Wednesday, March 30, 2022
A daily summary of Ukraine crisis
Most of the newspapers seem to be full of propaganda. I wonder whether this is a bit more neutral than others.
See also https://www.ianwelsh.net/reorienting-about-how-well-russia-is-doing-in-ukraine/
Monday, March 28, 2022
Long cold war ahead
Did Biden just escalate in Ukraine? "The greater question one must ask is: Why? Why on Earth would Biden wade into this geopolitical crisis that could go nuclear at any moment at a time when both the Ukrainian government and the Russian government appeared to be taking de-escalatory steps? And why hasn’t Biden come out immediately to correct the record, if he did indeed misspeak?"
Sunday, March 27, 2022
An Igor Tamm story
Told by George Gamow:
During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukrainian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.
Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.’ Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.
Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.
……..
The following excerpt from Dirac-Tamm correspondence suggests that it may be true:
“ There is a possibility of the story being true. I came across this bit “e spent the years of the revolution and the Civil War quite adventurously, appearing, for instance, in June 1917 in St.Petersburg at the first All—Russian Congress of Soviets as a representative of the Men’shevik party (Social Democrats, rivals of the Bolsheviks), in 1919 as a member of a local Soviet in his home, in 1920 as a physics assistant at Tavria University in the Whitee stronghold Crimea. Several times he slipped across the front lines and several times was arrested by all possible political regimes. Survival was a matter of luck and chance.”
'pro' Russian parties in Ukraine
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/21/why-did-ukraine-suspend-11-pro-russia-parties informative article as Dan Kervick says.
A glimpse of Russian operation in Ukraine
Russian soldiers release Ukraine town’s mayor and agree to leave after protests
So, it seems not all in Ukraine want Russian occupation and that Russians are not too keen to occupy allof Ukraine.
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Summary of the Ukraine war after 30 days
From Defence politics Asia in video. This may possibly be a neutral site giving video reports few times a day.
The site information here and they are also on Facebook.
A canonical Indian tree Kherji (Jammi in Telugu)
"After a severe famine in Marwar 500 years ago, Jambeshwar Bhagwan formed a community that would live in harmony with nature to survive even in a worse famine. The community is known as Bishnois or twentyniners' on account of 29 principles that they follow. They not only protect trees and wild animals with great dedication but follow several customs that conserve nature. Bishnois allow wild animals to forage on crops from their fields. They do not cremate dead bodies because that needs firewood; they instead bury them to give back to the elements. They even do not use blue coloured clothes because blue die has to be produced from trees. A village 'Khejarli' in Thar desert near Jodhpur has many Khejari trees (Prosopis cineraria) which the Bishnois consider to be very valuable. They are one of the few trees that survive in the deserts of Rajasthan.
On a fateful 10th day of Bhadrapad in 1730, Maharaja Abhaysingh of Jodhpur sent men to cut Khejari trees in Khejarli village. A lot of firewood was needed to produce lime for the new royal palace. Amritadevi, a local Bishnoi sent them back in defense of Khejari trees. They retaliated with armed soldiers but Amritadevi embraced Khejari trees and challenged the soldiers to axe her head to spare Khejari trees. The obedient soldiers not only severed Amritadevi's head but went on to kill 363 Bishnois who dared to follow the courageous lady. The news of Bishnois sacrifice for Khejari trees reached the king who then apologized to Bishnois and assured protection to trees and wild animals of that region.Since the day of Khejari sacrifice, Amritadevi's embrace has become immortal 'Chipko' movement among dedicated conservationists, who gather at a monument in Khejarli every year in Bhadrapad month to salute the great Khejari sacrifice. Bhadrapad month is the sixth lunar month in the Hindu Calendar."
India -Russia currency swaps
India-Russia currency swaps bypass US sanctions from Asia Times "Several of India’s state-owned banks will execute the swaps under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India, starting as early as next week, according to A. Sakthivel, president of the Federation of Indian Export Organizations (FIEO)."
And in an interview with Saker:
Michael Hudson: There seem to be two ways for hostile countries to buy Russian gas. One seems to be to use Russian banks that are not banned from SWIFT. The other way would indeed seem to be to go through what looks to develop as a formal or informal third-country bank or exchange. India and China would seem to be the best positioned for this role. U.S. diplomats will be pressing India to impose its own sanctions on Russia, and there is a strong pro-U.S. constituency there. But even Modi sees the obvious superior benefits of benefiting from India’s geopolitical position with Russia and China’s Belt and Road Initiative relative to whatever the U.S. has to
Back in the 1960s the West dealt with the Soviet Union using barter deals. Arranging this barter became a big banking business. Barter is the typical “final stage” of the deterioration of a credit economy into a money economy that breaks down. Over the medium term, a new international financial organization needs to be created as an alternative to the dollarized IMF to handle such intra-bloc transactions in today’s new multipolarizing world. https://thesaker.is/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson-5/
Bloomberg on the grand illusion of capitalism
The problem with the article is that it mainly pins it's hopes on Biden. He is some thing of a war hawk himself and appointed other war hawks like Victoria Nuland in key positions.
Friday, March 25, 2022
From the Wikipedia article on 'The economic consequences of peace's by Keynes
[Clemenceau] took the view that European civil war is to be regarded as a normal, or at least a recurrent, state of affairs for the future, and that the sort of conflicts between organised Great Powers which have occupied the past hundred years will also engage the next. According to this vision of the future, European history is to be a perpetual prize-fight, of which France has won this round, but of which this round is certainly not the last. From the belief that essentially the old order does not change, being based on human nature which is always the same, and from a consequent scepticism of all that class of doctrine which the League of Nations stands for, the policy of France and of Clemenceau followed logically. For a peace of magnanimity or of fair and equal treatment, based on such 'ideology' as the Fourteen Points of the President, could only have the effect of shortening the interval of Germany's recovery and hastening the day when she will once again hurl at France her greater numbers and her superior resources and technical skill.[7]
from the Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace?fbclid=IwAR2TJn8zJ7hqGyNB95qPmX-IEkww7VBWQ99l5D8FMxU6ZPaOjr6I9o-i0YE
Articles on covid
Three posts below about covid in Africa,America and one in The Guardian about several countries in the west. One observation from The Guardian article is that one of the things that matters may be interpersonal trust of people in the society, apart from other interventions.
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
Money laundering vs money washing
Wash "... rich Russians (no joke) hold as much money outside Russia as the entire Russian people hold inside Russia."
Sunday, March 20, 2022
Lang Pritchett about his background from the interview with Shruti Rajagopalan
Lant Pritchett about his background:
”Both of my grandfathers were just completely working class. They finished grammar school but not higher, and one became a cement finisher and benefited from the fact that they were building a freeway across Utah. He used to say that he knew Utah well because he crawled across it backwards, finishing cement. And one was a carpenter.
I always felt that I am in some ways closer, by being a nonelite, not that far from pretty hardscrabble, rural backgrounds. I have an empathy with the development experience that sometimes is harder today for kids coming from the generation behind me. They have to look back several generations to find equivalent conditions of how people survive and thrive. Whereas, again, my parents were born in the Depression, and my grandparents survived it and lived in Utah in a time when it was a very poor place. My grandparents cut ice out of the lake in the winter to keep their food cool. I do think that background has helped.
The second thing is—and I’ve never said this to anyone before—but Mormonism is an American religion that was founded because a 14-year-old kid named Joseph Smith was living in upstate New York during a religious revival in which there were all these tent preachers and denominations coming around, preaching the true word of God. And Joseph Smith at 14 years old said, “It sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. I don’t believe any of it,” and went off and had his own revelation and started his own church.
He believed that organized religion conveyed dogma but not any true, sincere truth. I’m a member of a denomination who believes that the devil had introduced religion into the world. I think I came away from a religious upbringing with a really enormously high level of doubt that anything that anybody says to me is true, which I take as a characteristic of the founder of our religion, that it was a religion that was grounded. That before you had faith, you had to have doubt because if you just believe what you’re told, that’s not even real faith. I’m a huge believer in doubt, if that makes sense.“
Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-3
Now I come to the first part of Lant Pritchett interview. My take away: There is a hockey stick like growth in the West,now mainly represented by OECD countries, which have sustained growth of around two percent for more than a hundred years. Some other countries like China, India, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore too have entered this hockey stick growth, often with larger growth rates for some periods exceptChina which had long sustained growth. India is essentially a deals economy. The divergence between the western economies and the rest which was already large is increasing. The reasons may be 'institutions' and their relative well functioning. When the state capacity is low, it may be good to simplify rules which cannot be implemented.
For the next parts, I have already posted the quotes; these are about the educational system. There is also a long discussion on RCT in which Lant Pritchett does not have much faith.
Excerpts from the first part of Lant Pritchett interview:
Hockey stick
"In part because, as you know, if I had to name my biggest contribution to the economics of growth, it’s the emphasis that for whatever reasons—and we can get back to that—the growth process in the OECD countries, conditional on the takeoff that has since solidified by about 1870, has been just amazingly stable over time. The rich world is now rich not because they ever actually had super rapid growth like India and China we’ve seen, but because they had steady growth of about 2% per capita for 100 and more years."
"Then, of the countries that were lagging, more and more of them have gotten into the hockey stick growth themselves. The pace at which their growth happens, conditional on getting into the hockey stick, is actually much faster—much, much faster than anything that happened in history. Anyway, I think, overall, it’s been a period in which several very big and very important countries like China and India, but also Vietnam and others, have gotten into and stayed in a sustained GDP per capita growth. It’s still the case that India is probably at a tenth of the leading countries in the world in terms of levels."
"That said, precisely my contribution to the growth literature is that growth in the non-OECD countries has been extraordinarily episodic, in the sense that it’s chugged along, again, at slightly the same, if slightly lower than the OECD on average across countries, but the dynamics have been very different. There’s been many more episodes of very rapid growth, followed by a whole variety of different outcomes in terms of just moderately slowing growth as one converges on the leaders, as we saw with Japan. "
"I’ve written a paper called “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean” that argues, even if there isn’t something called a middle-class trap—which we’ll get back to; maybe there is—but even if there weren’t a middle-class trap, just regression to the mean would suggest that if you’ve seen a country growing very fast for a very long time, what we should expect is a very substantial deceleration of growth rather than a continuation."
"The quickest way to not get a routine government to work is to say, “Do you know who I am?” That line will get you treated worse than any other thing you can say [in the west]. Whereas in India, in the past and maybe more so today, it’s a deals economy."
"What happens to your investment has to be indexed on you either in terms of identity or indexed on you in terms of the accommodations you are taking to adapt yourself to the rules. There isn’t, in fact, a completely neutral, predictable rule of law. Deals on investments are not completely and totally secured by rule of law. Again, this is what has made episodic growth so pronounced, in my view—in the developing world versus the OECD—is that in a deals economy, shifts across deals become a major source of uncertainty in the growth process.
You can easily get stuck because the further you dig into a growth process secured by deals around a particular regime, the harder it is to reconstitute those deals when the regime shifts—even in a democracy."
"One of my views is, very strongly, up to about 25,000 GDP per capita countries just need growth in order to be able for all their citizens to have access to what anybody would reasonably consider the material basics of an adequate lifestyle. I think the focus on dollar-a-day poverty has just been morally obscene. To act as if our aspirations for humankind is for every person to get to what is now in inflation terms $1.90, that’s just morally obscene. And we could go on about how terrible poverty has been for the development crowd.
Second, I think the potential for redistribution to improve livelihoods is just radically overestimated for poor countries. One of the things about being poor is your economy tends to not be in the position to have the levers to generate large amounts of revenue. One way in which developed countries generate 40% of GDP in revenue is they have a large, formal, highly productive economy that, therefore, is easy to observe, easy to tax in relatively low-cost economic ways. That’s precisely what poor countries don’t have, so we should expect total revenue yield to be low as a fraction of GDP."
Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-2
The later parts of the Lant Pritchett are about RCT and indian educational system. Here are a couple of quotes :
”Like I said, other places that were equally weak can do it. Then the only way I disagree with your characterization of the Indian schooling is that you, in your description, said people were assuming there was learning, and then there was selection. I think it was worse than that. I think teachers went into it assuming that only certain kinds of kids could learn.”
About the other places, he said earlier:
”Then, in other countries, municipalities in Brazil, large-scale things in Africa have done this, where they’ve just said, “We have completely lost our way. We need to reconfigure the curriculum, reconfigure the attitudes, reconfigure what the goals are.””
Caste system seems to come in a part of the selection process:
”Even though the massive expansion in public government has allowed the Dalits into school, they still see the teacher as being not an instrument of their liberation, but as an instrument of social selection. ”
More from Lant Ptritchett about writing a paper with Chandra Bhan Prasad:
”We wrote a paper together about the change in status and life well-being of Dalits over the reform period, which, if I had to name my most under-cited paper, I think it’s this paper. Because it’s very important, but most people don’t want to hear it. Anyway, but we went to visit his village. We’re walking around the village with a Dalit. We’re sitting around with a group of maybe 16 men, and we’re talking to somebody who is a Dalit that had been a public schoolteacher—a very respected guy, obviously, in his community and the broader community.
We’re sitting around, and he tells this joke. The joke he tells is, “You’re walking through the forest, and you come across a snake and a teacher. What do you do?” He says, “Oh, you pick up a stick and you beat the teacher.” Everyone just rolling on the ground laughing, and I’m like, “What in the—?” I’ve clearly got this mystified look on my face, and he says, “Oh.” He looks at me, he says, “Because the snake, it’s just a brute; it doesn’t know what it does. But the teacher should know better.” Again, I’m not saying that’s a huge sample, but that is, in some sense, the social reality.”
Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-1
Excerpts from the Lant Pritchett interview-1, posted below:
“ Anyway, my super strong view is that growth is a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving high levels of human well-being.
I think all of the evidence is completely consistent with that. No, you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity at below-average levels of GDP per capita. Because in the end, the average is what would happen if everybody had exactly the same. Well, if your average is, as most countries are, well below the 10th percentile of a rich country, well, you’re not going to redistribute your way. Now, that said, my second strong view is we have been perhaps too dogmatic, not about the in-state, but about the transition path for my take . . .”
“ RAJAGOPALAN: It’s a little bit like the “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy kind of development story. All happy families are alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a little bit of that going on here, which is, all rich countries—
PRITCHETT: You know that I have that as an epigram for my first growth episodes paper.”
“ Because by about the late 1990s, early 2000s, nearly everybody who had been in development as a field since the 1980s, and had really worked in countries and in the trenches, were convinced that a, if not the, major problem with the effectiveness of development as an endeavor and development assistance as an endeavor, was that it was inadequately political—inadequately embedded in a realistic, positive, political economy of how positive change actually happened, and therefore, inadequately embedded in history, society, politics.
The way the field was headed was that even to do a successful World Bank project and even if the World Bank was forbidden from doing politics, you had to be embedded in a more realistic politics. That you couldn’t fix the problems that were made to be fixed in a purely technocratic intervention mode that “Seeing Like a State” wanted you to, and that we had to grapple with that.“
“ I have to say, people in the field were stunned by this level of naivete. How could you imagine that the problem with our failure to achieve takeoff and growth or to achieve adequate development outcomes was merely the result of this one tiny little technocratic fix? It was just stunning. It was just so ludicrous on the face of it that I think one of my main regrets is not having devoted more time to pointing out how ludicrous on the face of it their fundamental claims were.”[rct]
........
Saturday, March 19, 2022
Lant Pritchett interview
Ideas of India: Where Did Development Economics Go Wrong? Shruti Rajagopalan and Lant Pritchett
There is also a discussion at Marginal Revolution https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/shruti-rajagopalan-podcast-with-lant-pritchett.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=shruti-rajagopalan-podcast-with-lant-pritchett
Friday, March 18, 2022
Some links to Ukraine crisis
The History Behind Putin’s War in Ukraine AN INTERVIEW WITH ANATOL LIEVEN by Doug Henwood. From the interview:
“But I think it’s worth remembering that in the 1980s, as the children of the Soviet elites became aware of how much better they could live in a Westernized Russia than a Soviet Russia, that played a huge part in the fall of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. If you are plugged into the wider Russian elites and listening to what they’re saying in private, and what some of them have even started to say in public, you see that they are becoming really anxious. And they understand better than the rest of the population, even the educated population, just how badly this is going to affect them. If the Ukrainian quagmire goes on for a long period, then I think discontent against Putin will mount very, very high.” This is also the case with many other countries like India. But the differences have decreased with a lot of propaganda and harassing people who did not condemn Russia. But with the economic sanctions, the differences may increase again and in the long run, it will play a role.
Samo Burma makes three prediction: one of them is that China will be main beneficiary.
John Helmer on the possibilities of fake news; it seems that we cannot really believe any thing in the main stream newspapers. http://johnhelmer.net/the-zelensky-summit-meeting-in-kiev-on-march-15-with-polish-czech-and-slovenian-prime-ministers-was-a-fake-devised-in-warsaw-the-meeting-was-at-przemysl-poland-zelensky-also/?fbclid=IwAR2AVzZ2hWwQkdJajAJAOlWCmdmkQscln1cOEtcW8lbjeZHvxk0XQgEWcPY
Monday, March 14, 2022
Why the global south is not taking sides
The map of global participation in the sanctions against Russia suggests a new non-aligned movement might be on the rise
Wednesday, March 09, 2022
Monday, March 07, 2022
James Galbraith interview
Resource Limits to American Capitalism & The Predator State Today interview by Lynn Fries
Saturday, March 05, 2022
More than a film reviewfilm review
“MISSISSIPPI MASALA” @30: REVISITING A FILM CLASSIC IN AUTHORITARIAN TIMES by Debra Mitra discusses I dian diaspora in US. There are various interesting passages like “ My mother would often say that in Christianity, she found a principle that was unavailable for Hindu women outcast like her: forgiveness. Her experience of the Indian diaspora in America stood in stark contrast to the provisional acceptance she felt with the local Black community. In the Indian gatherings, she was marked by her divorce, her lack of economic mobility, and our status as a broken, poor family. Indian men would leer at her, while wives would resent her presence and whisper to each other. Perhaps we were technically no longer Hindu; nevertheless, my mother’s conversion offered little protection from the stringent policing of social and sexual norms in the conservative Hindu diaspora. There was also widespread anti-Black racism. Membership in the “Indian community” came with unspoken rules of propriety and exclusion.”
Friday, March 04, 2022
Thursday, March 03, 2022
A fascinating discussion between Ezra Klein and Alex Tabarrok
Via Chris Blattman https://chrisblattman.com/2022/02/23/gangsters-want-to-be-good-people-too/?fbclid=IwAR2VpkZFQq9utSB_IoRuAAs8HfYl3GAxkq7eDB4O1ddYkrfNdaeukOWc5zY
The link to the transcript of the interview is in Blattman’s post. It is also posted in Marginal Revolution but the link to the transcript gives only part of it. But one can read the comments.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/tabarrok-on-the-ezra-klein-podcast.html
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