News from Khasi society

From Freakonmics Blog:
"Their results are summarized as follows:

Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men. Perhaps surprisingly, Khasi women are even slightly more competitive than Maasai men, but this difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels under any of our formal statistical tests."
Via BBC and Evolutionary Psychology group:
"An Indian politician has been stripped of his status as a tribesman and may be barred from contesting elections because he took his father's surname.
Leaders of the Khasi tribe in the north-east Indian state of Meghalaya have told Waibha Kyndiah that he has "ceased" to be a Khasi.
The Khasis are a matrilineal society and their legal code does not recognise anyone who uses a paternal surname.
Mr Kyndiah was planning to contest an assembly seat reserved for tribes."

Social monogamy

From http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080206/full/451617a.html:
By traditionalist standards, prairie-vole couples may enjoy the ideal relationship: the rodents form lifelong partnerships — a highly unusual practice in mammals. Males help raise the children; females help build the nest. As for their sex life, let's just say it far exceeds the efforts required for procreation.

But the respectable public behaviour of North American prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster ) may hide a bed-hopping double life. Paternity tests published last week indicate that the animals touted as paragons of monogamy frequently cheat on their partners (A. G. Ophir et al. Anim. Behav. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.09.022; 2008). “Ironically”, the study's authors conclude, “the dissociation of social and sexual fidelity leads us to suggest that prairie voles are even better models of human attachment than has been appreciated.”

Studies on prairie voles have led scientists to look at the role of hormones such as vasopressin and oxytocin in strengthening human relationships. Revelations of infidelity in the creatures will not change the significance of that research, but may make the voles a little less popular among political agitators for sexual abstinence. (Eric Keroack, who headed a government family-planning committee in the United States, even used the monogamous voles as evidence to support his view that people who have extramarital sex damage their oxytocin signalling mechanisms.)

“Humans want to believe in sexual monogamy.”
Over the past few decades researchers have learned to distinguish between 'social monogamy' — in which a pair lives and tends their young together — and 'sexual monogamy', in which a couple mates exclusively with each other. “You may have a partner you come home to every night,” says Alexander Ophir, a biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, “but that's not necessarily the one that you're mating with.”

Ophir and his colleagues found that infidelity had no effect on reproductive success: a cheating vole was just as likely to reproduce as a faithful one, so long as the cheater maintained a socially monogamous relationship. Sue Carter, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says that these findings highlight the importance of social bonding. “Humans want to believe in sexual monogamy,” says Carter. That focus may have distracted people from the relative importance of social monogamy, she says.

Carter has observed philandering voles in her own lab, and notes that the infidelity did not disrupt pre-existing partnerships. When a female initiates contact with an outside male, for example, the relationship remains strictly sexual. “She mated with him,” says Carter, “and then she attacked him, ran him off and went back to her established partner.”

Gurram Jashua

Gurram Jashuva was one of father's favourite poets and I remeber attending with my father a 'kanakabhishekam' ceremony for him around 1952. Recently I went to study a micro finance project in Modukuru and was pleased to find that the only library in the village is named after himand is in the Dalit part of the village. Eecerpt from the Wikipedia article:

"Gurram Jashuva or G Joshua (b. 28 September 1895-d. 24 July 1971) was a popular Telugu poet, born into a poor Christian family in Vinukonda, Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, India. He was discriminated as an untouchable in school, college and professional life.

Jashuva was born to Virayya and Lingamma. Because of the intercaste alliance of his parents, their poverty and their caste, his childhood was spent in alienation from close relatives, undergoing severe hardships and being subjected to inhuman treatment from the society which considered his caste untouchable. His parents raised him as a Christian. In spite of this, Jashuva often drew his inspiration from Hinduism and Hindu mythological epics. This angered his Christian society, which was quick to proscribe Jashuva's family from their community. This did not deter Jashuva who continued to write excellent poetry in Telugu."

Trying to see whether there is some follow up of his work, I found that his daughter Hemalata married Gora's son Lavanam and both Lavanam and Hamalata carried on their parents' work:
An autobiographical account of Lavanam and some of their work. Earlier posts with links to Gora and Gandhi.
A recent blog postabout Gurram Jashuva. Three poems including 'smasanavatika'
and Andhra mata
English translations of some of his poems by Velcheru Narayana Rao are in
'Hibiscus on the Lake'.

John Howard's parting gift?

From BBC News:
"To others, the award of extra points to fluent English speakers is more sinister, with shades of the monocultural "white Australia policy", the umbrella term for a swathe of policies and laws engineered to limit non-white immigration which finally petered out in the early 1970s.

"I do see this as an attack on multiculturalism," complains Kate Gauthier, from the group A Just Australia.
................
Australia claims to be the most successfully multicultural country in the world. According to the 2001 census, 23% of the population were born overseas, while 43% of the population were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas.

But gaining citizenship is just about to get tougher, and applicants will be soon required to take a test on the country's history and values.
......
For British applicants, Australia is about to become more welcoming - but is it at the cost of migrants from other countries? "

Tabula Rasa looks back

In the post 'Rear-view', Tabula Rasa contemplates on some of his favourite posts. I missed some of them but remember fondly this and this. Some of the travel posts are on my reading list.

A link to the past

and may be to the future too. Following up a post in 'churumuri' on R.K. Karnanjia, I came across three interesting articles by Alexander Cockburn in the series 'Travels with Sainath'. I seem to have been in the some of the places travelled by Sainath at different times: coastal Andhra, Madras Layola College, Bombay and Delhi. Anyway, here are the pieces.

'Dark Hope' by David Dean Shulman

Avishai Margalit's reviews David Shulman's 'Dark Hope' in New York Review of Books. Excerpt from the book:
"There is something infuriating about the notion that we can go on as usual,teaching our irrelevancies, drinking coffee in the faculty club, reading Telugu poetry, sitting on committees, whatever, and next door to us - a Palestian ghetto of our own - that is, the army's - making."
Another review of different books about Israel.
Here is a list of books by David Dean Shulman and a couple of articles in Hindu about him
here and here.
P.S.Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman won theA.K. Ramanujam tranlation prize in 2004 for their"Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology".

CNC-IBN Indian of the Year 2007 For E.Sreedharan

From The Hindu:"Delhi Metro Chief E Sreedharan was on Tuesday adjudged as the "Indian of the Year for 2007" by CNN-IBN news channel. "
More about Sreedharan here.I attended a function in Vijayawada when E. Sreedharan was awarded
Dr. Pinnamaneni and Smt. Seethadevi Foundation award for 2007. He mentioned during the speech (from the link above):
"Dr. Sreedharan said small and lean teams of dedicated professionals were major contributing factors behind the successful implementation of the first phase of Delhi Metro much in advance of the scheduled time.

It was ensured that there were no clerks or peons in the system to the extent that officials of the rank of joint secretary to the Government had to fend for themselves, which worked wonders in avoiding corruption and enabling fast-paced decision making, he added."
I also remember him saying that the contractors were paid 75 perecent as soon as they submitted the bills and the rest with in 10 days. The money from the awards he wins goes to a charitable foundation.

What did Harbhajan say?

According to Times of India :
"Reports said that Harbhajan admitted at the hearing that he had abused Symonds with a hindi word which sounded like 'monkey'.

When the Counsel for the Australian players asked Harbhajan what he had said, Harbhajan said "I admit I abused Symonds and said m- - - - (an abusive word in Hindi).

The Indian officials at the hearing burst out laughing when Harbhajan disclosed the word.

Judge Hansen confirmed the meaning of the word from Tendulkar and the dropped the charge of racial abuse against the Indian spinner. "
Harbhajan's mother:"I knew God was with us and I had full faith that my son would come out clean", according to TOI again.
More from CricketInformation:
"Unlike Mike Procter, who thought Tendulkar was not in a position to hear what was uttered, Hansen said "extensive video footage" establishes that Tendulkar "was within earshot and could have heard the words".

Tendulkar said he heard Harbhajan "use a term in his native tongue "teri maa ki" which appears to be pronounced with an "n". He said this is a term that sounds like "monkey" and could be misrepresented for it."

Symonds couldn't recall if he had heard Harbhajan use that particular Hindi abuse and accepted that it was a possibility. He also didn't find favour with the judge with his explanation for abusing Harbhajan after he had patted Brett Lee on the back side. Symonds said he had objected because "a Test match is no place to be friendly with an opposition player" but Hansen dismissed that explanation ("If that is his view I hope it is not one shared by all international cricketers").

Michael Clarke's account was critical, considering that it did not coincide favourably with the rest. "It is not without significance that the Australian players maintain other than Mr Symonds that they did not hear any other words spoken, only the ones that are said to be of significance to this hearing," Hansen said.

"This is a little surprising in the context where there was a reasonably prolonged heated exchange. Indeed Mr Clarke went so far as to say that he did not hear Mr Symonds say anything. Given Mr Symonds' own acceptance that he initiated the exchange and was abusive towards Mr Singh, that is surprising. This failure to identify any other words could be because some of what they were hearing was not in English." "
Cognitive dissonance?
P.S.1) Text of Hansen's decision and afterthought.
2)Rohul Sidhardhan notes some inconsistencies in Symond's statements.

An Australian innovation

From http://discovermagazine.com/blogs/discoblog/archive/2008/01/23/when-australians-invade:
"Finding Cancer in Hair
Last, but not least, Fermiscan, a company with the alternative to the mammogram, stole the show today and, consequently, took the prize money. David Young, managing director touted his company’s unique technique to discover breast cancer with a simple, non-invasive pluck of (dye-free) hair. Once removed, the hair is shipped to one of 40 synchrotron—or a sub-atomic particle accelerator—facilities worldwide where molecular x-ray patterns are compared. It turns out breast cancer can be detected by changes in the structure of hair—so far with 80% accuracy, according to the current 2,000 patient trial. All the imaging work for Fermiscan is already being done in U.S. labs (With a home in Chicago), and with a 7 to 10 day turnaround, the breast cancer detection could prove to be a relatively simple, and more accurate, alternative to a mammogram. That is, unless you dye your hair, in which case you might have to plan to grow out your roots every 4 weeks or so."

Several links on rising food prices

in bayesianheresy.The one from The Economist is interesting. Most seem to be concerned about biofuels. Perhaps the reasons vary from country to country and I am not sure how much these articles apply to India. As I noted before, in coastal Andhra Pradesh "Due to the uncertainity of returns from rice farming, some farmers have shifted to other crops and even eucalyptus plantations on the land that they were using for rice farming. Some predict that there will be food crisis in the next five years."

Steve Waugh's recent comments

on Indian cricketers (from http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23124244-5001023,00.html).
On Ishant Sharma:
"INDIA have something special in Ishant Sharma if managed correctly.
The danger in such a cricket- crazy country is the pedestal that is slipped under one's feet the moment any inkling of success occurs.
In the blink of an eye massive endorsements, instant stardom and invites to all the happening events can quickly dilute on-field performance.
This kid reminds me of a young McGrath in his attitude towards learning, trajectory of delivery, temperament and the rapid improvement he has shown in a short space of time."
On Virenra Sehwag:
"His game-saving fourth innings in Adelaide revealed a cricketer who has finally realised that talent alone doesn't guarantee consistent results.
He has always been a debonair, swashbuckling type who refused to dilute his instinctive play, but in Adelaide he elevated his game by adjusting to the conditions and showing his teammates that the team result came before his ego."

On Sachin Tendulkar:
"Tendulkar found something from within to turn back the clock after struggling in recent years against quality bowling, to once again be the batsman the rest of the team bat around.
He set himself for a stellar series, focusing in on technique and channelled concentration and never appeared rushed in his shots or harassed by the bowlers.
He mixed text book shot-making with a variety of unorthodox sweeps to regularly ask questions of his opponents and single-handedly took on the responsibility to stop Australia's momentum by occupying the crease and making two scores in excess of 150."

Jan Bremen's "The Poverty Regime in Village India:.."

reviewd by D. Narasimha Reddy in Frontline: http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20080201506207600.htm
Concluding paragraphs of the review:
"The idea of undeserving poor has taken root in the minds of those who are rich, more in these years of reforms. The rich, thus, neither feel guilty nor are afraid of any mobilisation by the poor in acute destitution because of the absence of solidarity among them. The result is that the landless, footloose rural proletariat lead a nomadic existence, following the seasonal, sectoral, and local fluctuations in the economy with occupational multiplicity. This, according to Breman, is not a temporary imbalance but a structural crisis, of which the enormous reserve army of land-poor and landless are the victims (page 206).

INCLUSIVE GROWTH

In the last chapter of the book, Breman engages in the present debate on “inclusive growth”. He believes that one of the critical inputs in making the rural landless poor move out of the present state is access to land. “Making land accessible to households which had been made landless in the near or more distant past would put an end to their exclusion from right to property” (page 414). He shows how Dhodias, another tribal group with access to land, though marginal, are able to achieve a little more of stability, gain access to education, and experience improvement in living conditions. The present stirrings and mobilisation of the rural poor in all parts of the country, one hopes, marks the beginning of the second wave of land reforms, which becomes imperative.

The book shows that the expectation that the landless would leave the village seeking better life in non-agricultural and urban occupations and relieve pressure on land did not happen. On the contrary, it shows the irrational phenomenon of people having land acquiring skills and moving to lucrative non-agricultural occupations without leaving their hold on their land. The landless poor thus suffer “double denial”.

The book, which is a product of long years of dedicated, unparalleled fieldwork , has been brought out with a great deal of care, supported by valuable photographs to drive home the message in a telling manner. It would be a difficult, but eye–opening, reading for policymakers, and rewarding in method and substance to students trying to understand poverty in all its dimensions. "

Another paper on the Great Divergence

here.Rodrik's comment:
"Aside from an interesting historical discussion, Galor and Mountford provide some striking evidence on the contemporary relationship between trade, on the one hand, and fertility and education, on the other. Controlling for endogeneity and other possible problems, they show that larger trade shares are associated with lower fertility and greater investment in education in the OECD economies, but with higher fertility and lower education in developing economies.
I am more convinced by the historical discussion than by the contemporary evidence (for one thing, the skill premium has generally risen--not fallen--in most developing economies opening up to trade in recent decades). But I do find these scatter plots intriguing. "

Partha Dasgupta on measuring sustainable development

here via bayesianheresy.

Andrew Leonard on decoupling

in this post:
"What seems remarkable at this juncture is that the decoupling thesis ever gained any traction in the first place. While it is undoubtedly true that Europe, the U.S. and Japan are no longer the sole pillars holding up the global economy, the fact that there has been a wide diffusion of economic vitality does not necessarily imply that the separate pieces now have separate destinies. If anything, the opposite is true.

Globalization is built not just out of the telecommunication and computer network linkages that make financial markets anywhere accessible from your iPhone. The bricks-and-mortar of global production supply chains have turned that iPhone into a product requiring the efforts of multiple nations and multiple companies. An earthquake in Taiwan affects Dell's quarterly earnings. High corn prices in Iowa lead to an expansion of soybean farming in Brazil. Bad investment bets by New York bankers lead to an infusion of funds from Singapore and Abu Dhabi and bankruptcies in small towns in Norway. In every direction one looks the linkages are multiplying.

The decoupling thesis suggested that if the U.S. stumbled, China could keep on running. It would be lovely if this were true. It is not a happy thought to think that the welfare of hundreds of millions of poor people around the world depends on the buying power of American consumers with maxed-out credit cards teetering on the brink of foreclosure. But the jitters visible in global markets this week tell us that when the king stubs his toe, everyone starts limping."

It is time to remember Ganguly's gesture

in the 2003 Adelaide testbetween India and Australia:
"Ganguly replaced Tendulkar in the batting line-up on Saturday night after Australia had taken two quick wickets.

Tendulkar has struggled in this series and Ganguly says it made sense to save him from batting late in the afternoon.

"Sachin is the best batsman in the world," he said.

"He's one of our key members and there are times in your career when you have to look after certain people and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

"We want him to fire."

Ganguly says the "Little Master" should be given every chance to find form.

"As a batsman, I also know that it's (the end of the day) not the best time to come in and bat," he said.

"He said he wouldn't mind and I said fair enough and he deserves it with the amount of runs he's scored for the country, he deserves it (not to have to come in)."

When U.S Sneezes

Rest of the World Gets the Cold, says Nouriel Roubini. Excerpt:
"First, the US recession is unavoidable and has already started; and this recession will be ugly, deep and severe, much more severe than the mild 8-month recessions in 1990-91 and 2001.

Second, the rest of the world will not decouple from the US since – as discussed in detail below – many trade, financial, currency, policy, confidence links – lead to a transmission of negative growth shocks in the US to the rest of the world that will lead to a sharp global growth slowdown: 2008 will be the year of recoupling rather than decoupling.

Third, the US stock market has already started to reflect in the last few weeks the consequences on earnings and corporate profitability of a severe US recession.

Fourth, a growing realization that even aggressive Fed easing will not prevent this severe recession, i.e. that we are at the last leg of the stock market’s sucker’s rally and that the Bernanke put has very little value as massive financial losses will increase regardless of what the Fed does.

Fifth, now other global stock markets are now starting to price the effects of the US hard landing on the rest of the world growth, the phenomenon of recoupling. "
But Gulzar Natarajan in this post, and T.T.Ram Mohan in "US crisis does not spell crisis for world economy" think that India wo'nt be too affected.

Pataudi Jr. says

"Pataudi has a radical idea, something sledgers of the world would likely unite to oppose. "The fielders should not be allowed to say anything in the hearing of the batsman," he declares. "It's a sport. Shut up and get on with it. If a team tries to gain an unfair advantage by sledging, it must not be allowed." Rather radical, and perhaps too much so. It might make the sport sterile, but there won't be any race rows at least. "
From Outlook article http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080128&fname=Cricket+%28F%29&sid=1 by Rohit Mahajan.
John Traicos seems to agree (From Sidhartha Vaidyanathan's Australian Diaryhttp://blogs.cricinfo.com/tourdiaries/archives/2008/01/an_encounter_wi_1.php ):

"I don’t believe the atmosphere of sledging has helped at all. I don’t believe you need to sledge as a systematic process, simply because it gets to abuse. Everybody plays the game hard, and you play a bit of a prank now and than, but there’s a different between that and a systematic mental
rattling. It’s a systematic feature of cricket that has to be eradicated.”

India aims for

'quantum jump' in science. Excerpt:
"“We are planning to fund 30 new Central Universities, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology,” Singh said. In the next five years, he added, India will also be launching 1,600 polytechnics, 10,000 vocational schools and 50,000 skill-development centres. One million schoolchildren will receive science innovation scholarships of 5,000 rupees (US$130) each over the next five years, and 10,000 scholarships of 100,000 rupees per year will go to those enrolling on science degree courses." Lots of comments too.

Eric Wargo on stress

The following excellent artcle on stress by Eric Wargo seems to have appeared in part in several places(including The Hindu), often without acknowledgement. Conclusion:
" So Nietzsche’s strenuous view of life, “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” just plain isn’t true. Stressors that don’t kill you in the short run may yet shorten your life or drastically lessen its quality.

But quit your moping and look on the bright side: The newly refined science of stress could lead to new drug therapies that can control stress or inhibit its effects on health. Also, depression and anxiety are not only results of stress, but also causes, and existing therapeutic and medical treatments for these conditions can help change how people perceive threats, put their life challenges in context, and cut stressors down to manageable size. The cycle doesn’t have to be vicious, in other words.
What’s more, the confirmation that the mind directly affects the body can work as much in our favor as it does to our detriment, as the personality-and-stress research above indicates. As APS Fellow Carol Dweck, Stanford University, has argued, personality is mutable (see Herbert, 2007); if our outlooks and beliefs about ourselves can be changed, so (theoretically) can our vulnerability to life’s slings and arrows.

The bottom line: Stress is not inevitable. Even with more than one’s fair share of vulnerability genes, there’s plenty of room to take one’s life and one’s mind in a less stressful direction. Relaxation techniques such as meditation and yoga, for example, have been confirmed to quell stress demons. Even if you are a determined workaholic glued to your cell phone or a fearful and angry urban neurotic like Woody Allen, stress-reduction methods are readily available to cope with stress in the short term and even alter perceptions of stressors in the long term.

Meyer Friedman, co-discoverer of the link between “Type A” behavior and heart disease, is a case in point. A self-described Type-A personality, Friedman wound up suffering a heart-attack at age 55. He made the conscious choice to change his ways in accordance with his own discoveries — including following his own prescription by reading the classics. To get more in touch with his slow, patient, and creative side, he read Proust’s languid seven-volume opus Remembrance of Things Past three times. In short, he trained himself to relax and enjoy life, and he had the last laugh at stress by living to the ripe old age of 90. "
Eric Wargo is the Managing Editor of "Psychological Science in the Public Interest", and has written popular pieces on Daniel Gilbert, Philip Zimbardo and others.

Breadsociety news for January

here. Excerpt:
"BREAD Society had just completed awarding about a thousand scholarships – 569 fresh scholarships and 422 renewals on November 25, 2007. The Society had the biggest surprise waiting at its doorstep. Here comes a noble soul offering it a donation of Rs. 1.25 crore for the award of fresh scholarships. He wanted the entire donation to be utilized for giving scholarships."
The site for the breadsociety is www.breadsocietyindia.org and it does not seem to be working at the moment. A few days ago, I was in Hyderabad and expressed the desire to know the workings of the society which I heard gave scholarships without considerations of caste or crees. The secretary Ramamohan Rao Kakani came to see me at 7:30 in the morning on his motorcycle and explained their work over 3 hours. He is 70 yeard old and finds it is easier and faster to travel on motorcycle in Hyderabad traffic. From what I could gather, it was an informal group of senior govt. officials, many of them from Andhra villages, who felt that many poor, bright students in their villages missed out on educational opporunities and started the organization about 12 years ago. The criteria for giving scholarships and minitoring process have been evolving over years. Originally they depended on income certificates from local officials to decide eligible candidates. Later they realized that many from relatively affluent families were able to produce those certificates and decided to give the scholarships mainly to those from govt. funded schools. Funds seem to have increased in the last four years and last year, they gave over 500scholarships. They have now a database for the scholarship to students so that they can guage their progress over years and their careers later on. Monitoring is done by examining four reports an year from the beneficiaries and periodic visits from the members of the organization. It is my understanding that these visits, mainly by Mr. Kakani and other organizers, are at their own expense and they can do with more volunteers. Some more details are in my earlier post "Some useful organizations" and Mr. Kakani and others can be contacted for any clarifications. But one wonders about the life span of these organizations and whether they will survive after such people.

Follow up of "A micro effort"

There has been some response to my earlier post on micro finance from some friends of my brother Kamalakar.
A brief summary of the requirements:
"The one I am keen about at the moment is a small micro-finance effort with no name organized by P.Sunder, a cousin of Benjamin Kaila. I wrote about this in my blog. Benjamin started this on an experimental basis with fund of Rs. 12,500. The current efforts :
a) 50,000 rupees for Velur projects, current and new,
b) 35,000 rupees for Jamudupadu projects, current and new,
c)35,000 rupees for Modukur projects, new.
In addition, there is plan for a sewing training school in Modukur but this is planned for the coming summer. There is no estimate of the costs yet.
I gave 50,000 rupees so far and am trying to raise the remaining 70,000. I met Sunder a few times and spoke to the beneficiaries as well as applicants on two days. I think that I can monitor the projects, if necessary, through relatives and during my trips."

Here is an excerpt from one of the responses:
"I just wanted to let you know that we mailed a check payable to IREF for $1,000 to Kamalakar Gadde's attention yesterday. Supporting the Micro Finance project is so well worth it. I am very much impressed to read the details about this work and efforts through P.Sunder. I guess when IREF gets the check, they know where to send it to for this project (at least that's what I am assuming). If we can get the details of the work and the names of the beneficiaries, I will strongly recommend our board members to support with more funding in the near future."
My impression is that there are many who want to contribute ( on the recent trip to Andhra one group which organizes educational scholarships told me that a person they did not know at all came up with a contribution of one crore and twenty five lakhs rupees} but want be sure that the money is well spent. The one I identified is a small struggling organization at the grass roots level and the hope is that this small help will make it self sustaining. These are at the level that Shanta Devrajan talks about in this post. Excerpt:
"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."
P.S. This post is not a request for more funds. The current effort seems to be getting enough funds. There are many NRIs from Andhra who come from villages and periodically visit their villages and there are many efforts from them to improve their villages. This is just an example of a similar effort except that I am not from any of the villages mentioned.

I liked

this. And the Australian cricket team seems to be in a spot of bother.

'Tadbeer se bigdi hui '

on youtube here.

A strategic proof

that real numbers are not countable here, exposition of M.H.Bakers's new proof by Julie Rehmeyer.

Letter to Bimol

To a friend who after years of research in Physics experimented with farming for nine years and who wanted to know my impressions from the recent trip to A.P.:
Dear Bimol,
Among my relatives and friends that I visited all except those in agriculture seem to be doing ok. Many of these have jobs or professionals like doctors or are businessmen or contractors. When I was kid, having about 10 acres of property in coastal A.P. (where there is water facility) was considered good. Now, even those with ten acres seem to be looking for part time jobs outside. Some of the rice farmers have turned to Eucalyptus farming for more reliable income.One nephew manages 35 acres and another is tenant farmer. Both say that they just get by. I also spoke to some agricultural labourers (in the course of examing a micro-finance project), two friends (one of them with a Ph.D in economics) who are hobby farmers, some professors of agriculture from Acharya N.G. Ranga University. In addition I visited D. Rama Naidu Institute for Rural Development in Tuniki. Rama Naidu like Ramoji Rao comes from a farming family and both seem to be contributing a bit to the farming community. Ramoji Rao manages a subsidized magazine "Annadatha" for farmers, the diary which comes with it has the addresses of various govt. depts and organizations related to agriculture. He also has an excellent daily programme on ETV which, according to the friend with economics Ph.D, has been doing more for farmers than many govt. depts. Most of these are from Kamma community to which I belong. My views may be biased by them and my reading of Glenn Davis Stone.First I will confine myself to what I heard. The concensus seems to be:
1) The cost of farming has gone up with new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and more water.
For somebody who depends on his own labour (I spoke to some agricultural labourers who want to lease land for farming), the minimum cost for one acre for rice growing is around 10,000 rupees. For those who employ others, labour costs are higher than before.
2)The research support and advice with new technology is not easily available (govt. organizations do not work well and need bribes), conflicting advice from businessmen and NGOs committed to self sustaing agriculture. So farmers learn from others who experiment or are adventurous.
3)The returns are still weather dependent and indebtedness grows with failure and interest rates are very high. In villages they seem to start with 20 percent per annum and usually the interest is subtracted before the loan is given (That is if you borrow 10,000 rupees, you get only 8,000 in hand). The govt. schemes ,if any, involve bribes.
4) No guaranteed prices. Where there are minimum support prices, they do not seem good enough. Farmers sell when prices are low and buy the lentils etc they need at high prices.
5)The cost of labour has gone up and the quality has gone down. Some attribute this to drinking with shops in almost every village. The govt. seems to be quite happy with the revenue and unlikely to make any change. I heard that one chief minister had a target for new year drinking revenue.
These are the sort of comments that I heard. The general feeling is that prices are controlled by middlemen and that the politicians and govt. servants respond better to those with money. In spite of farmers' voting power, the others would like cheap food. With some rice farmers turning to Eucalyptus farming and other safer cash crops, some feel that there will a food crisis in the next five years. Others say that it does not matter; as long as the GDP grows, India can buy food from other countries. In Hyderabad, I have met some people who left their work as farm labourers and have come to Hyderabad to work as domestic help. They say that they are doing better now. With pollution increasing in Hyd. I am not sure about their long term prospects. But medical help is nearby if they can afford and that seems to be one reason which many retired people prefer to live in cities. One of the hobby farmers that I mentioned has his own mini plan. On part of his farm, he wants to keep accounts and make it as an example of sustainable farming and persuade some nearby villagers. He had some success 20 years ago and it is possible that he may pull it off for a few years. His wife is a doctor and he is planning on a mobile hospital for 3 days a week in the area where he is farming.
I also met some seed sellers who say that the ideas of sustainable development of DDS and such groups is anti-science and other battles with the involvement multinationals seem to be brewing. I myself feel that there is nothing wrong with GT seeds as long as they are sufficiently tested and farmers properly trained in the new technologies.
That is all for now.
With best regards,
Swarup

Raj Chetty wins an award

From 'The American':
"James K Glassman, editor-in-chief of The American magazine, announced today that Raj Chetty, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the winner of the The American magazine’s 2008 Young Economist Award, a research grant of $100,000 provided by the Searle Freedom Trust. The American is a publication of the American Enterprise Institute.

To be eligible for the award, economists have to be featured in the magazine’s bimonthly column entitled “The Young Economist,” which profiles talented economists under the age of forty doing groundbreaking original research. In the year since the launch of The American in November 2006, up to September 2007, six economists have been profiled.

A jury of economists awarded Chetty the grant for his proposal to empirically “identify a set of policy changes that will make low-income support programs more effective per dollar spent.”
Chetty, who is twenty-eight, did his undergraduate and PhD work at Harvard, became an assistant professor of economics at Berkeley at age twenty-three and an associate professor at age twenty-seven.

Chetty has done extensive research on taxation, unemployment, risk preferences and social insurance. Among his notable published research includes “Dividend Taxes and Corporate Behavior: Evidence from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut,” with Emmanuel Saez, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The study found not only that more companies paid out dividends after tax rates were lowered but also that they were likelier to pay dividends if top executives had substantial shareholdings in the firm.

He serves on the board of editors for the Journal of Economic Literature and is a coeditor for the Journal of Public Economics. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research."

Dilip's question

Dilip D'Souza in his blog wonders why conversions anger and threaten so many people. I have seen a bit of this anger and fear recently and have also been wondering about it. A few weeks ago, I contributed a bit of money to a micro-finance effort organized a village pastor P.Sunder (I have made similar small contributions to other efforts headed by Hindus and Moslems). Since then, I have been assailed by various relatives and friends that this money will be used for conversions and that a lot of money has been pouring in from abroad for conversions to Christianity. This may be true but I have seen very little evidence of this money reaching the few villages that I visited. I heard some stories in Hyderabad of money coming from in Germany but eaten up by middlemen and fake reports to satify the donors. In any case, that people feel threatened about some conversions seems to be true.
In an article on a related issue 'The Fundamentalist Challenge' ( from the collection "The Imam and the Indian"), Amitav Ghosh suggests a plausible cause: " I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy troughout this (20th) century: an ideology, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over particular stretch of geography." But why such a reaction now more than before is not clear to me. Is it due to recent prosperity and better communication systems? At another place in the article, he suggests:" ...the market ideal as a cultural absolute, untempered by any other ethical, political, or spiritual ideals, is often so inhuman and predatory in its effects that it cannot but generate dissent"
I have met many old people during this trip, many of them relatively prosperous. They seem to attribute their prosperity, not even in part to some sort of luck, but to their cultural and value systems and are very eager to impart them to others, particularly youngsters (It scares me because I too am old). May be similar things are true for groups that have survived.
P.S. (12th January, 2008) Annie Zaidi too ponders about Dilip's question.

Some useful organizations

DRNVJIRD (Dr. Rama Naidu Vignana Jyothi Institute of Rural Development) is located near Tuniki vilage, Kowdipally Mandal, Narsapur, Medak District, e-mail:drnvjird@hotail.com. It is about 70 kilometers from Hyderbad, has an office in Hyderabad: 209, Sree Ramakrishna Towers, Nagarjuna Nagar, Ameerpet, Hyderabad-500 073, Phone:(040)23740933.
One of their programmes is an yearly course and a three monthly course to train young farmers who have finished 10th grade in modern mehods of farming. Both courses start on January 17th but the director Dr. K.N. Rao informed me that they allow a few days of delay. It seems that there were more than 120 students two years ago. The original idea was that they would go back to villages and implement modern methods of farming. But all of them got jobs with agricultural and other firms. Last year, due to lack of publicity and recruting staff, there were less than 30 students. Both courses carry a stipend. Lodging and boarding are provided. It seems a good opportunity and not too late, particularly for Telangana students. There are also some programmes in colloboration with Acharya Ranga Agriculural University.
I understnd that there are other similar institutes (one named after Ramanand Tirhda) ner Hyderabad. The diary provided with Annadatha monthly has a list of various got. offices relatd to agriultural matters in the state of A.P.
I have also come acoss an organization called Bread Society which provides educational scholarships to poor students of merit irrespective of caste and creed. The number of scholarships is rapidly increasing. Originaly they were planning to fund about 450 scholarships this year, but that has increased to 900 due to generous contributions. They have also developed a system of monitoring the progress of students which seems reasonable. As far as I know, most of the people who are working in distributing the fellowships are older peope who spend their own money for travel and oter incidental expenses. Their website is: www.breadsocietyindia.org
Their office address: 403, Prashantiram Towers, 8-3-319/8, Yellareddyguda, Yousuguda Main Road, Hyderabad 500073. The secretary's phone numbers are (040)65887177 and (Cell)9391357141. The Present secretary's name is Ramamohana Rao Kakani. He retired as Dy. Advisor to the Planning Commission and is an energetic 70 year old gentleman.

Some prosperity

The coastal districts of Guntur and Krishna seem much more prosperous than in my childhood days. I have mainly visited relatives in villages and the towns of Guntur and Vijayawada and these are the impressions gathered from talks with some of the relatives. Relatives on my father's side were mostly small farmers and the next generation except for one moved to towns, new professions and trade. One was driver who became a APRTC driver later, another a APRTC mechanic. One became a Veterinary doctor, and there are enigineers doctors and teachers. One cousin became a widow early and with my mother's encouragement took up 100 rupees a month job with medical firm and raised her family. All seem to have focussed on the education of their children and most of the next generation are now professionals. Currently some are abroad, some in Vijayawada and most of them, including the cousin who was earning 100rupees a month, seem to be prosprous now. Many of them seem to have properties worth crores, good apartments and houses and comfortable living styles, all except the one who remained in agriculture. I do not know where the prosperity came from. For some, it seemed to be earnings from abroad, For some thrift and later contracts, and for some professions.
There seems to be a time gap in development between these families and families on my wife's side. Her brothers and sisters have started focussing on the education of children a bit later ( my father was the first graduate in our family and my wife the first in her family). Two are still in farming, one with a fair amount of land and another a tenant farmer. Both say that it is an uncertain profession and hard going. Generally, the transport and roads are better, all villages can be reached by buses or autos. Different villages seem to be at different levels of well being. Some have new buildings and a few have returned to them after retirement, in many others families have moved to towns for children's education and even though they still look attractive, they are somewhat deserted. Good old houses with some land seem to be available for about two lakh rupees.
Another village Thullur where my father used to work seems to be thriving. A kin Gadde Venkateswara Rao Says that he was instrumental in bringing Krishna water to the village through a pumping scheme near Raipudi and they charge only 300 rupees per acre as water charges. His sister told me that according to her brother I am the sixth greatest mathematician in the world and that they are very proud that a Gadde made his mark in the world.
P.S (23rd December)Due to the uncertainity of returns from rice farming, some farmers have shifted to other crops and even eucalyptus plantations on the land that they were using for rice farming. Some predict that there will be food crisis in the next five years.

A micro effort

Benjamin Kaila who has been organinizing Ambedkar fellowships has initiated a micro finance effort through his cousin, pastor P.Sunder. It seems that rural pastors of his denomination do not get salaries but get by with offerings from their congregations.
I visited Modukur (where Mr. P.sunder is currently pastor), Jamudupadu (where he was pastor for 5 years) on 7th. Dec. and Veluru (his native place)on 10th. Dec. I am giving below my impressions. These visits were done in between vists to relatives and may not be completely accurate in all details.
The Current programmes are in Jamudupadu (5) and Veluru (3). I spoke to seven of the beneficiaries. In all places, Mr. Sunder was received with regard and warmth. Most of the programmes involve grocery type activities,one on push cart (topudu bandi) and one just carrying idli and dosai and such during mornings and evenings on her head. All are about 2500 rupees each and all except one (which was given later than others) are repaid. Interest is one perecent and after the first month the interest is charged on what remained of the loan and so on.The recovered loans are recycled. I have seen the accounts. I understand that Spandana charges are much higher and practices of the village lenders can be worse.
The money is used to for groceries or eqippment (like stove,vessels when cooking is involved). These loans made it possible, according to their own accounts,of some desperate cases like widows , accident victims to make a living. To come to a stage where they can finance their purchases themselves. Continuation of loans for one or two more periods and in some cases some increase in the amounts may be necessary.
Jamudupadu has 70-80 dalit families and there are some more applications of different nature (one needs a bit more cash to buy a buffalo and there are some agricultural labourers who lease one to two acres and need investment for seeds and ferlizers). At the moment they pay exorbitant interests and can make money only if the weather is good and that mainly on a second crop of lentils.
The strength of Mr. Sunder in Jamudupadu seems to due to his work as a pastor and has moral authority and popularity to make beneficiaries repay.
Mr. Sunder's position is stronger in Veluru. It is his village, has a number of friends and relatives and one of his nephews seems to know the system of loans well. The village has about 500 Dalit familes living in approximately 300 houses. The only library in the village, named after Gurram Jashua is in the Dalit part. There is voluntary type (with some minimal payments when possible)tution by two Dalits who finished school. There is an agricultural labourer who helps students with tution and books when he can.I spent more time in Veluru and spoke to many who applied for loans. The applicants include a muslim, a vaisya, a chakali and kummari. The total amount needed for new applicants as well as continuation seems to be around 50 thousand rupees. The village has a leftist background and I was told that the caste relationships are good. So far Mr. Sunder refrained from giving loans in Modukur since he feels that at the place he is working, there may be unhappiness if does not suport all the urgent cases. I think that both Veluru and Jamudupadu projects are worth supporting.
P.S. (21st December). This has also been posted with an additional comment in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/telugudanam/message/3858

Debraj Ray

Julius Silver Professor of Economics in New York University has a survey article on 'Development Economics'. Ray's bookon Development Economics has been used by Dani Rodrik and others in their courses.There is aseminar at Crooked Timber on Dani Rodrik's book "One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalizathttp://faculty.oxy.edu/gsecondi/dev.htmlion, Institutions and Economic Growth".
I vaguely remember that Ray was among a group of three young economists who came back to India in the early 80's to find a suitable job and work on development. Only one of the three is in india now. I think that one of them is in Australia and Ray is in USA.
More links to development economics here

Meanwhile...

I completed reading "Economics, A Very Short Introduction" by Partha Dasgupta. For an outsider like me trying to get some understanding of economics, this seems to be the best of the popular books that I have read or browsed through so far. Earlier, it seemed to be a subject driven by politics and hegemony, a view supported to some extent by the articles of Mike Reay and Marion Fourcade. This book indicates that basic economics can be used with a view of sharing scarce resources and planning for the future irrespective of ideolgy. I recall David Warsh's comment from
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/07.10.28.html
"Each book targets a different audience. Often there are advertisers lurking in the background. The primer I have enjoyed most, the one I would recommend to a friend who wanted to learn how economists think about the world right now, is one that passed almost completely unnoticed into the stream, perhaps because it is so slight. But then, that is the point of Economics: A Very Short Introduction, by Partha Dasgupta, the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. He boils down everything that's ordinarily included in a thousand-page introductory text, and more, to 160 graceful but undersized pages."
I feel that elementary books in sciences, at least at the level of understanding current news, should be available in regional languages. I think that this book fits that criterion. I am taking a copy of it to A.P. with the hope that somebody may translate or write articles in Telugu based on this book. If I cannot find anybody, I may attempt to do it myself, even though my Telugu is not that good.

Going to India

on a long trip. Possibly very few posts in the next months.
Happy holidays and new year to all.

Lorraine Lee Rose

pictured hereis an Australian bred rose. In the last ten years, I never watered it and sprayed it only once. It seems to flower most of the year.

Two posts on eco-friendly housing

Rahul Banerjee explains his efforts making his house in Indore eco-friendly :
"All the kitchen waste is composted to yield manure. What is more even at the height of summer when the temperature in Indore hits 45 degrees centigrade our house remains cool because of its leafy exterior. We have a natural air-cooling system as the house has been designed with a lot of cross ventilation and all we have to do is hang some khas grass curtains on the windows and wet them through drips and the air blowing in becomes cool. We do not have to run fans let alone air conditioners. Our average daily consumption of electricity is 1.75 units (kwh) only."
The ecofriend blog on Agro-Housing:
"The concept of Agro-Housing is to have housing programs that will allow the formation of a new social and urban order that can be replicated as it represents basic human values lost in the process of modernization and progress. Additional expected benefits from Agro-Housing include the decline in commuting, the decline in further transportation system development, and the replacement of the zoning strategy by more sustainable urban conception. As the world’s population burgeons at startling speeds, it’s a proposal that’s more necessary than simply clever."

NYTimes on Babajob

Anand Giridhardaswrites about Babajob(via Angry Bear):
"The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India’s elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev’s page, travel to the page of Rajeev’s chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur’s friends are looking for similar work.

Mr. Blagsvedt, now 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house policy research arm. The new team worked on many of the same complex problems as their peers in Redmond, but the employees here led very different lives outside the office than their counterparts in Redmond. They had servants and laborers. They read constant newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy.

The company’s Indian employees were not seeing poverty for the first time, but they were now equipped with first-rate computing skills, and many felt newly empowered to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft was plagued by widespread software piracy, which limited its revenue in India. Among other things, the company looked at low-income consumers as a vast and unexploited commercial opportunity, so it encouraged its engineers’ philanthropic urges.

Poverty became a major focus in Mr. Blagsvedt’s research office. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. In the course of that work, Mr. Blagsvedt stumbled upon an insight by a Duke University economist, Anirudh Krishna.

Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Mr. Blagsvedt’s epiphany? “We need village LinkedIn!” he recalled saying, alluding to the professional networking site.

He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague built a social-networking site to connect Bangalore’s yuppies with its laborers. (The site, which Mr. Blagsvedt started this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore now, but he plans to spread it to other Indian cities and maybe globally.)

Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers. The wealthy potential employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend their gardens or their newborns. To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, who finds job seekers and registers them online. (Babajob earns its keep from employers’ advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who register job seekers.) And instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: through chains of personal connections.
....
Mr. Krishna, the Duke economist, called it a “very significant innovation,” but he cautioned that the very poor might not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob, even on the periphery."

More information here.

Synthesizing the wisdom of experts

Julie Rehmeyer at Mathtrek talks of the work ofBruce Bueno de Mesquita :
"The New York University political science professor has developed a computerized game theory model that predicts the future of many business and political negotiations and also figures out ways to influence the outcome. Two independent evaluations, one by academics and one by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have both shown that about 90 percent of his predictions have been accurate. Most recently, he has used his mathematical tools to offer approaches for handling the growing nuclear crisis with Iran.

Bueno de Mesquita provides the computer tools, but he relies on political or business experts to identify specific issues, their possible outcomes, and the key players. He asks experts narrow, carefully delineated questions about which outcome each player would prefer, how important the issue is to each player, and how much influence each player can exert. But he does not ask about the history of the conflict, the cultural norms of the area, or what the experts think will happen.

With careful interviewing, Bueno de Mesquita finds that he can get experts to agree on what information the model needs as input, even when the experts disagree sharply on expected outcomes. Once, after generating a report for the CIA using information from the agency's experts, he had his students assemble the same information from news reports. "Over 90 percent of them came up with the same results as I got [when I was] locked in a lead-lined vault at the CIA headquarters," Bueno de Mesquita says. "It's basic information that experts agree on and that you can even find in The Economist." "

She also refers to Mesquita & Roundell, a company he founded that uses his model to advise businesses and governments and this article , according to which they advised Union Carbide.

Vacation links-1

Going on a long trip to India soon and may not have internet access during parts of the trip. Trying to keep track of some articles to be read again.
Alex Gunz on hate (via Abi at Nanopolitan).

Robert Burton on prejudice at salon.com.

Holly Arrow on sharp end of altruism (needs subscrpton). Abstract:Simulations show that war drives the joint evolution of altruism and hostility to outsiders.

Current Biology article "Cooperation peaks at intermediate disurbance".

Vilaynur Ramachandran on 'THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS' (via 3quarksdaily). There are some predictions and a surprising statement towards the end: "Here again was, evidence that two seemingly contradictory aspects of self — its the individuation and intense privacy vs. its social reciprocity — may complement each other and arise from the same neural mechanism, mirror neurons. Like the two sides of a Mobius strip, they are really the same, even they appear — on local inspection — to be fundamentally different."

Arun Thiruvengadam on Arundhati Roy.
P.S.(7th Nov.) Nice survey but not up-to-date: http://www.powells.com/review/2007_11_01
Wilson and Wilson on the survival of the selfless *with references to Turchin):
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19626281.500-evolution-survival-of-the-selfless.html

M.S. Swaminathan on India's urban-rural divide

From scidev.net:
"The disconnect between farmers and researchers can be overcome by bringing Internet and telecommunications to rural villages, he argues.

Swaminathan's research foundation aims to set up at least one village telecom kiosk for every six villages. Farmers will be able to go to the kiosks for information about livestock management and crop diseases.

One of the keys to this scheme is training villagers to become advocates for ICT in their communities. Many past ICT projects have failed in India, largely because they failed to listen to the villagers themselves. "
The longer source article is in Nature.

Partha Dasgupta's primer on economics

is drawing some attention. I recall Partha Dasgupta's comments from the foreword "Poverty, Environment and Society: The Role of Natural Capital in Economic Development": "Despite the interdisciplinary nature of my enquiries, the lens through which I have studied the social world has been that of economics. I have assumed a point of view of the circumstances of living that gives prominence to the allocation of scarce resources - among contemporaries and across the generations. One hallmark of the viewpoint is to study human well-being in terms of its commodity determinants and the institutions that shape our lives. Another is to reason quantitatively. Moreover, because it is subject to empirical discipline, the inquiry encourages approximations. Inevitably, the viewpoint is partial. But increasingly I have come to realize that it is possible to look outward from that partial view to catch a glimpse of the larger enterprise called "living".
I do that regularly in the essays that follow and, in the one methodological essay in the present collection, I respond to several prominent critics of contemporary economics by showing that they misunderstand the foundations of my discipline.

While re-reading the essays here, I noticed that I have rarely ever published an article in which the bird I was ultimately able to catch was in fact caught. This is because I have rarely ever known what it was that I was really after. Maybe I knew it subconsciously, but I doubt that. In my case, a discovery has meant a growing realization, not a blinding revelation. Usually, it has taken me several publications, brick by metaphorical brick, before I was able even to understand what the phenomenon I had been working on was, let alone to uncover the pathways that give rise to the phenomenon. I don't know whether this is a common experience among scientists, but I doubt it. I suspect there is nothing common among the processes by which we gain an understanding of the world around us."

Links: October, 28

Raj Chetty explains some of his background and motivation in this Rediff interview (via V.K. Chetty):
"In my case, I realised that my long-term objectives lined up better with a PhD than other paths. At a young age my dream was to discover something that would have a great impact on the world and help a lot of people. I think I was very aware of issues such as poverty and lack of growth partly because of my background, having grown up both in India and in the US. I remember, quite vividly, going to the Taj Mahal when I was eight. It was immaculate and beautiful inside. But outside, you see extreme poverty in Agra. Experiences like that sparked my interest in understanding how to improve the economy. "

Two articles on non-Smithsian developments; one by James Fallows and another by David Ludden (via Brad DeLong links).

Discussion on Tyler cowen's article on private contractors; in particular the first comment by Bruce Wilder:
"Tyler Cowan: "the overall problem is not private contracting in itself; ... but rather ... the sins and virtues of . . . governments"

There you have the whole of Tyler's philosophy.

The rest of his op-ed treats us to a tour of a few of his many unfounded prejudices, helpfully re-lit from novel angles to support his thesis.

Ordinarily, Tyler is obsessed with progress. It is actually one of his more endearing traits, and a founding concept of his blog, Marginal Revolution. It kind of disappears in this op/ed, though. A necessity, if you are going to argue that "privatisation" of warfare is not a regression to the brigandage of the 16th century.

Efficiency is another Tyler favorite, which is replaced, here, by an undefined, "flexibility". ". . . the use of contractors is not a free lunch" Tyler helpfully informs us, but he never gets around to mentioning just how much more, American mercenaries cost then the also paid soldiers of a volunteer Army. Of course, very few of our soldiers in Iraq are Republican campaign contributors. But, then, how could they be? General Petraeus costs Uncle Sam less than the lowliest thug employed by Erik Prince, and charged to Uncle Sam through three layers of contractor and subcontractor."

Andrew Leonard reports ecouraging trends from South Korea:
"South Korea, write World Bank researchers Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta, is the first Asian country to reverse the discouraging trend of "rising sex ratios at birth" -- by which is meant families taking advantage of new sex-selection technologies (or good old-fashioned female infanticide) to favor boys rather than girls. (Thanks to Ben Muse's Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement blog for the link.)

The trend is all the more noteworthy because until relatively recently, South Korea's authoritarian government did its best to legislate societal adherence to radically Confucian traditional values that emphasized the primacy of the male lineage and the extreme necessity of having sons to care for one's ancestors, both living and dead. In the view of the authors, Korea's example offers promise for other Asian countries, especially India and China, where "son preference" is also rampant and social demographics have become highly skewed."

Mike Reay on the uses of economics

Mike Reay's "ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERT AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN ECONOMICS" based on his interviews with American economists was linked before. He continues the study in "The Uses of Economics". It seems throw some light on the influence of American economists. Here is a fairly long quote from the introduction of the paper:
" Such notions of ideology and hegemony fit into a wide range of work on the symbolic authority of scientific knowledge, its tendency to be viewed as ‘objective’ and incontrovertible, and its complicity in ‘co-constructing’ naturalized social and political institutions (e.g. Habermas 1970, Shapin & Shaffer 1985, Latour 1987, Haraway 1991, Gergen 1994, Jasanoff 2004). However, these ideas of the influence of economics are also somewhat in tension with work on the large-scale shift and perhaps even decline in the authority of science in Western nations since the 1960s. Some researchers in this field suggest that universalizing scientific ideologies are breaking down because their very dominance has revealed their internal inconsistencies and limitations (e.g. Lyotard 1984(1979), Beck 1992), while others explore the commercialization of academia and of expertise formerly monopolized by national governments that might conceivably lead to an external pluralism problematizing claims to universal truth (e.g. Leydesdorff & Etkowitz 1996, Slaughter & Leslie 1997, Nowotny et al 2001, Krimsky 2003). Either way, science is thought to no longer easily serve precisely the kind of global legitimizing,
coordinating, and naturalizing functions that observers such as Bourdieu and Callon
ascribe to economics.
The influence of American economics thus poses something of a sociological puzzle. If it really involves hegemonic technocratic domination, how can this be reconciled with notions of the apparent transformation of scientific legitimation? And if it does not involve such domination, what was in fact going on with its global spread
alongside neoliberal political regimes? The following discussion attempts to resolve this puzzle by looking more closely at how neoclassical economics was actually used in the United States towards the end of the Twentieth Century. It does this by considering a range of work on the activities of professional economists – often by economists themselves – and on knowledge-based authority and the practical utilization of science. It also uses an original set of face-to-face interviews with professional economists working in a variety of different academic and non-academic jobs at century’s end.
It argues that both ideological/hegemonic and skeptical/pluralist phenomena were being generated by three underlying features of how economics was used. The first of
these features is the existence of three basic effects of economic expertise, paralleling Steven Lukes’ famous three ‘dimensions’ of power; substantive influence on particular decisions, symbolic exclusion of others from decision-making, and background framing of possible courses of action. The second feature is flexibility. This refers to how, as predicted by a range of work on social construction and uncertainty in science, economics could always sustain a range of answers to specific policy questions, such that different groups could use it to support different, often conflicting claims. The third feature is the softness of the influence of economics, that is, the way it tended to fall short of strict
determination of outcomes, and hence left room for other political, cultural, and
interpersonal processes. Taken together these underlying features of knowledge not only help explain the situation of economics in the US, but also suggest ways to improve and combine models of ideology/hegemony and pluralism/contestation in modern science."

Photos from Andhra Pradesh

Found these nice photographs mostly from Andra Pradesh while following up a racchanada message .
The linked news item in Telugu from AndhraJyoty says that some of the statues of gopis in Velpuru Venkateswara temple (on the road from Tanuku to Attili, West Godavari dt.)were considered obscene and clothed in some sort of undergarments. That seems to be the gist of it but my Telugu is rusty and I may be mistranslating a bit.
Googling 'clothing naked statues' shows that there are many other instances.

Some economics links, October 25, 2007

Nouriel Roubini revists his predictions from last year and says:
"As for decoupling of the rest of the world from the US slowdown this author argued as early as August of 2006 - and again throughout the fall of 2006 - that the decoupling view was conditional on the US achieving a soft landing; instead, conditional on a US hard landing twelve separate financial, trade, currency, confidence and other channels would imply that the rest of the world would not decouple from such a US hard landing."
Dani Rodrik on economists with snake oil. From Roubini's post it seems that some main stream economists are not exempt either.
Brad Setser on who is holding up the dollar:
"The funny thing is that the emerging world has been able to muster support for massive, global intervention needed to hold the dollar up –"
James Surowiecki supply side economics via Brad DeLong
"It’s more like saying that the best way to treat sick people is to bleed them to let out the evil spirits."

George Monbiot on Matt Ridley

in Business Guardian via Felix Salmon:
"Ridley and I have the same view of human nature: that we are inherently selfish. But the question is whether this nature is subject to the conditions that prevailed during our evolutionary history. I believe they have changed: we can no longer be scrutinised and held to account by a small community. We need governments to fill the regulatory role vacated when our tiny clans dissolved.

I can offer nothing more than speculation, but Ridley has had the opportunity to test his beliefs. He took up his post - which was previously held by his father, Viscount Ridley - in 2004. Under his chairmanship, the Economist notes, Northern Rock "pushed an aggressive business model to the limit, crossing its fingers and hoping that liquidity would always be there". It was allowed to do so because it was insufficiently regulated by the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority. When his libertarian business model failed, Ridley had to go begging to the detested state. If the government and its parasitic bureaucrats had not been able to use taxpayers' money to clear up his mess, thousands of people would have lost their savings. Northern Rock would have collapsed, and the resulting panic might have brought down the rest of the banking system.
...
Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people's resources, they will dump their waste in other people's habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies that once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.

The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time, we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.
I doubt that Ridley would be able to sustain his beliefs in a place where the state has broken down. Unless taxpayers' money and public services are available to repair the destruction it causes, libertarianism destroys people's savings, wrecks their lives and trashes their environment. It is the belief system of the free-rider, who is perpetually subsidised by responsible citizens. As biologists we both know what this means. Self-serving as governments might be, the true social parasites are those who demand their dissolution."
P.S. Matt Ridley is one of my favourite science writers. I liked his "The Red Queen",large parts of "Nature via Nurture" and "The origins of virtue". Allen Orr is critical of parts the later two books as mentioned in one of the early posts.

Innovation Race

India lagging behind say some Indian scientists:
"Although India's potential is high, it is not nurturing innovation, Sri Krishna Joshi, scientist emeritus at India's National Physical Laboratory, told delegates at a conference on inventions and innovations in Delhi, India today (15 October).

India's education system "kills any spirit of innovation" by failing to close the gap between industry and academia, said S. Srinavasa Murthy, professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

He said very few PhD theses in technical institutes are linked to industry and innovations, and the bulk of academics — even at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology — are not industry-savvy because their promotions are only linked to publications in peer-reviewed journals.

A World Bank report released this month (4 October) also warned that, despite an impressive growth rate of eight per cent in gross domestic product since 2004, India's full innovation potential remains unrealised.

Of the top 50 applicants for patents in India between 1995 and 2005, 44 were foreign firms, while only six were Indian. "

Sanskrit Knowledge Systems

on the Eve of Colonialism is a relatively new site that I have come across in a Telugu discussion group 'racchabanda'. It looks interesting and will make available digital copies many manuscripts. However,the few available science related articles by the team members that I browsed through do not look particularly impressive.
P.S.(25th October)There is some interesting discussion in'racchabanda'http://groups.yahoo.com/group/racchabanda/messages?o=1
See inparicular the messages 18603-05 by Hanuma Kodvalla.

A message about rural women from karmayog.com

Rural women have to fetch wood for cooking from a long distance away. They suffer bruises during collection; headache / backache / neckache during the walk back; and respiratory diseases from smoky kitchens - apart from depleting trees and ground cover more rapidly than it can self-generate.

Integrated Research and action for Development (IRADe), Delhi, has been working on this issue and has succeeded in getting the Planning Commission to incorporate this issue in the 11th Plan but both need realistic ideas on how to reduce these problems.

e.g. Should every village have a planters' cooperative which grows such trees within 1 km; Or should subsidised LPG / kerosene be provided; OR are alternate energy sources e.g. biogas, solar cookers, etc. feasible?

Please email your suggestions for this and any other rural problem.

Happy Dussehra!
Vinay
www.karmayog.org -- helping to conquer the evil spirits within and without

World Bank on Agriculture

From WSJ blog:
"After decades of preaching the benefits of urbanizing and industrializing as the best path to development, the World Bank is going back to the roots — agriculture.

“We need to give agriculture more prominence across the board,” said World Bank President Robert Zoellick as the bank released its annual World Development Report. The bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, are holding their joint annual meeting this week.

While 75% of the world’s poor live in rural areas, only 4% of official development assistance goes to agriculture, the bank said. Growth in agriculture is about four times more effective in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors, the report concludes. To turn agriculture into an engine of growth, efforts must be made to increase productivity, and to connect farmers to global markets, the report said."
P.S. (21/10/07)World Bank Report here.

Confirmation for Dunbar's theory of gossip?

Robin Dunbar's theory of language and gossip developed in here and in his books "Grooming, Gossip and evolution of language" and "The Human Story" (See also the Wikipedia article on Dunbar's number)seems to get some more confirmation in recent research according to "Facts Prove No Match for Gossip, It Seems":
"The donor was told that the source of the gossip didn’t have any extra information beyond what the donor could already see for himself. Yet the gossip, whether positive or negative, still had a big influence on the donors’ decisions, and it didn’t even matter if the source of the gossip had a good reputation himself. On average, cooperation increased by about 20 percent if the gossip was good, and fell by 20 percent if the gossip was negative." (via 3quarksdaily)

Illusions?

New Scientist has a discussion on the spinning dancing girl and says that "What this animation does not involve is different sides of the brain, as the initial post claims. What you see is purely due to your perceptual and cognitive flexibility."
I am not so sure. Reversal rates seem to vary and some can see only clockwise or anticlockwise motion.
This Wikipedia artcle says:
"Reversal rates vary drastically between stimuli and observers, and has been found to be slower for people with Bipolar disorder ("sticky" interhemispheric switch in bipolar disorder)".
Combining motion and sound has interesting effects like the McGurk Effect.

Duetting is symptomatic of monogomy?

At least in tropical birds and some primates, says Sarah Hrdy in "The Woman that Never Evolved" (page 46, last paragraph):
"Before the report by Telson and Tenaza (published in 1976), no one suspected that Old World Monkey-much less a langur- would be monogomous. Until then, known cases of monogomy in higher primates came from either New World monkeys or gibbons. My own first respnse was increduality. It was only when Ron Wilson played me a recording of a male and female Mentawei langur singing duets that I believed my ears. I had to. As has long been known for tropical birds, duetting is symptomatic of monogomy"

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." "