Ava and I like this

I am learning about modern Hindi films from my four year old granddaughter Ava. I have not watched a single movie of Rajesh Khanna or Amitab Bachan or Shah Rukh Khan but I and Ava watch Hindi dance-songs together. When I asked her who the actor was she looked at me as if I were stupid and said 'Shaukkan' and the dance-song is 'dola re dola' about which Sangita Shresthova has written effusively in "Dancing to an Indian Beat:"Dola" Goes my Diasporic Heart". Here is it which both Ava and I like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-ZAisSUaRc

A British site on education

I read the first two articles from this site http://infed.org/mobi/?s=globalization
 It seems to be a non-profit site devote to education. Does anybody know more about it? I came across it accidentally while looking for reviews of Micheal Mann's 'The Sources of Social Power' volume 4. 

Unknown mathematician proves an anlogue of the twin prime conjecture

namely that there is number N less than 70 million, such that you can find arbitrarily large prime differing by N. More from Erica Klarreich:
"Since that time, the intrinsic appeal of these conjectures has given them the status of a mathematical holy grail, even though they have no known applications. But despite many efforts at proving them, mathematicians weren’t able to rule out the possibility that the gaps between primes grow and grow, eventually exceeding any particular bound.

Now Zhang has broken through this barrier. His paper shows that there is some number N smaller than 70 million such that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N. No matter how far you go into the deserts of the truly gargantuan prime numbers — no matter how sparse the primes become — you will keep finding prime pairs that differ by less than 70 million."

(via J.K. Mohana Rao)

Two discussions of Marx

One by Robert Skidelsky in 'Keynes, Hobson, Marx'
"I want to sum up what we can gain from all three of the thinkers I have been discussing.

From Keynes, it goes without saying, an analytic precision, lacking in Hobson and Marx, and the exposure of an irreducible problem for all forms of social interaction, not limited to economics: our lack of knowledge of any but the most immediate consequences of our actions. So, as he put, it wealth was a highly unsuitable object for the methods of the classical economist.

From Hobson, an understanding that structures of wealth and distribution can aggravate or mitigate the Keynes problem of unstable investment. Collapses due to uncertainty are more likely and more likely to be severe the more unequal is the distribution of wealth and incomes, and recoveries feebler.

From Marx we get an analysis of how unequal structures of wealth and incomes arise. This was lacking from Hobson: he never explained how savings got to be piled up in one place. And he could not do so, as long as he accepted that workers were paid their marginal product. Hobson did of course talk about monopoly, administered prices, and other distortions, but these contingent factors might be dealt with by reforms, and did not impugn the integrity of the classical theory of markets.

Marx did better by dropping the assumption that workers are paid their marginal products. If productivity growth outstrips wage growth, the gap between production and consumption will grow, resulting in an automatic rise in the savings ratio.

The ability of capitalists to pay workers less than they were worth and themselves more than they were worth rested, in Marx'v view, on their ownership of the means of production. This gave them power in the economy; and governments were subservient to that power.

Recent events have persuaded me that there is something intuitively right about the Marxist analysis."

The second is a discussion of Dan Little's post 'What about Marx?' in Economist;s View where Dan Little oulines  " a small handful of key theoretical frameworks that Marx advocated." The second is:

"Emphasis on the primacy of property and class. Sociologists and historians want to explain processes of social change. Marx puts it forward that the economic interests created by the property system in a given society create powerful foundations for collective social action.  Those who occupy positions of advantage within a given set of property relations want to do what they can to preserve those relations; and those who are disadvantaged by the property relations have a latent interest in mobilizing to change those relations. Persons who share a location in the property system constitute a class, and their interests are systematically different from those in other such positions."

I wonder just as 'contradictions of capitalism', the above points to a contradiction in any state organization since it always involves some in positions of advantage. In any case, Marx does not seem to go away and after any sort of crisis, there seems to some resurgence of his ideas.
P.S. Why read Marx today? by Jonathan Wolff free online

A report about traditional education for the underprivileged

There are reports that some variations of traditional education like those practiced in Finland work better even in terms of economic returns. There is a report about traditional education of those belonging to scheduled castes and another about those who were ranked in IIT/JEE. From the website of Andhra Pradesh Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (APSWREI) "APSWREI Society running 289 residential institutions conducting free residential education to SC/ST/BC communities from 5th class to Intermediate classes" From the first report above 
"Coming to the statistical scrutiny, there are 210 colleges spread across the 23 districts of the State. Of these, 18 colleges secured cent percent results. A total number of 14,195 students have appeared and 12,034 succeeded. The overall pass percentage of these poor students is 84.78% as against 74.95% last year — a rise of 9.83% which is notable and truly praiseworthy. Girls secured 85.34% and boys secure 83.67%. The pass percentage is considered to be brilliant as such a jump had never occurred in the past. Hence this deserves greater commendation.
The highest marks secured in each group are: Prashanthdevathi, an MPC student secured 976 marks; Akulapally Ashok, a BPC student got 951; Korepu Santhoshini a CEC student 899 and Sandepogu Jyothi, aa HEC student 869 marks."

It is interesting to compare these reports with the studies of Hoff and Pandey. This seems to correspond to their 'revealed segregates' case and does not seem to correspond to their result. Perhaps short term experiments differ from long term experiences where daily discrimination over a long period and other economic disadvantages can be sapping. I remember some dalit classmates who were at the top of the class in the sixth grade but declined to very average scores by the eleventh standard.
P.S. As expressed above, I am beginning to have doubts about the applicability of studies such as those by Huff and Pandey. Kuffir on Facebook suggested looking at primary sources like the Roundtable. In an interview "Separate Panchayats for Dalits shall ensure security and development: Sivakami".  P. Sivakami, ex-IAS officer, writer and politician who founded the political party, the 'Samuga Samatuva Padai', to work 'on the principles ofDr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, as a forum for social equality'. She is also the founder of the Dalit Land Rights Movement in Tamil Nadu. So, may be, sometimes seperate works.eparate Panchayats for Dalits shall ensure security and development: Sivakami

Lots of Hindi film tunes in this Telugu film

Agni Pareeksha 1951 http://desitunes.desibantu.com/agnipareeksha (thanks to Paruchuri Sreenivas) The site has many more songs from old Telugu films.

More from Krugman on ausrerity

The Smith/Klein/Kalecki Theory of Austerity "And the lineage goes back even further. Two and a half years ago Mike Konczal reminded us of a classic 1943 (!) essay by Michal Kalecki, who suggested that business interests hate Keynesian economics because they fear that it might work — and in so doing mean that politicians would no longer have to abase themselves before businessmen in the name of preserving confidence. This is pretty close to the argument that we must have austerity, because stimulus might remove the incentive for structural reform that, you guessed it, gives businesses the confidence they need before deigning to produce recovery."
Sandwichman responds Wild Things: Question Mark and Austerians. Four years ago Sandwichman said "Sixty-seven years ago, Michal Kalecki nailed it. The economics of full employment is not rocket science. It's the politics, stupid." He is not so sure now "I wonder, though, whether Kalecki went too far or spoke too subtly when he observed that "obstinate ignorance is usually a manifestation of underlying political motives." That might indeed be true when we include as "political" the rather mundane motivation of fitting in with one's colleagues. But I suspect it is misleading if we take "political motives" to refer to some larger purpose. Thus the controversy between the self-proclaimed Keynesians, like Krugman, and the austerians may be a bit of a phony war." I do not quite understand this; perhaps he is suggesting deeper structural reforms ( check also the next paragraph about ' Faustian bargain that settles for half the treasure in return for the whole soul').

Krugman on austerity

Krugman has a readable account on the austerity craze in How the casre for austerity has crumbled? Though hje notes that "It’s also worth noting that while economic policy since the financial crisis looks like a dismal failure by most measures, it hasn’t been so bad for the wealthy. ", but does not mention Kalecki. 
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From Aditya Chakrabort's account of Klechi's 1944 paper Political aspects of full employment
"His article, Political Aspects of Full Employment, explains with an almost eery prescience why the coalition is attacking our wages, our working terms and conditions and our welfare state. The tone is exhilaratingly brisk. "A solid majority of economists" agree on how to solve a slump, Kalecki says. The government borrows more and invests the cash either in building schools and hospitals or in providing benefits and tax cuts; this boosts demand and generates employment. Ta-da! Two pages in, and he has both fixed the problem of recessions and despatched most of the arguments against public borrowing that we have heard with such tedious frequency in the past five years.
What if savers become wary of lending to the state? Then, Kalecki says, the Treasury pays higher interest rates – and, since most of its lenders are British (just like now), the money will still flow back into the economy. But he notes that Churchill's war coalition has run "astronomical budget deficits", while "the rate of interest has shown no rise since the beginning of 1940". What if it becomes too costly to keep on top of the national debt? Then ministers should raise more funds, not by taxing ordinary pay or spending, which would slow the economy, but with a levy on idle wealth."

Krugman too notes "But a funny thing happened to other countries with high debt levels, including Japan, the United States, and Britain: despite large deficits and rapidly rising debt, their borrowing costs remained very low. The crucial difference, as the Belgian economist Paul DeGrauwe pointed out, seemed to be whether countries had their own currencies, and borrowed in those currencies. Such countries can’t run out of money because they can print it if needed, and absent the risk of a cash squeeze, advanced nations are evidently able to carry quite high levels of debt without crisis."
P.S. Recessions can hurt, but austerity kills

Tom Stafford on ASMR

in MindHacks
"Presumably the feeling has existed for all of human history. Each person discovered the experience, treasured it or ignored it, and kept the feeling to themselves. That there wasn’t a name for it until 2010 suggests that most people who had this feeling hadn’t talked about it. It’s amazing that it got this far without getting a name. In scientific terms, it didn’t exist.

But then, of course, along came the 21st Century and, like they say, even if you’re one in a million there’s thousands of you on the internet. Now there’s websites, discussion forums, even a Wikipedia page. And a name. In fact, many names – “Attention Induced Euphoria”, “braingasm”, or “the unnamed feeling” are all competing labels that haven’t caught on in the same way as ASMR."

More here.

Links 14th May 2013

Possibly to some changes in the offing
Russia's Plan for BRICs to dismantle the dollar system
BRICS Development Bank
Dealing with TNC's
Changes in Japan "In my view, Abenomics has been remarkably centered on the domestic economy."
See also Noahpinion "Will Abe address Japan's number one problem after all?
George Osborne will step up his campaign to toughen developed countries' stance on tax havens and company tax transparency
and from Britain's dirty secret “We couldn’t believe it when the UK put tax on the agenda. For years, whenever we tried to put even a sentence on tax into communiques, the British got out their red pen. And now it is they who are leading the call for action. So thanks to them, to you NGOs … and to Starbucks.”