Decentralised Energy Solutions for Underserved Households and Institutions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUy0-QUwtiY&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3mpdkOi2lo
Their website
From The Guardian:"ONergy’s business model focuses on three core areas: technology, energy infrastructure and financing. In the technology sector, the company manufactures and distributes a proprietary line of solar-powered products including irrigation pumps and micro cold storage for agriculture, AC and DC micro grids to support livelihoods, TV and computers for digital access and learning. The RECs provide a complete energy infrastructure able to deliver custom-driven solutions to ONergy’s clients. Finally, to make solutions affordable, ONergy facilitates financing by partnering with both banks and micro finance institutions. In addition, with the support of international organisations, ONergy has set up a revolving energy corpus to facilitate low cost credit to monetary financial institutes (MFIs) and rural entrepreneurs.
Founded in 2009, ONergy’s three-pronged business model has already had a positive impact on 250,000 people in the regions where it currently operates. Its solar lighting, home electrification and cooking solutions alone are being used by more than 200,000 people. Solutions for agriculture are helping more than 4,000 farmers. Computers, water heating systems and other products are being used by more than 15,000 people and micro grids are helping another 8,000. The company has trained more than 600 rural entrepreneurs for its Renewable Resource Centres and its products have saved approximately 13,000 tons of CO2 emissions. "

Bandhan, the microfinance institution (MFI) that has become a full-fledged bank

To bond with the poor "In a recent interview to a television channel, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, the founder of Bandhan, the microfinance institution (MFI) that has become a full-fledged bank, said that the day he quit his low-paying job in a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to start it, his wife cried all night. With an aging mother-in-law and a two-year-old child to care for, Ghosh’s wife could not really be blamed for her apprehension. The next morning his brother-in-law called to dissuade him from his “insane” plan. But Ghosh was not to be dissuaded. Fourteen years later, on August 23, Bandhan Bank, the newest bank in the country and the first to be inaugurated in eastern India in 72 years, commenced operations with 501 branches, 2,022 service centres, 50 automated teller machines (ATMs) and 19,500 permanent employees spread across 24 States. It has 1.43 crore accounts and a loan book of around Rs.10,500 crore. The last bank to start operations in eastern India was UCO Bank, which was established in 1943."
Interview with the CEO Chandra Sekhar Ghosh

P.S. I had a bit of exposure to this sort of thing. I tried to do it from Australia through a friend in India who could only work part ime. It worked well in the beginning on a scale simiar to that in the beginning for Shri Ghosh, and is still limping along. It seems that hard work and full time committment are needed.

More from India

Indian tribal communities spin their way out of poverty in one area of Madhya Pradesh
FAO interventions help raise women's status and up poultry rearing in India (via Rahul Banerjee)
(In Telugu from two years ago) భారత దేశంలో మహిళల వస్త్రధారణపై విమర్శలు by Rama Sundari

Are there measurable effects of religion?

There seem to be some in India. I think most are converts from Hinduism and there may be othervfactors like the nature of groups or people that converted, the reasons for conversion. But it is good to see that in one measurable factor, all are improving.
What the cenus tells about having faith in our daughters

Variations

The politics of China's anti-corruption campaign by William H. Overholt
Mostly about USA, a review of three books by Josepf Stiglitz Why the rich are so much richer by James Surowiecki
About India Lock up the doors, time for them to depart by Markandey Katju

India relared stories and news

23 lakh aspirants for 368 posts in UP secretariat:Phd, post graduates apply (via Madhukar Shukla)
'When Chowkidar is paid more than a lecturer in Kashmir'
India's chaotic lesson in letting go by Eric Weiner (via Madhukar Shukla): "It’s been said that an indication of mental health is whether you can simultaneously retain two contradictory ideas without your head exploding. By that measure, India is the most mentally healthy place in the world."
Similar thoughts in Is there an Indian way of thinking? An informal essay by A.K. Ramanujan. Talking of his father "When I asked him what the discovery of Pluto and Neptune did to his archaic nine-planet astrology, he said, 'You make the necessary corrections, that's all'. Or, in answer to how he could read the Gita religiously, having bathed and painted on his forehead the red and white feet of Vishnu, and later talk appreciatively about Bertrand Russell and even Ingersoll, he said, 'The Gita is part of one's hygiene. Besides, don't you know, the brain has two lobes?'"
We are IT Labor Contractors not IT Superpower says India's Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar
The most powerful Indian technolgists in Silicon Valley from The Guardian
Digital Indians: Five pioneers of technological innovation from BBC
There is a distinct caste-elitism in Carnatic sabha culture in Chennai, says musician T.M. Krishna

About theories of everything

There is no theory of everything by Simon Critchley. A very interesting portrait of one of his terachers Frank Cioffi (1928-2012): "His quest was to try and clarify the occasions when a scientific explanation was appropriate and when it was not, and we need instead a humanistic remark. His conviction was that our confusions about science and the humanities had wide-ranging and malign societal consequences.......Frank’s point, which is still hugely important, is that there is no theory of everything, nor should there be. There is a gap between nature and society. The mistake, for which scientism is the name, is the belief that this gap can or should be filled.......What is needed is a clearer overview of the occasions when a scientific remark is appropriate and when we need something else, the kind of elucidation we find in stories, poetry or indeed when we watch a movie or good TV (Frank watched a lot of TV).....We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew.."

Bad Loans

Raghuram Rajan last year: 'Rajan slams banks for 'hiding' NPAs'(Non-Performing Assets) ""In India, too many large borrowers insist on their divine right to stay in control despite their unwillingness to put in new money. The firm and its many workers, as well as past bank loans, are the hostages in this game of chicken — the promoter threatens to run the enterprise into the ground unless the government, banks, and regulators make the concessions that are necessary to keep it alive," he said. The governor was delivering the Dr Verghese Kurien Memorial Lecture at IRMA, Anand on Tuesday.

The governor lashed out at banks for joining hands with borrowers in seeking relaxation in classifying some projects as "non-performing assets". "This is short-sighted, especially on the part of the banks. Today, the market does not distinguish much between non-performing loans and restructured loans, preferring to call them both stressed loans and discounting bank value accordingly," Rajan said."

Some names from 3 years ago Dead beat corporate borrowers? Not in India Reuters, June 20, 2012:

"Officially, 3 percent of loans in India are bad. Including restructured or "impaired" loans, for which banks don't have to set aside heavy provisions in case of default, the figure is about 7 percent, according to analysts.

The reality is worse, say some bankers and industry experts, who say many loans are restructured outside official channels, with some banks and borrowers taking advantage of harder-to-track "evergreening" of loans to avoid declaring default. Under evergreening, banks provide additional loans to stressed borrowers, often indirectly, to enable them to repay existing loans. That can keep a loan from going sour, but it ratchets up a bank's exposure to a troubled credit.

It's estimated that at least a tenth of loans to the real estate sector - where restructuring rules are stringent - are stressed, as against the 3-4 percent cited by banks, said Amit Goenka, head of capital markets at UK-based Knight Frank....................

In the best-known recent example of a restructured loan turning sour, liquor baron Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher Airlines(KING.NS) defaulted to most banks on a $1.4 billion loan."

Possible political links from First Post June 15 2015 by Adil Rustomji:

"Basically, over half of the country’s infrastructure is built by firms from Andhra. Close to a third of the country’s power projects and half of its road construction projects are built by Andhra Infra. The leading lights among them are GMR, GVK, Lanco, IVRCL and KSK Energy. This is besides the whole host of smaller companies, including Gayatri, Madhucon, Navayuga, and Ramky.......

First, the involvement and how it came to be. Ever since the Nagarjuna dam was built in the sixties, the predilection of Andhra businessmen for infrastructure was apparent. Aggressive risk taking and the ability to get things done also went with the ability to “manage the environment”. This is a wonderful euphemism for dealing with the hera pheri and “compromises” essential in any interaction with the bureaucracy and the government; and anything to do with infrastructure requires extensive interface of that sort.......

How they got here is an interesting question. Sure, bad decisions were made and there was bad luck involved. But the eagerness of the public sector banking system to lend to them has yet to be explained. One answer may lie in the political economy of rent-seeking. In its second term, the Congress-led UPA was basically in an oxygen tent without the political numbers for survival. Yet the biggest constituent of the UPA came from Andhra Pradesh."

A recent article by Mahesh Nayak Money from Junk June 15 describes some of the recent efforts through ARCs (Asset Reconstruction Companies):

"Several factors are driving this flourishing trade in bad assets. But the biggest trigger came in November 2013 when Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan, in a strongly worded exhortation, asked the banking system to clean up its act. "You can put lipstick on a pig but it doesn't become a princess. So dressing up a loan and showing it as restructured and not provisioning for it when it stops paying, is an issue," he had said. Until then, scared to bell the cat, banks had been ever-greening their bad loans - and slipping deeper into the abyss. ....Under Rajan's stewardship, the RBI has announced a host of measures that have fuelled distressed asset sale business. Early last year, the central bank allowed th"e banks to sell even the loans where the principal or interest was overdue by 60 days rather than 90 days, earlier. In essence, it allowed banks to start selling assets early if they felt the loan was non-redeemable. Other factors are also responsible. ARCs are betting heavily on the proposed new bankruptcy law which will give them a greater leeway (including sale of whole or part of the company and change of management or promoter) to revive the distressed assets.

Links July 12, 2015

Paul Krugman carefully explains whywe never had to worry about the second great depression by Dean Baker
Won's somebody please think of the tax havens? by Izabella Kaminska
Australia's crawling internet speed signifies widespread fiscal failure by William Mitchell (via Lambert Strether): "There is solid evidence that real GDP growth, in the Internet age, and connectivity speed are positively related."
War in the womb by Suzanne Sadedin and more recent developments

A Rafi-Khursheed duet from 1947

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oR8bXWbs-8&feature=youtu.be
More about Khursheed here.

Robert Fisk on the refugee crisis

Refugee crisis- Thank God for Germany taking resposibility, the rest of Europe appears to have forgotten the age-old lessons of history (via The Automatic Earth) A moving tribute to Angela Merkel with hints of possible problems. I hope that Angela Merkel stays the course. Excerpt:

"And if the rags of our integrity as human beings have been salvaged these past few weeks, this is due to the dour, rather sour Protestant ethics of an east German hausfrau who history may (or may not, for let us remember her people’s grandfathers for whom my Dad was supposed to shoot his own refugees) say has saved our soul."
P.S. Related:
The big myth about refugees:
"But refugees aren't always an economic benefit to countries. The way that refugees affect their host economy depends a lot on how a country deals with them.

It might seem counterintuitive, but the countries that take the longest to process refugees and have the tightest restrictions on them end up paying the most per refugee, says Erik Jones, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who has researched migrants."

The refugee crisis could actually be a boon for Germany:

" Trade and service companies — from caterers to plumbing firms — are struggling to find new workers, with more than 37,000 trainee positions unfilled, according to the Federal Employment Agency.

Couple that with that fact that many of the asylum seekers — especially Syrians — are highly educated or skilled workers and include doctors, engineers and architects. And suddenly, for Germany, some say, what initially seems like a crisis becomes something else."
Another

Saudis offer to build mosques for Syrians in Germany

Saudi Arabia offers to build 200 mosques for Syrians in Germany:
"It would be unfair to suggest that the Gulf Arab states have done nothing to help the estimated four million Syrians who have fled their country since the start of the conflict in 2011.

Just this week, the al Hayat newspaper reported that 500,000 Syrians had found homes in Saudi Arabia since the civil war began – as workers, not refugees.

There have also been significant contributions from rich individuals towards the upkeep of refugee camps round the Syrian border, estimated by the BBC to total around $900 million (£600 million)."

About Ancient North Indian (ANI)

From the group that coined the term:
"In our data, the hypothesis of mixture emerges naturally from 

PCA (Figure 3), which shows that nearly all the Indo-European and Dravidian speaking groups spread out on a one dimensional gradient in a plot of the first versus the second PC.

Modeling the history of many Indian groups as a mixture of two ancestral populations is an oversimplification. In reality, even if ancient mixture did occur, it is likely to have been between substructured populations instead of homogeneous populations, and it is likely to have occurred at multiple times and at multiple geographic locations. However, approximating the history of many Indian groups as a simple mixture of two homogeneous ancestral populations provides a good fit to the summary statistics of allele frequency differentiation, and we believe that in this sense it is a useful starting point for future analyses that can detect more subtle events."

This is in Note S2 of the supplementary material.

Razib Khan quotes (the main paper is behind a paywall):

"We warn that ‘models’ in population genetics should be treated with caution. Although they provide an important framework for testing historical hypotheses, they are oversimplifications. For example, the true ancestral populations of India were probably not homogeneous as we assume in our model, but instead were probably formed by clusters of related groups that mixed at different times. However, modelling them as homogeneous fits the data and seems to capture meaningful features of history."

Apparently a link from Gobekli Tepe to Vedic priests

From http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/gobekli-tepe-and-nevali-cori-astronomy.html
There is also video of the lecture by B.G. Sidharth  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I8xRnU0Y8U

A discussion between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault in 1971

Human Nature: Justice Versus Power
It seems fairly contemporary. Along the way, Chomsky expressd his world view:
"ELDERS:

   Well, yes, perhaps. Mr. Chomsky, we are all very interested to know your political objectives, especially in relation to your well-known anarcho-syndicalism or, as you formulated it, libertarian socialism. What are the most important goals of your libertarian socialism?
   

CHOMSKY:
   I'll overcome the urge to answer the earlier very interesting question that you asked me and turn to this one.
   Let me begin by referring to something that we have already discussed, that is, if it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effect of coercive institutions, then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realised. That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society, ours for example, as a historical residue.
   Now any form of coercion or repression, any form of autocratic control of some domain of existence, let's say, private ownership of capital or state control of some aspects of human life, any such autocratic restriction on some area of human endeavour, can be justified, if at all, only in terms of the need for subsistence, or the need for survival, or the need for defence against some horrible fate or something of that sort. It cannot be justified intrinsically. Rather it must be overcome and eliminated.
   And I think that, at least in the technologically advanced societies of the West we are now certainly in a position where meaningless drudgery can very largely be eliminated, and to the marginal extent that it's necessary, can be shared among the population; where centralised autocratic control of, in the first place, economic institutions, by which I mean either private capitalism or state totalitarianism or the various mixed forms of state capitalism that exist here and there, has become a destructive vestige of history.
   They are all vestiges that have to be overthrown, eliminated in favour of direct participation in the form of workers' councils or other free associations that individuals will constitute themselves for the purpose of their social existence and their productive labour.
    Now a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will.
   And again, like Mr. Foucault, I don't see how any human being can fail to be interested in this question. [Foucault laughs.]"

Foucalt was skeptical. As far as I can see he seemed skectical of abstract thinking to explain the countours of historical chages. Earlier he said:

"Let me take a very simple example, which I will not analyse, but which is this: How was it possible that men began, at the end of the eighteenth century, for the first time in the history of Western thought and of Western knowledge, to open up the corpses of people in order to know what was the source, the origin, the anatomical needle, of the particular malady which was responsible for their deaths?

   The idea seems simple enough. Well, four or five thousand years of medicine in the West were needed before we had the idea of looking for the cause of the malady in the lesion of a corpse.
   If you tried to explain this by the personality of Bichat, I believe that would be without interest. If, on the contrary, you tried to establish the place of disease and of death in society at the end of the eighteenth century, and what interest industrial society effectively had in quadrupling the entire population in order to expand and develop itself, as a result of which medical surveys of society were made, big hospitals were opened, etc.; if you tried to find out how medical knowledge became institutionalised in that period, how its relations with other kinds of knowledge were ordered, well, then you could see how the relationship between disease, the hospitalised, ill person, the corpse, and pathological anatomy were made possible."

The discussion, though interesting, is too abstract for me. no where in the discussion of problems with centralization was mentioned the principle of subsidiarity. And evolution does not get much mention. And as far as I can see many big changes seem to come unforseen. But the discussion seems worth a look.

There are videos of the discussion and some comments in http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/noam_chomsky_michel_foucault_debate_human_nature_power_in_1971.html (via Lambert Strether)

A comment in Michael Pettis blog

I have been reading economics posts with a very partial understanding for the last few years. Once in a while some posts like this seem to make sense. Then I found that I did not understand much of his recent post  "If we don't understand both sides of China's balance sheet, we understand neither". Responding to the frustrations of another commenter, one Deek writes
"I think there are a number of readers/lurkers in your boat (that is, not having a finance/econ background). I count myself in this group. I started reading this site in 2013/2014 – the first thing that I found helpful was reading through the year or two of essays that preceded the first one I read. I’ve read every post since then and the professor’s books in reverse order (finishing Volatility Machine now). The material above seems to dovetail more closely with the Volatility Machine, as compared to the other books. I find it more challenging as well. In any event, if you are really interested in all of this, it would probably do you well to read the Volatility Machine."
I seem to be in a similar situation; still a few more years to go.

I have come to this stage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ6-7TrmKxU

James Simons interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siGBO4Nqqws

About families on two dollars a day in USA

Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American familes live on $2 per a day and it is difficult to sell plasma in Mississipi

A Mahe Jabeen poem in Telugu and translation

here 

ఆకురాలు కాలం

అతనెప్పుడూ అంతే

ఒంటరిగా రమ్మంటే వసంతాన్ని వెంట తెస్తాడు

Burying religion?

"Remains of buried temple may mark point of religious transformation when prehistoric society shifted from worshipping landscape to the Sun."That ia about new discoveries near Stonehenge.
Another instance of burial of a site for unknown reasons is Göbekli Tepe:
"Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE Göbekli Tepe ("Potbelly Hill") lost its importance. The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new realities to human life in the area, and the "Stone-age zoo" (Schmidt's phrase applied particularly to Layer III, Enclosure D) apparently lost whatever significance it had had for the region's older, foraging communities. But the complex was not simply abandoned and forgotten to be gradually destroyed by the elements. Instead, each enclosure was deliberately buried under as much as 300 to 500 cubic meters (390 to 650 cu yd) of refuse consisting mainly of small limestone fragments, stone vessels, and stone tools. Many animal, even human, bones have also been identified in the fill.^[32] Why the enclosures were buried is unknown, but it preserved them for posterity."

Gandhi's racism

I am an admirer of Gandhi. Gandhi kept changing his view on many topics. perhaps, one has to look at his last comments on any issue to see the transformation. Gandhi did express racist views in his younger days. I do not know his last views on the topic. Here are some links to his early views:
A discussion Was Gandhi a racist?
Gandhi was a racist from Sulekha 8 years ago.
What did Mahatma andhi think of black people? Rama Kalshmi on September 3, 2015 writing about a new book on Gandhi.

Refugees for Charter cities

Paul Romer has been advocating charter cities for a while. Here is a possiblity:
One billionaire's dream to build a refugee utopia

Narayan Swamy on Facebook

Narayana Swamy:"ఏ తెలుగోడి గోడ చూసినా ఏమున్నది గర్వకారణం
ఫార్వాడిన ఫోటోల్ విడియోల్, తను పాటించని నీతుల బోధల్!"

meaning "Nothing much to be proud of on the Faceook wall of many Telugu.It is all forwarded photos, videos and sermons which they do not follow" apparently based on his newsfeed. that may represent the class to which he belogs to.
P.S.Facebook storytellers of India

Marappa searching for his sister Laxmi

Trailer and videos in five parts by Gautam Singh about five minutes each starting with this. The rest here and here.

Gulf countries and refugee crisis

Ajzal Ashraf asks Refugee crisis: Where are the Gulf countries?:
"The Syrian conflict has created over four million refugees. Add to that nearly two million more fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and this becomes a crisis that no amount of European generosity can address.
The problem is likely to get worse. The war in Yemen, which resulted in an almost 80 percent of the population needing humanitarian assistance, and the long-running Libyan conflict have yet to release their burden of displaced and desperate people. When they do, it could add millions more to the region's refugee exodus.
...........................

Why are some Muslim governments seemingly indifferent to this plight, and why are people from the region fleeing to Europe for safety and prosperity?

It is not because regional countries lack the capacity to cope with the problem. The region has unimaginable wealth. It has constructed the tallest buildings, built lavish palaces, provided spectacular places of worship and created universities so big that they have their own railways.

The region has no shortage of space or jobs. Millions of professionals and labourers are imported from across the world to service the lifestyles, ambitions, and enterprises of these states."

Education Links

Stop Hyping Academic freedom  by Simon During (via Chapati Mystery)
Academics are being hoodwinked into write books that nobody can buy (via Rahul mSiddhathan)
Why India should stop celebrating Teacher's Day from Quartz.india

Discussions on China

Prasad, Pettis lock horns on China growth prospects from March 2014
Michael Pettis’s Main Arguments:
  A significant part of China’s growth has come from wasteful investment.
 That’s not sustainable as debt has grown faster than debt servicing capacity.
 Fights over who faces the cost of bad loans will add to downward pressure.
 Arithmetic of rebalancing means even if household income growth can be maintained at 5 percent to 7 percent, GDP growth must necessarily be lower.
 China’s limited institutional development makes it difficult to absorb large volumes of capital productively.
 GDP growth of 3 percent to 4 percent, combined with progress on rebalancing, would be a significant achievement.
Michael Pettis blog post on September 1, 2015
From Steve Keen Why China had to crash part 1, part 2
A report from Nikkei Asian Review on September 6, 2015: "Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei told his Group of 20 counterparts that the country's economy is likely to face tough conditions for up to 10 years, sources familiar with the G-20 meeting said Sunday." Via Marginal Revolution

Chris Blattman's juxtaposition

I still cannot get over Chris Blattman's comment in his links post:
"In the US, subsidies for people to move from poor neighborhoods to better ones had positive long term outcomes (PDF) but Barnhardt, Field, & Pande find in India, taking people away from their social support networks is very disruptive and many people refused or left the program (PDF)."
My experience in Souith India, in a different conext, is somewhat different from the conclusions of the above above paper whose field work was done in U.P. in North India. This concerned an agricultural institue near Hyderabad which trained rural poor students with grade 10 educations. They were trained free of cost in more modern methods of agriculture for an year and it was hoped that they would go back and implement the new methods. Instead all took city jobs in agri-business.
So, what gives. The only thing I can think of is the family systems of Emmanuel Todd. He distinguishes the North and South Indian family systems as Exogamous Community Family and Assymetrical Community Family respectively. Part of the difference, outside Kerala which is more matrilinear, comes from the marriage stem where the children of brother and sister can marry. Apparently, this gives women a bigger role in the society though not as much as in matrilinear societies. I would guess that US would come under Absolute Nuclear Family like England. For Todd, two important causes of 'progress' (from what I could lean from 'The causes of progress') are literacy and status of women.
There have been criticisms that Todd is "grounded as it is in deterministic anthropological categories" as a recent review by Sarah Waters of 'Who is Charlie?'). In her review of 'The Causes of progress', Evelyn Rawski has similar criticism but goes on to say "The great value of Todd's book lies elsewhere: it forces scholars out of the increasingly narrow specializations in which we tend to spend our lives. We may disagree with Todd's interpretation and his facts, but we can learn a great deal from the structural comparisons he makes. If comparative studies are stimulated by books like this, we may eventually achieve a more satisfactory synthesis to explain the demographic, economic, and cultural changes that are central to the early modem and modem historical ages."
When there are such differences in different places coming from modern quantitative research, it may be useful to look at some of the factors that Emmanuel Todd has been pointing to.

Trade 1890 to 1860 B.C in one area

" The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation." from The V.C.s of B.C.

Germany leading the way on immigrants and refugees

Angela Merkel's humane stance on immigration is a lesson to us all:
"It is not Britain, the alleged “soft touch”, which is the favoured destination for what is emerging as one of the great movements of people in history, fleeing the mayhem of Syria, North Africa, Afghanistan, Eritrea or northern Nigeria aided and abetted by sinister, organised gangs of people traffickers. Instead, they prefer Germany. In the last 12 months alone, it has received some 300,000 asylum claims, 12 times more than Britain, on top of the immigration it receives within the EU under the freedom of movement rules it defends to the last. During 2015, the number of asylum seekers to Germany is set to rise to 800,000. Germany is becoming a country of immigration, the most popular destination for the global dispossessed......
Confronted by forces that would overwhelm British leaders, the woman the Greek left (and many on the British left who should know better) mistakenly accuse of being the leading advocate of conservative neoliberalism has stood up to be counted. Being the country to which so many want to migrate should be a source of pride, she says."
Germany did some thing huge for the Syrian refugeees-and for the future of Europe
"German Chancellor Angela Merkel did something really good this week: Her country will now allow Syrian refugees, who normally would be deported back to wherever they first entered the European Union, to stay and apply for asylum. Thousands of Syrians who would have otherwise faced uncertainty in Europe can now begin the process of rebuilding their lives in Germany.

Germany, with the stroke of a pen, has just given an awful lot of Syrian families the chance to start a new life. But this is even more important than that: In addition to being a blessing for these Syrians, it is also a gift to Europe. Migration has become a crisis so great for Europe that, earlier this month, Merkel called it an even bigger challenge for the EU than the Greek debt crisis. She is now leading by example, showing Europe what it must do to overcome that crisis."

Two on global value chains

Here Tim Taylor gives the background.
In May be this global slowdown is different Justin Fox " Building global supply chains became so fashionable for Western manufacturers that they built them even when it made sense to keep production closer to customers; now they're retrenching and revising their approach."

Two on Tata steel

Real Steel: Jamshedpur's little known war history by Anura Mallick and Priya Ganapathy
From opium to outsourcing by Andrew Leonard in 2007

Some long reads about development

From Brad DeLong Weakend reading: An interview with Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece:
"The new data allows us to test the robustness of contemporary theories of political and economic development. In the classical Greek world, political development was a primary driver of economic growth; democracy appears to be a cause rather than simply an effect of prosperity. The steep rise and long duration of the city-state ecology offers a challenge to neo-Hobbesian centralization theories of state formation, which hold that advanced economic and political development requires the consolidation of centralized state power. The comparatively low rate of ancient Greek income inequality, along with the high rate of economic growth, suggests that the negative correlation of sustained growth with extreme inequality, observed in some recent societies, is not a unique product of modernity. Finally, the history of the ancient Greek world can be read as a cautionary tale about the unanticipated consequences of growth and human capital investment: It reveals how innovative institutions and technologies, originally developed in the open-access, fair-rules context of democratic states, can be borrowed by ambitious autocrats and redeployed to further their own, non-democratic purposes."

From Chris Blattman :
"In the US, subsidies for people to move from poor neighborhoods to better ones had positive long term outcomes (PDF) but Barnhardt, Field, & Pande find in India, taking people away from their social support networks is very disruptive and many people refused or left the program (PDF)."

The first Moving to opportunity Abstract: Neighborhoods matter for the well-being of residents. Helping families with young children living in high-poverty housing projects to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods improves the later-life outcomes for the children and may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty.

The second Moving to opportunity or isolation? Network effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India Abstract: A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the citys periphery. Fourteen years later, relative to lottery losers, winners report improved housing farther from the city center, but no change in family income or human capital. Winners also report increased isolation from family and caste networks and lower access to informal insurance. We observe significant program exit: 34% of winners never moved into the subsidized housing and 32% eventually exited. Our results point to the importance of considering social networks when designing housing programs for the poor.

P.S I am not sure whether it works the same way in South India. May be the clue to the difference of U.P. from USA and South India may be in family systems, as Emmanuel Todd would say.

Oliver Sacks RIP

From NY Times with links to other articles.
Check also Oliver Sacks has left the building by Vaughan Bell

What most people want

I guess is work to feed their children. A picture of a Syrian refugee

Fearless Nadia (?)singing a romantic song 1943

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho6QH0xDgAw (apparently sung by Rajkumari and Mansoor)
More about Fearless Nadia

From Ghar Sansar-1958

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo03Z87MlRU
Another from Circus Queen 1959 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuc1HS0LtS8

Never stop learning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcObwNybu7k&feature=youtu.be

Refugees are people too.

Refugees are human. That simple fact seems to have been forgotten
Some good news from Germany: German public: we can cope with more refugees
German mayor says he wants more migrants
""They had the flexibility and the legislation allowing admission of asylum seekers in their territory faster than standard resettlement procedures," said Bernard, commenting on the Alameens' fit with Germany. 

The European country was the first to allow certain Syrians registered in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt to move there without a protracted asylum application procedure.

About half of all those selected have successfully arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany, where they have a chance to integrate and build a new life.

Thomas Langwald from the German Office for Migration and Refugees explained the programme, which costs the state about $14m, specifically targets families that "cannot return to Syria" and would have difficulty settling in the country they first fled to. " from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/08/syrian-family-journey-life-germany-150823113233692.html
And there are villages for sale in Spain

Links 28/8/2015

Evan Osnos on Donald Trump phenomenon, similar phenomena sprouting in many places.
In Spain, entire villages are up for sale
India's sewer cleaners risk their lives for a living
The Indian Government releases the list of 98 smart cities
Why have so many films dealing  with civil war embraced the Confederate struggle? in Jacobin
Molecular windows to speech and language

Against charity

Against charity from Jacobin by Matthew Snow. Are there solutions in between?

David Levy in July 2014

Economist who predicted housing  bubble says another recession coming:

""When the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold," may need to be flipped.Maybe the rest of the world will sneeze this time, and the U.S. will get sick.,,,,,

Now, Levy says the United States is likely to fall into a recession next year triggered by downturns in other countries, the first time in modern history."

S.Varalakshmi -Jikki duet from Krishna Prema 1961

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SX2N5iXsyg&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfSyzWGS3Ag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJOlhjlKt5M

Nagaraju Koppula memorial lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1110&v=KJK3NfMJNM4
More about Nagaraju Koppula

Hansa Wadkar and others.

I just finished reading Hansa Wadkar's autobiograpky "You ask, I tell". It was a made into a movie Bhumika in 1977

Related articles: Letter from an unknown woman: The film actress in  late colonial Bombay by Debashish Mukherjee The article mentions Bombay Talkies archives in Melbourne, Australia

The second by Nandini Ramachandran After the last sky: Memoirs by women who were not paragons but survivers: "AnNIS KIDWAI, Bina Das, Hansa Wadkar, Prabha Khaitan and Temsula Ao were all born in colonial India and actively participated in the making of an independent nation. Anis Kidwai was one of India’s first female Rajya Sabha members. Bina Das helped organise the Quit India movement in Calcutta. Hansa Wadkar was a popular actress in early Marathi cinema. Prabha Khaitan managed two companies, wrote several novels, and translated the French writer Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal feminist text, The Second Sex, into Hindi. Temsula Ao is Nagaland’s most famous living writer.

All these women were pioneers in their professions, but unlike more glamorous women memoirists of their era—Amrita Pritam, Shaukat Azmi, Leela Naidu, Vina Mazumdar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Gayatri Devi, Durga Khote—they aren’t famous enough to have achieved immortality. They inhabit the tenuous territory between success and celebrity. They led fulfilling and trailblazing lives, but not readily accessible ones, and often their stories about themselves are the only ones we have. Luckily, they all wrote memoirs that have appeared in the original English or in translation over the last four years."

More China related links

My guess: bad for China but not a disaster for the rest except for the usual rent seeking problems which are already there.
Why China's stock market implosion may not be very meaningful by Isabella Kaminska
"Casino Capitalism": Economist Michael Hudson on What's Behind the Stock Market's Rollercoaster Ride

China downturn related links

David Beckworth at Macro and other Market musings. Like Michael Pettis he too talks of 'impossible trinity'. A short version of Pettis at FT Alphaville.
John Maudlin on the role of US Federal Reserve: "...I want to show you how the current market meltdown is being brought to you courtesy of your friendly US Federal Reserve Bank"
Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler Central Banks have become a corrupting force: "If central banks purchase stocks in order to support equity prices, what is the point of having a stock market? The central bank’s ability to create money to support stock prices negates the price discovery function of the stock market."
Steve Keen Is this the great crash of China?: "So China is having its first fully-fledged capitalist crisis. To date its response to it has been to try to sustain the unsustainable: to transfer the bubble from housing to the stockmarket, and to keep the stockmarket rising like some production target for wheat from the bad old days before the fall of the Gang of Four. It can’t be done. At some point, the Chinese government is going to have to make the transition from generating a credit bubble to trying to contain its aftermath."
Steve Keen China Crash: You can't keep accelerating forever

Glenn Davis Stone on GM foods and DDT

GM foods: A moment of honesty. Excerpts:
"A lot of studies have failed to find any health risk for any GM food. .....
But what we do know is that it took us 62 years to even begin to “discern the injury” to humans caused by DDT. ....
Different GM organisms include different genes inserted in different ways. This means that individual GM foods and their safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis and that it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods."

Some Beth Moon photographs of oldest trees

here and here.

Ezra Klein advice on retreiving information

There is a better way to read on the internet, and I have found it. I have been using this blog and internet search.

Property prices related links

Property prices should fall: Raguram Rajan
Earlier :
"Rajan's prediction turned out to be right in the end and a little over three years later in September 2008, the world was in the midst of a full-blown financial crisis, the impact of which is still being felt, almost six years later. Banks and financial institutions about the go bust had to be rescued by governments all over the Western world. Also, in the aftermath of the crisis, Western governments and their central banks decided to print trillions of dollars in order to get their economies up and running again.

Now Rajan has sounded a warning again. In an interview to the Central Banking Journal which was published a few days back Rajan said "The problems arising are not so much from credit growth, which is relatively tepid in the industrial markets and has been much stronger in emerging markets, but from asset prices due to financial risk-taking and so on. Unfortunately, a number of macroeconomists have not fully learned the lessons of the great financial crisis. They still do not pay enough attention - en passant - to the financial sector. Financial sector crises are not as predictable. The risks build up until, wham, it hits you. So it is not like economic growth, where unemployment offers a more continuous indicator."

What Rajan is essentially saying here is that all the money printed and pumped into the financial system by the American and other Western governments has led to financial market bubbles all over the world. And these bubbles when they burst will lead to another financial crisis. As Rajan put it "We are taking a greater chance of having another crash at a time when the world is less capable of bearing the cost.""

Michael Hudson 2006 article: Real Estate, Technology and the Rentier Economy:
"The reality is that the economy is tilted to favor property owners, monopolists and creditors at the expense of those who produce goods and services. A widening share of national income is going to landlords, creditors and other rentiers at the top of the income and wealth pyramid, increasingly free of taxes. The wealth that produces these rentier incomes is not real capital investment, nor is it technological. It is created by law, often by stealth and insider dealing. "

Robert Solow recently on rents: The future of work: Why wages are not keeping up

"Wealthy, very nervous foreigners yanking their money out of their countries while they still can and pouring it into US residential real estate, paying cash, and driving up home prices – that’s the meme. But it’s more than a meme as political and economic risks in key countries surge."

An old article by Hamid Dabashi

Can non-Europeans think? via a Chapati Mystery link to an interview with the author, who has now written a book with the same name.

More on John Coway

A fellow of infinite jest in WSJ (If the link does not work, search with the title) via Genius at play which has interesting comments.

Two on epigenetics

Grandma's experiences leave a mark on your genes by Dan Hurley in Discover.
Michael White urges caution.