy Scares Me

I am not a fan of democracy. It scares me. Pure reason persuaded me that pure democracy is against liberty and freedom. Basically, pure democracy is mob rule. Note what happens when mobs take over — from tyrants or from benign rulers. Think of the so-called “Arab spring” and you’ll see a mob in action. That’s democracy. As someone put it, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

Liberty has to be shielded from democracy. That’s why there has to be a mechanism which prevents the majority from oppressing the individual. The proper focus of liberty is the individual and in a democracy the individual is powerless against any coalition of voters.

I take particular delight in noting that those who were the authors of the American republic were not in the least enamored of democracy. They appear to have had a dislike for it. James Madison, the “Father of the American Constitution” and the 4th president of the US, wrote in the Federalist No.10,

. . . [pure] democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

It is not hard to find evidence that the founding fathers of the American union did understand the dangers of a democracy and therefore made the new nation into a republic.

What’s the Difference?

A democracy is where the government does what the majority of its people want it to do. The people have essentially unlimited power and it does degenerate into what de Toqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.” In a republic, the people — and by extension the government — is restrained from arbitrariness by the institution called the “constitution.” To be sure, the constitution itself is a product of human intentions and therefore can be flawed. So if you have a good constitution, a republican form of government frees the individual from despotic rulers and despotic mobs.

Soft Despotism

For much of its existence, one can say that India has been under what Alexis de Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America called the “soft despotism” of corrupt citizens and its democratically chosen corrupt government. About such a government, de Tocqueville writes

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

. . .

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.

Is there a way out?

India’s constitution is flawed. This claim can be supported by the evidence that India’s government is corrupt. It’s not a new phenomenon. It has always been so but it’s become more starkly evident as the system degenerated. The rewriting of a constitution is not a matter that happens on its own. It only happens at times of great change, at revolutions. Revolutions require an “external shock” and people who are awake to the need for change. Both these are imminent but not yet manifest.

Until then, we have to be content with celebrating India’s status as a banana republic.

Netaji Subhas Bose

Bose created the “Indian National Army” to fight the British but it was short lived — Aug 1942-Sept 1945. Shortly afterwards, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It is still uncertain where or when he died. Regardless of that, he had an impact on the British.

Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister during whose rule India became independent, mentioned that INA activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (which weakened the Indian Army – the very foundation of the British Empire in India) and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny in 1946 were major reasons that made the British realise that they were no longer in a position to rule India. [Wiki]

We all know that the British ruled India until August of 1947. I have a fairly good idea of why they left — although it differs significantly with the conventional wisdom. I give absolutely no credence to the persistent claim that Gandhi won India’s independence from the British. That’s another story.

What I don’t know is this: how many were the British that ruled India?

• What was the population of India? That is, how many were being ruled?
• What was the population of Britain? That is, how many belonged to the class of rulers?
• What was the population of Britishers in India? That is, how many Britishers lived and worked in India ruling over the Indians?

I realize of course that there is a time dimension to these questions but for the sake of simplicity, we can consider the answers to those for a specific year, say 1900. The wiki says, there were 200 million Indians (which I guess includes the ancestors of today’s Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) living in India, and 38 million Britishers living in the UK. That’s a ruler/ruled ratio of 1:5.

The picture is bleak from an Indian perspective. There were five times as many Indians in the world as Britishers and yet Indians got ruled. It gets even bleaker when you consider that all the Britishers were not in India ruling over Indians. Hence that last question: how many Britishers were physically present in India in 1900 ruling over 200 million Indians?

Was their number 20,000? That makes the ruler:ruled ratio an astounding 1 is to 10,000. Every Britisher present in India ruled over 10,000 Indians.

Though I can find out by doing a bit of search on the web, I don’t know the answer to that question off the top of my head. I can only suppose it was less than 100,000. It could be as few as 5,000 for all I know. Do you know the answer? If you do, please leave a comment.

Why do I ask? Because I believe that the answers would be critically revealing. It will tell us why India is faltering today, and what we must to do to prevent India from totally failing.

If there were only a few thousand Britishers controlling 200 million Indians, it just means that Indians must have been following the orders of the Britishers. It means that Indians under the order of the Britishers were oppressing other Indians. It means that Indians could not have been subjugated without the active participation of some Indians in that subjugation.

It means that there is a long tradition of traitors in India’s history, since India has been ruled by foreign invaders for many centuries.

It means that the reign of traitors is not over yet.

Indians must know that there were almost insignificantly few Britishers who ruled 200,000,000 Indians. The traitors have kept the game of exploitation and impoverishment of India, and the rest of the Indians have allowed it to happen.

In Dec 2011, I wrote that “the Congress are not traitors” –

The Congress is the enemy. Their goal is to destroy the country to enrich themselves. They are true to their goal and cannot be faulted for it. Indians who support the Congress are traitors since treason lies in aiding the enemy. Even some of the biggest names in the BJP have aided the Congress in the past, and continue to do so. They are traitors. Let’s distinguish between the enemy and the traitors. While I may grudgingly respect the enemy, I have nothing but contempt for traitors.

There are too many Indian traitors. They aid the enemy. Let us beware.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Stream of Life

This poem is from Tagore’s Gitanjali. It is simply titled “Praan” which means “life” in Bengali. The English translation is by Tagore himself.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Below the fold is a related video. It is Matt Harding’s 2008 dancing video in which the background score is the poem sung by Palbasha Siddique.

I had written about Matt in Feb 2006. Wow, that’s nearly seven years ago. How time flies. Here’s bit from “Dancing at the edge of the world“:

At times one despairs about humanity, what with all the global terrorism, and the rioting, killing, destruction, and insanity inspired by a bunch of marks on pieces of paper. Some semblance of hope appears when you realize that there are billions of people who go about their lives without meaning harm to others, who would rather live and let live and if they can, enjoy the good things that the world has to offer.

Here is a glimpse of one such ordinary human in a little video clip titled Man Dancing.

I found it heart-warming and joyous. An average guy simply doing what he thought was cool. You can tell that he enjoys doing this crazy dancing all over the world. And then there are the positive externalities: you watch the video and it makes you smile for no particular reason. Dance, music, friendship, just plain joie de vivre. It is not high art, it is not heavy with meaning and significance, it is not pre-meditated, it is not produced to change the world, it does not pretend to send a message of global dominance, or complain about oppression. It could cause offense in some parts of the world but in the majority of the world, it is just a guy dancing.

Stop for a moment and think about what makes this possible. An average guy traveling around the world: the commercial airline industry. This could not have been possible a century ago. Next, the technology: a hand-held recording device cheap enough and small enough for an average rich nation citizen. This was not possible even 30 years ago. Finally, the global broadband communications network which brings you the video with the click of a mouse: not possible 20 years ago.

Yes, there is the mindless rage some express on being told about a few scribbles on pieces of paper but then there are billions of others who would express themselves in their own ordinary ways given the opportunity to do so and thus create what is truly extraordinary, truly human.

The background score to that video is an old favorite — Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. Here is a trance version of that song.

That’s it for today. Have fun.

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

— Lord Acton (John Dalberg-Acton) (1834-1902) English historian

Please provide feedback on the changes. Suggestions and recommendations are always welcome. Thanks for visiting.

Hint: There are several countries of primarily desert religion that are much above India.

Question: Could it be that your own religion is the culprit?

Modified Hint: Your own religion preaches subhuman treatment to a very vast section of the population bringing down average quality of life for all.

Certainly there are several countries much above India in the list of preferred places to be born — including “desert religion” countries. By itself that does not imply anything about that religion because there are multiple causal factors that determine the fortunes of a country. My point was that everything else being equal, the presence of the desert religion in the mix does not improve matters but rather it makes it worse.

The empirical evidence is incontrovertible. Across space and time, wherever that desert religion has had its baleful influence, there’s been lack of prosperity. Places which were peaceful before, once the desert religion got its stranglehold, descended into barbarity and chaos. The reason for this can be summed up in one word: freedom. That desert religion imprisons people.

First it mandates the forcible conversion of people into it. The punishment for leaving the religion is death. Second, it divides all of humanity into believers and non-believers, and forces the two groups into eternal conflict. Third, it suppresses all dissent and makes people into automatons.

All this is not conducive to any kind of human or economic development. The Indian subcontinent is a study in the destruction that the ideology achieves. The people of the region are of course backward in general but the degree of backwardness of specific groups and sub-regions is positively correlated with the degree of influence of that ideology.

Practically all the on-going conflicts in the world involve adherents of that desert religion. That is not surprising: as mentioned before, the religion mandates its faithful to wage ceaseless war against others. Huntington had observed that that religion’s borders are bloody. He went further and said that its innards are also bloody. The two major sects of that religion slaughter each other with gusto as a distraction from the routine killing of non-believers.

People who were once peaceful turn murderously violent once that desert religion takes hold. Afghanistan used to be home to a peaceful people just a few centuries ago. Its tranquility and peace were shattered when it gave up its old religion and adopted the desert religion. Its people suffer immensely.

In modern times, Iran used to be a fairly good place. Then the great revolution happened and the ideology took over. Iranians suffer needlessly.

People in Western Europe are beginning to suffer. And more is on the way.

India was entirely free of that ideology. Then it arrived in the Indian subcontinent. Two of India’s present day neighbors are countries which have as their foundation that desert religion. Both are worse off than India. They wage war on India for no other reason than that a large segment of Indians are non-believers of their insane ideology.

That ideology defines the culture of the people who identify with it. Culture strongly determines peoples’ fortunes. The results of an interesting natural experiment are conclusive. People from the Indian subcontinent have migrated to different parts of the world. Those migrants of the native Indian culture do phenomenally well relative to those migrants with the desert religion culture. Look up the statistics. In the UK, just to cite one example, South Asians immigrants from that desert religion are at the bottom of the socio-economic heap, while those from cultures not from that desert religion are at the top.

In India, the followers of the desert religion are more backward relative to others. They are poorer, less educated, less socially cohesive, less at peace with their neighbors. Of course, it is possible that they are systematically discriminated against since they are a minority. But people in those to aforementioned neighboring countries are not a minority — what accounts for their obvious backwardness?

Followers of that desert religion take immense pride in pointing out that they ruled the Indian subcontinent for centuries. Well, if that speaks to the superiority of that ideology, then how would one explain that even after lording it over their supposed inferiors for centuries they end up at the bottom of the heap?

It may not be politically correct to point this out but it is time that we examined dispassionately the proposition that the desert ideology has something rotten in it that it impoverishes people. But then it is not a matter that will engage the attention of the leftists, the jholawalas and the mombatti-walas. All they are good at is making bald assertions about how wonderful that ideology is and that’s that.

One of the favorite deflectionary tactic of the jholawalas is to hide behind the tu quoque logical fallacy. Faced with undeniable evidence that that desert religion is destructive, they may respond, “But Christianity and Judaism are equally bad.” I have seen this gambit from quite a few Westerners. (Not all jholawalas are necessarily Indian.)

There are two objections to this kind of nonsense. First, those ideologies are cats of the same breed. All the three major monotheistic ideologies are bad. The late Gore Vidal put it best. “The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.” Let Vidal speak —

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved–Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal–God is the omnipotent father–hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good.

Go read Vidal’s lecture “(The Great Unmentionable) Monotheism and its Discontents,” which he delivered in Harvard University in April 1992.

The second objection to the jholawalas nonsensical tu quoque argument is that while monotheism as an ideology is evil, not all followers of the evil three behave equally badly. The oldest has the fewest followers (a few million in total) and they are quite happy with their ideology and don’t believe that everyone has to believe in their theology. They don’t proselytize, unlike the other two.

The second monotheism in the triad has the largest number of followers in the world. The ideology states that those who don’t believe in the nonsense are condemned for eternity in hell. It prescribes to its followers that they should go and convert the non-believers, and many indeed do. But the followers of this monotheism have matured a bit in the recent past and they are not as murderous as they used to be.

Indeed the followers of the first two have become sufficiently mature that criticizing the ideology does not make them go off into a murderous rage. The third desert ideology is vicious, vengeful and cannot tolerate criticism. To that extent, it is the most uncertain of the truth of its proposition.

But the third desert ideology is the most vicious of all ideologies so far invented by humans. It commands its faithful to kill those who refuse to convert, as previously noted. It kills its own children who want to leave the faith. And all the time it proclaims that it is the most best perfect unique unalterable grand shining magnificent perfect superb best perfect grand profound perfect . . .

Enough to make a body scream enough already.

As Hitchens used to say, it makes some rather tall claims for itself — claims to supremacy and to perfection. Of course, if it were all that wonderful, how come it has to keep its people imprisoned and kill those who wish to leave? Have you heard of any club which they claim is so wonderful that everyone must join but if they try to leave they are beheaded?

Anyway, Indian jholawalas trot out the “you are a Hindutva fanatic” and “Hinduism is equally bad” the moment they hear any criticism of the desert religion.

I am happy to state that I am a Hindu. I am a Hindu because of accident of birth — my parents were Hindu. I am also a Hindu by default — as I am not a Christian, Jew or Muslim. More broadly, I am a follower of what is called the “dharmic” traditions — those that arose in India — which includes Jainism and Buddhism.

The dharmic traditions do not make claims to supremacy. They do not imprison their people. People are free to leave, if they so desire. They are not immutable. They are not revealed, and therefore their truths can be discovered through reason. What does not accord with reason can be rejected and there is no penalty.

I am a Hindu but I am also an atheist. I don’t believe in anything that does not make sense to me. I don’t believe in the supernatural. I don’t care what you believe in or don’t believe in.

I don’t judge people for what their beliefs are. I judge ideologies for what they are. I judge people based on how they behave. I think Wafa Sultan, an apostate from the desert religion, put is very nicely: “Brother, I don’t care what you believe in. You can believe in a stone as long as you don’t throw it at me.”

I am a Hindu but I don’t believe that Hinduism is perfect. Neither do I believe that Hindus are infallible. I take what I want from whatever ideology that is (according to me) reasonable and sensible. I am a free person. This is quite contrary to what that desert religion would have people behave.

So now to the final point in Vickram’s comment. Is India’s backwardness due to Hinduism?

India is backward and its culture has something to do with it. As religion has a major role in defining culture, and since India is predominantly Hindu, I would say that Hinduism has something in it that makes it hard for India to prosper.

Vickram no doubt pointed to Hinduism to deflect blame from the desert religion. Heaven forbid that anyone ever point a finger at that most holiest of ideologies. Tauba, tauba. Hai main marjava.

Or perhaps his point was that all religions are equally bad. Which of course is one of the more asinine points made by jholawalas. (I don’t know Vickram and therefore cannot know for sure that he’s a jholawala.)

The asininity of “all religions are equally bad” brings to mind Isaac Asimov’s point that right and wrong are relative concepts and are not absolutes. Here’s what he wrote in an essay “The Relativity of Wrong” in the Skeptical Inquirer (Fall, 1989). The context: someone had written to him pointing out many people had been shown to be wrong in the past and therefore all scientific understanding of the world is likely to be wrong.

My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

However, I don’t think that’s so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.

That is where the tu quoque argument falls. Not all religions are equally bad. There are degrees of “badness” of religions, you can say. Some are indeed worse than others. My point is that that desert religion is the worst of the lot.

The Economist of Nov 21, 2012 had an interesting article, “The lottery of life: Where to be born in 2013“. (Hat tip: Nitin Pai.) They asked the question, “which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?” and to answer it, they created a quality-of-life index from “subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are.” The results are not all that surprising. Broadly speaking, it is better to be born in a rich country than in a poor country.

Here are the results for 2013.

I would definitely go for Switzerland but I don’t care that much for Australia even though it ranks second only to Switzerland. Although the US is ranked 16th, I would go for the US rather than Australia. Perhaps it is because I like living in the US.

I am surprised to see U.A.E. in the top quartile. But otherwise I find nothing surprising in the placements in general. China is 49th — and I am certain that it will move up as the years roll by. India is at 66th and I am also certain that it will probably end up in the bottom in a few years, competing with Pakistan (75th) and Bangladesh (77th). There’s something toxic about the Indian subcontinent. (Hint: it has something to do with a desert religion.)

For comparison, there’s the 1988 survey that The Economist conducted. They compiled 11 economic and socio-political criteria such as GDP per capita, human rights, literacy, and even what they call a “philistine factor”. Here is the table:

(Click on the image below to see the full table.)

Only 48 countries are ranked in this 1988 survey, as compared to the 80 ranked in the more serious 2012 survey. It provides a base-line for understanding the trend. India in 1988, for example, was ranked 27th, ahead of China at 32nd. Thanks to India’s UPA government, India has slipped far below China — and as I claim above, India is likely to continue its slide thanks to Dr Manmohan Singh and his Italian boss Antonia Maino (aka Sonia Gandhi.) Let’s not talk about Pakistan (ranked 43rd) and Bangladesh (does not make the list at all.)

This kind of ranking is not too be taken too seriously, of course. However, while these may not be absolutely accurate, they do point to some truth, some trend that we should be mindful of. India’s slide down the list is not an illusion but rather a reality.

The mainstream media will not point to this inarguable sign of decline under the UPA because they are paid to misdirect and mislead. But we have to take note and worry. Not just worry, we must do something to avert the disaster that awaits us.

Right now India is not a great place to be born in. That’s so because Indians have made really poor choices, and the most significant of those poor choices is in its choice of leaders like Manmohan Singh and the Italian Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi.

You and I are not struggling like the vast majority of Indians. So why should we care?

… even if we are not altruistically inclined, we must act for pragmatic and selfish reasons: our position near the top of the economic pyramid is precarious because the base of the pyramid is so weak. We have to care because our fate is inextricably tied to the fate of the desperately poor of India. (p12)

. . . governments can be classified into “roving bandits” or “stationary bandits” (p15)

Our parents and grandparents struggled for a decent living. We don’t want our children to face the hardships they faced. We have to be the ones to transform India and we have to do it now. Think of a time in the future when your child asks you, “You saw what dire straights the country was in. You knew what needed to be done. Did you do anything?” And you will be able to look that child in the eye and answer, “Yes, I did my best. I did it for you.” (p25)

“Material things are not to be despised – without them there can be no manifestation in the material world.” – Sri Aurobindo

The people were not really free and what was worse, people thought that they were free when in fact they were not. As Ram Dass pointed out, “If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.” The illusion of freedom is as good a prison as ever constructed. (p34)

Free people do not have to seek permission from their government. (p34)

Poverty in the 21st century is not a natural state of any economy. It has to be engineered. (p41)

The government decided who was allowed to run educational institutions what was to be the capacity, what was to be taught, who could be employed to teach and how much they were to be paid, how many students of particular segments of the population could attend, how much tuition fees could be charged, what was going to be in the examination, when the examinations would be held, what was considered appropriate passing grade for whom. (p44)

Kids like yourself had to needlessly spend years during their high school years just preparing for entance exams, which as we noted before did nothing but select a very small percentage from the applicants and reject even quite well-qualified and able students. (p45)

. . . old Hindi saying, “jab Raja vyapari, toh praja bhikari” – which loosely translated means that the citizens are reduced to begging when the government gets into business. (p48)

The opportunity to amass wealth (for criminals) is directly related to how much control the government has over the economy. (p58)

The labor released from agriculture was employed in the more productive manufacturing and services sector. That shift of labor away from agriculture increased average incomes all through the economy. (p62)

The answer to rural development – lay in urban planning and urban development. This is not at all a counter-intuitive idea once you study the problems of rural populations.

The single most important material constraint for economic growth is energy. Without sufficient energy, development is impossible since energy is required for every economic activity. (p69)

Ideas are what economists calls “public goods”, as opposed to “private goods” which are things that you can grab with hands. Private goods are “rival in consumption”, meaning if you consume it, the total stock goes down. (p85)

Ideas are public goods and when used, the stock of ideas does not go down. The stock of ideas keeps growing. If you have an idea and I have an idea, we can share the ideas and both of us have two ideas. The stocks of both ideas and material goods have been increasing in the world. The thing is that once a good idea is created, it persists and is available for anyone to adopt and use it. (p86)

.. being late on the scene allows one to learn from others’ experience and avoid the mistakes they had made. It allows the late comers to “leapfrog” certain intermediate steps. (p86)

That ends part 1 and the context shifts back to the present.

[On Education]

The quantity appears reasonable until one recalls that only about one out of four engineers is employable. This creates the paradoxical situation of vast numbers of unemployed engineers on the one hand, and on the other employers desperately seeking skilled engineers. (p97)

[On Energy]

.. energy rests at the core of all human advancement and energy growth. The story human civilization is principally that of an increasing ability to find and exploit energy sources. (p105)

.. animals and humans were the principle sources of energy. Slavery was an unfortunate consequence of that need for energy. Coal later powered the industrial revolution. The discovery of petroleum oil about 150 years ago literally fueled such phenomenal growth that is increased human population six-fold to its present 6 billion. (p105)

The greatest constraint that developing countries face is that of energy availability. Energy is the primary resource in that sense that all other resources – land, water – can be substituted to a considerable degree by energy. (p105)

[On Cities and Urbanization]

… cities are disproportionately productive. Today around 1.2 billion people living in 40 mega regions of the world produce two-thirds of the world’s output of goods and services. They also produce more than 85 percent of all global innovation. A person living in a mega-region compared to a person not living in a mega-region is eight times as productive in terms of goods and services, and in terms of innovations is about 24 times as productive. (p110)

Cities “manufacture” wealth.

[On Transportation]

A bit of arithmetic is all that is needed to expose the underlying reality that India does not have the option of having road or air as the backbone of India’s transportation system. We not only cannot afford the fuel (source constraint), but we cannot also afford the fuel (sink constraint) of 700 million cars and 20,000 airlines spewing exhaust – as would be required to match the US on a per capita basis. India needs what can be termed an “integrated rail transportation system.” (p116)

Current per mile infrastructure for high speed rail is around $10 million per km. To build the backbone links outlined above would require 10,000 kms of high speed rail. So the cost will be around $100 billion.

It looks like a very large sum but it is not actually. First, it is a capital investment, not expenditure. What the IRTS will do is to increase the efficiency of the economy, which means that it will produce more stuff than it takes to build it. Second, building it will give a boost to the economy. (p118)

From part 3.

The world is constantly reminded that India is the largest democracy. That it is a democracy appears to be the highest accolade India has any claim to. Paradoxically, this same badge is used as a shield for deflecting all criticism directed against India for its failure to develop. (p130)

Indian leaders and policymakers have a seemingly schizophrenic attitude towards the people. The people are assumed sophisticated enough to figure out who should rule the nation, but they are not smart enough to make simple day to day decisions; for the latter, they have to have a patronizing government official in charge. (p131)

I am working on another book which as I mentioned before on this blog will provide a foundation for understanding the economics of economic growth and development. I expect it to be done by mid 2013.

A few days later, the thieves stole a goat. Once again the old man told his sons to not let them get away with it. The sons said that they have dozens of goats and it’s not worth the trouble. The next week it was a horse. Once again the sons rationalized it away saying that they still had six horses that the farm needs.

Finally, the next week the sons came back to report to the old man and said, “Father, our sister has been abducted. What shall we do?” The old man said, “It’s too late. You should have recovered the chicken. Now there’s nothing you can do.”

* * *

Act 2:

I heard this story from an expat from New Zealand who runs a very successful school in Singapore. David told me that in the early years of Lee Kuan Yew’s government, a minister was suspected of having taken a bribe. People said that since the minister was a close associate of LKY, in all likelihood the man would get away with it.

But as it happened, LKY had a brief chat with the minister one afternoon. The next day the minister went out with a bang — he put a bullet in his head.

Singapore is one of the least corrupt nations in the world. LKY’s policy is simple: zero tolerance for corruption. That’s so because he himself is incorruptible and therefore does not tolerate corruption. The wages of public corruption is death. People know it and act accordingly.

* * *

Act 3:

India’s appointed prime minister is Dr Manmohan Singh. Under his watch, the most egregiously blatant instances of public corruption have taken place. His ministers and other office holders have been involved in acts of public malfeasance that are stunningly incredible — but for at least a significant segment of Indian voters, it is quite alright. They appear to take it as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary. The rulers are going about the rape of the land and the people just lay back and supinely accept it.

We are talking figuratively about rape but Dr Singh’s misgovernance has descended into literal rape. Not just rape, gang rape. Not just gang rape, it has finally hit (one hopes) the rock bottom into murderous gang rape.

The 23-year old woman who was gang raped in a New Delhi bus died in a hospital in Singapore.

* * *

Act 4:

They first stole a chicken.

The Congress government under Jawaharlal Nehru was involved in corruption. The news papers reported it. Nehru responded saying that the reporters were being silly since corruption is a global phenomenon and there’s nothing to get all excited about.
Then they stole a goat.

Nehru’s daughter nationalized many sectors of the economy, thus making public office attractive to the most criminally corrupt. The people of India did not disapprove. They in fact voted her back to power.

The stage was set for horse thieves.

* * *

Act 5:

Some people started waking up to the reality. They realized that somehow the system was not working. They heard the call from a chosen few and gathered to register their protest. The government followed the time-worn strategy of attack being the best form of defense. They sent in their baton-wielding cops and the crowds — leaders too — beat a hasty retreat.

The lesson the appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s government learned was that it does not take a whole lot to put the people in their place — the place of course being that the people in the government are the rulers and the people are serfs.

For around a century, a few hundred million Indians were the serfs of a few thousand British. Now it is different. India is under self-rule.

An Italian, Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, and her bunch of sycophants led by Digvijaya Singh are ruling about a thousand million Indians.

Well, perhaps it is not all that different. Though Maino’s father was a fascist. That could make the British Raj 2.0 a little more vicious than the British Raj of pre-1947.

* * *

Act 6:

It tickles me no end when I hear talk about India being a free country and a democracy with universal adult franchise. Every adult has the vote and therefore is in some sense responsible for the kind of government. In my opinion, India is a kakistocracy — government by the most corrupt and the least principled. Indians freely elect these people. And among the elected are criminals who have been charged (and many convicted) of rape and murder.

The guys who gang raped the unfortunate woman on the bus in New Delhi a few days ago share at least some of the characteristics of the law makers of India: their criminality. A significant numbers of Indians vote for these kinds of criminals.

* * *

Act 7:

I hear that the despicably dishonest appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s government moved to shut down protests in New Delhi by closing down a few metro train stations. Perhaps the people will back down and go home.

If they don’t back down, I suppose the unfathomably dishonest cretin, the appointed prime minister Dr Singh will probably escalate the situation till we see tanks on the streets of New Delhi.

The sister has been abducted.

And if I were a betting man, I would place the bet that the people are not going to do anything about it. Come next elections they will vote for Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her henchmen.

* * *

Act 8:

Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her gang of vile henchmen are unprincipled criminals. But they are not stupid. Their moves are calculated to push the boundaries and they know precisely what they can get away with. They know precisely how much they can steal and yet be elected. They know precisely how many backs they can break with their police lathi-charge and still the people will not lynch them.

Indians have an amazing capacity for tolerating injustice.

It was an American, born a slave but who understood the dynamics of slavery, who put it best over a century ago. Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), the renowned American abolitionist wrote, “Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them . . . The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

The rulers are not unintelligent. They would not be where they are if they were not the most accomplished criminals. They make the laws, don’t you know. They dictate the terms.

They control the press. The press provides the cover for them and they in turn protect those in the press that do their bidding. The Ghoses, the Sardesais, the Dutts — these are not unimportant players in this sordid play. They are complicit in the figurative rape of India and are handsomely rewarded for their prostitution.

* * *

The Final Act

No doubt for a few days the twitterati will be screaming bloody murder. A few thousand will go on candlelight vigils. In a few weeks, another distraction will occupy the talking heads on TV. Cricket will take over the collective psyche. And of course the sordid stories of Bollywood shakers will move the public to other concerns.

Talking of journalists, I am reminded of what the legendary American radio broadcaster Edward R Murrow (1908 – 1965) said. “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

Yes, India does have a government of wolves because India is a nation of sheep. The tyrants like Dr Singh know well precisely how much oppression the Indian public is willing to endure.

The rape of the land and the people — literally and figuratively — will continue.

Firms Hate Competition

It is easy to appreciate that firms don’t like competition because it hurts their profits. The fewer competitors they have in the market, the greater their profits. In the extreme case, if they are the only firm in the market — a monopoly — they are the happiest. If being a monopoly is not an option, incumbent firms would settle for being in a market in which firms face entry barriers and therefore competition is limited. Profits are inversely related to the degree of competition in the market.

Each firm in the market would like to eliminate its competitors. Burning down the factories of its competitors could be a useful strategy but it is generally frowned upon by society at large. Murdering the owners of competing firms is also not an acceptable form of limiting competition unless you are talking of illegal drugs’ cartels. So what is a firm to do? There is a way out: get the government to limit competition in the market and share some of the resulting profits with those in the government. That is, change the nature of the competition from being in the market to being a competition for the market.

Governments Hate Competition

So far the story is not all that interesting. Yes, firms like to limit the competition they face because they want to maximize profits or dominate the market. That is an innocuous observation and nothing extraordinary. The really interesting bit comes in when you introduce government into the picture. Governments have the general power to coerce and more particularly they have the power to meddle with the market. Governments stop markets from being free and that’s the start of a long list of maladies that end up impoverishing countries and wholesale destruction of life, liberty and happiness.

That’s a tall claim but it enjoys superb analytical and empirical support.

Competition in the market moves to being competition for the market under government patronage. What’s in it for the government? Follow the money. When the government totally forbids entry into the market, as in the case of a government monopoly, the public sector firm makes monopoly profits. These profits come out of the pockets of the consumers. Wherever there are economic profits, there are social welfare losses called “deadweight losses.”

(Let’s say that the consumers pay an extra $1000, and the firm makes $500 economic profits. The deadweight loss in this case is $500 — the bit that consumers lose but no one gains.)

We have to remind ourselves that when we say the “government” we mean actual living breathing people, people who are motivated by self-interest, greed and fear — just like the rest of us. They are not saints working selflessly for the benefit of mankind and “the greater glory of god” (as the monotheists put it.) The reason government people love monopolies is that they have access to the pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits that arise from their monopoly control. Public sector monopoly is bad for the economy but good for the government. The public sector airlines is an easily observed example: the government uses it as its own private airline.

(Note that civil aviation has been liberalized to the extent that the private sector firms are allowed but the public sector airlines continue to exist for no discernible reason — other than the politicians can continue to have their private airline.)

Governments Profit by Limiting Competition

Instead of a public sector monopoly, the government can grant a private firm exclusive access to some market thus creating a private sector monopoly. How much can the government (or more accurately “the politicians and bureaucrats”) make from this? Theoretically whatever profits the monopoly firm can make in the market.

The government can invite bids from firms and sell off the right to be the monopoly supplier to the highest bidder. The firms competing for the market compute how much profit they are likely to make. The one which expects the highest profit is likely to bid the highest, and win the right to ply its trade as the monopoly supplier. A part of that bid ends up in the pockets of the people in government.

It’s the same when the government decides that it will restrict the market to not just one firm but to a few. Limited competition in the market –> profits for firms –> part of the profits given to government.

Free markets maximize social welfare under a reasonable set of conditions. When these conditions are not met, some degree of intervention is required. But we need not go into that here. The focus is on why governments in dysfunctional economies like India needlessly interfere in the market in ways that leads to social welfare losses. They do so because it is profitable for them.

This is much worse than what it appears. Being in government is profitable if the government interferes in the market and restricts competition. If it had been a free market, it would have led to maximum social gain. By shifting competition from being in the market to being a competition for the market, it leads to social welfare losses. That’s the first order loss. There are much greater higher order losses.

Market Interference Leads to Corruption

Suppose the government did not needlessly interfere in the markets. That is, it did not limit competition in the market. Then there will be no (economic) profits in the market, and consequently there will be no profits that firms could, or would want to, share with the people in the government. Which means that being in the government would not be economically profitable.

Conversely, if being in the government is economically profitable, then it would attract the criminally inclined to compete to be in government. The ability to limit the free market shifts socially beneficial competition in the market of goods and services to socially harmful competition in the political market.

The criminalization of politics is a direct and unavoidable consequence of the government’s ability to interfere in the free market.

Criminals are good at crime. They are not good at governing, which involves the ability to reason, to have a vision of what a good society is, to be able to propose and enforce socially beneficial policies and programs. So therefore if the government has the power to interfere in the free market, it leads to criminals filling the government and that means bad economic and social policies.

The UPA Government is Corrupt

The Antonia Maino-led UPA government at the center is a striking example of extreme corruption, an example of the nexus between bad economics and rampant political corruption. The UPA government is filled to the brim with crooks — from Dr Manmohan Singh to P. Chidambaram to this or that Raja — the list is seemingly endless. Scams are reported with sickening regularity. Examine any instance of corruption and you will find that underneath it all, there’s the government meddling in the market. Whether it is coal or spectrum or food grains or civil aviation or whathaveyou — the government has the power to distort markets and make a quick few hundred billion.

Crony capitalism or relationship capitalism — whatever it is called, the result is the same. India is an impoverished country not because Indians are particularly stupid as a collective but because of structural reasons. The rules of the game are lousy. And the most important rule book of them all is the constitution of the nation.

You hardly ever hear criticism of the Indian constitution. But it is a flawed constitution. It has to be because the evidence is overwhelming that under its dispensation, you have a political system that selects criminals in the highest places — including the head of the state and the head of the government.

Hardened criminals occupy every position of power and influence in politics and through their patronage, the most venal liars dominate the media. It’s a cozy arrangement with the media shielding the criminal politicians by hastily burying the scams by focusing on the trivial and the inconsequential such as sex, cricket and bollywood.

Idiots Running the Opposition

Certifiable idiots are promoted as saviors of the people. Dog and pony shows — exhibit A is India Against Corruption — make the headlines. People are led to believe that expanding the size and power of the government is the way to end corruption. I suppose that some people feel left out of the gravy train and they therefore want to add a few dozen coaches to the train so that they and their cronies can get on.

What I have argued in here (and in the previous piece) is that if the government has the power to distort markets, it inexorably leads to criminals entering politics, which then means that corruption becomes endemic, and that leads to economic disaster. To put it in plain terms, a competent criminal does not a good economist make (regardless of how loudly one is proclaimed to be one by a paid media.) Criminals make lousy economic policies — see the “economists” in the UPA government — which leads to economic disasters. Economic disaster then leads to popular discontent. And that leads to attempts at revolt — and the next act in this sordid play is when the government cracks down on any visible sign of protest.

The substitute for the invisible hand of the market is the very visible heel of government coercion.

Sometimes I feel sorry for Indians. Then I remember that India is a democracy and people have the freedom to vote. Enjoy your so-called “freedom”, Shri & Shrimati Indian Voter. You deserve the police heel on your throats and the lathi on your backs, and you deserve it good and hard.

What would Narendrabhai do next is the interesting question. Let me pause to point out one little thing — I refer to Modi as Narendrabhai. The “bhai” suffix is a sign of respect, just like in Hindi you would say “ji” or in Japanese you would say “san.” Actually, if I were to use the Japanese convention, I would not even stop at “Narendra-san”; I would escalate it to “Narendra-sama” — a much higher sign of respect.

I respect Narendrabhai. Why, you may ask. The simple answer is that because he does not care. He does not care about shit. He cares about India but he does not care about shit. To put it as mildly and politely as I am capable of, there’s a lot of shit that is flying around from the top — Antonia Maino — to the bottom starting with her chief chaprasi Dr Singh and his cabinet of crooks, to the low-paid retards on their payroll such as the unmentionable Sanjay Jha.

(I should point out that I preferentially use “Antonia Maino” over the more common “Sonia Gandhi.” It’s because I prefer to call a spade a spade, or as in this case, an Italian by her Italian name. Referring to her as “Sonia Gandhi” is something the feminist in me would not allow. She was born as Italian and with a perfectly fine Italian heritage and name that she ought to be proud of. There’s no reason to force a change of name on her merely because of her marriage to some (nominal) Indian. I don’t know for sure but I am told that the man known as Rajiv Gandhi also had his name changed to some foreign name when he (allegedly) converted to Catholicism to marry the Catholic Antonia Maino. But that’s neither here nor there as this is about Shri Narendrabhai Modi — a person who would not change his name or misrepresent his origin for money or power. So let me move on.)

Narendrabhai has no use for the enormous amounts of steaming piles of horseshit that the Indian political scene is decorated with.

Like me, Narendrabhai does not care for the shit that the NDTV-watching public lap up so eagerly. He wants to appeal to the voter who has got his or her priorities straight. Narendrabhai is not a chaprasi.

Allow me to digress once again. I call someone like Dr Singh a chaprasi but I don’t intend to demean the station of a chaprasi. In any functioning system, you do need chaprasis. They too have their place. You need CEOs and you need chaprasis who will do what is required of people who carry files from one desk to another without having the burden of figuring out what the organization ought to do. Dr Singh’s function is the polar opposite of what a CEO does. He follows orders while the CEO gives instructions.

Now here’s the important thing: chaprasis serve at the pleasure of the managers of the firm. They don’t dictate strategy or even how much to spend on office supplies. They just do what they are told to do. Dr Singh, the chief chaprasi in the Antonia Maino setup does what he is instructed to do. He really does not have a role in deciding policy, leave alone dictating policy.

As I was saying, Dr Singh resides at the polar opposite of the spectrum that Narendrabhai occupies. Narendrabhai does not care for shit. The question of what he would do next is therefore so self-evidently clear that I hesitate to spell it out fearing that I would be insulting your intelligence. But allow me to elaborate.

Many many year ago, when I was running for the class representative at my undergrad engineering college, my message to the voting public was simple: “Vote for me if you want a competent representative. I will represent your welfare better than the other candidates. But if you don’t want me to do that, that’s perfectly fine with me. No skin off my back.”

I did not try to persuade them overly. I was not really interested in selling myself to them. If they were deserving of what I had to offer them, good for them. If they didn’t want what I had to offer, good for them also. No compulsion. The world will not end if I didn’t get elected.

I lost that election, and every other election that I have ever participated in. The thing is that my offer is “take it or leave it” — no coercion. I didn’t enter the race for personal gain and I will be damned if I want your support for any personal gains.

I don’t know for sure but I suspect that Narendrabhai has a somewhat similar stand which goes like this: “I have something to offer in terms of what we should be doing in terms of public policy. If you like what I have to offer, good for you. If you don’t, no skin off my back. Good luck and goodbye.”

Of course I cannot be certain but that’s what I presume that’s Narendrabhai’s position. Like me, I like to think, he does not have any need for billions of dollars that others need for their self-worth. What he wants is general prosperity of Indians and if that’s what a sufficient number of Indians want, he would be happy to help in that quest. But if they don’t — if for whatever reasons they want something else — that’s fine with him too.

That’s just a conjecture and I don’t claim to read Narendrabhai’s mind. I am just saying this as a disinterested observer.

I see Narendrabhai going ahead giving others a stark choice. He does not need any of the “leaders” — either from the BJP or from the NDA partners. If they like what he has to offer, they can get on his agenda. If they don’t like what he wants, they aren’t obligated to join him. He will not compromise because his goal is a transformation of India, and which transformation cannot be done with the same people or the same mindset that brought about this state of affairs.

A friend of mine said the other day that Narendrabhai will now have to get others like Nitish Kumar to join him. I don’t think so. I think that Modi will not only not make any moves to appease the likes of Nitish Kumar but that he will take a position that makes it clear that it is he who rejects Nitish Kumar and not the other way around.

In the end, Narendrabhai’s success depends on only one thing — how ready the Indian voter is for real change, for real economic and social growth. If they are not, no amount of “democratic” elections are doing to amount to a hill of beans. If they are ready, someone like Narendrabhai cannot be stopped. If they are not, no amount of Narendrabhai compromising with the Nitish Kumars of India would make the slightest difference.

If my conjecture about Narendrabhai is correct, here’s what I think he will do. He will strike out on his own. He will not bother about the BJP leadership, he will not bother about NDA alliances, he will not bother about the RSS or the VHP leaders. He will directly go to the Indian voter and say, “I have a different deal for you. Take it if you like it or leave it. In either case, I don’t gain personally from it. Your move.”

Even as individuals, we are not undivided. Within us there are competing forces fighting for dominance. Do the laundry or surf the web or write an essay? Our present needs and desires compete with that of our future selves. Get some exercise or watch TV?

It is hard to get away from the conclusion that competition is as fundamental a feature of our universe as are space and time. Indeed competition is guaranteed anywhere there’s a shortage of resources — and time is the most binding of all resources. If we had infinitely long lives, we would not have to compete either with others or within ourselves.

So competition is unavoidable and ubiquitous. But is it good? That depends on whether the focus is on the individual or the collective. Competition is never good for the individual but I think (believe, feel, suspect, conjecture, assert) that for the collective in the long run it is a good thing. That brings up the question as to what is the good that competition promotes.

Let’s take a concrete case. Consider the competition between predators and preys. It is never good for any individual prey — it gets eaten in the game. But only in the presence of predators does the prey as a group become better at survival. Of course the game does not stop there, as the predators also continue to evolve and become better (in some sense.) Perhaps in the long run it is a zero sum game as no party really “wins.” Or perhaps it is a positive sum game since in the long run both parties “win” in the sense that they evolve to be more complex entities.

Be that as it may, win or lose, what’s certain is that there is no getting out of this competition game. Being a basic feature of the universe, it cannot be outlawed or even controlled. It is my belief that attempting to control competition is not only futile, it is actually harmful and socially counterproductive. Which brings me to the point of this piece which deals with competition in the economic sphere. The arena where economic competition occurs is called the market. I wish to argue that societies that try to curb competition lose the benefits of competition and end up impoverished. Avoid taking the market route and you will have to take the road to poverty and serfdom. Why is that? Trying to curb competition is futile. Being a basic feature of the universe, it cannot be suppressed. It shows up elsewhere and in form that is damaging to social welfare.

Markets and Competition

To save time and avoid being pedantic, let’s just assume that we share a common understanding of what a market is. Much of our buying and selling happens in markets, whether it be labor, stuff such as food or services such as haircuts. Most of our exchanges are mediated by markets but not all: within households, we avoid the market mechanism and instead take the “command and control” route. Why we are able to dispense with markets within the family is an interesting question which need not detain us now.

From an economics point of view, markets and competition are innately fascinating phenomena. Markets are where competition takes place but whereas competition is natural since it is in-built into the universe, markets are not natural. They are human artifacts. Markets are artificial and don’t exist in the natural world. They have to be invented by humans. Among the great apes, humans are the only ones who use markets for the exchange of goods and services (if you discount the fact that some great apes do engage in some kind of primitive exchanges.)

Markets as an idea is an invention but they arise spontaneously whenever there is competition. Consider any natural resource, say water or land. If the supply is so great that there’s virtually an unlimited amount available for everyone’s needs, there is no scarcity and therefore no competition, and thus no market for that resource. There is no market for ice in the Antarctic or for sand in the Sahara. The moment demand reaches a level that needs come into conflict, markets come into being to ration the supply. Markets ration limited supply.

Every instantiation of the abstract idea of the market has to be engineered or created. Markets come into being when demand exists. There’s a market for land around the world today. But that idea of land being bought and sold would have been preposterous to a nomadic people living on a vast unpopulated territory. Even a few decades ago, carbon credits would not have made sense to most people. But now a global market for carbon credits is coming into being.

Scarcity and competition for the scarce good are required for markets to exist. And one more thing. Markets can be outlawed. There was a market for humans where slaves were bought and sold. Now it’s illegal in most economically developed countries. You cannot buy or sell human organs legally in most countries. Note that the legal boundary between the legal and illegal shifts. The legal market for alcohol, for example, was abolished during the prohibition era in the US. But of course because the demand for alcohol could not be abolished by law, the market simple went underground. Therein lies a lesson: demand cannot be suppressed by law and competition cannot be legislated away. They just move elsewhere. More about this later.

Competition IN the Market

The two essential competing participants in any market are buyers and sellers. Let’s be very clear where the competition in markets occur. It is not that buyers compete with sellers. In a market, buyers compete with buyers on the one side, and on the other side, sellers compete with sellers. Where there are many buyers and many sellers in a market, the outcome of the operation of the market is socially good and optimal. Under a few assumptions that are easy for us to understand, the optimality of such markets can be mathematically demonstrated. (That’s called the First Theorem of Welfare Economics.)

In the case that there is only one seller (such a market is called a monopoly), there’s no competition in that market. The result of that market is socially suboptimal. That’s basic Econ101. In a market with only one buyer (monopsony) and many sellers, the result also is suboptimal. Then there are other cases in between — a duopoly (two sellers), or an oligopoly (a few sellers) — which also produce results that are not as optimal as a perfectly competitive market (a large number of buyers and sellers.)

As noted before, sellers compete with each other in the market. Let’s underline that bit: they compete IN the market with each other. And because of that competition, the buyers gain. The simple way to think about this is to consider what motivates a seller. It is profit. Profit is the difference between their cost and their revenue. Competition ensures that the sellers whose costs are above the market price (which is what determines the revenue) will exit the market. Competition also ensures that prices will be close to the costs. An intuitive argument for this is that buyers will buy from the cheapest sellers and competition among sellers will drive the prices down to the costs.

The thing that most Econ101 students find hard to comprehend at first is that in a competitive market, sellers don’t make any (economic) profits. Basically they just break even. Being in a competitive market is the worst thing to be for a seller. Competition in the market is a bad thing for sellers.

So what’s the alternative? Simple: drive your competitors away. How? Get the government to restrict entry into the market!

The Source of Public Corruption

In the next bit, we will see how competition shifts from being IN the market to being a competition FOR the market. This distinction between competition in the market and competition for the market is important because it determines very powerfully the balance of power between the consumers (the buyers), the producers (the sellers) and the government (the third party that has the power to coerce others.) When producers are forced to compete in the market, the consumers gain. If the producers are able to persuade the government to limit the competition in the market, the producers then compete for the market and to do that they have to pay the government. This payment has to come out of the profits that they make in a protected market (profits that they would not have made in a competitive market.)

Public corruption — the kind that we have pretty much gotten sick of hearing about — is primarily a consequence of government power that shifts competition in the market to competition for the market. That story coming up next.

(Continued in “Competition and Markets — Part 2“.)

{This is an excerpt from a work in progress book on basic economics.}

Technological progress is speeding up. In 100 years, it is almost certain that there will be no poverty — at least of the kind we know of today. There will be poor people but by then our definition of poverty would have changed. Perhaps the poor of the future will be richer than the richest of today — just like the poor of today are richer than the richest of a hundred years ago.

That’s the nature of our technological world: that on average the world gets richer. No amount of money 100 years ago could have bought you the antibiotics that you can get at the corner drug store, or a flight at 40,000 feet moving through space at 1000 kms at hour in an aluminum cylinder. Heck, aluminium was barely known at that time.

(Did you know that aluminium is the third most abundant element (after oxygen and silicon), and the most abundant metal, in the Earth’s crust.)

The world is richer today than could have been imagined one hundred years ago — and the world of 100 years from now will be richer in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine today.

I am sure that the grinding poverty of the world of today will be a thing of the past. I am certain that people 100 years hence will have a life expectancy measured in the hundreds of years. It sounds fantastic but then if you had told people living 100 years ago that the life expectancy of people will be 80 years or more in 100 years, they would have laughed in your face.

Every of the technological bits we routinely enjoy today could not have been imagined one hundred years ago. To those who lived a century ago, everything we take so casually as a given would have sounded like magic. As the late great technology prophet Arthur Clarke said, a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

As I said before that no one reading this is going to be around on Dec 12, 2112 but I am also certain that there are people alive today who would be around to witness the next 12-12-12. Life expectancy would grow exponentially. Advances in biotechnology will guarantee indefinite life spans. Many of the children born in the 21 century in today’s developed nations are likely to live for hundreds of years.

In a sense, today is no different from yesterday or tomorrow: it is just that according to the calendar that is commonly followed, today is 12-12-2012. Our calendar dates are merely nominal. What is called “common era” or CE used to be called the “Christina Era” previously. It really does not matter what you call an arbitrary convention. The earth is inconceivably older than two thousand years. It is four or five billion years old — six orders of magnitude older than what the Jews, Christians and Muslims believe.

Talking of beliefs, some nutcases believe that the world is going to end on Dec 21st, 2012 — that is in a few days. They believe this because the Mayan calendar ends on that date. That’s kind of silly. It’s like believing that your world will end just because the calendar on your kitchen wall ends on Dec 31, 2012. The printed calendar ends because it runs out of pages — the publishers of the calendar believe that they cannot sell calendars with thousands of pages.

So anyway, the world is coming to an end — at least according to the feeble-minded. I only wish I knew some of the rich feeble-minded kooks so that I could persuade them to give me some of their stuff since they will not miss stuff anyway.

Of course, regardless of how much stuff I have today, I know that the world for me is definitely going to end in a few short years. That prospect does not fill me with dread like it does for the believers of monotheistic religions. For the deeply monotheist religious, death holds a particular dread that arises out of the uncertainty of whether they are going to heaven or to the hell that Jesus created for the unworthy. (Jesus was a particularly nasty person with a heinous imagination.)

I am out of here. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

The government had a monopoly on telecommunications in India. It was a public sector monopoly; it barred the entry of other firms in the telecom sector. Regardless of whether public or private, monopolies restrict supplied quantity, which leads to lower quality and higher prices. Lacking any competition, the monopolist makes super-normal profits and ends up reducing social welfare. In cases like these (and we should note that there are many), the way to improve social welfare is to open the market to competition — which the government finally did in the 1990′s. We know how the telecom sector improved once that happened.

The improvement in the telecom sector was entirely predictable for anyone familiar with basic economic principles. The question is why didn’t the government do it sooner. The answer is because a public sector monopoly is good for the people in the government (politicians and bureaucrats) and the workers of the sector. Powerful vested interests normally trump the interests of the public.

Another example is of an improved sector following the removal of government mandated monopoly is the civil aviation sector in India. We also know that story too well. In any case, the government continues to maintain monopolies in other sectors. The railways is perhaps the most striking example. Until the government lets go, the railways will continue to be a disaster story.

The first basic lesson is that governments do distort markets and it ends up costing the public dearly. The second basic lesson is that unless there’s some reason to believe that there’s a market failure, it is good to just let well-enough alone.

So now let’s talk about labor markets, a topic I had touched upon in a previous post on minimum wages. First, let’s ask if there are failures in labor markets and if so, what’s the source of the failure. Second, can something be done about it. It could be possible that the failure is such that nothing can be done about it, or if anything at all is done, it could make a bad situation worse. Sometimes we are powerless to intervene. Finally, if indeed something can be done to improve the situation, is the government the right agency to fix the market failure or is it something else.

Let’s take a simple case. Imagine that the employer has monopsony power. That is, it is the only employer of the labor available in a particular market. A monopsony is the equivalent of a monopoly. We term the single supplier of a good (or a service) in a particular market a monopoly, while the firm which is the single buyer (“demander” if you will) of a good or a service is called a “monopsony.”

A monopsony, like a monopoly, has market power. What that means is that monopolies and monopsonies have the power to set the price. That is, they can dictate terms. A monopoly can dictate the price at which the good or service is sold, and a monopsony can dictate the price at which it buys the good or service. Contrast this with a firm operating in a competitive market. In a competitive market, a firm is a “price taker” — meaning it cannot set a price, and instead can only sell its product at a price that is outside its control and which it is compelled to take.

A monopsony in the labor market — in other words, a firm that has the market power to determine the wage at which it hires labor — will a lower wage than what would prevail in a competitive labor market. In that case, it is possible to increase social welfare by mandating a wage that is higher than what the monopsonist would pay and which is therefore closer to the wage that would result if it had been a competitive market. Bottom line: a minimum wage makes sense if the firm has power in the labor market.

It can be argued that in most cases the labor markets are competitive and therefore no intervention is warranted. But then how does one explain why the wages are so low that it attracts the attention of well-meaning people? It is because there is an excess supply of unskilled labor relative to demand. Prices are jointly determined by supply and demand in a free market. Low prices change to high prices only if the supply contracts or the demand expands.

Mandating a price floor (which is what a minimum wage is) does not affect the supply or the demand — although it does affect the quantity supplied and the quantity demanded. At a higher wage, the quantity supplied increases and the quantity demanded decreases. That means there is an excess supply. The limited quantity that is demanded therefore has to be rationed.

Where previously say 100 people were employed at a lower wage, at a higher wage say only 80 people are employed. So the 80 are better off but the 20 are worse off. Minimum wages have redistributive effects. You cannot make all 100 better off — only some of them gain and the remaining lose.

There is a general principle which should be noted. It is never possible to do only one thing. When you try to do something, other things also happen — things that are not intended. If you imagine that by introducing a minimum wage, you only change the wages and nothing else changes, you come up against what Garrett Hardin has called the First Law of Human Ecology: We can never do merely one thing.

Here endth the lesson.

Transforming India
Translated by S Krishnamoorthy

Translator’s Preface

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I regularly heard about India becoming a “superpower” and surely will be one by 2000. But when 2000 neared, the target date was shifted to 2010 and now it is pushed to 2020. The word mirage comes to mind. A quarter century since I first started hearing about it, and even after reducing superpower expectations of the country by many notches, India is not even close to achieving what some proclaimed was an inevitability. But the rhetoric keeps getting louder and this raises certain questions. Is becoming a superpower a goal for India? If so, why has India failed? Leave alone superpower dreams, the most important question is “Why is India so desperately poor?”

It is in pursuit of an answer to this question that Atanu Dey wrote “Transforming India: Big ideas for a developed nation”. This book is not just about India’s poverty (a fact), but also describes a dream (a possibility) and the essential transformation (a process) to attain that dream. And here’s my opinion on these three and the book. Poverty is another word for an inability to produce enough. Are Indians incapable of producing enough? If so, what has stopped, and is stopping, us from producing enough?

Perhaps the government is implicated in India’s poverty. People in governments found that keeping people poor keeps them in power and that poverty sells. Being part of the government became a very profitable venture, and the governments, one after another, perfected the art of selling and maintaining poverty. There is cash for votes, free TVs, free stoves, free weddings and the list goes on. Falling for these gimmicks, we buy poverty first with our votes and then once more with taxes; a rare instance where we pay twice to buy the same thing.

Prolonged buying has another name, investing. So all the while, we have been investing in poverty and with predictable results: poverty has become the defining characteristic of India. In an era when many countries around the world are known for their development and advancements in science and technology, India stands out as the largest concentration of poor people. It is as if India specializes in manufacturing poverty. A cynical view would be that the Government of India is really an institution that is in the business of PPP – “Perpetually Planned Poverty,” as Atanu Dey labels it.

To sell something successfully needs good marketing or as some say, propaganda. This the governments did by controlling the education system to raise generations of subservient citizens who are enthralled by and dependent on the government. As a result, we ended up producing a political system with ruling parties and oppositions that are different versions of more or less the same economic ideologies.

Eulogizing poverty is an industry in India. In the guise of protecting the poor, most of the media and the so called intelligentsia go around demonizing free enterprise as an evil western concept, while conveniently brushing aside the fact that communism and socialism are also western concepts. To write about poverty, to create an aura about poverty are favorite themes for some of the celebrated authors. Conflating simplicity with poverty in the name of Gandhian economics is the most famous fallacy of our times. Like Thomas Paine says, after all, a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it an appearance of being right. But the facts are: poverty is not a way of life; poverty is not a fashionable thing; poverty is not a virtue; poverty is nothing to be extolled, and nothing to sing hymns about. Borrowing Thomas Hobbes’ words, a life spent in poverty is nasty, brutish and short.

Poverty, like prosperity, needs a conducive environment to flourish. In our country, democracy is the name of the game. Surprising, considering the fact that it has always been mostly dynastic rule at all meaningful levels. The set to whom we have given our consent to govern is almost always from a select set of families; sons, daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons and so on. Such a system used to be called a hereditary monarchy. Nevertheless, the claim loudly and proudly made is that India is the largest democracy in the world

There is another political factory: the entertainment industry. Take Tamil Nadu, for examples. It is notorious for its politicians who arise from its entertainment/film industry. It churns out chief-ministers (a hero, heroine and a script-writer so far.) Being the good people we are, in our infinite wisdom we select only the heroes and never the villains as chief ministers thus displaying our abundant incapacity to distinguish between reality and fiction.

So what would India be like if it were a developed country? Transforming India describes that India of our dreams. It does not stop at that. It outlines what is holding India back and what needs to be done to make that dream a reality. The good thing is that it is all common sense.

The author’s reasoning is based on economics, a subject that affects every aspect of everyone’s life. Economics is a subject that is poorly taught and understood even more poorly, particularly in our country. All this in a land which over the millennia gave birth to some of the greatest minds of the human race, a land that produced Arthashastra, a land that had Nalanda — one of the greatest universities of the ancient world.

Why should the transformation of India interest me? I am obsessed with the dream of living in a developed India. The current circumstances call for a transformation: a transformation from a filthy, third-world, under-developed country into a developed first-world country, whose citizens are not viewed upon as potential migrants to other countries. As the translator of the Tamil version of this book, I hope it gets translated into all Indian languages. That hope has to be translated into a plan.

I should stress that this book is not a panacea but shows a glimpse of how things ought to be and how they are now. It is an outline of a dream and some ideas that can take us to that dream, ideas we need to constantly remind ourselves of and most importantly we need to act upon.

So all we need to do is take little steps toward that dream. Sit back, relax and enjoy the read, and I am sure that it will be well worth it. Have a look at what the author has to say; debate, discuss and dissent. Let ideas flourish.

Here’s to a developed India. Jai Hind.

The Tamil version will be available shortly in hard copy and on Amazon Kindle.

My alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, is an extraordinary place. It consistently ranks among the top few universities in the world. The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked it fourth overall—behind Harvard, Stanford and MIT. It ranks world’s second best in science, and third best in engineering, and in social sciences.

UC Berkeley has been a stellar institution ever since its founding in 1868. People associated with it have won 71 Nobel prizes, and scores of top awards such as Fields Medals, Turing Awards, etc. It has been and continues to be a truly great university. Take a look at the wiki entry on UCB to get a feel for how good it is.

The campus is impressive, as you would expect any great university to be. The buildings are architecturally beautiful and the grounds are lovely. Admittedly, parking on campus is a problem but the saving grace is that if you win a Nobel, you get a reserved parking spot on campus close to your office.

You might wonder what explains UCB’s obvious and persistent success. To answer that question, we have to first understand what precisely UCB is. It is definitely not its buildings or any other physical attribute, though they are not irrelevant. Is it because of the people associated with it? Certainly the people matter. But there’s constant churn in them: generations of faculty, students and staff pass through it and yet it continues to have a persistent quality that transcends them all.

The most fundamental description of the University of California at Berkeley is that it is an institution. It is an extraordinary place as I said before but it is not just a place: it is an institution. What defines it essentially is its objective, and the necessary rules and regulations that follow from it. Its institutional structure defines it and determines its success. Its objective determines the rules that govern it and because those are good, the results are good.

Every 50 years or so, the entire set of people associated with it gets replaced but the essential character of UC Berkeley does not change because the objective and the concomitant rules continue to be the same. It is the persistence of the objective and the rules that follow from it that make it what it is.

I have chosen UC Berkeley because I spent eight years of my life there but regardless what’s true about it is also true of any arbitrary successful institution. The objectives and the rules matter for the success or failure of any institution.

II. The Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto

Douglas Adams, the author of such fine books as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (in five parts, no less), wrote what is in my considered opinion one of the finest books you could ever read – Last Chance to See. It’s a funny book, as he appears to be unable to write anything un-funny. But it deals with a very serious topic: the loss of biodiversity and extinction of biological species.

I was particularly struck by one passage in Last Chance to See. Allow me to quote that bit in full.

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

What I call the objective is what Douglas calls “the intention” and that’s what’s immutable. The wood used in the construction of the temple is not material to what it essentially is. The living institution transcends the materials that give it form and shape. The objective is an idea and ideas are the foundation that institutions are built on and with.

III. India

Depending on how you figure it, roughly for around 150 years, the geographical area now called India was under the control of the British Empire. It was certainly comprehensively under the total control of the British between 1857 and 1947. During that 90-year period, the rules and regulations that defined India were created by the British. That period is commonly referred to as the British Raj.

The British Raj was an institution like any other. It had its objectives, and the rules and regulations that the British created were consistent with that objective. The objective was to exploit the economy and extract as much as possible. Colonialism is undertaken for profit, not just for fun on a whim.

As it happens, all things come to an end. They end when circumstances change, as circumstances usually do. The British colonial rule eventually ended for various reasons, primary among them was that the cost of colonial rule exceeded the benefits. The Second World War had enervated the Empire and besides, colonialism was going out of fashion around the world. The British left and did not need to be persuaded too much.

There was a change of guard in 1947. All of the British – with some notable exceptions – left for home, leaving behind all the institutions that they had created for ruling the Indians entirely intact. The new rulers took over the task of ruling the Indians quite enthusiastically. The first task at hand was the creation of a constitution of the country.

A constitution is an institution. Actually, it is the most fundamental institution since it defines the basic character of the country. Time was of the essence. I guess considerations of expediency required that the old rules created by the British were incorporated into the constitution of India without changes. And while they were at it, the objective – the British government objective – was also left intact.

IV. British Raj 2.0

Here’s the bottom line. The British Raj ended in 1947, and yet it really did not end. The Britishers certainly left but the objective they had when ruling India – the government domination of the people of India – remained unaltered. The rules and regulations that the British had established in pursuit of that objective were written into the constitution. The government established by the British continued post-1947.

India did not prosper under the British. That’s not surprising because countries don’t usually prosper under foreign domination. Not just countries, individuals don’t prosper under domination. India did not prosper after the British left because the institutional structure did not change. The same old rules, the same old game, the same old outcome. The rape of India started with invaders and foreign rulers creating institutions for their own benefit, and it still continues under those same institutions under the same set of rules.

Sure the names have been changed. The ICS is now called IAS, to quote just one tiny example. But does changing one letter in the title change things all that much? The man who lives in what is called the Rashtrapati Bhavan is not as fair-skinned as the one who lived there before 1947 but skin color is only skin deep. The new rulers still go around in cars with red flashing lights on top, and the relationship between the rulers and the ruled still remains as before.

India did not prosper under the British Raj and it should not come as any surprise that it does not prosper under what I call British Raj 2.0. Institutions don’t change merely because people working in them are replaced. The intentions of the original builders matter, not the buildings themselves. For real change, you have to change the objectives, and the rules and regulations that follow from them.

For India to prosper, the idea of India has to change.

Is there a case for a third party to intervene in this? The answer is yes only if the intervention could make at least one party better off without making any other person worse off. To use a technical term here, this is what is called a “Pareto improvement.” Otherwise the answer is no.

This involves a general principle and we should pay particular attention here. A situation is “Pareto optimal” if you cannot make someone better off without making at least one person worse off — which is that you cannot make a “Pareto improvement.”

Is anyone being made better off while simultaneously ensuring that no one is made worse off by intervening in a simple labor transaction?

Let’s take one case at a time. Suppose the seller and the buyer of labor voluntarily agree on $10 as the wages. That is what we will call the “free market” wage rate — both parties arrived at a rate voluntarily and without any coercion from third parties.

As a third party, suppose you step in and force a different wage rate. You side with the seller and impose $9 as the wages. You make the employer better off and the employee worse off. Or say you impose a $11 wage rate. In this case you have made the seller better off and the buyer worse off. In either case, you have only helped one party at the expense of the other.

There is a range of wages at which a transaction takes place. The lower end of the wage, say is $8 — below which the seller will not sell; and the upper end, say $12 — above which the buyer will not buy. If your intervention is between these two limits, you are just changing how the “surplus” — which is the difference between the two limits — is divided.

The total surplus in this transaction is $4, the difference between $12 (the maximum the buyer is willing to pay) and $8 (the minimum the seller is willing to accept). Since the buyer and seller have arrived at a voluntarily negotiated $10 as the wage, the seller enjoys a surplus of $2 ($10 – $8) and the buyer enjoys a surplus of $2 ($12 – $10). In this case the $4 total surplus was equally divided. Had the negotiated wage been anything else within the range, it would have yielded the same total surplus but the division of that total would have been different.

When you intervene to set a wage rate within the rage, your intervention moves the situation from one Pareto optimal to another, but it is not a Pareto improvement. It is pure meddling but you can actually do much worse. Here’s how. By imposing a wage rate outside the feasible range.

Suppose you impose a $7 wage rate. The buyer is willing to buy at that rate but the seller is unwilling. Trade does not take place. That makes both the seller and the buyer worse off. Similarly, if you impose $13 — the seller is willing but the buyer is not. Trade again does not take place and both are worse off. Through your intervention in the market, you have imposed losses.

Let’s examine what you are doing: you are imposing your will on others. You decide how much the seller’s labor is worth (in case you impose a wage lower than the free market wage) or how much the buyer should value labor at (in case you impose a wage higher than the free market wage.) There is no justification for you to do so in either of these cases.

Note that I have introduced the terms “surplus,” “Pareto optimum” and “Pareto improvement” here because it is useful vocabulary. Vocabulary helps us reason efficiently and present out arguments compactly.

To summarize the above, the free market wage of $10 arrived at by the buyer and seller is Pareto optimal. Your intervention within the range $8 – $12 leads you to another Pareto optimal but it is not a Pareto improvement. It is not a Pareto improvement because one party gains only at the expense of the other.

Your intervention outside that range leads you to a situation where the trade does not take place — and this is not Pareto optimal since at least one or both parties can benefit (a Pareto improvement) if the wage is allowed to be freely set within the range.

In this simple example, the $10 free-market wage rate is Pareto optimal. But it is not the only Pareto optimal wage. As pointed out above, wage rates of $8, $9, $11, and $12 are also Pareto optimal. But an imposed wage rate below $8 or above $12 is Pareto inferior because you can make both parties better off — a Pareto improvement — if you just let them get on with their business and not interfere.

At this point you may say that all this is very tedious and simplistic. It is tedious but necessary. If we have to understand the big issue we have to proceed slowly one small step at a time. We need to do this only once to establish the basic principles. Once only and then we can simply use the results we get to move on to the apparently more complicated bits. I say “apparently” because a complicated case is nothing more than a collection of simpler bits. If we understand those simple bits, the complicated bit does not appear to be all that complicated.

So now the next simple bit is to ask how are the range limits — $8 and $12 in our example — determined. That’s done by the availability of “substitutes.” The employer is willing to pay a maximum of $12 for the job because for $12 he can get the job done by using alternative means. Suppose he can hire a machine and thus avoid hiring a worker.

In the case of the worker, for $8 he is willing to do the work but for less than that, he will not do the job — because his best available alternative is a job that pays $7.99. So the principle here is that the wage that a person can demand depends on the person’s available alternatives.

So what determines what alternatives a person has? That depends on the skills of he person — a characteristic intrinsic to the person — and on the demand for that skill — a factor that is extrinsic to the person.

The wage rate for C++ programmers is determined by demand for C++ programming and the supply of C++ programmers. If there are very few people with C++ programming skills and there is a high demand for C++ programming, the wage rate will be high. Prices in free markets are determined through the interaction of supply and demand. If the free market wage rate is high, then it sends a signal to people to learn C++ programming. Conversely if the wage rate is low, then people will not learn C++ and move to acquire other skills.

Suppose the government imposes a high wage rate for C++ programmers which is higher than the free market rate, then employers will at some point move their C++ programming centers to where the wages are lower than the government mandated wages. Fewer people would be employed as a consequence of the imposed minimum wages if the minimum wages are higher than the free market wage.

The basic principle here is a very broad one. People respond to changes. If prices go up, people buy less of that and use substitutes. If the price of coffee goes up, people drink less coffee and perhaps drink a bit more of tea. If the price of apples go up, people switch to oranges.

You cannot raise the minimum wages and expect the same number of people to be employed at the job. Those who get to have the jobs are of course better off but there are many others who would be worse off.

One of the more important lessons one can learn by thinking systematically (which is what economics demands — thinking systematically) is that you should not only look at what happened as a consequence of a proposed policy but also look at what other things were prevented from happening as a consequence.

Yes, raising the minimum wage looks great when you consider that no one will get paid less than the minimum wage — and immediately think that all those who are currently earning minimum wages will benefit. But one of the absolutely predictable and unavoidable consequence will be that some people who are currently employed at the lower minimum wages will be let go. They will have no job at all.

Why is that? Because wages, by and large, are determined by how much a person’s labor is worth to the employer. The technical term is the “marginal product of labor.” I will go into that the next time I take up this topic of minimum wages.

Economist regularly fail to predict things like the Housing bubble burst in the US. Back then, some nutcases (like Peter Schiff) who are not economists predicted it exactly. At the same time Nobel prize winning economists completely discarded it on television shows. If economic models can’t even predict such big things, I wonder what are they good for? In other words, isn’t the current economic theory just some mathematical model that has nothing to do with reality?

I would like to have some examples where economic theories have been successful and reasons why they have failed miserably in other occasions.

Economists often fail and so do other professionals, including doctors, engineers, architects and journalists. Humans are imperfect and even under the best of circumstances, bounded rationality and imperfect information don’t make it easy for anyone to predict stuff. Predictions are hard, especially about the future. Those who are foolish enough to do so usually end up badly. But that does not mean that all of economic theory is just stuff and nonsense. You cannot discard advances in, say, medical sciences just because some doctors have made mistakes.

People have put in lots of effort into figuring out how the world works. Yes, they don’t know everything, and perhaps they will never know everything. But even though our understanding of complex systems is incomplete, we still know things that are indubitably true. This core set forms the solid foundation on which we can continue to extend our understanding of the world.

Economic models do predict with surprising accuracy a wide range of behaviors. But like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which states that there is a limit to how accurately you can simultaneously know the momentum and location of a particle, there must be limits to how accurately you can predict both the timing and the extent of any particular bubble. Too many factors at play that we have no knowledge of.

Modeling economic phenomena using mathematical models is useful, although it may be hard for non-economists to appreciate their utility. But that does not mean that one cannot go overboard with too much esoteric mathematics.

What the vast majority of us should know about the fundamentals of economics does not involve much mathematics at all. Just plain arithmetic and a bit of high school algebra suffices. If you really want to, you can throw in a bit of differential calculus — but only if you want to manipulate the variables with ease. Add a few simple diagrams, such as supply and demand schedules, and you are fairly well equipped to explain quite a bit of the world.

DJ replied to Tanno thus

@Tanno You’ve asked for economic models that would predict the crisis. Minsky is an economist who had models for ponzi debt cycles which would explain and predict the debt crisis. Schiller has behavioral models which predicted the housing bubble and various bubbles born out of irrational exuberance. Didier Sornette while not an economist, uses mathematical models to predict when asset prices will peak. Schiller is not a good example, he is like a broken clock who will be right eventually at some point in time.

Sambaran wrote

Fiat currency intrigues me. Fiat currency helps us avoid the complications of Barter system, this much is understood.

Hence it seems to me that amount of fiat-currency printed/released by a Fed/RBI should be equal to value of goods that its citizens are going to exchange.

Question1: How can the RBI/Fed print money with such abandon then?
Question2: How does RBI/Fed go about deciding the amount of money to print?
Question3: Excess money printing is a mechanism by government to take money out of the hands of citizens’ savings without explicitly calling it tax. Please confirm.

Abhijat too wants to know “what is money.”

Money is hard to get — in more than one sense. I will try and get around to it eventually. I say eventually because I don’t think it is useful to introduce money into the discussion too early. It just confuses people. We can get a fairly good understanding of the basic principles of economics without reference to money. After that, we can talk about money and it will then become quite clear that money is not all that important.

Yes, money matters but there are others things that matter more. Money matters to accountants but not so much to economists. Money is nominal, not real. Stuff is real. Stuff is wealth. Stuff matters.

The answer to the question 3 above is, “Yes, inflation is a disguised tax brought about by printing money and putting it in circulation.”

Piccolo wrote

I have a question about free-market philosophy. How does the philosophy of free-market or minimum govt justify govt funding of scientific research and primary education?

Good question. Even a brief answer would be fairly long. The answer will have to start with “what is a market?” Then you have to go to “what is a free market?” Then we have to ask how the cost of production of something is recovered. Then we will get to kinds of goods for which it is hard to allocate the costs and the difficulty of recovering the costs of these goods. Then we will figure out that there are other mechanisms for funding such goods, etc.

In exploring that, we will also have to visit the role of governments and why a minimal government is better. All this is worth exploring.

VirtualPresence wrote

I like the idea of a free market and am aware of the advantages of an incentivized system. Looking at the economic disparities in our society i would like to see you explore some policies or “regulations” enacted the government that are consistent with the idea of a free market economy (without any form of redistribution) and provide a better moral ground to justify a greed based system. Such policies, if any, will help us avoid situations like the sub-prime mortgage crisis which was the result of nothing but pure GREED.

Exploring the role of greed is an excellent point. Also economic disparity and what to do about it. All of this has to start with an understanding of what we mean by “government.” The starting point is to recognize that governments are people too. That means that whatever human characteristics you and I have as people, the people who constitute the government also have the same. If we are greedy, so are the people in the government. Therefore it may be asking too much to expect the “government” to fix the problem of greed.

DJ wrote in response to the matter of greed

@VirtualPresence Greed is not a property of a system, but of human beings (at least some large subset of humans). You cannot have a system that does not take that into account. Greed will always exist, no matter what system you come up with. Greed is not bad in a competitive, fair, accountable framework where it can be channeled into productive activities. Markets are the best system of determining when greed goes too far and companies get punished accordingly. Its only when the framework isn’t fair, or if the accountability mechanism is broken, or when there are distortions from regulators or govt that you have a problem. The problem is that greed is usually one step ahead of regulators, or greed can corrupt regulators, then what do you do?

Kumar_N asked about taxation. Among other questions, he asked

What does taxation theory say about the best model to ensure effective disbursal of tax monies across the nation? Thanks in advance.

I am sorry I can’t answer to those questions, only partly because I don’t know much about it. I may get to them if time permits me later on in the work.

Finally Suramya wants to know about “market failures.” That is an absolutely essential topic and it has to be addressed in the book.

Thanks all for the inputs. I will address them as I go along.

Like most everything she’s tried in her long career, she nailed it. That speech forms the basis of a new book about the principles behind her enormous success in music, in television, in movies and as a theme park entrepreneur. The first of them became the title: “Dream More.”

In part, it’s the story of the dreamer who told her high school graduating class that she planned to go to Nashville to be a star, how to visualize success and adjust your goals along the way.

She’s not just a pretty face, of course. She has lived life and learned a lot. Here she is making a distinction between dreams and wishes.

CONAN: One of the important distinctions you make is the distinction between dreams and wishes.

PARTON: Well, that’s true, because a lot of people don’t know the difference. I don’t know if I can exactly define the difference. It’s just that, to me, to dream something, actually, you really know that’s something that you can have, and then you set about having to work it. You have to, as I’ve often said, you’ve got to put arms and legs and wings and feet and hands on dreams. You’ve got to get it out and make it come true.

But when you’re just wishing something would happen, it’s just kind of empty. It’s just empty thoughts and dream there, or fantasize. And if you don’t really get out and put some sweat into it and, really, some muscle power, it’s not likely to happen. So you don’t want to just wish your life away. You want to dream it and get out and do it.

She dreamed big. She declared at her own high school graduation — in 1964 — that she would go to Nashville and be a star. Here’s how she recounted that experience during the 2009 commencement speech:

Now when I was a kid I use to put a tin can on a broom handle. I use stick it down in the crack out on the porch of our old cabin. And of course in my mind’s eye I was standing on a stage. With my guitar. Singing my heart out in this microphone. And those were not chickens out there in the yard. It was my audience. And that was no ragged dress that I was wearing. It was a dress all a glitter with rhinestones. And it was made of the finest silk in my mind.

So you have to stay true to your heart. And to your dreams.

Now the night I graduated from Sevier County High School, back in 1964, we were all asked to stand up and talk about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. And everybody had a different story. And when it came my time I stood right up there. I said I’m going to Nashville and I’m going to be a star. Well the whole place laughed out loud. And I was so embarrassed, cause I thought how odd. Why is everybody laughing, cause that is what I’m going to do.

But as bad as I felt at that moment and as embarrassed as I was, it did not shake me from my dreams.

So I guess I showed them, huh?

And you can do the same.

Of course you have to be careful. Do not confuse dreams with wishes. There is a difference. Dreams are where you visualize yourself being successful at what’s important to you to accomplish. Now dreams build convictions. Because you work hard to pay the price to make sure that they come true. Wishes are hoping good things will happen to you. But there is no fire in your gut to put everything forth to over come all the obstacles.

So you have to dream more. And never ever ever blame somebody else if it doesn’t happen. That is in your department.

There you have a genuine country singer talking about her dreams and how she made them come true. What I found the most striking about her is her down to earth simplicity and honesty. She was born poor (one of 12 children; her father was a sharecropper; lived in a single-room cabin in the mountains of Tennessee) and she talks about it with humor and grace. Here’s what she told Neal yesterday on TotN:

CONAN: We played that clip of tape of you talking about the – your own graduation from high school and how people responded when you said you were going to go to Nashville and be a star. But the dream is one thing. Then you hit the reality of Music City.

PARTON: Yeah, I did. But, you know, anywhere you go, people say, well, ain’t you afraid you’ll starve to death? Ain’t you afraid you’ll go hungry? I said, well I couldn’t be any poorer than we’ve been here. And I’m not a bad-looking girl. I’m sure I can find a boyfriend to take me to some drive-in restaurant to get the cheeseburger and then probably talk him into getting me one to go.

I figured I wasn’t going to go hungry even if I just had to – will date for food, you know, that kind of thing.

(LAUGHTER)

PARTON: And I used to walk through the halls of, like, the Holiday Inn and a few little hotels around there, and I’d get the food, you know, that people had set outside their doors, you know, because there’s a lot of good food that people throw out. You know, there’s nothing wrong with picking up a french fry. Even if it’s a little cold and soggy, they ain’t touched that.

But you do what you got to do. So I made do. I’d take a bottle of ketchup, make it last forever, make tomato soup and water, or mustard soup and water. So I went the whole bit with all that in the early days, but I wouldn’t take nothing for it. I wouldn’t change it.

She would pick up food that people left outside their hotel room doors? Talk about humble beginnings! And she talks about it so matter-of-factly. She must have a heart at least as big as her breasts.

While listening to Dolly Parton, I was mentally comparing her to the politicians we normally hear about and hear from. They are so pathetic and fake. Bereft of any wisdom or insight, their speeches are aimed at misleading people. I cannot think of one line that the most consummate politician — the appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh — ever said that reveals that he even has a brain, leave alone a heart.

Dolly Parton of course is not a politician and does not have to lie. Take this line of her’s from the commencement address:

I learned to love reading when I was just a tiny little thing. I read everything I can get my hands on. Because, It is my belief that if you can read, even if you don’t get a chance to get an education, you can learn about everything.

I have stressed that point because it is something that not a single politician in India understands that point. You don’t need made-in-China tablets or reservations based on caste or any of the dozens of stupid schemes named after the Nehru-Gandhi family members to make Indians become educated. All you need is to give people a little help become literate.

Anyhow I should stop before I get carried away and go off on a rant. You’re better served listening to Dolly Parton.

Links:

* NPR Talk of the Nation Nov 27 transcript of Neal Conan with Dolly Parton. Download the mp3 (right-click and “save link as”.)

* Dolly Parton’s UT Knoxville Sring 2009 commencement speech video and transcript.

Ron Paul is retiring after serving in the US Congress for 23 years over a 36 year period. There’s a striking line in his farewell speech he gave on Nov 14th to the US Congress. “The immoral use of force is the source of man’s political problems.” It strikes me as the crux of practically all of humanity’s problems, not just political problems. All the manifest problems that we collectively face involve the immoral use of force or coercion. Look and you will find what lies beneath any problem is clearly an instance of someone or some organization using force to take what is not given freely.

The US is a striking example of how freedom promotes comprehensive prosperity, and increasingly unfortunately so, an example of how a steady erosion of freedom can eradicate prosperity.

This year Ron Paul made his last and final attempt at getting the Republican nomination as the presidential candidate. I am really sorry that he did not get it. I am sorry the American voters did not elect someone who stands for human freedom and who understands that human freedom is central to human development.

Ron Paul is not popular. He is a just another voice in the wilderness. I am afraid that not enough people are listening to what he has to say. All that his speech evoked was a bit of half-hearted applause. We need to pay attention to someone who understands the problem that not only the US but all of humanity faces — the immoral use of force.

I listened to Ron Paul’s speech with an ache in the heart. He was not just addressing the US Congress. His message is for all of us, not just Americans. Listening to his speech, I kept wondering how anyone can keep fighting what appears to be a losing battle. Great conviction must evoke great effort.

Here are some excerpts from the transcript of his speech (link at the end of this post).

Politicians deceive themselves as to how wealth is produced. Excessive confidence is placed in the judgment of politicians and bureaucrats. This replaces the confidence in a free society. Too many in high places of authority became convinced that only they, armed with arbitrary government power, can bring about fairness, while facilitating wealth production. This always proves to be a utopian dream and destroys wealth and liberty. It impoverishes the people and rewards the special interests who end up controlling both political parties.

I think there is widespread ignorance among the public regarding how wealth is produced. Politicians cynically exploit that public ignorance for their own benefit.

At one point, among a set of questions he poses, he asks, “Why does changing the party in power never change policy? Could it be that the views of both parties are essentially the same?” As I put it, choosing between the Republicans and the Democrats is a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Supporters of all government edicts use humanitarian arguments to justify them. Humanitarian arguments are always used to justify government mandates related to the economy, monetary policy, foreign policy, and personal liberty. This is on purpose to make it more difficult to challenge. But, initiating violence for humanitarian reasons is still violence. Good intentions are no excuse and are just as harmful as when people use force with bad intentions. The results are always negative.

Every political party and every government India has had since 1947 has as its avowed goal the eradication of poverty – a humanitarian goal. And they have used that excuse to take away freedom from the public. The irony is that it is lack of freedom that is the cause of poverty.

Governments have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a nation. But we should be careful not to confuse “legitimate” and “moral.”

The immoral use of force is the source of man’s political problems. Sadly, many religious groups, secular organizations, and psychopathic authoritarians endorse government initiated force to change the world. Even when the desired goals are well-intentioned—or especially when well-intentioned—the results are dismal. The good results sought never materialize. The new problems created require even more government force as a solution. The net result is institutionalizing government initiated violence and morally justifying it on humanitarian grounds.

All large-scale violence is always done by the government. When was the last time that any bunch of citizens initiated any war?

Restraining aggressive behavior is one thing, but legalizing a government monopoly for initiating aggression can only lead to exhausting liberty associated with chaos, anger and the breakdown of civil society. Permitting such authority and expecting saintly behavior from the bureaucrats and the politicians is a pipe dream. We now have a standing army of armed bureaucrats in the TSA, CIA, FBI, Fish and Wildlife, FEMA, IRS, Corp of Engineers, etc. numbering over 100,000. Citizens are guilty until proven innocent in the unconstitutional administrative courts.

Government in a free society should have no authority to meddle in social activities or the economic transactions of individuals. Nor should government meddle in the affairs of other nations. All things peaceful, even when controversial, should be permitted.

A nanny state is just the most benevolent-appearing face of the government. It just appears that way but even when it is benevolent, it uses force – and that is immoral.

Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. It is the tool for telling the people how to live, what to eat and drink, what to read and how to spend their money.

To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. Granting to government even a small amount of force is a dangerous concession.

As the old adage goes, people deserve the government they get.

I never believed that the world or our country could be made more free by politicians, if the people had no desire for freedom.

Under the current circumstances the most we can hope to achieve in the political process is to use it as a podium to reach the people to alert them of the nature of the crisis and the importance of their need to assume responsibility for themselves, if it is liberty that they truly seek. Without this, a constitutionally protected free society is impossible.

The problem of people not appreciating the importance of freedom and the immorality of force is universal. Especially in India, we need to understand that.

Go read the transcript and/or download the mp3 of Ron Paul’s speech.

One of the things that I want to do with the book is to explain what economic models are. As you know, economists do it with models. A few months ago I was explaining to a 12-year old kid that models help us understand the messy world around us. We cannot comprehend the complicated world unless we strip it of all its rich details and create a model which we can hold in our heads and think systematically about it. We proceed slowly, taking the next step cautiously only after we are sure of our mental footing.

Going too fast when working with models is definitely a bad idea. Patience is absolutely essential. The kid was, as all 12-year olds are, very impatient. He wanted to know it all right now. Sorry, kid, I said, we have to proceed methodically. I gave him his first real lesson in economics model building. Here it is, for the record.

“Consider an economy which produces and consumes only corn,” I began.

“That’s it? How on earth can anyone survive on corn alone?” he objected.

“Remember we are building a model. We make up the world any which way we like. In this world, the only thing produced and consumed is corn. And the only thing you need to produce corn is — guess what — corn, since that’s all that there is in our model world. If you have some corn, you produce more corn. You don’t need land, or labor, or anything else. Just corn,” I said.

“Without land, you cannot grow corn,” he said firmly.

Yes, in the real world you cannot grow corn without seed corn, land, water, sunshine and labor. But in the model we have at hand, all we need is seed corn. How much is produced depends on how much seed corn you have. Now comes the constraint. You cannot consume more corn than your total production of corn. You can however consume less than your production — in which case you have what we call “savings.”

What do you do with your savings? You invest it. So the “investments” come from that part of your production that you save. From your investment comes the next period’s production. Another word we can use here is “capital.” Capital gets produced by not consuming all your production and saving some of it.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the 12-year old. “I want to know about exchange rates, and the use of technology, and about balance of payments. I want to know how the GDP growth rates depend on aggregate demand and how to control inflation. I am not sure how you can talk about unemployment and how subsidies for the trading sector can affect it with this silly thing about corn and how it grows without labor and technology.”

“I was coming to that,” I said. “But you have to have patience. Slowly we will enrich the model and when it is done, you will see that every bit makes sense.”

Part of the problem, you see, is that people are too impatient. They want it all and they want it now. The great unnoticed evil is that of instant gratification. Here we will take our own sweet time and gradually develop the story.

“What have you learned so far?” I asked.

“It seems that without production there can be no consumption. And that without saving there can be no production either. That there is a trade-off between consumption now and consumption later. If we consume all our corn this period, there can be no production next period. I also figure that if you are too short-sighted, you suffer in the long run,” said the kid.

He’s a smart cookie even though he’s impatient. Remember, I said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

“So what’s next,” said the kid.

“Exciting things,” I said. “Next we are going to introduce labor as an input to production. And tractors. Would you like that — tractors? We will introduce labor and tractors so that we can figure out how technology helps us produce more corn.”

“But when will we start producing more interesting stuff than corn?” he said.

“In due course we will produce a zillion different things. And trade with other nations — which don’t exist at all right now in our make-believe world. In time our model will become rich enough that everything you care to consider will be in it. Gradually we will have our world produce more than just corn. And we will see how the terms of trade change when we produce both corn and tractors. Of course you cannot run tractors without fossil fuels. We will figure out how natural resources influence the production of stuff. Then we will see how governments affect the whole enterprise of production and consumption. We will talk about the production of shoes and ships, and sealing wax and kings,” I said.

“Kings?”

“Yes, kings,” I replied. “Or at least their contemporary equivalents. Politics and politicians. We will talk about markets and market failures. About other models of human behavior such as the prisoner’s dilemma and the tragedy of the commons. Later we will talk about the theory of the second best. By the time we are done, you will know why some nations fail and why some other nations succeed. You will know what the secret sauce is and why.”

“Whatever,” said the 12-year old.

Update Nov 30: The follow up to the comments to this post is here “Understanding Economics — Follow up.”

(Click on picture to go to his photo site.)

An All India Policy Writing Competition was launched on 15 November 2012 by the Freedom Team of India (FTI). The competition, awarding INR 5 lakhs in prize money, including an INR 1 lakh first prize, is targeted towards university students, policy experts and policy think tanks across India. The first of its kind, the competition will help FTI formulate its own policies for the problems facing India. Policy submissions are sought in relation to basic roles of government like defence, police and justice, as well as broader topics like economic policy, local government, infrastructure, and poverty elimination, to name a few.

For more details, please go to the link in the quoted text above. There will an event in London on 6^th December 2012 to discuss this competition. The last date for submission of policy papers 28^th February 2013. The contact person in London is Shantanu Bhagwat (jai.dharma at gmail dot com.)

Here is a picture of my twitter time line where I state why RIP is not appropriate for those who follow the dharmic traditions (Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, etc).

Nama and Rupa

Pondering the fact of death, I am reminded that impermanence is a central feature of the world we live in. The phenomenal world — of things and events — is called maya in the dharmic traditions. The world is maya. Many people simply translate it as “illusion” but that is incorrect. The world is real. Maya does not mean that the world is unreal or that it is an illusion. It means something like this: the world as we perceive it is not what the world actually is. That reality is given a word — Brahman. Most of us cannot comprehend the Brahman because we are limited beings.

That is, our perception is imperfect or incomplete, and the model of the world we build in our brains is not what the world is. Neti, neti. Not that, not that. Alan Watts explained maya nicely.

. . . the maya doctrine points out, firstly, the impossibility of grasping the actual world in the mind’s net of words and concepts, and, secondly, the fluid character of those very forms which thought attempts to define. The world of facts and events is altogether nama, abstract names, and rupa, fluid form. It escapes both the comprehension of the philosopher and the grasp of the pleasure-seeker like water from a clutching fist. There is even something deceptive in the idea of Brahman as the eternal reality underlying the flux, and of the atman as the divine ground of human consciousness, for in so far as these are concepts they are incapable of grasping the real as any other.

The idea that words are incapable of fully defining reality is a central defining feature of dharmic traditions. We have to use them but we should not confuse them for what they represent. The map, as they say, is not the territory. Words are symbols and they have their utility but if imperfectly understood, they can be a hindrance to the ultimate goal — that of liberation, variously known as moksha or nirvana.

Alan Watts again, on moksha:

Moksha is also understood as liberation from maya—one of the most important words in Indian philosophy, both Hindu and Buddhist. For the manifold world of facts and events is said to be maya, ordinarily understood as an illusion which veils the one underlying reality of Brahman. This gives the impression that moksha is a state of consciousness in which the whole varied world of nature vanishes from sight, merged in a boundless ocean of vaguely luminous space. Such an impression should be dismissed at once, for it implies a duality, an incompatibility, between Brahman and maya which is against the whole principle of Upanishadic philosophy. For Brahman is not One as opposed to Many, not simple as opposed to complex. Brahman is without duality (advaita), which is to say without any opposite since Brahman is not in any class or, for that matter, outside any class.

Now classification is precisely maya. The word is derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, “to measure, form, build, or lay out a plan,” the root from which we obtain such Greco-Latin words as meter, matrix, material, and matter. The fundamental process of measurement is division, . . . Thus the Sanskrit root dva- from which we get the word “divide” is also the root of the Latin duo (two) and the English “dual.”

To say, then, that the world of facts and events is maya is to say that facts and events are terms of measurement rather than realities of nature.

Just by the way, Alan Watts (1915-1973) is a favorite teacher of mine. He explains many basic concepts of Hinduism and Buddhism in terms that I find accessible. Philosophically I place myself in the advaita (non-duality) school, which I think is what unites Hinduism and Buddhism, the two great traditions of India. As Watts puts it, Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export.

Avoid Resting in Peace

Anyhow, getting back to the matter of Balasaheb’s death and the usual “RIP” nonsense. I say it is nonsense because “rest in peace” or its Latin original “requiescat in pace,” implies a belief in the concept that at death, the body is separated from the soul, and so the body is buried while the soul rests elsewhere until the final day of judgement when some “god” unites the body with the soul and then assigns some to “heaven” and others to “hell.”

I find the whole notion of heaven and hell, and its necessary correlate of a judgmental “god” who hands out eternal rewards and punishments, utterly insane and repulsive. It’s all very fine for people who profess the Abrahamic faiths to wish their co-religionists RIP but others would do well to respect people of different faiths and not wish them RIP.

Material versus Cosmological Beliefs

In response to my tweet about RIP, Satish Jha (@satish_jha) tweeted

@atanudey True.but what’s so Hindu about anything we do, say, read, write, wear, consume. Am shocked at conversion of India into vChristians

I suppose “vChristians” means “virtual Christians.” Satish perhaps meant it rhetorically but it raises an interesting question: does what I read, write, wear and consume make me a Hindu? I read and write in English, I wear Western style clothing, I live in a Western country, etc. Even then I am a Hindu at the core of my being.

What defines me as a Hindu is my core belief system. How I comprehend the world is what determines whether I am a Hindu or not. The important distinction here is between “material beliefs” and “cosmological beliefs.”

Material beliefs relate to the everyday matter of how to make a living, while cosmological beliefs relate to how should one live. The former is informed by the physical and social sciences (which in my case happens to be economics) and the latter by philosophy. My cosmological beliefs define me as a Hindu. I understand, appreciate and subscribe to the ideas of maya, dharma, karma, moksha and so on.

Even though I have adopted material beliefs that appear to be Western, that does not mean that I have to abandon my cosmological beliefs. They are not in conflict and they are not mutually exclusive. What I wear or the language I speak are superficial features that can mislead those who can only see the surface (and not what lies beneath) into thinking that I am a “virtual” something or the other that I am actually not.

(I write “material beliefs that appear to be Western” — the stress is on the word “appears” — because there’s nothing Western about economic and individual freedom. India has a long tradition of that and only recently has it been eclipsed by socialism. This too shall pass.)

While I have put the above in personal terms, it has relevance for India as a whole. India needs economic development and that would require Indians to change their material beliefs. Indians must understand that material poverty is an unavoidable consequence of wrong ideas of “how to make a living.” But changing their material beliefs will not require them to change their views on “how to live.” Poverty is not a core defining feature of being a Hindu, although Gandhi (and his followers) may insist that they are congruent.

Getting back to Shri Balasaheb. “Namaste and Om Shanti,” Shri Balasaheb.

Ken Burns is an amazing documentary film maker and has made many great ones but the civil war documentary is outstanding. As he puts it, what he essentially tried to do was to examine how the idea of the United States changed. Before the American civil war, you would say “the United States are;” after the civil war, it became “the United States is.”

The Civil War historian Shelby Foote, a Southerner, appears in the documentary a few times. I like his explanation of why it happened — because of a failure to compromise.

It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is for compromise. Our whole government’s founded on it. And, it failed.

Here’s another quote from Foote on what the civil war did:

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things… It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads…

Another quote:

If Americans were anything as superior as we claim to be, we would be paragons of virtue, and of course, we’re not that. But we are superior in another sense. And our superiority comes from this diversity of the way we’re made up. We can see a subject in a different way from the way a Frenchman or an Englishman or a German would see things because so many different points of view are combined in the one American mind. It gives us a view of things that’s extremely valuable to the world as well as to ourselves.

Why is the US so materially successful? It intrigues me a lot and I keep getting glimpses of the answer — or more accurately answers — in works such as the civil war documentary and from historians like Foote. I believe that part of the answer has to be that the US is a land of immigrants, and therefore as a people the Americans are more risk taking and novelty seeking than the average human.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the movie, “Lincoln.” NY Times as a piece on Daniel Day-Lewis playing the role of Lincoln.

Before I stop, here’s Ken Burns talking about the documentary.

And finally, I love the title theme song which is played 25 times in the 10-hour documentary. It was composed by Jay Unger in 1982 and is called “The Ashokan Farewell.” I thought that it had something to do with Emperor Ashoka, and then found out that “Ashokan” is a place in New York state. I wrote to Unger to tell him about Ashoka and he replied saying that he got to know about Ashoka after he wrote the song.

Here is the song on YouTube with images of the death and destruction that the US suffered:

(If you like the song, check out the extended version.)

A few facts about the Civil War:

• It lasted four years: from April 12, 1861 until April 9, 1865.
• Lincoln got re-elected during the war in 1864. He was assassinated on April 15th, 1865.
• The population of the US was around 31 million people, about 4 million of whom were slaves.
• About 2 percent of the population died in the war — 620,000. An astonishingly high figure, comparable to a war in India in which 24 million people die. Only about 220,000 died on the battle field; the remaining 400,000 died because of disease. Remember there were no antibiotics.

The US presidential elections are just around the corner, scheduled as all US elections are for the Tuesday following the first Monday of November which happens to be the 6th of November this year. If like me you take your civic responsibility of voting in public elections seriously, the predictability of the date is helpful. Since it is set by US federal law (dating back to the 1840s), the date is not subject to bureaucratic or political whim. This is yet one more example of rule of law and not rule by people. I like it.

Since it concerns them the most, Americans naturally pay more attention to the presidential elections than to other elections, domestic or international. In fact, the presidential elections have to be the most closely followed elections in the world. Indian media also focuses keenly on the process and the outcome. Why it does so is a bit of a mystery to me. Let me explain.

A couple of admissions. First, I am not into spectator sports. Not to put too fine a point on it, actually I am not into any sports, spectator or otherwise. Therefore I find people’s fascination with sports, such as football in the US and cricket in India, totally mystifying. Second admission, I am not into electoral politics. By that I don’t mean that politics — the practise or activities associated with the governance of a country — does not matter to me. Politics matters immensely but it is a mistake to pay too much attention to the elections because it detracts from the real matter of how governance should be done.

But isn’t the US presidential elections special and important? Isn’t it the president the one who sets the agenda for the US? Well, sort of. But remember that the president is not the monarch. Thanks to the founding fathers of the country, the US constitution ensures that the president’s powers (executive) are checked by the other two branches of the government — the Congress (legislature) and the Supreme Court (judiciary.) The president can only do what he is allowed to do, and that is whatever the general consensus is. US presidents are the most powerful figureheads in the world but in the end, that’s all that they are: figureheads. The primary requirements appear to be that they should be able to talk a good talk. And look reasonably presentable on TV.

But does it not matter for US domestic policies whether it is a Democratic or a Republican president? No, actually not. The differences are trivial compared to the common agenda. Sure the Republicans are fiscally and socially conservative while the Democrats are liberal (read “tax and spend”). But those are superficial differences not much thicker than the red and blue paint they use to color Republicans and Democrats. If they were not painted differently, I would have had a hard time distinguishing between them. Yes, they do compete against each other but then Tweedledum and Tweedledee too agreed to have a battle.

In any case, US policy is fairly constrained by its constitution, its history, its permanent interests at home and abroad, the aggregate mood of its citizens, by corporate interests, and a whole bunch of other factors to the extent that it really does not matter whether a Republican or a Democrat lives in the White House. Did anything of any significance change post the last elections in 2008? You could have fooled me. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

To me, the US presidential elections is a fake battle in which everyone wins. Which, you may say, explains the Indian media’s fascination with it. The Indian media generally focuses on the trivial, the tawdry and the loathsome — cricket, Bollywood and politicians — to distract the attention of the gullible Indian public. Fake TV journalists and reporters faking it and reporting on big fakers. I will desist from naming the biggest fake of them all since it is polite to not state the obvious. So let’s just move on.

But doesn’t the outcome of the US elections affect India through their foreign policy? No, not really. It is true that Democrats and Republicans relate to India differently. Republican presidents are more likely to be friendly to India than the Democratic ones. This is somewhat puzzling since Indians and people of Indian descent in the US generally support Democrats over Republicans.

Be that as it may, the fact is that in the greater scheme of things as the Americans see it, India does not matter a whole lot. And quite understandably so. India just does not attract American attention. India does not have mineral resources, unlike say Iraq. India does not engage in global jihad, unlike say Pakistan. If India were to magically disappear off the face of the earth, I doubt that the Americans would notice or greatly mind.

Indians do care about the US — at least those who follow the English language main stream media. The more crass simply ape the worst bits of American culture. But India does not impinge on the American consciousness except occasionally such as when they reach an Indian call center or when some sensational piece of news is reported about India. Caste, curry and call centers just about sums it all up.

But surely, you may ask, doesn’t what the US does have an impact on the Indian economy? The answer is precisely no. The Indian economy is quite isolated from the US as also the rest of the world, thanks to the autarkic regime imposed by Nehruvian socialism, which partly explains India’s debilitating poverty. Here are some numbers. Bilateral trade (imports and exports) of goods and services between US and India was $86 billion (all figures for 2011.) Compare that to China’s $540 billion bilateral trade with the US.

China matters to the US much more than India does, and with good reason. China’s trade surplus with the US was $282 billion in 2011 alone — and that’s been going on for a while. Consequently, China holds around $1.1 trillion in US Treasury bonds, as does Japan. India’s trade with the US does not really count, not to the Americans and neither to Indians. Remember India is a large country with over 1.2 billion people. That means, per capita the US-India bilateral trade in 2011 was a measly $70. Compare that to Canada: total trade was $261 billion, and per capita was a whopping $20,000.

You may say that Canada should not count since it is US’s neighbor. Alright, then consider an even smaller country half-way across the world from the US: Singapore. The volume of bilateral trade with Singapore was $12,750 per capita. Each Singaporean both and sold around $12,750 worth of goods and services with the Americans. Let me repeat the comparable number for India: $70.

What that means is that economies of countries likes China, Canada and even distant Singapore have a relationship with the US economy. If the US sneezes, these other countries could catch a cold. They share in the prosperity of the US also. Or in the case of China, the US is in a deadly embrace with it. The bottom line is that what happens in the US has scant effect on India — and conversely what happens in India does not bother the Americans.

Anyway, as I was telling you, I don’t care for the US presidential elections. But the Indian media appears to care. I think it is mostly because they are ignorant. They don’t know that what happens in the US does not materially affect India’s fortunes. India is a large, isolated economy. And any large economy prospers or fails entirely on its own performance based on its domestic economic policies.

Aside from the ignorance, the media’s focus on the US election reflects the basic taste for circus that people generally have. Shakespeare’s take on life is an apt description of the spectacular political sideshow election generally are: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They really don’t matter in the sense that nothing of any significance changes regardless of the outcome.

The narrator is Birendra Krishna Bhadra. His voice is hypnotic. Listen.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary. As the author of two highly influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, he inspired the America Patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment era rhetoric of transnational human rights.
. . .

Born in Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin and he arrived in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America’s independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–83), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

And here’s a quote from Common Sense that will resonate especially with observers of contemporary India and its dysfunctional government:

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Indians do pay for the whips that the government uses on them.

[Go read "Common Sense - Addressed to the Inhabitants of America. February 14, 1776."]

In news that has relieved lovers of money everywhere, legendary investment guru Warren Buffet has announced that the search for his successor is finally over. New Delhi-based entrepreneur Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Indian Supremo Sonia Gandhi, will soon be taking over as head of Berkshire Hathaway.

“Despite an extremely rigorous gym schedule, this extraordinary young man has become a billionaire in just four years,” said the Sage of Omaha. “Not only did he convince real estate giant DLF to give him an entire suburb of Delhi at throwaway prices, he also got them to lend him the money, interest free. My sources inform me that he is also acquiring two or three other Indian states, but he’s too modest to talk about these things.”

Members of Sonia Gandhi’s domestic staff have welcomed the move.

“I kiss his boots on a regular basis,” said Law Minister Salman Khurshid, “It’s amazing how smooth he keeps the leather.”

“He’s extremely dynamic,” said baggage-handler Manish Tewari. “When I carry his bags at the airport, I can barely keep up. And it’s not just because he doesn’t have to go through security.”

Another blogger, AmreekanDesi, who aims to “Taking the Tire out of Satire”, wrote an open letter to Shri Rober Vadra saying that he was very impressed.

You know how everybody has their life-changing moments? Buddha had it below than Banyan tree. Newton had it when that apple fell on his head. Poonam Pandey when she realized her best talent was taking her clothes off. Similarly, mine was when i saw a sign at the airport listing out the most important people in India, the ones exempted from getting their balls cupped by CISF officers.

President. Prime Minister. Cabinet Ministers. Chief Justice. Shri Robert Vadra.

Man, this must be an order of magnitude bigger than getting AIR 1 in IITJEE, 100 percentile in CAT and topping the civil services exam. In the same year. Mumma must be so proud.

Dude, you’re such a rockstar. And i felt important when Continental airlines sent me a one-time pass to the premium lounge. What a loser.

But i guess you were destined for greatness. Your mom was of Scottish origin, and dad an Indian. Always the mark of a great man to marry a foreigner, and i guess it also fit into the whole Gandhi family theme. But clearly, if there’s one thing you did well, it was getting married to Priyanka ji. Very nice lady she is, tall, charismatic, short hair and all that.

While most Indian men dream of marrying a woman who can get them a crore in dowry, you went long. And how. Good job there.

Don’t get me wrong, i am not like those stupid BJP walas, ranting against you. I truly adore you man. Your journey is going to inspire men and women for many centuries.

I mean, you got the airport frisking exemption even before the chiefs of our defense services. That is so FREAKING AWESOME.

Of course, you are not all about being the first-son-in-law of the country. There’s more to you. Like spending time in the gym to give a complex to Salman and Hrithik. You’re forty and have a six pack of abs. I am 32 and my lungs turn into the Agni missile if i dare run a kilometer. You already have a mustache. I say you should shoot for the lead role in Dabangg 2.

Oh, and i love your 1800cc motorcycle. Even my car doesn’t have that many CCs. But then, the national jamai has to live in style, so it is cool. Kitna deti hai, btw?

There’s so much to you. I think you are doing a great job of removing gender stereotypes that crappy shows like Balika Vadhu are creating. There the bahus spend their time cooking, looking good and taking care of the family name. Here, you are making sure you look good, while taking care of the family name. This is just so sweet. I would do chubby cheeks to you, if i could.

Along the way, you’ve also built yourself a business empire. Stakes in hotels, apartments all over the place, everything totaling hundreds of crores. Excellent example for unmarried budding entrepreneurs. Just one suggestion – you should consider putting up those apartments for rent. Some supplemental income never hurts.

Awesome, man. Awesome. Very impressive.

An awesome piece overall but what I love the best are the “kitna deti hai” and the “I would do the chubby cheeks to you” bits.

OK, enough of fun and games. Now on to the serious stuff. Why, you may ask, didn’t the main stream media do its job of poking around the shady deals that Robert Vadra has been doing for donkey’s years. Simply because the main stream media is part of the whole corrupt system. The MSM journalists and the politicians that they shield from public scrutiny form a symbiotic relationship enveloped in a cocoon of corruption.

I have visited on this blog the matter of the connection between politicians and corruption in India. India has corrupt politicians because the Indian government is more into business and not that much into governance. Look even superficially into any corrupt deal that the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress party people are involved in, and you will note that at its base is a business that the government has no business to be in. The government’s control over the economy — which is what socialism is all about — makes it impossible for the people in government to not be corrupt. Indeed, the most corrupt and the least principled are attracted to be in government precisely because it is the best way to amass enormous wealth by robbing the people.

India is a kakistocracy — government by the least principled and the most corrupt.

The corruption of the main stream media is also a natural outcome of the power that the government has over the economy. Any journalist who dares question the government will be out of a job because the government will make sure that the newspaper or TV station that he or she works for will be the target of unwelcome attention of government agencies such as the CBI (aka the Congress Bureau of Investigation) or the income tax authorities. Therefore no honest journalist can make a living under these conditions — only those who have no integrity or backbone.

Thus the job of exposing the rot in the system falls to commentators and reporters who have access to social media channels like blogs and twitter. This would have been a matter of shame for the MSM “journalists” but for the fact that unlike the average human, they are not burdened with conscience or morals.

The governments of some states in India have enacted laws which forbid selective abortion. Doctors are prevented from revealing information about the sex of an unborn child to the parents. Recently, to take an example, the state of Gujarat has made it mandatory for doctors who perform sonography tests on pregnant women to report the result—and other details about the family—online to the government. Technology once again to the rescue—this time for the benefit of governments which have an interest in controlling the sex-ratio of the population.

Government interference in the personal lives of people is nothing remarkable or new for India. After all, Indians endured British colonial rule until 1947 and following that, socialist governments took over which continued to enforce the rules inherited from the colonial period. So the denial of reproductive rights to women in India should not come as a surprise. This, however, is a particularly heartless move. It condemns too many girls to lives of great misery and to some to a death penalty for the crime of being born a girl.

Parental rights, one assumes, includes the freedom to decide when and how many children to have, and if possible, the freedom to choose the sex of their children. Forcing people to have children of an undesired sex is an infringement of those rights. The parents have the responsibility of bringing up their children, not the government. It can be argued that a skewed sex-ratio is not good for society. The question then is which of the two – forcing people to go through with unwanted pregnancies or a skewed sex-ratio – is less harmful to society. The answer to that is not a foregone conclusion.

The preference for boys over girls is a rational response to the prevailing social and economic conditions. Preferences change gradually, and that too only when conditions change. Government mandates—whether or not well-intentioned, rational, fair—are at best heavy hammers wielded clumsily by people who consider every problem to be a nail. Parents’ preferential desire for male children is not a technical problem and the use of technology to fulfil that desire does not make it into one. Indeed, any attempted technical solution can be circumvented: people determined enough figure out work-arounds which are usually technical.

Technology provides tools which are always neutral although economic agents using them are motivated by ends to which one may attach moral values. Those who want to use technology to limit human freedom are naturally opposed to those who use it to increase their choices.

By restricting information which may be useful for parents to make an informed choice whether or not to have a female child, the government is sacrificing the right of a child to a decent life in order to protect the “rights” of a fetus. If people cannot avoid having girls that they do not want, they will be forced to have more children to reach their desired number of sons, and to ration their resources to the detriment of girls. Rational responses to economic circumstances—poverty—cannot be averted by government mandate. Indeed it can be argued that the prevailing poverty itself has much to do with government mandates.

In the end, in the contest between the people and the government, the drive for freedom proves to be stronger and eventually overcomes the forces that seek to limit freedom. The government will fail in this case as well—as it must for the sake of the girls.

In case you are wondering what Quartz is, here’s a snippet from their About Quartz:

Quartz is a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy. We publish bracingly creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview, built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones.

Like Wired in the 1990s and The Economist in the 1840s, Quartz embodies the era in which it is being created.
. . .
Quartz is owned by Atlantic Media Co., the publisher of The Atlantic, National Journal, and Government Executive. “

This course introduces the fundamentals of technology entrepreneurship, pioneered in Silicon Valley and now spreading across the world. This is the second offering of the class. Last time, nearly 40,000 students from around the world participated and worked in teams together. The top teams were matched with Silicon Valley mentors, and the best teams at the end of the class pitched their ideas to investors. Many of the alumni of the last class are continuing to build their startups and will be mentoring teams this time.

Register at http://venturelab.stanford.edu/venture

2- Crash Course on Creativity, Tina Seelig. Starting October 17th.

In this course, Tina Seelig reveals a set of tools and conditions that we each control – our Innovation Engine – that allows us to increase our own creativity and that of our teams and organizations. She shows that just as the scientific method demystifies the process of discovery, there is a formal process for unlocking the pathway to invention.

Register at http://venturelab.stanford.edu/creativity

3- Finance, Kay Giesecke. Starting October 15th.

This class introduces the basic concepts of modern finance and their practical application. Learn about financial markets and securities, how to rank investment alternatives, use different interest rates, immunize a bond portfolio, measure financial risk, and structure a stock portfolio optimally. Apply your learning in a project involving actual security market data.

Register at http://venturelab.stanford.edu/finance

4- Start up Boards. Clint Korver. Starting October 15th.

The class helps you accelerate your startup through hands-on guidance from a board of peers and experts custom-built for your venture. You will learn how the most successful startups seek guidance from the smartest people in their industry to avoid common startup traps.

Register at http://venturelab.stanford.edu/advanced_venture

5- Designing a New Learning Environment, Paul Kim. Starting October 15th.

What constitutes learning in the 21st century? Should reading, watching, memorizing facts, and then taking exams be the only way to learn? Or could technology (used effectively) make learning more interactive, collaborative, and constructive? The ultimate goal of this project-based course is to promote systematic design thinking that will cause a paradigm shift in the learning environments of today and tomorrow.

Register at http://venturelab.stanford.edu/education

All the above classes are offered on Venture Lab, a unique platform developed by Stanford faculty Amin Saberi and students with a strong focus on collaboration and experiential learning. In all of the above classes, students form teams and work together on real world projects.

Find more free Stanford courses at http://online.stanford.edu/courses

India’s poverty is entirely man-made. Nature has not been too unkind to India in terms of natural resources. India does not suffer devastating natural calamities. External aggression does not routinely lay waste all Indians build. None of those can account for India’s chronic poverty and backwardness.

India’s poverty is due to bad policies arising from flawed and dangerous ideas. Gandhi was one of the most fecund fountains of bad ideas. What is worse is that Gandhi forced Nehru on India. That one act alone is sufficient to damn Gandhi. But it will take a few more decades before people recognize the damage Nehru did to India. Nehru put India on the fast track to serfdom.

Gandhi made a fetish of poverty. It can be said of Gandhi what Christopher Hitchens had said of M. Teresa — that she was not a friend of the poor but rather a friend of poverty.

Gandhi did not understand the first thing about the nature of the world that he so powerfully intervened in. Human welfare follows from adopting good ideas — regardless of where the ideas originate. He rejected the best ideas merely because they were not home-grown in his tiny backyard.

The world is ideas. Every human artifact is in its essence a collection of embodied ideas. We humans are unique in the known universe as the creators and users of ideas. We create ideas, build upon previous ideas, we adopt ideas created by others, we do “mash-ups” of ideas, we delight in sharing ideas.

Rejecting good ideas is most definitely the best way to impoverish oneself. It leads not just to material poverty but to spiritual poverty, a diminishing of the human spirit.

India had been impoverished for centuries by foreign domination. Foreigners ruled India because India was weak. India’s vulnerability was because it had not adopted good ideas.

If Gandhi has been wise, he would have himself adopted good ideas and exhorted Indians to adopt good ideas — regardless of the origins of the ideas. His rejection of ideas merely because they originated in the West had tragic consequences.

Just as an example, consider the case Gandhi and machines. He rejected industrialization. Machines were bad, according to Gandhi. Actually, some machines were bad — those that Gandhi did not approve of were bad. Machines that Gandhi approved of were good. Gandhi appointed himself as the arbiter of that distinction.

Gandhi rejected machines that made cloth efficiently and approved of machines that humans had to use laboriously. Perhaps he thought that there was some special virtue in doing mindless drudge work. But if enough people are forced to do mindless drudge work for most of their lives, it leads to impoverishment.

If instead of 100 people slogging away on their tiny charkhas to make a few yards of cloth, machines (perhaps a “Western” product) were used to make large amounts of cloth using only a little human labor, wouldn’t that free many people to do other things such as growing food, writing poems, teaching, playing, contemplating the universe, etc?

Why is it OK to use charkhas (a primitive machine) but not a power loom? If the use of charkha is recommended because it employs more people than the use of a power loom would, then should one not recommend the use of bare fingers to employ even more people to make cloth?

People who reject machine made cloth on the grounds that Gandhi did not approve of machines and industrialization, should as a matter of consistency reject practically everything that we routinely use today. The entire edifice of modern life in even an underdeveloped backward economy such as India is intimately tied to goods and services that are made possible by industrialization.

Gandhi’s central idea was the rejection of good ideas merely because it was “foreign.” Gandhi’s idea has impoverished India as powerfully as any foreign invader ever had.

This is the first video I’ve seen in which Condell does not end with the usual “Peace.” He must be really upset at the retards.

Ganesh unveiled

Greetings from Pune on this Ganesh Chaturthi.

It is morning of Ganesh chaturthi and I am at my friend Shrikant’s home in Pune. Preparations are being made to install Ganesh in the little puja place in the living room — just like in millions of other homes across Maharashtra and the rest of India.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Alright, Ganesh has been installed. Here are a few pictures.

Ganesh has a nice cape.

Shrikant, Medha, Ranjani and Rohan

Shrikant tells me that this is a very eco-friendly Ganesh. He is made of clay and the the paint is organic: the yellow is turmeric and the red is a vegetable dye.

Note the M&Ms I offered to Ganesh

Ganesh is very popular here in Maharashtra. He’s universally welcomed, actually. You can even meet him in Ireland. I blogged about it a few years ago — check out Ganesh in Ireland.

(Click on the image to read some of the tweets in response.)

While I would differ with Mr Raman about Shri Narendra Modi, I understand why he is critical of Modi. Perfectly mentally sound people sometimes hold unreasonable views. Where I think Raman displays his mental weakness is regarding Mrs Priyanka Vadra née Gandhi.

Like her brother, her main accomplishment appears to be that she is the granddaughter of Mrs Indira Gandhi – and she’s as pretty as her brother Mr Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi. She’s married to one Mr Robert Vadra whose net worth is estimated at billions of dollars. Mr Vadra is uniquely successful in business, it would appear. I am sure proximity to power has nothing to do with it. Purely coincidental. It just so happens that often people who have political power in banana republics suddenly become fabulously wealthy.

Anyway, this is not about Mr Vadra or even about Priyanka or her pretty brother. This is about Mr Raman.

About a year or so ago, Mr Raman got infatuated with one Ms Barkha Dutt. Nothing illegal there. It is quite normal for males to get infatuated with females. Before the advent of these interwebs, only one’s closest acquaintances would know about one’s infatuations. These days one can make a public display of it and get laughed at by people halfway across the world.

Mr Raman made an ass of himself in public on twitter regarding Ms Dutt then. Now he is doing the same for Ms Vadra. I guess next he will be sending little love notes via twitter to pretty Mr Rahul Gandhi. And when he does, and when neutral observers like me (neutral to the issue of who loves whom and why) point out the silliness of public displays of affection, Mr Raman will no doubt protest that trolls or “internet Hindus” are bothering him and claim that that proves whatever point he thinks he was making by professing his love and admiration of the pretty one. It is both sad and funny.

Aniccha, aniccha.

Post Script: Sept 3rd. I am in transit from my home in the Silicon Valley to India. I plan to respond properly after I arrive, on the 5th of Sept.

Dear Madam,

I support the public funding of the arts — provided those people who are in charge of handing out other people’s money are wise, have immense artistic sense, are sensible, awesomely educated and wonderful. Unfortunately, I am the only one that fits the bill. But as I have some prior commitments, I will not be able to do the job. I regret that means that the people whose money it is will have to figure out themselves which kind of art to support.

In other words, public funding of art will have to involve the public directly and not through some government agency.

Sincerely,
Atanu Dey

As in many other matters that the government needlessly intrudes into, art is best left to artists and the public who want to support art. Art supported by the government is a bad idea because governments cannot know what art is good for the people — only the people know and they can convey this knowledge through their voluntary support. Whenever some people handle other people’s money, there’s always the problem of moral hazard which generally leads to waste.

If in a democracy the government makes the claim that information should be carefully controlled, curated and censored for public consumption, it leads to an inconsistency. It means that the people are incompetent and incapable of handling information but yet somehow, even though not fully informed, are able to decide and choose who is to be entrusted with the important task of making public policy. Without the people having the freedom of speech and expression, without the freedom to be exposed to the widest range of ideas and opinions, democracy is a meaningless word parroted by ignorant demagogues for purely self-serving ends.

India is supposedly a democracy. But that is a contestable claim given the reality that Indians are ruled rather than being the rulers. Citizens have to get permission from a paternalistic government for what they can read or write, see or hear. The British colonial government of India quite understandably ensured that it controlled all avenues of information and that the people were not too well-informed. Colonial rule is like that. The situation does not appear to have changed after 1947. For sure, India got free of British colonial rule in 1947 but it is equally clear that those who rule India today are not free of the colonial mindset. It appears that Indians transitioned from one form of repressive government to another.

Let me put it this way. India is not free today any more than it was under the British. India is under what I call British Raj 2.0. India’s lack of freedom of expression is one very important component of the new Raj.

It is almost axiomatic that comprehensive freedom of the people and the general prosperity of the nation are necessary correlates. It is not an accident that all countries that are free are also the most prosperous. India and the US are frequently mentioned in the same breath as great democracies. Yet, the contrast is striking and heart-rending. India is a desperately poor country while the US is the richest and the most powerful nation in the world. Americans enjoy freedoms that are entirely missing to Indians. That suggests at least, if not prove, that Indians are not really free in any meaningful sense of the word.

It is no accident that the entire modern revolution in information and communications technologies was born in the USA. Not just the underlying hardware — the internet or the computers — but all the applications that enable its use — such as the world wide web, the email system, blogging, social networks such as twitter, the whole set of tools that make people to people communications possible — all originated in the US. Social networking and communications lie at the roots of social capital, and social capital is what creates the wealth of nations. India’s material poverty is certainly an outcome of the lack of social capital, and that is not being allowed to be created by India’s repressive governments.

Once again, I cannot but contrast India and the US in this context. The Constitution of the US guarantees freedom of expression. The so-called Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, was adopted in 1791. The First Amendment states,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The United States Congress, the supreme legislative body of the federal government of the United States, is expressly prohibited by the First Amendment from putting limits on the freedom of speech or press. I have read and heard it repeated so frequently that I know it by heart. I cannot say the same thing about the first amendment to the Indian Constitution. In fact, I have not met anyone who has even read the Indian Constitution. Be that as it may, the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution empowers the government to limit freedom of speech and expression. How is that for a contrast? And just by the way, you cannot memorize it either since it is long and written in such terms that no person without years of study can even understand it. I am certainly not going to quote it here but I challenge you to understand it and memorize it. I couldn’t.

But let’s get back to what the repressive UPA government is attempting to do by throttling whatever little freedom of speech Indians have. The repressive (and I choose this word advisedly and repeat it lest we forget) UPA government does not want people to know how disastrous their misgovernance has been for India. If Indians truly get to know about it, the Sonia Gandhi Congress-led UPA will not stand a chance of winning elections ever. In their desperation, they are now intensifying their war against the people.

It must be stated, in all fairness, that the previous Indian governments have not been champions of freedom — including the freedom of speech and expression — either. What the present UPA government is doing is in line with that but they have two reasons for their urgency in repressing information. First, they have misgoverned the most and therefore they have the most to lose if the public becomes fully aware. Therefore they have a desperate need to keep real information under control. If they had done a good job, they would not be running this scared.

Second, these days it is remarkably easy to store, disseminate and access information. Mobile phones and the internet have made it possible for people to circumvent the government controlled traditional media channels and get past the government propaganda. People are not stupid, although the UPA government appears to think so.

The UPA government’s haste in repressing social media more than anything else reveals its desperation. This is actually a good sign and tells us that there is still hope for India. When the government is afraid of people, the people are most likely winning the war. Indians still have a chance at real freedom, something that has eluded them for so long. But first, we must understand what real freedom is. And that is what the government is afraid of people finding out. Social media might create social capital India needs for freedom.

Let me end with a quote from that indefatigable champion of human freedom, Prof Milton Friedman. He wrote, “Freedom is not the natural state of mankind. It is a rare and wonderful achievement. It will take an understanding of what freedom is, of where the dangers to freedom come from. It will take the courage to act on that understanding if we are not only to preserve the freedoms that we have, but to realize the full potential of a truly free society.”

Economic well-being is definitely not sufficient for living a full life but it is absolutely necessary. That most — if not the majority — Indians don’t have the economic wherewithal to live decent lives (decent by 21st CE century standards, not stone age standards) says something. What it basically says is that Indians are not economically free. Because it is a fact that if a nation is materially poor, it means that it lacks economic freedom. Economic freedom invariably produces material prosperity, regardless of what other freedoms people have or not have.

Freedom — that most awesome of concepts — is multi-dimensional. Among its many facets are the ideas of political freedom, economic freedom, and personal or individual freedom. You can have some without the others. You can have economic freedom without personal or political freedom, or you can have political freedom without economic freedom. But economic freedom has priority over the others. Economic freedom makes the other kinds of freedom meaningful.

Political freedom, for instance, provides people the ability to choose how to organize society, to figure out how to order society and provide for its governance. That choice can only be exercised by people who are not constrained by material deprivation. As they say, to the starving, a loaf of bread is what god looks like. When you are sufficiently materially deprived, you can be forgiven for choosing to follow the most corrupt, unprincipled and self-seeking leader if only he or she promises you a bit to eat. That is what happens to hundreds of millions in India, and if that is what you call freedom, I say you can have it and good luck to you, sir or madam.

Indians are not free because Indians don’t have economic freedom. Why they don’t have economic freedom has something to do with history — as all things invariably do. India’s history has been of foreign domination for centuries. First there were the Islamic invaders, then came the Europeans. Among the Europeans, the British were the most successful in dominating India. And they raped the country to their hearts’ delight. That was the British Raj.

Then they left. Yes, they left. No, there was no war of independence. The British upped and left. Before 1947, attempts were made by Indians to kick out the British but they did not find it convenient to give up India. Only by 1947 was India sufficiently impoverished that the British found it not worthwhile to hold on to India. The well that was India had run dry and the bucket was coming up empty. So they left and handed over the control they had to the ersatz British — the likes of “Pandit” Jawahar Lal Nehru and his cronies.

“Pandit” Nehru and his cohorts found the system that the British had instituted quite to their liking. The British had figured out how to dominate and control the people. Nehru and his gang — and later on Nehru’s progeny — were only too happy to continue with the exploitation and extraction of the nation. It was a well-oiled machine to keep the people under their command. Mind you, “Pandit” Nehru made pretty speeches but that’s about all he apparently was capable of. Governance? Perish the thought.

Yes indeed, there was political freedom of sorts in India. Not for all, however. The people who became free were the ones who took over the reins from the British. They were free from the British but the rest — the people, the masses — merely changed masters, from the British to the home-grown “brown sahibs.” It wasn’t much of a stretch for either the people who ruled or the ruled, actually. The masses were used to being dictated to. Dictation is dictation, and Indians are not all that particular about what the color of the skin of the dictators is. The heel of the crushing boot upon one’s face feels just as hard, regardless of whether the boot is worn by a white-skinned person or a brown-skinned person.

So what would it take for India to be really and truly free. That’s the big question. The answer is surprisingly simple. Indians have to realize that economic freedom matters and it matters critically. Indians must, as a first step, realize that they are living not as free people but people under economic slavery. They have to demand comprehensive freedom before they get it. They will not be given it. They will not be granted it. They will have to fight for it. The people who hold Indians in slavery — under what I call “British Raj 2.0″ — are not going to relinquish their control willingly. They will have to be forced.

How can Indians force their rulers? By making it abundantly clear that they are done with being ruled. This they can do by demanding that the crooks find alternate occupations, some means of living other than sucking the life blood of the nation. This they can do by exercising their franchise at the ballot box.

Indians are not given to revolts and revolutions. But it is high time they woke up and took some action — even if it is nothing more strenuous than casting their votes.

It’s all karma, neh?

My point here (and in the previous post) is that one cannot fault the media alone — the people are also guilty. The two are a package deal, inseparably involved in a process of circular causation. They feed on each other. I make this claim not to let the media off the hook but as a reminder that things are not going to change by merely bitching and hoping that they change.

It is easy to demand that the media be regulated. There are two problems. First, who is going to do the regulating: the government? But the government and the media have an incestuous relationship themselves. The media, if it didn’t do the government’s bidding, would suffer, and conversely the government would suffer if the media did the watchdog job that it should properly be doing.

Second, one of the characteristics of a liberal society (the word ‘liberal’ is used in the accurate sense of the word to mean free and of or pertaining to liberty) is that there are no restrictions on the freedom of expression. Regulating the media is not consistent with that.

We really need to address the problem of the harm that the media are causing. That’s why we have to be careful that in our haste to pin the blame on the media alone, we don’t give the public a free pass. What appears to be the problem may be just the symptom of a deeper problem. If we diagnose the problem properly, the appropriate remedy would be evident.

As a card-carrying market-liberal, I believe that the way out is to increase market competition by deliberately introducing channels that are good. Initially it will have to be “primed” but within a short time (a few years), the good channels will become sustainable since more people will migrate as the quality of the public discourse gets appreciated by more people.

Good stuff usually drives the shoddy stuff out. The good news is that it is easy to start new channels. On the internet, you can start the equivalent of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. It’s true that internet access is limited to a very small percentage of the population but the growth rate is impressive and it will be quite substantial in a decade or so.

The beginnings will be modest but I am convinced that it won’t be too long before the likes of NDTV will be history. The Rajdeeps, Barkhas, Sagarikas of the world are doing well now but the writing is on the wall — if only they could read and understand.

Are the TV channels really at fault? More specifically, is NDTV really to blame? What about the viewers?

Media channels care about TRPs because they depend on it for their income from advertisers. Their programming is driven by the preferences of their viewers, not the whims and fancies of channel executives. If they stopped providing their viewers what they (the viewers) liked, they would be out of business.

Perhaps NDTV does a lot of harm, and perhaps its reporters and anchors are the worst kind of low life known in the world. But they survive and continue to broadcast, which they could not have done without viewers. NDTV’s character is really a proxy for the TV-watching Indian’s character. If Indians really did value objective, unbiased, true and good reportage, what is stopping them from tuning NDTV off?

Why doesn’t India have a TV channel that is so great and wonderful that viewers desert NDTV and NDTV goes out of business?

Perhaps NDTV is a pimp. But it takes more than pimps to keep the prostitution business going. Indeed, pimps are just middlemen who enable the trade between prostitutes and johns. From my perspective, I approve of all agents that enable mutually beneficial trades which don’t have negative externalities. The politicians want to sell and the people want to buy. The TV channels enable that trade.

I hope the wise and the wonderful would stop pointing fingers at NDTV and the loathsome bunch like Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose, Barkha Dutt & others. (Sorry I can’t list them all — it will take to much space.) But for the tastes and preferences of the Indians who dutifully watch them, the Ghoses and the Sardesais would have been probably shoveling shit in Louisiana. They are only the visible face of the rot that lies beneath. Let’s be thankful for they hold up the mirror to us, and their loathsomeness is merely a reflection of the loathsome qualities of the society.

[Continue on to read the followup to this post.]

Fun Fact #2: we are always making predictions, whether or not we speak them out loud and are quoted in the press. Every decision we make involves making predictions and our expectations about the future dictate our choices. The outcome of what we end up choosing reveals whether the predictions were good or not. The laughter of the gods — and even mere mortals — rings loudly when the seemingly wise and powerful make predictions.

The quality of our predictions and our choices, great and small, determine how successful we are. The errors we make in our small predictions are hardly noticeable although their effects may accumulate over time and eventually get us into trouble. The errors of large predictions we are sometimes forced to make — our choice of career, spouse, house — can ruin us. Just because it is human to err does not impose an obligation on the universe to be forgiving.

Make bad predictions and you are literally out of business. Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) used to be a successful computer company. Most readers of this piece have probably never heard of it. Never mind the details of how it disappeared, one thing you can say for sure is that its management made wrong judgement calls. They, people like Ken Olson quoted above, misjudged what the market needed and what was to come.

From being “a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s”, it vanished without a trace. It was acquired by Compaq in 1998, which in turn was engulfed and devoured by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. (How long HP will survive is another prediction that you make at your own peril.)

Make somewhat consistently large and correct predictions, and you can become fabulously wealthy. That’s the Warren Buffet way. But the probability of success is negligibly small and not many travelers are found on that road to riches. Just do the arithmetic. Make 10 successive large predictions with probability of success 0.1, and the overall success rate drops down to one in 10 billion.

Conversely, the probability of failure adds up (in a manner of speaking since we actually have to do multiplication for conditional probabilities) the more predictions one makes about events that are not independent, until failure become virtually certain. The major lesson then is to avoid having to make too many large predictions. The trick is to keep in mind the first fun fact — that both our knowledge and rationality is bounded.

The universe is always poised at the edge of forever, with the great god Shiva as the Nataraja dancing the Tandava, the dance of creation and destruction. In the more limited world of economics and commerce, coming at the realization from a different domain Schumpeter also pointed to it. Corporations come into existence and they go out of existence in a dance of creative destruction. The success of new corporations depends on the failure of old corporations.

The universe persists and evolves because its component subsystems are impermanent and expendable. Any attempt at preventing change is misguided and costly because of its ultimate futility. The flexibility of a system is a function of how quickly it can adjust to changing environments by changing its components.

Our inability to foresee the future and make correct predictions are the result of our bounded rationality and knowledge. Whether we live in a deterministic universe or not, we just don’t know enough, and even if we did have all the relevant information at hand, our bounded rationality would not allow us to process that information to make long-term predictions.

So what are we to do? We have to work with what we know. We, each one of us, have local knowledge. That knowledge is temporally and spatially local. You know what happened in your immediate past and in your neighborhood. The further away an event is from you in time and space, the less your know about it and with less certainty.

No one of us knows it all but the total information needed is spread out among all the participants. The dispersed information gets aggregated and each participant in the system takes the relevant bit, combines it with the local knowledge and makes its own predictions.

The socialist system depends on what is called the “social planner.” The social planner supposedly has all the information needed to make correct long-term predictions about the future and make the choices for the entire system. This places information requirements and rationality requirements that are impossible for humans. The probability that they will make the right predictions and choices is zero.

The wealth and poverty of nations depends on its people understanding this universal truth. This is the core of the argument which supports why socialism fails and why the market-liberal order succeeds. Socialism strives to maintain the status quo, and that goes against the very nature of the universe. It resists change, it fights evolution, it fears novelty and innovation. For innovation always leads to change and change leads to diversity. Diversity leads to inequality. That’s the law and it has operated right from the beginning of the universe. What started off as an homogeneous collection of fundamental particles has evolved into a diversity of objects and entities. Diversity and novelty are coincident with growth and development.

The market-liberal system does not impose unrealistic demands on the participants. It says, “Do what you think is in your best interest. Your incentive is that if you make the right choices, you will be rewarded. Otherwise, you lose. But don’t worry. You have only to make very small decisions. You will be able to continually make course corrections as you go along. You will learn from your mistakes and figure out how to get things done better. You are the master of your own destiny and no one will tell you what you have to do. No one will command you to follow his dictates. You are a free person.”

The market-liberal system works because it recognizes basic nature of the universe and works with it, not against it.

Socialism fails everywhere to deliver the goods. India’s story is just a special instance of a general story. But socialism has an appeal to a large number of people. Let me stress that: not all people, only a large number of people. Who are these and what is its special appeal is the subject of a later post.

It’s all karma, neh?

“A FIVE per cent per annum rate of increase in real national income seems entirely feasible on the basis of both the experience of other countries and of India’s own recent past. The great untapped resource of technical and scientific knowledge available to India for the taking is the economic equivalent of the untapped continent available to the United States 150 years ago.” If these opening words in a memorandum addressed to the government of India do not impress you, think again: the date on the memorandum is November 5, 1955 and its author is Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Friedman visited the ministry of finance briefly during 1955 and wrote the memorandum at the invitation of the government of India. Less than 5,000 words long, today the contents of this memorandum have become standard thinking among reform-minded economists in India. But at the time it was written, it must have been nothing less than heresy. It certainly did not see light of the day for 37 years until it was published in a volume edited by Subroto Roy and William E James.

India took the road to central planning. Nehru set India on that road. Shiny objects catch the attention of people with dim eyesight. Somewhat similarly, dim-witted people get attracted by the superficial and are unable to see the underlying reality. Nehru perpetuated a system which is basically characterized by a lack of freedom. As Friedman in 1963 in a brief note titled “Indian Economic Planning,”

. . . centralized economic planning is adverse to economic development. First, and most basic, it is an inefficient way to use the knowledge available to the community as a whole. That knowledge is scattered among millions of individuals each of whom has some special information about local resources and capacities, about the particular competence of particular people, characteristics of his local market, and so on in endless variety. The reason the free market can be so efficient an organizing device is because it enables this scattered information to be effectively coordinated and each individual to contribute his mite. Centralized economic planning substitutes the knowledge and information available at the centre for this scattered knowledge. The people at the centre may individually be exceedingly intelligent and informed much more so than the average participant in the economic process. Yet even so their combined knowledge is meagre compared to that of the millions of people whose activities they are seeking to control and coordinate. It is the height of arrogance – or perhaps more realistically, of ignorance – for central planners to suppose otherwise.

In the second place, growth is process of change; it requires flexibility, adaptability, and the willingness to experiment; above all, is a process of trial and error that requires an effective system for ruthlessly weeding out the errors and for generously backing the successful experiments. But centralized economic planning tends to be cumbersome and rigid. So-called plans are laid out long in advance and it is exceedingly difficult to modify them as circumstances change. Inevitable and necessary bureaucratic procedures mean that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, that a long process of files going up the channels of communication and then coming back down is involved in adjusting to changing circumstances. Above all, the unwillingness to admit error, and the political costs of doing so, mean that the unsuccessful experiments are rarely weeded out; unless they are failures of the most extreme kind, they will be subsidized, protected, supported, and labelled successes.

He saw that what Indians needed most was freedom. If only Indians were “not hampered and hindered in every direction by governmental interference and control, India could achieve a rate of growth that would exceed today’s fondest hopes.” Note that that was written 50 years ago — and it still holds true.

. . . the correct explanation for India’s slow growth is in my view not to be found in its religious or social attitudes, or in the quality of its people, but rather in the economic policy that India has adopted; most especially in the extensive use of detailed physical controls by government.

“Planning” dose not by itself have any very specific content. It can refer to a wide range of arrangements: to a largely laissez-faire society, in which individuals plan the use of their own resources and government’s role is limited to preserving law and order, enforcing private contracts, and constructing public works; to the recent French policy of mixing exhortation, prediction, and cooperative guesstimating; to centralized control by a totalitarian government of the details of economic activity. Along still different dimension, Mark Spade . . . defined the difference between a planned and an unplanned business in a way that often seems letter-perfect for India. “In an unplanned business”, he writes, “things just happen, i.e. they crop up. Life is full of unforeseen happenings and circumstances over which you have no control. On the other hand: In a planned business things still happen and crop up and so on, but you know exactly what would have been the state of affairs if they hadn’t”.

In India, planning has come to have a very specific meaning, one that is patterned largely on the Russian model . . .

(We all know what happened to the Russian model — the Soviet Union disappeared. If India does not change course, the Indian union will also disintegrate.)

More about Uncle Milton to come.

Second, India has – and always had – the potential to become a prosperous and developed nation. India is not destined to be poor for the lack of any of the principal ingredients necessary for prosperity such as resource endowments, human capital, domestic peace, and the absence of external invasion.

Third, the necessary processes for the prosperity of a nation are well-understood. Economies are complex entities which do not lend themselves to laboratory experiments for us to figure out how they work and under which conditions they fail. Fortunately for us, for well over a century, natural experiments have been conducted in different parts of the world on scores of countries which reveal the nature and causes of the wealth and poverty of nations.

Let’s use a cooking analogy. The second fact tells us that the necessary ingredients are there, and the third fact tells us that good recipes are known. But if, analogous to the first fact (that India is an extremely poor country), it happens that the outcome is an unpalatable dish, then we have some explaining to do. There could be two reasons for the disastrous outcome. It could be that the cooks are thoroughly incompetent. Or it could be that the cooks are somehow not interested in cooking something edible. Perhaps the cooks are in the kitchen to steal the ingredients and cooking well is not what they are primarily interested in.

It can be argued that India is not just poor but is an impoverished country. India’s poverty is not an accidental outcome of unfortunate circumstances but is the result of conscious human design and decades of effort. It arises not from benign neglect or unconscious omission but a well-orchestrated set of actions which flow from the malign objectives of those who have been in positions of power and control. India is therefore not just poor but has been impoverished.

The impoverishment of India is the consequence of the actions of a set of people in control. The set comprises primarily of those who are in political control of the country such as the leaders of the political parties (in and out of power) but it is not limited to them. It includes the entrenched bureaucracy and the opinion makers in the media such as television and print. The government exercises near-total control of not just the economy but also control of those that influence public opinion. The media are effectively controlled by the government because the government has the power to shut down any channel that is recalcitrant and disobedient. The media therefore has to serve its master, the government, or else they cannot survive.

So now back to the impartial observer. He notes that the government is nearly all-powerful and that the people in government are in it to enrich themselves and their helpers. Anything or anyone which threatens this system would be as welcome as the police in a drunken fraternity party. The most important task would be to discredit the interloper and get him evicted so that the party can continue.

The ties that bind the partiers in our case are the shared interest in raping the country to enrich them. Although the goal may not be to impoverish the country, the general welfare of the people is something they are quite willing to sacrifice for their own narrow interests.

The group of people who want this system of exploitation and extraction, as has been noted before, is heterogeneous. What they have in common is their desire to enrich themselves at the expense of the larger interests of the nation. So they share their opposition to the one person who has the passion and the ability to upset the fun party that they are having. They all share a common fear and loathing of the one man – Shri Narendra Modi – who can put an end to the exploitation of India and make India prosperous.

Shri Narendra Modi is a unique individual. He does not care for personal enrichment for a variety of reasons that we need not go into here. No one is really selfless. We all have objectives. What distinguishes one from another is the objective, not the fact that we have objectives. Shri Modi’s objective is, to put it succinctly, the prosperity of the nation. He’s a nationalist whose passion is general welfare, and it is evident from what he has been working for – and achieved – in his home state of Gujarat.

To any dispassionate observer, he has what India needs in terms of leadership. But to the entrenched interests, to those for whom the status quo is just wonderful, to them he is their worst nightmare. He inspires the type of fear and loathing that unhinges reason among the group that is currently at the top enjoying the fruits of being in control of the whole corrupt system. The corrupt system imposes misery on hundreds of millions but that is of no consequence to them. They want their billions of dollars neatly salted away in off-shore banks even if it means that hundreds of millions waste away in unimaginably miserable poverty.

The conclusion is inescapable for the impartial observer: that the reason that Shri Narendra Modi inspires fear and loathing is not because of any objective reason but because he threatens the game that those currently in power are playing so profitably for themselves. In their desperation to avoid the fate that awaits them (jail), they huddle and figure that attack is the best form of defence. They impose a discipline of making sure that everyone is focused on attacking Shri Modi. Anyone stepping out of line is severely and instantly punished. Go read the news reports to see how devastating the response is to any politician even slightly praising Shri Modi. The consequences are certain and swift – generally ending the person’s political career. In most cases, those who step out of the party line are quick to retract their statements and bend over for the ritual flogging.

The media honchos are not that tactless. They are consistent in their expressed loathing of Shri Modi. After all, they are trained in following scripts when speaking and don’t shoot their mouths off like average people do. They know how to flatter those in power. They didn’t get there by accident – they earned their badges for brown-nosing and you better believe it.

The bottom line is this: Shri Modi is bad for those who are India’s enemies and consequently he is good for India. Even if you know nothing about him, you can deduce this fact logically. The reason they hound him is that he can upset the nice little game they have, the game that has impoverished India. Anyone can be forgiven for any sins but upsetting this extractive game is entirely unforgivable.

I hope Shri Modi continues to inspire fear and loathing among those who are currently in power. As the Vulcan observer may put it, “May You Live Long and Prosper.”

The more “rights” that the government confers on selected groups (minorities or this or that particular caste), the more it tramples on the freedoms of citizens. I am quite willing to support, to the extent that I am able, the education of those who are unfortunate enough to not be able to pay for themselves. I can be persuaded to lend a hand to help a fellow human being but I will resist with all my being any attempt to threaten me with violence if I refuse to be robbed, regardless of what the robber intends to do with the money.

I am generous enough to always give money to people who are forced to beg because I have the empathy to understand that misfortune can strike anyone and I should do what I would have expected to be done to me if the roles had been reversed. But if someone demands — not ask but demand — that I give them money, generosity goes out the window, I get turned off and move on.

The recent expansion of rights that the government of India is imposing has nothing to do with social justice or fairness. It has to do with vote bank politics. It serves two major functions. First, by transferring income from one group to another, it gets the support of the latter group. More specifically, the non-poor are taxed for the benefit of the poor. This ensures the support of the poor in elections, and since the poor outnumber the non-poor, the deal sticks. The non-poor often don’t fully understand that they are being robbed (thanks to the propaganda machine called “education” under government control) and generally don’t bother voting anyway.

The second function of the transfer through rights is that the people in government get to handle the transfer with very sticky fingers. Right to employment essentially boils down to those in charge siphoning off billions from the flow that is meant for the millions.

There’s a nice feedback loop — a positive feedback — in this expansion of rights. The rights are meant to help those who are in poverty. But the schemes deepen poverty. So the number of the poor increases. That means more votes for those who propose to enlarge the set of rights. Which increases poverty and the number of the poor, and so on. Round and round we go in the bowl and down the tubes. That, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is what is going on in India.

The other day I was talking to a friend and explaining the distinction between negative rights, positive rights, and freedom. After about a half hour, he got the idea. A light bulb went off for me as well. I realized that I generally assume that everyone who is even somewhat educated knows these distinctions. But that assumption is wrong. People don’t have the time to sit and think about these things because they have other urgent matters to attend to. So I am starting a campaign to tell people about that. Here’s a short video. But be warned that even though the video is short, the matter needs quite a bit of pondering. The speaker is Prof Aeon Skoble of Bridgewater State University. Following the video, I quote the entire transcript because it should be read slowly. But wait, there’s more after the transcript.

The transcript from LearnLiberty.org:

Positive Rights vs. Negative Rights

One reason there’s a lot of confusion about rights from both liberals and conservatives is that there are different sorts of rights. Besides the distinction between legal and moral rights, we also need to distinguish the different sorts of claims the assertion of a right makes. Philosophers generally use the expressions negative rights and positive rights to express these distinctions. Now there’s nothing evaluative about these terms. It’s not negative in a bad way. These are precise terms that philosophers use to make an important distinction. So let’s see if we can explore it.

Consider this claim: I have the right to go to the store and get a lottery ticket. Let’s begin with what this doesn’t mean. First of all, it doesn’t mean that I have an obligation to buy a lottery ticket. It’s up to me. No one should be forcing me to buy one, but also no one should be forcing me not to buy one. Second of all it doesn’t mean that the store clerk has any obligation to give me one. I’ll have to pay for it, which is shorthand for making a trade.

This works whether we’re talking about lottery tickets, milk, potato chips, coffee, beef. My right to get these things is not an obligation to get them, and neither is it a warrant to be given them. My right to get these things means that no one ought to stop me from making trades through which I can acquire them. That’s a little different from, say, when you get arrested and are informed that you have the right to an attorney. You know how they say it from TV. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. The store is under no obligation to provide me with a steak if I can’t afford one, but the folks who arrested me are obliged to provide me with an attorney if I cannot afford one. So these are different kinds of rights.

One way to get clear on this distinction is to think about the relationship between rights and duties. If Smith has a right then Jones has a duty. Understanding what different kinds of duties Jones might have is one way to understand what kinds of rights Smith might have. We’ll call negative rights the kind of rights which impose on others a negative duty, a duty not to do anything, a duty of noninterference. If I have a right of this sort all you have to do to respect that right is refrain from blocking me. Negative rights are sometimes called liberties.

Now we’ll call positive rights the kind of rights which impose on others a positive duty, a duty to provide or act in a certain way. If I have a right of this sort, you respect it by complying. Positive rights are also sometimes called entitlements. So my right to a lottery ticket or a steak is a negative right. No one can properly interfere with my efforts to acquire these through trade. Freedom of speech is another example of a negative right. I cannot be arrested for speaking out. The right of criminal suspects to an attorney is a positive right. One will be provided. One interesting feature of negative rights is that they don’t conflict and we can all respect everyone else’s liberties all the time. We simply have to refrain from using force to make people do our bidding.

Positive rights can conflict and in a couple of ways. One way they can conflict is scarcity. If there are 10 public defenders and 100 people get arrested, they can’t all have their right to an attorney satisfied equally. This sort of conflict can sometimes help us understand which claims are legitimate. Your property rights give you exclusive use of a resource so others can’t claim a right to vacation in your yard, at least not without your permission.

The other source of conflict raises a more troubling issue. Since positive rights create duties on others to act or provide, doesn’t that represent a violation of their negative rights, their liberty? It depends. Some positive rights are created by a contractual relationship. Since I’m a member of AAA, I have a positive right to towing services if my car breaks down. Nonmembers have a negative right to seek towing services, but I am actually entitled to receive them. That doesn’t violate anyone’s negative rights, though, because the relationship is entirely consensual and defined by a contract. If I claimed I had a positive right to a steak, someone would have an obligation to give me one, not as a trade but as a nonconsensual service. That would violate their liberty, making them involuntarily subservient to me. This suggests that if we’re free and equal by nature, any positive rights would have to be grounded in consensual arrangements.

Unfortunately, for a lot of so called positive rights this just isn’t the case.

Let’s continue with the topic. Wiki usually does a good job but in this case, I find the article on Negative and Positive Rights somewhat lacking. But I found a site[1] that does a sweet job of explaining the distinction, “What are Rights“.

What are Rights?

There are two types of right. Negative rights and Positive rights.

Negative rights

Put simply a negative right is the right to be left alone. Specifically it is the right to think and act free from the coercive force of others. Free from muggers, fraudsters and restrictive laws and taxes. A negative right is an absolute. You are either free from the above or you are not. even the slightest violation breaks this right. Imagine that a man stops you in the street once a week and forces you to stand still for one minute – hardly a life changing violation – yet your right to be free of the coercion of others is being broken. The degree to which this right is violated changes from place to place but I know of no country where it is not routinely violated by the state.

Remember that a person cannot claim this right while violating the same in others. A mugger cannot claim a right to be left alone whilst mugging people.

The kind of society where this right is prevalent is a society whose government exists only to protect the individual from the force of others. The American Constitution and Bill of Rights are the closest examples – which, sadly, modern day America is abandoning daily.

Positive rights

These are rights to something. A right to food, to healthcare, to education – whatever. The reality of a positive right is that whatever the object of the right is (eg healthcare), it needs to be created before the ‘right’ can be fulfilled. This creates an obligation upon others to create it and it is the basis for slave societies and statist dictatorships. In the UK positive rights exist and each person who is taxed and restricted via legislation into providing the object of the right is working a proportion of his/her life as a slave. This may seem a bit extreme, but it isnt. Unless you agree entirely with your payment of every tax and everything the government then spends your money on, you are being forced to work for ends you have *not* given your consent to – just like a slave. Slavery was outlawed, but it crept back under the guise of the ‘public good’.

The reason most people tolerate, or even give apathetic support to it, is because they are not thinking about which principles are being abandoned and which of their own rights they are giving up by doing so. Many people find the costs of obeying restricitive laws and paying 50% in tax irritating but, amazingly, no more than that. “Its not all that bad!” They might say – I would suggest turning back the tide of controls and restrictions now before it is terribly bad – it has happened in other countries, however naively you might imagine “it cant happen here”. The answer is to ask, whenever some new scheme is proposed by the government, “at whose expense?” and you will find that the expense is your freedom.

I have highlighted only one bit in the above quote because it describes quite well the path India is on.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

NOTES:

[1] This is from “Freedom in the UK“. I have not explored the site but I intend to.

The guy posted a few more comments (not approved) to my blog claiming that I was censoring him. I absolutely did that. He feels that I have somehow violated his right to say whatever he wants to say on my blog. That is not so. I believe the freedom of expression is absolute[2] but that does not automatically confer any rights to anyone to say what they want on my blog.

Freedom of speech means that you are free to say whatever you want but it does not give you the right to a forum or an audience. You can choose to exercise it on your blog or your radio station or your newspaper or on your soapbox in the public square. But you cannot demand that the New York Times publish your gibberish just because you have freedom of speech. You have the right to speak or write but demanding to be heard or read is ridiculously stupid. Your freedom of expression does not confer a right on you to come into my living room and abuse me, nor does it impose a corresponding obligation on me to allow you to disturb the peace in my home with your rants. I will defend your freedom of speech but I will be damned if I let you violate my property rights. I will politely tell you to get the foxtrot off my property. Which is what I did by not approving that idiot’s (yes, he has to be an idiot if he has not figured out this simple truth) comment.

NOTES:

[1] The URL of this blog “deeshaa.org” is a compromise. You take what is available and cannot choose what is already registered by others.

[2] I have written at length on the freedom of expression and speech on this blog. See these posts.

The Americans create disproportionately more because their culture allows people to tinker and play. They are a nation of tinkerers. Tinkerers take stuff that exists (always the result of previous tinkerers) and create new stuff. Example: Someone has taken some of Carl Sagan’s stuff, added some new video footage from other sources, and created these wonderful videos.

Part 1 of the Sagan Series: The Frontier.

This particular series is by created by Reid Gower, who in turn credits Michael Marantz for the inspiration. Here’s one of Marantz’s video at Vimeo, The Pale Blue Dot.

EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

What I like about the videos is that they are short; most are around three minutes long. The Sagan series shares space with the Feynman series over here.

Richard Feynman is one of my all-time heroes. His worldview is pretty close to mine and therefore his words resonate with me. See him explain what the scientific method is:

That’s about it for now. Play and have fun — because the alternative is not good.

Part 1. The Higgs boson

Part 2. What is mass?

There’s more where that came from over at Minute Physics.

If you still have questions about the Higgs boson that you are afraid to ask, click on over to this article in the New York Times. It clarifies matters such as:

Q. What exactly is a Higgs boson, and why all this fuss?

A. Essentially, it’s an eentsy-teensy-weensy particle — we’re talking small here — that contains the answers to how the universe came about, including whether God was involved. As for the “fuss,” the CERN laboratory in Geneva, where the particle was discovered, spent $10 billion on its Large Hadron Collider. Over the last two years, 800 trillion (give or take) proton-proton collisions have been performed, which works out to — what? — maybe not so much per collision, but 10 billion is still 10 billion. For that kind of dough, you expect more bang for your buck than, “Ja, ja, we’re working on it, go away!” Physicists — spare me.

Isn’t the web fun, the great big classroom in the clouds?

Dateline: July 7th, 2012.

We’re now getting very close to the mature PC/tablet/smart phone, though it doesn’t have a name yet. Microsoft’s Surface, announced with the usual euphoria a day or two ago, comes closest. But it’s still beset with one problem. It’s too large. At around 12″ (30cm) x 8″ (20cm) it still needs to be shrunk further so that it’s the size of, say, a small paperback: something that can be comfortably slipped into a packet or handbag but, with the flip of a lid one way or the other, is equally able to be used as a phone or a PC.

Unlike Apple, Microsoft have been clever enough to realize that a keyboard is still necessary on any tablet that claims to be versatile. Even if voice recognition software becomes far more advanced, able to cope with any dialect or timbre, we’re now moving into a specialized age where the written or typed word is required to be more precise than ever. It can’t always be dictated as a one-off. But Microsoft have not yet paid as much attention to the keyboard as they have done elsewhere in their machine.

The problem is our finger-tips. They’re too wide. Thus we still require a keyboard that’s at least 10″ (25 cm) wide in order to accommodate everything we need. Otherwise, we’d be pressing two or even three keys at once more often than not unless we slowed down to snail pace. But we don’t need the keys to be the size of fingertips.

If Microsoft had some biologists among their researchers then they might have solved this problem because Nature has already done it. True, it’s in the visual department and not the tactile. At any one instant of time our eyes see only a small 2 degree cone of sharp vision before they flick elsewhere. Perception tails off steeply outside the cone. Why not the same for sharply sensitized pressure pads? With a smaller keyboard of about 8″ (200 cm) we’d always be impinging on two or three keys but if it responded only to a very small cone in the centre of each jab even the clumsiest person among us would soon learn to type each letter unambiguously.

There we are then. I’ve solved the next step for Apple or Microsoft, or Nokia or any other manufacturer. What’s more, by writing this I’ve prevented any of them claiming copyright and perhaps monopolizing the innovation for years to come as corporations are wont to do.

Keith shares his ideas on his blog All Is Status.

Liberty and Democracy

A large country like India cannot be ruled without some degree of popular consent. That the population gives that consent despite the enormous harm the tyrannical government does to them would be inexplicable but for the fact that the rulers make sure that the population does not ever become informed enough to know that they are living under a tyranny.

India has been a democracy for a long time. But India has not been free since very long. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out over two centuries ago that liberty and democracy are not the same thing. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence over the centuries that democracy has existed to show that democracy can be the enemy of liberty. We must keep in mind that a despotic dictator like Adolf Hitler was democratically elected.

Tyranny and Democracy

India’s government is elected by the people. But being popularly elected as a democratic government does not mean that it cannot also be a tyranny and deny the people freedom. The subjugation of the population can be as real in a democracy as in a despotic rule. As Murray Rothbart wrote,

“… every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.” [From the introduction to the book by Étienne de La Boétie “The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude” (1576)]

It is popularly believed that Indians have freedom of expression, and to some extent they do. But slowly and surely, the government is tightening the screws. The Congress party is a past master of the game, having taken over the mantle from the British. The British had a good reason to do it: to keep the Indians under control. The Congress/UPA government also has the same reason to suppress expression that it finds unpalatable.

Antonia Maino, aka Sonia Gandhi, does not like it when the natives poke fun at her and her family. She has directed her minions to go after cartoonists. She’s a 1-person fatwa issuing authority when it comes to the UPA.

Anyhow, I bring all this up because on July 6th, the Human Rights Council of the United Nations voted on a resolution that calls for “individuals to have the same rights online as off. The resolution could have a lasting impact on how the Internet is controlled, and censored, the world around.”

The resolution attracted some 85 state co-sponsors, 30 of which sit on the Council. The United States, along with Nigeria, Sweden, Turkey, and Brazil presented the bill. There were opponents, including India, China, and Russia. As you might expect, countries that have a history of repressing free speech both offline and on, formed the resolution’s detractors.

According to The Australian, Tunisia found the passage of the bill to have more than symbolic import. Its ambassador, as quoted by the paper, stated that “the most important result of the Tunisian revolution is this right to freedom of expression [making the passage of the resolution] very important at the moment.” He went on to note that the freedom of expression online is a “major tool for economic development.”

The resolution matters as it begins to craft a legal framework to protect dissident voices. As The Hill notes, Sweden’s editorial in the New York Times makes the case for such protections: “We cannot accept that the Internet’s content should be limited or manipulated depending on the flavor-of-the-month political leaders.” [Source.]

Let’s see. India is in good socialist company — China and Russia — in opposing the resolution. Like them, India has a “history of repressing free speech.”

Will Indians wake up and smell the stench of government repression and censorship? I would not hold my breath. Indians don’t have the stomach for freedom of expression. As the saying goes in Hindi, कुत्ते को घी नहीं पचता है |

[Hat tip: Raja Sekhar Malapati for the link to news item.]

I miss Hitchens.

It was named in honor of the Nobel-prize winning physicist S. Chandrasekhar who worked for University of Chicago from 1937 until he passed away in 1995. He was known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs. “Chandra” also means “moon” or “luminous” in Sanskrit. [Wiki]

The naming was certainly done by American scientists. Had it been by the morons in the Indian government (the majority of it have either been Congress or Congress-led), the x-ray observatory would have been named as the Gandhi, or Rajiv, or Sanjay, or Indira, or Nehru x-ray observatory even though none of those idiots could have come within light years of any knowledge of physics (or any other subject of human inquiry.)

The number of schemes, institutions, plans, roads, ports, airports, public squares, etc., named after the Nehru-Gandhi family boggles the mind as they run into the thousands. It is both shameful and ludicrous to do so but Indians don’t seem to mind. They don’t seem to mind because they are ignorant (both about the thousands of things named after the morons and about the real people who have worked for the common good) and because they simply don’t care. It is as if they don’t have a sense of fairness. It is unfair that just five people who have done precious little good (and instead have done an immense amount of harm) get credited for things they didn’t do and the real people are ignored. The vast majority of Indians apparent don’t care that this is unfair.

If India ever has a non-Congress government, I hope they start removing the names of these bunch of jokers from the more important institutions, and — not just rename but — entirely eliminate all the schemes that are named after Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv & Sanjiv. If it is named after one of them, eliminate it. Thus the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme” or MREGS must not be renamed but totally scrapped because it is leading India deeper into poverty.

Anyway, back to the Higgs boson.

Read all about it on them interwebs. Here’s what I know from there: Particles come in different classes. The class called bosons has six members that are elementary: four gauge bosons (γ · g · W± · Z), the Higgs boson (H0) and the graviton (G). There’s somethings called the Higgs mechanism which depends on a field called the Higgs field. The Higgs field permeates space, and particles interact with it and thus gain what is called mass. That interaction between the field and the particle is mediated by another particle which is a boson. So the particle that is responsible for other particles having mass is called the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson had been conjectured to exist since the mid-60s but to discover it required very high energy physics experiments. That had to wait till the Large Hadron Collider was built by CERN in Europe. The LHC particle accelerator’s mission (in part) was to figure out if the Higgs boson was indeed what it was supposed to be.

Talking of CERN, you may wish to check out this previous post by clicking on the image below:

Happy 4th of July. And now, read this bit.

From the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776, here’s a bit that Indians need to ponder:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I have highlighted one bit that Indians should take to heart. India is well on its way to absolute despotism having suffered “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” It is time for India to have its own “4th of July, 1776″ and fight a revolutionary war of independence.

(I suggest focusing on the audio and ignoring the video.)

The mantra says

Guru Brahma
Guru Vishnu
Guru Devo Maheshwara
Guru Shakshat Parabrahma
Tusmai Shri Guruvey Namaha
Om Om Om

Guru, one of the many awesome words that the dharmic traditions of India given to the world lexicon, simply means teacher. The idea is as simple as it is profound. It claims that the guru is Brahma, the Creator. The guru is also Vishnu, the Preserver. And the guru is Maheshwara, or Shiva, the Destroyer. The guru is the Supreme Brahma. All salutations to the guru.

The guru is the embodiment of wisdom and knowledge. What we know is transmitted from the guru to us. By transmitting to us the accumulated wisdom, the guru is the creator of our own enlightenment. As carriers of knowledge ourselves, our guru puts us on the path to creating more knowledge. The guru dispels and destroys our ignorance and is therefore Shiva, the destroyer of ignorance. The guru is also Vishnu, the Preserver of what has been created or discovered.

The guru is a living embodiment of knowledge. The guru is not an ancient book with outdated information. Rather, the guru is a living, breathing person transmitting what is known up to that point in the evolution of humans. We have to take that and build upon it, and in turn become gurus to those who come later. It is a continuous process of accumulation, enrichment, invention, discovery and transmission.

I Am That, say the ancients of India. Tat tvam asi. I am the guru, and I am therefore the Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh.

The outcome of the second world war could have been different if it had not been for the genius of Turing. The Wired article says:

In a tour-de-force of logic, information theory and sheer insight, Turing designed the machines that by summer 1940 allowed Allied forces to decipher German communications. Winston Churchill would later describe it as the single largest contribution to Allied victory. Without it, the war may have had a different ending.

. . .

Often called the father of computer science, Turing’s 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” articulated ideas that became technological bedrock: that any computable problem could be computed on a machine, with calculations controlled by means of encoded instructions; and that code, rather than machine, was the essence of a computer.

Turing was an extraordinary human being. His parents lived in India for a while.[2] But for all his contributions to the world, he was hounded by the English for being gay. He was chemically castrated — the alternative was prison. He committed suicide a little before this 42nd birthday.

I am sure that England is very proud of him today. But they killed him. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great lexicographer, could have been talking about Turing when he wrote,

See nations slowly wise, and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust. [3]

Happy Birthday, Alan!

Post Script: Read this beautiful essay “‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence” by Daniel Dennett in The Atlantic June 22, 2012. (Hat tip: A Tiku.)

NOTES:

[1] Just the other day I was telling a friend about John Conway’s “The Game of Life.” It was one of the first programs that I had written.

[2] The wiki notes that while Turing was born in London, he was conceived in India. His father was in the Indian Civil Services, which was renamed the Indian Administrative Services after India’s political independence from Britain.

[3] From “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) by Dr Samuel Johnson.

• Start off with Kanchan Gupta’s column in the DailyPioneer.com titled “Democracy is alien to Dynasties.” Excerpts:
  

  Thirty seven years ago this week, the Constitution was brutalised to turn India into a police state. One of the men who helped enforce Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorship is set to become the keeper of the Constitution

  . . .
  And so it was that although the Calcutta papers did not arrive on June 26, 1975, everybody [in Jamshedpur] knew by mid-morning of the events with cataclysmic consequences of the previous evening in faraway New Delhi. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had ‘recommended’ to President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed the declaration of Internal Emergency as she had information that there was “an imminent danger to the security of India being threatened by internal disturbances”. The President had complied without a murmur of protest.

  At the stroke of the midnight hour, civil liberties and fundamental rights had been suspended; censorship imposed; Opposition leaders arrested; and, dictatorship of the dynasty had replaced democracy of the people. India was in chains all over again, this time enslaved by its own. “Don’t talk to strangers,” parents instructed their teenaged children.

  Over the next few days a strange fear descended upon the people of this country — the fear of being punished and persecuted by the Emergency regime through its many agents and agencies. The dreaded midnight knock became the metaphor of those dark, terrible days when friends stopped trusting friends, relatives shunned relatives, teachers squealed on students and vice versa, and censors eager to please Congress bosses decided what was fit to print.

  Not everybody, though, was appalled . . . There were middle-class collaborators who, convinced that imitation was the best form of flattery, mimicked Sanjay Gandhi’s mannerisms and style of speech, and wore white kurta-pajamas similar to his. Hoodlums wore white kurtas over drainpipe pants and ran extortion rackets. Many people thought the Emergency was a good idea because trains ran on time and Vinoba Bhave endorsed Mrs Gandhi’s evil decision, calling the Emergency “Anushasan Parv”. Newspapers, barring honourable exceptions, caved in without a fight: Journalists, asked to bend, chose to crawl.

  Meanwhile, dissent and its expression through protest was met with swift retribution. The RSS, which mobilised its vast network of swayamsevaks to launch an underground movement against Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorship, was banned. But that did not deter swayamsevaks from persisting with their movement that was described by The Economist as “the only non-left revolutionary force in the world … its platform at the moment has only one plank: To bring democracy back to India.” The only other organisation which led from the front in the fight-back was the Akali Dal. Mrs Gandhi tried to coopt the Akalis, but they rebuffed her gesture; for them, freedom was far more important than power.

  The Intelligence Bureau and the Central Bureau of Investigation were used for intimidating and harassing both rich and poor on mere suspicion of anti-Emergency activism. The Income Tax Department was instructed to let loose a reign of terror on trade union leaders. People were arrested and packed off to jail; many of them were brutally tortured to extract a confession that would serve the Emergency regime’s political interests — for instance, that he/she was a CIA agent.

  The Constitution was slyly amended to declare India a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic, an absurdity whose burden we are still forced to carry. To inspire confidence in the Supreme Leader, a massive Soviet-style propaganda offensive was launched. Billboards were put up with slogans like “The Leader is right, the nation’s future is bright!” In offices, including those in the private sector, Congress goons put up posters, urging people to “Work more, Talk less.” It was all very darkly reminiscent of the Third Reich.

  Mrs Gandhi had the Supreme Court packed with handpicked ‘committed’ judges whose job it was to overturn the Allahabad High Court’s judgement of June 15, declaring her 1971 election as void and disqualifying her from contesting elections for the next six years. To demonstrate their ‘commitment’ to her, the judges also suspended the provision for habeas corpus without which India is no different from a police state ruled by a tin pot dictator.
  . . .
  Thirty-seven years later, the excesses of the Emergency era may appear too distant in the past to be worthy of recall. But to believe that would be incorrect. There has been no change in the attitude of the Congress and the party’s first family makes no effort to hide its unshakeable belief that it has the divine right to rule India, either directly or indirectly, and not be held accountable for the many sins of omission and commission of which the Nehru-Gandhis are guilty. Indeed, to forget the Emergency would be a grave injustice to those who suffered so that liberty and rights would be ours.
  . . .

  . . . [Mr Pranab Mukherjee] as Minister for Finance in those dark days he did Mrs Gandhi’s bidding and more than helped keep dissenters at bay through the expedient means of getting the Income Tax Department to ruthlessly hound them. Seen in this context, it’s only apt that he should resign from the Cabinet close to June 26, the 37th anniversary of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, to assume the charge of ‘Keeper of the Constitution of India’ as President of the Republic. [Italicized emphasis added.]

• Read the Wiki article “The Emergency (India)” for some details.

The article would do with a bit of cleaning up, and adding Kanchan Gupta’s column as a reference. (If you have a moment, please help out. Thank you.)

• Did you know that the so-called “Mother” Teresa supported Mrs Gandhi’s emergency? Not surprising is it? She liked supporting dictators and scam artists. I suppose she considered them her kin seeing that she was herself dictatorial and a big swindler.

It is high time that we started educating ourselves and then telling the Indian voter that much of India’s present troubles can be traced to the Nehru-Gandhi-Maino dynasty’s evil deeds. I would like to compile all of their misdeeds into one handy little volume for publication in every Indian language so that we are on our guard against the Dynasty.

You could take the road less traveled. Point out to a bunch of well-educated, comfortably off Indians at a dinner party that India is desperately poor, and you can forget about getting invited back to any future parties. Argue that India is a failed state, and you will be socially ostracized and people will cross the street to avoid running into you.

The demand for unpleasant truths is very low and therefore there is not much in terms of supply. The market for any truth consequently is very thin. That’s one of the reasons that the “Why is India poor?” question does not get much play. The other reason is that the people in power don’t want it highlighted because the answers may lead to their undoing. If people actually figured out the real reason for India’s poverty, it would create a very unhealthy atmosphere for those at the top who are running the whole show. They depend on popular ignorance for their continued survival. Writers and speakers generally don’t want to get on the wrong side of those in power. You cannot blame them for it can be very bad for one’s health, not just one’s reputation.

Since I don’t have a reputation to protect and since there’s no need to be concerned about any future reputation (I will never have one), I have been asking that question for many years. Fortunately for me, I had a lot of time to think about it. It was not really a hard question to answer for me. A lot of very smart people had worked very hard and came up with a variety of answers for the general question of why nations are poor. The best ones survived in a competitive marketplace of ideas. Even without reading very widely (I can’t read more than a couple of pages a day), I got to know of those ideas. Then I thought about them and looked at India — and figured out why India is poor and why it is most likely to fail. (I actually think that has indeed a failed state but I will not go into it right now.)

I remember clearly the aha moment. It was a spring day in 1998 in Berkeley. I was having coffee with Brad DeLong at Nefali Cafe. DeLong is an economic historian. So he says something like this: “The governor of colonial Bengal had to figure out a way to extract the wealth that the local population was already producing. Bengal therefore got systems that were exploitative. The governor of Massachusetts during that same period had a different problem. There wasn’t much economic activity in Mass: a few natives minding their own business and a whole bunch of lobsters on the beaches. You cannot collect taxes from lobsters. The governor of Massachusetts had attract people to come, settle down, work hard and create wealth.. Therefore, Massachusetts got systems that created economic wealth.”

Since I had previously thought about the problem and how institutions held the answer, when Brad made that observation, it immediately made sense to me. India was poor because its system of governance was exploitative and extractive. The British created the exploitative system and it was as good a system as can be for their purposes. The British were evidently good — how else would they have ruled so many people for as long as they did. Rule Britannia and all that sort of thing, ol’ chap.

India was not particularly rich when the British came to India. But it was not abjectly poor either. For the time — the 17th century C.E. — India was about average. Its per capita income was nothing to write home about but — important bit coming up — the aggregate was substantial since the population was large even then (compared to the population of Britain.) One can come up empty handed trying to rob a poor person but can make a fortune robbing millions of people, poor or rich. Anyhow, the British came, built the necessary institutions, and started extracting and exploiting Indians.

Note the word “institutions.” The British created institutions. They created institutions to extract and exploit.

Institutions explain the wealth and poverty of nations. Good institutions are necessary (but not sufficient) for nations to prosper. Bad institutions are sufficient for nations to fail. The institutions that the British created were good for them but bad for Indians. By the time the British left (which some claim was because of a freedom struggle but I beg to differ and think that it was just time for them to go), India had been reasonably impoverished.

I don’t blame the British for what they did. They did it because they had the opportunity and the desire. I too would do the same thing under the exact same conditions. I don’t do it not because I am morally superior but because I don’t have the opportunity. If I did have the opportunity and yet I did not do it, then I could claim moral superiority. Be that as it may, the British did what they did and left.

Here’s the last bit. They left but the institutions they had created continued after them. Those same exploitative and extractive institutions which helped impoverish India under the British, precisely those institutions stood in the way of India’s economic growth. After 1947, it was “The British are Dead; Long Live the British”. It was — and still is — British Raj 2.0.

I have been writing about the extractive and exploitative system for a while now on this blog. At the end of this piece, I append quotes from a few of those. Here I will quote from some others. See this — “The Citizen at War.”

. . . the interests of the people in the government are antagonistic to the interests of the citizens. To make the case, we have to distinguish between two types of governments: one is a development-oriented government which is committed to economic freedom, individual freedom, and political freedom; and the other, a predatory government which denies citizens freedoms for extractive and exploitative (E&E) ends.

It is both an analytically and empirically well-established fact that economic and individual freedoms are necessary for development. It is also beyond doubt that a “license control permit quota” regime—a command economy in other words—is inconsistent with economic growth and development. The explanation for India’s dismal economic performance can be explained almost entirely if one posits that the Indian governments have been of the E&E kind. The evidence is overwhelming.

The reason for why India has an E&E government lies in India’s colonial history. Imperial powers get into the business of running colonies for economic gain. The economic interests of the ruled and the rulers are necessarily mutually antagonistic. The relationship between the colonial masters and their subjects is not voluntary, and as a consequence, power is asymmetric: the rulers have the power to extract economic rents from the economy, at the expense of the ruled. For this, the masters create the laws and regulations which are consistent with their goals. It is perfectly natural and understandable that the British framed laws that gave the colonial government supreme power. During the British Raj, the government was the master and the people its servants.

But of course that relationship between the government of India and Indians changed after India became politically independent. Or did it? The laws which the British had framed for their purposes continued to operate. The institutions continued as before, with minor cosmetic changes, such as renaming “Indian Civil Service” to be “Indian Administrative Service.” Different people occupied the chairs but the functions remained exactly the same. Admittedly the new rulers had more pigment in their skin but they were actors in the same old play on the same old stage with the same old script. Like their predecessors, the new rulers went around with the same red flashing lights on their cars as they did before 1947. They still do. It was, and still is, what in modern parlance can be labeled “British Raj 2.0.” It would be, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, déjà vu all over again for us except for the fact that most of us were born after 1947.

Unlike the United States, India did not have a “Revolutionary War of Independence.” Actually, India never had any revolutions to speak of, unlike other countries; nor did it have a civil war to iron out what India really stood for. Indians are as a lot not very excitable, and prefer the laid back chalta hai attitude. The British left in their own sweet time when it suited them. They had extracted enough wealth out of India by then, India had become too impoverished, and in any case, colonialism was fast going out of fashion. Their imperial power and hegemony was waning. They left because the sun was setting over the British Empire and it was time to go home.

There are major differences in the cases of India and the US, though they were both British colonies at some time. The Americans won their freedom by defeating the British, and decided that they will not ever be subjects of a king. They gave themselves a new set of rules, and were not interested in reusing or recycling British rules. They wrote an absolutely brilliant constitution which gave the people power over their government. It is short enough for one to read over a lazy cup of coffee, and most Americans have read it in high school.

The American constitution spelled out what the government could and could not do. The constitution severely limits the power of the government, and prudently distributes it across three institutions—the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary. The people are the masters and the government that they elect does what the people allow them to do. In India’s case, the government is the master and the people exist to serve it. The Indian constitution is a set of prescriptions and prohibitions limiting the freedom of the people.

What India needs is a fundamental transformation, a change in the rules of the game, not a mere change in the set of players. The independence that Indians should have fought for should have been about real economic and personal freedoms. Granted that Indians have the political freedom to choose but it is more a matter of servants choosing which master they wish to serve, rather than free people choosing who is to serve them. My contention is that the independence of 1947 was at best a partial one. Because Indians of the previous generation avoided a real war of independence, it remains for us to fight and win the upcoming war.

I have been writing that stuff for a while. In Dec 2005, I wrote in a piece titled “Wars, Opium, Powerful Governments and Weak Nations“:

In the case of India, the majority of Indians are do not subscribe to intolerant monotheistic creeds. Due to this, an all-powerful religious institution cannot grow up. In a sense, it is as if in the religious sphere, India has a competitive market and is not dominated by a monopolist. As long as the monotheists don’t take over India (and I am not sure one day India may not become majority monotheistic), India is safe from that threat. But India is more and more vulnerable from the other evil: powerful government.

An increasingly bigger and powerful government is the real and present danger that India faces. It was a large intrusive controlling government that has forged the chains that have held the Indian economy captive since independence. The British created that government for its own extractive and exploitative ends and once the British left, those who took over the reins were more than willing to enjoy the benefits of power over the economy. However, a government that becomes powerful does so only at the expense of the power of the people. And since the power of the people determine the prosperity of the nation, the more powerful the government relative to the people, the more impoverished the nation is.

If you want a prosperous nation, you must have a powerful people and a weak government. For India to develop, the power has to shift from the government to the people. That is the law.

This has been a constant theme. In May 2007, in a piece on education, “The Indian Education System – Part 3” I wrote:

In the broadest terms, the government of India is an extractive and exploitative system created specifically for that purpose during the nearly one hundred years of its existence as a British colony before India became politically independent. The British, as a colonial power, created a system designed to control every aspect of the economy to maximize extraction. The challenge of administering such a large population required a certain small percentage of the native population to be educated in a very specific way. Therefore the total and absolute control of the education system was a necessity.

Even after British left, the structures they had created for controlling the economy in general, and the educational system more specifically, remained intact. The new political leaders saw it was beneficial for them not to deviate from the old colonial goal of imposing an extractive and exploitative government on the people. By continuing to control the education system, they were able to impose a degree of control over the population that would be unthinkable in a free society.

As you can readily ascertain, India is not really a free country. The lack of freedom has been a unifying theme that explains why India is not rich and is more likely than not to fail. Last year in April, in “The Illusion of Freedom“, a piece I wrote for Pragati, I wrote:

Robert Solow, Nobel prize-winning economist, observed that poverty is not simply an economic problem and that “underdevelopment is a web of economic, political, institutional, ethnic, and class-related connections with persistent historical roots.” My conjecture is that India’s continued struggle with poverty and underdevelopment are the understandable consequences of its governments’ objective. I believe that roots of the Indian government’s “license permit control quota” regime lie in its history of British colonialism.

In 1947, Indians got political freedom but little economic freedom, and only limited personal freedom. Merely changing the people who ruled India without changing the rules is superficial change which does not change the objective of the government. The government’s objective continued to be extractive and exploitative. It was “British Raj 2.0”.

Under the British Raj, the rules were made for the convenience of the rulers. Power was vested in the government and the people were subservient to it. The British government employed a strategy of “divide and rule” effectively and pitted one community against another. The government controlled important sectors of the economy: the railways, telecommunications, power, education. There was no violent revolution that overthrew the British. When they left, every institution that the British had created was left intact. The people who replaced the British found the system suited them quite well.

Note “persistent historical roots.” Even if we don’t know much history, this much we know that what we have today has its roots in what happened in the past. As Toranaga-sama would put it, “It is all karma, neh?”

Well, anyway, so why do nations fail? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have a recent book titled Why Nations Fail:The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Jared Diamond, the author of such wonderful books as Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collapse, did a book review for the New York Review of Books a few days ago titled, “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor.” Excerpts:

There is no doubt that good institutions are important in determining a country’s wealth. But why have some countries ended up with good institutions, while others haven’t? . . .

. . . An additional factor behind the origin of the good institutions that I discussed above is termed “the reversal of fortune,” and is the subject of Chapter 9 of Why Nations Fail. Among non-European countries colonized by Europeans during the last five hundred years, those that were initially richer and more advanced tend paradoxically to be poorer today. That’s because, in formerly rich countries with dense native populations, such as Peru, Indonesia, and India, Europeans introduced corrupt “extractive” economic institutions, such as forced labor and confiscation of produce, to drain wealth and labor from the natives. (By extractive economic institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson mean practices and policies “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society [the masses] to benefit a different subset [the governing elite].”)

On May 24th, I heard Jared Diamond on NPR’s Talk of the Nation program, hosted by Neal Conan. Both the audio and the transcript are available on the NPR website. Here’s a quote:

DIAMOND: Right. Given the fact that temperate zones have an advantage, and so Europe starts off richer than tropical countries, that advantage is then multiplied when European countries colonized African countries and South American countries and then set up basically corrupt, exploitative institutions to make the local people work for the good of the colonial masters.

And those then corrupt institutions have persisted until this day and left a bad legacy of colonialism, making it a double-whammy in the tropics.

CONAN: And then you have other kinds of colonies, though, where there were not extractive policies. There wasn’t much to extract, at least not initially.

DIAMOND: Sure, the United States is a prime example. The Native American population in the United States, particularly after European diseases swept across, was lower in population density than, say, in Mexico or Peru so that Europeans who came to the United States had to work for themselves, and they set up institutions that rewarded them for working for themselves. Whereas in densely populated tropical countries, such as Mexico and Peru and Bolivia, Europeans set up institutions to extract work and money out of the local population, and those institutions have persisted and continue to impoverish the countries until this day.

India can avert going over the abyss even now. We have to figure out a way to change the institutions. It can be done but the people have to first understand what the basic problem is.

India’s problem is not corruption. Corruption is merely the visible and inevitable consequence of a powerful government ruling over a weak people. What India needs is powerful people and a government that is its servant, not their master.

QUOTES from previous posts:

Fundamental Change. Dec 2003.

The policy in [the telecom] sector is so wrong-headed that it is difficult to imagine a system that is more detrimental to the goal of economic development. Indeed, I would find it more believable if someone were to reveal that the policy was actually made by an enemy government to sabotage any chances of India becoming a developed nation.

Why does India have the misfortune of being saddled with malevolent policy? My conjecture is that the context in which the government framework was built was one where the goal was not economic and social development but rather the exploitation of the economy. The government objective should have changed once it was a government of the people. But it did not because the administrative structure found it too hard to give up its control. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton observed. The British government was the dispenser of India’s destiny — bharat bhagya vidhaataa — and it was not easy for those who replaced the British to not take on that mantle.

So what is the answer to India’s millions of woes? I believe that the government of India has to be re-invented. We need a “government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” We need a government whose objective is human development and economic growth. We need a government that is accountable to the people. We need a government that delivers on its promises. We need a government that values freedom and which does not chain the citizens of the country simply because it is easier to extract and exploit the system.

The Enemy Within. Dec 2003.

. . . India has been saddled with an extractive and exploitative government. Until we change the basic nature of our government, all this futzing around in the margins is not going to amount to a hill of beans. All the talk about India becoming an IT superpower or a BPO superpower is not going to materialize. We need to wake up to that fact and figure out how we can change the nature of the government.

India’s Much Vaunted Freedom. May 2011.

I think the reports of India’s independence from colonial rule are severely exaggerated. Indians have been under foreign rule for several centuries and have become accustomed to being treated like irresponsible slaves, demanding to be controlled. Sure they do “democratically” determine who will rule them, but in the end, they are still slaves entrusted with the task of electing their masters.

NOTES:

[1] Here’s a bit from a previous post, Darwin’s Big Idea. (Feb 2008).

Great ideas are the greatest achievements of humans. What is worth pondering is why these ideas arise among certain people and not among others. Are there any regularities that characterize the populations within which great ideas arise? In 1776, Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In the same year, the founding document of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence, was written (principally) by Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826). And again it was in 1776 that Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), “The Father of the American Revolution,” published Common Sense.

Human Resources

What are human resources? Before the advent of the industrial age, human resources definitely referred to human labor alone. Human muscle power augmented to some degree with animal muscle power was an important factor of production. But with advances in science and technology came the increasing ability to harness non-muscle power. There was a shift in the balance of power, so to speak. While the muscles became increasingly less useful, brains began to become more useful in the production process.

There is a sort of poetic justice in this story of the ascendancy of brains over brawn made possible by better science and technology. After all, brains created the science and technology, not brawn. So in our post-industrial age, human resources basically refer to trained human brains. Astonishing isn’t it that a couple of pounds of gray organic matter encased within a human skull can unleash so much power?

The human brain comes up with ideas. More specifically, it synthesizes new ideas by combining existing ideas. There is an hierarchy of ideas. Since each brain is short-lived relative to the life-cycle time of human society, it does not have the opportunity of inventing all ideas and building on them. It has to use the stock of available ideas and add to that stock. To use the stock, it has to know the stock. And to grasp even a small subset of the stock, it needs to be trained. That training is part of the job of education.

To build an economy from scratch, here’s what you do. First, get some land. Add humans. Educate the humans. Set them free. Voila!

Freedom is important. And the most important freedom is the freedom to think and to express the results of that thinking. Then comes the freedom to act. The most important economic act that humans engage in — after production and consumption — is barter, trade or exchange. That’s uniquely human. The rest of economics is an exegesis of those simple but fundamental activities.

Societies that don’t allow people the freedom to think and express themselves, are bound to be poor. And societies that don’t allow the freedom of voluntary trade are poor. India is poor by choice. Somehow collectively India has chosen to restrict freedom – the freedom of inquiry and expression, and the freedom to trade. That is why India is poor.

{This post is an updated version of a post “Stuff and Ideas – Part 2” (Dec 2007).}

1. Stuff Fundamentalist

Fundamentally, it is all about stuff. The universe is stuff, of course. The economy is also about stuff. Stuff and one more thing we will get to in a bit. The necessary ingredient for making an economy, as I have argued before, 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 volcanoes and storms and . . . But until you have people, you don’t have an economy.

The thing is that people are made of stuff. They are “stuff input-output” mechanisms, interacting with the environment which is made of stuff. Their bodies are made of stuff and they manipulate other stuff with brains that are made of—you guessed it—stuff. It is all about stuff and one other thing. That other thing has something to do with brains. More specifically it has to do with human brains: Ideas.

Stuff and ideas: that sums up the entire list of ingredients that you need to cook up an economy.

To a first approximation[1], the amount of stuff in the planet today is no different than was available say one hundred years ago, or even a billion years ago. There is some interchange of energy between the earth and the rest of the universe, naturally. There has to be a source of low entropy energy and a sink for the high entropy energy. For our purposes, we will just consider energy as just another form of stuff (as Einstein demonstrated a century ago), although in a bit we will see that the special form of stuff we call energy has a special place in the overall scheme of things.

The total amount of stuff on earth is constant. What changes over time is the arrangement of the stuff. Much of that stuff gets rearranged through non-human agency over time, and that has been going on for billions of years. The earth cools, continents drift, animal and plant life evolve (speciate, and go extinct), and so on. Only relatively recently, human agency has been mucking around with the stuff and rearranging it. Of course, non-human living things also rearrange stuff but they do it instinctively. Humans do it intentionally, and with some degree of foresight and conscious design. Reorganizing stuff takes energy and ideas.

For most of human history, the primary source of energy was muscle power. At some stage, captive muscle power came to be added with the domestication of animals and the enslavement of people. Fire as a source of energy was also present but the ideas on how to use it effectively arose gradually. Animals and slaves (a distinction that slave owners probably did not care to make) had to do for a while.

Slavery as a source of muscle power largely disappeared when ideas appeared on how to efficiently use non-human energy sources. Fossil fuels did more for the eradication of slavery than is commonly appreciated. Where slavery still persists, it is largely because they have not figured out how to substitute muscle power with more efficient ways of using energy.

The story so far is that you have to transform the stuff that you find lying around. You can neither create new stuff or utterly annihilate stuff; you can only re-arrange or recombine them into new stuff. You need some source of energy to make the transformation. And you need ideas because they allow you to use the energy effectively on the stuff around. A good economy is one where people are most successful in transforming stuff into useful stuff with the least negative effects on their own well-being.[2]

To sum up this bit, stuff matters because we are made of stuff and need stuff. Ideas are important because otherwise we would not know how to do the transformation of stuff. Besides, ideas help us harness the needed energy.

I am a stuff fundamentalist. I believe in stuff. First of all, I am made of stuff. Second of all, I use stuff. I eat stuff, wear stuff, use stuff to get around, need stuff to shield me from the natural elements, etc. We all do. Those who don’t have stuff that they need to use, are poor. Poverty is the lack of stuff. Everything that we do, ultimately involves stuff.

From the composition of sublime music to mind-blowing accomplishments of theoretical physics—they all involves stuff because they are all produced by people who, as we can easily appreciate, need stuff. Any system that produces lots of useful stuff has the necessary (though not the sufficient) condition for producing all sorts of things. Conversely any system that is unable to produce stuff in sufficient quantities is one that is characterized by poverty.

Take any subsystem of our world. If you look under the hood, the engine you will find is basically stuff. Let’s take the University of California. It has buildings built by people who needed food, clothing, and all the rest of it—all of it stuff–to survive. The researchers and teachers? Same story—at the bottom of it all lies stuff. Machines? Made by people . . . It’s all stuff.

2. Idea Fundamentalist

Stuff is not just stuff. It is not any old stuff lying around. As mentioned before, it is stuff transformed through ideas. Forget that bit about my being a stuff fundamentalist. Actually, I am an ideas fundamentalist. Ideas transform any old stuff into useful stuff.

I can lead you to a huge mountain of iron ore. But if you don’t have the coal and other things needed to extract the iron from the ore, you are SooL. Even if you have the coal, if you don’t know what needs to be done — that is you don’t have the ideas — you are also SooL. Getting iron from ore required both energy and ideas (another word for which is technology.)

There are very few things we use that are the raw stuff of the universe untouched by human hands. Most the stuff that we use are things that have been transformed by human hands, and more importantly by human minds. In a strict sense, useful human artifacts are embodied human ideas. As humanity advances, more and more things get to be that way. A machine is an embodiment of human knowledge or human know-how.

Compare a horse-drawn cart to an Airbus A380 jetliner. The cart has a few ideas embodied in it: the wheel, the fixed axel, the harness, the blinkers. But the super jumbo-jet? The list is endless—principles of aviation, the technology of jet propulsion, high strength materials and high temperature metallurgy, electronics, avionics, organizational theory, complex contractual negotiations, legal systems, and the rest of it. I don’t think there is a single area of human knowledge that is not in some way intimately and ultimately tied to the production of that marvel of human ingenuity.

If you were to follow all the links in the web of ideas that went into the production of an A380, you would traverse the entire set of technical ideas ever to cross the human mind. An Airbus A380 is just one example out of millions of artifacts, all products of human technology. Technology is essentially ideas. It is knowledge of how to do things.

Natural resources — land, minerals, water — no doubt is necessary. But without ideas, they are of not much value. You may have an oil well underneath your land. Until the technology came into being for extracting and using that oil to some end, you were out of luck. All the raw ingredients in the world will be of little value until you have the recipe. Ideas are the recipe that make something out of the stuff that nature provides.

Ideas have two important characteristics that differentiate it from stuff. First, ideas are non-rival in use, whereas stuff is rival in use. When I consume some amount of stuff, the total amount of stuff available for others to consume grows down. My gain is your loss, given a fixed amount of stuff. But if I use an idea, it does not reduce the total stock of ideas available for others to use.

The other thing about ideas is that they are built upon simpler ideas. All ideas, except for the most basic (the primitives) are combinations of other, simpler ideas. There is a hierarchy of ideas. And as the stock of ideas grows, the set of potential ideas that are combinations of the elements of the current stock increases exponentially. Of this set of potential ideas, only some will be brought into existence by minds that are sufficiently prepared. That “sufficiently prepared” implies that minds have to understand, or internalize, at least a subset of the existing stock of ideas. In other words, you don’t have to re-invent the idea of a wheel. But you have to know that there is a such a thing—an idea—as a wheel and then you can go on to combine it with the idea of a lever to come up with a complex idea, the wheelbarrow.

No one of us is sufficiently smart to come up with all the ideas all on our own. Even if we were that smart, we are given only a finite amount of time on this mortal plane. Fortunately, ideas are non-rival and therefore ideas invented elsewhere and whenever are available for us to use, provided we are sufficiently smart to adopt them. Anyone anywhere can use the decimal system of arithmetic invented centuries ago by Indian mathematicians. Anyone anywhere can use Einstein’s relativity theory, or Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. Once discovered, an idea is forever.

To recap the story so far. We need stuff that is transformed by ideas into more useful stuff. The stock of ideas is large and growing. To create more useful stuff, we need to use the existing stock of ideas and using our ingenuity, create even more ideas. Those who are the cleverest, use ideas most effectively to have the most goodies.

A slight digression is in order here. You can have stuff that you didn’t produce but merely snatched it from the other guy who produced it. As a strategy, it may work in the short run, but in the long run you cannot make a career out of theft. For sustainable development, using the best ideas to produce stuff yourself is better than begging, borrowing or stealing stuff.

3. Energy Fundamentalist

Transforming stuff requires not just ideas, as has been previously noted, but also energy. Every process in the universe requires energy. Forget about what I had said about being a stuff fundamentalist or an ideas fundamentalist. I am really an energy fundamentalist. Without energy, ideas and stuff don’t amount to a hill of beans.

The material progress of human civilization is basically due to its increasing ability to use energy. The range of sources is impressive: wind, water, biomass, coal, oil, geothermal, nuclear fission, solar. Mass manufacture produces useful stuff and requires huge factories which have machines. These machines require energy. The cost of producing stuff depends on the cost of the energy that goes into producing it. The price of the stuff depends on the cost.[3]

Once we start thinking about energy, once again we find that we cannot get away from the realm of ideas. It’s technology that allows the discovery and efficient use of energy. That’s another way of saying “Ideas allow the discovery and use of energy.” If you had the technology, you could use oil from below the ground; and if you had better technology, you could use the incident solar radiation. Fossil fuels are limited and costly; solar energy is super-abundant, virtually limitless, but we don’t have the technology to use it efficiently. That is the bad news. The good news is that we can develop the technology. It is a matter of getting new ideas. There is a meta-idea there: the idea that we can figure out the set of ideas that will go into the technology to harness solar energy. The systematic search for new ideas is called research and development, R&D.

Production of stuff matters in the sense that the wealth or poverty of a population is determined by the ratio of stuff to people: if the ratio is sufficiently small, you have poverty. Energy is a very critical element in the production function. Efficient production requires the use of technology and energy. Technology is embodied ideas. The production of ideas itself requires the use of existing stock of ideas. Knowledge of the existing stock of ideas requires education. Good education allows one to build upon the existing stock of ideas and create new ideas. I suppose I should now admit that I am really an education fundamentalist.

4. Education Fundamentalist

Never mind what I said previously about being a stuff fundamentalist. Yes, stuff matters but not as much as ideas. But ideas without energy to use is impotent. So ideas matter both for producing stuff and for producing the technology to harness energy. Yet, if you are not educated, all the ideas in the entire universe will pass you by like so many neutrinos.

Honestly, here’s the bottom line. To escape poverty, an economy needs an educated population. This is so because an educated population will not only be able to use the stock of ideas but will create more ideas. That is, they will have access to technologies—which in turn will help them harness energy and transform stuff. The more stuff the economy produces efficiently, the more wealth the economy has.

An operational definition of education will have to do for now. There are broad similarities between what is an educated person and what one would call an educated economy; after all, an economy is a collection of individuals. The quality and level of education of an economy flows from aggregation of the educational qualities of the population. An educated person is one who is able to make the right choices and allocate his or her limited resources to fulfilling a wide range of needs efficiently and effectively. It is a matter of resource allocation. What to produce, how much to produce, what factors to use in the production process, how much to consume and how much to save (that is, invest for the future), how to organize time and prioritize tasks, what to borrow and from whom, and so on—all these are choices that an individual is forced to make.

How efficiently an individual solves that resource allocation problem is a measure of how educated the individual is. It is an operational definition of education and does not make references to how many of what formal degrees the person has.

In a similar sense, an economy which is able to efficiently solve the resource allocation problem is educated. It produces goods and services using methods that are efficient, it allocates its productive assets in the most important ends, it has institutions that help in the production and distribution of goods and services, it is just and fair towards all its constituents, it ensures intergenerational equity, grants freedom of various kinds to its citizens, etc.

There is one important distinction between an individual and an economy. The individual has to operate within the society that it finds herself in. She takes a lot of the constraints as given, as exogenous to her. She cannot change the rules of the game, or the level of prosperity of the economy, or the set of institutions that exist. The economy, which is a collection of individuals, does not have that same set of constraints. For the economy, nothing is a given; it can choose which set of rules it wants to play the game with. The constraints for an economy are endogenous; they arise from within the system.

For instance, the economy chooses the planning horizon, which can be either long term or short term. The individual is mainly concerned with her life-time, or at most her children’s. For example, the individual is restricted to this or that educational institution from among the existing one and she takes it as a given. The economy, in contrast, has the freedom to choose which set of educational institutions will be allowed to function and for whom.

The individual follows rules which he cannot alter. The society chooses the set of rules. Of course, the set of rules the society creates emerges out of the collective choice of its constituents. Therefore a definite degree of circularity is involved: the people as a collective choose the set of rules, and the rules themselves dictate what choices are available to the people as individuals. The choice that people collectively make  depends on the level of education of the people, which in turn depends on what the previous choices were. In other words, there is a dependency on the initial set of rules. If the rules were by some chance chosen such as to induce intelligent subsequent choices, it is a virtuous cycle. It all comes down to a random draw: the initial set of rules are as if from a randomly draw and then the rest of the game is fairly constrained by that initial positioning of the pieces.

5. Rules Fundamentalist

Enlightened leadership emerges out of an enlightened population. And an enlightened population is the result of enlightened leadership. It is a recursive process with one boundary condition which is the initial choice, which in most cases is a random draw.

To move from generalities to specifics, let’s take one specific economy and one rule that it set for itself: the United States of America and its rule about the freedom of expression. By a random draw, those who wrote the constitution – the book of rules that will govern the new republic – were in favor of free expression. That rule-set granted all citizens to speak and write whatever they chose. Under the American constitution, you were free to speak your mind. In other words, your ideas were available in a marketplace of ideas and may the best idea win. And when you allow a population—or more accurately, when a population allows itself the freedom to express itself without restraint—to throw ideas into the ring, the best ideas emerge victorious. And that leads to prosperity through the process of technology.

The greatest strength of the American Revolution is that it allowed the expression of ideas. The constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights is a phenomenally unique institution that to no small degree makes the US the pre-eminent power of the world. Repressive states don’t allow free expression around the world and the results are clear to see. We once again come back to the primacy of ideas. Ideas dictate the destiny of economies.

{This is a revised draft of the post “Stuff and Ideas — Part 1” (Dec 2007).}

NOTES:

[1] The phrase “to a first approximation” is a very useful one. It signals that what follows is a statement about the broad outline of the beast and not all the minor details that are not relevant to the task at hand. To a first approximation, people don’t own private jets. That is to say that the number of people who own private jets is less than even the rounding error in the estimate of the number of people in even a rich country.

[2] For the moment we will only use a very broad definition of “well-being.” Suffice it to say that our well-being is intimately tied to the well-being of others, both of the current and future generations of living beings. It is shortsighted to trash the environment or to provoke a massive die-off of existing species to just get more stuff.

[3] The distinction between cost and price is very very very important. Too many people use those words interchangeably but they are not synonymous — not when we are talking about economics. The examples of sloppy thinking arising out of mixing these two words are distressingly common.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Economics is what economists do.

Seriously though, economics is about what everybody does. It is the study of human behavior. People have noted regularities and codified them. Economics tries to explain human behavior. And to a limited degree, economics predicts how people will behave.

Humans behave predictably. We just don’t know enough about the specifics of the individual to fully predict how a particular individual will behave at a specific instant in time. However, enough progress has been made in that study that we can predict with some confidence how a person will behave generally. For instance, we know that a person will probably consume less of something if the price goes up.

As opposed to individuals, it is easier to predict overall collective behavior. Our predictions become more accurate as the size of the collective increases. We know that when the price goes up, most certainly consumption goes down. Individual behavior may deviate from that regularity but groups of people will never do.

Economics is “the science of human action based on deductive logic.” It is “not about the amassing of data, but rather about the verbal elucidation of universal facts (for example, wants are unlimited, means are scarce) and their logical implications.”[1]

If there were no people, there would be no economy and no economics. Consider an uninhabited continent with flora and fauna, with lakes and rivers, and minerals and mountains — in short everything except people. Because it has no people, it does not have an economy. But put even one person on it — Robinson Crusoe — and it becomes an economy. Suddenly you can talk about choices and trade offs, about production and consumption, about savings and investments, etc. Everything except one thing: exchange.

Economics is the study of how people behave, individually and collectively, in producing, consuming and exchanging (or trading.)

The focus has to be on human behavior and not on resources. Humans produce, consume and trade. That is what is at the core of this subject. Production requires resources — so the interest in resources is a “derived” interest. Humans attempt to maximize their “satisfaction” by optimally using the resources they have at hand. There are constraints under which this is done. It is a constrained optimization problem. Which means that choices have to be made, both for production and consumption. You cannot have it all. You can eat your cake or have your cake — but not both. Anything we do comes at a cost — which is that we have to forego the opportunity of doing something else.

Economics is the study of opportunity costs.[2] That’s one of the most compact definitions of economics. Economics is the study of humans making choices, individually and collectively. There’s strategic interactions between the choices that people make. Thus game theory is a very important tool used to analyse human choice. Later we will read a bit of game theory.

Paul Samuelson defined it thusly in his famous textbook Economics:

Economics is the study of how people and society end up choosing, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources that could have alternative uses–to produce various commodities and distribute them for consumption, now or in the future, among various persons and groups in society. Economics analyzes the costs and the benefits of improving patterns of resource use.

Yet, what is economics is not an easy question. Your answer will start to become more general as you understand the subject better. That’s true about all disciplines. For those of you who have a background in computer science (and I don’t mean just a background in knowing how to program), you will be able to appreciate a definition of a program which goes like this:

• A program is a state to state mapping.
• A state is a name to value mapping.

That definition would not make sense at the beginning but with time you will see that it is the most concise, compact and general definition of a program. Definitions are funny like that. Simple words can be defined easily. But an idea cannot be defined so easily. You have to know the idea before its definition makes sense. And an hierarchical collection of abstract ideas — which is what a subject like economics is — is even harder to compactly define before one knows the subject. The best one can do is to examine the subject from various angles (continue to walk around the elephant) and then construct your own definition.

So why, you may ask, did I put that question at the start of this class? It was to show that different people have different conceptions of what something is. And I am pretty sure that whenever we learn something, it changes our understanding of what the subject is about. I hope at the end of this class, you will think differently about what economics is and why it is important.

The Tao which can be named is not the Eternal Tao.

That’s what the ancients in China realized a long long time ago. And back home in India, our ancients put it quite succinctly: neti, neti. Whatever we conceive it to be, it is not that, not that.

Whatever we think economics is, it is probably not that.

NOTES:

[1] What is Austrian Economics? The Ludwig von Mises Institute. Mises.org

[2] Opportunity cost is one of those ideas which if you understand deeply and correctly apply, you can save yourself a lot of mistakes. I dare say that many of the most costly mistakes made by well-intentioned public policy makers is due to their not understanding the idea of opportunity costs.

Here’s a bit about the idea from a previous post, “Casting Spells to Fix the Broken Car” from Dec 2004.

Folk wisdom captures very succinctly the idea that life is about tradeoffs in the saying that one cannot eat one’s cake and have it as well. If you eat the cake, it is gone and you no longer have it. Economists call it opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of eating the cake is not having it; conversely, the opportunity cost of having the cake is that of not eating it.

Remarkable results follow from exploring the idea of opportunity costs. The whole theory of comparative advantage — the fundamental reason why trade is a win-win game — pivots around the idea. One could do worse than to sit and consider opportunity costs whenever one contemplates doing something.

In fact, I would go so far as to claim that economics at its most fundamental is the careful systematic study of opportunity costs. Opportunity costs implies choices and tradeoffs, and is itself the consequence of a fundamental physical characteristic of the universe that we live in. That fundamental fact is that this universe has limits. Each one of us has a limited amount of time and other derivative resources at our disposal.

Economics is about making choices and economic policy is about policy choices. How an economy performs depends on the economic policy choices made by whoever is in charge of making choices.

Even money — the most fungible of all goods — has a satiation point. We want more of it but the desire for money is definitely limited, with the possible exception of those who are pathologically insane.[1] After a point, having too much of it is a burden. Money is good but it is not an end in itself. It is only a means to an end, and it is not even the only means. Money is not a terminal value. Freedom is the terminal value and money only has instrumental value to that end. Anything beyond the amount of money required for ensuring freedom from material want does not add to our utility and is therefore useless.

To repeat, freedom is a terminal value. That’s what we all want. All other things we do can be eventually traced to that goal of having freedom. We are happy when we are free. Everything seems to point to that. Our daily human struggle — collective or individual — is ultimately directed towards that one goal. The little boy wants to be free to do what he wants, the puppy wants to be free to go outside or come in, the grown up wants to work at a job that she finds pleasant, groups of people all over the world want to be free from the dictates of whoever is controlling them. We get out of bed to do things not because we value doing those things but because it helps us creep a little bit closer to being free.

That desire to be free is so deep rooted that it has been the one constant tune to which (most) humans dance. For millennia the wise among the ancients have searched for a way to be free, to be liberated. Liberation, moksha, nirvana — that’s the search. All are searching for that lost chord but only some have found it.

Rational people want freedom, of course. The average person wants freedom from material wants, at least to start off with. Those who have transcended their material needs, go on to desire freedom from desire itself. The more advanced seek freedom from attachment. Not just the average or the wise, even severely deluded people want freedom. Gandhi wanted freedom, for himself and probably from himself.

The cry of freedom moves the masses. The masses are not enlightened beings but even they rise up when they hear the cry for freedom. The desire for freedom is so strong and blinding that they are willing to enslave themselves to those who promise them freedom. That’s the ultimate irony. Billions of people willingly submit themselves to cruel masters just because they are promised freedom from material want.

So then, why is freedom not seen much of around the world. Why is it that only a small percentage of the world’s population has any appreciable degree of it? But first, let’s note two facts. The fact is that the parts of the world where the people are the most free are the parts which are materially prosperous. Material prosperity is not the end all and be all of human existence but it is certainly the most basic necessity for the realization of human potential. Another fact is that the world today has the technology that makes it possible for every human to be materially non-deprived. This was not true just a couple of centuries ago but today now the world has the resources and the technology for that.

Let’s get back to the question I started off with. Why does it appear that people don’t like freedom? Apparently some people don’t like freedom. That claim is based on a simple premise and it is this: if people really sincerely desired freedom, it would not be possible for them to not have freedom. After all, if enough number of people desire freedom, they would have it. It’s one of those things that for everyone to have it, all that is needed is a certain fraction of the people to demand it. And since not sufficient people (apparently) in a particular society want it, that society does not have it.

To make this idea a little bit concrete, let’s take the case of freedom of expression which is an important component of a broad conception of freedom. Suppose in a certain society only one percent of the people feel that freedom of expression is important and the rest feel that there should be severe restrictions on what people are allowed to say. That society will not have the freedom of expression regardless of whether it is a democracy or an autocracy or any other kind of -cracy. Conversely, suppose an overwhelming segment of the population values freedom of expression, I think it is self-evident that freedom of expression will be the societal norm.

Societal norms arise from within the society and they reflect the broad consensus and the consciousness of the majority of the people. They don’t have to go to regularly scheduled formal polls to express their desires; the will of the collective emerges all by itself. If the people did not want it, it would not be a reality for them. In other words, in the jargon that is so beloved of economists, norms are endogenous — arising from within the system. (The antonym is “exogenous” — given or imposed from outside the system.)

My claim is that if a society has a repressive government, then it means that a sufficiently large segment of the population wants a repressive government. A necessary corollary to that claim is that if a sufficiently large segment of the population wants a particular type of government, they will have it. Therefore, I claim that wherever you find governments repressing their people, it’s because that is what the people want.

That some people want a repressive government is an outlandish claim. It is not only outlandish, it directly contradicts the first part of this essay that people want freedom and it is hard-coded in their genes. In the rest of this I will resolve that apparent contradiction.

Any given population is heterogeneous along many dimensions. There are rich people and there are poor people; there are productive people and non-productive; skilled people and non-skilled people; talented people and the other type; hardworking people and lazy people; informed people and ignorant people; honest people and dishonest people; there are old people and young people; males and females. Let’s just consider the division between the rich and the poor, in this case.

Suppose the poor were convinced that it is the avarice of the rich that is responsible for their misfortunes. For the moment we will set aside the question of how the poor came to be poor, or how the belief arose that the rich are responsible for the situation. Now suppose the poor see the government as their agent and endow the government with the power to redress their grievances. This the government does through wealth redistribution. Which means that the government does away with the right to property. If the government feels like it, it simply appropriates a part or the whole of your property and does whatever it wants to do with it. It takes property from the haves and transfers it to the have-nots. The loss of the right to property is a restriction of freedom.

This story has three main characters: the poor, the rich and the government. The poor are happy to receive stuff; the rich are unhappy; and the government is happy. The happiness of the latter arises from two sources: first, it is good to be powerful and make others bend to your will. It’s a natural animal instinct, and the human animal gets more out of it than do non-human animals. The second source of happiness for the government (we must remember that governments are people too) is that in the process of the redistribution, they get to keep some part of the other people’s stuff they are handling.

But wait, what about the rich? Are they not powerful? Actually, they are not powerful relative to the poor. Here’s how. Every government has to have popular support. Every. Dictators and authoritarian governments not excepted. In the government’s move to remove property rights, it has the support of the poor — which in most cases (and especially in poor countries) — who outnumber the rich. The poor want the wealth to be redistributed and the government is only too happy to oblige. It may be that good people were once in government who could take the long or enlightened view. But only those who are skilled in the game of promising redistribution win and in time the government is made of people who are good at it.

What are the factors that drive this redistribution game? It’s a combination of envy, greed, sloth and ignorance — all very human failings but ultimately supremely destructive at both the individual and the societal levels. I reluctantly admit that in moments of weakness, I envy the rich even though I am far from being poor. How much more the envy of the rich among the really poor I probably cannot imagine. I am not immune to greed or laziness either. My only saving grace, I boldly claim, is that I know that giving up any bit of my freedom in exchange for me to receive some free stuff is a very stupid trade.

People who support governments that steal from the rich are being myopic. The habit of stealing grows, and while the promise made is that the rich will be robbed to give to the poor, in truth the government steals from the poor with equal relish. The theft from the poor is not so visible but is equally or even more despicable and destructive. What the poor lose is not just self-respect (being on the dole cannot be very good for the soul) but also the capacity to shape their own destiny. Slavery and dependency are not very distinct concepts.

Given a choice between keeping the right to property intact and getting free stuff, if the poor choose the latter, then society ends up with a government which steals stuff and redistributes some of it. As noted earlier, the poor have to outnumber the rich, and is always so in poor countries. Two related matters to consider now. One, why don’t the rich prevail? And second, why does the basic instinct for freedom get subverted? Let’s take the first one now.

The non-poor can be further segmented into the middle-class (which is also sometimes called the bourgeoise or the social middle-class), and the rich upper-class. You and I belong to the bourgeois. We mostly make our daily living in middle-class occupations such as being engineers, scientists, office-workers, small-time merchants, etc. We are get a salary. We are the people who are the haves that the government preys upon.

The upper-class rich are those who make their fortunes by being close to the government and indeed are (in most poor countries) rich because of their proximity and their intimate relationship with the government. Governments in poor countries are heavily interventionists in the economy and have the power to make or break the fortunes of the upper-class rich. In this piece, I will focus on only on the dynamics of the middle-class, the poor and the government. The filthy rich in poor countries, for the purposes of this exercise, can be considered as part of the government because their fortunes are so intimately and inextricably related. The license-control-permit-quota raj that India is so famous for lies at the foundation of that relationship.

In the most important sectors of the economy, the government steals private assets outright under some pretext or the other. It is called nationalization. It is naturally rationalized on the grounds that is in the national interest — and in the service of the poor. For instance, an international air carrier is nationalized. The government never does anything but for the benefit of the poor.

So the summary of the story so far is this. The poor, the middle-class and the government (together with the upper-class rich) are locked in a game. The government to stay in power has to have the support of the poor because they outnumber the middle-class. This the government does by redistributive policies which amount to confiscation through various means of private property. These policies are supported by the poor but the society as a whole loses an important bit of an essential freedom. Society gives up freedom in exchange for free stuff.

This theft cannot go unnoticed. So the government faces the problem of people speaking up. It solves that problem with clamping down on the freedom of speech and expression. Another piece of the freedom edifice crumbles to dust. The poor — uneducated for the most part — cannot fathom what the whole fuss about freedom of expression is anyway, and they are not concerned. The government, to ensure that education is government directed, controls the education system with an iron fist. The people only get to know what the government wants them to know. But then what to do about those media channels — newspapers, radio, TV, and now of course the internet. The answer is simple: censorship and licensing of those channels that the government does not own, and outright ownership of others.

So we began with the crushing of property rights. Then came along destruction of the freedom of expression. Control of the education sector became essential. The private sector was made subservient to government diktats. Somewhere along the way came the control of the private sector.

Let’s get go back to the freedom of expression for a bit. Everyone truly wants it just as everyone wants to be free. But — and this is a big but — many people want to restrict others on expressions that does not suit them. The contradiction between wanting freedom of expression for themselves and simultaneous restrictions on the similar freedom of others is not apparent to them. However the government is quite happy to oblige and restrict freedom of expression because it serves the government’s objective also.

So back to the question. Do people value freedom or not? The answer depends on many things. One has to know what freedom is to really value it. Freedom is a terminal value but it also has an instrumental role. Its instrumental role is that it increases material prosperity. If one does not know that it is so valuable, it is possible that one gives it up in exchange for trinkets. If enough number of people get into that exchange, then the outcome is predictable. The result is poverty.

At some level of analysis, the poor are themselves responsible for the poverty they suffer and endure. The government, at that level of analysis, is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It just is a response to the underlying reality. What the government does is what any “rational” actor would do if he or she were in government: maximize his or her own payoffs.

There is a way out. If we were to fully comprehend the underlying causes of poverty, the solution cannot but be absolutely clear. All our searching would lead us to the inevitable conclusion.

The story that I have told (imperfectly) is simple. It is what economists call a model. Just as an aside, a model is just a story. Any story has a bunch of characters in it. These characters act in certain ways according to the personalities that the author gives them. The author chooses from the universe of all possible characters and their traits those that are important for her story. So also, an economist’s model is a story and the economist chooses which characters to have in it and how they interact with each other. What makes an economist’s story interesting is whether or not the story conforms in some way with reality. To judge that, you have to look out your window and see if the story is believable in the sense that the story the model tells is like what is happening outside your window.

In this model, I chose three characters: the poor, the non-poor and the government. This is just the first draft, so to speak. But even in this rough sketch you can see that the characters are true to life. The government is indeed doing what is in keeping with its nature. It is a government of the poor, by the poor, for the poor. Its main objective is to extract wealth. For this it needs the support of the poor. That means it has to pit the poor against the non-poor. The government has to create divisions and if there are already tears in the social fabric, it has to deepen them.

The government has to make policies that ensure that the numbers of the poor increase. It has to control all aspects of the economy not just to extract as much rents as it can but also as a by-product enlarge the number of the poor. They depend on the poor for their legitimacy and poverty is their friend — and who would willingly give up their friend!

India is a classic case of a people who have collectively, at least in the last couple of centuries, never really valued freedom. What will it take to awaken them to the great wonders of being a free people? Lots of people have tried and judging from the results have failed miserably. Swami Vivekananda was eloquent and forceful. Result: The people are in deep slumber. Sri Aurobindo tried and eventually retired to his ashram.

Ultimately, the slavery preached by some continued to fascinate the masses. Gandhi, Nehru and the whole bunch of sepoys ruled over them. Freedom didn’t mean a damn thing.

I am not done. But then I am never done. Yet this one I will provisionally close with a quote from Milton Friedman, that great champion of freedom:

Freedom is not the natural state of mankind. It is a rare and wonderful achievement. It will take an understanding of what freedom is, of where the dangers to freedom come from. It will take the courage to act on that understanding if we are not only to preserve the freedoms that we have, but to realize the full potential of a truly free society.

Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

Draft: June 11th. Revised 11 PM Pacific Daylight Time.

NOTES:

[1] There are people who amass huge wealth, counted in billions of dollars. These people can be put into two broad categories. First, those who made the money by selling stuff. They created something that others value and use, and for which they get paid as the producer. The wealth that these people have is a fraction of the value they created for society. Eventually, many of these people give away their wealth for purposes that makes them feel good but are also good for society. They endow great social causes such as scientific research or build institutions.

The other category of people who amass billions do so by stealing. They do not create wealth for society; they just steal it from society. Stealing a bit from here or there is a minor moral failing and is no more damaging to society than bad breath or sloppy table manners. But stealing in the billions does incalculable damage to society and to the world. These people are pathologically insane, because rational people will not steal so much that it does them no good and yet causes so much harm.

In contrast to those who make billions selling, those who make billions stealing cannot even give away their ill-gotten wealth for a useful cause. One lady in India who is among the most politically powerful is reported to have tens of billions of stolen money in foreign banks. Wonder what she plans to do with it.

And now for the final of three shows. Today, June 5th 2012 (PST), we will have the solar transit of Venus. As Science at NASA puts it, “one little black spot on the sun, sure can cause a lot of fuss.”

This is where the Venus transit will be visible across the globe.

The last Venus transit occurred on June 8th, 2004, and the next one will be in 2117. It’s our last chance to catch it because for sure we will not be around to see it the next time Venus comes directly between the earth and the sun.

It makes me wonder. Most of us will be history by the next transit of Venus. But I am quite certain that there are people alive today — mostly children — who will be around in 2117. In about 50 years, biomedical technology would have advanced enough that life expectancy would be around 100 years or more, and some people at least would live hundreds of years.

Here’s a graphic of the path of Venus across the broad face of the sun in 2008 and 2012.

Good news! You can watch the transit from the comfort of your own home. Foxnew.com has a list of resources for that.

Viewers who decide to tune into a webcast will be able to watch the entire transit unfold, as Venus appears to touch the outer edge of the sun, then travels onto the face, before crossing the inside edge and continuing along its orbit.

NASA will be hosting a Sun-Earth Day webcast on June 5 that will last the entire length of the Venus transit. The footage will stream live from the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, with accompanying commentary from various experts. Times are subject to change, but the webcast is currently scheduled to begin at 5:45 p.m. EDT (2145 GMT). [Transit of Venus 2012: An Observer's Guide.]

People can tune in to NASA’s Venus transit broadcast by visiting the agency’s Sun-Earth Day website.
. . .
Another option is the webcast hosted by San Francisco’s Exploratorium. The museum will showcase a 6.5-hour live event with telescope feeds from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This footage will be accompanied by audio commentary every 30 minutes, according to officials at the Exploratorium.

The Exploratorium webcast will begin at 6:09 p.m. EDT (2210 GMT) and last until 12:49 a.m. EDT June 6 (0445 GMT June 6).

People are invited to watch the webcast on large screens at the museum (during museum hours), or online at http://www.exploratorium.edu/venus.

Astronomers Without Borders will also be broadcasting the transit live from the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, Calif., where astronomer Edwin Hubble worked to explain the expanding universe and the nature of galaxies.

The webcast will include interviews with experts and amateur astronomers. Members of the Antique Telescope Society will use vintage telescopes to observe the transit, just as predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries did.

More information on the webcast, plus how to view it, is available on the Astronomers Without Borders homepage.

So that’s what’s going on up in the skies above our heads. While on the topic, I have always been fascinated with the moon illusion. I clearly remember the day when I first learned that it was just an illusion. I was in high school and a professor of physics, one Prof Natarajan, explained to me that it just appeared bigger near the horizon than when it was higher in the sky. Even after all these years, I still have fun relaying that bit of knowledge to others. People are as incredulous on learning it as I was then. If you did not know about the moon illusion, leave a comment.

What the survey did for me is to give me reassurance and hope at a time when I am on the verge of giving up all hope for India’s future. Granted the sample size is small — only about 220 responses so far — but still it suggests the possibility that among the educated, connected, middle-class English-speaking population, there is at least a (possibly small) set of people who can help steer the country in away from the poverty of socialism and towards a market-liberal order.

{I qualify “English-speaking” as a qualifier above not because I think that they are more important than non-English speakers but because this is a English language blog and the survey was done in English. The results can be easily extrapolated for the segments excluded by the language barrier.}

The summary results are:

1. Over 80 percent “somewhat support” or “strongly support” the BJP.

Among the reasons cited for the support vary a bit but the central tendency is more of a disgust with the Congress than any great liking for the BJP.

Here are a few:

Congress has ruined the nation more than what the colonial Brits did. After all Congress is a party that began during colonial Brit rule. The very idea of divide and rule is as much evident as was then pre-independence thanks to Congress parties greed to remain in power as long as possible, using any means.

. . .

Congress is a douchebag party full of criminals. Above all it’s a socialist party! And there is no place even in the worst of hells for India if it doesn’t rid itself of socialism! The BJP is not a paragon of economic freedom either, but the Congress is also virulently anti-majority!

. . .

Can never vote for a party that does not care for the nation or its people. BJP though not close to ideal is the best bet that we have. But LKA is projected as PM as a protest I might vote for JP Loksatta which always has good candidates(though they never win)

. . .

I used to be a strong supporter of BJP, but in the last 4-5 years, their utter lack of direction, energy spent in stalling parliament rather than any creative contributions and total lack of effort in defining agenda has put me off. Still lesser of 2 evils, the contributions of the NDA govt are many, but unrecognised.

. . .

Strongly oppose the Congress party because in its present form, it is against all of India’s national interests and objectives. Support the BJP (not strongly support) as it is a better and viable alternative to the Congress. Will strongly support the BJP after they unequivocally announce Narendra Modi as their prime ministerial candidate for the next general elections.

2. What would cause you to change your support between the Congress and the BJP?

About 30 percent of the respondents chose to skip this question. Perhaps because it is poorly framed, and redundant.

Some responses:

I will oppose BJP if they follow Congress policies like dynastic policies and practise Congress brand of Secularism which is appeasing select religion/ caste groups , Or if start practising crony capitalism or if they put party ahead of country

. . .

Will oppose BJP if they betray public of what they promised.

. . .

if Narendra Modi were to leave BJP AND Sonia Gandhi were to leave Congress.

. . .

If BJP chooses to project LKA or Sushma as their PM, I will be as confused voter as LKA/Sushma itself. Another factor is if Congress takes action against Sonia/Raul/Vadra for coruption, I will definitely vote for Congress.

. . .

I would support the Congress party if there is a new crop of pro-India, and credible leadership team with a track record and clear ideas on how to take India forward. There is really no alternative to supporting the BJP in the next general elections, as supporting the Congress once more would seriously jeopardize this and the next generation’s future.

. . .

A party that is controlled by a foreigner will never have my support. The loyalty to India of anyone who supports such parties must be suspect. That being said if congress throws out the gandhi nehru family and is reborn then it has a chance…but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen. On the other hand with BJP becoming another congress, I’ll look for other alternatives

3. Support for Modi in case the BJP/NDA comes to power?

Overwhelmingly people supported a Modi-led BJP government. Only around 7 percent chose “I wish a BJP govt but not led by Modi.” Practically no one wanted a Congress government.

The comments are quite varied but the central tendency is one of praise for Modi as a person of integrity and as an administrator.

Question 4 was about participation in the election process.

Over 60 percent reported that they will vote and persuade others to vote; around 17 percent said that they will vote as they usually do; and 12 percent said that unlike before, they will vote this time around.

Anyhow, I am guessing that this time around, participation in voting will go up — especially among the middle-class.

For us who are hoping to bring about regime change in India, the challenge is to channel the middle-class disgust against the Congress to actual votes against the UPA. To meet that challenge, we are working on informing the people that the Congress is actually destroying India steadily and surely.

Here are a few responses:

I will vote in the next general elections because there is no excuse for middle class apathy any more. The only reason why I do not vote regularly is because my home town is Chennai, and I have lived and worked in different Indian cities over the last 7 years. I wish there were a way in which I could vote even though my permanent and present address are different.
. . .

I only blame my political illiteracy for not being an active Voter. This time I am actually flying to India ONLY to vote the congi motherfuckers out and if need be beat the shit out of people who have been traditional congress voters
. . .

I will vote because I realize the complexity of electoral process and the importance of signals. A slow but steady rise in the voting of the enlightened middle class will make the politicians listen. The trick is to be significant as a voting bloc and, therefore, the need to persuade others to vote.
. . .

Because the country is going to the dogs (economically as well as geographically, look at how China is bullying India) under the UPA regime and if we do not bring in a strong administrator like MODI this time, then we are doomed. I believe this UPA government has lost at least one decade for India, it is a wasted generation! This time I will exercise my franchise and kick this government out

One comment to that question was, “I will vote if NaMo is the PM candidate. Otherwise may not. There is no difference between BJP & CongI without NaMo as the leader.” It would be really interesting to poll the general population and see how they feel about voting for a NM-led BJP as opposed to a BJP led by someone else. The BJP should do this survey. (But from what little I know about the BJP, I guess it will not be done.)

Question 5 dealt with the matter of financially supporting a political party.

About a third of the people say that they will contribute time and money.

What this tells me is that we generally think that “it is not my job.” This is part of the thinking which arises from a lack of a sense of responsibility. Generally, we Indians think that the government should take care of this or that. Which is at the root of many of our troubles. But that is a different rant and I will not go into it here.

Question 6 was about Sonia Gandhi.

No surprise that nearly 90 percent responded that she is either “extremely bad” or “quite bad” for India.

Naturally, I think that she’s extremely bad for India. I would hesitate to claim that she’s an extremely bad person. For all I know, she’s just a run-of-the-mill bad person in the sense that where she finds the opportunity to make huge amounts of money, she will take it. She did not demand the position that she presently occupies — in fact, that position cannot be demanded. She was thrust into it by a significant (but not majority) of Indian voters. They are to blame for Sonia Gandhi’s rape of the nation. Her power to destroy is inherited from the people. She was not born powerful, although she perhaps does not have any moral compunctions about stealing from the abjectly poor.

Nearly everyone responded to the question. Most of the comments on her are not pretty. She is at least in these circles roundly despised and in my opinion, correctly so.

Question 7 was about Modi and the reasons for liking or disliking him.

A resounding 85 percent “liked Modi” or were “absolute huge fans.” Amazing support for a man whom the main stream media loves to hate.

To the matter of “what would change your mind about Modi?”, one person wrote:

Right now he has been delivering the goods like no one has done in India in many decades. So he has my absolute support! I would like him to continue in this path of development and embrace economic theories of champions of freedom like Adam Smith and Hayek as far as possible, tailored to Indian conditions! I believe that is the way for the uplift of the common man. If he strays too much from this path, I’ll lose a little of my enthusiasm!

Question 8 related to the choice between socialism and a market-liberal order.

I have not defined what a market-liberal order is. Most of us don’t know for sure what it means, since we are schooled in socialism and the wonders of a planned economy. Still, I wanted to throw out that question to see how people react.

Around 45 percent said that they are in favor of a small government and a market-liberal order. Around a fifth said that they see a role for the government but it should not be in business. No one claimed to be a socialist or supported an interventionist government.

India needs to educate its citizens better about markets and why they matter. But then if education itself is left out of the market and in the grasping hands of the government, it is not likely that the brainwashing is going to stop anytime soon.

Question 9 related to perceptions about India.

There was overwhelming agreement on the proposition that “India was great but not any more but will be once again.”

Around 10 percent said it still is great, and an equal number took the pessimistic view that India is unlikely to become rich.

This is a very interesting topic and I will have to make a separate post on it one of these day outlining my take on the topic.

Well, that’s it for now. Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

PS: If you want to read more details, please see “Intermediate Results of the Survey” which I had posted a few days ago.

Bholanath and Devendra Pandey are two friends who in 1978 hijacked an Indian Airlines plane on a domestic flight. They demanded the release of opposition leader Indira Gandhi (who had been arrested by Indian parliament) and the withdrawal of all the cases against her son Sanjay Gandhi. [Ref.] They carried only toy weapons. After keeping 132 passengers hostage for some hours, they surrendered in the presence of media.

The Indian National Congress party rewarded them with party tickets for 1980 state assembly election. Both won the election and became members of the legislative assembly of Uttar Pradesh. Bhola served as a Congress MLA from 1980 to 1985 while Devendra remained a member of the house for two terms.

Devendra served the party as a general secretary of Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) until recently. He is now nurturing the Sultanpur constituency in the hope of a Congress ticket in the next elections.

Bholanath unsuccessfully contested the 1999 Lok Sabha elections from Salempur as a Congress candidate.

The wiki article references the book by Kishin R. Wadhwaney Indian Airports (Shocking Ground Realities). 2005 Diamond Pocket Books. p. 124. Here are jpegs of the relevant pages:

So now Teesta Setalvad attempted and to some extent succeeded in hijacking the legal process of the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat. She is being rewarded. The bunch at the top of the UPA heap are most accurately described as criminals. Criminals rewarding one of their own kind is neither new nor surprising.

What is hard to understand is why the Indian public meekly accepts this sorry state of affairs. Perhaps the explanation is simple: that Indians on average are dishonest people. They are not troubled by dishonesty because they are themselves dishonest. (See my post “The Habit of Being Honest” (Feb 2011) and “The Habit of Being Dishonest” (Nov 2011) for more on this topic.)

Related post: On this matter of hijacking of an Indian Airlines, I had written a post “Hijack a Plane, Get Rewarded by Govt of India” in Dec 2011.

1. This is a long post — certainly the longest so far, and likely not to be exceeded in length anytime soon.

2. Take a look at the numbers for sure and quickly scroll down through the comments. I have not read all the comments yet. I will do that later and write a summary of my findings in a post later.

3. I may even go back and update this post by highlighting specific comments. That is going to be quite a bit of labor. So it may take time.

4. Please feel free to add your comments to this post. Your views matter a great deal and will inform us all.

5. Once again, thank you for taking the time to do the survey. It has helped me understand how people feel about matters that I believe are important. You have my gratitude.

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I have decided to vote candidates based on a set of criteria. Party affiliation comes at the lowest priority. Till now, I have chosen candidates based on criteria where party affiliation has not figured yet.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
Reasons to support BJP: – Proof of performance by State CMs – Good track record of NDA days as opposed to UPA – Inner democracy ensures even mass leaders in check – Respect for democratic processes and institutions
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
I have never forgiven Indra Gandhi her descendants and their families for all that is wrong in the Country for the last 30 years or so.
5/27/2012 8:32 AMView Responses
Support BJP because it has the answer in Narendra Modi to this nation’s myriad problems
5/27/2012 8:25 AMView Responses
actually before the last ne meet i would have taken the third option but now sensing that some sense may be returning to bjp i have taken the first option.basically i want hindu majoritarian rule to replace the current ‘secular’ dispensation.the current setup is giving a free run to the mulla & xn gundaism a free run in the garb of acting to protect ‘minority aspirations’.
5/27/2012 8:19 AMView Responses
The way bad politcs seemed to prevail in UPA rule which has been the cause of all problems like corrupation.poverty,unemployment,price rise.etc.
5/27/2012 8:17 AMView Responses
There is no differentiator between the two, whether in terms of policies, or the brand of politics they follow.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
Support BJP – merit based party , less corrupt than Congress, puts country ahead of self , progressive industrial policies , vast pool of capable leaders , pro-army , truly secular , only party who can defend India’s interest in international context , capable to provide low inflation 8% growth which is required , can establish “Dharma” in India which is “missing link” in modern India
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
Congress has ruined the nation more than what the colonial Brits did. After all Congress is a party that began during colonial Brit rule. The very idea of divide and rule is as much evident as was then pre-independence thanks to Congress parties greed to remain in power as long as possible, using any means
5/27/2012 8:06 AMView Responses
The BJP needs to do something about the massive skepticism against them. The left-leaning media will try and harm their case as much as possible. They have only 2 years to turn it around. Another Congress-led govt is a BIG NONO.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Cong has always been a party of corruption, nepotiGoingsm and integrity. Going by the performance of the BJP run states one can expect reasonably good governance.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
Hv been traditionally BJP supporter fm RJB days – this UPAI & UPA II hv been the worst govts post independence and Last but not the least BJP has given us a leader and visionary like SHRI NARENDRA MODI who should be the next PM
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
If they promote Narender Modi and put honest candidates in the foray then full support to BJP
5/27/2012 7:50 AMView Responses
Na
5/27/2012 7:49 AMView Responses
Nationalist Party vs Family Owned Party.
5/27/2012 6:45 AMView Responses
Congress is a douchebag party full of criminals. Above all it’s a socialist party! And there is no place even in the worst of hells for India if it doesn’t rid itself of socialism! The BJP is not a paragon of economic freedom either, but the Congress is also virulently anti-majority!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
BJP has some leaders and roots that give hope that it would not be the useless and corrupt government that congress has always been. However, BJP also has encouraged bad apples to join it and its image has been sullied.
5/27/2012 5:48 AMView Responses
There is no future with Congress. BJP is the only , though weak and dependent on Subra. Swamy, opposition . I would rather like to See Mr Swamy and Narendra Modi together than the whole BJP . I hate LK Advani and Sushma Swaraj as they are lazy bastards looking for PM post just because they think they are senior leaders. LKA and Swaraj should let NaMo/+Swamy lead the country in the best interests of India.
5/27/2012 5:00 AMView Responses
They have more nationalist people than congress, due to their roots, RSS.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
Both have not so good track records. Both don’t have clear agendas. How can you support something which is not clear?
5/27/2012 4:55 AMView Responses
As compared to congress.. BJp is 10000 times better…
5/27/2012 4:30 AMView Responses
Nationalist Less Corrupt Right of Centre Economic Policies More democratic
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
Can never vote for a party that does not care for the nation or its people. BJP though not close to ideal is the best bet that we have. But LKA is projected as PM as a protest I might vote for JP Loksatta which always has good candidates(though they never win)
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
1. Modi 2. Highly unlikely interference of religion in policy making
5/27/2012 3:10 AMView Responses
I used to be a strong supporter of BJP, but in the last 4-5 years, their utter lack of direction, energy spent in stalling parliament rather than any creative contributions and total lack of effort in defining agenda has put me off. Still lesser of 2 evils, the contributions of the NDA govt are many, but unrecognised.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
Strongly oppose the Congress party because in its present form, it is against all of India’s national interests and objectives. Support the BJP (not strongly support) as it is a better and viable alternative to the Congress. Will strongly support the BJP after they unequivocally announce Narendra Modi as their prime ministerial candidate for the next general elections.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
They managed the economy far better than UPA. Created long term infrastructure.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
BJP leadership has acted spineless in the recent past. It is not clear what their real agenda for growth and development is. Sometimes they sound pro business but sometimes mired in ancient India morals. I particularly despise Shushwa Swaraj, Advani and Jaitley. They are good orators but they didnt speak on issues that every concerend India wanted to ask and know about.. esp. point blank corenering Antonia Maino, Chidambaram, Pranab and most importantly Manmohan Singh.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
Congress had plenty of chances of plundering India and it’s time to give others the chance. We might also get lucky if Modi is allowed to lead and that might become the single-most important factor in escaping the vicious circle of poverty, bad governance and human misery. Congress is proven to be anti-national and it’s more of a vte of anti-congress than pro-bjp but that is our best bet.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Because BJP has Narendra Modi, the greatest administrator India has ever seen
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
Centre-right economic, greater infrastructural spending, smaller Govt, more federal, spending on India’s future instead of spending India’s future income on present.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
The day when I cast my First Vote sometimes ago 1998 i voted for BJP, and do the same throughout today…In my view with BJP and particularly Narendra Modi….we can clear some mess does by the Cangress. In my view Cangress that we know before independence and today’s are entire different entity. Its a dangerous party which has only one mission……..Loot the India
5/27/2012 12:44 AMView Responses
Policies of BJP have never been coherent. The party often shows a confused stand on multiple issues and opposition to the ills of the incumbent UPA have come more from the junta that the party with a difference. More than my love for BJP, it’s the hatred i have for INC! BJP has some good leaders i agree and their view is nationalistic but i hope they reinforce themselves more strongly. Their voters and the nation needs to know what they stand for!
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
Atanu, you prachaarak, you left out this one option: I don’t support Congress, but I do strongly oppose the BJP. BJP has the Hindu cultural and political nationalism at its base and core. BJP ranks and file, except for a thin layer at the top and a local oddity here and there, are all religious bigots, thugs, goonDaas, etc. Worse: Congress keeps everything and everyone confused, and hence, is slow in personally attacking someone like me. BJP fuckers think that they know the truth, determine me to be an enemy, and psychically and IB- and RAW-wise attack me. They actually did. Even to a middle class engineer like me. Why the fuck should I encourage them?
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
Because the congress needs to be sent into oblivion for their arrogence abd their callousness
5/27/2012 12:35 AMView Responses
Furthered economic liberalisation between 98-04.
5/27/2012 12:26 AMView Responses
Congress has failed; highly corrupt, harming our country and causing permanent damages; openly sidign with minorities and against Hindus. If NaMo
5/27/2012 12:23 AMView Responses
Actually, I’m skeptical of any elected government operating at the scale of India. Power corrupts & Democracy tends to route the power of many into hands of a few. Corollary: Democracy fails ‘at scale.’ In my opinion, the world needs not just “bicycle-commute” economies, but also “bicycle-commute” governments to organize multi-faceted society. At the very least, it will reduce the scale of f-ups that politicians who (almost universally) refuse to do arithmetic are bound to repeat.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
Fedup with the non-sense of the Congress over the last 8 years. i can give 101 reasons. But, to give a few – Pathetic foreign policy, crawling to Pakistan, Hinduphobia, dictatorial rule, hounding and prosecution of individual whistleblowers, and most important everything is becoming so expensive costs spiraling out of control. To add salt to injury, the “Dr Manmohan Singh is an honest economist” chorus.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
Need I explain, Sir?
5/27/2012 12:13 AMView Responses
BJp is democratic and rewards merit and hard work. It is rooted in Indian Ethos. It is least corrupt of all parties in India. Whenever it has ruled it has been development oriented and works on the principle of teaching people to fish instead of giving them fish.
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
BJP with its infighting and lack of clear leadership will end up causing more trouble similar to UPA
5/27/2012 12:08 AMView Responses
As you said Atanu, in democracy we have to choose between bad & lesser bad.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
electoral democracy is flawed in india. the police, the judiciary and the bureaucracy are fully corrupted and inefficient. poverty and caste are crucial factors for people making decisions while voting. no political party can do anything as long as this continues. the solution–reorganising india into 25 metros, 25 cities, 25 states ruled by upper castes, 25 states by sc/ st/ dalits, 25 union territories, 3 autonomous states, all called the federation of india that will elect a president.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
I am ideologically opposed to communist and leftist policies and BJP is the only alternative. plus track record of successful execution from the past.
5/26/2012 11:44 PMView Responses
NaMo
5/26/2012 11:39 PMView Responses
Only party that cares for majority
5/26/2012 11:36 PMView Responses
BJP has had a record of development and less of entitlement politics in their brief history. Hence they get the support. However, they have been of late acting like spoilt brats – infighting, and hence not a strong support.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
I strongly support BJP because i hope that NaMo will be their Prime Minister candidate. He is incorruptible and a man with spine. India urgently needs a leader like NaMo
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Both are full of dishonest, corrupt individuals with no integrity, ethics, vision or at the very least competence.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
BJP is a nationalist party and is its victory in the coming elections is necessary to strengthen the economy.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Corruption, premature welfarism, devoid of intellectual platform, dynastic rule of Congress. Issues with BJP but lesser of two evils
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
India values, Opposition to Psuedo secularism/minoritism, bad policies and corruption of UPA, Vision documents of BJP are very good
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
1) Economic policies are different from what little we have seen of the NDA government and in some BJP states like Gujarat. 2) Lot more cadre driven without allegiance to one family. 3) In the current scenario where Hindus are being openly discriminated I hope they will stand up for us.
5/26/2012 11:18 PMView Responses
I feel congress policies r a bit screwed becoz of their problems with dealing their regional party supporters.For me,BJP just doesn’t seem like a national party.They have failed as an opposition more than congress did as a ruling party
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
I oppose congress more than I support BJP. However, we don’t have an alternative to them. Six months ago, I would have said I strongly support BJP
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
My opposition of congress comes before my support of BJP. Since BJP is the only alternative to congress, i support it
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Anyday for a wholly Indian democratic party!
5/26/2012 10:58 PMView Responses
Congress is the most useless party and shall be thrown in the Bay of Bengal. BJP – Immature. I favour due to TINA factor
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
I am not happy with the way UPA2 has handled the economy. It is mired in corruption and its inability to take well needed decisions has cost us a lot. But the BJP’s record as an opposition is not awe-inspiring either. Its mindless opposition of some of the genuine reforms like FDI in retail for political gains only shows its petty-mindedness. If it cannot prove itself as a good opposition even when the Congress is scoring self goals, i am not sure it will prove to be good when at the helm.
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
In agreement with concerns related to Security and Economic development. And besides, they are not as corrupt as Congress.
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
Cong Demerits: Utter misgovernance. Stranded with policy paralysis. Family/dynasty influence in political arena. Serious corruption charges. Lack of interest in legal proceedings against corruption charges.
5/26/2012 10:42 PMView Responses
I like the speak of dvelopment that BJP leaders do unlike the Congress which speaks of minority reservations
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
The Congress party has no vision for the nation and is led by one of the most shady people in world politics today, Sonia Gandhi.
5/26/2012 10:34 PMView Responses
Congress with its 70s mentality is a definite no – but then does BJP even have an ideology? – every leader wants to run things his/her own way. So unless BJP gets its act right, I am not supporting them.
5/26/2012 10:21 PMView Responses
India needs leaders whom people can look up to. Great leaders bring about not only policy change but can influence the moral fabric of society – something India desperately needs. Narendra Modi is the reason I support BJP.
5/26/2012 9:33 PMView Responses
Congress + Nehru dynasty is the reason this country is in such a mess. BJP is the only way forward. Stronger and better leaders will evolve as we go along.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
1) Even though the national leaders of BJP might not be that good, the regional leaders (and their allies) are better than they are for Congress. In the next decade or two in India, we should see a stronger move towards federalism (which is seen by the rise in regional parties), which may not be a bad thing. We should see a bigger impact by state policies and a bigger impact on national policies by joint recommendations from states. 2) BJP leaders are at least invested in the country, unlike the leaders of Congress. 3) There are too many negatives of the Congress to list out.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses
I believe in disinvestment and infra spending over populist policies like nrega. Track record shows BJP delivered it.
5/26/2012 8:01 PMView Responses
Congress will take India back to stoneage. Although BJP is only marginally better as a party, there are a few individuals in BJP with great promise.
5/26/2012 8:00 PMView Responses

Showing 91 text responses

No responses selected
I do not vote a congress or a BJP. I vote a candidate. So this question does not apply.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
With 2 years remaining, if Congress brings in a strong leader as PM (any left?), the Government distances itself from politics at 10 Janpath, the CBI is made independent with absolutely NO interference from the Government.
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
Not really likely. But am perturbed with a few developments within the party and hope they are able to weed out the wrong deeds and policies in the party.
5/27/2012 8:32 AMView Responses
Dont think will change my mind
5/27/2012 8:25 AMView Responses
nothing can change my mind for supporting the congis.if bjp under sh modi fails to live upto my aspirations i’ll certainly look for an alternative sans seculars.
5/27/2012 8:19 AMView Responses
Its seems to be this time there will be no change in our minds as situation is worsening with this govt. with lots of scam arising.
5/27/2012 8:17 AMView Responses
Any party who shows the will to make change…who talks about implementing reform,and bringing transparency to the way the govt functions.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
I will oppose BJP if they follow Congress policies like dynastic policies and practise Congress brand of Secularism which is appeasing select religion/ caste groups , Or if start practising crony capitalism or if they put party ahead of country
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
I never have had to worry about changing my mind w.r.t support to Congress. I either voted for BJP or have never voted at all.
5/27/2012 8:06 AMView Responses
Nothing. Another UPA govt is untenable. And we dont want another 1977 to happen ( followed by a 1980)
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Nothing
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Nothing will change my mind.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
nothingggggggggggg
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
oppose Congress always Will oppose BJP if they betray public of what they promised.
5/27/2012 7:54 AMView Responses
Corruption,, Governance
5/27/2012 7:50 AMView Responses
No
5/27/2012 7:49 AMView Responses
Their priorities and response to national issues
5/27/2012 7:48 AMView Responses
Long held Economic Reforms
5/27/2012 7:47 AMView Responses
if Narendra Modi were to leave BJP AND Sonia Gandhi were to leave Congress.
5/27/2012 7:30 AMView Responses
Will Never Support the congress till it is controlled by the Fake Gandhi Family
5/27/2012 6:45 AMView Responses
If the BJP no longer counters the anti-majorityism of the Congress it will lose my support! If the Congress pursued a policy of limited government, decentralisation, non-protectionism, etc., AND gave up anti-majorityism, it will gain my support! But that can happen only in my dreams … Antonia Maino and her cohorts are out to rape India and their poor! So no change in my position as of now.
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
if BJP were to adopt a policy of chucking out all corrupt and criminal politicians from its ranks. Nitin Gadkari does not inspire confidence. if it were to bring some one dashing who creates hope if congress were to bring in lokpal bill without diluting it.
5/27/2012 5:48 AMView Responses
If BJP chooses to project LKA or Sushma as their PM, I will be as confused voter as LKA/Sushma itself. Another factor is if Congress takes action against Sonia/Raul/Vadra for coruption, I will definitely vote for Congress
5/27/2012 5:00 AMView Responses
If, Congress doesn’t help anti-nationals, follow the path of dharma and care for its people, not special sections of society. But it wouldn’t change within a day,would like to see action on ground and then will I act accordingly.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
Clear agendas based on sound principles and execution.
5/27/2012 4:55 AMView Responses
There is no changing in mind as for as congree is in power.. Such an arrogant shameless corrupt2daBottom, dangerous Poisoning, antinational party congress
5/27/2012 4:30 AMView Responses
More transparency in BJP; Inner party democracy Clarity on vision Sharp differentiation on policies
5/27/2012 4:30 AMView Responses
If the ruling party is not able to keep the cause for improvement India above their party agenda, and they are not able to curb corruption and impose rule-of-law
5/27/2012 4:26 AMView Responses
It is unlikely to be event driven. I think political parties are what they are because of their DNA, and a whole eco system of rent extraction evolves and flourishes around it, which will not change overnight. Hence difficult to change my mind.
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
Never going to vote for Congress. If Modi is projected as PM, then my vote to BJP is a done deal.
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
Any political party that can assure that they can bring in a common civil code, end the doles, put up a fight against corruption, improve law and order bring about reforms, that would be a viable option to the BJP. Don’t see that happening.
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
1. Interference on freedom of expression 2. Considering religion for bills and policies of the state
5/27/2012 3:10 AMView Responses
Lessening of support to BJP mentioned above. Was never a Congress supporter except during Narasimha Rao phase whom I rate as an unsung hero.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
I would support the Congress party if there is a new crop of pro-India, and credible leadership team with a track record and clear ideas on how to take India forward. There is really no alternative to supporting the BJP in the next general elections, as supporting the Congress once more would seriously jeopardize this and the next generation’s future.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
Gandhi family taking political sanyas and BJP abandoning democratic values of the nation.
5/27/2012 2:53 AMView Responses
If the BJP is not able to do to India, what it has done in Gujrat (wrt economic development)
5/27/2012 2:14 AMView Responses
Their stance on corruption and commitment to the economy.
5/27/2012 2:09 AMView Responses
No hope from Congress in correcting it’s ways. If BJP starts playing populist politics and does not act strong enough in tackling corruption, I will have to start supporting some other party or some independents.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
I was always pro BJP and still am. Congress will and can do only more harm to India. BJP can be given a chance.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
Nothing in reasonable realm of possibilities but if a majorly reformist attitude takes over at congress with enlightened leadership and BJP dumps modi for nutcases like uma bharti as leader… then yeah.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
If BJP does not anoint NAMO as the Prime Minister, There woud be no reason to continue to support either BJP or Congress, for they both would then be same
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
Riots if triggered by BJP affliated organizations like VHP and Bajrang Dal
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
Corruption
5/27/2012 12:53 AMView Responses
My support for BJP is unwavering. Like i said earlier, i guess BJP is a lot lesser evil than INC.
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
That’s an impossibility. But since you ask: BJP officially and actually giving up on Hindutva, and then also learning about what Capitalism really means. (Hint: It doesn’t mean filling up the coffers of a few Gujarathi, Marwari and similar fuckers by sacrificing rational men and smartly using the same fucking government machinery as put in place by Indira Gandhi.
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
If BJP starts misbehaving like Congress I’ll change my mind
5/27/2012 12:35 AMView Responses
There is no secondary opinion of mine on this
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
Drastic economically prudent decisions taken in next few months
5/27/2012 12:26 AMView Responses
If NaMo isnt the PM candidate, i may not go and vote. But i wont vote for CongI
5/27/2012 12:23 AMView Responses
A scorched earth policy.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
It the BJP becomes supporters of “Aman Ki Asha” by surrendering Siachen/Sir Creak, they go soft on Jihadis and Maoists, make ridiculous rhetorics on “Social Engineering / Social Justice” and start dividing the country on cast lines, show a tendency to intrude in private individuals life-style etc.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
Sonia Gandhi becoming BJP President. Manmohansingh/Rahul Gandhi as BJP’s PM candidate.
5/27/2012 12:13 AMView Responses
If Congress becomes a democratic party and has economic policies which are not left oriented . however Cong has to divest itself of the dynasty. I may reconsider my support to BJP mif it becomes a personality led party rather than a democratic party.
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
Clear vision and display commitment to implement plans to achieve the vision instead of being just another political party which will oppose every single thing ruling party will do
5/27/2012 12:08 AMView Responses
I would never support congress, let them dissolve the party. I will support that cause. A party which can’t do a bit for the nation after occupying the PM seat from 60 years also, who can hope for the change. I support BJP somewhat, but it seems they want to become congress part-2. If they skip their ideology for vote bank. i will switch to other party.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
if sonia gandhi quits politics–for the congress. if n modi becomes p m and refrains from talking about religion, caste and community–for the bjp.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
Hmmm…tough one, but if I see Congress policies tend to the national interest, create less communal and entitlrment policies, tackle pakistan and the terror problem,act against corruption, and give a string leader like PVNR I would think about changing my pref.
5/26/2012 11:46 PMView Responses
If the BJP starts spouting off about hindutva and other irrelevant nonsense.
5/26/2012 11:44 PMView Responses
if bjp and congress exchange their names, i’ll support congress.lol
5/26/2012 11:39 PMView Responses
Unlikely coz that’s how much I despise Congress
5/26/2012 11:36 PMView Responses
Two independent things: 1. Modi’s candidature comes under a shadow, and 2. Cong suddenly starts reforms sincerely.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
If BJP succumbs to coalition compulsions and couldn’t project NaMo as their PM candidate then i may vote some regional party or good independent candidate.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
I could vote for the BJP if they choose candidates with integrity and good economic sense.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Not declaring Narendra Modi would cause me to change my support.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
If Congress adopts Swatantra Party ideas of free market, embraces genuine secularism, stomps on corruption, does away with quotas (in phases), and rewards merit in the country as well as its own ranks.
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
no change
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
if effective governance is compromised
5/26/2012 11:19 PMView Responses
Narendra Modi leading the Congress.
5/26/2012 11:18 PMView Responses
My stance on BJP will change only when they get rid of their religious identity.I believe,more than policies,inefficiency in governance,it’s the religious intolerance which in the long run may prove 2 be costly for india. Also if BJP can at-least now focus on their own manifesto rather than just opposing 2 wtever congress does,I may change my opinion on BJP
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
I’d vote for any party that puts national security, Hindu civilizational assertion and economy above all. Today that party is BJP. If BJP lets go of these, they’d lose my support. Congress will never get my support because they’ll never put national interest above a Family.
5/26/2012 11:14 PMView Responses
Nothing would change my opposition to Congress. I already have years of information about what they are and what they are not. My support for BJP will probably be much stronger if I see a more cohesive – plan, communication strategy and leadership.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Development perhaps..
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
If the Cong can be democratic rather than dynastic & be Indian rather than divide us into parts just to rule. However, that won’t happen. Buddhu baba kya karega phir!
5/26/2012 10:58 PMView Responses
If BJP continues to have useless leadership or Congress gets into the hands of a better leader.
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
If in the remaining 2 years the Congress shows intent and political will to usher in good governance and strong reforms, i might vote for the congress. Also, if the BJP proves to be a good and responsible opposition in face of the continuing dilly-dallying of the Congress, my vote will go to the BJP. All boils down to the next 2 years.
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
26/11 was defining moment. Prior to that I voted along with “Founding Fathers”
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
I would support BJP over Congress at the current scenario. For me to support Congress, it must > give away the dynasty (eliminate the Gandhis and Vadera) from party positions. > award leadership upon merit. > have a Prime Minister ready to listen and speak. > show transparency in policy decisions > act with a sense of ownership over the nation and concern national interest over self interests. > stop its minority politics. > act with integrity and zero corruption. > act against those found/alleged to be corrupt.
5/26/2012 10:42 PMView Responses
I have firmly decided BJP deserves a chance in 2014.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
If Congress gives up 1. Communal politics. 2. Shows real intent to reform our economy. 3. Gets rid of the Nehru-Maino family for good.
5/26/2012 10:34 PMView Responses
The Leader and Election campaign that decides the Credibility of alternative
5/26/2012 10:33 PMView Responses
Congress – nothing. Will oppose. BJP – Lacklustre leadership. Lack of cohesiveness.
5/26/2012 10:32 PMView Responses
congress is destroying hindus and hindu culture / assets systematically . so i hate congress.
5/26/2012 10:28 PMView Responses
Fielding lousy candidates
5/26/2012 10:27 PMView Responses
Economic policies and effective leadership
5/26/2012 10:21 PMView Responses
My lower degree of support for BJP willl change only if modi becomes the PM candidate, I really don’t see much difference between BJP and congress.
5/26/2012 10:07 PMView Responses
Nothing.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
I will choose the Congress if they dissolve the parliament today and call for snap elections. I will choose the BJP if the announce Modi as their PM candidate. Reason: either will show their commitment to India’s development over anything else.
5/26/2012 9:20 PMView Responses
If Congress moved away from the Gandhi family, from sycophancy, from psedo-secularism, towards more regional, diverse, dispersed leadership, I would consider them. If BJP cannot create a cohesive whole from their disparate state leaders, they won’t exist as an option at the national stage. If their leadership continues their current decline, they again won’t be a good option.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses
If Congress were to follow principle of good governance, such as uphold rule of law, small government, and low taxes, and stop pandering to minorities.
5/26/2012 8:23 PMView Responses
Less sycophancy and eliminate Gandhi Basra family from politics
5/26/2012 8:01 PMView Responses
A party that is controlled by a foreigner will never have my support. The loyalty to India of anyone who supports such parties must be suspect. That being said if congress throws out the gandhi nehru family and is reborn then it has a chance…but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen. On the other hand with BJP becoming another congress, I’ll look for other alternatives
5/26/2012 8:00 PMView Responses

I do not know whether Gujrat has really progressed or is it hype. I do not know whether Modi is culpable in killings or is it hype. However there is definitely a lot of newsprint dedicated to both the above mentioned line of thought. Hence Modi is an interesting candidate. I won’t mind giving him a chance.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
Inspite of dogged persuasion of vested interests and also the entire might of the Indian law system, Modi has emerged unscathed from the shadows of 2002. In these 10 years he has made Gujarat into an economic powerhouse and demonstrated what is a known truth, as also the correct course of action for India, that disparities are closed with ensuring economic progress and opportunities for all, and not through politics of entitlement.
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
Modi has to work to get his acceptance across the Country and across all parties. His personal integrity notwithstanding, he is seen as hawkish and also always willing to put his own agenda ahead of the party. His recent interactions like demanding the sidelining of Sanjay Joshi, not so cordial relationship with Advaniji, etc are sending disturbing signals and does not point to a statesman in the making.
5/27/2012 8:32 AMView Responses
given above.
5/27/2012 8:19 AMView Responses
I want Modi to next PM with absolute majority to BJP so that he can establish Gujrat development model all over country.Better economic policies need to formultaed to strengthen country economy.
5/27/2012 8:17 AMView Responses
None of the above. I dont mind Modi or Rahul Gandhi as the PM, so long as they have the mandate (i.e. they are projected as PMs by their respective parties before elections, and receive votes based on that). No backdoor entries ala Dr. MMS please!
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
at present only Namo only deliver from BJP what I elicited earlier. He is single , clean , pro-India , pro- Industry , pro-People , pro-army . We need Namo for atleast 2 terms to dig India out of the hole Congress has sunk us in.
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
He’s proved his case as an administrator.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
He has shown a Lot of maturity during all the time he was persecuted.has come out a winner as a politician. Has proven to be a good administrator.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
With the 10 yr governance Narendra Modi has shown tht good development is good politics – would love to see India advance in all respects as GUJ has advanced in last 10 yrs
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
Modi has proved with his work in Gujarat But i want Dr Swamy as PM in NDA govt (no option here )
5/27/2012 7:54 AMView Responses
Would have preferred a Jaitley led BJP but not being a mass leader disqualifies him. Would have liked Modi being in the race post a probable acquittal by the Supreme Court. But don’t see a better alternative to him at the moment in BJP, so will pick him anyways. My reason for supporting the BJP is the UPA. Enough said.
5/27/2012 7:47 AMView Responses
there is sufficient coherent information on nehru to make me bleieve he was not Chacha nehru…i think he helped british rape this country. and the family is misusing gandhis name. gandhi himself may habe been a “satya ka pujari” kind of man…but i dont think he was good politician for india..i think he was somewhre biased in his own logics for truth.
5/27/2012 7:24 AMView Responses
Modi is the Best Person to Lead India
5/27/2012 6:45 AMView Responses
Modi has shown progress concretely in Gujarat! While the Congress, starting from Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru down to Antonia Maino are a bunch of ineffective idiots or worse! It is clear where the support of any right-thinking person would lie!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
Modi is one of the most efficient and able leader. I don’t give a damn about what happened in riots. even if he is guilty, in the larger interest of the country, we need to bring him on board.
5/27/2012 5:48 AMView Responses
Very few congis (non nehru/gandhi) ahve been allowed to emerge as a leader.
5/27/2012 5:00 AMView Responses
Anyone except Modi would do and this is absolutely not based on Gujarat Riots or its aftermath. Whatever he did during that time was the best anyone else could have had done in that situation.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
It is worth a try.
5/27/2012 4:55 AMView Responses
Decisive leader. Focussed on development Does not pander to religious and caste blocks Has a vision more importantly and the ability to pursue them
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
India needs a very strong leader with vision to tackle all the huge problems it now faces. Poverty, external and internal threats, realization of potential of young India
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
It has been a well scripted act to taint Modi. If Modi was bad, it would have come out. Also he believes in getting things done and he has proven track record of reforming a state that was pushed back due to natural calamities, political instability and the riots. Rahul gandhi has no such track record and from whatever speeches he has made, he comes across as a vote bank targetting politician rather one who can take along every-class forward. Congress has forgotten than upper-classes, business houses and economically forward Indians are also Indians.
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
My major worry is that Modi is too authoritarian a figure who keeps control to himself. While that may work in states (Jayalalitha for eg), at Centre where demands on Govt are diverse (Foreign relations, defence, etc), it will be difficult to do everything yourself. Whether he has the ability to get things done thru ministers like Vajpayee/ Rao remains to be seen. Will he the confidence to delegate to people like Vajpayee did with Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha , Jaswant Singh (their younger equivalents) remains to be seen. Can he manage give and take? Still the TINA factor is in his favour.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
Narendra Modi has a solid track record of delivering positive outcomes for his state in the last 10 years. The outcomes that he has delivered seems to be unmatched by anyone else in India since 1947. Nobody else in India seems to be even in the same league. I wonder with amazement as to what can be achieved on a national scale if he is the prime minister of India for a period of 10 years or more.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
Agenda set by development. Genuine break from Delhi-based politics.
5/27/2012 2:53 AMView Responses
He is against identity politics and moreover has a proven track record of good governance and good economic growth.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
Only Modi speaks his mind out. Rest are double forked.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
BJP without mode can be still less harmful than Congress but Modi at the helm is probably the only chance India has in the near future to embark on a path of living with dignity.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Dont mind Modi, but since many are suspicious of his role, I would prefer a Arun Jaitley.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
Because of Gujarat
5/27/2012 12:53 AMView Responses
I am a great fan of Modi or his leadership skills and no-nonsense attitude but he will have to ensure that if at all he becomes the PM of India in 2014, his stand is always inclusive. He has been projected very adversely and negatively by the English media for almost a decade now. I was a great fan of Sushma Swaraj, I still am! Actually it’s the party that matters to me. Modi would be good but even if Sushma, Arun or for that matter even Advani were to become PM, i would be absolutely fine with it.
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
No comments. Reasons might be obvious to you by now.
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
I may not agree with Modi’d hindutva-ness, but its time this country had an incorruptible and strong leader who is passionate about progress
5/27/2012 12:35 AMView Responses
I would prefer if Dr.Swamy is also taken on board alongwith Namo
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
Performance in Gujarat
5/27/2012 12:26 AMView Responses
I’d rather pick Jigme Thinley, but since that’s not possible, and since you supply no choice of leaders with backbones, I’ll pick Subramaniam Swamy. And if you still refuse to provide the choice, then Modi it shall reluctantly be (I don’t think his methods will work in a non-Gujarat context/scale.) Political parties, not unlike people, need backbones and balls to do what is right.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
Why not Modi?
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
So obvious.
5/27/2012 12:13 AMView Responses
As long as it is a BJP govt and whoever leads it is elected fairly. I will accept it.
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
Modi seems to have done wonders in Gujurat and has the capabilit but the godhra incident is the problem. Can you entrust the nation to a person like him? well what are the alternatives..? Rahul ?
5/27/2012 12:08 AMView Responses
No better person than him as if now to lead country, he may be accused of being authoritarian but will serve the best to India.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
we need somebody who’s not corrupt and with experiene running a state plus, most importantly, no dynasty to cater to.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
India needs a strong leader who we know based on his actions is non corrupt and wil act in the interest of the nation
5/26/2012 11:46 PMView Responses
Execution. But I am somewhat conflicted. I do not want to vote for Hitler, and I am not 100% sure that Modi is not a fascist.
5/26/2012 11:44 PMView Responses
the usual.
5/26/2012 11:39 PMView Responses
in the past 10 yrs, Modi has gained trust as a good leader. In the same time, UPA has lost trust. So, Modi it is.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
Frankly, no one can come anywhere close to NaMo in terms of leading the Govt. His brilliance is already proved in Gujarat.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
It is time to put the much ballyhooed riots behind us. At least, Modi seems to understand the need for economic growth and is, I believe, decisive.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Narendra Modi has a proven record of good governance in Gujarat.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Everyone – Brookings, NYT, Ratan Tata – think Gujarat is a success story. I hope Modi can repeat that at a national level. Worried about his Hindutva image, but willing to accept innocence until proven guilty.
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
development model from Gujarat.
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
1) The belief (not hope) that the economic change that what we’ve seen in Gujarat will be replicated across the country. 2) Modi will not favour one religion over the other – read sucking up to ROP and ROL and openly discriminate against Hindus.
5/26/2012 11:18 PMView Responses
Since I prefer congress…y not a Nehru-Gandhi dynasty 2 lead congress ? at-least they r the ones with whom very common ppl can identify with..i prefer sonia gandhi as my PM,after nehru..best in their line
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
Modi represents the very antithesis of everything that’s wrong with Indian politics. 2 terms with Modi as PM and India will arrive globally.
5/26/2012 11:14 PMView Responses
Continuing from my earlier point. Modi seems to be our only hope because he has a clear plan for the improvement of Indians and proven leadership skills.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
No, not again…giving UPA second chance was a blunder…giving it third chance i wonder what to call it !!
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
That guy has a plan & acts! And yes…believes in India’s larger interest !
5/26/2012 10:58 PMView Responses
Modi has porven his ability. Very sincere guy. Need to reduce his dictatorial style.
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
Not a big fan of Modi. But not averse too. No opposition to a dynasty-led Congress govt.
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
I would like a strong Leadership, Cong-Nehru-Gandhi nexus needs to be kicked out. Don’t want to be represented by a moron, who thinks its his birth right to become India’s PM
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
A Modi led BJP is the most desirable. Even otherwise a BJP powered government is a better alternative to the Gandhi dynasty influenced government. A congress government where there is no influence of the Gandhis is also welcome, but not as much as the former two.
5/26/2012 10:42 PMView Responses
If you are not being able to establish Modi’s legal culpability no point cribbing about it. I want a leader who is firm,decisive. I a not going to fall in this garb of secularism.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
Modi seems like the most qualified person for the top job.
5/26/2012 10:34 PMView Responses
i dnt want another india to bcum another N K .
5/26/2012 10:28 PMView Responses
Modi appears to be a strong leader, yet often is isolated within his own party. If we need the country to progress, it is better to have a team of good individuals rather than just one – and for that Modi may have to step aside.
5/26/2012 10:21 PMView Responses
Clear vision, tough, capable of enormous change, powerful drive. Will bugger the rotten Kkkangress permanently. Will keep minorities in their place.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
Refer to my answer above
5/26/2012 9:20 PMView Responses
Its not all important for me that Modi be PM, but its about time he had a key role in the national stage. If he were second in command, that would be just fine. That arrangement might well be more palatable to the pseudo-secularists and he could then move on to becoming PM in the subsequent elections.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses
Modi has decisive leadership focussed on growth
5/26/2012 8:01 PMView Responses

I vote because I believe one vote may make a difference. It also gives me a feel-good-punch.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
I think the time when we could stand aside and blame politicians for everything is gone. Every citizen needs to take a side and read, talk and discuss about it to make us a better informed society that makes the right choices.
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
Nothing really to explain. I believe it is our duty to cast our vote.
5/27/2012 8:32 AMView Responses
I will vote as each single vote voted against UPA will give a fitting reply to this govt.only just outrage on social media will not work we need to use every single opportunity we get to use our voting right.
5/27/2012 8:17 AMView Responses
I vote for candidates, not parties. So, as long as I feel a candidtae deserves my vote, I will go out and vote.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
Voting is the only way by which we can express support or oppose the policies practised by govt of the day
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
I’m not in India right now and I haven’t voted before. If I am in the country in 2014 AND can cross the red-tape to get a voters, then I will vote. I wont go out of my way to persuade others , that’s none of my business.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Our vote is precious. If don’t vote someone else will vote on our behalf and corruption will be there in our name.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
have always voted
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
I will vote as w/o voting i have no right to comment on Any govt
5/27/2012 7:54 AMView Responses
not very hapy to say, i am quite pessimistic about voting. but spreading the word and talking about it is more likely to bring good changes in teh future.
5/27/2012 7:24 AMView Responses
I’d like to think that my vote against the Congress is like spitting at its face! But I know that it’s a totally futile gesture as of now, as elaborated in Bryan Caplan’s book!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
I will because it is wrong to blame if you are not doing your bit.
5/27/2012 5:48 AMView Responses
I am not in India presently. When I was in India, frankly, it seemed a difficult project- getting the Voter ID, queuing at booth against possible dangers, possibility that your name would not be listed at the booth despite having Voter ID
5/27/2012 5:00 AMView Responses
Right and duty towards nation.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
It’s not too hard to vote. Even if it doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt either.
5/27/2012 4:55 AMView Responses
I will vote because I realize that unless we don’t exercise our choice, we are unlikely to see the kind of governance we want. Look at what we got in UPA1 & 2.
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
If we don’t vote, what right do we have or criticizing the political parties? Also I as an individual have been entrusted with the duty to help elect a govt that can take this coutry forward. I have always believed that voting is not a right, but a duty to the country that I call my own.
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
Since the last 3 elections, I was based overseas.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
I will vote in the next general elections because there is no excuse for middle class apathy any more. The only reason why I do not vote regularly is because my home town is Chennai, and I have lived and worked in different Indian cities over the last 7 years. I wish there were a way in which I could vote even though my permanent and present address are different.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
Otherwise I feel impotent. How will I truthfully argue in debates about the country?
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
I only blame my political illeteracy for not being an active Voter. This time I am actually flying to India ONLY to vote the congi motherfuckers out and if need be beat the shit out of people who have been traditional congress voters
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
I will vote because I realize the complexity of electoral process and the importance of signals. A slow but steady rise in the voting of the enlightened middle class will make the politicians listen. The trick is to be significant as a voting bloc and, therefore, the need to persuade others to vote.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Because the country is going to the dogs (economically as well as geographically, look at how China is bullying India) under the UPA regime and if we do not bring in a strong administrator like MODI this time, then we are doomed. I believe this UPA government has lost at least one decade for India, it is a wasted generation! This time I will exercise my franchise and kick this government out
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
If you dont vote, you dont have any right to complain whether on inflation or fuel hike.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
That’s a stupid thing to have in mind. Middle Class in India is an emerging force. Those who don’t vote should better stick within the comforts of their homes and never complain. If one has problems, complain to the ECI. Rather than sitting ducks and imagining a rotten world, do something!
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
Until the fucking BJP grabbed power at the center, I had not cared to vote even once in my life. In fact, I wouldn’t have begun voting if the BJP were not to target me so acutely and effectively via all means: denial of jobs, ridiculing via articles and ads in media, psychic attacks, harassment by artificially creating payment issues, harassment by sending right “feriwaalaa”s selling the “right” things and throwing the right kind of a knowing smile at you, such things happening day in, day out, for years on, etc. Yes, right during those much venerated Vajpayee government times. They did that to me. I decided to kick them out of power, and began voting in around 2003 onwards.
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
now a days middle class is well aware so I can easily perusade them to vote
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
We need to change govy. It’s important and urgent
5/27/2012 12:26 AMView Responses
I will vote if NaMo is the PM candidate. Otherwise may not. There is no difference between BJP & CongI without NaMo as the leader.
5/27/2012 12:23 AMView Responses
In a human world that has become so maddeningly convoluted, non-doing is better than doing. Even the Janata Party holds dear misguided opinions about what is good for Agriculture (Food) and to a fair extent, about Water. If one screws up these two things, there won’t be much to govern will there? But maybe it is possible to reason with this group. They seem reasonable.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
True, but in a 1st past the poll system even a modest 4% swing has caused a landslide electorally in recent years, so numeric majority it not an essential requirement. All a party needs is just a 25%-30% of the vote share. In any case it is the only way i can register my opinion.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
I have always voted and will keep on voting.,
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
Every single vote counts even if i am one of the minority middle class
5/27/2012 12:08 AMView Responses
As sabhlok says, Words without action has no meaning. Merely complaining about the things won’t serve the purpose. Be a citizen!
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
as explained earlier
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
Have never missed an election
5/26/2012 11:46 PMView Responses
My vote could well decide winners and losers
5/26/2012 11:36 PMView Responses
It is foolish to blame others if I do not do my job (voting).
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
I never voted in any election. I did n’t even register my name in voters list. But this time i will not only register my name but also will vote. Also i will try to persuade all my friends to vote for BJP. This time i’m more political then ever before
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Having to choose and vote for the “least of the wicked crooks” is not my idea of liberty, freedom or democracy.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
If the middle class votes as a bloc it will be a powerful force.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
The duty of every citizen. My individual taxes are also a pittance, but only together can we have a public works or defence budget…
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
I always vote since that is the only say I have – for whatever it is worth. This time I’m going to try and convince people to vote for Modi.
5/26/2012 11:18 PMView Responses
I don’t care whether others feel it’s a waste of time 2 vote or the other way around…I don’t know whether my vote really counts r not..but it’s mu duty 2 vote..i will…i feel,if i don’t vote..I wouldn’t have the right 2 show my dissent at any later point of time
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
I’d vote if the process is not too cumbersome and time consuming..
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
We owe us this change…that’s why!
5/26/2012 10:58 PMView Responses
Most seniors in my family didnt vote and we ended up with a mess called UPA. I hope my vote changes that…
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
If you have not voted you have betrayed your countrymen.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
Look, I am a Kashmiri Pandit, our numbers have never mattered. Neither in Kashmir nor outside it. As a middle class person, I do feel that our numbers get swamped out, as a KP, that feeling is magnified a hundred times. Also, one could say that in the absence of modi at the national scene, there isn’t much choice to motivate me to vote.
5/26/2012 10:07 PMView Responses
I am an Indian citizen but live in the US. I am not sure how the voting process works for NRI’s.
5/26/2012 9:33 PMView Responses
Feel strongly about issues. First step towards taking a decision and deciding to act is VOTING.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
This will be my first opportunity to vote.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses

I vote candidates, not party. It would take whole lot of persuasion to convince me to vote for an idiot just because he/she belongs to particular party.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
We need to become active changemakers instead of hoping someone will do it for us
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
We all have our fields of interest. I would rather be involved in the social processes of the country, and that is what I do.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
I’m still a skeptic. I keep myself informed and thats it.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
can’t take active part in politics but keenly follow the political developments.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
Democracy is itself a sham, and not such a moral thing as the left would like to claim! Our monarchs of yore protected dharma much better! But given the current situation, I wouldn’t want a party openly hostile to Hindus and to economic freedom for the common man to come to power. Hence I vote, whatever use it might be of!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
Interest.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
participating in active politics i mean good politics can many a times become choosing life and death
5/27/2012 4:30 AMView Responses
I have only this life to make a change. I could take the easy way out but then what will I tell my future generations.
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
I donated genoursly for JP’s loksatta last time around. Although a good party, if Modi is going to be projected as PM, my vote and all my family votes are for BJP
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
Its our way to effect a change.
5/27/2012 3:10 AMView Responses
Not exactly correct, since I do not pay money, but do spend time spreading word on contributions of Rao/ Vajpayee govts.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
I realize the magnitude of damage that can be caused to our collective future if people like myslef continue to be apathetic. A belated and preliminary awareness about India’s ancient history and knowledge systems has made be want to see India return to its traditional place of being a positive example for all nations and peoples of the world.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
I have done my bit to educate and inform people. Not a rich man but willing to donate to see congress out of power.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
I dont mind spending time and money to have a desirable party making a government.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Already stated above. BJP supporter for life.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
I feel it is my duty towards my nation.
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
I vote, but don’t consider it my “duty.”
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
i defenitely say we need alternative this time around
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
See #4 above.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
Informing people is important, most voters are uninformed.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
I don’t have money to support, but can volunteer if needed.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
the system is flawed.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
more a start but happy to give time and money for bjp
5/26/2012 11:36 PMView Responses
I also spend a considerable amount of time informing people. But that option (vote + inform) is not there.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
Will vote if I there are candidates like http://www.facebook.com/ashwin4mlc
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
as usual media highlight on ills of nation on GENERALIZATION of politicians causes mistrust
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
joining a party doesn’t fit 2 my living criteria
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
There is a strong sentiment in individuals lives and society against people who publicly support any political ideology. Unfortunate but true. Only position accepted is to criticize all politicians and parties.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
I don’t have belief in any political parties…
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Political awareness is necessary.
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
No exact reason for this stand.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
Lack of an option that supports true economic freedom in India.
5/26/2012 10:07 PMView Responses
You watch and go all the way, or things don’t get done.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses

I do not have a problem because Sonia is Italian born. I have no data which implicates Gandhi clan in corruption, yet. So no problem on these two fronts. My grudge is the dynasty thing. It makes me feel very bad.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
If she were to leave the Congress President post and work on implementing inner party democracy such that the best leaders make it to the top. This can be her single most important legacy for Indian politics and ensure her an exalted place in History.
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
I believe at this point nothing would make me change my mind.
5/27/2012 8:32 AMView Responses
nothing.
5/27/2012 8:19 AMView Responses
The way she has handled the govt has been very pathetic for aam aadmi .Lot has been kept secret about her like her abroad tour.her expeniture.income,etc.
5/27/2012 8:17 AMView Responses
She is just another one of them politicians, no one special. She could start to change my mind by actively participating in the political process, not just behind the scenes. And also doing away with people pleasing policies like NREGA etc.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
See my comments on why I prefer BJP compared to Congress
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
Nothing. Case in point : 2004 – 2012 . Petrol prices have doubled . Gold price has increased five fold. All the scams under her party’s govt’s watch. Power infra in paralysis. Continuation of unsustainable schemes in face of current Rupee crisis. Weak foreign and domestic policy. And it goes on and on … The farmer suicides problem (state policy more than centre policy) was most intense in MH where a Cong-NCP alliance ruled and still rules. The NDA took the bullet for that though. Left-leaning media for you.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Nothing can make me change my mind.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
Her corruption, dynasty, her antcedents, her role in smuggling antiques and above all she is not Indian
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
Democratization of the Congress and shift in her ideology from the economic left to the economic right
5/27/2012 7:47 AMView Responses
ot be honest…i dont really know much…its my impression. also somewhat based on the fact that she is not born in india, and her life in india is far far away from that of a common indian…i think shes into politics, coz she didnt have a better choice to stay rich and powerful. its difficunlt to say how bad she is for indian…coz that depents on who we are comparing her to…some bastard or weak ministers are no better perhaps.
5/27/2012 7:24 AMView Responses
Sonia Gandhi is the Cersei Lannister of India. Enough said. For reasons of decency we will not go into the list of Cersei Lannister’s sins!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
After the things we have experienced, read and educated ourself about her, even if Brahmaji came to canvass for her i would disobey him. Or else if she would do things that would in long run help my nation and countrymen, most importantly Sanatan Dharmis, then only would i change my mind, but i am sure that day would never come. So, i am happy that i wouldn’t have to stress my mind regarding this matter.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
I have nothing against one person.
5/27/2012 4:55 AMView Responses
She is the baddest, worst in every possible ways.. dangerous, Italian Mafioso minded, highly anti national on.every possible way
5/27/2012 4:30 AMView Responses
If she is able to dismantle dynastic politics and the NAC
5/27/2012 4:26 AMView Responses
Less said the better.
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
what ever it takes need to make the dynasty irrelavant..
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
having been born, educated and working india all my life, I still sometimes fail to grasp the nuances of the ‘indian’ way. I do not expect sonia gandhi to understand India from second hand appraisals. Also the corruption matters.
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
Nothing. Period.
5/27/2012 3:10 AMView Responses
1. Minority pandering 2. Spread tax payers money and gain votes is the only economics known to her. 3. No regard for institutions like Army, Parliament, etc. The NAC writes the bills. 4. No attempt to find long term solution for poverty, education, etc (Reservations/ spread tax money etc is the only way) 5. The country can be mortgaged to keep the dynasty alive.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
The passage of sufficient amount of time.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
If she creates a democratic organisation in Congress where leaders come up on merit and not through allegiance to family.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
SHE IS A BITCH, A LIAR, A THUG, A CHEAT. I want to see what BJP does to her once they are in power. I am scared that this lady will vanish from India using a fake passport once she finds herself out of favour.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
Nothing that’s reasonably expected to occur
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
If she changes the entire system and gives away her power and releases the Congress party from the dynastic clutches so that real democratic leadership emerges in the party, then I would be eternally grateful to her
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
If she makes sure that dynastic politics stops in Congress & Rahul Gandhi is not given the PM candidature on a platter, I might change my opinion on her.
5/27/2012 12:59 AMView Responses
I hope that bitch dies soon.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
The worst thing is the hype and god-motherly tag surrounding her. She is kept beyond criticism and is so opaque! She has been accused of many things and i have read of almost all the conspiracy theories around her but i wonder what complicity prevented most of them from coming to core. I find NDA a culpable partner here.
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
It isn’t so much that she herself is bad as the mixed economy and the culture of command and control is bad. She inherited it, has no clues how or why to change it for the better. But then, neither does your hero Naryaa Modi, for instance, has any clue on these matters. Ask the bastard to talk about individual rights and (actual) capitalism, and see the distance that fucker is able to travel. If she makes Rahul Gandhi a PM, I will immediately begin considering her extremely bad.
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
nothing
5/27/2012 12:35 AMView Responses
wish not to make a laundry list here
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
Nothing, her policies are regressive socialist bumkum
5/27/2012 12:26 AMView Responses
Why should we lead by an illeterate foreigner with very low IQ? She is harming the Indian culture irreparably. Missionaries are very active, thanks to her tacit support.
5/27/2012 12:23 AMView Responses
If she returns to her privately-own hometown, before which she repatriates all that she has taken away from her publicly-adopted residence.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
Less of Hinduphobia, less of bankrupting India through populist schemes, less of intrusion into privet lives, less of the preachiness and so on.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
I
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
she has been pushed to this situation by the other “senior” leaders of congress…
5/27/2012 12:08 AMView Responses
Worst thing to happen for India. Ofcourse Voters are responsible for that.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
it is a tragedy really. she could have had a happy life in a civilised country like italy. she needs to leave indian politics for this animosity between political parties to end. the fight is not politial. it is personal and that is why she needs to go for the betterment of india.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
Same as earlier reason
5/26/2012 11:46 PMView Responses
Nothing. Her place is in her home as a grandmother.
5/26/2012 11:44 PMView Responses
if she decides take sanyas from politics, i’ll wholeheartedly support her :p
5/26/2012 11:39 PMView Responses
Zilch
5/26/2012 11:36 PMView Responses
Declare assets / step down from the high chair / allow Bofors to reach its logical conclusion / dismantle NAC / … well, lets us say, nothing realistic would happen that would make me change my mind about SoniaG.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
She is bad so long as she is in power.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Nothing. 1. She aint India Born 2. She is totally clueless about economics.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
If she leaves(!) or accepts what I had stated about Congress adopting certain Swatantra party ideas.
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
power without responsibility and accountibility
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
i hope she doesn’t screw up totally that i change my mind on her
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
Absolutely nothing. I have no information so far that she is good for the country.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
can’t change…
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Nothing at all!
5/26/2012 10:58 PMView Responses
No1 Looter of the nation. Has no knowledge of India
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
She is not good in adminstration and has a big attitude too.So not fit as a public servant.
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
She is simply a opportunistic lady though I give her credit that within years she adjusted to Indian Politics so well.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
Someone will have to convince me first that Mussolini and Hitler were saints.
5/26/2012 10:34 PMView Responses
She is must to bind Congress together. thats it
5/26/2012 10:33 PMView Responses
She’s done enough damage. She’s beyond forgiving.
5/26/2012 10:07 PMView Responses
If she gives up politics; brings back all her black money and gives it back to govt.
5/26/2012 9:33 PMView Responses
Nothing.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
If she quit, and asked her children to stay away from politics.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses

I choose not to believe news-media. Hence I have no opinion on Gujrat development or Modi’s complicity in any killings. I saw one of Modi’s lectures on youtube and I was not impressed at all. It felt overtly dramatic which put me off. However, a few folks whom I admire have sung praises of Modi’s administrative capability. Hence I am ready to give him a chance to lead India.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
Not sure about it although till date haven’t found anything said or done by him (the real things, as opposed to what is reported in media) that would make me change my mind
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
if he fails to check the mulla demographic,gundaism threat.
5/27/2012 8:19 AMView Responses
Again, he can be the PM/CM so long as he has the mandate. I would vote for him based on his manifesto and nothing else.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
I returned to Gujarat in 2003 and have seen his brand of governance. India needs him more than Gujarat now.
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
I dearly hope the media hasn’t completely killed his chances of reconciling with the Indian public at large.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Never.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
Nothing – Not even Narendra Modi himself
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
Supreme Court Acquittal in Gujarat Riots Case.
5/27/2012 7:47 AMView Responses
my opionion is based in few youtube videos i saw with him in it. (and the above average development of gujarat)
5/27/2012 7:24 AMView Responses
Right now he has been delivering the goods like no one has done in India in many decades. So he has my absolute support! I would like him to continue in this path of development and embrace economic theories of champions of freedom like Adam Smith and Hayek as far as possible, tailored to Indian conditions! I believe that is the way for the uplift of the common man. If he strays too much from this path, I’ll lose a little of my enthusiasm!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
I do not see a possibility.
5/27/2012 5:00 AMView Responses
Allow him more time for his 6 Crore Gujarati’s even with a BJP led govt at center, for at least 10 years. Let the nation know that he is not just taking countrymen on another bogus emotional overdrive and is open to others viewpoint. We don’t want a Corporate backed autocratic, self-obsessed individual careless towards roots. A person cannot be BIGGER than the party/people.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
Nothing
5/27/2012 4:26 AMView Responses
Nothing.
5/27/2012 4:25 AMView Responses
Nothing
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
Nothing can change the fact that he is development oriented. Actually he is the person responsible for bringing about politics of development in India.
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
still have my doubts expressed above.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
I already carry a positive impression of Narendra Modi. The worry I have is that my friends and family members who carry a very main-stream-media (negative) impression of Modi. We will need to (individually and collectively) mount a massive campaign to better educate family, friends and the public at large.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
If he is convicted in the Gujarat riots case. Then my conscience would nota low me to vote for him.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
Modi is a man with a Spine. So I will support him and willing to turn a blind eye once a while for sake of India
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
Authoritarianism in areas where he has least expertise- like economics and other specialist areas. Violation of individual rights through authoritarian legislation.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Almost nothing, I guess
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
If his role is proven in riots. He is otherwise a visionary and clean politician. He is brilliant orator and mass leader.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
It would be good if he were to be a PM but BJP has many good leaders. Maybe he is the best amongst them all. He has my support.
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
I dislike his way of doing things, but, frankly, don’t have any particular like or dislike for his personality. I don’t care for personalities, that way. Naryaa’s is a gone case. He will never be able to get Hindutva out of himself. In contrast, you could make a thinly argued case that simply because BJP is so inconsistent, it could, perhaps, some one day in future, give up Hindutva and adopt rational capitalism. But, talking of Naryaa, he has grown up in the Hindutva fold, and he is so consistent about it. No, he couldn’t possibly get Hindutva out of him. Not in this lifetime.
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
he is one the choice but there are others who are equally competent for PM job
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
I need to live in Gujarat and find out for myself.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
If he becomes a bogged down compromising figure. If he changes his political position to play to the gallerys. If he becomes willing to live with the ivory tower self-serving indifferent to public bureaucracy. If he starts making a large intrusive government instead of a small efficient government.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
If he does not develop a team and encourages personality cult around him.
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
Come clean on godhra and apologise
5/27/2012 12:08 AMView Responses
Minority appeasement
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
There needs to be a display of contrition and demonstration that he will take all Indians ahead with him.
5/26/2012 11:44 PMView Responses
unlikely to change unless he becomes a totally different person.
5/26/2012 11:39 PMView Responses
Fails to deliver, but then I am sure he will succeed I
5/26/2012 11:36 PMView Responses
If he proves to be yet another politician after he hits the PM’s post, then I would be doubly disappointed / irritated. Having no hope is bad enough (UPA), but destroying cultivated hope is worse.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
I don’t change my mind unless he becomes corrupt(possibility is extremely small)
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
If he is found guilty of the riots in Gujarat.
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
My mind is made up.
5/26/2012 11:18 PMView Responses
go on and agree his role in anti-muslim riots….he did it once…i don’t see a reason y he wouldn’t do it again? yep..the court gives a clean-chit…but hw many of us really believe tht??
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
Nothing
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
it wouldn’t…
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
He is a good administrator but should shed his ego and take everyone into account.
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
Narendra Modi has been blasphemized by Congress and Pro Congress media in order to keep him at bay for Rahul Gandhi’s benefits. He has shown prudent and committed resourcefulness to the chair and has proven that things can happen in India too. As an acting CM he recuperated the entire of Bhuj within less than a year from the quakes which speaks volumes in comparison to the Bhopal Gas Victims.
5/26/2012 10:42 PMView Responses
May be if he fails to deliver ,but I doubt it.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
But he must defuse the gap. A lot depends on him for his candidature to PMship
5/26/2012 10:33 PMView Responses
If he actually gets convicted in any of the cases.
5/26/2012 10:07 PMView Responses
Nothing
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
He’s in the dock and for good reasons, I believe. However, I give him the benefit of doubt as he’s not been convicted of any crime (as yet). On the positive, he has done a exemplary job in Gujarat and I think he could do the same across India. So I remain interested in Modi.
5/26/2012 9:20 PMView Responses
He is the best we’ve got at the moment. That said, strategically, one should be on the look out for an alternative – an alternative with Modi second-in-command would be ideal, although one feels that he would not be second-in-command to anyone. Which is a good thing – and in that case, better he be PM than anyone else.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses
Modi becoming PM is going to be good. However, important thing is that even if Modi does not become PM, the governance should be about sensible and good governance.
5/26/2012 8:23 PMView Responses

As a country we have not really moved forward much from where we were at the time of independence in terms of social inequalities. Free markets rest on the premise of each person having the opportunities to achieve their potential. Till the time we can create equal opportunities, the weaker sections need government intervention and support. However, the approach needs to shift from ‘socialist’ (giving) to liberal (helping them afford).
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
1) Kashmir issue went to UN becoz of JLN’s misgovernance 2) Kashmir issue couldn’t be solved in 71 even after capturing 93K Pak soldiers due to incompetance of IG 3) RG’s incompetance in handling Srilanka and blind eye to J&K cost us dear. 4) Huge inflationary policies of UPA 1+ 2 and corrupt policies are due to misgovernance and incompetence
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
IMHO The govt has 3 responsibilities. 1) Making laws and enforcing them. 2) Reaching out to the people who the markets alone cant lift out of poverty. Ergo , not libertarian. ( Im talking about things like relief schemes for the poorest of the poor, cheap public transport etc. Im not very good at this , clearly.) 3) Dont overdo 2) for political gain. Classic examples include the flawed Food Security Bill and MNREGA. This much Im sure about, I think.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
Govt’s job is to provide infrastructure and not run profitable business.govt run business are not efficiently run.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
I believe in Narendra Modi’s mantra – MINIMUM GOVERNMENT MAXIMUM GOVERNANCE
5/27/2012 7:59 AMView Responses
The historical record is as clear as a crystal. Socialism is bad. Period.
5/27/2012 7:47 AMView Responses
money and society both are important…………..i fear if we leave everything to business people,.they may start misusung their power. also focusing only on social aspects may make us not use our full potential..
5/27/2012 7:24 AMView Responses
The market is the fairest dispenser of social justice, I feel, free from government intervention! The poor in India are willing to work hard once they realise that there is hope for a better future if they show initiative, and once it is made clear to them there is no other way! The various interventions by the government, from votebank politics to reservations to subsidies have rendered them ineffective and weak, so the government can leech off them! One can only pray to Lord Shiva that this changes at some point in our lieftimes!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
Government should minimize its footprint to focus on law-and-order, improving the judicial system, protecting the environment and taking care of ensuring equitable distribution of wealth and natural resources
5/27/2012 4:26 AMView Responses
govt role should be very limited in providing the right environment for investments. It should only play the role of Umpire rather than being the player itself..
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
The way India has moved since independence, wealth creation opportunities have been skewered towards already wealthy. I strongly dis-agree with doles and hand outs as a way out. Schemes like nrega and fsb further weaken the population. Govt should rather create opportunities for the weaker sections and create platforms for skill impartation. The iti development in gujarat is a step in the right direction
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
I believe that PSUs did have a role to play after independence when India was capital starved and hence selected this and not the next point. However I believe once an industry gains critical mass, the govt should disinvest at a profit for eg Airlines, telecom, etc. The Govt also should act as a facilitator for ensuring basic amneties . However it should be out of running any business which can be done privately and where there can be competition.
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
Ancient Indian knowledge systems did have a view of how an economy needs to function to help achieve the 4 fold human goals of dharma, artha, kama and moksha. We need to adapt our ancient knowledge systems to suit today’s global context, and not ape either socialist or market-liberal policies. Market-liberal policies from other materially successful nations should inform our understanding, but should not drive the path we choose for ourselves.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
The private sector is the most efficient in performing certain tasks because they have the right incentives and disincentives. Govt employees have no incentives as they can’t be fired. But a few things can’t be privatised like the Army and there is some Market regulation required to ensure investors are not cheated. So, a minimum govt is required.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
The debate is not about capitalism and socialism. Its about free markets vs non-free markets. Nordic countries believe in socialism but at the same time are all for free markets.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
Requires an essay length answer-refer my guru’s work-Milton Friedman
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Welfare states are disastrous, we must have minimum governments. Market forces will eventually lead to welfarism and address all the inadequacies, state has no role in it.
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
Socialism has failed globally and India. No point in trying it again and again.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
Socialism is like a small cake being distributed to a large gathering. With liberalism, the size of the cake grows, so opportunities are many. If a govt is honest and transparent, a controlled liberalism can have inclusive affects i am sure.
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
You once again provide partly clueless options. … You must have done your education at Berkeley, have you? The laissez-faire Capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s sense of the term, is the only way to go. It’s about smallness of government. Government must be strong, very strong, but it must be kept restricted to its proper role.
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
socialim is dead it is more towards market economy bit taxation shud be very rational
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
*Someone* should be in a third party position to ask hard questions, get answers, and pursue a course of action whenever the need arises.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
The role of the govt should be to infrastructure, Security, Finance , Health and education
5/27/2012 12:09 AMView Responses
Let not our servicemen decide how to do trade.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
economic policy—too many controls. foreign policy–outdated and influenced by local minority pandering requirements. education, healthcare, infra polices–all outdated. old paper-pushing attitude of bureaucracy. judiciary–slow, ineffective. police–corrupt, archaic. teachers–ordinary. what else? internal security is a joke. armed forces–competent but need to become modern.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
60 odd years give me no reason to think otherwise
5/26/2012 11:46 PMView Responses
Again, these are nuanced questions where all the choices are NOT given in a either or way. For instance, I feel that the government should not play, but regulate – which would mean some oversight. Also, I feel education and health should be government prerogatives (a lá European countries).
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
socialism and market economy are two extremities. The answer lies somewhere in between but mostly tilted towards market economy.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
A limited role for government will, I believe, reduce corruption and incompetence. After all, it is not in human instinct to be careful with other people’s money.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Bureaucracies since Ancient Egypt become bloated, corrupt, and inefficient. The smaller the better (and Government is another bureaucracy)! Also refer to Hayek, Mises, or even Hoppes.
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
change has to be controlled
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
only market-liberalism may not guarantee us economic development which is y I want govt interference 2 account for every1
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
Toughest question in this survey. I believe in markets but a number of factors including clout of existing players and uncertainty about judicial process makes pure market model not my first choice.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Socialism has failed all around the world. we don’t want another experiment and demo,,,
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Whatever the policies. The Govt. should be honest to implement it.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
and the final target is to minimize inequality and good governance. the small govt shouldn’t be there only for market
5/26/2012 10:33 PMView Responses
Look at USA…….
5/26/2012 9:33 PMView Responses
We have to evolve as we go along and this is my initial position; as Bharat re-emerges, our outlook should be modified as it suits us.
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
I also agree with the last point.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses

All are equal priority. Genie missed out: 1. Establish freedom-of-expression in Indian mindset.
5/27/2012 8:48 AMView Responses
1. Make all citizens equal before the law 2. Remove corrupt politicians and prohibit criminals from contesting elections 3. Restrict the government to governance I would add: 1. Implement public funding of elections 2. Remove income tax
5/27/2012 8:33 AMView Responses
1. Remove corruption 2. Educate every citizen 3. Remove discrimination
5/27/2012 8:25 AMView Responses
I would also like to see a law like the First Amendment in the US, to stop people from making “being offended” into a business.
5/27/2012 8:10 AMView Responses
1) I always say India’s biggest problem is “Government wants to run business” and “Businessmen wants to run Governement” so would support Govt out of business except that involving national security/defence , critical infrastructure 2) Removing corruption is impossible but removing corrupt politican will free up resources by which govt can provide basic facilities like education , healthcare , defence , roads , power , ports vital to improve HDI and commerce
5/27/2012 8:08 AMView Responses
1) Law enforcement 2) Education 3) Sane limits to govt.
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
A Ferrari
5/27/2012 8:03 AMView Responses
1. Make all people.2. Govt 2 governance n no business.3.make education system autonomous away from govt. Electoral reforms to ensure good people are enthused to participate in policy making.
5/27/2012 8:01 AMView Responses
Genie missed: -prohibit accused also from contesting elections -need 2 have measures of fastrack court else falsely accused will be suffered
5/27/2012 7:54 AMView Responses
Economic reforms will be a top priority. Genie should also have offered complete freedom of speech with minimal restrictions, decentralization and accelerated infrastructure development.
5/27/2012 7:47 AMView Responses
only two points…i would have taken education as second..but the statement is strange..will govrnments reduced interference really improve education? the private people running schools are no better…the want money and more money.
5/27/2012 7:24 AMView Responses
I would prioritize my choices in the order in which they appear above! Corruption is a by-product of bloated socialist governance, and all the Anna Hazares in the world cannot remove it by adding more socialism into the mix!
5/27/2012 6:21 AMView Responses
remove corruption from india – entails a lot of actions like right bills, quick justice, competent politicians Improve the education system restrict the governmetn from being in business
5/27/2012 5:48 AMView Responses
choice 2 is stronger than choice 1, so I chose 2, they appear in order. What genie missed is: Allowing people to choose their leader in a way done in France/USA etc. We are suffering MMS and his remote control.
5/27/2012 5:00 AMView Responses
Start by setting examples from the top, punish one and all, give no special treatment, end all special privileges. Start with small term goals and long term priorities.
5/27/2012 4:58 AMView Responses
1. Fast and just courts. 2. Small government. 3. States having more power. 4. More professional, transparent and accountable bureaucracy.
5/27/2012 4:55 AMView Responses
Difficult to choose between Make All Citizens Equal and Restrict Government – both equally important Improve Education System ** Missed: Fix the Judicial System; Make it work
5/27/2012 4:30 AMView Responses
Ensure that we preserve our heritage and the environment for the future generations
5/27/2012 4:26 AMView Responses
stop messing with people lives and concentrate only on governance
5/27/2012 3:58 AMView Responses
Corruption and corrupt population would be number 1. The root cause of most issues india faces is that for personal profits individuals subverted the system and benefits meant for many reached only a few. Education is the only way ppl can have an opportunity to be successful.
5/27/2012 3:28 AMView Responses
Yes, it should make India a secular state.
5/27/2012 3:10 AMView Responses
Here again, I would like to add a rider that the Govt may have a role in setting up institutions/ business where the private sector is not willing or in which returns come later. For eg Roads, O&G etc. I also believe the Govt did play a +ve role in higher education like IITs, IIMs, etc. The Govt should be an angel investor who exits at profit and then reinvests the same to develop infrastructure (physical, security, health and education)
5/27/2012 3:03 AMView Responses
1. Remove the corrupt politicians and prohibit criminals from contesting elections 2. Restrict the government to governance and prohibit it from being in business 3. Make all citizens equal before the law and prohibit the government from discriminating against people What was missed: All self-respecting countries of the world protect and nurture their culture/ unique ways of life. Indians and India must begin to once again respect, protect and nurture our ancient culture. Nobody else is going to do it for us.
5/27/2012 2:59 AMView Responses
education end of discrimination more governance
5/27/2012 2:53 AMView Responses
First priority is to have minimum govt so that tasks are more efficiently done by the private sectors and all that govt does is to formulate policies. But to ensure transparencies we need open govt where all things are in public domain.
5/27/2012 1:43 AMView Responses
Obvious choices. Corruption is a consequence. not a cause. Get the Govt. to do what it is supposed to do.. Governance.
5/27/2012 1:27 AMView Responses
In the order listed above. Am lazy too.
5/27/2012 1:15 AMView Responses
Yes, the genie missed the fact that India needs reforms, a lot more reforms in various sectors. For instance, the first thing I would want to do is privatize Indian Railways, government has no business running public transport.
5/27/2012 1:09 AMView Responses
1. Make India more federal 2. Increase local government 3. Democratize all political parties by putting in age limits and terms for all party and govt posts. 4. Reduce the barriers for people to join politics particularly that of money power. Anybody who contests and wins atleast 15% of popular vote, his entire expenses would be borne by Govt. State Funding in this manner would reduce political corruption and ensure better governance. 5. Increase transparency through e-governance. 6. Accountability and transparency of media funding.
5/27/2012 12:54 AMView Responses
Difficult question. Government can meddle anywhere provided the intentions are good. Corruption is definitely the biggest issue. Talk of anything, education, health, security of the nation, nutrition, if our govts were transparent and honest, we wouldn’t want to exploit the diversity of the nation upon whom we can’t thrust a common code. But yes, the same diversity has been a breeding ground of vote bank politics and it should also go but it;s very difficult to achieve considering narrow gains that both the parties would not want to forgo!
5/27/2012 12:40 AMView Responses
Yes. Strengthen the proper functions of government. I would put it ahead of that education thingie, because, simple: education is (or ought to be) a business, and you already have the prohibition order served to the government in #3. How could Indian citizens aspire for pride unless their government is strong? Another point. *Some* minuscule small number of people in India (and not just Brahmins and higher castes), distributed to various pockets in space and time in the past, were great. But India was not too great; could not have been; no nation was and could have been—Individual Rights, Industrial Revolution and Capitalism are recent developments. So, keep your fucked up RSS prachaaraki naaTak of “India was great, Sindhu was great, so let’s arrange a 10,000 yadnya mahotsav with the help of criminals and even murderers filling up the ranks and files of RSS/BJP…” aside, and think rationally. Even in those supposedly wonderful Vedic/Sanaatan times, men were restricted to travelling only by horse-carts and not by aeroplane; human sacrifices at the time of building palaces were not unknown; the science of medicine i.e. Ayurveda often lacked acuity; Individual Rights were not discovered and so, a son was seen as morally responsible the private promises made by his father and without involving the son’s own choices, etc. Do be respectful of or grateful to the (actual) great thinkers of any times, including any (and every) of those ancient times. But don’t mistake a few geniuses for the post-Rennaissance, post-Industrial Revolution, post-Capitalism-beginnings culture as we know it today. This culture, if it survives in the West, will also influence India positively. But, its survival in the West itself is no longer an unquestionable kind of a premise. I will let you know my name on the presumption that you won’t publish my free-wheeling unedited, on-the-fly “thoughts” without my permission. It’s Dr. Ajit R. Jadhav. (Yes, I could have sharpened my thoughts better and articulated them better. For a blog now, as for a hostel-room chat in the earlier times, however, I don’t care a lot. In fact, before hitting done, let me you in on something. I thought of government having to be strong right while writing answer to your question # 8 before reading your question #9. I have been that free, on-the-fly; haven’t edited a single answer.) Best, Ajit [E&OE]
5/27/2012 12:36 AMView Responses
If citizens are empowered adewquately surely governeance will be far more better
5/27/2012 12:30 AMView Responses
new govt engg college /graduation instt should be opened so that politician own colleges couldnt exploit helpless students.private education is very costly and govt colleges r very less.new RTE law should be scrapped.
5/27/2012 12:28 AMView Responses
[A] and [B] are pipe dreams. You cannot cut out the cancer when the very cause is still in the system. Government has no business being in business, nor moral grounds to discriminate and differentiate within it’s own people, nor ethical authority to perpetuate only it’s own view of the world.
5/27/2012 12:22 AMView Responses
According to my priorities as follows: 1) Restrict the government to governance and prohibit if from being in business. (All governments are bad in doing things) 2) Make all citizens equal before the law and prohibit the government from discriminating against people. (No, to entitlements. Yes, to National integrity) 3)) Improve the education system by reducing government interference. (Government of India has a pathetic record in ensuring quality. Educationists are a bunch of self-indulgent lot. Magsaysay Awards… what non-sense ) 4) Remove the corrupt politicians and prohibit criminals from contesting elections. (Bell, the cat last) If these are achieved corruption will get reduced as a result.
5/27/2012 12:14 AMView Responses
1) Improve the education system by reducing government interference —The young breed has been corrupted a lot by educating them about fake history, false ideologies. Let them have a quality education first. 2)Make all citizens equal before the law and prohibit the government from discriminating against people —This is important so that there should no atmosphere of guilt/hatred between communities. 3)Restrict the government to governance and prohibit it from being in business —Let individual explore the business market.
5/26/2012 11:56 PMView Responses
independent police commission and reform. judicial commission and all cases to be closed in 2 years. all mps compulsorily to go thru 2 stages of elected public office before becoming mp. reorg as mentioned earlier.
5/26/2012 11:51 PMView Responses
Reforms and economic freedom is really what we need. Everything else follows.
5/26/2012 11:44 PMView Responses
1,4,5
5/26/2012 11:39 PMView Responses
1. amend the constitution and bring a uniform civil code. (this is similar to genie’s point no. 4) 2. remove reservations but provide world class primary education system (government onus). somewhat similar to Genie pt. 5. 3. since we are in the wishing game – just make NGOs non existent. BTW – the genie missed out on energy policies / agricultural reforms etc. those are all interlinked to overall growth too.
5/26/2012 11:35 PMView Responses
Mere removal of corrupt politicians will not yield any result. People are also equally corrupt. After all politicians are just samples drawn from the population called people. Each person holds multiple ration cards to enjoy govt schemes on multiple fake names and brazenly argues that it is their birth right to loot tax payers money. I believe that Right education(international standards) blended with ancient Indian dharmic values can change the face of the future India. If all people are truly equal before law then the corrupt rich will automatically land in jail.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
1. Limited Government 2. Ensure Individual liberty, Good Health, safety and security without discrimination whatsoever. 3. Develop Infrastructure: World Class Roads, Rail Network, Power, Water, Sanitation, Connectivity.
5/26/2012 11:31 PMView Responses
Genie missed a lot (literacy, women’s rights, environment, civic virtue), but “kabhi kisi ko mukammal jaha nahi milta!” So with the above list – Restrict the government to governance and prohibit it from being in business, Make all citizens equal before the law and prohibit the government from discriminating against people, Remove corruption from India.
5/26/2012 11:30 PMView Responses
you should have put one choice as “sauno saath sauno vikas”
5/26/2012 11:23 PMView Responses
In order of priority: 1) restrict the role of the government to enforcing law / rules and not being in business of any kind – education / hotels / airlines / what ever else… 2) Education system – doing (1) should address this 3) Make all citizens equal before the law
5/26/2012 11:18 PMView Responses
1.Make changes in political,electoral processes so that it guarantees transparency and better legislative 2.Improve the education system with MORE and better govt interference
5/26/2012 11:16 PMView Responses
Accountability of public servants and services.
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Remove all kinds of reservation…
5/26/2012 11:00 PMView Responses
Maybe…the genie missed the bottle…my Old Monk bottle!
5/26/2012 10:58 PMView Responses
Have a leader with ability to govern in an outstanding way
5/26/2012 10:56 PMView Responses
Of course, Education also needs to be improved and sensitized. And Law by all its means should be equal for all.
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
Education and Healthcare should be given utmost care by Govt.Knowledge and health are very important for a nation’s prosperity.
5/26/2012 10:44 PMView Responses
Education First. Genie, Please add Health care too. (These two must be in the hands of Government). Equality for all is just in letter. Should be brought in spirit. Remove, eliminate, exterminate the corrupt elements from the society and not just elections.
5/26/2012 10:42 PMView Responses
There is this minority,dalits,OBC’s crap that comes into every debate. Hope this changes in the Indian society and politics.
5/26/2012 10:41 PMView Responses
1 restrict government interference 2 make all citizens equal before law 3 improve education system Just these should set in motion all else that would reduce the first two points as well.
5/26/2012 10:07 PMView Responses
Improve the education system Remove corruption REstrict gove to governance One additional wish: Improve moral fabric of society.
5/26/2012 9:33 PMView Responses
(5) (4) ( 1 and 3)
5/26/2012 9:30 PMView Responses
Priority 1 – restrict government Priority 2 – make all citizens equal Priority 3 – reduce government interference in education
5/26/2012 9:20 PMView Responses
Prioritize 4 before 3 before 5. Amend freedom of speech law in constitution – make it similar to first amendment in the US constitution.
5/26/2012 8:39 PMView Responses
Rule of law Limited government Better education
5/26/2012 8:01 PMView Responses
It all starts with education
5/26/2012 8:00 PMView Responses

Alright, here goes.

(Please note: This survey was first done on SurveyMonkey, and is now closed at that site. The survey continues on “Google Forms” below. If you have already responded, thank you — there is no need to respond here. UPDATE: I have posted the intermediate results of the survey.)

UPDATE: This survey was first done on SurveyMonkey using their free version. Unfortunately, that restricts responses to just 100. I have closed the survey there. I will consolidate the results so far and post it in a bit. Thank you all for your help in promoting this survey. You all have my gratitude.

UPDATE 27th May 11 AM PST: I have posted the intermediate results of the survey.

But not all problems are fake and these need remedies. Some of our real problems have yielded to diligence, dedication, intelligence, knowledge, perseverance and sometimes to just plain old good luck. We have grown so accustomed to some of the more amazing solutions that they appear to be commonsensical and not worthy of much remark. If we had not been exposed to them right from birth, we would have been astonished out of our wits on our first encounters with them. We take all our electronic gizmos for granted but to someone from a century ago, it would knock them senseless. Somewhat similarly, we take for granted so many innovations and institutions that have been invented to address our problems that we are not even aware of them or the problems they solve.

Markets, for instance. When I realized that markets are a human invention and how they order society without orders, I was literally awestruck. The Two Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics appeared to me to be masterpieces of intellectual brilliance. The idea of prices and how they encapsulate information that no one has — however intelligent or powerful — left me speechless. Closely connected with markets, the idea of money struck me as outstandingly brilliant. Money, I understood soon enough, is not a “real” but a “nominal” thing, and yet it has real implications for human welfare. Without money, trade will be much harder. And trade! Wow, what an idea.

Trade makes the world go round. When I first understood the role of exchange in human affairs, the staggering importance of trade had me . . . what’s the word I am looking for . . . staggering. All the bits and pieces started falling in place for me and I began getting the big picture: markets, trade, exchange, money, order without orders, etc., etc. These were simple ideas and yet when one understands these basic building blocks, one can create robust structures that explain how the world works.

Economics explains the modern world in a way that is not available to other disciplines. I think that there is a reason for the unreasonable effectiveness of economics in this regard. The modern world is the product of ideas, and economics studies those ideas that go into the production of everything that we humans produce.

(My current reading list includes a book by Deirdre McCloskey, “Bourgeois Dignity” which has the rather provocative subtitle, “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.” She’s just being deliberately contrary, I guess. She writes in the preface to the book that ideas enriched us and have been “alleviating poverty worldwide, and enlarging the spiritual scope of human life. The outcome has falsified the old prediction from the left that markets and innovation would make the working class miserable . . .”)

Fortunately for us, the basic ideas of economics are very easily accessible to anyone with average intelligence and the ability to read with an inquiring mind. It does not require years of dedicated study although it does require a bit of time to observe what’s going on critically and carefully. Superficial appearances can be deceptive and naive uninformed intuition can be a treacherous guide. Like learning how to read or to do arithmetic, reasoning economically is not part of our genetic endowment. We have to learn some simple rules and understand some basics about the nature of reality. There is no way around that little barrier.

Sainath is an example of a person who does not understand the basics. Not knowing the basics is not a handicap for most people. Most of my friends (and they are almost all of them in the IT business) know fancy little of economics and yet navigate through life quite well. However, if one is in the business of pontificating on matters economic, being ignorant of the fundamentals of economics is not just a petty personal affliction but can be positively harmful to others.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the video of Sainath’s talk is instructive. I have half a mind to use it in one of my economics courses. I would first play it at the start of the course. The hour and 15 minutes video is uncomfortably long but for the sake of learning, one can devote the time. Then in the rest of the course, I would go through every ill-conceived idea in it and point out the basic errors and explain why they are wrong. Finally, at the end of the course, I would have them watch the video again — not to torture the kids but to make them appreciate how much they have learned in the course. They would be rolling on the floor. ROTFL time would be had by all. They would be like this:

Alright, enough of a preamble. Time to get down to the dirty business of examining P. Sainath’s talk. Let’s put on the gloves. I first mentioned the talk in the post titled, “Sorry but it’s not my fault” and posted the video in the next post, “Manufacturing Discontent.” In the post previous to this, “We Don’t See Rants on Fire on YouTube,” I noted that there are many rants on neo-classical economics. I am reposting P. Sainath’s video for ease of reference.

Sainath starts off his talk by remarking that the unrest in Africa (I suppose he meant various Arab states in the Middle East) was partly due to food price inflation — which he claims was not reported by the media at large. His attitude is that of someone who has caught the media with its pants down. The media, he claims, never revealed that food prices and civil unrest are causally connected but he has made the astonishing connection and there it is. This is more than a little surprising to me since it the connection was quite evident and widely reported in the media, not that it takes a genius to see the relationship.

Basic Econ101 lesson: prices matter to people, and they respond appropriately. When prices of essential goods — like food — rise drastically, they respond by violently agitating against whatever they perceive to be the cause(s).

The media has much to answer for. Accusations that they serve the rich and the politically powerful are warranted in many instances. But why would they wish to conceal the rather evident fact that people are agitating against food price inflation? Rising food prices are not deep dark state secrets — everyone knows it.

Anyhow, he makes a big production of “revealing” the connection. Later on in the talk he contradicts himself and takes the IMF to task. It seems that the IMF did a study to quantify the relationship between the risk of political unrest and food price inflation. This, Sainath claims, was needless (since everyone knows that anyway) and as pointless as closing the barn doors after the horses have fled. When he dresses up an evident truth as a grand revelation, it’s fine; when the IMF does a rigorous study to quantify the relationship, it’s a waste of money. Here’s what he says around the 36-37 minute mark of his talk: “There’s a serious link between food prices and political unrest. And only the IMF could tell us that. They needed a study.” I suppose the irony of pointing out IMF’s silliness while indulging in the same pointlessness is entirely lost on him.

He glibly rattles off truckloads of data without pausing to ponder what the implications are. What’s worse, he does not even provide the relevant contextual details. Without context, data are meaningless. Suppose I make the claim that someone weighs 120 lbs, and expect you to be astonished by it. Should you be astonished? You can’t say unless I provide the context by also stating the age and gender of the person. There’s nothing the least bit surprising if the person is a 25-year old 5-foot tall Asian woman. But if it were a boy aged 4, or a 40 year-old 6 foot 4 inches tall man, that would be abnormal.

Sainath has spent a lot of time living among the rural poor in India and has gathered a lot of data. What he has missed in all this looking at the trees is the forest. Problem is that he has a limited capacity to comprehend the information he gathers. Unfortunately, most of his audience is even more limited in their comprehension and are unable to critically evaluate his interpretations (or rather the misinterpretation) of the data that is being cited.

For instance, food price inflation is a real concern for the poor — in Egypt, in Yemen, and even in the US, as he notes with rising alarm. He does not pause to ask why. If he had, he could have seen the connection between supply and demand.

Supply shocks lead to food price rise in general. What’s the obvious solution? Increase in the supply by bringing more land under cultivation. But no, he decries that. He reports that India is buying thousands of acres of land in Ethiopia and Kenya for cultivation. That, he says, is the wrong thing to do. Why it’s wrong he leaves it as an exercise for his audience.

What are we buying this land for? To grow food in India (sic). Having destroyed India’s food production capabilities with 20 years of neo-liberalism, . . . we have invested $4.3 billion in Ethiopia . . . don’t you think they have enough problems of their own without us landing up there? . . . India is buying vast tracks of land in Brazil, Keyna and Ethiopia. . . China has also bought land in 20 different countries in an absolute race to the bottom. It’s very curious that India should say that we would buy farmland in Ethiopia to grow food in India (sic) when — and this is part of the economics of our time — we’ve shifted millions of farmers in the last 20 years from the cultivation of food crops to the cultivation of cash crops. Millions of subsistence farmers growing food crops like paddy and wheat to growing vanilla. . . We shifted millions. . . [Link to this part of the video of the talk.]

“We shifted millions. . .” Who are the we? Are farmers stupid and passive? Do they have any choice in what they do? This automatic categorization of them as victims is what I call the manufacturing discontent industry. I will come back to this matter later on.

I believe that Sainath does not understand how prices work. Egypt, he reports, removed food price controls, and that caused food prices to rise, which then led to political unrest. If putting price ceilings could ever solve any problems of affordability, it would be a much simpler world: we could just legislate that all food should be sold at one penny a pound. Problem of food security solved!

But in the same breath that he talks about food prices, he also talks about the poor farmers. I don’t suppose he understands that buying and selling are two sides of the same coin. If food prices are kept low by decree, it is the same as decreeing that farmers starve. By putting an artificial lid on food prices, it discourages food producers from producing food. That restricts supply, and that increases the price of food.

His pet hobby horse is farmer suicides. He rattles off numbers–so many farmers killed in so many years. Again the context is missing. Yes, we understand that 250,000 farmers killing themselves is serious business. But why are they killing themselves? Because food prices are too high or too low?

Basic Econ101 lesson: Prices in undistorted markets reflect the supply and demand of goods. They convey essential information to producers and consumers. If prices rise, it could be due to demand increases or supply shocks, or both. Producers increase production when prices rise; consumers reduce consumption. Suppressing price information leads to foreseeable but unintended adverse outcomes.

This post is getting awfully long. I am not done by a long shot, however. I will have to continue it the next time. The talk is a treasure trove of fascinating misconceptions delivered with supreme confidence. If I had the time and the inclination, I could write a book-length analysis. But I am sure that you don’t have the patience for that and besides, I am too lazy. So out of laziness, I am going to do a cut-and-paste job from one of my previous posts that talks about farmer suicides. The post was on Siddhartha Deb’s article in the Boston Review with the subtitle “India Is Growing, But Indians Are Still Starving.”

. . . Take for instance, ” . . . part of the growing national trend of farmer suicides, with nearly 200,000 farmers killing themselves from 1997 to 2008, in the very years that the Indian economy was expanding.”

Did you catch that implied hint of causation in the reported correlation? Anyway, just how high is that raw 200,000 number? We just don’t know because the context is missing. India’s raw suicide rate in 1998 was 12.2 for males and 9.1 for females per 100,000 population, or approximately 10.6 people 100,000, per year. With a population of 1 billion, India can expect 106,000 suicides per year. Now we have to ask, “Is the number 18,000 farmer suicides a year unnaturally high if the total number of suicides a year is 106,000?”

The answer to that question depends on what the population of farmers in the Indian population is. If the population of farmers in the population is, say, 25 percent, then the number of suicides among farmers is actually below the population average.

The point is that for us to make sense of the suicide numbers, we need to know not the raw numbers but normalized numbers — “farmer suicide rate is 15 per 100,000, as compared to overall rate of 12.2 per 100,000,” for example. Not just that, we need to know the trend. “Farmer suicide has gone up to 15 per 100,000 in 2008, from 12 in 1997.” (These figures are made up and not to be taken literally.)

The piece by Deb is unfortunately typical of such reporting. Perhaps word limits don’t permit a fuller treatment of the subject by the reporter. But even then, surely one can glean from just looking around that India’s starving hundreds of millions is a symptom of a deeper malaise, and mention that however briefly in the article. Instead the overall impression one gets from the article is that somehow evil multinational corporations are behind all the unimaginable misery and it is a compassionate government which is trying its best to fix the problem.

It is not my case that MNCs are really benevolent charitable organizations. They are in the business for profit, and can be as ruthless as they are often reported to be. You cannot wish them away, although you could legislatively force them to keep off your property. But that comes at a cost — there are benefits to having MNCs around. The challenge is to control them such that the benefits exceed the costs. Which brings us to the one agency which lies at the crux of the matter — the government. [Source: The Starving 800 Million in India. June 2011.]

There’s more but as Napoleon said, “Not tonight, Josephine.”

Yesterday while brewing my morning cup of coffee I saw through the kitchen window a huge plume of thick black smoke rising from the neighboring housing complex. A massive fire was evidently under way. The column of smoke ominously rose into the clear blue sky and I wondered what caused it. Perhaps it started as a kitchen fire or an electrical fire, I could not tell. Within minutes a dozen fire fighting units came rushing down the street, their wailing sirens shattering the morning calm. A little while later, the black plume started getting shades of white, indicating that the water jets from the fire tenders were working to control the blaze. Within an hour, the fire was over. The episode led me to reflect on the nature of fire and the visceral human reaction to it.

Fire is one of the most awesomely destructive forces of nature that we ever encounter. An out-of-control fire can devastate an entire neighborhood or even a city in a matter of hours. Years ago I witnessed the chilling spectacle of an entire hillside on fire — the Oakland firestorm of 1991. It left 25 dead, destroyed over 3,300 houses and 400 apartments, burnt 1,500 acres, and caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damages.

Civilization has to contend with fire. Indeed, the progress of civilization is also the story of humanity’s ability to use fire as a means to beneficial ends. Merely focusing on the devastating effects of fires that have gone out of control either accidentally or through malicious intent would be silly at best. The damage accidental fires cause is huge but on balance the benefits of the use of fire for human welfare is staggeringly incalculable.

Not only have humans learned how to use fire but having seen the harm uncontrolled fire can cause, have figured out ways to limit the damage. We use fire in our dwellings but, in recognition of the harm of accidental or malicious fires, we also have fire fighting forces in the our cities. We have also figured out a way to recover from loss due to fire by spreading the financial risk by creating institutions that provide insurance.

Yesterday’s fire and the rapid response from the police and the fire brigade was an example of the occasional fire and how society has learned to live with it. We don’t ban kitchens or electrical wiring at home just because when (not if) a fire breaks out, it causes lot of damage. Instead of banning the use of fire, we deal with it. We have fire codes, we have fire insurance, and we have fire fighters and fire engines.

Anyone who goes on a rant about why fire is an unmitigated evil, and how we should ban the use of fire in any civilized society, is a nutjob who should be treated with derision and ridicule at best. If the rant is recorded and put on display on YouTube for all the world to watch and marvel at, the comments should reflect the absurdity of the claim. Should but it could as well lead to admiration from viewers who have not critically examined the rant.

You don’t usually come across rants on the use of fire but there are heaps of videos on YouTube of people ranting about the evils of “neo-liberalism,” of “neo-classical economics,” of “globalization,” and “multinational corporations,” of rising inequality, and profits. These people need to go back to school and understand that nothing in this material world of ours is without risk, that all human institution are imperfect, that the benefits could be great compared to the costs, that inequality in outcome can never be entirely eradicated without total destruction of society, that profits have social utility, that systems have to be evaluated in their entirety and not only partially, that sometimes the obviously easy remedy can be worse than the disease, that humans are generally motivated by self-interest but even then that selfish drive can be socially beneficial under easily obtainable conditions, that superficial observation is not a substitute for rigorous analytical thinking, that the distinction between prices and costs is worth noting, that corporations are an invention that has helped humanity immensely, that globalization has helped hundreds of millions of ordinary people and not just multinational corporations, . . . , and a few other things as well.

What about the P. Sainath video that I mentioned in my last post, you may ask. I was coming to that.

As a reporter on the ground, he’s good. He’s very, very good. He tells it like he sees it. If you can’t actually go to the so-called grassroots, you have Mr Sainath to observe and report. As a journalist reporting facts he is as good as you need one to be. However, if you need to understand the implications of the facts he reports, you will have to look elsewhere. Sainath is a good journalist but his understanding of the economic causes of the problems he observes is abysmally inaccurate and fundamentally flawed. Read him for his reportage but when it comes to the implications of the data he reports, and his analysis of the causes and what’s to be done to fix the problems, it is best to ignore him. Unfortunately, most of his audience are a bit more clueless than he is and they get taken in by his rhetoric.

Here’s Sainath’s talk at the University of Texas, Austin, of 6th April 2011 titled, “Mass Media vs Mass Reality: From Farm to Field to Wall Street Deals.”

It’s an instructive talk. The main lesson I take away from it is that there’s much profit in the manufacturing discontent industry. I wish it were a cottage industry but unfortunately it isn’t. It’s much more than that: it’s as much of a multinational global industry as the multinationals that it so vehemently opposes. It seeks to promote and sell its branded products — discontent and victim-hood which I wrote about in my last post — globally, and its captains seek its profits as assiduously as any CEO of a multinational selling soap.

I want to deconstruct that talk in a bit. For now, I leave you to take a look at it. As I said, it is instructive and well worth the time. The lesson can be titled, “How to misinterpret the world and make a killing at the same time.” I don’t wish to impute dishonorable motives on his part. The most charitable interpretation is that he is misguided. Perhaps he is simply ignorant and to a degree that he is ignorant of his own ignorance.

Then I had visitors. I think they were important visitors although you may disagree. In any case, major time sinks. Blame those visitors, not me. Then of course there’s my roommate. The guy does not pull his weight around the apartment and I have to take care of things around the house. He’s to blame.

You may say that perhaps I should be prioritizing better. You may say that I should know how I should allocate my time better and not waste it on surfing the web. But really I am an innocent victim of circumstance. Yeah, that’s it. I am a victim. I am the injured party, and I claim “the holiness of always being the injured party” as Maya Angelou so eloquently put it.

At this point you may object saying that I am making excuses, rather transparent and flimsy ones at that. Perhaps you’re right but I am taking my cues from very important and famous people. I learn from examples. My greatest inspiration is our dearly beloved fearless leader, Dr. Manmohan Singh. He is unable to do the right thing because he is — as he readily and frequently asserts — bound by circumstances.

It’s never his fault. Every crappy thing he does, he does because he is a victim of this, that or the other. He’s in control but he is not in control. He is the most powerful political figure in India and yet he is powerless to do anything at all. If you notice the contradiction in that, you are one step ahead of Dr Singh. And may I remind you that he is a shining example of probity and moral excellence. I am merely following his example in attributing his failures to everyone and everything else. I refuse to take responsibility and with that I absolve myself of taking any corrective actions whatsoever.

This refusal to take responsibility is not limited to the high and the mighty. Perfectly ordinary people do it too. A few years ago a good friend of mine came to me with his tale of woe. His marriage had hit a rough patch. His wife, Urvashi (not the actual name, to protect the utterly blameless) had arrived at the totally reasoned position that my friend was the cause of all her troubles, personal and professional. According to her, she was perfect and was an ideal wife, while he was the personification of evil. She was the victim of an evil genius. The marriage was on the rocks because he needed to change. She, on the other hand, being perfect, had nothing to change. After all, who can reasonably expect her to step down from her perfection and make changes, eh?

It does not take a marriage counselor to guess that that marriage did not end up happily.

Just recently another friend told me about her teenage son. The son was the “victim” of unreasonable parents, messed up teachers, corporate greed (cell phone companies and the makers of electronic gadgets), and so on. It was all a massive conspiracy arrayed against him and it threatened his very existence. The universe owed him happiness and it was not delivering. As he was a victim, he was blameless and he could not take any responsibilities for fixing the situation.

There are endless examples of people blaming others for their troubles. No doubt you have given in to the temptation of declaring yourself a victim some time or the other. I know I have, and I feel ashamed for doing it. It’s an universal human failing to deflect blame from oneself, “an admirable evasion,” as Shakespeare put it so beautifully. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”

Playing the victim part in the great game of life isn’t just for individuals. Groups do it often enough and do it quite successfully — if success is appropriately defined. Entire collectives of people make it a way of life, of accusing others of oppressing them. Sometimes the claimed oppression cuts across great swathes of geography and centuries of time. Minorities, we are told in India, are victims, and they have been victims for hundreds of years. And having donned the mantle of the oppressed, they can not only do no wrong but are not required to do anything to help themselves. They are simply entitled, and as the aforementioned erudite and wise prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh — let’s not forget a victim by his own estimation and in his own right — said, “the minorities have a first claim to India’s prosperity.”

Being oppressed at once sanctifies one’s existence and relieves one of any responsibility at all. That responsibility is the burden of the other. My roommate or my spouse, or my co-workers, or my friends — they are responsible for the disaster that my life is. If only they took their responsibility seriously, I would be a success.

The immorality of this victim position aside, the consequences of this attitude are serious. Successful people don’t play the victim. Not only they don’t play the victim, they refuse to be victims. Successful people take responsibility for their failures and their shortcomings. They are in control. They choose how and on what terms they meet the world. It is not that successful people never make mistakes. They do, but built into the responsibility-taking mechanism is the way to correct for their mistakes and continue to be in control. Successful people don’t whine and complain that the universe owes them.

Unsuccessful people play the victim and, in time, consent to being victims because that’s how they define themselves. They don’t see themselves as winners but compete to be losers. They loudly proclaim that they are more oppressed, more poor, more powerless, more worthless — and therefore more deserving of charity, more deserving of consideration, more deserving of handouts — more deserving and “more equal” than others.

This attitude of being helpless innocent victims of external forces simultaneously absolves them of any responsibility for their sorry predicament and excuses them from exerting any effort in solving their own problems. They themselves block their way out of trap of their own making.

It seems to me that success and ability to assume responsibility are causally related, and the direction of causality is from being responsible to being successful. I should hasten to add that by “successful” I do not mean that one is rich, although being materially comfortably off is a necessary — but not the only — component of being successful. One does not have to be a millionaire to be successful. Success, as I see it, is that state of being where one is not in conflict with oneself, with others, and with nature — in that order. It is quite feasible to be only modestly materially well off and yet be successful in the sense defined above; conversely, one can be fabulously wealthy and still be miserable due to conflicts, internal or external.

To be a victim, one has to be party to a conflict. The relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor is not one of amicable friendship. If one is determined to be a victim, one has to be engaged in conflict — and manufacture a conflict if there isn’t one. Absent conflict, there would not be a victim.

The world is not, and never has been, a place of unfettered peace and tranquility. There have been and there will continue to be conflict. The modern world is unique in the sense that it has given rise to conditions that conflicts are manufactured for the sole purpose of manufacturing victims. Being a victim is good business in some parts of the world and thus comes into being the industry that manufactures victims and victim-hood by the truckloads.

The manufacturing victim-hood industry is large and flourishing. It has a superbly efficient supply chain, stretching from the highest political peaks to the lowliest man on the journalism totem pole. The prime minister Dr Singh has figured out that not only is he a powerless victim, but he is also the protector of hundreds of millions of other victims. The top journalists generally don’t claim to be victims themselves (unless they get caught with their pants down, in which case they squeal like stuck pigs) but do declare loudly whole sections of the population to be victims. These people make an enviably decent living from the culture of manufactured victim-hood.

Just a couple of days ago I was reminded of how lucrative this victim-hood industry is. I was asked on twitter to comment on a talk by P. Sainath. The video is on YouTube. I watched it — the whole hour and fifteen excruciating minutes of it. I watched it because I am like that only — a victim of the demands that people make on my time. But since I have watched it, I will comment on it tomorrow.

Sorry but I will have to call it quits for now. Don’t blame me. I am not at fault. I am just a victim of the tyranny of time.

Why? Because, as Sam puts it in the addendum to his post, “it is simply a fact that, in the year 2012, suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon. If you grant this, it follows that applying equal scrutiny to Mennonites would be a dangerous waste of time.”

Before I go on, let me point you to a video that Sam Harris links to in his piece. I must declare that watching it was not good for my health, as it raised my blood pressure to dangerous levels. Watch it at your own risk. A toddler in a wheelchair with a cast on his leg being minutely scrutinized for explosives!

I, as much as the next guy, would not like to be a victim of a terrorist bombing of a commercial jetliner. It’s a fact of the modern air transportation system that there are groups which keep trying to kill innocents by the planeloads, and these groups are overwhemingly jihadi. The security apparatus which costs billions of dollars is – in part – a response to the threat of terrorism. Not just truckloads of money, it is costly in terms of delay and needless aggravation. No one touched by it (literally and figuratively) likes it, with the exception of those employees of the “security theater” who get their jollies from groping people. We have to live with this reality but that does not mean that the whole exercise should not be as rational as possible. Rationality and sanity dictate that at the very least, the process should be efficient and effective.

When everyone is presumed to be a suicide bomber with equal probability, precious resources are wasted in subjecting clearly harmless people to embarrassing harassment. The time and effort wasted is not just an exercise in futility but allows the dangerous possibility of letting real terrorists get through the security shield.

Bombs, guns and sharp objects do kill people but their are only the instruments — they are not the ultimate cause of the death and destruction. For that we have to look to the motives of the person boarding a flight. To distinguish between a harmless 3-year old toddler or an 85-year old granny, and a potential suicide bomber requires at the very least some judgement and the ability to assess humans. This ability is demonstrably lacking in too many of those who are employed by the security system of airports.

I never had a fear of flying but going through airport security (whether in the US, Germany, Mexico or India) scares me witless these days because I realize that the people in charge of security are brainless automatons who are merely following orders. They cannot distinguish between the abstract ideas of possibility and probability. Yes, it is possible that the toddler, despite all appearances, is really being used as a live bomb by the family hellbent on committing suicide. It’s also possible that I will win the Super Lotto this week. It’s possible but it is improbable: the probability is about 140 million to one, against.

Sam Harris is always an engaging writer and that piece of his does not disappoint. Here’s a bit:

Although I don’t think I look like a jihadi, or like a man pretending not to be one, I do not mean to suggest that a person like me should be exempt from scrutiny. But other travelers fit the profile far less than I do. One glance at these innocents reveals that they are no more likely to be terrorists than walruses in disguise . . .

While leaving JFK last week, I found myself standing in line behind an elderly couple who couldn’t have been less threatening had they been already dead and boarding in their coffins. I would have bet my life that they were not waging jihad. Both appeared to be in their mid-eighties and infirm . . .

After much preparation, the couple proceeded toward the body scanner, only to encounter resistance . . . This imposed obvious stress on two harmless and bewildered people and caused considerable delay for everyone in my line. I turned to see if anyone else was amazed by such a perversion of vigilance. The man behind me, who could have played the villain in a Bollywood film, looked unconcerned.

. . . my wife and I once accidentally used a bag for carry-on in which I had once stored a handgun—and passed through three airport checkpoints with nearly 75 rounds of 9 mm ammunition. While we were inadvertently smuggling bullets, one TSA screener had the presence of mind to escort a terrified three-year-old away from her parents so that he could remove her sandals (sandals!). Presumably, a scanner that had just missed 2.5 pounds of ammunition would determine whether these objects were the most clever bombs ever wrought. Needless to say, a glance at the girl’s family was all one needed to know that they hadn’t rigged her to explode.

Sam has an excellent brain no doubt but what’s more, he has the cojones to say it like he sees it. He predictably received tons of hate mail because of that blog post of his. But Sam is an all too rare exception. Not everyone who believes that profiling is a good idea is going to come out and say it. They don’t because it is not politically correct to do so. We live in dangerous times, made all the more dangerous because of the incredible stupidity of the politically correct. Political correctness is a disease and while it may not kill humanity, it will definitely cripple it.

Let me paraphrase H. L. Mencken, that old devil whom I admire immensely. I substitute “democracy” and “anti-democrat” with “political correctness” and “anti-politically correct person” in the following quote:

Political correctness, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-politically correct person is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.

The US is moving gradually and inexorably towards a disastrous culture of political correctness. Who gains? Follow the money. The security theater in US involves spending in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. Absent political correctness, security can be ensured for perhaps a fraction of the costs. So for those who are making money in the wasteful expensive system today are quite happy to promote political correctness to trump reason and sanity.

The lesson I take away is that regardless of whether it is a rich country like the US, or a poor country like India, the government can be relied upon to deliberately mess up any job as long as there’s money to be made in the mess up. (Note that I eschewed using the f-word twice since this is a family blog.)

~ ~ The Low Library, Columbia University

Rajesh’s point is that we know what needs to be done to transform India, for it to become a developed country. He therefore talked about the “how”. We have to change India’s governance. As he put it, “. . . the road map is there, what’s missing is the driver; the vision is there; what’s missing is the leadership, and the will and vision to implement it . . . “.

He talked about the need to change the policies that got us into the present state. Those policies derived from the objectives of the kind of governments India has had — extractive and exploitative. I will not repeat his arguments here as you may as well hear it as Rajesh said it in the conference.

Let me add my two bits here. India had just about started moving in the late ’90s. It was not sprinting but neither was it stuck in the mud. A modest degree of liberalization had given it the freedom to break out of the socialist chains that tied it down since independence. Though still mostly chained, India was at last limping along, and many of us saw a glimmer of hope. We earnestly prayed that the economy will be further liberalized. Liberalization — the act of making free — was after all the whole idea behind India’s independence from British Raj.

But it was not to be. The Indian electorate, in its infinite wisdom, dealt a serious blow to India. The UPA, led by the Congress took over India’s fate in 2004. Then when post the 2009 elections the UPA continued to rule India, India’s fate was sealed. Where before it was merely limping, the UPA crippled India. India was not moving ahead, for sure. But what’s worse, the UPA began dragging the crippled India back. Read what’s happening to India now and weep for all the unnecessary misery that has been imposed on it by the UPA.

It will be a long time before India can recover the lost ground. But first we have to stop the back-slide. It is hard not to despair but we have to keep hoping that better sense will prevail among the voters of India, especially the middle-class which has the most to lose. We have to wake up to the reality and not pretend that the UPA led by Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi is not actually hell-bent on destroying India for the personal enrichment of Ms Maino and company.

I spent the next few days with a friend, IG, who teaches macro at Haverford University. I know little macro and like it even less. But IG and I have interesting conversations on the nature of reality and other such pointless but essential topics.

My next stop was in a lovely little town in New Jersey. For two days I was the guest of Mr & Mrs V Kumar. Yesterday, Rajesh arrived from India in the afternoon. I picked him up at Newark International and we went directly from the airport to meet with Rajiv Malhotra in Princeton, New Jersey. Today we spent some time in Manhattan — much of it in book stores — and then met a couple of friends (Alok and Tulika) for dinner at a restaurant called Vatan. While it is very highly rated, it does nothing for a Bengali such as yours truly because it is a vegetarian joint. Dinner for four sets you back close to $200, which in my books is a crime and a half.

I am writing this from the Westin Hotel in Jersey City where I will be till I get back home on Monday evening. Rajesh will come to California with me and then go back to Mumbai next Friday.

Walked along the waterfront today. The weather has been awesome. To top it all, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. I took lots of pretty pictures. Perhaps I should put them up on the web.

Alright, that’s it for now. Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

[Image stolen from Kanchan Gupta.]

Although all but forgotten by America’s 20 million would-be yoginis, clad in their finest Lululemon, Vivekananda was the Bengali monk who introduced the word “yoga” into the national conversation. In 1893, outfitted in a red, flowing turban and yellow robes belted by a scarlet sash, he had delivered a show-stopping speech in Chicago. The event was the tony Parliament of Religions, which had been convened as a spiritual complement to the World’s Fair, showcasing the industrial and technological achievements of the age.

On its opening day, September 11, Vivekananda, who appeared to be meditating onstage, was summoned to speak and did so without notes. “Sisters and Brothers of America,” he began, in a sonorous voice tinged with “a delightful slight Irish brogue,” according to one listener, attributable to his Trinity College–educated professor in India. “It fills my heart with joy unspeakable…”

Then something unprecedented happened, presaging the phenomenon decades later that greeted the Beatles (one of whom, George Harrison, would become a lifelong Vivekananda devotee). The previously sedate crowd of 4,000-plus attendees rose to their feet and wildly cheered the visiting monk, who, having never before addressed a large gathering, was as shocked as his audience. “I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world,” he responded, flushed with emotion. “I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.”

I feel a kinship to Swami Vivekananda–which arises not merely from my being a Bengali and a Hindu like he was. It’s more of an intellectual kinship that transcends space and time. Swamiji had the power to move people spiritually and emotionally. I knew that George Harrison was influenced by Indian thought but I did not know that the path lay through Vivekananda:

“No doubt the vast majority of those present hardly knew why they had been so powerfully moved,” Christopher Isherwood wrote a half century later, surmising that a “strange kind of subconscious telepathy” had infected the hall, beginning with Vivekananda’s first words, which have resonated, for some, long after. Asked about the origins of “My Sweet Lord,” George Harrison replied that “the song really came from Swami Vivekananda, who said, ‘If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must perceive it.’ ”

The teachings of Vedanta are rooted in the Vedas, ancient scriptures going back several thousand years that also inform Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. The Vedic texts of the Upanishads enshrine a core belief that God is within and without—that the divine is everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) is another sacred text or gospel, whereas Hinduism is actually a coinage popularized by Vivekananda to describe a faith of diverse and myriad beliefs.

Vivekananda’s genius was to simplify Vedantic thought to a few accessible teachings that Westerners found irresistible. God was not the capricious tyrant in the heavens avowed by Bible-thumpers, but rather a power that resided in the human heart. “Each soul is potentially divine,” he promised. “The goal is to manifest that divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal.” And to close the deal for the fence-sitters, he punched up Vedanta’s embrace of other faiths and their prophets. Christ and Buddha were incarnations of the divine, he said, no less than Krishna and his own teacher, Ramakrishna.

Swami Vivekananda was valued for what he represented — Indian thought — and recognized by some of the brightest minds in America. One of them was Nicola Tesla. A few years ago I came across a wonderful documentary on Tesla. (I will dig up the reference later.) There I got to know that Swami Vivekananda and Tesla had met.

[Sahah] Bernhardt, in fact, introduced him to the electromagnetic scientist Nikola Tesla, who was struck by Vivekananda’s knowledge of physics. Both recognized they had been pondering the same thesis on energy—in different languages. Vivekananda was keenly interested in the science supporting meditation, and Tesla would cite the monk’s contributions in his pioneering research of electricity. “Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic prana and akasha and the kalpas [time],” Vivekananda wrote to a friend. “He thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go to see him next week to get this mathematical demonstration. In that case Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations.” For the monk from Calcutta, there were no inconsistencies between science, evolution and religious belief. Faith, he wrote, must be based upon direct experience, not religious platitudes.

As I said before, the WSJ piece is quite delightful. But I have one tiny disagreement. It is this:

Vivekananda’s influence bloomed well into the mid-20th century, infusing the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, George Santayana, Jane Addams, Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller, among assorted luminaries. And then he seemed to go into eclipse in the West. American baby boomers—more disposed to “doing” than “being”—have opted for “hot yoga” classes over meditation. At some point, perhaps in the 1980s, an ancient, profoundly antimaterialist teaching had morphed into a fitness cult with expensive accessories.

The claim that Vivekananda “infusing the work of Mahatma Gandhi” is untenable. Swami Vivekananda exhorted people to be strong, while Gandhi’s call to Indians (and anyone else who would care to listen) was passivity and resignation. Gandhi told people to surrender passively in the face of evil. India has indeed followed Gandhi’s path and rejected Swamiji’s. Examples of that would fill volumes but let me just point out one simple instance.

Auranzeb was one of the many tyrannical rulers of India who slaughtered Indians wholesale. One of the major thoroughfares of the capital of India prominently bears his name. One can understand that Pakistan celebrates those who invaded and subjugated India but it is absolutely puzzling to see India do so. Why? The answer must be because Indians are weak. I believe that the day that Indians throw off the yoke of subjugation will be the day that India embarks on the path to emancipation and freedom.

Weak people don’t have the freedom to take what is best and what is good for them. Instead they are forced to take whatever is least threatening to their overlords. The English language main stream media of India is what it is because it is filled with weak people doing what they are allowed to do by the neo-colonial rulers of India. An article praising Swami Vivekananda would be unthinkable in the Indian MSM.

Imagine if Vedanta and yoga were to be introduced as part of the curriculum in Indian schools. You bet there would be howls of protests from all corners of India. Vedanta and yoga — what Swamiji meant by the word “religion” — are not for the weak. The intellectuals and seekers of the West who came in contact with Vivekananda and the message he embodied were strong. They freely drank deep from the well of Indian wisdom.

. . . Christopher Isherwood and his friend Aldous Huxley, who wrote the introduction to the 1942 English-language edition of “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,” a firsthand account (originally published in India in 1898) described by Huxley as “the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality.” Nikhilananda, Salinger’s guru, did the translation, with assistance from Huxley, Joseph Campbell and Margaret Wilson, the daughter of the late president.

Huxley and Isherwood were introduced to Vedanta in the Hollywood Hills in the late 1930s by their countryman, the writer Gerald Heard. In a fitting counterpart to the New York Center, the Hollywood Vedanta society was likewise run by a scholarly and charismatic monk, Prabhavananda, who initiated the English trio of writers.

Like Nikhilananda, Prabhavananda was a magnet for the intelligentsia, and his lectures often attracted the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and W. Somerset Maugham (and led to his writing “The Razor’s Edge”). Inspired by Isherwood—who briefly lived at the center as a monk—Greta Garbo asked if she too might move in. Told that a monastery accepts only men, Garbo became testy. “That doesn’t matter!” she thumped. “I’ll put on trousers.”

Henry Miller, who made headlines with his torrid and banned “Tropic of Cancer,” visited with Prabhavananda at the Hollywood center, devoured a small library of Vedanta books and settled down in Big Sur in 1944. Throughout his memoir, “The Air Conditioned Nightmare,” Miller invokes Vivekananda as the great sage of the modern age and the consummate messenger to rescue the West from spiritual bankruptcy.

The supreme irony is that India itself needs rescuing from spiritual bankruptcy — all the while when India itself has the world’s largest stock of spiritual capital safely locked away. As they say in Hindi, दिये के नीचे अँधेरा (“it’s dark right under the lamp”.) Perhaps centuries of slavery has robbed Indians of the discriminating faculty and the intelligence to recognize true wealth and wisdom.

Isherwood’s commitment to Vedanta, like Salinger’s, was unswerving and lifelong. Over the next 20 years, he co-translated with Prabhavananda the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali’s “Yoga Aphorisms” and Shankara’s “Crest Jewel of Discrimination,” and was the author of several books and tracts on Vivekananda and Ramakrishna.

Alright, I have quoted enough from the WSJ piece. It’s a fairly long piece and I recommend it in its entirety. Here’s one last bit from it.

India has scheduled a yearlong party to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Vivekananda’s birth, beginning on January 12, 2013. There will be plenty of readings of his four texts on yoga as a spiritual discipline. Nine volumes chronicle his talks, writings and ruminations, from screeds against child marriage to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to his pet goats and ducks. But if there were a single takeaway line that boils down his teachings to one spiritual bullet point, it would be “You are not your body.” This might be bad news for the yoga-mat crowd. The good news for beleaguered souls like Salinger was Vivekananda’s corollary: “You are not your mind.”

[Read more on Swami Vivekananda in this blog.]

Economic growth and development has held the attention of some absolutely brilliant people for at least a couple of centuries. For instance, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” was published in 1776. Others have walked quite far along the way he showed, and have over the years established new directions and pushed the frontiers of our understanding of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. We have at our fingertips an immense treasure of collective wisdom and insight into how we can solve our own problems.

Development is a complex topic because the world is complex. The world is complex because it is heterogeneous. If it were homogeneous temporally and spatially, the problem of development would not have been complicated. The specifics of the location in time and place does not allow for a general one-size-fits-all kind of solution. But useful generalizations still exist and our job is to understand how to adopt and adapt them to the specifics of our case. This is why we need specialists.

We are forever indebted to specialists. Just look around our everyday lives and we will notice specialization everywhere. Everything that I use was made by people who specialize in making them. The food, the clothes, the electronics, the infrastructure, the books, the . . . you name it, it was done by a specialist. Adam Smith called it the division of labor.

No one can be equally good at everything. The greatest unintended harm comes from people who believe that they are good at things that they basically suck at. Let’s say Mr G is good at getting people organized and mobilized. But because of his success in that, he thinks that he is the cat’s meow when it comes to formulating economic policy. But in truth, he absolutely sucks at it. I think it is because success goes to one’s head and soon enough the person gets trapped in the illusion that he knows it all. It’s a problem of a bit too much and a bit too little ego.

Too much ego in the sense that the person is blind to his own limitations. A bit too little ego because if one was supremely confident, then admitting that one does not know it all does not endanger one’s self-worth. Only those who are confident of their own knowledge can freely seek and confidently accept what they don’t know. They are the ones who hire others more intelligent than themselves.

India’s disastrous journey down the immiserizing road to socialist heaven was initiated by one who did not know his own limitations. Analytical and empirical evidence abounded which showed that socialism is a sure formula for ensuring poverty. One just had to be smart enough to ask for directions, and scores of people who specialized in the subject would have been happy to help. In fact, some of them, like Milton Friedman, even came to India to give freely of their hard-earned expertise. India itself had home-grown wisdom, and wise men and women. Unfortunately, India was destined to be led into poverty and irrelevance.

It’s not too late. India needs competent leaders who, first of all, truly care about India’s prosperity, and second of all, understand that they need good counsel from intelligent people who have specialized in working out the solutions. How can we help? By demanding competent leaders. Vote wisely because that is our only hope of rescuing India — and ourselves.

Vision does not win you elections. Which is why Indian elections have not seen the election of a single visionary leader. Elections are a popularity contest. Being a visionary will never win any popularity contests.

In a “democracy” it is not possible for the leader to be anything more than the essential character of the people. Take Dr Manmohan Singh. He represents the will of the people with such high fidelity that he has kept that job for over eight years.

(I know that he did not win any elections and that he was appointed to the job by the Italian woman Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi. Most observers credit the success of the Congress party to her and rightly so: a lot of Indians vote for anyone associated with the Nehru-Gandhi family. Therefore, Dr Manmohan Singh represents the will of the people through the agency of Ms Maino.)

It is not politically correct to say this but realistically speaking, the average voter is not particularly wise or even smart. In general, voters are myopic, ignorant, bigoted and irrational. Consequently, their will as expressed in elections usually gives rise to “leaders” who are myopic, ignorant, bigoted and irrational. Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi is the perfect combination of irrationality, bigotry and ignorance, and note how many proclaim him to be India’s prime minister.

I am convinced that the most successful politicians are certainly intelligent and street smart. Politics is tough business and the competition is harsh enough that it weeds out the stupid. Laloo Prasad did not get handed all the loot — he acquired it because he was better at stealing than his competitors.

What about the progenitor of the Nehru-Gandhi-Maino clan, Mr Jawaharlal Nehru himself — isn’t he hailed as a visionary and wasn’t he one? Not really. I see him as an anti-visionary. A visionary is someone, as noted before, who can see what others cannot see. An anti-visionary is someone who cannot even see what others have seen.

By the time Nehru got to dictate India’s fate, a lot of very smart people had seen that communistic command and control systems could not (and did not) work. They had written volumes on the failures of socialism and the inherent dangers it poses to economic growth and prosperity. These people were not obscure recluses — instead they were some of the most celebrated economists of those times.

Nehru was not an illiterate villager. He was literate and not just that, fancied himself to be an intellectual. It is quite possible that Nehru had the opportunity to read F. A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” There are two possibilities, neither of which speak very highly of Nehru.

First, he never read Hayek. The mind boggles that a person who thought it was his destiny to rule an impoverished country did not bother to find out what ought to be done by reading as widely as possible those works that would likely inform the topic. Perhaps he was just arrogant and thought that he knew it all.

Second, he read Hayek but he did not understand what he read. There is the first degree stupid — not being able to originate the idea oneself. The second degree stupid is when the idea does not register even when explicitly told about it. Even if one is not smart enough to discover some truth on one’s own, one should not be so dumb as to not even understand them when explained at great length.

Politicians cannot be great visionaries but that does not mean that they cannot be smart enough to borrow the vision of visionaries. They can learn from the wise and the insightful. They can stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, to see farther. The problem with Nehru was that he was too arrogant to even realize that he did not understand. The essential humility that truly intelligent people have arises from knowing that they don’t know it all.

Nehru’s descendants illustrate that old adage about the fruit not falling far from the tree: they all were too stupid to be aware of their own ignorance. But who can blame them? They were told that they were visionaries and they believed it since it felt good to believe. When followers insist that the leader is wise and wonderful, does the leader have much of a choice but to go along?

Walter Adams and James Brock in their book “Adam Smith Goes to Moscow” relate this Polish folktale:

It is said that a wonder-rabbi of Chelm once saw, in a vision, the destruction by fire of the study house in Lublin, fifty miles away. This remarkable event greatly enhanced his fame as a wonder-worker.

Several days later a traveler from Lublin, arriving in Chelm, was greeted with expressions of sorrow and concern, not unmixed with a certain pride, by the disciples of the wonder-rabbi. “What are you talking about?” asked the traveler. “I left Lublin there days ago and the study house was standing as it always has. What kind of wonder-rabbi is that?” “Well, well,” one of the rabbi’s disciples answered, “burned or not burned, it’s only a detail. The wonder is he could see so far.”

It has become part of the Indian folklore that Nehru was a visionary. No proof necessary and no doubt ever expressed. The same goes for Gandhi, the man who arrogantly dictated the truth to others. It was not some truth that he had discovered and generously shared. No, he dictated the truth. And often enough, he threatened to kill himself if people did not obey.

I think it will take a few more decades before Indians wake up to the idea that India’s leaders have been anti-visionaries. Midway along the continuum from anti-visionary to visionary is the region of intelligent and clever. With time, Indian political leaders will come from that bit of the spectrum because the average voter would have become somewhat intelligent. And being smart and clever, those leaders will be able to borrow the vision of visionaries. But it will never be that any great visionary will ever become a great political leader. Specialization just does not allow that.

Update: Here’s Google’s April Fools joke.

Ricardo ushered the others out and then came to drag me out of the room. (He’s the one at the front of the room in this picture.)

The whole school was evacuated and assembled in the front yard.

Jeanene addressing the assembled school. She spoke in Spanish and I have no idea what she said.

We are now back inside. There are some aftershocks but nothing to write home about.

I have been through tons of earthquakes in California. The most intense was the Loma Prieta of 1989. It was on the San Andreas Fault which runs through the San Francisco Bay area. San Andreas is one of many faults in that region. Berkeley sits on the Hayward Fault.

On October 17th, 1989, I was at a technology trade show at the Exposition Center in San Jose when the building started violently shaking. Even today I can vividly recall the scene in my mind’s eye. This one will be memorable too.

A couple of years ago, recalling Mrs Indira Gandhi’s assault on democracy through the suppression of Fundamental Rights, a critic of the Emergency had bitterly commented: “Hitler was Indira and Indira was Hitler!” That comment came after he had drawn some telling comparisons between the Emergency regime of Adolf Hitler and that of Mrs Indira Gandhi. Hitler had imposed Emergency under a constitutional provision, so had Mrs Gandhi. Hitler had killed freedom of speech with censorship, so had Mrs Gandhi. Hitler had a 25-point programme, so did Mrs Gandhi (well, she had a 20-point programme; her younger son, Sanjay, had a five-point programme). A sycophant in Hitler’s camp is believed to have said, “Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler”; Dev Kant Baruah, who was president of the Congress during the Emergency, affirmed his loyalty by declaring, “Indira is India and India is Indira!” There would be other comparisons, too. For instance, Hitler had his Nazi goons, Mrs Gandhi had her Youth Congress thugs. In Hitler’s Germany trains are believed to have run on time, so also in Indira’s India, lending credence to the Government’s claim that “The nation is on the move.”

Yet, despite the stunning similarities that marked free India’s loss of liberty during those joyless 21 months of the Emergency that was clamped on an unsuspecting nation on the night of June 25, 1975, it would be unfair to describe Mrs Gandhi as Herr Hitler. After all, while the Emergency may have witnessed several outrages, including the incarceration of virtually the entire political opposition, the hounding of those who dared raise their voice against the Government, among them a handful of journalists, and the subversion of the Constitution of India to place Mrs Gandhi above the party and the Congress above the nation, but we were spared the sight of men, women and children being marched to concentration camps, adorned with signboards proclaiming ‘Work Liberates’, and their eventual death in gas chambers. The closest we came to this was a silly slogan, “Talk less, work more.” There were two other equally silly slogans that were ubiquitous. “Emergency: An era of discipline,” which was attributed to Gandhian Bhoodan leader Acharya Vinoba Bhave and prominently stamped on postcards and inland letter forms. The other was, “The leader is right, the future is bright.”

Kanchan writes that people were gripped with fear.

Parents worried themselves sick if their children were not home by sunset. Wives panicked if their husbands were late in returning from work. Friends stopped trusting friends; relatives were cautious in what they told each other; Government employees avoided sharing chai and gossip with colleagues; nobody spoke to strangers. You never knew who had been co-opted by the Emergency mukhabarat. In coffee houses, popular among college and university students those days — the brew was cheap and cigarettes were shared — the staff discouraged overcrowding at tables. Schools had to seek prior approval for elocution contests and essay competitions. I recall an incensed Fr Powell cancelling the annual elocution contest at our school after a paan-chewing babu refused to clear the perennial favourite, Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” and accused him of “polluting young minds”.

Whenever I see yet another scheme, university, road, airport or college named after Mrs Gandhi, I am reminded that in India, criminals often get top billing, and the greater the crime, the higher is the regard that the criminal is held in. Those who harmed India the most are the most venerated. Indians don’t remember anyone who did anything great for India but they certainly keep the memory alive of those who did the most harm. One major avenue in the capital New Delhi is named after a major criminal — Aurangzeb. A more contemporary example is the woman called Mother Teresa. They have named another street in New Delhi after her. I am sure in time to come they will use Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi’s name.

Mrs Indira Gandhi committed an enormous crime against the nation. In time perhaps Indians will learn that the Congress party was the nations greatest enemy, or perhaps they may not. But now at least there is an opportunity for people to know. Back to Kanchan.

But these are frivolous details that do not quite capture the enormity of the crime that was committed in the name of ‘saving’ the nation from the Opposition led by Jayaprakash Narayan. Mrs Gandhi should have resigned after the Allahabad High Court held her guilty of corrupt practices during the 1971 Lok Sabha poll, declared her election from Rae Bareli null and void, and barred her from contesting elections for six years. Instead, Mrs Gandhi imposed Emergency, had the judgement set aside by the Supreme Court, packed off her critics to jails, extended the life of Parliament and subverted the Constitution.

There were horror stories of young men, some in their teens, being picked up and ‘sterilised’ by zealous district officials eager to meet targets set for them. Overnight all goons and thugs became active members of the Youth Congress and took to wearing white kurtas with Chinese collars in deference to their leader, Sanjay Gandhi, whose meteoric rise to power by virtue of being Mrs Gandhi’s son was described by Russi Karanjia as “history’s own answer to our prayers”. The venerable Khushwant Singh, who was then editor of The Illustrated Weekly, was an unabashed supporter of Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, and found nothing wrong with their deeds.

The Congress loves to suppress information. Censorship is a favorite hobby. Kapil Sibal is exhibit A in the present time but Mrs Gandhi set the gold standard.

Newspaper editors had to send galley proofs to censors who would laboriously read through the text, cross out portions they thought were not in conformity with official policy or had a whiff of criticism or simply because they couldn’t understand and and hence were deemed not fit to be published. A copy of next morning’s paper had to be hand-delivered to the censors to prove that the might of their blue pencil had not been defied. Not that too many editors were eager to fall foul of the Emergency regime. In fact, a group of editors marched to Mrs Gandhi’s residence and presented her with a petition pointing out that the censorship laws were not strict enough and needed to be made harsher. As Mr LK Advani was to later famously say, “Asked to bend, many chose to crawl.”

Many still choose to crawl even without being asked to bend. Not only in the Congress, but also in the media.

Another era, another Mrs Gandhi. Perhaps it will soon be time for another “Emergency” since the new Mrs Gandhi may be in danger of being hauled to jail.

My criticism of Islam, as of any other religion, is aimed at its doctrine and the resulting behavior of its adherents. I am not talking about races of people, or nationalities, or any other aspects of culture. And yes, there are more moderate strands of the faith: The Ahmadis, for instance, resemble what many liberal Westerners imagine the “true” face of Islam must be like. I still find their creed disconcerting: According to one of the websites affiliated with this movement, Ahmadis believe that the “Holy Qu’ran is the word of God which is to guide mankind forever, and the Holy Prophet Muhammad was the perfect model of Islamic teachings whose example shall forever be binding on every Muslim to follow.” To my ear, the words “forever” and “perfect” and “every” and “binding” convey the scent of despotism about as well as “a thousand-year Reich”—especially when one considers the actual contents of the Qur’an and the example set by Muhammad. However, the Ahmadis at least claim to believe that jihad “primarily signifies a spiritual, intellectual and moral struggle to reform oneself and others” and to condemn “all use of force except in unavoidable self-defense.” I’m not sure I would want to put these assertions to the test by venturing into an Ahmadi mosque with a fresh batch of cartoons of the Prophet, but the Ahmadis are at least disposed to make the sorts of conciliatory sounds that the religious must make in order to live peacefully in a pluralistic world where most people do not share their favorite superstitions.

[. . .]

. . . we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or, indeed, than when they are intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes have to change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say that makes any sense within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed.) That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history. There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

The only way to know which way is up, ethically speaking, is to honestly assess what people want and what they believe. We must confront the stubborn reality of differing intentions: In every case it is essential to ask, “What would these people do if they had the power to do anything they wanted?”

India is not an Islamic state but the UPA & its “secularists” camp followers play it as one for getting the “minority” votes. Salman Rushdie is not welcome and his book is banned. The Pakistani cricketer turned politician, Imran Khan, refused to attend the India Today Conclave (why the hell have him there in the first place, I wonder) when he learned that Mr Rushdie is somehow involved in it. But he is being true to his faith as a fundamentalist Muslim. In all likelihood, if given the opportunity Mr Khan would send Mr Rushdie to meet his maker and he would become an instant hero of the Islamic world and the prime minister of Pakistan.

But aside from genuine Muslims like Mr Khan, there are quasi-Muslims like Mr Akhilesh Yadav, the newly elected CM of some state. His party won the recent state assembly elections because Muslims voted for it. Mr Yadav is a quasi-Muslim and therefore had to also boycott the India Today conclave (and I again wonder what sort of a dog and pony show that conclave is that it has to invite fundamentalist Muslims and wannabe quasi-Muslims.)

That’s just the way it is.

Atanu's Soup

If you have not checked out My Soup, it is time you did. It’s a tremendous waste of time but fun. (Most waste of time has to be fun otherwise why would anyone waste time?) While there, you must listen to Maria de Barros singing “Nha Mundo.” Pay attention to the sax in the background.

Indians did not get much of a clue about Rajiv Gandhi and the Bofors’ kickback, to take an old example from hundreds of others like it. In those days the sources of information was very successfully tightly controlled by the government. Now of course, retarded lowlifes such as Kapil Sibal and Diggy Singh try their best to throttle the internet but too bad for them, they are unable to succeed in their fascist plans (even though their boss does have some connection to fascism through her dear daddy.)

My guess is that the Indian TV and the English language newspapers will studiously avoid the topic of Sonia Gandhi featuring in that list — because they know what’s good for them. The Congress party too will avoid bringing attention to that Business Insider report.

A couple of years ago, some NRIs in the NY-NJ tri-state region had published an ad in the NY Times about Sonia Gandhi which got the Congress supporters’ knickers in a twist. They sued in some NY court and the judge threw out the case. (I will dig up the details later.) The reaction to the ad predictably drew more attention to the ad.

Fact is that if the Congress were to challenge the report, people will start digging into the question: how much wealth does Sonia Gandhi and her family actually have, and where is it now? It will only help in narrowing down the estimate which ranges from between two to 19 billion US dollars — that’s too wide.

Good things are going to happen.

On Monday, the Indian Patent Office effectively ended Bayer’s monopoly for its Nexavar drug and issued its first-ever compulsory license allowing local generic maker Natco Pharma to make and sell the drug cheaply in India.
. . .
“This could well be the first of many compulsory rulings here,” said Gopakumar G. Nair, head of patent law firm Gopakumar Nair Associates and former president of the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association.

“Global pharmaceutical manufacturers are likely to be worried as a result … given that the wording in India’s Patent Act that had been amended from ‘reasonably priced’ to ‘reasonably affordable priced’ has come into play now.”

The new wording is seen as a lower threshold for compulsory licenses, which can be issued under world trade rules by nations that deem major life-saving drugs to be too costly. The licenses allow them to authorise the local manufacture or importation of much cheaper, generic versions.

Global drugmakers see emerging markets such as India as key growth opportunities, but remain concerned over intellectual property protection. Nair said HIV-related medicines were likely to be the most at risk by compulsory licenses in the future.
. . .
A provision of the Indian Patents Act allows for a compulsory license to be awarded after three years of the grant of patent on drugs that are deemed to be too costly.
. . .
“This (Bayer) case might become a trend-setter, wherein generic players can make copies of patented products,” said Siddhant Khandekar, analyst at ICICI Direct.

“While global giants might not like this, generic companies will benefit along with common people,” he said, adding that the cancer treatment market in India was worth up to 30 billion rupees ($600 million).
. . .
Pfizer has questioned the issue of affordability, saying many Indians are well off and can afford Western medicines.

“There is huge wealth in India,” Pfizer CEO Ian Read told Reuters in London on Monday. “There are maybe 100 million people in India who have wealth equivalent to or greater than the average European or American, who don’t pay for innovation. So this is going to have to be a discussion at some point.”

But groups that campaign for cheap access to drugs in poor countries have welcomed the Bayer ruling.

Medecins Sans Frontieres said the ruling means that new medicines in India that are still under patent, including some of the latest treatments for HIV/AIDS, could potentially have generic versions produced for a fraction of the cost.

“It’s a bold move by the government and it’s a good judgment … which will benefit people,” said Dara Patel, secretary general of the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association, an industry body of Indian companies.

“Drugs to treat heart-related diseases and HIV are costly,” said Patel. “Compulsory licensing will make them available at one-fourth or one-fifth of the price, which is good.”

Now on to my comments. First, I note that “compulsory license” is allowed under world trade rules. The question is how often should this be exercised and what would the fallout be of this kind of court rulings.

There is no doubt that drugmakers will think twice about peddling their drugs in India. But they do have financial clout and if they want (I am not implying that they do), they can buy influence among the politicians and officers of the court. So they can keep a lid on how many cases of compulsory licenses we will see.

This drug issue is not a huge vote-getter (say unlike job reservations) because the politicians cannot really say that this drug will be only available to the minorities, or to this or that caste. Apparently the only bits that Indian politicians feel interested in is whether this or that voting block will vote for them or not. Price discrimination of drugs is not possible in the domestic market and therefore my guess is that politicians can be easily bought by the pharma companies to toe the line about intellectual property and how preventing them from monopoly pricing will cause social harm.

There is a good discussion going on over at Slashdot (hat tip: @achintyasharma) Here’s something I learned by following a link in one of the comments:

A new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry’s claim.

The researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion. [Source: ScienceDaily.com - Jan 2008.]

If you think about the economics of this sort of behavior by the drug companies, it makes sense. Drug discovery is a really costly process. Then there is a limited time that they get patent protection for. During this time, they have the monopoly on the drug.

Monopolies aim to maximize profits, just like any other firm. But they have one advantage over firms in a competitive market: they can set the price. They set such a price which is far above the marginal costs that maximizes their profit. At this price, the quantity demanded is lower than what it would have been if the firm were to set a lower price. Of course at a lower price they may still make profits but lower than the maximum profit they can make.

But here’s the thing. If the demand were to change, the profit maximizing price (and hence the quantity) will also change. So if they can push the demand up, their profits would increase too. That is, by advertising heavily, they shift demand outwards and thus can sell a greater quantity while increasing the price.

So it makes sense that they spend a lot in advertising if it increases their profits on the margin.

Moving on, Mr Read, the Pfizer CEO says that there is huge wealth in India. No doubt about it. But I doubt his estimate that there are 100 million Indians “who have wealth equivalent to or greater than the average European or American.” Wrong. I will not go into the details but the number is closer to 5 million than 100 million.

Even then, it is not whether there are wealthy people in India. The fact is that at prices at which the company maximizes profits in the rich countries, the quantity demanded in a poor country like India would be very small. The profit maximizing monopoly price would be lower in India by a factor of four or five. The Pfizers of the world can continue to increase their global profits if they could sell their drugs at a lower price in India — that is, if they could “price discriminate.”

Here’s an interesting comment in Slashdot:

Bayer would just avoid India completely, and not release their patented drugs until 10-20 years later

To a large part, this tactic is why most countries grant compulsory licensing in at least some instances — to make it impossible for a company to metaphorically “take its ball and go home”. Most countries besides the US take the attitude, “If the IP owner isn’t interested in selling it here, and won’t allow anybody else to sell it here by granting them a license under reasonable terms, we aren’t going to stand in the way of somebody else independently taking the initiative to do an end run around them, make it themselves and sell it here anyway.” India just happens to be notorious (within the pharmaceutical industry) for doing it openly, loudly, and proudly when lifesaving drugs are priced out of reach for most Indians by rent-seeking drug companies.

India is also somewhat unique in that it doesn’t grant or recognize patents for “method of use” or “molecules”, only manufacturing processes. So when finasteride was repurposed in lower-dose form as Propecia for baldness, it wasn’t eligible for a new patent in India. That’s why Propecia is patented and expensive in the US, but costs next to nothing when purchased from India. Likewise, when Indian companies came up with new ways to manufacture atomoxetine (the ingredient in Strattera), they were able to get their own patents and begin selling it, even though the original patent for Strattera was still in effect and valid in India. In the US, you can combine two old drugs in new doses into a new drug, and get it patented for another 17 years. In India, you’d be laughed at (unless you somehow came up with an innovative new manufacturing process that did something differently than just making the two original drugs by their original processes, mixing them together, and pressing them into tablets containing both).

As I was saying, a fascinating topic if you are interested in the economics of monopolies, patent protection and intellectual property right.

I am not very familiar with the subject — only that much that I need for teaching industrial organization courses at UCB. I found a reference online for a book that looks promising. “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. The abstract says:

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

I have not read the book but a quick glance at it says that it will be instructive.

(The book is freely downloadable from the site. This underlines my conviction that you can get a fairly decent education from stuff on the web, provided you have a good guide. In this case, I got the link from a comment on the Slashdot discussion.)

What is economic policy and why does it play such a decisive role? Why are bad economic policies decisive as a sufficient condition for poverty, and why are good economic policies a necessary condition for prosperity? Let’s consider an analogy. There are a set of recommendations that are generally associated with good health and fitness: good nutrition, adequate rest and exercise, a healthy environment, absence of physical and mental stress, etc. Those are necessary for a healthy and long life, but they are not sufficient. Even if you did have all those, you could still get run over by a bus or get a genetically inherited disease. That’s called an “external shock.” Conversely, if a person is a couch potato, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, and eats at McDonalds, that’s sufficient to ensure a short and nasty life. That is, even without the help of adverse external circumstances, one’s internal health policy can lead to disaster.

There is general consensus among most economists – a tribe not particularly known for agreeing with each other – what constitutes good economic policies, policies that lead to material prosperity. An open economy is one of them. Economies that are closed to trade (autarky) or which impose extensive barriers to trade (both domestic and international) needlessly burden themselves. Policies that promote economic freedom are good for the economy. This is not surprising since freedom in all its forms is a good thing, both as an instrument and as an end. In socialist economies, people lack economic freedom. The evident failure of socialist economies relative to the successes of free market economies can be explained analytically. Property rights play a critical role. If your property is subject to arbitrary confiscation by the state, the incentive to produce and save is blunted. If the state, instead of protecting private property becomes a bandit preying on the people, eventual material impoverishment is unavoidable.

While good economic policies are themselves not sufficient for the prosperity of a nation, bad economic policies are sufficient (although not necessary) for the poverty of a nation. If you look carefully at India, India’s poverty is due to bad economic policies, since there’s nothing else even remotely causally connected to it. India is not under foreign domination, it is not subject to repeated colossal natural disasters, it is not composed of absolutely retarded people, it is not under some divine curse, etc. India’s persistent poverty is the result of an easily understandable cause. The proximate cause is bad policies.

All economic policies – good or bad – are naturally made by people. Policymakers are just like the rest of us, with the same human ambitions, failings and drives. They seek to advance their own interests, whatever they may be. Policies are therefore a derivative of the objectives of the top policymakers – who are usually the political leaders – of an economy. Economic policies are a function of the politics of a nation. It is not so much whether a policy is good for the country but rather whether it is good for the political leaders.

Now it could be that some policy which is objectively good is also good for the policymakers. About those we don’t have to worry although how many instances of that actually occur is a different matter. But there are policies which while good for the country, are against the interests of the policymakers. The vast majority of good policies are not in the interests of the policymakers. Why are good policies often not in the interests of the policymakers?

Politicians are interested in continuing to be in power, and if in order to do so they have to sacrifice the general welfare of the country, they will do it. They cannot be blamed for this since this is normal and natural for self-interested creatures such as us. It’s only human. Saints and do-gooders do not generally get to positions of power. The competition to get to the top of the heap is usually intense and only the most battle-hardened bloodied warriors make it to the top.

Every policy – good or bad – has consequences, which is the whole idea behind having policies after all. And every policy has positive and negative consequences. You can have policies that are good for some of the people all of the time, and policies that are good for all of the people some of the time, but there are no polices that are good for all of the people all of the time. (I will leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to test the validity of that generalization.) That implies that every policy will have winners and losers – at least in the short run. In the long run, however, good policies help everyone. (If a policy is not good for some even in the long run, the winners can compensate the losers.)

Good policies are universally good in the long run (by definition, and therefore this is a tautology) but like all policies, they too have short-run winners and losers. If those who lose gang up against the policymakers, the policymakers lose. Therefore it is not in the interests of the politicians to make good policies (which we should stress have long-run benefits) since they care about their own fortunes which they have to make in the short run. Even for the best intentioned policymakers, it is a fine balance that they have to maintain: make good policies that have short run adverse consequences for some voters and run the risk of losing power; or make policies that please their supporters but which are harmful for economic growth in the long run.

To sum up, India is materially impoverished because of bad economic policies. These policies were made (and are being made) by short-sighted myopic self-serving stupid politicians and bureaucrats. The political system selects short-sighted myopic self-serving stupid politicians and bureaucrats. India is a large economy. It has a very large population and therefore a large domestic market. Let’s spell it out: a large domestic market means there are large number of producers and consumers. If there are no external reasons for why the economy does not produce enough, then the reason has to be internal. If Indians as a whole are not congenitally stupid, then we have to conclude that India’s poverty is due to bad economic policies made by terrible policymakers.

The way out is therefore easy to state: change the system so that it selects good people as the policymakers. No amount of futzing around with elections and schemes to uplift the poor will amount to anything other than more of the same.

Did you know that CERN had the world’s first-ever web server? Wonder if the RSS had a hand in that. Can’t rule it out, can you Mr Diggy Singh?

Moving on, the Science and Non-Duality Conference is on October 24-29th, 2012 in San Rafael, California. Their logo is

Clearly SAND is not a secular organization. It is tainted by Hindutva. O the horror!

Seriously though, it makes sense for the Nataraja to be there at the CERN HQ. Shiva as the King of Dancers (nat=dance, raja=king) dances the universe into existence and dances it out of existence. It is a dance of creative destruction. See this for a beautiful exegesis of Tandava, the Great Cosmic Dance of Shiva as the Nataraja.

Carl Sagan’s COSMOS (the PBS TV series which inspired millions to study science) has a nice bit about the Hindu idea of the universe and on the Nataraja. Here’s a short excerpt from that.

Sagan talks about the “Day of Brahma”. (See this for a more accurate number.) Here’s Carl talking about “billions and billions”.

Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite number of deaths and rebirths.

It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the earth or the sun and about half of the time since the big bang. And there are much longer time scales still.

There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who after a 100 Brahma years dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep and the universe dissolves with him, until after another Brahma century he recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic lotus dream. Meanwhile elsewhere there are an infinite number of other universes each with its own god dreaming the cosmic dream…

It makes me proud to think that my ancestors were bright enough to have conceived such ideas as are found in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist philosophy. Indians have much to learn about science and technology from the West but the West has even more to learn from the dharmic philosophies.

Oh, I nearly forgot. Mr Digvijaya Singh is a miserable turd whose abhorrent brown-nosing of the “minorities” is truly puke-worthy.

What according to you will happen in UP?

If there are no Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), the Congress will stand in the fourth position. It will not get more than 25 seats. Probably Mulayam Singh’s party will be number one. Mulayam may also be close to the majority, he may not need any other party. But the consequence is that in the Presidential elections opposition President will be elected. Then I think mid-term poll will be held very soon for the Lok Sabha.

If there must be mid-term poll who do you think will gain – NDA or UPA?

NDA has to enthuse its party workers, particularly the BJP, their party workers are disheartened. In fact some people suggested that I should align with NDA and I have said I am ready. But I wonder what we shall say to people. Congress says development and secularism. Are we going to say the same thing? Then people may not give us much chance. I think we have a better chance if we say we will unite the country on the basis of Hindutva. Because today there is a feeling in Hindus that nobody is talking about them. So that sentiment needs to be captured. If there is an honest projection with a new set of faces, there may be a chance.

It means no Advani?

It means none of them. All those who were there in NDA government. People will not believe them.

It also means no Jaitley, Sushma and all the second rung leaders?

They can be the ministers. But to be the Prime Minister, it has to be a new face. It could be Modi. The problem with him is that, he will not get the majority and other allies will not come with him.

The killings of Muslims in Gujarat will also go against him. Do you think people in South India would vote for Modi?

(laughs) That’s what I mean. He can deliver Gujarat but whether he can deliver in other places, we don’t know. That’s why even BJP also is hesitating to project him as prime ministerial candidate May be. But they don’t have anyone else.

There are predictions that if the Congress gets about 100 seats in Uttar Pradesh, Rahul will take over from Manmohan Singh and if the Congress gets around 50 seats, Rahul will remain as an MP, Manmohan will continue. What do you have to say?

(Laughs) They say a lot of new changes are going to take place in the Congress. Sonia Gandhi has terminal cancer. Rahul is not a very intelligent person, neither is Sonia Gandhi. But Sonia has the backing of Vatican.

That’s what Morarji said of Rajiv Gandhi, that he is not burdened by brains.

Yes, that’s true. But he (Rajiv) was a nationalist.

From the day you appeared in the Rajya Sabha during Emergency and created a sensation and then disappeared, till now, you have fought many a battle. What do you think of yourself and your position in Indian history when you look back?

When I came into politics, I said India needs three or four things to be done. Number one – It must give up socialism. When I said this, everyone was shocked. Ultimately, as a Minister, I got it done. Then, I said that we must have good and strong relations with Israel, which I ensured and it has since happened.

The third thing was that we must improve relations with China, and we should not be so dependent on the Soviet Union. When Morarji Desai became Prime Minister I had got Kailash Manasa sarovar opened. The fourth thing is that India can become a united country if you have a renaissance in Hinduism. I would like people to think of themselves more as Hindus than as Brahmins, Kshatriyas, North Indians or South Indians. I think that in contemporary history maybe things will not be so kind to me, because journalists get influenced by business houses. But when history gets recorded, it will be something like the improvement of the image of Sardar Patel – when he was alive nobody gave him much credit.

But Sardar Patel was considered the modern Bismark of India?

Yes, but those are after words. During his time nobody said so, as people were afraid that it might displease Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru-Gandhi dynasty minus Rajiv?

(Laughs) That’s a big minus. I did not know Jawaharlal Nehru. But as a historian, I think he was a bad Prime Minister. But to Indira Gandhi I was opposed because she was a socialist, pro-Soviet Union and then the Emergency. So, I had every reason to oppose her, and Sonia Gandhi naturally you know she had done a lot of harm to our country.

Now, can I say that your target is Sonia Gandhi?

She is the root cause of all problems. People blame Manmohan Singh, but it is Sonia Gandhi who prevented him from stopping Raja. And she got the biggest share of the bribe amount – of about Rs 36,000 crore.

What do you think about Anna Hazare’s movement or his fight against corruption?

Anna Hazare said corruption will be eliminated only if Jan Lokpal Bill is passed. I did not agree with that.

Do you think Jan Lok pal will come?

No, How can congress commit suicide?

You were close to PV Narasimha Rao. Do you think that he was treated properly by the Congress? Actually PV once told me that he had asked the ministers to do whatever Sonia’s secretary (George) asks them to… But what went wrong? Why had they become enemies?

He should have got Bharatratna for what he did. The economic reforms blue print was prepared by me and he gave political support. Manmohan Singh only implemented it.[1] But everybody gives Manmohan Singh the credit. I think Sonia Gandhi was unhappy with PV because he wouldn’t give up party presidentship for her. She wanted him to remain as Prime Minister and give her the party presidentship. He told her that it has been the Congress tradition to have the Party President as the Prime Minister.

But journalists also say that the Father of Indian economic reforms is Manmohan Singh.[2]

That’s wrong. If he could do all those big economic reforms then as a Finance Minister, what stops him now? So obviously it means that they have been Narasimha Rao’s reforms.

What do you expect the people of India to do now?

We are a very young population with over 70 percent below the age of 35. People have to take more risks. I want the people not to think of money as the final goal. You can’t sacrifice your whole life for making money. The desire for more money is the reason for increased corruption.[3] I will say don’t imitate the West. Learn from our tradition and have the correct view of the history. Don’t learn the British version of our history. I want people to take interest in politics…clean it up…don’t complain!

Where will India be 20 years from now?

India will overtake China in ten years of time.[4] China is going to have very big financial crisis. We will have a budgetary crisis but we are a democratic country so we can improve ourselves. When there is food crisis we had Green Revolution and when there was foreign exchange crisis we had economic reforms and so when we have a budgetary crisis we will have a more efficient government.

NOTES:

[1] Dr Manmohan Singh takes credit for reforms. That is one blatant example of how despicably dishonest Dr Singh is.

[2] Actually Indian journalists do get a lot of things wrong. They are trapped in an echo chamber and they just repeat what they have heard. Critical evaluation of evidence and investigative journalism is not very common among them.

[3] I disagree with Dr Swamy. It is not the desire for money that is the root of corruption. Desire for money (which is a proxy for desire for material goods and for power) is not unnatural or necessarily bad. It’s a mistake to confuse the desire for material gain with unethical and immoral behavior. Corruption is unethical and immoral, and in many cases it is also illegal. The root cause of public corruption is economic control without accountability and transparency.

[4] Actually India overtaking China in 10 years is plainly impossible. So what Dr Swamy says is nonsense. As I always say, a lot of nonsense can be avoided if you just do the arithmetic. Here’s a bit of arithmetic.

Today China’s economy is four times India’s economy. If China continues to grow at 10 percent per year (which it has been doing for the last few decades), in 7 years its economy will be double its current size — or eight times the size of India today. In 10 years, China’s economy will be 10.4 times India’s current economy.

Therefore to overtake China in 10 year’s time, India’s economy will have to expand to say 10.5 times it current size. What’s that rate of growth? That’s a growth rate of over 25 percent per year for 10 years!

The word impossible does not even come close to describing that growth rate. India at the best of times does around 10 percent per year growth rate. The Nehru rate of growth was around 3 percent — and the UPA is doing its best to drag India back to the Nehru rate of growth with its socialist policies.

At 7 percent growth rate, in 10 years India’s economy will be double its current size. China would have increased the lead it has over India. In 10 years, India will continue to be a Third world impoverished nation, and China will be in a different league entirely. You have a fairly large number of Indian voter to thank for that — they vote the Congress & the UPA & and the Nehru-Gandhi-Maino family to bring the country to ruin.