Relevant Academicians needed

Nicholas Kristoff Professors, we Need You "SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates." via Ramarao Kanneanti timeline. Ramarao remarks " But, we can surely simplify enough to explain to educated outsiders. By relating to the models that they are familiar with, we can even make it relevant." My response "What you said is possible in the usual sciences and there have been some excellent writers even at the blog level from Sean Caroll to Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong. Possibly people tend to emphasize their own areas and at the very small level our intutive concepts do not seem to work. Also there is the problem of university publicity machines pushing their own 'breakthroughs'. I have more problem with social sciences including economics. People like Mankiw and Krugman seem to start from the same basics, write clearly and say different things. It is not clear to me how sound the foundations are. Their conclusions probably come from their political biases. Dissenting views are ignored or suppressed. For example the empirical work of David Card or those of Marxist writers like Paul Mattick who long ago disagreed with Keynes. Now many seem to agree with some of his analysis and it is becoming clearer with the work of Thomas Piketty. Card explained his problems "I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole." So politics seems to play a role in social science literature and makes it difficult for us to trust the experts even when they write clearly."

Some ancient wisdom about producing public intellectuals "VI-iv-18: He who wishes that a son should be born to him who would be a reputed scholar, frequenting the assemblies and speaking delightful words, would study all the Vedas and attain a full term of life, should have rice cooked with the meat of a vigorous bull or one more advanced in years, and he and his wife should eat it with clarified butter. Then they would be able to produce such a son."  from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad via http://therationalfool.blogspot.com.au/2006/12/bulls-biltong.html   
An earlier article in Foreign Policy discusses "Why  does so much of the academic writing on international affairs seem to be of little practical value, mired in a "cult of irrelevance"? "
See also Atul Gawande article Cowboys and pit crews : " the reality that medicine’s complexity has exceeded our individual capabilities as doctors."

Rahul Banerjee on grassroots vs electoral politics

in his blog Anarkali. More discussion on his timeline. Excerpt:
"That is why there has been a veritable flood of people from the grassroots movements joining AAP. However, these people have not really analysed the winning methodology of AAP which involves sticking to anti-corruption and populist promises and then spending fairly large amounts of money to get the message across. After all even if you have a large number of volunteers working free you have to spend a lot of money to feed and house them and provide them with mobility and telecom connectivity apart from spending on publicity materials. The AAP was able to mobilise funds and voluntary support through an innovative campaign on the internet. It mustered Rs 20 crores which is a huge amount. However, currently the fund mobilisation is much less and stands about Rs 8 odd crores with the daily contributions having trickled down. To fight the Lok Sabha elections will require Rs 2 crores per seat if they are to be fought in the same way as the Delhi elections were fought by the AAP and therefore to fight even the announced 100 seats which have corrupt representatives the AAP will require 200 crores for a winning effort. This is something that the grassroots movement people who are migrating to AAP will have to come to terms with because the AAP does not have this kind of funds with it and so individual candidates will have to fend for themselves!!! In KMCS we discussed this thread bare and eventually came to the same conclusion as before that those who wanted to contest elections whether of Panchayats, assemblies or parliament were free to do so but would have to mobilise resources on their own and if needed they could join political parties. Many members of the KMCS are simultaneously members of the Congress, BJP or BSP. Now some like Shankar have become members of the AAP. 
So there is no confusion as there are many in the KMCS who are still not affiliated to any party and are committed to go on fighting at the grassroots for a decentralised social system which is just in all respects including the most important matter of gender equity. There will always be enough scope for such mobilisation within a liberal democratic system.
The AAP itself is going to face many hurdles to remain true to its ideals. The Socialists and Communists or say even the Hinduvadis of the RSS were very committed and upright in the beginning but the exigencies of acquiring and retaining power through elections have corrupted them. Kejriwal and a few at the top of AAP can remain true to their ideals but it will be difficult for them to keep their whole flock on the straight and narrow path of incorruptibility. Nevertheless at the moment the AAP is a progressive party within the liberal democratic set up and so it should be supported in every way to provide a better alternative than the Congress and the BJP which are both stooges of global capital."

Looking for bottle gourds

How to make economics a realist and relevant science

by Lars P.Syll here

The Demographic Cliff

Harry Dent on a promotion tour of his book The Demographic Cliff: "He discovered that he could predict what he calls the “spending wave” according to people’s age. At that time the postwar baby boom generation were having children and reaching the peak of their lifetime spending – not just on mortgages, but nappies, food, school fees and all the other extras that come with raising children.

The problem comes as that large generation passes its spending peak – at 46 in the US and about 47 in Australia, the UK and other western countries – and starts planning for retirement. This is the crux of his pessimistic world view.

“For the first time in history, the generation following is smaller. I spotted this first with Japan in 1988-89 where their demographics were turning. Everyone thought the 90s would see Japan pass the US and become the biggest economy in the world, but it collapsed and has been in deflation ever since,” he explains.

“The same thing is now happening in the US and Europe, especially southern Europe. Everyone thinks that in the current crisis we are fighting a debt bubble but it’s not a temporary financial crisis, it’s a demographic crisis.""

" Dent says he will apologise if he’s proved wrong, which he acknowledges could happen if central banks revert to their printing presses rather than slowing monetary stimulus as many are now doing.

“If we don’t see something starting to crack soon, a 20-30% fall in the stock market, for example, I’ll apologise. Governments will have pulled it off again and kicked the can down the road."
P.S. He has some advice here, mainly for Americans. His track record Concept better than reality
P.P.S. According to Wikipedia "The basis of Dent's research is the highly predictable nature of consumer spending based on a family's formation pattern: minimal spending as young adults, increased spending while rearing children, peaking their spending as their children leave home, and then slowing spending during the last 15 years of working life (48-63) while saving more and preparing for retirement." and after that many of his predictions have been off.

More about books

I read books off and on and more articles these days. I am not sure about the value of reading books and recommending them to others. But I suppose that we have to use accumulated knowledge and reading provides a part of it. Many in earlier times before internet were written by winners and their cohorts and it is not clear which books one recommends to others, particularly one's own grown up children. I guess the important idea come through anyway through articles and it is not really necessary read books apart from some poetry. Following a discussion elsewhere, I have come up with two books , one not published yet in English. In the kind of social, economic and political areas I am interested in and have very little expertise, I think that these two help us to think for ourselves emphasizing on the data over long periods to gather, seeing the components, and analysing. The first is volume one "The sources of Social Power" by Michael Mann and the second "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty.

Democracy in India in the old days

Arvind Kejriwal's vision Arvind Chitra Katha by Shekhar Gupta (via Rahul Siddharthan's timeline)
Democracy of a high standard-ancient example by Dr. R.Nagaswamy
A recent example: The Making of Authority: Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi

Neecha Nagar 1946

reviewed by Dustedoff. One of the comments "After watching this film a boy from kolkatta wrote a letter to chetan anand, appreciating the film and expressed his desire to become his assistant director…………… chetan anand never replied to that letter and years latter this boy from kolkatta became a very big director and when he went to the pune film institute he met chetan anand and revealed this fact to him ……………. the boys name was ”Satyajit ray”."
Recently, Minai discussed the film and Uday Shankar in 

Zohra Segal's Shankar-Style Choreography in Neecha Nagar (Hindi, 1946)

See also Kamini Kaushal in the second dance 

Quote

"Capitalism survives by the vaccine of revolution." from Beware of geeks bearing revolution

News factories

"In the previous eight months, Packer's TV network had become a kind of Corby innocence factory, taking the unlikely material of a part-time beauty student accused of drug smuggling, and forging from her a martyr. The story, which Nine sewed up early with exclusive access agreements, made the network millions, and ultimately ensured Schapelle Corby became a household name, and a part of the zeitgeist.

"I said to Kerry, 'What do you think? Is she guilty'?", Costello recalls asking. "And Kerry said, 'Yes, I think she is.' I remember saying, 'But Nine is the cheerleader for her innocence.' And Kerry told me that this was how current affairs TV works - the audience was totally convinced of her innocence and so the network goes with what the public feels passionate about." from The Age. There is also more about how some are still making money out of the affair. 

Piketty type arguments

and his data are being used even before his book is out in English. From  Karl Smith in FTAlphaville:
"As the quantity of capital increases, the return to capital is driven down. Eventually, the return to capital falls below the growth rate of the economy, and the value of the capital stock starts to shrink. This shrinking arises from the same dynamics that Piketty evokes to explain the growth in capital values over time. It is all about the return on capital vs. the growth rate of the economy...................

I am a fan of Piketty’s brute mechanistic approach. It is one that I have employed myself and on much the same question. It is one that led me to conjecture, and still suspect, that landlords are the once and future global plutocracy. And this happens precisely because all wealth is not created equal and some forms are more persistent and pernicious than others.

In the wake of the subprime crisis, I understand the temptation to rally against big banks and global finance. However, Lehman Brothers is dead. Sam Zell, founder and CEO of Equity Residential, is still alive. This is not an accident. The future does not belong to high flying titans. It belongs to dogged men and women who squirrel away rent checks when times are good, and buy your home when times are tight. This is the tyranny of land. Ignore it at your peril."

From an earlier post of Karl Smith Piketty and the case for land capital "...I think I’ve seen enough to identify a point of confusion that has led both defenders and critics of the book astray. Piketty uses the term capital to refer both to capital as classical economists understand it, and land. Now, neoclassical equations of the type Piketty employs rarely give reference to land, focusing solely on capital and labor. "
I guess the point is that lot of the return on this part of the capital is probably going to classes other than the those in the top and may not be contributing that much to the inequality. Moreover this part is not carefully studied and the land taxes vary from place to place. May be this is why Karl Smith's reading of inequality (comparison of r,g)  is different from Piketty's. I do not know. But with this kind of economic thinking with more refined data may be accessible to the general public.

The tyranny of minority of one in Victorian parliament

"The balance-of-power MP had wanted Speaker Ken Smith's scalp, and by 2.10pm on Tuesday, Smith was gone. He wanted his friend Christine Fyffe promoted instead, and by 3.15pm that day, she was.
And yet within hours, Shaw was at it again, siding with Labor to sink the government's business program, complaining that no one briefed him on it. Later, when Attorney-General Robert Clark briefed him on a bill for a new parliamentary budget office, he voted against it anyway. As one senior Liberal told The Sunday Age: ''We are sick to death of this.''
That's the thing about Shaw. He's unpredictable, erratic, hard to read. He says he despises Labor, yet will happily collude with them to flex his political muscle. He claims to hate the ''vulture'' media yet clearly thrives in the limelight, even telling colleagues last week that he hoped his new beard would guarantee front page coverage. And he makes bold demands - a chauffer-driven car to guarantee safe passage to work was the latest example - but doesn't like it when his needs aren't met. Just ask Ken Smith." from Geoff Shaw makes his mark in Victorian politics

Three articles by K.Balagopal on C.B. Naidu

Apparently Chandra Babu Naidu is a standby PM candidate for some coalition. Here are some articles about him. There may be many more and some better ones. But these give some idea of CBN.

Politics as property October 1995: "Like any man who was born in a four-acres-of-dry-land peasant family from backward Rayalaseema and has made for himself umpteen crores by the time he is 40. he is abundantly endowed with what capitalism calls enterprise. But going beyond making money for himself and his cronies, he claims the vision necessary to structure a modern capitalist society endowed with the characteristics
required to reproduce itself as a matter of course. This, as we have said, is one vision that underlay the rise of the Telugu Desam Party."

A long reflective article during the middle of Naidu reign June 1999 The Man and the Times (It is for me more difficult to copy and paste from here. But this seems to be a very crucial article)

After his defeat Beyond Media Images June 2004, "Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, the new chief minister has given the impression of being a man who cares for the classes neglected by Chandrababu Naidu’s model of development. Whether that is really so, is extremely doubtful. That those classes have reposed trust in the Congress Party under his leadership is clear: the issues of irrigation and employment appear to have contributed to the defeat of the Telugu Desam Party, augmented by the desire for a separate state in the Telangana region."

On the rise of robots

Martin Wolf reviewing the "The Second Machine Age" by Erk Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee says (google the title if the link does not work, See also Yves Smith (Susan Webber) commentary http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/martin-wolf-sounds-cautionary-note-rise-robots.html) in If robots divide us, they will conquer:

"There are good reasons why people should be disturbed by this. First, the lives of those at the bottom might get worse: the authors note that the life expectancy of an American white woman without a high school diploma fell five years between 1990 and 2008. Second, if income becomes too unequal, opportunities for young people dwindle. Third, the wealthy become indifferent to the fate of the rest. Finally, a vast inequality of power emerges, making a mockery of the ideal of democratic citizenship."

About Satya Nadella

Dalel Benababaali has several posts where many have been wondering about his caste status and feeling proud that he is from their caste. It seems that his father was not keen about such things and very few knew about his caste identity "Satya Nadella's father Yugandhar is known as a very committed, straight-forward civil servant, and nobody knew his caste during his tenure because he didn't wear any surname suggesting it. He apparently says publicly that he hates Eenadu publication [which deliberately puts his caste title]. Satya's father in law K.R.Venugopal too is a class apart among civil servants, and respected among progressive and dalit intellectual circles. Now, some stupid paper writes his name as Yugandhar 'Naidu', while some other casteist papers identify his son as Satyanarayana 'Chowdary'. Nobody has felt any shame in the fact that Mr.Yugandhar shut his door to media, and switched off his mobile and disconnected his landline. And now these two icons of old world being dragged into the shit they abhorred and shunned for life! Such utterly shameless people!!" Moreover the discussions really were not about what this success in corporate life means to eneral wefare or people in India. Finally, it took The Guardian to articulate these doubts Actually, Satya Nadella's selection as Microsoft CEO isn't great for Indians. But who knows? His father and father in law ( both IAS, friends and from different castes) seem exemplary. May be some thing good will come out of it.
P.S. More tidbits (via Rahul Siddhathan) http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2014/02/gates-spends-entire-first-day-back-in-office-trying-to-install-windows-81.html
(via Akshay Regulagedda) http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-05/why-microsoft-and-everyone-else-loves-indian-ceos.html , interesting comments too

On the direction of evolution

Evolution, You're Drunk by Amy Maxmen (via Ed Yong) "With comb jellies at the base of the tree, evolution suddenly seems less like a march towards complexity and more like a meandering stroll. This isn’t a new idea. Back in 1996, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould posited that evolution progresses like a drunkard’s walk. "

What happened to Damascus steel

"Thus, by blending the unique characteristics of Wootz steel with a forging process that included tiny amounts of specialized materials, the blacksmiths of the Islamic Civilization were able to create the Damascan steel. What happened in the mid-18th century was that the chemical makeup of the raw material altered--the minute quantities of one or more of the minerals disappeared, perhaps because the particular lode was exhausted. Such a difference would not have been apparent to the blacksmith visually; but, interestingly, the blacksmiths may have extended the life of the process by including small pieces of the previous batch in each new batch." From http://archaeology.about.com/od/ancientweapons/a/damascus_steel_2.htm
Which also links to a website on Damascuss steel. The raw maretial called 'wootz steel' was from Deccan, I think http://archaeology.about.com/od/wterms/g/wootz.htm More information in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

Meaningless jobs and no jobs

I believe that lot of our jobs are meaningless and have been trying this quote on friends and family since 2006 "all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." I have not been able to convince anybody, but there was an addition from Jhansi: 'many women too'. Today Dalel Benbabaali mentioned this article on bull-shit jobs. Enjoy. 
Mishra says towards the end of this article (behind a firewall)in NewYork Review of Books "It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about "The Overcoat," called "flaws in the texture of life itself.""
This may very well be true, but Gaeber's point in the above, blaming many meaningless jobs on capitalism, seems to me to have some validity. Apart from this, as foreseen in the 1994 book 'A Jobless Future'  "Accordingly, if unwork is fated to be no longer the exception to the rule of nearly full employment, we need an entirely new approach to the social wage and, more generally, "welfare" policy. If there is work to be done, everyone should do some of it; additional remuneration would depend on the kind of work an individual performs." Some have been suggesting universal basic income: 
"We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff." Another related solution, out of temperament or necessity, is to  form small communities relatively independent of the state, described here, here and other places.

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.