Links April 14, 2013

Some good news A village that plants new tress for newborn girls:
"Here, villagers plant 111 trees every time a girl is born and the community ensures these trees survive, attaining fruition as the girls grow up.

Over the last six years, people here have managed to plant over a quarter million trees on the village's grazing commons- inlcuding neem, sheesham, mango, Amla among others.............

On an average 60 girls are born here every year, according to the village's former sarpanch Shyam Sundar Paliwal, who was instrumental in starting this initiative in the memory of his daughter Kiran, who died a few years ago.

In about half these cases, parents are reluctant to accept the girl children, he says.

Such families are identified by a village committee comprising the village school principal along with panchayat and Anganwadi members.Rs. 21,000 is collected from the village residents and Rs.10,000 from the girl's father and this sum of Rs. 31,000 is made into a fixed deposit for the girl, with a maturity period of 20 years.But here's the best part.“We make these parents sign an affidavit promising that they would not marry her off before the legal age, send her to school regularly and take care of the trees planted in her name,” says Mr. Paliwal.People also plant 11 trees whenever a family member dies."

Another Madras Loyola college student remembers Fr. Racine. Mine are linked in a comment. However I did not like that college and I think I went back only once, that too to visit Fr. Racine.

 Le Carre comes out of the cold (via 3quarksdaily):
" And I had absolutely no sense of transition from the one war to the other, because in the secret world there barely was one. To the hard-liners of east and west the second world war was a distraction. Now it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had been running under different flags and disguises ever since.............The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then – or its offence, depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves 50 years later: how far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them along the way?."

Ashwin Parameswaran  thinks that some of the left and the right can combine "Neither the left nor the right is wrong. But both of them only see one side of what is the core strategy of neoliberal crony capitalism – increase the scope and reduce the scale of government intervention........But both the radical left and the radical right need to realise the misguided nature of many of their disagreements. A robust safety net is as important to maintaining an innovative free enterprise economy as the dismantling of entry barriers and free enterprise are to reducing inequality."
He also links to his essay All systems need a little disorder

Top Economic Advisers Forcast Unrest and War

A quick review of Kedar Sharma's work  Atul's blog http://atulsongaday.me/2013/04/12/dekh-hamen-muskaaye-kyun/
More about Kedar Sharma's interactions with Nehru
http://autarmota.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/rama-vaidyanathan-kedar-sharma-pandit.html
http://cfsindia.org/tag/kedar-sharma/

A new blog from India based on data

Abi has pointed out a new data based blog and an interesting post there We are the 5%:
"Take a look at the map below. It maps the proportion of households in each district, who told census-takers that they own all of the following – a TV set, a phone, a computer and a vehicle (scooter/motorcycle or car). That number, for the country as a whole, is 4.6% (roughly 11 million households)."
I posted the link in my Facebook and there is a comment that the figure is like ninety percent in USA. The point of the post seems to be this five percent is like the one percent in USA, the opinion, decision makers and those who implement the decisions. This seems possible. 
 There are some benefits in India not available in the US. One of my aged relatives recently broke his back and got operated at the government expense and is even getting a pension even though he never worked. When I mentioned this to a friend and inquired how widely such benefits are available, he responded that we the 5% swallow most of the money in those schemes. This tallies with a point that Lant Pritchett made in Everything you think you know about poverty is wrong
"One common belief among people working in international development is that a poor country can be changed by improving its education system, but Pritchett’s research suggests otherwise. The problem in poor countries is that they cannot make effective use of their people’s skills, Pritchett said, so giving them more skills does lead to development. Counter-intuitively, his research has shown that countries whose education system improves actually grow slower on average. He suggests that one reason for this may be that putting more educated people into a corrupt bureaucracy may result in more sophisticated corruption."

Another point that puzzles me is that I know many in towns and villagers who have properties worth crores of rupees but do not own personal computers. It is possible that owning personal computer is not yet a measure of influence in India. I am not sure but it seems that the data has to be interpreted carefully.

Savings and Loans

From a Credit Slips post : " Rhino Foods in Burlington found that employees in financial strain were not as good at their jobs and that the small loans improved the company’s bottom line.  Rhino brought in a combination social worker/financial advisor, who helped arrange 17% income advance loans paid back through wage deductions. Once a loan is paid off, the default rule is that the employee continues to pay into a savings account in the same amount as the prior loan repayment deduction. People who had never saved a dime are now building wealth."
Related PBS video http://video.pbs.org/video/2364991049
(Again via Naked Capitalism links)

I cannot resist posting this

From Naked Capitalism Links 4/12/13:
"Poll: Most Women See Bias in the Workplace Wall Street Journal. Duh! Women experience bias everywhere. Barry Ritholtz told me recently that for over 15 years, when his wife would put down her credit card to pay for dinner, the waiter would inevitably bring back the charge form to him to sign. Every time. She would sputter to him about it and he would say, “It’s because I have a penis” and sign the receipt. He similarly recounts how women he knows who run businesses and want to get a quote (say for an IT installation) will have the salesperson try to find someone else to talk to, assuming the woman can’t be in charge (mind you, I never get this sort of thing, but I send a “don’t fuck with me” vibe rather than normal female politeness/chipperness).

Recently Barry’s wife looked at the receipt. He’d written “I have a penis” in the signature line. He’d been doing that for 15 years (she dug out some older receipts to confirm) and the restaurant and bank never saw anything amiss."

Raj Chetty wins John Bates Clark medal

A description of his work http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/12/raj-chetty-was-just-named-the-best-american-economist-under-40-heres-why/
NYTimes interview http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/a-chat-with-raj-chetty-clark-medalist/
A link to his lectures on Public Economics via MR http://www.youtube.com/course?list=EC2SOU6wwxB0v3c46v2ptuDKIHmXHRAmeU

Trilok Kapoor version of 'zindagi dene wali sun'

One of his own from Trolley Driver 1948
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOjUoLYbTrk

Puzzled

I try to keep track of Indian things via internet and visiting about once an year. but I really do not know how things are working for the poor. I heard stories (from a reliable social worker in Hyderabad) of a mother and daughter of whom only one can go out since they have only one decent set of clothes to wear. On the other hand, we have a poor relative of around 90 and at one stage we arranged for him to say in an old people's home paying around three thousand rupees a month. Then he had an accident in the bath room and broke his back. It seems that now he had a free operation under some government scheme and even gets a pension. He never worked, mainly lived off the land and sold most of it. I wonder how widely these schemes are available and how well they are working.

Last bottle gourd and luffa of the season?

America's most profitable export

is Tobacco according to Wiki answers, but Cash according to Bruce Bartlett:
"... 84 percent of the increase in cash since 1990 has been in the form of $100 bills, which have risen to 77 percent of the value of cash outstanding in 2012 from 52 percent in 1990.......According to a Federal Reserve study, the vast bulk of United States currency held abroad is $100 bills. Indeed, 65 percent of all $100 bills in existence circulate outside the United States."
P.S. See also http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2013/04/who_is_holding.html

Twin songs in Hindi films

AK of 'Songs of Yore' makes a point that I am vaguely aware of but not so much detail:
"Now if you observe carefully you notice a very strange phenomenon. In all these songs the male version caught the popular fancy. The female versions lagged so far behind that many of them became extinct from public memory and it would be difficult to believe that they existed. ......
If you somehow block the memory of the male versions and listen to the female versions of the above songs, they are technically sound and quite melodious. Then why even Lata versions pale in comparison to their male counterparts seems inexplicable. Perhaps it has to do with something abstract in the way our senses respond to when the same song is sung by a male and a female singer, and we always seem to be favouring the former."

Here is a possible exception that proves the rule. Geeta Dutt's version of 'preetam aan milo' came after the famous version by C.H. Atma and seem to be popular even though it  comes in snatches against different backgrounds:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LywY3L5CCM

There is also a short version by Asha Bhosle in 'Mardon Wali Baat' 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQZaw5B_uWc

Offhand, this is the only example that I remember.
P.S. This topic intrigues me. I found a couple more posts on the same topic, again w.r.t. Hindi songs
http://anuradhawarrier.blogspot.in/2012/08/its-first-anniversary-of-my-blog.html
http://amvaishnav.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/version-song-a-song-rendered-by-two-or-more-different-singers-or-in-different-moods/
There is one about Tamil songs in TFM but no links http://tfmpage.com/forum/12586.11309.5.html

Ashwini Parameswaran's blog

I have been reading posts in his blog Macroeconomic Resilience for a while, but only recently I started understanding a bit. Check out his recent posts. Rajiv Sethi mentions that one of the earlier posts
Resilience Stability Trade Off: Drawing Analogies Between River Flood Management and Macroeconomic Management as one of his favorite posts.

Summary of a Lant Pritchett speech on Poverty

'Everything you think you know about poverty is wrong': (via Chris Blattman)
"Counter-intuitively, his research has shown that countries whose education system improves actually grow slower on average. He suggests that one reason for this may be that putting more educated people into a corrupt bureaucracy may result in more sophisticated corruption.....
Working temporarily, Prichett suggests, three-year visas would give the poor an opportunity to earn a substantial amount of money, money that could change the trajectory of their lives when they returned home."
Some of the earlier posts about Lant Pritchett's ideas here, here, here and here.

Struggling to understand

After the recent confiscation of deposits in Cyprus and the attempts in Australia to tax superannuation, I found that I do not know how money originated or how it works now. Looking around, I found a 1993 paper by Randall Wray The origins of money and the development of the modern financial system which seemed understandable. But reading it a second time, I understood less. Then I found that he updated the paper in 2012 and read it again and understood even less. Here is the later version http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_717.pdf
There is also a book What is money? edited by John Smithin in which experts discuss different theories.

Today's editorial 'The welfare of the patient must be paramount' and the news which triggered it ' 'Deceitful' Big Pharma accused of putting lives at risk' An earlier report from WSJ

First draft of a paper

First draft of 'Adopted almost invariant sets and splittings of groups' with Vincent Guirardel and Peter Scott is ready if anybody is interested. I assume that it will be ready before the end of year. Peter Scott is a long time collaborator and wrote the paper so far, though he claims that I outlined the arguments a few years ago. My final paper may be some thing that I will not understand.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala RIP

Obituaries in The Guardian and in The Outlook.
The New Yorker makes some of her stories available online.

One more tax haven seems to be unravelling

From The Guardian article Offshore Secrets
"Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife.

The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens....................

As well as Britons hiding wealth offshore, an extraordinary array of government officials and rich families across the world are identified, from Canada, the US, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states..........

The British Foreign Office depends on the BVI's company licensing revenue to subsidise this residual outpost of empire, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries."

P.S. More reports in The Guardian and Indian Express
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/global-media-investigation-finds-612-indian-firms-in-tax-havens/1097501/0

Nice picture

From the website of Shobana Chandrakumar
http://www.shobana.in/photo-gallery.html/freedomofmovement/
Freedom of movement seems to come only trained persons.

'Coarsening effects of privilege'

so says Chrystia Freeland  in the last chapter about the plutocrats''obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others'.An angry Monbiot talks in similar terms
"Most of the world's people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I've reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government's full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poorcommences, the thought keeps returning to me.".

Chrystia Freeland on plutocrats

I came across Chrysia Freeland's book 'Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everbody Else' from a passage quoted in Miles Kimball post The Rise Fall of Venice. Parts of the book are presented in the New Atlantic article The Rise of the New Global Elite which sounds like a panegyric of the plutocrats. But the book is more balanced, particularly the last two chapters is an antidote for some of the earlier hype. The earlier chapters may be useful to new entrepreneurs. The book won the 2013 Lionel Gelber prize. A review from FT.com Follow the Money by a former editor of The Economist.

Tax leakage from Bric

From Most foreign investment in BRICs is not foreign at all-it's tycoons using tax havens
"The clearest sign that BRICs are leaking tax revenues is that each country’s biggest source of outside investment is a tax haven. China counts the tiny Caribbean bolthole of the British Virgin Islands as its biggest source of foreign investment (not including the Chinese territory of Hong Kong). India has Mauritius, Russia has Cyprus, and Brazil has the Netherlands."
via Tim Worstall in Forbes

An old Punjabi film song

from Yakke Wali http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ArFHH8EOIO0

Interesting article

in washingtonsblog but many things in the links related to banking and money creation are not clear to me. An interesting excerpt from from Benjamin Franklin's observations starting with a trip to London in 1764:
"When he arrived, he was surprised to find rampant unemployment and poverty among the British working classes… Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied:

“We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.”

In 1764, the Bank of England used its influence on Parliament to get a Currency Act passed that made it illegal for any of the colonies to print their own money. The colonists were forced to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold. Anyone lacking in those precious metals had to borrow them at interest from the banks.

Only a year later, Franklin said, the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed beggars, just as they were in England. The money supply had suddenly been reduced by half, leaving insufficient funds to pay for the goods and services these workers could have provided. He maintained that it was “the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War.” This, he said, was the real reason for the Revolution: “the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction.”

Links 29 March, 2013

I thought that hundred thousand euros was lot of money to put in a bank. Today Age has a story about a Cypriot_Australian who worked in Australia for over thirty years, retired to Cyprus in 2007 with his life savings of a million Australian dollars, deposited in Laiki Bank and has been living on the interest.

Meanwhile, some of those who took advantage of tax shelters seem to be doing fine. WSJ has an article 'Wealth Over The Edge: Singapore' "But over the past decade, Singapore has undergone a dramatic makeover, as the rich and famous from Asia and beyond debark on its shores in search of a glamorous new home—and one of the safest places to park their wealth." Akshay Regulagedda who linked it on Facebook mentions that an Indian cabinet minister goes there for a haircut every two months.

One problem seems to be banks too big in comparison to a country's GDP. From an article coming from a German Foundation "For the Germans, the Cypriot saga played into political tropes about moral hazard and free-riding tax havens. One German public intellectual described Cyprus in the Financial Times as a "cesspool of profligacy and haven for tax-dodging Russian oligarchs." German media are providing detailed analyses of other tax havens to which their countrymen might be exposed. The daily Die Welt declared recently that the tax haven as an economic model has been "exhausted." Luxembourg, with a financial sector more than five times the size of its €44 billion GDP has come under particular scrutiny. With a financial sector twice the size of its GDP, the United Kingdon could also become a point of interest."

In The Debate on Bank Size Over "What really moves the needle in terms of consensus among policy makers and the broader public opinion is when events combine with a new understanding of how the world works. Thanks to Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio; Senator Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and many other people who have worked hard over the last four years, we are ready to understand what finally defeated the argument that bank size does not matter: Cyprus."
Nothing will happen soon says The Atlantic And there are the problems that Holder mentioned

Links, 28 March, 2013

City of London Spider at the centre of tax havens by Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Treasure Islands. George Monbiot on London Corporation "There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple" According to Shaxson, the rest of the votes is 23,000 and Blair wanted to increase it to 32,000. Shaxson has a new article on the new rich in the City of London 'A Tale of Two Londons' "A decade or so ago, that may have been true. But today another class sits above even them—the global commodity plutocrats: owners of mineral rights, or dominant players in mineral-rich countries in sectors such as construction and finance that benefit from commodity booms. " Some of them live in One Hyde Park built by Candy brothers. One of them names his children Monaco and Cayman.

Krugman on Cyprus 'Treasure Island Trauma' "But step back for a minute and consider the incredible fact that tax havens like Cyprus, the Cayman Islands, and many more are still operating pretty much the same way that they did before the global financial crisis. " and 'Hot Money Blues' "one thing seems certain: for the time being, and probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country....I am, of course, not the first person to notice the correlation between the freeing up of global capital and the proliferation of financial crises; Harvard’s Dani Rodrik began banging this drum back in the 1990s. Until recently, however, it was possible to argue that the crisis problem was restricted to poorer nations, that wealthy economies were somehow immune to being whipsawed by love-’em-and-leave-’em global investors. That was a comforting thought — but Europe’s travails demonstrate that it was wishful thinking." Felix Salmon reminds "Cardiff Garcia looks at at a meta-study on capital controls and finds that only once — in Malaysia — were they effective. In that case, the controls were “accompanied by aggressive counter-cyclical spending, bans on short-selling the currency and trading it offshore, and defending the ringgit against speculators by fixing it to the dollar”. Those things aren’t happening in Cyprus and won’t be."

Andrew Watts in 'Mario Draghi's Economic Ideology revealed' "In other words the productivity measure includes inflation, the wage measure does not."

Daniel Little 'Michael Mann on Power' "This is an amazing corpus, and I think it throws important light on both the theory and the history. It is historical sociology on a macro-scale; and yet Mann also provides careful, almost ethnographic details at the level of individual actors -- fascists, ethnic paramilitaries, legislators, colonial administrators. So I think Mann also offers a great example of a sociologist who is not prisoner to a single methodology or a single avenue of approach to these supremely complex social processes.:

Michael Pettis on reckless bankers

in Why the world needs reckless bankers

"In fact, long-term wealth creation accrues most to societies in which the financial system most willingly funds risk-taking entrepreneurs. But the more a financial system is willing to finance risky new ventures, the greater the likelihood of banking instability.

.........

We should allow localised – manageable – banking crises to occur more often.

.....

What might in fact be best for the US and the world may be more and smaller banks, tougher and even ruinous competition, more bankruptcies, more kinds of financial institutions and a regulator whose main function is to enforce transparency and to manage periodic crises with countercyclical measures. Perhaps then we might even prefer a little more 19th-century-style “reckless banking”.'

From the Wikipedia

article Chinna Jeeyar Swamy
"We have heard several stories and legends about God incarnations, Godman, and Acharyas in the past, but very rarely can we come into the living presence of divinity like, His Holiness Tridandi Srimannarayana Ramanuja Chinna Jeeyar Swamiji.
......
For about four years i.e. from 1985 to 1988 there was a continuous and constant failure of rains in Andhra Pradesh. The state in general and Hyderabad in particular were reeling under the conditions of drought. Sri Swamiji was merciful enough to perform a Varuna Yagna in Hyderabad for a period of 9 days. From the last day of the yagnam (i.e. Poornahuti day) miraculously there were a heavy rains."
I missed him on visits to A.P. but it seems from his Facebook account he has been visiting Australia. May be I can find about Vedic science and look for a job in his university if there is a Cyprus type crisis here.

Los Alamos reminiscences of Richard Feynman

Probably very well known but I noticed it only today
Los Alamos From Below: Reminiscences 1943-1945, by Richard Feynman
Some excepts. First about cracking safes "Once, however, I did open a safe purely by accident, and that helped to reinforce my reputation. It was a sensation, but it was pure luck...... For 20 minutes I turned pi upside down. Nothing happened.

            So I started walking out of the office, and I remembered in the book about the psychology, and I said, “You know, it's true. Psychologically, DeHoffman is just the kind of a guy to use a mathematical constant for his safe combination. And the other important mathematical constant is e.” So I walk back to the safe. 27-18-28 - click, clock, it opens."

About meeting Niels Bohr "Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, he said to his son, “Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He's the only guy who's not afraid of me, and will say when I've got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we're not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we'll talk with him first.""

About watching the first atomic bomb explosion:

"The next thing that happened, of course, was the ' I 'test, after we'd made the calculations. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that time, after my wife died, and so I got a message that said, “The baby is expected on such and such a day."

            I flew back, and I just arrived when the buses were leaving, so I went straight out to the site and we waited out there, 20 miles away. We had a radio, and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go off and so forth, but the radio wouldn't work, so we never knew what was happening. But just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio started to work, and they told us there was 20 seconds or something to go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, 6 miles away.

            They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes - bright light can never hurt your eyes - is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing. OK.

            Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, “That ain't it. That's an after-image.” So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. The clouds form and then they disappear again; the compression and the expansion forms and makes clouds disappear. Then finally a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat.

            All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn't see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.

            Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous noise - BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder -- and that's what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody- - released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it had really worked.

The man standing next to me said, “What's that?"

I said, “That was the bomb.""

A fascinating book on tax havens

While trying to follow the recent Cypress events, I came across this quote from Nicholas Shaxson's book 'Treasure Islands':
"Having gone out of its way to welcome wealthy Arabs in the 1980s and rich Japanese and oil-rich Africans in the 1990s, the City has more recently, with the help of conduit havens like Cyprus, aggressively courted Russian oligarchs, providing them with bolt-holes beyond the reach of Russian law enforcement. By April 2008 a hundred companies from the former Soviet Union’s Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) were listed on the London stock exchange…"

Here are some more excepts from the book http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/Treasure_Islands.html
I am midway through the book and find it a fascinating account of globalization from around 1955, particularly the last thirty years.
Paul Krugman says in 'Treasure Island Trauma':
"A couple of years ago, the journalist Nicholas Shaxson published a fascinating, chilling book titled “Treasure Islands,” which explained how international tax havens — which are also, as the author pointed out, “secrecy jurisdictions” where many rules don’t apply — undermine economies around the world. Not only do they bleed revenues from cash-strapped governments and enable corruption; they distort the flow of capital, helping to feed ever-bigger financial crises.
One question Mr. Shaxson didn’t get into much, however, is what happens when a secrecy jurisdiction itself goes bust. That’s the story of Cyprus right now. And whatever the outcome for Cyprus itself (hint: it’s not likely to be happy), the Cyprus mess shows just how unreformed the world banking system remains, almost five years after the global financial crisis began."
An excellent review of Shaxson; book  'Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens' and 'Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made Rich Richer- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class' by Jacob Hacher and Paul Pierson appeared in the  London Review of Books last year. It is 'Did not they notice? Offshore' by David Runciman.  Excerpts from Runciman's review:
"This is the web, but where is the spider? At the heart of Shaxson’s story lies the City of London, itself a kind of island within the British state. Again, the rise of the City as the favourite place for foreigners to park their money, no matter who they were or where it came from, is related to imperial decline. After the Second World War, sterling still financed much of global trade, but the British economy was no longer able to sustain the value of the pound against the dollar. In the aftermath of Suez, which caused a run on the pound, the government attempted to impose curbs on the overseas lending of London’s merchant banks. The response of the banks, with the connivance of the Bank of England, was to shift their international lending into dollars. The result was the creation of the so-called ‘Eurodollar market’ – which was effectively an offshore haven. Because the trade was happening in dollars, the British saw no need to tax or regulate it; because it was happening in London, the Americans had no means to tax or regulate it. ....US policy-makers were now in a dilemma. They could try to face down the threat of offshore, either with higher domestic interest rates, or with tighter controls on currency outflows and a tougher regulatory regime requiring US banks to share information about their overseas activities. Or they could copy London by creating an offshore world of their own closer to home: in other words, if you can’t beat them, join them. The second was the path of least resistance – among other things it was a useful way of reinforcing the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency – and over time it was the one they took. .......

What happened to the representatives of all those people who don’t have lots of money to move around, who can’t relocate even if they wanted to, and who have an interest in a fair, open and broadly progressive tax system? Didn’t they notice what was going on?

This is the question that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tackle in Winner-Take-All Politics. They don’t spend much time talking about offshore, but the story they tell has striking parallels with the one laid out by Shaxson. One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to Shaxson, is that local politics gets captured by financial services. In that sense, Washington has gone offshore: its politics has been captured by the interests of a narrow group of very wealthy individuals, many of whom work in finance. For Hacker and Pierson this, more than anything else, explains why the rich have got so much richer over the last 30 years or so. And by the rich they don’t mean simply the generally wealthy; they mean the super-rich......

All this happened because the politicians followed the path of least resistance – as elected politicians invariably do – and the better organised and better-funded resistance came from the representatives of big business, not organised labour."

There is more about the increasing inequality and damage to the developing countries in the book. My take away point is a quote of Keynes in Shaxson's book which is almost Gandhian:
"Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible. Above all, let finance be primarily national'.

The mouse that roared

Yves Smith has comprehensive report 'Cyprus: Will the Mouse that roared be Gored?', from money laundering and arms trade to Nato bases. As some of the comments point out, some of the points not covered are "The UK has a large money-laundering and tax-free system explained in Vanity Fair this month. It is independent from the UK government. Perfect to process the overseas money even from Russia while maintaining their air base in Cyprus. Perhaps the EU will have new respect for the global implications of their financial instability." "Cyprus and Iceland demonstrate that it is easier to impose unpopular, and unjust, antisocial measures in larger countries. Why?" "...the Archbishop of Cyprus formally placed the entire wealth of the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus at the government’s disposal this morning..." etc

A duet from 'Neki Aur Badi' 1949

Amirbai Karnataki and Feroz Dastoor and may be another male singer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PC8nf0_jPKw
via http://atulsongaday.me/2012/12/15/kyun-jee-scent-lagaaya-hai/
which also has the lyrics and translation.

Iraq oil after ten years

Barkley Rosser in 'Who Got Iraq's Oil Ten Years After the War Started': "The big winners in the oil industry in Iraq are the Chinese, followed by the old Saddam era operators from France and Russia, along with upstarts from Norway and Canada.  The US companies are only now beginning to get any pieces of the action, but not in the largest producing areas in the main parts of Iraq, but in the one part of Iraq that clearly can be said to be in better shape now than prior to the US invasion, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq that was not on anybody's radar screen before as a major possible oil producing region.  I am quite certain this is not what Cheney either expected or hoped for."

Misc. links, March 19, 2013

Father of modern Lahore Sir Ganga Ram with hospitals named after him in Lahore and Delhi. His Samadhi was damaged after the Babri Masjid affair. An article Gangapur and Lahore celebrating Ganga Ram just appeared in The Dawn.
Julia Gillard trying old tactics: Gillard's foreign worker attack hits home but does't help her.
Aditya Chakraborthy on the robbery in Cyprus.
The Cypress File by Satyajit Das
America's Latest Phony Fiscal Crisis by Simon Johnson
Bee venom component might offer HIV protection from SceinceNews.
Perespolis by Marjane Satrapi removed from seventh grade curriculum in Chicago via Richard Singer's Facebook. Richard Singer also links to a YouTube video of Perespolis with English subtitles. An old interview with Marjane Satrapi.

Amitav Ghosh on V.S. Naipaul

A reader writes to Amitav Ghosh " As a lover of Naipaul and a London-born Trinbagonian, I think your article on Naipaul is note-perfect."

సి నారాయణరెడ్డి 'ఆధునికాంధ్ర కవిత్వం- సంప్రదాయాలు ప్రయోగాలు'

available online
 http://www.teluguthesis.com/2013/03/adhunika-andhra-kavitvam-sampradaayam.html
This is the only book of C.Narayana Reddy that I read and like many I am familiar with some of  his film songs.
Interview with C.Narayana Raddy where he explains some of his early background, rest of the interview here, here and here. Around 6 minutes in the first part, he describes how as a kid  he used to listen to hindi film songs and translate them in to telugu for himself and sing.

One aspect of online learning

emphasized in 'Binge Learning'.... "This seems like a more natural way to learn than traditional educational structures can offer: develop an interest and mercilessly indulge it until another interest supersedes it. It is a method that conserves the mental energy associated with willpower, leaving more of the brain’s resources to focus on the material itself. Since it relies on the student actually being interested in the class, it is hard to fit into a physical schooling environment, where classes have to begin on a schedule, go slow enough for everyone to keep up, and run in parallel with other classes.

Online education also saves the resources associated with context switching. Humans are notoriously bad multitaskers. Each time a high school student has to change classes, she has to quickly stifle the thoughts and questions raised in previous classes to focus on the current class. She has to expend mental resources remembering where the previous session of the current class left off. And when she returns to the class that stimulated the thoughts that had to be stifled, she may not recall them. Far better to focus on—or even to binge on—one subject until she is at a good stopping point." 

I am not sure about all the points above. If one does not practice and use what one learns, it can disappear quickly. The traditional method of learning over a long period several things also involves sleeping over what one is learning and helps retaining it. With older students with specific interests and motivation, I am sure online learning helps. I am sure that online learning is here to stay but it is still evolving and people have to figure out what works for them for which topics in which combinations.

Sangita Shresthova celebrates Bollywood song and dance

The author of "Is It All About Hips?Around the World with Bollywood Dance", in the article "Dancing to an Indian Beat:"Dola" Goes my Diasporic Heart" has a four page description of 'Dola re Dola' from (republished in "Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance"):
"The lyrics play an important role in determining the meaning of the dance. During the recurring refrain, the two women execute a series of movements in unison to the lyrics: "Hey dola re dola re dola re dola" (Hey, I swayed, I swayed, I swayed), "Haai dola dil dola mann dola re dola" (Oh, my heart swayed, my spirit swayed).The movements incorporating a gentle sway of the hips from side to side, with one arm behind the head and a look off to the diagonal, stress the sway of women's hearts, caused by their love for Devdas, is the pretext for the performance.. Their movements are echoed by female dancers in foreground and male dancers in the background as the "dola" or "sway" of the hear motivates their dance. The recurring movement establishes unity between the two women as they compare the depth of their affection for Devdas.
....
Leading to the climax, Paro and Chandramukhi repeat a variation of Chandramukhi's entrance. With the right leg straight and raised slightly off the ground and their arms to the sides, they walk side by side. Then they repeat the step to the other side, this time keeping one arm bent at chest level with palms flexed and facing up, as if to stop some one from advancing.With their finger on their shoulder and their arms raised, they shift their weight between their hips pausing briefly on the fourth beat. In this way, they summarize their shared experience and assert their space."
She then goes on to describe the variations of the dance in functions of Indian diaspora. Some of the description reminded me of dance in an obscure film 'Two Moon Junction' by Sherilynn Fenn and Kristie McNichol.

Biography of 'one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin'

So said the famous sociobiolgist Robert Trivers. I just started browsing through the biography of William Hamilton: 'Nature's Oracle:The Life and Work of WD Hamilton' by Ullica Segerstrale. It looks promising. Here is a review in The Guardian.

Global Bollywood

It is not clear to me why I like songs and dances from Hindi films. I am fairly ignorant of Indian classical music, I know very little Hindi and saw very few Indian films after 1960, But I love those songs and dances and follow film blogs from India to USA. As I said in one of those blogs:
"It seems that we know very little about ourselves, let alone about others. If I had known that I would like Hindi songs, I would have learnt it in school. Even though learning Hindi was popular with earlier generations during the Independence movement, we got into anti-imposition mood and did not learn. The government banning Hindi songs from AIR did not help. But there were Hindi films and songs played at functions or sung by various people in the background. I remember my mother singing Rattan songs. Later I started remembering tunes and sometimes lines I heard and after a while started looking for those songs.I used a Aan tune as a lullaby for my children (Jana gana mana did not work) as well as Pather Panchali tune. I was desperate for ‘aeri maito prem diwani’ but could not find it. Around 1992, I was n Allahabad for a conference and asked folks there. They said that it was a famous Meera tune and got me Jogan songs. When I came back to Melbourne and listened to it, it was not the tune I remembered. The search started again. Around 2000, I was in Bombay and visited Rhythm House to find Aan sons to give to my children since they still remembered the tunes. When I mentioned to a friend who came along about the Meera Bhajan and he said that it may be the Nau Bahar song and I finally got it after 40-50 years. This is how it is going on."
I just came across a book which describes the appeal in diverse places even where is no Indian diaspora "Global Bollywood:Travels of Hindi Song and Dance" parts of which are available here. A review by Philip Lutgendorff , and a discussion at Sepia Mutiny. 

Honey hunters of Nepal

Through Iconic Photos, I came across these Eric Valli photographs from 1987, There are several videos on YouTube, this may be from a Eric Valli documentary. This article from Daily Mail links to more recent documentaries and also has excellent photographs.

A fascinating study on food prices

"Somehow the very term ‘financialization’, hard to understand and hard to explain, captures something of how remote the world of high commodity finance is from the reality of the vast majority of those who earn their living from agriculture, particularly those in the developing world. For smallholder producers, who make up some 70 per cent of the agricultural world, worries include how to protect and increase soil fertility; how to ensure reliable seeds; where to get credit for the season’s planting; whether the rains will come; where to store the harvest so as to avoid the low prices at harvest time. Guessing at the political mood in Russia or what changes the Dodd-Frank legislation might bring, let alone which way the rouble or the yuan willmove against the dollar, are not factors.
Yet both the increased presence of financial investors as owners and operators of farms (the
financialization of production) in a number of developing countries and the significantly increased activity of speculators and investors in commodity exchange markets (the financialization of price formation and risk management) affect the context in which smallholdersoperate."
From page 48 of the fascinating study 'Cereal Secrets' via Duncan Green who has a brief summary.
Another recent paper along the same lines but shorter is 'Food Price Volatility and Financial Speculation' by Stephen Spratt again linked and summarized by Duncan Green.

First bottle gourd from my garden

Gavin with squash grown by a neighbour

Two 'hauley hauley' songs by Geeta Dutt

The earlier one from 1954 composed by Nikhil Ghosh
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u5vK-9b33tg
via http://atulsongaday.me/2012/05/05/hauley-hauley-hawaayen-doley/ which also has the lyrics and translation.
The second, a more peppy version, from a film in 1958
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0jrv2mPhn4s
again via http://atulsongaday.me/2013/03/05/hauley-hauley-doley/

Hugo Chavez RIP

Obituary in The Guardian From another article in The Guardian "But the most damning critique of Chávez's rule concerned not democratic credentials but managerial competence."

Sheema Kermani fighting on

From The Dawn "The troupe enthralled the audience by performing the play titled ‘I want peace’ at the Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto Memorial Library, Hindu Dharmshala and Hamal village over the weekend.

The programme was organised by the Tehreek-i-Niswan in partnership with the Larkana Social Forum to provide quality entertainment with thought-provoking and meaningful programmes portraying and encompassing political, economic, social and cultural issues with special reference to violence against women."

Brief biography of Sheema Kermani in the series Peace Women Across the Globe.

Conversations from last year.

An Introduction to Odissi Dance by Sheema Kermani

Noor Jehan listening to herself

More details at http://cineplot.com/noor-jehans-last-appearance-in-a-film-baji-1963/
A longer video containing the above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1KjmmgdZ8s

Miscellaneous links, March 2, 2013

Two articles on the blocking of URLs by DoT (Department of Telecommunications). The one from Outlook and the other from the Open magazine.

Ouch " Further analyses showed that men’s preferences for larger female breasts were significantly associated with a greater tendency to be benevolently sexist, " via MindHacks

Video games take aim at dyslexia from ScienceNews
Honeybees may be busy, but they may not be efficient: Native pollinators could help farms worldwide produce bigger harvests. from ScienceNews.

Yves Smith has good memory " Steve Waldman, Who Extolled Deception and Theft, Should Explain Himself"
Perhaps as reminded by Arunn The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy. See also the earlier post in Naked Capitalism on Matt Yglesias. I hope that Yves Smith posts will help to improve some bloggers.