Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

The first time I met Prof. Amartya Sen was after a talk he gave at UC Berkeley. I was then a graduate student there. It must have been around 1997 or thereabouts. At that time I was still learning the basics of my subject.

After his talk, I went up to him and introduced myself. I was not only a fellow Bengali economist (although in training), but we shared the same birthday. How cool was that! He was a Nobel laureate economist, to boot.

“Sir,” I said after introducing myself as a graduate student studying development economics, “we share a birthday.” He said he was pleased to know that. He was gracious and kind. People from Shantiniketan are like that only, as they say in India.

A couple of years later, Sen was back at UC Berkeley for another talk. This time I understood a lot more of the subject than I had at his previous talk. Once again after his talk I went up to him and introduced myself.

“Prof Sen. Pranam. I am Atanu,” I said. Pranam in our dharma conveys respect and reverence.

Without the least hesitation he replied, “Hello, Atanu, I’m happy to see you again.” Before I could remind him of our previous meeting he continued, “I have good news for you. You and I share our birthday with Tibor Scitovsky. He too was born on the 3rd of November. We are in good company.” I am quoting him verbatim.

It’s remarkable that Prof Sen would remember a brief 30-second conversation with a nobody like me from a couple of years before. But there it was. I was delighted. I did not agree with his economics since he is too much of leftist (as Bengali economists tend to be) but it pleased me no end. And I was also happy to know that Scitovsky was a member of our gang of economists born on Nov 3rd.

We are in good company, indeed. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Tibor Scitovsky”

This is a quick update on the previous post, This is the End. The title was poorly chosen. What I should have written was that some changes are due after 23 years of the blog.

A few readers have very kindly left supportive comments letting me know that they’d be happy to contribute. I am delighted. One may ask, why involve money? The happy fact is that I am very comfortably off. As it happens, I have all that I need or even want, and I am not responsible for anyone. Except that I am, by my nature, moved to help those whom I can.

I regularly give to charity. In fact, a family member does the giving because he knows where and how to help, and I settle the account at the end of the year. But every now and then, I come across requests for help from people in my residential complex (it’s huge). I am fortunate that I have the ability to give. Continue reading “Update on Proposed Change”

It’s time to say goodbye. I have been writing this web log for a while. I started it on the recommendation of Rajesh Jain in September 2003 with this post.

Over the years, I have written around 3,300 posts. I estimate that around a third of them are pretty good. I like them. I hope that you too liked some of them.

In the past, before the days of social media, daily readership was around 5,000 but over time it has decreased to around 1,000. Not too shabby but a noticeable drop for sure. However, that decrease in readership does not overly bother me. I write because I want to write. If people read my stuff, that’s great.

I still want to write but now I want to know if my readers care for what I have to say. Economists (my tribe) have a simple metric for judging the value of what one produces: the consumers’ willingness to pay. Something is only worth what others are willing to pay for it. If you disagree with that, argue for your position.

Over the nearly quarter century I’ve been writing this blog, only one person has volunteered a contribution. He sent me $25. Thank you!

That amounts to an average of the princely sum of a $1 a year! Panhandling in the streets of San Jose, CA, would have probably netted me around $25,000 a year. Continue reading “This is the End”

Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers of AI,” said in an interview, “I am worried that there’s going to be massive job losses and that would be good if the increase in productivity made us all better off. Big increases in productivity ought to be good for people but in our society they make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

Dr Hinton, Nobel prize worth smart and intelligent, gets this wrong. True, that an increase in inequality could mean that the rich get richer and the poor poorer.  But that is not necessarily so, has never been so, and is unlikely to be so.

No matter how hard one tries, it will be impossible to argue that the poor are getting poorer. Anyone who claims that — Nobel winner or not — is either ignorant or lying.

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The cartoon at the top of this post was created by Gemini. I gave the prompt but I could not have created that cartoon even if were to spend a couple of days trying to do that. Continue reading “Hauled from the archives: AI and Jobs”

Today is Avogadro’s Day. October 23rd.

The most striking fact about Avogadro’s number is that Amedeo Avogadro never calculated it, nor did he ever suggest the specific value associated with his name today.

Instead, the number arose through a century-long detective story that bridged the gap between macroscopic chemistry and the microscopic reality of atoms.

In 1811, Italian physicist and lawyer Amedeo Avogadro published a paper addressing a dilemma raised by John Dalton’s atomic theory and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac’s law of combining gas volumes. Avogadro proposed what is now known as Avogadro’s Hypothesis:

Equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, contain the exact same number of molecules.

Avogadro realized that gaseous elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen travel as diatomic pairs (H₂, O₂, N₂) rather than isolated atoms. While revolutionary, his proposal was largely overlooked for nearly half a century because contemporary chemists conflated atoms with molecules. Continue reading “Avogadro’s Day”

Today is Bijoy Dashami (or Vijay Dashimi) the final day of Durga Puja or simply pujo as we Bengalis call it. It is the most important festival for Bengalis.

Today, Durga, the beloved daughter of the family, returns to her husband’s home after visiting her maternal home for four days. The backstory goes thusly.

Durga is married to Shiva, an eccentric yogi who resides on icy Mount Kailash. He doesn’t care much for a domestic life. He hangs out with all sorts of characters who exist on the fringes of society.

Shiva’s day job is vital, though. He is the adi-yogi, the original yogi. He gave the world the knowledge of yoga. More than that, he is Nataraja, the king of dancers. Shiva as Nataraja dances the universe into existence and also dances it out of existence. The cycle of creative destruction has to go on.

That dance is known as the Tandava. It’s Shiva’s cosmic dance.  Continue reading “Shubho Bijoya!”

I find two concepts deeply mysterious and puzzling. One of them is the nature of consciousness, and the other is the nature of time. Both have been investigated by philosophers (particularly by sages in India) for at least a couple of thousand years, and Western philosophers and physicists have struggled to make sense of them for the last few centuries.

Both time and consciousness are necessarily related. To perceive the passage of time, there has to be a sentient entity that is conscious. In deep sleep or under general anesthesia, there’s no perception of time.

(Aside: I was quite intrigued to learn that while general anesthesia works quite well, the precise mechanism is not well understood by scientists.)

What is time? That’s a pretty dumb question, most people would say. But it’s one of the deepest mysteries that humans have ever attempted to answer.

The operational definition of time is that it is whatever a clock measures. All processes take time; nothing happens in an interval of zero duration. Nothing happens which does not involve time.

Something similar can be said about space: everything occupies a non-zero amount of space. That is intuitively obvious but it is extremely difficult to understand what space is. Continue reading “The Nature of Time”

Today is Mahalaya, a day of great significance to Bengalis.

When we were little, we would be woken up at 4 AM by the parental units so we could listen to “Chandipath” on the radio. A radio was all we had. No tv, nor tape recorders, no smartphones and of course no YouTube channels to listen to Chandipath at will. Just that one day of the year. You snooze, you lose.

For nearly a century, since 1931, All India Radio (the government radio channel) has been broadcasting Mahishasuramardini, the dawn chanting of the Chandipath. Shri Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s intense voice echoed in one’s mind long after the program ended.

Within the Bengali tradition, Mahalaya carries several distinct connotations. It marks a metaphysical pivot from remembrance, shadow, and indebtedness to renewal, celebration, and effulgent light. Continue reading “Subho Mahalaya”