Marion Foucade on Economics

Economics: reviled because it matters Both Marion Foucade and Michael Reay appeared in this blog a few times before.

A book review by Rahul Govind

Interpreting Hegel's India Seems a very fine essay though he is not happy with the book. Articles from EPW are usually online for four weeks.

Time to relearn?

Hints of Human Evolution in Chimpanzees That Endure a Savanna’s Heat by Carl Zimmer 

A comment by Ratnesh Madhur

Ratnesh Mathur India's Haves pay themselves to create a bigger gap with the Have-Nots - Just 34.5 mn of India's 480 mn working population have jobs ( i.e. employment contracts with a tenor in excess of 90 days). Rest of the country works on dehadi/daily-wages. While each of the 29 state governments define the statutory daily wage of their area, the real dehadi across India is quite consistent at approx Rs 120 ( men) & Rs 100 ( women)for 8 hours of work, across the country & it reflects in the India country GDP per capita of Rs 5700 ( per month). Off the 34.5 mn jobs in India, 22.5 mn jobs are in the government ( central, state & public sector), including the world's 3rd largest army. 

The overall pool of Indian Govt. wages of its 22.5 mn workers, along with pension payments for its retirees ( Nearly Rs 3 lac crores ( Rs 1.25 lac govt+ Rs 0.7 lac defence + Rs 0.25 lac govt pension+ Rs 0.5 lac defence pension), is already more than 25% of India's total Annual Revenue ( including all taxes) of approx Rs 10 lac crores, in 2014-15 budget. Now with the 7th Pay Commission, the Central Government folks are getting an additional 23.5% increase, with the minimum wage of a new clerk increased to Rs 18000 ( More than 3 times India's GDP per capita) & maximum to Rs 225000, per month ( 40 times India's GDP per capita). There are more government pensioners than actual government workers & they too will benefit from the increase. (Nearly 80% of the Indian army workers take pre-mature retirement at the age of 36 & join private sector jobs, since they get pension benefits for life after that age). And to top it all, these government folks think of themselves as " Middle Class" & " Lower Middle Class" of India ! All government jobs are based on a one-time entry & are secure for life, unless terminated for fraud. They are the only citizens of India who are healthcare insured for life. Yet lateral recruitment even at the upper echelons is negligible. Meriotcracy is a function of sucking up to elected politicians & the government entrance exam rank/results achieved, after college. 

And if you think shrinking total number of Indian government servants & political positions is the answer, think again. Shrinking needs to happen at the top & middle layers. In absolute numbers, India's total govt. size ( central+state) of 23 mn as a percentage of 480 mn working population is miniscule (5%), compared to western countries. In Germany ( a country without a defence force), Czech Rep & most of central Europe , approx 22 to 25% of the entire working population, works for the government. In Scandinavian countries, it goes up to 30 to 32% of the working population. Indian government needs more foot-soldiers as population increases from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion in next 30 years. Yet, as %age of GDP, the 22.5 mn sarkari workers already consume as much of the country's GDP in wages, as European countries do. Wage rationalization was needed, across the board, not this increase. Just last month, for UP government peon jobs , more than 370+ PhDs applied, in addition to several lac graduates. The value of the sarkari perks is where the hidden wages, really are. Transparency of wages through monetization of perks into cash compensation, is actually the need of the hour. If you want to see how politician & government servant wage metrics in more details, please see this IMF analysis ( https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/tnm/2010/tnm1015.pdf )

Like in banks & private sector, first you have to define the "wage pool" , as a function of the geography/market's " revenue" . Then you have to define the JDs/ Roles. Rationalize the headcount. Only then do you do the basic wage + incentives process, linked to the nature of the job. If you go ahead & create monetary incentives beyond basic wages for all roles, the whole process becomes unmanageable. That is where the Indian government already is. Rationalization of headcount needs to be done in tandem with rationalization of roles.
.......
The above was in a post by Namit Arora linking to an article on big government https://evonomics.com/freedom-prosperity-big-government/ 

On work

The mythology of work by Peter Fleming
(Un) learning about jobs & work by Madhukar Shukla

Peter Norman

Peter Norman to be recognised for role in 1968 Black Power salute
More about that statue The white man in the photo of the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics)

More people adopting Miyawaki technique

Building a forest in the heart of Karachi and also some collaboration with India 

Aruna Tella

My efforts to help Aruna Tella in her endeavours seems to be taking some shape. Recently my old friend and her brother in law Nalluri Gopalakrishnaiah demarcated his land in Mangamuru, now essentially a suburb of Ongole, to will to his son. He is willing to advise his son to give some of the land under Aruna’s trusteeship for various ventures like, Short Stay Home, Family Counselling Centre, Centre for women empowerment etc and the family may even help with some of the construction. Jhansi is favourable to donate some money when we sell our house and move to a smaller house. We hope that over the next five years or so, we will be able to do some thing concrete to continue the work and cherish the memory of this remarkable lady.

An old UBI experiment in Canada

 On the Canadian prairie, a basic income experiment it seems to have been rather successful but was dropped by the conservative government which come later. There is also a discussion about the current Finland experiment in Naked Capitalism. Yes Smith seems to be against it but it all depends how it is planned and done I guess. Here is the link to the Naked Capitalism discussion Was Finland’s Universal Basic Income Program A Failure?  

The coming IQ trap in education?

Steven HSU on the recent article by Philip Ball New Statesman: "like it or not, the debate about whether genes affect intelligence is over
Philip Ball’s article which may need searching the Internet The IQ trap: how the study of genetics could transform education 

Libraries

Reading North: Books in the Arctic Oula has run a mobile library in the Nordic Arctic for 40 years, but as retirement looms the bus' future is uncertain.

An older one from P.Sainath The wilderness library 

Tributes to Rajani

అభిప్రాయం: ఒక్క రజనీ - ఒకే ఒక్క రజనీ!
And anolder one from Sreenivas Paruchuri
తెలుగు లలిత సంగీతంలో “రజనీ” గంధం 

The continuing Afroz Shaw saga

Filthy Mumbai beach rebreeds turtles, thanks to a city lawyer "Shah's herculean efforts - removing more than 13 million kg of toxic waste by working non-stop every weekend since 2015 - had borne fruit with the hatching of the turtles, a phenomenon that last happened on Versova two decades ago."

More about Freeman Dyson

i have not paid much attention to Freeman Dyson. I always felt that his contributions to Physics were ok but not in the same league as those of Richard Feynman and a few others. But Freeman Dyson has    great knowledge of diverse areas and still writes lucidly. His climate scepticism seems to have caused angst to various people and the following articles have discussion of this aspect, all from a few years ago.
The civil heretic from The New York Times
Letters to a heretic from The Independent
The danger of cosmic genius from The Atlantic

Two book reviews by Freeman Dyson

A wonderful review The key to everything, a review of

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Freeman Dyson not only points out good points of the book as well as what is missing and words of caution towards the end:

“The last time humans invented a grand unified theory to make our existence sustainable was when Karl Marx came up with dialectical materialism. The theory had great success in changing human behavior over large areas of our planet. But the changes did not prove to be sustainable, and the theory did not remain unified. It seems likely that West’s theory will run into similar difficulties.

The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste. West chooses sustainability as the goal and the Grand Unified Theory as the means to achieve it. My taste is the opposite. I see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to achieve it. Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents.”

Along the way, Freeman Dyson points out “West is evidently unaware of Fang and Li’s insight.” 

The insight is explained in an earlier review of Freeman Dyson:

“This gloomy picture of the future was known as the heat death. Learned scientists and scholars portrayed the heat death as our inevitable fate. The paradox appears when we look out at the real universe and see nothing resembling the heat death. Both in the world of astronomy and in the world of biology, we see evolution moving in the opposite direction, from disorder to order, from death to life. Everywhere we see new and intricately ordered structures arising out of primeval chaos. The most obvious and familiar example of order growing out of chaos is the emergence of our ordered system of sun and planets out of a featureless cloud of interstellar dust and gas.

Fang’s chapter “How Order Was Born of Chaos” is a beautiful piece of scientific explanation. He explains the paradox of order and disorder as a consequence of the peculiar behavior of gravity. Unlike other kinds of energy, gravitational energy is predominantly negative. Our gravitational energy becomes more and more negative as we walk downhill toward the center of the earth. In any situation where gravitational energy is dominant, temperature and energy flow in opposite directions. The flow of heat works against the heat death, making warm objects hotter and cool objects colder. Instead of disappearing, temperature differences grow as time goes on. In the universe as a whole, gravitational energy is always dominant, and so the heat death never happens. Order grows out of chaos because we live in a universe with structures dominated by gravity. The dismal images of doom and gloom associated with the heat death turn out to be illusory. Fang’s understanding of the paradox brings us into a hopeful universe, with beauty and diversity growing around us as we move into the future.”

This passage from his review of the autobiography of Fang Lizhi The heritage of a great man.

Too many men

China, India grapple with the consequences of too many men Longish read.

A Telugu lullaby

https://archive.org/details/DharmaDevataSantakumariMeevantidenandiMaKannePapa From  Dharma Devatha  1952

On Syria

Robert Fish Searching for truth in the rubble of Douma... “War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.”
General background from two years ago from Robert Kennedy Jr. Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria

After a flu injection

Just had a flu injection at government medical centre. First a doctor inquired about the general background and then sent me to a nurse. The injection was gentle and I was asked to wait for fifteen minutes after the injection to see whether there were any adverse reactions and was then advised on watch to in the next few days. I find that it is generally like this in government medical centres here though some like Monash Medical Centre are quite crowded. Once you get in to the system, there is little waiting time, doctors are good and equipment excellent. Around 1988, I lived in a very poor area and most of dental care, except for dentures, was free. It seems that even dentures were free earlier. But some benefits started disappearing due to pressure from private practitioners and pharmacies companies. Even now the services are excellent for pensioners like me though there is waiting time for some non life threatening ailments like cataracts. That allows me to send about 10-20 percent of my pension ( I have no savings) to projects in India. May be good government services allow people to a bit more benevolent though it is not clear where the government is coming from. At one time it was from mining at home and abroad in which some poor countries were exploited heavily.

Babies at the ‘right’ time may decrease gender pay gap

The 10-Year Baby Window That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap 

George Orwell, warts and all

The Quixote of cant, a gripping review of a new book on George Orwell, reviews by Martin Tyrrell. The book is by David Ramsey Steele Orwell your Orwell : A Worldview on the Slab

About Aryan migration

Aryan migration: Everything you need to know about the new study on Indian genetics by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan with links to longer articles.

Long read about how babies learn

How babies learn- and why robots can't compete. "More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language.”

Dependence on trade?

When nature says 'Enough!': the river that appeared overnight in Argentina 

Review of book on democracy

Democracy in peril by Sanford Levinson. Mostly about America.  A quote:
“Mostly about American democracy “As he wrote in Federalist 63, “The true distinction” of the new system of government created in Philadelphia “lies IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share” in actually making specific decisions of policy. (The capitalization, incidentally, is Madison’s.) The Constitution, though “ordained” in the name of “We the People,” unlike almost all subsequent state constitutions written in America (and many new constitutions written abroad), deprives the people of the ability to engage in even a scintilla of what is often called “direct democracy.” Consider only the initiative and referendum found in many countries and in at least 26 of the states within the United States (the most famous, or infamous, being California). ”

Dani Rodrik on globalization

Globalization has contributed to tearing societies apart An excerpt
“I think globalization has contributed to tearing societies apart. You can see some of that in terms of greater inequality, but you can also see it in the increase of what one might call “social distance” between different groups in society: those who are globally networked and feel themselves to be part of a cosmopolitan group that don’t recognize or need national borders, who have the assets and the mobility to take advantage of the world economy, and those who think that their fates are tied up with local communities, that don’t have the assets or the resources and networks. It’s a social and cultural cleavage that globalization has deepened by having very asymmetric effects on different groups.”

on Ilaiyaraaja, composer from Tamilnadu

Why many Ilaiyaraaja songs sound as if they emerged from a jam session with Salil Chowdhury
Related Ten Electronic Extroverts from the Middle East and South Asia, Part 2. Andy Votel has this to say “The opinion that I’ve saved the best for last is technically undeniable, because whatever “genre” of music you choose to like/love/promote/protect/politicise/over-intellectualize/despise/defend or pretend to enjoy Ilaiyaraaja has done it! Even if it only lasted for four bars. And even if there were no less than two other styles of music playing at the same time.”