A brief preview of Piketty's book

from Thomas Piketty & Marxist Meme "So accounting identities can be manipulated mathematically while still remaining necessarily true, and this is what Mr. Piketty does. His first law is simply rewriting some known identities.

First among these is that income is allocated between capital and labor. Income from capital is known as return on capital, while income from labor is called wages. The total income is the sum of the return on capital and wages. So it could be, for example, that 30% of total income is awarded to capital, while 70% is awarded to wages. The fraction of total income that's awarded to capital is called alpha.

The second identity is a relationship between the average global return on capital (let's designate that by r), and the rate of growth of the global economy (let's call that g). Piketty shows that if r >g, then alpha must get bigger over time. That is, a larger and larger fraction of the global wealth will accrue to capital, with an ever smaller fraction going to wages.

Conversely, if r < g, then the reverse is true--wages will grow relative to capital.

In the former case, r > g, reasonably assuming that rich people own most of the capital, then more and more wealth will accrue to the 1%. The rich will get richer, and the poor, while perhaps not getting poorer, will certainly be getting richer a lot slower. In the latter case, r < g, the premium goes to wages, and so wealth is more evenly distributed across society.

So which is it? The relative values of r and g depend on empirical fact rather than accounting identities. And here Mr. Piketty apparently excels--he has collected extensive data from most of the capitalist world from before the French Revolution to the present. He has found that for most of the last 200-300 years that r > g. The exception has been the period from 1913 to 1970--during that time r < g. His conclusion is that r > g is the normal state of capitalism, while r < g was an aberration that will likely never be repeated.

Today global growth is in the 2-3% range, while the average return on capital is roughly 4-5%. Thus r > g, and accordingly an ever increasing fraction of wealth is accruing to the top 1%. This is certainly true in the US, evidenced by high unemployment, declining labor force participation, and stagnant wages. Piketty argues that global growth can't get much higher. It depends predominantly on two things: population growth (stagnant), and improvements in technology (yielding approximately 1.5%). Growth is as high as it is because of China, but as it becomes fully integrated into the capitalist system its growth rate will slow, taking global growth down with it.

The return on capital has averaged 4-5% over the past two centuries, and barring exceptional circumstances is unlikely to change significantly. So Mr. Piketty forecasts r > g for as far as the eye can see.

The exceptional period from 1913 to 1970 was due to the World Wars (echoing my Trotskyist friends). By destroying so much capital, the return on capital was greatly reduced (perhaps even negative in some years). Further, rebuilding Europe and Asia enabled very strong growth. So, with r < g, this was the heyday of labor, when workers could claim an ever larger share of the pie. Unfortunately, economists coming of age during that time thought that was normal, and that capitalism would inevitably lead to a richer and more equitable society. Mr. Piketty says that's wrong.

Piketty's view is very pessimistic, essentially condemning a large fraction of the population to relative poverty. He suggests that 50% of the population will generally benefit from the trend toward capital, but that the bottom 50% will be losers."

See also the rest of the author's comments. About the last point, Gabriel Palma's views mentioned earlier. the losers are the bottom 40 percent, the top ten percent ain and the the other fifty percent take half the income. from data of about 135 countries http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/its-the-share-of-the-rich-stupid-brilliant-inequality-stats-politics-from-gabriel-palma/
P.S. Another note about Palma http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/inequality-all-about-tails-palma-gini-and-post-2015

MR. & MRS. 55 on Lata and Asha's highest notes

Bollywood's Beloved Sopranos: Lata and Asha's Highest Notes "Before the arrival of the Mangeshkars onto the filmi musical scene, female singing in Hindi films was dominated by artists with heavy, nasal voices, such as Suraiyya and Shamshad Begum. Once music directors had the opportunity to work with the Mangeshkars, things changed forever: the nasalized heavy female voices were out and the delicate soprano voices were here to stay. After Lata and Asha became established as playback singers, I would argue that  music directors of the time pushed the boundaries of their compositions in terms of range to test and showcase the virtuosity of these two exceptional talents."
They also have a theory about the popularity of the male versions when both males and females sang the same song "In almost all cases that I can think of, music directors made the female singer of a tandem song sing her versions in the same key as the male version. Because men tend to be more comfortable in the higher register of their voices than women, this practice often put the female playback singer at a disadvantage when it came to hitting the highest notes of the composition. "
See also their discussion of one of the songs in a different post where they explain the lyrics etc 
http://mrandmrs55.com/2013/05/25/panchhi-banoon-udti-phiroon-lyrics-and-translation-lets-learn-urdu-hindi/
P.S. A discussion on twin sons in 'Songs of Yore'
http://www.songsofyore.com/twin-songs/

Weird News

Music used for torture "While Metallica politely asked the US military to stop using their music for the sleep deprivation of detainees, Skinny Puppy took it one step further.

"So we thought it would be a good idea to make an invoice to the US government for musical services," Key added. "Thus the concept of the [band's new] record title, Weapons.""

Swartz's dream of new order

"In his attic meeting with McLean during the OPEN summit at Holmes, Swartz had sketched the contours of a new order, in which he envisaged corporate power being severely weakened and political parties replaced by internet-based people power. In contrast to efforts by activists such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who sought to reduce state power that derived from secrecy, Swartz's objective was to build citizen power to counter that of governments and corporations. He revealed a grand design by which he envisaged artificial intelligence making activists such as himself and McLean redundant." from  Aaron Swartz:a beautiful mind by Paul McGeough

Links

May be the next big thing in economics: Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty; the blurb has links to some reviews. There is also a long review by Branko Milanovic. Some of the influemtial American thinkers seem to disagree: "“Part of his interpretation I do not share. Piketty argues that there is a natural tendency for high inequality in ‘capitalist’ economies (the term capitalist is not my favorite) and that certain unusual events (world wars, the Great Depression and policy responses thereto) temporarily reduced inequality. Then both earnings inequality and inequality between capital and labor have been reverting back to their ‘normal’ levels. I don’t think that the data allow us to reach this conclusion. All we see is this pattern of fall and rise, but so many other things are going on. It is consistent with what Piketty says, but it is also consistent with certain technological changes and discontinuities (or globalization) having created a surge in inequality which will then stabilize or even reverse in the next several decades. It is also consistent with the dynamics of political power changing and this being a major contributor to the rise in inequality in advanced economies. We may be seeing parts of several different trends underpinned by several different major shocks rather than the mean-reverting dynamics following the shocks that Piketty singles out.” according to Acemoglu. More of his and collaborator's views in Democracy vs Inequality "Overall, our results suggest that democracy does represent a real shift in political power away from elites and has first-order consequences for redistribution and government policy. But the impact of democracy on inequality may be more limited than one might have expected). US-centric discussion in Economist's View of Acemoglu-Robinson post. There seems to be problems with decentralization too. According  to a new paper (via Chris Blattman): "We posit that administrative unit proliferation occurs where and when there is a confluence of interests between the national executive and local citizens and elites from areas that are politically, economically and ethnically marginalized. We argue further that although the proliferation of administrative units often accompanies or follows far-reaching decentralization reforms, it likely results in a recentralization of power; the proliferation of new local governments fragments existing units into smaller ones with lower relative intergovernmental bargaining power and administrative capacity" 

A recent discussion on Telangana

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/the-buck-stops-here/will-telangana-be-political-death-knell-for-congress/307481?vod-related
Lon. To me it seemed that J.P. Narayan of Loksatta presented reasonable answers. But I am not following the issue carefully since I assumed that there will be separate state at some stage.
(via a comment in Dalel Benbabaali timeline).

A discussion in Ramarao Kanneganti's timeline on politics of anarchy

https://www.facebook.com/ramarao?hc_location=timeline where I begin to express some opinions. One of my comments there: "While I recognize that many groups are using relatively non-violent methods for their own ends which seem dubious (like Thailand now), I am not sure how the really poor can get justice in the current set ups in various countries. While many of us have done reasonably well, I still see lot of subsistence existence, both in person and in videos and reports (for example brick workers, tribals via Rahul Banerjee who worked with them for several years), whose lot do not seem to have improved since the British left. But how do I know how many of them are worse off and how how the rising tide will not lift them. I look at the reports of people like Jan Bremen or John Harriss and others who worked in India for over forty years. Then there are studies by Gabriel Palma which says that in about 140 countries the top ten percent and the bottom forty percent earn about the same as the rest of the fifty percent. That means that the gains of the top ten percent are at the expense of the bottom forty percent; who are being further pushed to the bottom in spite of the overall gains. Moreover, we have reports like http://marginalrevolution.com/.../why-the-worst-get-on... which indicate the stakes against the bottom forty percent. There seem to concerted wars against the poor in countries like US, UK. I do not know the motives. Either they are considered dispensable with the rise of technology or the calculation is that you need some at subsistence level for the comforts of the others (now colonialism etc are passe). We in the fifty percent are coopted in the process. If these perceptions are somewhat correct, I do not seem what options the poor have except unconstitutional protests, since new laws are being passed everyday to make all kinds of protests illegal (one law planned next week in Melbourne). See also this from today's Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/.../three-charged-vagrancy-act..."

Bricks of bondage

Vis Dalel Benbabaali timeline.

Revenge effect

is not what I thought it was. From The Ouroboros Effect: "The origin of the Ouroboros symbol (serpent devouring its own tail) can be traced to ancient Egypt and China, Norse mythology, Medieval Europe, and into modern times. It has been interpreted in a variety of ways, but here represents the cyclic and interactive nature of events. More specifically, it reflects how some of our best attempts to solve problems comes back to bite us!
Solutions to problems are usually intended as final fixes, but more often than not, while solving one problem, they generate more problems. In some cases the new problems from the intended solution are bigger, worse, or more complicated than the original problem; in other cases, the intended solution feedsback into the original problem and simply exacerbates it. The German word,verschlimmbessern, can be interpreted as "to fix something more broken," or to worsen through attempts to make better. These unintended consequences have been called "revenge effects" and are largely a function of limited scope in problem strategy conceptualization: most problem solving deals only with the problem (as defined) at hand, and does not consider the long term effects, ripple and spin-off effects (contingencies), or feedback effects in a larger system. The examples I have collected below present a variety of revenge effects that might have been prevented by taking a more systemic view of the situation." \
via Chris Dillow post Revenge Effects  who sees the recent failure of the English team in Ashes as one of those effects.

Happy Republic Day Happy Australia Day

I have spent about 40 years in India and 25 years in Australia and both countries have been overall good to me though I did not get along well with authority figures in either country. My most enjoyable years have been in Bombay learning and starting to do mathematics and my best work has been in Melbourne after the age of fifty. I now support Australia in cricket except when they play India. Home is still the few taluks in Guntur and Krishna districts where I spent my first 15 years and any other place is still a foreign country (except New York once in a while). May both countries and all other countries thrive.

Teaching methods:evidence from Mexico

How a radical new method could unleash a generation of geniuses by Joshua Davis. Excerpts:
"Juárez Correa spent his nights watching education videos. He read polemics by the Mexican cartoonist Eduardo del Río (known as Rius), who argued that kids should be free to explore whatever they want. He was also still impressed by Mitra, who talks about letting children “wander aimlessly around ideas.” Juárez Correa began hosting regular debates in class, and he didn’t shy away from controversial topics. He asked the kids if they thought homosexuality and abortion should be permitted. He asked them to figure out what the Mexican government should do, if anything, about immigration to the US. Once he asked a question, he would stand back and let them engage one another.

A key component in Mitra’s theory was that children could learn by having access to the web, but that wasn’t easy for Juárez Correa’s students. The state paid for a technology instructor who visited each class once a week, but he didn’t have much technology to demonstrate. Instead, he had a batch of posters depicting keyboards, joysticks, and 3.5-inch floppy disks. He would hold the posters up and say things like, “This is a keyboard. You use it to type.”

As a result, Juárez Correa became a slow-motion conduit to the Internet. When the kids wanted to know why we see only one side of the moon, for example, he went home, Googled it, and brought back an explanation the next day. When they asked specific questions about eclipses and the equinox, he told them he’d figure it out and report back."

And the students did very well in Mexico's national achievement examination at the end of the year.

"Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”"

Via Felix Salmon's post How Tumbir and GitHub could be the future of education

Oxfam report on politics and inequality

Here 'Working for the few' by Ricardo Fluentes and Nick Galasso. Summary by Duncan Green here. From the summary "After the 2008 global meltdown, we have not seen anything like the New Deal, in terms of redistribution or reform. The paper argues that this is because political capture by a small economic elite is much more complete this time around.

The numbers take your breath away – my favourite new killer fact from the report (and there’s a lot of competition): The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world."

Another summary in The Guardian. I wonder how a few either 85 people or the top one percent can accure so much without the cooperation of at least a considerable percentage of the rest. An earlier study by Gabriel Palma reported by Duncan Green says that the fifty percent below the top ten percent take away fifty percent of the income in most countries. So it seems to between the top 10 percent and bottom 40 percent. How alliances are formed between various groups in the middle fifty percent with the rest seem worth analysing. From Palma's study there seems to be variation in the alliances in different countries.

Links

Apparently well known but I was unaware The Citigroup Plutonomy memos
Two articles on Norway. Apparently Norway saved the oil money for its people but the personal debt levels in the country are high one by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian and the second in Bloomberg News
Failing elites threaten our future by Martin Wolf (if the link does not work, searching with the title should be help), mostly about the west.
About Kolmogorov ""Kolmogorov was particularly interested in the deviation of actual rhythms from classical meters. In traditional poetics, the iambic meter is a rhythm consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. But in practice, this rule is rarely obeyed. In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the most famous classical iambic poem in the Russian language, almost three-fourths of its 5,300 lines violate the definition of the iambic meter, and more than a fifth of all even syllables are unstressed. Kolmogorov believed that the frequency of stress deviation from the classical meters offered an objective “statistical portrait” of a poet. An unlikely pattern of stresses, he thought, indicated artistic inventiveness and expression. " 
Apparently ADHD incidence among French kids is low
About Bangkok shutdown corrupt but 'pro-poor' against more traditional power groups and a longer article in Asia Times (both and some of the above via Naked Capitalism)
Glenn Davis Stone on Malthus
80-year old snake venom still potent and finally a Asha Bhosle-C.Ramachandra duet

Minai on L.Vijalakshmi

Minai usually likes more classical type dances but she has finally written about one of the favourite film dancers of Andhras L.Vijayalakshmi. I came to know of Vijayalakshmi dances through my grand-daughter Ava and linked to an interview and some of her dances before (some links are not working but cinema chat links are still working). Vijayalakshmi's favourite dance among her dances seems to be

.

P.S. The comments section of the video links to this post by Lalita Mukherjea which has the lyrics and translation Sex between sects

Amitava Kumar about his mother

In Indian Express "When I was a child, hanging in our family’s drawing room was a black and white studio photograph. It showed my young mother with her BA degree in Hindi literature from Patna Women’s College. On a small table next to her, the photographer had placed Ma’s gold medal. My mother was the daughter of a policeman; two of her brothers were in the prison bureaucracy. She didn’t grow up in a literary milieu but she wanted to be a writer and a Hindi scholar; I believe she never overcame the bitterness of having her dreams thwarted by marriage and motherhood. As a result, rightly or wrongly, I felt that by writing books I was living her dream. "

Interview with Anil Kumar Gupta

Trying to see again how Honey Bee Network is doing, I came across this 2009 interview . I find that he is on Facebook (Honey Bee Network too)too and has a blog. Some related links.

B.M.Leelakumari about Dalit men and herself

Her biographical videos Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 via Dalit Camera.

'Foibles of power and the melancholy of its abuses'

Links to Karen Knorr's art in 3quarksdaily. See also the article The Photographic Practice of Karen Knorr

VC of University of Hyderabad wonders about the second law of Thermodynamics

Blogger and VC of University of Hyderabad wonders about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This seems to assume that system is isolated and springs to action when external outputs like visits of UGC arrive. I think that it is more than that. Can we develop excellent institutions which are sustainable isolated from the social conditions outside. Perhaps for short periods if they are lucky enough to have outstanding leaders. Anyway, it is good to see a VC who blogs.http://hcurocks.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-second-law/

It seems that we still don't know how bicycles work

(via Naked Capitalism)  a recent article here. An older article in Discover Magazine.

Epigenetics in practice

in tackling aggression, the work of Richard Tremblay in Nature News Feature Behaviour and Biology: The Accidental Epigeneticist "This and later work culminated in Tremblay's 'original sin' hypothesis: that physical aggression is the default setting in human behaviour⁵. It peaks between the ages of two and four, and is usually socialized out of children by the time they enter school (see 'Aggression regression'). “We took the view that violence, and physical aggression, is a part of us as a species,” says Nagin, “so the issue is not how we learn it, but rather how we learn to control it.”

Many criminologists dismissed the findings. They argued not that the idea was wrong, but that it was irrelevant — that chronic childhood aggression is trivial compared with murder and rape in adulthood, and that the former does not explain the latter. Most still focus primarily on delinquency during adolescence, and for good reason, says sociologist Robert Sampson at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Early childhood is centrally important, but it's not determinative, because there are still changes [in behaviour] later on.”

Yet the Montreal and similar longitudinal studies show that heightened physical aggression at a young age correlates with serious antisocial behaviour in adolescence and adulthood, says Tremblay. He is fond of citing the view that Saint Augustine offered some 1,600 years ago: “It is not the infant's will that is harmless,” he wrote, “but the weakness of infant limbs.”"

Matt Ridley discussed related New Zealand studies in his book Nature via Nurture and recaps it at Edge. Here is a review of Ridley's book by H.Allen Orr.

It seems to be a war on the poor in some developed countries

It seems that unemployment benefits are cut in USA and we have this news from UKhttp://www.governamerica.com/news/7026-taking-food-from-the-hungry-uk-govt-rejects-eu-food-bank-subsidy-elites-starving-out-the-rabble-2oth-century-familiarity-rings-a-bell and http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/28/coalition-wont-face-fact-of-food-banks

Evgeny Morozov on privacy

The Real Privacy Problem A long and thoughtful article. Among his conclusions "First, we must politicize the debate about privacy and information sharing. Articulating the existence—and the profound political consequences—of the invisible barbed wire would be a good start. We must scrutinize data-intensive problem solving and expose its occasionally antidemocratic character. At times we should accept more risk, imperfection, improvisation, and inefficiency in the name of keeping the democratic spirit alive."
A shorter version The Snowdon Saga Heralds a Radical Shift in Capitalism.

Focus on cities

Can cities change the politics of fragile states? Some of the points from the article:
"Despite the many difficult challenges they face, cities are easier to fix than states. The political dynamics of running a city are potentially much more favorable than that of a fragile country for a number of reasons:

First, elections work differently. Whereas national polls pit various ethnic and religious groups against each other, and turn into a mud fight between elites for control of rents earned from natural resource wealth or foreign aid, a city’s compact size, blurring of identities, and daily grind makes elections more a test of competence and pragmatism. There are also many more ways to hold officials accountable in a city than in a huge weakly cohesive country.

Second, the compact size of cities make the creation of mechanisms to promote collective action and to institutionalize negotiation between disparate societal interests easier than at the national level. As Goodfellow, Rodgers and Beall point out, “cities arguably also offer the greatest potential for the development of inclusive institutions for managing political conflict rather than suppressing it. The concentration of diverse actors and state institutions in cities make them, in theory at least, critical spaces for institutionalised forms of political debate and participation that translate into demands on the state rather than violence.”"

And more. The first point is not clear to me. Delhi and Mumbai seem different in the first point above. Nevertheless interesting article.

Fascinating article on the effect of social life on gene expression

 from bees and monkeys to humans and how loneliness may be a killer. May be the NRIs are different as Ramachandra Guha suspectedThe Social Life of Genes byDavid Dobbs via Ed Yong's list of long reads for the year.
"Your DNA is not a blueprint. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your surroundings. Your neighbors, your family, your feelings of loneliness: They don't just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells. Inside the new social science of genetics."

Unconventional Monetary Policy

From Peter Dorman at EconoSpeak"
"On August 12, damaged by the revelations emanating from the leaked NSA documents by Edward Snowden, President Obama empaneled a commission to make recommendations for reforms of US cyber-surveillance.  On December 12 this group submitted its report, “Liberty and Security in a Changing World”.

One item that has attracted a bit of attention is a proposal, lodged in Recommendation 31, that reads as follows:

We recommend that the United States should support international norms or international agreements for specific measures that will increase confidence in the security of online communications. Among those measures to be considered are:  

(1) Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry;  

(2) Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems.....

This last item is interesting.  No documents have yet been released that suggest that the NSA or its foreign affiliates have altered financial accounts through electronic manipulation, but the commission presumably had access to a wide range of materials without knowledge of which will be made public in the future.  It may be the case, then, that they are acting to preempt a future revelation.  Even if there has actually been no such financial intervention, however, it is clear that there could be and that it would be prudent to consider the implications of such actions."

Links

The effect of international organizations on government solutions in developing countries. In additions many powerful leaders are trained in IMF and World Bank as Marion Fourcade noted years ago
The prevailing aid orthodoxy works well enough in stable environments, but is ill-equipped to navigate contexts of volatility and fragility. (Both via Chris Blattman)
Quotas for education helped SCs, but only boys reaped the benefit from The Hindu
Rome:Sex and Freedom (via Chapati Mystery)
Tagore endorsed Godrej soap

Cricket

Watched cricket last night until 3AM. Cricinfo calls it one of the greatest draws. I am not sure whether game highlights or reading about it can completely convey the tension or thrill of the last day. With only four bowlers and the spinner fairly ineffective and all exhausted I am not sure how India will fare in the next test. Talking of Swann Darren Lehmann says "..so you only have to take one or two of them out of the equation and make their quicks bowl more. That was certainly a plan from us." Similar tactics may be applied to India.
My takeaway from the game "But India also showed huge resilience under wrenching pressure near the end to pull South Africa back from the brink of victory, with the seamer Mohammed Shami outstanding with his three for 107 and his incredible controlled finish. De Villiers was bowled for 103, Duminy was out cheaply and, crucially, Du Plessis was run out by a brilliant direct hit from Ajinkya Rahane with South Africa needing only 16 runs." 

If it is so tense for spectators, I wonder how it is for players. Some possibilities here.

Naivete

This happened in the early 70s. I was visiting Calcutta and was wandering around College Street lookin for second hand book. I met somebody who started talking in Hindi which I could not understand. I could gather that he was a truck driver from Bombay and was pleased to see somebody from Bombay in that foreign place. I said I could not really understand him and wandered off. Then I ran into him again and it seemed interesting to me that I was able to communicate with somebody in a language that I did not know and continued to chatting. He said that he wanted to buy a watch, he knew the owner of a shop and wanted my help in buying it. He wanted me with him because he liked the watch I was wearing. On the way to the shop, we stopped for tea. He wanted to check how the watch would look on his hand and I put it on his hand. Suddenly he had a coughing fit, went out to spit and never came back.
No wonder that I am considered naive my many. It has not changed with age. More recently, I have been fascinated by this program of Arunachalam Murugananthamhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/true-life/the-man-who-wore-a-sanitary-napkin and wanted to initiate it in Guntur-Vijayawada area as a way of employment for some poor and better sanitary condition. Even after an year there is no progress even though a gentleman offered space in his work shop. Finally I wanted to approach Ramakrishna Mission rural development centre in Narendrapur which is doing wonderful work and wrote to a friendly monk. This is the reply " I had a bout of uncontrollable (but forcedly silent) laughter at your idea. this certianly will be HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE
for Narendrapur. Dont talk to monks (except heretics like yours truly) regarding such outlandish schemes.

The main reason is that they will all be totally unco-operative. Secondly they'll start looking at you as if you were some kind of a NUT
(perhaps not so far from the truth though). Finally, they will be reassured that the natural occupational hazards for mathematicians
involve eccentricity and therefore in future will probably humour mine."

tommydan channels on YouTube

Many cleaned old Hindi films and sons often with subtitles http://www.youtube.com/user/tommydan55?feature=watch http://www.youtube.com/user/tommydan333/ http://www.youtube.com/user/Tommydan22
Also the series containing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZ56NqxbBc&list=TLZO6zh3Zfb0KAQt55Hf_IZiY7B5wIXKpo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHL0Pll6w4
Check also http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeisatrain

Joshua Greene on common-sense morality

In an interview: "Consider the dilemma philosopher Peter Singer posed four decades ago. You see a child drowning. You could save that child's life but, if you do, you will ruin your fancy $1,000 suit. Singer asked if it was OK to let the child drown. Most people say, of course not, that would be monstrous...........
Psychology can help us answer that question. Jay Musen and I recently did a more controlled version of Singer’s experiment and got very similar results—distance made a difference. What does that mean? When you are thinking about whether you have an obligation to try to save people's lives, you don't usually think, well, how close by are they? Understanding what we are reacting to can change the way we think about the problem.....If, biologically, morality evolved to help us get along with individuals in our community, it makes sense that we have heartstrings that can be tugged—and that they are not going to be tugged very hard from far away. But does that make sense? From a more reflective moral perspective, that may just be a cognitive glitch."

A paper on local public goods

Browsed through Ryan Sheely's paper "Maintaining local public goods: Evidence from rural Kenya" recommended by Chris Blattman.
Abstract: "Political Scientists have produced a substantial body of theory and evidence that explains variation in the availability of local public goods in developing countries. Existing research cannot explain variation in how these goods are maintained over time. 
I develop a theory that explains how the interactions between government and community institutions shape public goods maintenance. I test the implications of this theory using a qualitative case study and a randomized field experiment that assigns communities participating in a waste management program in rural Kenya to three different institutional arrangements. I find that localities with no formal punishments for littering experienced sustained reductions in littering behavior and increases in the frequency of public clean-ups. In contrast, communities in which government administrators or traditional leaders could punish littering experienced short-term reductions in littering behavior that were not sustained over time."
   In the end, he says "I argue that the relative effectiveness of the Collective Action treatment is shaped by the legitimacy of public goods maintenance by civil society organizations in Laikipia, Kenya. As a result, it is incorrect to interpret these findings as stating that punishment of littering (and other actions that harm public goods) by governments or communities is always ineffective. In contexts in which punishment of littering by governments or traditional leaders is more closely matched with local norms and practices, we would expect to see much stronger performance of the Chief and Elders treatments."

Links

Blurring Mandela and Neoliberalism (via Naked Capitalism)
One percent holding the economy back
Dean Baker on inequality and unemployment
Illicit financial flows See also GFI site and Tax Justice Network
Disappearing spy  via Moon of Alabama
Peter Higgs :"After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough." via The Guardian
MindHacks on marketing a ADHD drug
Wired.com update on mirror neurons
Carl Zimmer in search of first animals

From Carl Sagan's last interview

Morehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jod7v-m573k  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDKSZO-aACk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxeN6Wf7mbU

Two on AAP

From Jacobin India's Post-Ideological Politician " AAP may find the going tough elsewhere But the Obama-Kejriwal analogy can only be taken so far. Unlike Obama, Kejriwal is coming from outside his country’s dominant two parties, and India’s parliamentary political system means that third parties can make a significant impact on both regional and national politics. The success of the AAP in the Delhi Assembly elections has threatened the political mainstream in a way that Obama’s victory hardly could. Congress party officials, sheepish, have admitted that they have much to learn from the AAP. And commentators have made much of the AAP’s penchant for upending conventional political wisdom by refusing to give handouts like cash and booze before elections, and by largely eschewing identity politics.

The party has tapped into an idealism and a genuine desire to build a better political system, and it has shown that these altruistic feelings can translate into strong election results. But this momentum will likely result in a rapid rightward drift if the party continues to cling to its “post-ideological” approach."

Moreover, the AAP may find the going tough in many other places. My own feel that circumstances in Delhi suited AAP at the moment and any political ambitions on a much bigger scale will only result in disappointment. May be they should first try to clean up Delhi as much as possible. That may provide inspiration for local groups elsewhere to do the hard yakka of working locally for better administration and justice and they may one day get lucky and do even better.

Forms to fill, choices to make

From Corey Robin reacting to Obamacare "More important than the politics, that byzantine complexity is a symptom of what the ordinary citizen has to confront when she tries to get health insurance for herself or her family. As anyone who has even good insurance knows, navigating that world of numbers and forms and phone calls can be a daunting proposition. It requires inordinate time, doggedness, savvy, intelligence, and manipulative charm (lest you find yourself on the wrong end of a disgruntled telephone operator). Obamacare fits right in with that world and multiplies it."
And then from an older post "There is a deeper, more substantive, case to be made for a left approach to the economy. In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once we are made more cognizant of our money, where it comes from and where it goes, neoliberals believe we’ll be more responsible in spending and investing it. Of course, rich people have accountants, lawyers, personal assistants, and others to do this for them, so the argument doesn’t apply to them, but that’s another story for another day.

The dream is that we’d all have our gazillion individual accounts—one for retirement, one for sickness, one for unemployment, one for the kids, and so on, each connected to our employment, so that we understand that everything good in life depends upon our boss (and not the government)—and every day we’d check in to see how they’re doing, what needs attending to, what can be better invested elsewhere. It’s as if, in the neoliberal dream, we’re all retirees in Boca, with nothing better to do than to check in with our broker, except of course that we’re not. Indeed, if Republicans (and some Democrats) had their way, we’d never retire at all.

In real (or at least our preferred) life, we do have other, better things to do. "

Some links

Carl Zimmer on vitamins
No, doctors did not "inject HIV into a dying girl" to treat her cancer
The science of hatred (via MindHacks)
An educational experiment
Biggest barrier to inequality "It's not just the wealthiest 1 percent. 
Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality. "
May be more ""But if you add up the income shares of the 50% of the population just below that rich 10% you find that in almost all countries, they receive about half the national income (see graph 2, below).....‘In Latin America the middle classes seek to defend their share of income with different forms of alliances with the élite (some more successfully than others). This is different to India, for example, where the administrative classes defend their position mostly via alliances with the poor (which gives them the political power to mediate in the different conflicts between the capitalist élite and the state)’. Vintage stuff."

Mandela was never a revolutionary, always a radical

Another ode to capitalism

Capitalism Redefined by Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker. There is no mention of Marx. "This twenty-first-century way to understand economics allows us to understand capitalism as an evolutionary problem-solving system." If " growth must be a measure of the rate at which new solutions to human problems become available" I am sure Marx will come in somewhere.

Another thesis on Kammas

by Dalel (Dalal) Benbabaali http://bdr.u-paris10.fr/theses/internet/2013PA100002.p (in French)
Conents (in English) http://www.academia.edu/2505857/Dominant_Caste_and_Territory_in_South_India_Migration_and_Upward_Social_Mobility_of_the_Kammas_from_Coastal_Andhra
On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/dalel.benbabaali
Princeton talk on her thesis

Transcript of the talk.
!988 work by Carl Upadhya The Farmer-Capitalists of Coastal Andhra Pradesh in two parts.
There is another by Y.Keiko in 2008 Politics and representation of caste identity in regional historiography: a case study of Kammas in Andhra which I have not seen.
See also Balagopal's articles at http://balagopal.org/ A couple of them The Man and the Times Beyond Media Images.

More than one percent

A recent press report via Richard Singer
"It's not just the wealthiest 1 percent. 

Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality. "

From an earlier report of Palma's work

 "But if you add up the income shares of the 50% of the population just below that 

rich 10% you find that in almost all countries, they receive about half the national 

income (see graph 2, below).....‘In Latin America the middle classes seek to defend 

their share of income with different forms of alliances with the élite (some more 

successfully than others). This is different to India, for example, where the 

administrative classes defend their position mostly via alliances with the poor (which

 gives them the political power to mediate in the different conflicts between the 

capitalist élite and the state)’. Vintage stuff." 

Nelson Mandela RIP

There have been a variety of comments from right to left in the comments sections of various posts and also from leftist sites. I do not think he was prefect. My feel is more in line with this short article by J.M.Coetzee:
"With F.W. de Klerk, a man of much smaller moral stature, yet also, in his way, a contributor to the liberation of South Africa, Mandela held a turbulent country together during the dangerous years 1990-94, exercising his great personal charm to persuade whites that they had a place in the new democratic republic while step by step emasculating the separatist white right wing.
By the time he became president in his own right, he was already an old man. His failure to throw himself more energetically into the urgent business of the day – the creation of a just economic order – was understandable if unfortunate. Like the rest of the leadership of the ANC, he was blindsided by the collapse of socialism world-wide; the party had no philosophical resistance to put up against a new, predatory economic rationalism."

Kathak dancer Monisa Nayak

Interview describing her career and explaining the connections with music, difference between different gharanas.

Interesting paper on self-decption

The Evolution and psychology of self deception by William von Hippel and Robert Trivers. The paper is about fifteen pages long and after that pen peer commentaries and response by authors. From the abstract: "In this article we argue that self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent. Self-deception has two additional advantages: It eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving, and it can minimize retribution if the deception is discovered. Beyond its role in specific acts of deception, self-deceptive self-enhancement also allows people to display more confidence than is warranted,which has a host of social advantages."