New Economist Blog recommends

"The Origins of Western Economic Success:Commerce, Finance, and Government in Pre-Industrial Europe" by Meir Kohn:
"This is a detailed and fascinating work, written in a clear prose. I look forward to its publication and the ensuing debate."
Most of the draft is available at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/
From the first chapter:
"Why does one economy do better than another? What is holding back the less developed
countries from catching up with the more developed? What problems do the former communist economies face in their transition to a market system? And perhaps the most basic question: What are the origins of the economic success of the West? Our answer to these questions depends on our understanding of the process of economic
growth. Only with a sound understanding of this process can we hope to formulate
economic policies that promote economic progress and, perhaps more important, avoid
economic policies that hinder it.
Modern economics offers an explanation of economic growth that has its origins in
the work of Ricardo and Malthus.1 This ‘Ricardian’ theory sees the potential output of an economy as being determined by the resources and technology available. At any time, producers exploit this potential to the full: there is no slack. Consequently, for output to grow, the economy needs either more resources or better technology. With no change in technology, output per worker—and so income per capita—can grow only if each worker uses more capital or more land. If more capital or more land is not available, then total output can still grow if population and so the number of workers increases. However, in these circumstances, total output will grow by decreasing amounts—the law of diminishing returns. As a result, as population grows, average output and so income per capita will fall. Malthus saw in this a mechanism that would constrain the growth of population: falling income would raise mortality and so keep population in check. The great hope of escaping this 'Malthusian trap' is technology: better technology can increase output per worker even without additional resources. Consequently, technological progress becomes for the Ricardian theory the key to long-run economic growth. Despite its pivotal importance, however, the theory offers no economic explanation of what determines the rate of technological progress. Rather, it emphasizes non-economic factors: culture—the degree of mechanical and scientific curiosity—and politics—the extent of government support or opposition.
.....
The can-opener in the Ricardian theory of economic growth is the market. The market is simply taken for granted: it plays no explicit role in the Ricardian theory. But in the real world, markets cannot be taken for granted. Contrary to the Ricardian view, it is not technological progress but rather the creation and expansion of markets that drives economic growth. Technological progress is a consequence, not a cause. It is a lack of well-functioning markets—not a lack of resources or of technology—that explains the stagnation of the less-developed world and the problems of the transition economies. The economic success of the West is explained, not by its cultural superiority or by the wisdom of its governments, but by its greater success in developing markets. Of course, the obvious question is, Why do markets develop more successfully in one place rather than in another? Answering that question is a primary goal of this book."

Reality Check

The Age reports Monkey chants for Symonds:
"THE ugly spectre of racism has returned to cricket, with sections of the Vadodara crowd subjecting Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds to monkey chants during yesterday's one-day international at the IPCL Sports Complex.

The incident occurred in the second half of the Indian innings when Symonds was fielding on the boundary. An unspecified number of spectators taunted Symonds with the monkey noises, which have been the scourge of European soccer for years.

In a separate crowd incident yesterday, play was halted for several minutes after a section of the IPCL Sports Complex pelted the playing surface with bottles as Australia's batsmen, Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting, closed in on a nine-wicket victory. But it is the taunting of Symonds that most upset the Australians, who are entering the final leg of the Indian tour."
Prospect of defeat bringsreconciliation talkfrom John Howard:
"Speaking last night to the Sydney Institute, he indicated he now accepted that the symbolic side of reconciliation — which he previously rejected — was important, along with the practical side of reconciliation.

But he is still refusing to make an apology to Aborigines, saying the approach must be acceptable to "traditional" Australia — "people who think this country has basically done the right thing".

In a highly personal and extraordinary admission, Mr Howard said his journey to this point " has not been without sidetracks and dry gullies".

And he laid part of the blame for his failures on the era in which he was born, saying: "The challenge I have faced around indigenous identity politics is in part an artefact of who I am and the time in which I grew up." "

Guardian Obituary of Bain D'Souza

From the
Guardian Obituary of Bain D'Souza(via Dilip D'Souza):
"In the heap of venality that passes so often for government in his homeland, he was one of those diamonds glittering in its depths, men and women who remain, despite all odds, dedicated to the idea of public service, a notion becoming almost quaint in modern India's world of swashbuckling capitalism. His sadness at the decline of those ethics hid from him his own impressive contribution to India's long, tortured progress towards social justice."

Miscellany

TIFR booklet about
Eminent Indian Scientists with the purported aim:
"The compelling factor for the choice of these few, from among the many in the country, is the time and circumstances under which they worked. Their achievements are nothing short of heroic. With no infrastructure and with little support from the Government of the day, they have built up world class scientific institutions and a scientific heritage we can be proud of. The institutions they built still stand proud and are rated highly by the scientific community here and abroad."
From a recent article on the persistence of caste
"The model of the caste system in the paper is more appropriate to pre-colonial India, or more specifically before the introduction of the British law courts. (Dirks 2001) argues that British policies introduced changes in the caste system. A snapshot of the pre-colonial economy shows a robust thriving economy. Lord Clive in 1757 noted that Murshidabad “is as extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London, with this difference that there were individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property than in the last city”. According to (Maddison 2003), in 1700 India’s share of world GDP was 24.4% compared to Western Europe’s 21.9%.7 The economy was largely agricultural but was noted for the high quality its manufactures. Another feature which is often called characteristic of the economy was its ability to sustain a high degree of division of labor. At the same time there is not much evidence of a well developed courtsystem.
This leaves us with two questions. First, can we model the caste system to better understand it and the reasons for its persistence over the years? Second, how was the economy able to sustain a high degree of specialization without a strong enforcement system? In answer to both these questions, I argue that the caste system functioned as a means of contract enforcement, thus providing an economic reason for its persistence over the years. I offer a model of how the system provided contract enforcement and check for testable implications. "
From The Age:
"ACCORDING to local newspaper reports, the Indian team spent much of its time here attending Twenty20 world championship victory ceremonies and endorsing sponsors' products. Hardly the preparation a sixth-ranked team requires for a showdown with the 50-over World Cup titleholder, and it showed during Australia's 47-run victory at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium last night.

Save for the batting heroics of Yuvraj Singh, and the solid contributions of Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Dhoni, the Indians found few reliable hands in their pursuit of Australia's 7-290. Perhaps the time for self-congratulations is over."
From Herald Sun:
"THE genesis of India's problem child Shanth Sreesanth and his aggression can be traced to the teachings of Steve Waugh.
Sreesanth has used Waugh's cricket memoirs as his guide to life as an international cricketer.
"I am a big fan of Steve Waugh. In his autobiography he said he always enjoyed proving people wrong. I have read the whole book. It is big and I really enjoyed it," Sreesanth, 24, said. "He said if you are down in the seventh, eight or ninth round you can come back in the 10th.
"He taught me you have to do the small things, the things others refuse to do.
"Steve says to never back down, so that is what I will be trying to do." "
From Economist:
"IT ISN'T just the average working people of developed nations who've taken a more sceptical view of globalisation in the past few years. Members of the economic community, as well, have begun to question the extent to which freer trade has been good for American workers. Just this week, Mark Thoma quoted Thomas Palley at length, arguing that "barge" capitalism generates a race to the bottom, causes job loss in nations with higher regulatory and tax standards, and "promotes downward wage equalisation." Dani Rodrik similarly took Austan Goolsbee to task this week for saying that "globalization is responsible for 'a small fraction' of today's income disparities." "

Anil Gupta on 'How local knowledge can boost scientific studies'

Anil Gupta of Honey Bee Network (see hereand here for descriptions of some of their work) talks about how local innovations can help scientific research:
"Local innovations could help inform scientific research, if only scientists would invest the proper resources into exploring them.

Scientists do not respond as enthusiastically as they should because they are often sceptical about the value of traditional knowledge. There are few opportunities for understanding the real potential of grassroots innovations and the rewards of validating or further developing them may seem limited.

Peer pressure can push scientists to focus on high-impact research with wide visibility and students shy away from work that won't guarantee them a successful career. Sometimes there is simply a lack of encouragement, or even authorisation, from research heads for such work.

A bias towards chemical-intensive technologies can also exist and often researchers are put off because the protocols for validating non-chemical grassroots innovations require different approaches.

Lastly, the pressure from local innovators and traditional knowledge holders to influence policies is feeble, fragmented and easy to ignore.

Providing incentives

Yet in my more than 25 years of experience serving on scientific committees, I have not found a complete lack of awareness of the need to work on grassroots innovations. So why has it taken so long to build the bridges between formal and informal science?

The NIF — set up by the Department of Science and Technology in 2000 to provide institutional support for scaling up grassroots innovations — works with the Honey Bee Network and has an annual budget of about US$300,000.

Having sold products developed by grassroots innovators across five continents, the NIF has proved that there is space in the global market for these types of goods. But the speed, scope and scale of these markets can become much bigger with the addition of formal scientific research."

Review of Indra Sinha's "Animal's People"

by Uma in Frontline. An earlier post by Uma in her blog.

Goitein, Geniza and Amitav Ghosh

While rummaging through my son's books I stumbled upon Amitav Ghosh's "In an Antique Land", found it engrossing and finished it in one sitting. As the cover quotes from Sunday Times:
"Ghosh's book is extraordinary; a travel book that reaches back into twelfth century as it touches on the dilemnas of our own times".
Cohen's article gives a description of how Amitav Ghosh started on the book:
"Later, the world-at-large got the chance—from an unexpected corner—to read about the thrills of the India trade as portrayed in Goitein’s Geniza. The story I am about to tell exemplifies Goitein’s global impact. I refer to the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh and his wonderful book, In an Antique Land, published in 1992. Ghosh, while an Oxford doctoral student in social anthropology in 1978, chanced upon the India trade while reading Goitein’s magnificent collection, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (1973). In that medieval, cosmopolitan world of commerce and travel, Ghosh met up with one of Goitein’s twelfth-century India merchants and his Indian slave and business agent. The young scholar from Calcutta identified with his twelfth-century countryman and resolved to tell his story.
He began by choosing to do his anthropological fieldwork in Egypt. His quest later brought him to Princeton in 1985: he wanted to meet Goitein. But Goitein had recently died, so poor Amitav Ghosh got me instead, a distant runner-up. That began an association that lasted several years while Amitav researched the Indian trade documents in the Geniza, first in Princeton, then in Cambridge, England, reading the Judaeo-Arabic texts about his characters in the original, and writing chapters for his book. It is a riveting story, interweaving his own experience as an Indian living in Egyptian villages of the late twentieth century with that of Bomma, the Egyptian(?) slave of that Jewish merchant who travelled between Egypt and India 850 years earlier.
Ghosh’s book catapulted Goitein and his research into the world of fiction readers, for Ghosh was already known by 1993 for two acclaimed novels set in India. Indeed, In an Antique Land reads like a novel. Early on I told Amitav that his book, when published, would do more for the Geniza and for Goitein’s reputation as a scholar than any number of the books Goitein or his students had written or ever would write. I was not wrong. The book has sold many thousands of copies, and many of the reviews mentioned Goitein. Readers of the Washington Post learned that “S.D. Goitein, almost certainly the greatest scholar to have written on the social and economic history of the Near East, made brilliant use of the Geniza materials in his exhaustively researched, fluently written, and magisterial five-volume work, A Mediterranean Society.” Clifford Geertz, who knew Goitein during the years he spent as a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study, told readers of The New Republic: “It is on these materials that Goitein based A Mediterranean Society, his magnificent synthesis of medieval society in the region, oneof the most considerable historical works of our time.”
Goitein would have loved In an Antique Land, for he was deeply committed to broad educational goals."

Addendum (30th Semptember): While posting the above I did not realize that "In an Antique Land" is considered seriously by several anthropologists and has been a part of various graduate courses in anthropolgy and literature. For a layman like me it was a multi-faceted, engrossing and finally a humble book giving a glimpses of the changing world we live in and an elegy to a world that seemed to have diappeared with the advent of Portugese and other European powers to the Indian ocean trade. To be sure there is not much about women or common people of the earlier period, a point taken up by Claire Chambers in this article. Here is another intersting article which discusses Ghosh's book.

India's economic rise not so clear cut

says Michael Blackman:
"SEEMINGLY from nowhere, Indian companies have emerged in recent years as big overseas investors, particularly in Europe and the US. And with each acquisition, the Indian media has been triumphant. Exactly why, is not clear.

India remains a capital-scarce economy and yet foreign direct investment (FDI) out of India is skyrocketing. Foreign acquisitions abroad have been funded partly by bond issues or loans raised abroad but even so, India's Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry said in March that they expected FDI outflow for the year to be $US15 billion ($A17.3 billion), and FDI inflow to be $US12 billion, meaning that India will actually have a net capital outflow for the year. The contrast with China could not be starker — China currently pulls in about $US6 billion in foreign investment every month.
........
All this when the Indian economy is supposedly growing at about 9 per cent a year. That so many Indian companies still want to diversify out of India is instructive about the true state of the Indian economy despite the headline growth rate."
His answer seems to be:
"India still spends comparatively little on infrastructure.

It spends far less than China, for example. One estimate is that for every $1 that India spends, China spends $7. It has some of the world's highest rail costs — moving a standardised container one kilometre in India has been estimated to be 53 per cent more expensive than in the US. And it takes an average of 85 hours to unload and reload a ship at India's major ports — 10 times longer than in Singapore.

Getting good managers in India is difficult. Many leave to work overseas. And that suggests another reason for investing in Europe or the US — good management talent in developed economies is not hard to come by in the way that it is in India, where too few good managers are being chased by too many companies.

Still, it is true that India's economy is doing well. But then, what economy isn't? Furthermore, India's economy is growing from a low base; it should be doing well. That an economy like India's records a 9 per cent growth rate should not be surprising. That a mature economy such as Australia's is likely to grow by 4.4 per cent this year, according to the IMF, is remarkable.

But then, World Bank data shows that when the world's economies are ranked by their average GDPs for the five-year period 1980-84 and then for 2001-05, India's position among the world's economies actually fell one notch; meaning that for the periods examined, India was doing little better than the average and worse than many.

India's economic performance today is good because in the past it has been so bad.

So it is no surprise that Indian companies remain cautious. They have endured decades of unbelievable red tape and little or no growth.

At last they have some surplus cash and, with relaxations on overseas investment and foreign exchange controls, they are lining up to diversify out of India.

But in doing this, they are not striking a blow for Indian pride. They're just being prudent."

"The bus always seems to be heading in the wrong direction"

Reading " The fallibility of human reason in everyday life" recommended by Tabula Rasa a few months ago, I do not find it as convincing as "stumbling on happiness" by Dan Gilbert or " Mistakes were made (but not by me)" by Tavris and Aronson. On page 67, Thomas Gilovich says " The belief that "the bus always seems to be heading in the wrong direction" is particularly interesting in this regard because of an important asymmetry between positive and negative events: Certain kinds of negative events can accumulate in ways that positive events cannot. I can become convinced that all the buses are headed in the wrong direction by observing quite a umber headed in the wrong direction before I encounter one going in my direction. Note that the opposite cannot happen..... If a bus is going in my direction, I take it. Because of this asymmetry, we can expect a certain kind of "bad streak" but not a complementary streak of good fortune."
There may be an element of this but there can also be real asymmetries as this well-known example shows. Suppose that the buses are going at one hour intervals in both directions but depending on one's bus stop, the following asymmetry can arise. At some stop (far from the mid point) there may be a gap of 50 minutes between the times when my bus arrives and the one in the other direction arrives and only 10 minutes for the other gap. If I go to catch the bus arbitrarily without checking the timings, it is five times more likely that I will notice the bus going in the opposite direction.

A story about Rene Thom

Even though Rene Thom was one of my heros and I used to read any thing about him that I could find, I did not know this story about Thom:
"To algebraic geometry, Mr. Grothendieck brought an entirely new level of power and abstraction, so much so that his colleague René Thom — a Field medalist and a great mathematician — acknowledged that he left pure mathematics because he was oppressed by Mr. Grothendieck's "crushing technical superiority." His technique was only a part of his genius. Mr. Grothendieck was a great mathematical visionary. Like mystics searching for the face of God, he was passionately concerned to see the unity of form behind various mathematical experiences. He did not simply solve isolated problems but, as Mr. Ruelle writes, enveloped them "in a rising tide of very general theories." " (via 3quarksdaily)

Peter Roebuck on T20

Like me, Peter Roebuckis a T20 convert:
"BEYOND all reasonable argument, Twenty20 was a resounding success. A vast audience was transfixed by the event. Soccer-mad youngsters switched over to the cricket. Shouts from downstairs indicated not that Manchester United had scored but that Yuvraj Singh had hit a six. Parents dismayed by their offsprings' coldness towards the game suddenly found those selfsame youths organising cricket parties. Television sets in pubs were switched to the game and the grounds were full of fun. Where the World Cup was po-faced, the game now laughed, not least at itself. Dammit, I am a convert.

Happily, the tournament produced a final to fit the occasion, pitting against each other two proud sides led by daring captains and full of passionate youngsters, two neighbours who for so very long could not play cricket across the divide. Two teams, also, that had cast aside their elders and given youth its chance. Pakistan and India were also the two best teams in the competition because they played with their hearts and also usually their brains."

Glenn Archer retires

Footy (Austrlian Rules Football) legendGlenn Archerretired yesterday. Footy is my favourite game and Wayne Carey is probably the best player I have seen but Archer epitomizes the heart and soul of football.

An inspiring story from Visakhapatnam

Madhukar Shukla at AternativePerspective links to this story in Al-Jazeera:
"Fatima and Shaikh Salary in a slum area in the Indian town of Visakhapatnam
Most of the high-paying jobs in India's $50bn information technology industry go to India's privileged elite.

But, with the help of her husband, one woman has managed to earn her university degree as well as a job at on of India's top IT companies. Rajesh Sundaram travelled to Visakhapatnam to meet her.

Fatima lives with her husband in a slum area in the Indian town of Visakhapatnam.

Her husband is illiterate, earning his money as a street food hawker. He makes about two dollars a day.

Six years ago, when Fatima was only 15, her parents took her out of school and arranged her marriage, a story common to many other young girls in her neighbourhood.

Fatima had been a brilliant student and she thought her marriage to Shaikh Salary, her husband, would mean an end to her dreams of becoming an engineer.

"When I said I wanted to be an engineer, my parents and others just dismissed my dreams," Fatima told Al Jazeera. "They said a girl from the slums could never get become an engineer or work for the big technology companies."

But, she says, Salary was different.

Fatima said: "When I told him about my dreams, he was very encouraging. He saved money from his meagre earnings to help me go to school and then to engineering college."

Poverty and tradition


Poverty and tradition still sees many girls in the slums drop out from school early
The couple received little help for Fatima's studies initially. They went hungry to pay for her books and university fees and Fatima's mother was even asked by neighbours to dissuade her from studying.

Rasia, Fatima's mother, told Al Jazeera: "The neighbours would say it is against our religion, they would ask me, 'Why you are allowing your daughter to go to school after she is married, what will you gain by that? Are you going to send your daughter out to work?'"

Very few girls in Fatima's poor, mostly Muslim, neighbourhood are encouraged to study. Poverty and tradition still sees many girl children in the slums drop out from school early. Most are married off and expected to raise children and do housework.

"They did not educate their daughters and so were opposed to my daughter going to school," Fatima's mother said.

Eventually, a charity gave Salary and Fatima a soft loan to part finance her engineering degree and despite the odds, Fatima worked hard and earned her engineering degree with distinction.

Success

Salary was pleased for his wife, and told Al Jazeera that it was their love for each other that had helped them achieve their goal.

"I am a poor illiterate man. I did not want her to be like me," Salary said. "Now that she has worked hard and achieved so much, people will look at us with respect."

For the time being Fatima helps her husband at his kiosk in the evening, but soon she will begin a job at one of India's top information technology companies where she will earn $600 a month.

She will have to move away from the slums to another city for her new job.

Salary will move with her."
There are also u-tube links in the post.

Cosma Shalizi's latest post

The erudite Cosma Shaliziwrites about Iraq:
"If James Wimberley can invoke Timur-i-Lang for a discussion of climate change, I feel free to resurrect his old interlocutor, the great historian and pioneering social scientist ibn Khaldun, in regards to our strategy in Iraq.
.....
Why is the United States government unable to impose its will on Iraq? It is because it has too few soldiers, too far from home, among too alien a population. (If our army of occupation was a million soldiers strong, the fact that almost none of them can make themselves understood would be much less of a problem.) Some have suggested that the problem is insufficient will or solidarity on the American side, but this seems implausible; assuming we actually want there to be an Iraqi population to govern, simply killing more of them is unlikely to work (never mind the moral issues). What ibn Khaldun would advise, I think, is to find an Iraqi group which is numerous, has the solidarity needed to dominate the rest of Iraqi society, and can be brought into alliance with us; and he would advise us to look at either the deserts or the mountains. I submit that there is exactly one group which fulfills the necessary conditions: the Kurds.

They comprise a reasonable fraction of the Iraqi population; their effective 'asabiyya is demonstrated by the fact their militias, a.k.a. peshmerga, already control Iraqi Kurdistan militarily; and they have, notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the 1970s and 1980s, a by-now long-standing alliance with us. Our strategy, then, should be to offer them our support in a bid for military and political domination over the rest of Iraq — with the understanding that they are to leave Turkey strictly alone. That is, they not only get Kirkuk, they get Baghdad and Basra, and not just the north's oil but all of Iraq's oil. Of course, this will be horribly undemocratic and bloody, and it will make anyone even remotely sympathetic with Arab nationalism hate us even more, but I suspect many in Washington would view those attributes as features rather than bugs in any policy."
Strange.
P.S. (17th March, 2005). Just noticed a update where Cosma says that he is not seriously advocating this.

End Poverty in South Asia

is is a new blog by Shanta Devarajan, the Chief Economist of the South Asia Region at the World Bank (viaBayesian Heresy). If this comment from the second post is any indication:
"I left Champaben’s house with a renewed appreciation of how both markets and governments have failed poor people; how poor people are essentially helping each other; and how they do so with charm, grace--and humor. I want to go back.",
it will be an interesting blog to follow.

Bleak Prospects for Young Researchers in USA

says The Chronicle of Higher Education :
"It is the best of times and worst of times to start a science career in the United States.

Researchers today have access to powerful new tools and techniques — such as rapid gene sequencers and giant telescopes — that have accelerated the pace of discovery beyond the imagination of previous generations.

But for many of today's graduate students, the future could not look much bleaker.

They see long periods of training, a shortage of academic jobs, and intense competition for research grants looming ahead of them. "They get a sense that this is a really frustrating career path," says Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

So although the operating assumption among many academic leaders is that the nation needs more scientists, some of brightest students in the country are demoralized and bypassing scientific careers.

The problem stems from the way the United States nurtures its developing brainpower — the way it trains, employs, and provides grants for young scientists. For decades, blue-ribbon panels have called for universities to revise graduate doctoral programs, which produced a record-high 27,974 Ph.D.'s in science and engineering in 2005. No less a body than the National Academy of Sciences has, in several reports, urged doctoral programs to train science students more broadly for jobs inside and outside academe, to shorten Ph.D. programs, and even to limit the number of degrees they grant in some fields.

Despite such repeated calls for reform, resistance to change has been strong. Major problems persist, and some are worsening. Recent data, for example, reveal that:

Averaged across the sciences, it takes graduate students a half-year longer now to complete their doctorates than it did in 1987.

In physics nearly 70 percent of newly minted Ph.D.'s go into temporary postdoctoral positions, whereas only 43 percent did so in 2000.

The number of tenured and tenure-track scientists in biomedicine has not increased in the past two decades even as the number of doctorates granted has nearly doubled.

Despite a doubling in the budg-et of the National Institutes of Health since 1998, the chances that a young scientist might win a major research grant actually dropped over the same period.

The job market in science is now shifting faster than graduate programs can keep up, leading often unhappy Ph.D.'s to hunt for careers far from the academic homes where they hoped their degrees would lead."

Steve Hsu responds:
"The article covers a lot of ground, but one thing that I think could have been emphasized more is that, no matter how dismal the career path becomes for US scientists, there there will still be foreigners from India, China and eastern Europe willing to try their luck, as well as a sprinkling of American-born obsessives (like me) who should know better. However, a significant number of talented Americans will simply choose to do something else."
Some of the responses to Hsu's post are also interesting.

Gulzar Natarajan on Urban Poor

Vijayawada Municipal Commisoner, Gulzar Natarajan in his recent posts considers some points discussed inThe Economic Lives of the poor by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Banerjee and Duflodescribe how some of the poor earn money in several countries. In one example from A.P. :
"Walking down the main street of the biggest slum in the medium sized Southern Indian city of Guntur at nine in the morning, the first thing one notices are the eateries: In front of every sixth house that directly faced the road, by our count, there was a woman sitting behind a little kerosene stove with a round cast-iron griddle roasting on it. Every few minutes someone would walk up to her and order a dosa, the rice and beans pancakes that almost everyone eats for breakfast in South India. She would throw a cupful of the batter on the griddle, swirl it around to cover almost the entire surface and drizzle some oil around the edges. A minute or two later, she would slide an off-white pock-marked pancake off the griddle, douse it in some sauce, fold it in a newspaper or a banana leaf and hand it to her client, in return for a rupee (roughly 15 cents, at PPP).
When we walked back down that same street an hour later, the women were gone. We found one inside her house, filling her daughter’s plate with lunch that she had cooked while making the dosas. She told us that later that day, she was going out to vend her saris, the long piece of decorative cloth that Indian women drape around themselves. She gets plain nylon saris from the shop and stitches beads and small shiny pieces on them, and once a week, she takes them from house to house, hoping that women would buy them to wear on special occasions. And they do buy them, she said confidently. All the other dosa women we met that day had a similar story: once they are done frying dosas, they do something else. Some collect trash; others make pickles to sell; others work as laborers."
Gulzar Natarajan in his post "Alternate lives of the Urban Poor" describes describes some of their main customers (I remember eating in such places with my father):
"Typically houses in urban slums are very small and do not have full fledged kitchens. Most often there is a single room which has a makeshift kitchen in one corner. Most slum dwellers have to get up early and go for work, and therefore have limited time available for cooking the morning breakfast. Further, South Indian breakfasts are inherently difficult in preparation and takes inordinately long preparation time. Early morning hours are valuable for slum residents for a number of reasons. Apart from their personal tasks, the women have to catch and store water (which is typically released for a couple of hours in the morning), wash vessels and clothes, get children ready for school, and also prepare lunch for the entire family (typically both husband and wife work during the daytime).

Further, a majority of slum households have atleast one tenant. The houseowner rents out a portion, generally a room, to supplement his income. (They get around Rs 500-1000 every month from this). The tenants generally do not have the space for establishing a kitchen and invariably rely on these eateries for their breakfast. These tenants are a substantial customer base for these food vendors. "
In an earlier post "Lottery Bonds", Natarajan discusses the relevance of Tufano's ideas to help the poor in saving.

On social segregation and economic inequality

Julie Rehmeyer reviews in sciencenews
the recent paper Is equal opprtunity enough? A theory of persistent group inequality by Sam Bowles, Glen Loury and Rajiv Sethi. Excerpts from the review;
"...the power of segregation may be even greater than commonly thought. The study shows that even when there is no history of discrimination between two groups, social segregation alone can cause dramatic economic inequities to develop.
....
They imagined a situation in which discrimination that had historically existed between two groups of people came to an end, so that people from both groups who had equal skills subsequently began earning equal wages. The researchers then asked whether, over many generations, the income of the two groups would tend to equalize or whether the disparity would persist.

The model incorporated the idea that parents tend to invest more heavily in giving their children the skills that employers value when they expect that investment to pay off later in higher wages. It also included the fact that children are more likely to succeed when they are surrounded by other children who are succeeding. For example, studies show that having friends with strong vocabularies helps a child to pick up more words with less effort.

The latter effect makes informal, social segregation particularly damaging, the researchers found. People who have been subject to discrimination in the past are less likely to have acquired the skills needed for high-wage jobs, compared with those who were not subject to discrimination. Their children, then, are less likely to pick up those skills naturally at home. Furthermore, in a socially segregated society, children will mix mostly with peers from their own group. As a result, children from the less-advantaged group will be less able to pick up high-wage skills from their friends.

These impediments make parents' investment in their children's future wage-related skills less likely to pay off, leaving parents less inclined to make the investment than parents in a socially advantaged group. The children are thus likely to have less economic success in adulthood.

"If you have enough integration between the social networks of the two groups, the inequality will go away over generations," Sethi says, but otherwise, the inequality could get worse, the study shows.
....
The positive side of the study, however, is that integration has a powerful effect in ending inequalities. "If equality between groups is a social objective," Sethi says, "the way to do it is through integration." "

These keep another generation going

From Dilip D'Souza's blog:
"The email, messages, calls and letters have overwhelmed us. But perhaps none more than the man who wrote to the Times of India (September 7):
I was saddened to read about the death of JB D'Souza, ex-chief secretary of the Government of Maharashtra. ... I have not come across another civil servant like him. I served under him when he was Director of Relief and Rehabilitation, Chandrapur, for the resettlement of Bangladesh refugees.

He was ... dedicated to the welfare of the common man, a visionary but practical, unassuming but bold, strict but friendly in and out of the office, patient and well-organised. He never lost his cool: and his respect for subordinates was exceptional. ...

UV Joshi
We had never heard of this Joshi, never heard my father mention him. But after this letter, we tried to reach him via a friend in the Times, then via another friend who knew whom to call at the hostel accommodation Joshi had listed as his address. Drew a blank. "Give us his room number", they asked, and we were lost right there.

Then, after dinner two days later, the bell rang. At our front door, a slender scruffy man with twinkling pale eyes, unshaven and tired, 78 years old and pants torn at one knee. "I am Joshi", he said, and we knew at once. He had taken the train from town, then walked from the station -- two km, near enough -- searching for the building, asking all the way. Sat with us, switching from fluent English to fluent Marathi to fluent Hindi. Has a son in the Army who has abandoned him. Lives with a friend in Nagpur. Felt he had to come see us, to "pay my respects". Looked often at the framed photographs on our table, affection and sadness in soft eyes. We told him, your letter brought tears to our eyes. Just telling him so brought more."

Raj Chetty

Caren Cheslerin a series about young American economists writes about Raj Chetty, son of old friend V.K.Chetty in The American:
"While his study on dividend taxes was influential, Chetty hopes to have his greatest impact in another area: social programs that help cushion risk. In a study entitled “Consumption Commitments and Risk Preferences,” published this year in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Chetty and Berkeley colleague Adam Szeidl contest the popular belief among economists that unemployment insurance is too generous. George Akerlof, who also teaches at Berkeley and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, describes Chetty’s insight in the study as revolutionary. “He had a new way of looking at the problems of the unemployed,” Akerlof says. “Raj emphasized that they find it very difficult to meet their prior commitments. For example, they must pay their rent or their mortgage, and these commitments very much add to the difficulties of being unemployed. Economists were just not thinking of that until Raj came up with it. This is a very big innovation in the theory of unemployment.”

Chetty believes that if he can bring models and theories into better alignment with real-world evidence, he will help shape economic policy. It’s an ambition that runs in the family: his father, V. K. Chetty, was an economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1980s, helping her privatize the government-run cement industry as India’s economy began to make the transition from socialism to free-market capitalism."
Since none of children took to academics, I seem to be gloating in Veerappa'a son's success. V.K. Chetty himself was considered a brilliant economist after his thesis on 'Chetty money', but my impression is that he did not fulfil his potential. Probably got caught up in the caste prejudices that he encontered in his younger days. It seems that caste still takes an inordinate toll on the energies of Indians.

Neglected diseases

Free access articlesin Nature:
"Tropical diseases affect more than one billion people, yet there are few effective treatments. And despite much research activity, scientific innovations with therapeutic potential are not making it out of the laboratory. The articles in this Outlook examine what can be done to stimulate the development of effective medicines and deliver them to the people who need them most."
Some other free access articles from Naturehere.

Helping Low-Income Families Save More

Gulzar Natarajan in 'Lottery Bonds'links to an article of Robert Schiller and ideas of Peter Tufano about'Helping Low-Income Families Save More'. Excerpt from Schiller's article:
"According to Tufano, the fundamental problem in encouraging low-income people to save is that they need the money not just to manage their lives years in the future, when they retire, but also to deal with short-term crises. But if government programs designed to promote saving by low-income people don’t tie up their money for many years until retirement, they will often succumb to temptation and spend the money frivolously.

Tufano approaches the problem with real sympathy for these people, and a realistic idea about how to help them: premium savings bonds. In addition to normal interest payments, these bonds have an attached lottery – an enticement to keep the money in savings. Low-income people manifestly enjoy lotteries, and they will acquire the habit of looking forward to the lottery dates, which will deter them from cashing in their bonds. But if a real emergency arises, they can get their money."
From the podcast, it appears that Peter Tufano himself came from a family which struggled to save for his education.

A novel about Srinivasa Ramanujan

Amardeep Singh talks about The Indian Clerk, a novel about Ramanujan by David Leavitt. There are also links to an interview with the author and some excerpts from the novel.

"Indians are privately smart..."

From an interview with V. Raghunathan, author of "Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are" and a former professor at at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. I guess that this kind of statements have to be taken with a grain of salt but it is possible that certain attitudes and practices may be prevalent with certain sections at a given time. I noticed that with economic discussions, even though there are heated discussions in Indian blogs and many refer to western blogs, very few Indian seem to take part in western blogs even when the discussions are about Indian economic matters. I wonder whether many of them are shy.

Mismeasurement of science

Peter Lawrence in Current Biology says that 'modern science. particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quantity and quality of research'.
Very interesting article (via Greg Mankiw).

I go to a bookshop

and find that I am probably vain. Yesterday I saw 'Poincare's Prize" by George Szpiro and noticed that there was a reference to me and immediately bought the book to show off to my family. Strangely, at the time I wrote the paper, I was not particularly interested in the Poincare conjecture. Much earlier, I got hooked by mathematics after reading a popular book 'Men of Mathematics" by E.T. Bell. It soon became a passion and going to a research institute seemed an easy way of learning good mathes. I was not sure whether I could do a Ph.D. but it seemed one could always go back home and teach in some college. I kept reading what I liked and what I could understand and slowly one could find some problems in research papers and connect the dots. That seemed to be about it. While reading Papakyriokopoulos's paper, it occured to me that I could improve his conjecture and wrote a note. It did not take more than a week and since I was not particulaly interested in the conjecture, i left it at that. Somewhat later, I noticed that those conjectures had to be wrong since Papa's approach implied that every homology 3-sphere would be real 3-sphere. I was surprised that nobody mentioned it; may be it was due to respect and affection for Papa.
But as time went on, I found that I spent more time on research and less on reading. Problems kept bugging me and it was not always easy to prove what seemed to be correct. I found myself working 14-15 hours day trying to prove what should be correct. I became more and more specialized and by the time I realized the Poincare conjecture was part of a bigger programme, I did not have the strength or technolgy to either work on it or understand the solution when it appeared. So it goes.
By the way, the book is interesting, with many stories about Poincare and the origins of topology that I did not know.

Fabric 'safe enough to eat'

I came across this story in Made to Stick. In 1993, Bill McDonough, an environmentalist and Michael Braungart, a chemist were hired by the Swiss Textile manufacurer Rohner Textil,which produced textiles for Steelcase chairs to create a manufacuring process without using toxic chemicals. As McDonough says in
Newsweek Interview:
"... we designed a fabric safe enough to eat. The manufacturing process uses no mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, heavy-metal contaminants or chemicals that cause ozone depletion, allergies, skin desensitization or plant and fish toxicity. We screened 8,000 commonly used chemicals and ended up with 38. When inspectors measured the effluent water, they thought their instruments were broken. The water was as clean as Swiss drinking water. A garden club started using the waste trimmings as mulch. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And it eliminated regulatory paperwork, so they've reduced the cost of production by 20 percent."
Braungart and McDonogh went on to build MBDC,a product and process design firmto promote and power the next 'Industrial Revolution" though intelligent design. More about their programmes can be found in the article by Nicolas Boullosa at faircompanies site. From Boullas article:

"With its headquarters in Charlottesville (Virginia, USA), MBDC was founded to work with any business that asks for its help in employing strategies of product and process design based on eco-effectiveness, ideas developed in Cradle to Cradle.

The American company divides its activity into distinct areas: consulting on the design of products related to eco-effectiveness; education and training based on the ideas developed in its philosophy; and strategic consulting related to the environment for large firms.

Surprisingly, given the radicalness of the change proposed by eco-effectiveness, McDonough and Braungart don't seem to have problems finding clients or large-scale projects. MBDC has worked, since its birth in 1995, in the integration of the regenerating ideas of Cradle to Cradle in projects of BASF, BP, S.C. Johnson, Nike, Ford Motor Company, Visteon, Volvo, Herman Miller, Victor Innovatex, Designtex, Rohner Textil, Pendleton y Miliken & Co.

C2C certification

MBDC has created a certification, C2C Certification, for those products that accomplish the criteria established by the consultancy's "environmentally-intelligent" design concept. "

A strange solution for preserving biodiversity

FromNature:
" The rapid expansion of oil-palm crops in equatorial regions has raised concerns about its potential detrimental effects on southeast Asia's biodiversity, leading to intense media debates between environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the oil-palm industry.
....
We think that this debate has been fuelled, on the one hand, by the NGOs' lack of awareness of the socioeconomic realities in countries that produce palm oil, and, on the other, by the crop growers' failure to appreciate both the threat to southeast Asia's unique biodiversity, and the conservation potential of non-pristine habitats. To break this agriculture–biodiversity deadlock, we suggest a new strategy of using revenue from oil-palm agriculture to fund the acquisition of land for the establishment of private nature reserves.
...
In our view, because the oil palm is such a high yielding and lucrative crop, a unique opportunity exists for NGOs to acquire relatively small tracts of existing oil-palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia and use the revenue generated to establish a network of privately owned nature reserves for biodiversity conservation."

Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds

Knowledge.Wharton discussesDownloading Wisdom from Online Crowds. Excerpt:
"Specifically, Saiz, in the real estate department, and Simonsohn, in operations and information management, argue in a new research paper that the likelihood that a topic is discussed online, in relation to a given location, correlates with its relative prevalence in the real world. "We are interested in the possible 'wisdom' resulting from the aggregation of a very specific kind of judgment, namely, the determination of which topic is worth writing about," they write in a paper titled, "Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds." For example, they wanted to discern which countries, U.S. states and big U.S. cities people perceived as the most corrupt. So they plugged the appropriate terms into a search engine called Exalead. By assessing how many documents contained the word "corruption" within the same paragraph as the location's name, they came up with corresponding corruption rankings."

New ILO report on labour productivity

FromILO Press Release:
"The ILO report, entitled “Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), fifth Edition” indicates that the U.S. still leads the world by far in labour productivity per person employed in 2006 despite a rapid increase of productivity in East Asia where workers now produce twice as much as they did 10 years ago.

What’s more, the report also shows that the productivity gap between the US and most other developed economies continued to widen. The acceleration of productivity growth in the US has outpaced that of many other developed economies: With US$ 63,885 of value added per person employed in 2006, the United States was followed at a considerable distance by Ireland (US$ 55,986), Luxembourg (US$ 55,641), Belgium (US$ 55,235) and France (US$ 54,609).

However, Americans work more hours per year than workers in most other developed economies. This is why, measured as value added per hour worked, Norway has the highest labour productivity level (US$ 37.99), followed by the United States (US$ 35.63) and France (US$ 35.08).

Increase in productivity is mainly the result of firms better combining capital, labour and technology. A lack of investment in people (training and skills) as well as equipment and technology can lead to an underutilization of the labour potential in the world.

“The huge gap in productivity and wealth is cause for great concern,” said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. “Raising the productivity levels of workers on the lowest incomes in the poorest countries is the key to reducing the enormous decent work deficits in the world.”

In East Asia where productivity levels showed the fastest increase, doubling in ten years, output per worker was up from one-eighth in 1996 to one-fifth of the level found in the industrialized countries in 2006. Meanwhile, in South-East Asia & the Pacific productivity levels were seven times less and in South Asia eight times less than in the industrialized countries, the report reveals.

In the Middle East and Latin America & the Caribbean, the value added per person employed is nearly three times less than it is in the developed economies; in Central & South Eastern Europe (non-EU) & CIS the level is 3.5 times less, and four times less in North Africa. The widest gap is observed in sub-Saharan Africa where the productivity level per person employed is one-twelfth of that of a worker in the industrialized countries."
More information atILO site.

A Disney Metaphor

From Made to Stick:
".. Disney calls its employees "cast members". This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization.
... street sweepers are some of the most highly trained cast members, since their very visible public presence - coupled with the fact that they are Disney employees - makes them an obvious target for customerts' questions about rides, parades and rest room locations. Having them think of their role as performance, rather than maintenance, is key part of the park's success. "Employees as cast members" is a generative metaphor that has worked for Disney for fifty years"

Another cracking article by Ramguha

Ramachandra Guha spares neither left nor right and gives some insights about promotions in government service in this Telegraph article(via Guru):
"I come, finally, to the rank careerism displayed in connection with this most contentious deal. On August 12, a Delhi newspaper published a leading article with the title “Trust the Treaty”. The caption gave away the line of argument. But what was significant was not what was being said but who was saying it. The article was written by S.K. Singh, at the time the governor of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Seeing his byline, I rang a friend in Delhi. “Surely it is unconstitutional for a serving governor to go out and bat for the government like this?” I asked. “Treat the article not as a violation of constitutional propriety but as a job application,” answered my friend. “He wants a bigger state.”
.....
He was right. It was not just that his transgression was not noticed; it was actually rewarded. In the reshuffle of governors announced last week, S.K. Singh was shifted from Arunachal Pradesh to Rajasthan — a more populous state, a much more important one, and closer (in all respects) to Delhi."
This may not be very new. I remember a prominent mathematician who refused to sign a petition for mathematician activist Banwari Lal Sharma's release during the Emergency.

Imprisonment and voting rights

from The Age EditorialThe right decision for democracy:
"YESTERDAY'S ruling by the High Court, overturning Federal Government legislation introduced last year barring anyone serving a jail term from voting, is an important constitutional decision that re-establishes the most fundamental of all democratic rights. Up to a point: the court upheld earlier legislation banning any prisoners serving jail terms of three or more years from voting.

The irony is that the person who challenged the laws, Vickie Lee Roach, an Aboriginal woman who was jailed for five years in 2004 and is not eligible for parole until next year, remains ineligible to vote. Nevertheless, Ms Roach, in winning the war but not the battle, has had restored to some others the rights that should not have been removed in the first place.

Until yesterday Australia was one of a handful of countries that bans all prisoners from voting. Three years ago, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain was in breach of prisoners' human rights, effectively forcing the government to begin the process of lifting a ban brought in just after transportation to the colonies was abolished."
A table giving an overview ofhow 45 "democratic" countries regulate voting for felons from the site http://www.felonvotingprocon.org/

Two Dalit Stories

From the Outlook obituary'The Mountain Parted':
"Dasrath eked out a living as a farm hand, toiling in the fields of local landlords on bare subsistence wages. One day, in the early '60s, his wife Phaguni fell ill and Dasrath set off with her to the nearest hospital. She died on the way. If only there was no hill blocking the road to the town, Dasrath would have made it to the hospital in time, and perhaps his wife's life would have been saved.

The villagers of Gelaur had to take a circuitous route and travel 19 km to Wazirganj, the nearest district town. This was because the massive 360 feet long, 25 feet high and 30 feet wide sheer rock came in the way of the shortest possible route between the village and the town.

The situation would have brought about a feeling of resignation or fatalism in the average man—as if God had himself put this giant obstacle in the path of his ailing wife. Dasrath's response was different and radical—at once unthinkable and stunningly simple. He decided to alter geography with chisel and hammer. To cut a road through the huge mass of rock.

After 22 years of back-breaking, single-handed toil, Dasrath finished in the mid-'80s."
FromBBC News:
"But the sixty-something Dalit from Dumka in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has published a newspaper every week without fail for the past 21 years, highlighting discrimination against the poor and local corruption.

Mr Rajak's four-page, handwritten Hindi-news Din Dalit is photocopied 100 times and sold to subscribers or pasted onto Dumka's main traffic lights, bus stands and roads.

Din Dalit is not just another small town news sheet - the newspaper is registered with India's Registrar of Newspapers, thanks to the efforts of India's first Dalit President, KR Narayanan, after Mr Rajak wrote to him.

Since its first edition in October 1986, Din Dalit has made a difference to the lives of local people, even helping a resident to secure social security from the authorities after his plight was reported in the paper.

Mr Rajak says he decided to bring out the newspaper after he was humiliated by local authorities when he took some people to meet them to help enlist them in a government social security scheme.

"I was very hurt. I approached the local media to highlight the incident but they did not show any interest. So I decided to go ahead and bring out my own newspaper," he says.

Over the years, Din Dalit has run stories on diverse subjects like a local scam in the distribution of specially-made cycles for disabled people, and bungling in a government housing scheme and kerosene oil distribution for the poor.

After washing clothes through the week for a living, Mr Rajak concentrates on bringing out the paper by selecting the news, deciding on the editorial page content and headlining the articles on Sundays.

The paper now even boasts a reporter - 45-year-old Ravi Shanker Gupta, who works in a grocery and goes out to collect news when he gets a work break."

Faults in the texture of existence

Abi mentioned Stumbling on Happiness several times in his blog and Tabula Rasa recommended it one of the comments. I finally read mainly because the last five books I read did not mention Shakespeare and this one did. I found it excellent and see it more as a book on 'self deception as a survival mechanism' and how we can possibly stumble on to improve a bit. Here is an interview with the authorand the book is much better than the interview.

Tara Winkler in Cambodia

From Sydney Morning Herald:
"TARA Winkler had an enviable life. She grew up in Bondi, enjoyed the beach lifestyle and was establishing a career in the film industry.

But after a holiday to Cambodia she gave it all up to devote herself to rescuing orphans from a life of abuse and neglect.

During that visit two years ago Winkler was deeply moved by the suffering of children she encountered at an orphanage at Battambang, in the country's west.

She established the Cambodian Children's Trust to support the orphanage, which she described as heartbreakingly run-down.

As the months passed, rumours intensified of underhand dealings by the orphanage's former director.

Early this year, Ms Winkler returned to Australia on a three-month fund-raising trip, and took measures to safeguard all donations to the orphanage.

She went back to Cambodia this month after learning the orphanage's director and staff had been removed by the former director and replaced with his relatives.

The former director allegedly has a history of embezzling donations from foreign sponsors, funnelling the money into his own property and livestock.

"It got a bit nasty and all of the children were being abused really badly - physically and verbally," Ms Winkler told The Sun-Herald from Battambang. "They have lost several kilograms each and look like little stick figures and really unhealthy."

Seven of the children have hepatitis B and one girl is HIV positive.

In a desperate bid to save the children, the young Australian set up her own orphanage - in just two weeks.

Battambang's Governor and government authorities gave her team full support to remove the children from the former orphanage and rehouse them, Ms Winkler said."
Tara Winkler's sitehere.

New alliance?

From Asia Times article by Siddarth Srivatsava:
"The Indian government formally approved the US$100 billion Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), the country's largest infrastructure project, ahead of the three-day visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this week.
.....
Business apart, India and Japan are also seeking each other as strategic partners in making a combined pitch for a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council and military and security cooperation in East Asia to check the influence of China. Beijing has been anxious about the "Quadrilateral Initiative" (Quad) involving India, the US, Japan and Australia.

India is looking to host its biggest multilateral exercise with navies of the four countries as well as Singapore in the Bay of Bengal next month. Twenty-five warships will include the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and the US nuclear submarine SSN Chicago. The US, Japan and India held similar exercises off the Japanese coast last year; this is the first time that the Australians will take part."

Bayesian Heresy’s Friday Book Club

Bayesian Heresy’s Friday Book Clubwill start discussing Daniel Yergin'sThe Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. I read the book, enjoyed it though I felt that it was sympathetic to the oil industry as the wikipedia article says.
There is a similar discussion in Marginal Revolution about 'A Farewell to Alms' but visit MR infrequently afterthis post.

Chris Dillow on the downside of inequality

Chris Dillow links to various articles on the downside of inequality. Some of them like Sapolsky's review article and the more recent research article discuss the effects on health. Further discussion at Economist's view.
More links to Sapolsky's work here. I am currently reading Sapolsky'sWhy Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.

From Shivam's blog

I cannot get over thisphotographfrom Shivam's blog. Apart from Shivam (?) picking his nose, the characters or lifetime experiences of some of the others seems etched on their faces.

Assorted links to Glenn Loury

In New York Review of Books, William McNeill reviewd Glenn Lowry's "The Anatomy of Racial Inequality" and two other books on race in America. Lowry, an African American professor was an opponent of affirmative action in his younger days and had considerably
changed his opinions by this time. McNeill is not convinced of the solutions offered and says
"My own opinion is that every human group, when seeking to consolidate internal cohesion, strengthens itself most effectually by engaging in conflicts with its outside rivals. Yet overall and across long periods of time, arrangements for accommodation and cooperation among different and rival groups prevail, simply because cooperation—sometimes willing, but often forcibly imposed—sustains the collective generation of wealth and power that most people prefer to their opposites. Disputes over how to distribute such wealth are perpetual; and cooperation on one scale always creates or intensifies conflict on another. That is why the race problem within American society may diminish if black manpower becomes vital in wartime; and why moral exhortation, even if rooted in religious conviction, is unlikely to make much difference, unless, or until, other Americans feel that joint action with blacks is needed for success in some sort of external conflict."
This seems to be a strange solution and even Iraq war supporters have not come up with this reason. Meanwhile Loury wonders Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?:
"Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.
...
A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.
....
Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy—intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order—can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: there is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions. "
Update: (via 3quarksdaily)Adiscussion on "Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?" and a review of three recent books on prisons.

Nepali teacher wins Magsaysay Award

From scidev.net
"Mahabir Pun, 52, from the remote village of Nangi in Nepal, will receive the 2007 Award for Community Leadership and a US$50,000 prize along with six other awardees in Manila, Philippines this month (31 August).

Pun started the project — The Nepal Wireless Networking Project — to meet the communication needs of his village, seven hours climb to the nearest road and without a telephone connection.

"I believe that better communication systems are important for the overall development of a community and a nation," Pun told SciDev.Net.

Under the project, villagers and a team of international volunteers initially powered several computers with small hydro-generators in a nearby stream.

They then linked them wirelessly to the Internet with a series of television dish antennas and mountaintop relay stations, using the nearest telephone connection in the town of Pokhara, a two-day trip away.

Pun said the project has so far provided 14 rural villages with access to services like telemedicine, distance learning, e-marketing of local products and telephone services."
From an editorial in scidev.net

"Almost unnoticed, Nepal is developing simple and cheap technologies that make the best of local resources and don't damage the environment.

Down a narrow alley in Kathmandu's historic heart, through a low door, you enter Akal Man Nakarmi's workshop. Nakarmi's surname means 'metalsmith' and the soft-spoken craftsman's ancestors crafted copper utensils and forged statues of deities in bronze.

Today, Nakarmi makes small turbines called Peltric Sets for micro-hydro electric generation plants across the Himalaya. He can't keep up with demand.

Nepal's successes in scientific application in recent decades aren't about grandiose hydropower dams or major infrastructure projects.

The new technologies that have worked have been indigenously designed, based on traditional skills and knowledge, and are cheap and easy to use and maintain. In fact, to visit Nepal these days is to see the 'small is beautiful' concept of development economist E. F. Schumacher in action."

Mahe Jabeen wins an award

Mahe Jabeen winsRajeev Gandhi Manav Seva award for child welfare.

Telugu Sahitya Vedika

Newonline Telugu literary magazine.

A wide ranging article on American and Global Economy

in Harvard Magazine by Jonathan Shaw (via 3quarksdaily). Very readable. A sample excerpt:
"The global imbalances created by this dynamic of American borrowing and foreign lending appear stable for now, but if they slip suddenly, that could pose serious dangers for middle- and working-class Americans through soaring interest rates, a crash in the housing market, and sharply higher prices for anything no longer made domestically. Harvard economists and political scientists see possible threats to globalization (the opening of markets and trade that has made the economy a world phenomenon): the risk of rising protectionism; the potential for a world recession if market forces unwind the imbalances too quickly; and even the possibility that political considerations could trump shared economic interests, causing nations to use their international financial positions as weapons."
Not so typical excerpt:
"That last idea—that nations can wield power through their accumulation of currency reserves—is rooted in our own history. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower learned in 1956 that Britain, in collusion with France and Israel, had invaded Egypt without U.S. knowledge, he was infuriated. “Many people remember Suez,” notes Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel professor of capital formation and growth at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), but few recall “the specific way that Eisenhower forced the British to back down.” At the time, there was a run on the pound sterling and he blocked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from stabilizing the currency. With sterling on the verge of collapse, says Frankel, “Eisenhower told them, ‘We are not going to bail out the pound unless you pull out of Suez.’” Facing bankruptcy, the British withdrew. This incident, notes Frankel, “marked the end of Great Britain’s ability to conduct an independent foreign policy.” "

SBS documentary on Noor Inayat Khan

today. From The Age:
"A beautiful Indian princess from a Sufi pacifist family holds "the principal and most dangerous post in France" during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the summer of 1943. Noor Inayat Khan was not a soldier but a radio operator, transmitting secrets between Paris and London, and working under the pseudonym Madeleine. It is astounding that Noor, a princess from a muslim family, came to be in such a precarious position.

Her success in the post, and her behaviour when captured by the Germans, earned her a George Cross - one of only three awarded to women in World War II. This documentary follows Noor's story, from her birth in Moscow and unconventional upbringing in Paris, to her training in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and eventual deployment to France."
More about Noor Inayat Khan at Wikipedia.

Sarah O'Connor on Shah Rukh Khan

From The Age:
O'Connor, 22, was coming to terms with her new-found stardom when "Sporting Life" called yesterday. "I didn't know much about Bollywood, except they do a lot of dancing and singing. Now that I've seen it, I'm like, this is pretty big," said O'Connor, who has a speaking role in which she clashes with one of the Indian players at a cocktail party. "I play a bit of a bitch," she said. "I didn't know who he (Khan) was, but I'd heard he was the Brad Pitt of Bollywood, and then I met him and you could just tell. He had the look and the smell. As soon as he came out, it was like a rock concert. People were going mental, they baked cakes, brought flowers, some girls fainted. When I shook his hand, I thought maybe I shouldn't wash it."

Chak De India is like Bend It Like Beckham, with sticks. But it keeps Bollywood silliness to a minimum. "There's an underdog team and they come together and win. It's predictable, but it's good. It has a great storyline," O'Connor said. "It was funny, when I did the movie we had the big crowds, so you kind of feel what it would be like to play for Australia. Then a month after we finished filming, I got a call-up to go to Argentina with the Australian team for the Champions Trophy. I got all these emails from the Indian girls saying, 'This is the real thing'!"

The spiral of risk

This is a first attempt to understand the sub-prime problem; the posts linked below seem somewhat understandable. John Kay in Financial Times (via bayesianheresy):
"The financial economics I once taught treated risk as just another commodity. People bought and sold it in line with their varying preferences. The result, in the Panglossian world of efficient markets, was that risk was widely spread and held by those best able to bear it.

Real life led me to a different view. Risk markets are driven less by different tastes for risk than by differences in information and understanding. People who know a little of what they are doing pass risks to people who know less. Since ignorance is not evenly distributed, the result may be to concentrate risk rather than spread it. The truth began to dawn when I studied what happened at Lloyd’s two decades ago."
A comment inRoubini's postlinks to
a letter from J. Kyle Bass, Managing Partner of Hayman Capital . Excerpt:
"He told me that the “real money” (US insurance companies, pension funds, etc) accounts had stopped purchasing mezzanine tranches of US Subprime debt in late 2003 and that they needed a mechanism that could enable them to “mark up” these loans, package them opaquely, and EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!! He told me with a straight face that these CDOs were the only way to get rid of the riskiest tranches of Subprime debt. "
There are aseveral posts on the topic in Information Processing. See in particular Profits from the meltdown and guide to the perplexed.
More at NY Times .

Mukul Kesavan on India's Unique Democracy

Mukul Kesavan in India's Model Democracy:
"Pluralism, a stratagem born of weakness (the early nationalist elite had no other way of demonstrating that they represented anyone but themselves), became the cornerstone of Indian political practice, because it legitimised the compromises essential for keeping hundreds of jostling identities aboard the good ship India.

This was the ultimate political goal: to keep the diversity of a subcontinent afloat in a democratic ark. Everything else was negotiable.
.....
If India didn't exist, no-one would have the imagination to invent it."

From an article of Mark Tully

Inthis article, Mark Tully says:
"Mahatma Gandhi said that he had never made a fetish of consistency. Hinduism for him was so broad that "every variety of belief found protection under its ample fold". It's not surprising that his country does not make a fetish of the efficiency which demands consistency and which, far from being capacious, only knows one way of doing anything."
I wonder whether some sort of secularism is embedded in Hinduism.

Emotional Memory Formation

From Information Processing:
"A mutation in the gene for the α2b-adrenoceptor improves the formation of memories of strong emotional events. Students in Zurich with the mutation performed twice as well on a controlled test. Rwandan refugees with the mutation tended to suffer significantly more often from flashbacks of traumatic events. So, the mutation affects cognitive function in a clear way. It's also distributed unevenly among different populations -- 30% of Swiss and 12% of Rwandans have the mutant allele."
For more links and excerpts from an interesting Economist article see Steve Hsu's post linked above. However, as the Economist article says:
"Whether that result has wider implications remains to be seen. Human genetics has a notorious history of jumping to extravagant conclusions from scant data, but that does not mean conclusions should be ducked if the data are good. In this case, the statistics suggest Rwanda may have been lucky: the long-term mental-health effects of the war may not be as widespread as they would have been in people with a different genetic mix. On the other hand, are those who easily forget the horrors of history condemned to repeat them?"

An interview with P. Sainath

An interesting interview with Sainath via Kuffir. Excerpt:
"I have a problem with always looking back only to what was said in the 1920s and what was said during the civil disobedience movement or during the Quit India movement. I do not believe Gandhi was the only leader of the freedom struggle. If you’re looking at statues and reverence, you would find there are far more statues of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, a PhD from Columbia University who emerged from the untouchable classes of Indian society.

In fact, the difference between Ambedkar and any other Indian leader is that the statues of Ambedkar are put up by public subscription, not by government fatwa. The freedom struggle of India gave us many leaders and luminaries of enormous standing. However, I think that on many issues I would rather look at Gandhi and Ambedkar in terms of what would their stance or their understanding of the present situation be? How would they act now? On some of the central issues of our time—oppression of the poorer castes and the so-called untouchables—I think history has proven Ambedkar to be right. Ambedkar’s prognosis of the role that caste would play in democracy, of how a lack of economic democracy would damage political democracy, has been borne out by history. What would Gandhi say about the obscene inequality that you’re looking at in the world? A man who said that for those who die of hunger the only form in which God may dare appear is food. That’s the interesting thing for me."
Interestingly, from Mark Lindley's Life and Times of Gora, chapter 5:
"Gandhi wanted to be certain, however, that Manorama was acting freely. Early in 1946, when he had occasion to visit Madras, he asked Gora and Manorama (as well as Mythri) to meet him there, and he asked an orthodox caste-Hindu colleague who was fluent in Telugu to interview Manorama and see if she was under duress. But she was unequivocal: “We are working for social equality and the eradication of Untouchability.” So Gandhi declared, “Now they are my children. Let them wait for two years and in the meantime let us announce their engagement.” Arjun Rao, the groom whom Gora and Sara swa thi had chosen, was sent for and came to Madras. Gandhi found him presentable and fairly fluent in Hindi, which was the one language common to every one at Sevagram, so he invited him to spend the next two years there, while Manorama, who did not speak Hindi, would study at a nurses’ and midwives’ training center in Andhra. At Sevagram Gandhi told Arjun,

“You should become like Ambedkar. You should work for the re moval of Untouchability and caste. Untouchability must go at any cost.” "
P.S. Sainath says "Palagummi is the name of a now-nonexistent village in Andhra Pradesh. ... My granddad used to tell me that Palagummi was a village in the Godavari area," According to Wikipedia, there is still a village Palagummi in Razole Mandal of East Godavari District.

A passion for reading

Froman interview with Pankaj Mishra:
"Initially, I saw the life of the writer as a life of reading, which for me was really an extension of the life of idleness that I’d been living as an undergraduate at university. Reading gave me so much pleasure that I felt that maybe I could continue that life indefinitely. I basically went from day to day, reading a lot, loving most books I read and making notes about them. I was just hoping that nothing would happen—like having to apply for a job or think seriously about a career—that would put a stop to the wonderful life I was leading. And, miraculously, nothing stopped me.
......
Most of what I read now is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It’s slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who’s reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia. Often I find that when I go back to those books by Flaubert or Chekhov—which I loved—I’m unable to summon up that same imaginative richness. That seems to me a huge loss. Now I’m thinking more about the craftsmanship of it—why did this paragraph end here—narrowly technical things.
......
(while discussing his book avout Budha)
Three books inspired me. One was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. It’s an extraordinarily radical book in that it’s the mid-twentieth century and he’s doing straightforward ethnography in Brazil while at the same time he’s looking at his own experience as a Frenchman and the larger encounter that’s happening between Western modernity and older cultures. The other book I had in mind was Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz. It’s another hugely fascinating example of someone mixing personal history with a larger historical account. My experience was quite different from theirs, I was neither an academic like Lévi-Strauss nor someone coping with very fraught political situations the way Milosz was, but these books were inspirations if not models. Also [V. S. Naipaul’s] An Area of Darkness, which I think is one of the more interesting examples of experimental nonfiction: it’s an essay, a travelogue, it’s an instance of what today might be called cultural studies, it’s certainly a memoir—a very angry one at times—there is a range of moods and a range of tones."

"BLVR: If you could have every American read one book, what would it be?

PM: A House for Mr. Biswas. It’s quite removed from the glamorous notions of what a great novel should be. It’s about a man in the middle of nowhere working his way out of a background of deprivation and wanting a house of his own for his growing family. The frustration and partial fulfillment of that desire is described with great insight and humor, and, most extraordinarily, with no sentimentality. Apart from other things, reading that book makes you understand—intuitively—the violence in the world today."

"BLVR: Are you ambitious?

PM: Well, I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don’t like, and I don’t want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure. I feel that I already have the life I love and I don’t see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have—bigger advances, more prizes. It’s a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt. To think of what someone like Flaubert would have made of it, what kind of utter disgust and scorn it would have aroused in figures like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. What would they say if they were told they all had to compete for these little trinkets that were given out? Yet the longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers."
More links to Pankaj Mishra here.

Assorted Telugu related articles

Nagaraju on the role of Rayalaseemain the development of Telugu.
Velcheru Narayana Rao in Coconut and Honey: Samskrit and Telugu in Medieval Andhrasuggests that Krishnadevaraya’s decision to encourage Telugu was a political decision. Very interesting article with lots more.
Narla Venkateswara Rao in ‘Idli Digvijayam’ (Telugu article) in Narla Rachanalu, vol.2 pp. 317-322 relates the decline of popularity of ‘idli’ with that of the Vijayanagara empire resulting in the decline of irrigation and availability of rice.
Idli seems to have come to India from Indonesia.
A recent article in Current Sciencestudies the rise and fall of the Vijayanagara empire in terms of control of resources and trade (at one place they seem to have used ‘nadir’ for ‘zenith’). They also suggest that a mini green revolution took place. A summary here.
K.Srinivasulu in Caste, Class and Social Articulation in Andhra Pradesh: Mapping Differential Regional Trajectories studies the effects of green revolution and different trajectories of class and caste struggles in different regions of A.P.
“In this paper we have examined the significance of class and caste on social mobilisation in Andhra Pradesh. The central question addressed here is: why have two of the State’s major regions, Telangana and coastal Andhra, differed in terms of social mobilisation, as class-based agrarian movement and dalit mobilisation have been gaining ground in these two regions respectively?”

A Farewell to Alms

by Gregory Clark is being touted as the next blockbuster. Here are some excerpts from
Tyler Cowen's review in New York Times
"Economists typically explain the wealth of a nation by pointing to good policies and the quality of a country’s institutions. But why do these differences exist in the first place?

In “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World” (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/FTA2006.pdf), Gregory Clark, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, identifies the quality of labor as the fundamental factor behind economic growth. Poor labor quality discourages capital from flowing into a country, which means that poverty persists. Good institutions never have a chance to develop.
....
A simple example from Professor Clark shows the importance of labor in economic development. As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks.

For instance, when it came to “doffing” (periodically removing spindles of yarn from machines), American workers were often six or more times as productive as their Indian counterparts, according to measures from the early to mid-20th century. Importing Western managers did not in general narrow these gaps. As a result, India failed to attract comparable capital investment.

Professor Clark’s argument implies that the current outsourcing trend is a small blip in a larger historical pattern of diverging productivity and living standards across nations. Wealthy countries face the most serious competitive challenges from other wealthy regions, or from nations on the cusp of development, and not from places with the lowest wages. Shortages of quality labor, for instance, are already holding back India in international competition."

I find it difficult to believe such differences remain constant and it reminds me of the speculation that the wealth of nations was determined by 1000 B.C.
UPDATE: Lively discussion at Economist's View .

Interesting reads

Mistakes were made (but not by me)
The Lucifer Effect
The Starfish and the Spider

Chemists Without Borders

Bill Hooker in 3quarksdaily writes about new vaccines from Cuba, Groundwater Arsenic and new international efforts without borders: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/08/is-there-a-chem.html
Excerpt
"Bego and co-founders Steve Chambreau and Lacy Brent are not the first to decide that doctors should not be the only profession without borders. There are also Laywers, Teachers, Sociologists, Builders, Engineers, Clowns and I daresay a good many other Professions Without Borders. All of them seek to do, within their own fields of expertise, something roughly on par with the mission of MSF. So really, the name of the organization largely explains what CWB are about:

Chemists Without Borders is a public benefit, non-profit, international humanitarian organization designed to alleviate human suffering through the use of proven chemical technologies and related skills. Our primary goals include, but are not limited to, providing affordable medicines and vaccines to those who need them most, supplying clean water in developing countries, facilitating sustainable energy technologies, and supporting chemistry education.

I became aware of CWB through their commitment to Open Chemistry, and then by taking part in their conference call series I learned about their interest in groundwater arsenic remediation, which is the problem I want to think about here."

Book Mules

The following is reminiscent of the work of Aravinda and Ravi of Aidindia in north coastal Andhra. From
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6929404.stm
"The idea of loading mules with books and taking them into the mountain villages was started by the University of Momboy, a small institution that prides itself on its community-based initiatives and on doing far more than universities in Venezuela are required to do by law.
....
The 23 children at the little school were very excited.
"Bibilomu-u-u-u-las," they shouted as the bags of books were unstrapped. They dived in eagerly, keen to grab the best titles and within minutes were being read to by Christina and Juana, two of the project leaders.
"Spreading the joy of reading is our main aim," Christina Vieras told me.

"But it's more than that. We're helping educate people about other important things like the environment. All the children are planting trees. Anything to improve the quality of life and connect these communities."
.........
As the project grows, it is using the latest technology.
Somehow there is already a limited mobile phone signal here, so the organisers are taking advantage of that and equipping the mules with laptops and projectors.

The book mules are becoming cyber mules and cine mules.

"We want to install wireless modems under the banana plants so the villagers can use the internet," says Robert Ramirez, the co-ordinator of the university's Network of Enterprising Rural Schools.

"Imagine if people in the poor towns in the valley can e-mail saying how many tomatoes they'll need next week, or how much celery.

"The farmers can reply telling them how much they can produce. It's blending localisation and globalisation." "

Sensex falls

and Gulzar Natarajan connects the dots:
http://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2007/08/sub-prime-lending-now-private-equity.html
A longer article by Nouriel Roubini along similar lines but full access needs subscrption which I do not have:
http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini/208166
UPDATE: See also the discussion (at my request) in http://retributions.wordpress.com/off-topic-forum/
and a general article on housing prices http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2007/07/house-prices-fu.html
New Economist links to a New Statesman special issue on India: http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2007/08/new-statesman.html

Images of 'ghost chilli'

with commentary from samachar.com http://samachar.com/showurl.php?rurl=http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14503492
See how meager the food is in image 4.
Update(Nov. 4, 2007): The link above is not working anymore. Try:
http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14503492&page=4
or google.