Democracy and debt

From http://democracyjournal.org/author/jgalbraith/
"A beauty of MacDonald’s idea is that it can be tested against

situations he doesn’t discuss. Thus the democratic decolonization of

India fits: It occurred after India had become a large war-time

creditor of Britain. And the struggle for democracy in Latin America is

complicated by foreign debt, easily analyzed as an external electorate

of enormous power–one in obvious economic conflict with the voters who,

at best, only hold the internal debt. The communists of China and Cuba

maintain their insular systems because they are financially autarkic.

Meanwhile, in democratic Venezuela, the rise and survival of Hugo

Chávez owes everything to the singular financial autonomy conveyed by

oil.

Finally, MacDonald’s financial perspective helps explain the

relationship between democracy and economic development. The most

democratic states are not only powerful; they are rich. They are richer

than the monarchies they succeeded and also than the communist states

with whom for much of the twentieth century they competed. Why? Surely

the simplest answer lies in their ability and willingness to mobilize

public debt for development as well as for war. Democracies yield

higher incomes not because of vulgar redistribution, which cannot

distinguish them from communism, but because they alone can master the

great Keynesian financial tools required for the achievement of full

employment and national construction on the grand scale.

Given the simplicity and power of this argument, one reads the

epilogue of this great book with surprise and sorrow. In MacDonald’s

view, it’s all over. In the nuclear age, deficits and bond drives on

the world-war scale are history, and the American citizenry has lost

its pride of place as creditor of the American state. Today, financial

intermediaries hold about 37 percent of U.S. public debt; Japan and

China, along with other countries, now hold about 30 percent. The

proportion of U.S. debt owned directly by Americans has fallen to below

10 percent; in 1945 (when the debt was more than twice as large in

relation to GDP as now) citizen-creditors just about held it all. He

concludes that the link is broken and “for all practical purposes, the

venerable marriage between public credit and democratic government, so

vital a factor in the history of the world, has been dissolved.”

But there is another possible way to interpret this fact. If

MacDonald’s thesis is right, the disappearance of the citizen-creditor

forces a question. Can democracy survive when its financial roots have

been cut? The scale of public debt is not the issue, but its ownership

is. Can a country–whether the United States or any other–be truly

democratic if it is in hock to banks and foreigners? And this is only

the obverse of questions raised by our pathetic voter turnout, by the

vote suppression that regularly poisons our elections, by the judicial

coup d’état of December 2000, and by our regression toward a tax system

from which the state’s main creditors are exempt, leaving the burden to

fall heavily on all who do not or cannot vote–exactly those who

comprise our passive and disregarded lower classes.To put it bluntly, are we still a democracy? And, if not, what would it take to bring democracy back?"

Lal Shahbaz Qalandar

Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar

"

The shrine attracts Hindu devotees,^[15] while one of the shrine's two sajjada nasheens, or hereditary guardian-families, is a Hindu family.^[16] Hindus still perform the mehndi ritual at the opening of the shrine's annual urs, or fair.^[17] Until the 19th century, Hindus as well as Muslims believed that the flow of the nearby Indus River waxed and waned according to the whim of the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.^[18] The name of the Sindhi Hindu variant of the God of water, Jhulelal, is displayed prominently in the shrine."

Another https://youtu.be/sNBaxhdn3bI
 Ore with links to various versions here https://www.cinestaan.com/articles/2016/nov/17/2965/how-dama-dam-outlasted-its-most-popular-singer-runa-laila

A recent post of Rahul Banerjee

About two friends helping in a school in Kakrana More on philonthrophy in Kakrana
There are a few earlier posts about him and also the book he wrote about his experiences.

55 mins · 

I have been following Rahul Banerjee's work for about ten years now and recently visited Kakrana and toured Alirajpur district with him for five days. He worked in the area for about thirty years I think, took part in various agitations for the welfare of advasis, jailed a few times and lots of the time it must have been frustrating. Over time he helped built various organisations in the area, built trust with the local people, helped them organise themselves as well as providing legal advice, various government schemes useful to them, helping with sewage, solar power and other hands-on projects. His work over so many years has now made it possible for others to easily enter some phases of these organisations and do what seems meaningful to them whatever their past careers have been. I met both the gentleman. One of them a gentle retired scientist trying to do some meaningful work after retirement. Other I could not stand. But both seemed to have settled Dow to some good work. People like Rahul offer some hope in these dismal times.

Game on

East vs West again by Andrew Cockburn Via Naked Capitalism. An excerpt:
"In any event, the vision of Augustine and his peers that an enlarged NATO could be a fruitful market has become a reality. By 2014, the twelve new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons, while this past October Romania celebrated the arrival of Eastern Europe’s first $134 million Lockheed Martin Aegis Ashore missile-defense system."

Banality of evil.

" In our age of complex bureaucracies, so much cruelty is simply the result of normal, everyday, “real” people doing what they think is most pragmatic. As the philosopher Bernard Williams said, “the modern world…has made evil, like other things, a collective enterprise.” Eichmann was not the personification of hatred. His motives were banal. Evil is often the result of small, procedural things. It is people doing their jobs and remaining loyal to their parties, regardless of evidence, arguments, or troubling historical parallels." From https://qz.com/906101/modern-philosophy-shows-that-most-atrocities-are-committed-by-normal-people-not-evil-ones/? , an idea discussed in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
This seems more plausible than the invisible hand attributed to Adam Smith. Perhaps self interest acts more as a centrifugal force increasing inequality.

You are not in control

You are not in control by Dmitry Orlov 

"It is often argued that a car is a necessity, although the facts tell a different story. Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. The population of the planet is over 7 billion. Therefore, there are at least 5.8 billion people alive in the world who don’t own a car. How can something be considered a necessity if 82% of us don’t seem to need it? In fact, owning a car becomes necessary only in a certain specific set of circumstances. Here are some of the key ingredients: a landscape that is impassable except by motor vehicle, single-use zoning that segregates land by residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial uses, a lifestyle that requires a daily commute, and a deficit of public transportation. In turn, widespread private car ownership is what enables these key ingredients: without it, situations.......

It turns out that the fact that so many people are forced to own a car has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with petroleum chemistry. About half of what can be usefully extracted from a barrel of crude oil is in the form of gasoline. It is possible to boost the fraction of other, more useful products, such as kerosene, diesel fuel, jet fuel and heating oil, but not by much and at a cost of reduced net energy. But gasoline is not very useful at all. It is volatile (quite a lot of it evaporates, especially in the summer); it is chemically unstable and doesn’t keep for long; it is toxic and carcinogenic. It has a rather low flash point, limiting the compression ratio that can be achieved by gasoline-fueled engines, making them thermodynamically less efficient. It is useless for large engines, and is basically a small-engine fuel. Gasoline-powered engines don’t last very long because gasoline-air mixture is detonated (using an electric spark) rather than burned, and the shock waves from the detonations cause components to wear out quickly. They have few industrial uses; all of the serious transportation infrastructure, including locomotives, ships, jet aircraft, tractor-trailers, construction equipment and electrical generators run on petroleum distillates such as kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and bunker fuel."

The Economic Vision for Precocious, Cleavaged India

The Economic Vision for Precocious, Cleavaged India by Tim Taylor. The link to MR does not seem to be working. It may be http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/02/pathology-domestic-aid.html

More on the great divergence

Why the Middle East fell behind By Jared Rubin "This post is not going to cover all of the reasons why the Middle East fell behind. There are a lot of reasons for the reversal of fortunes between (northwestern) Europe and the Middle East, most of which complement each other. I will discuss what I believe to be the two most important reasons: what I will call Timur Kuran’s “demand side” argument and my “supply side” argument (it is my post after all … of course I think the argument in my book is right!). I will also dismiss one argument which simply cannot account for the main historical facts: what I will call the “weak colonization” argument (as opposed to the “strong colonization” argument; I will define both terms below). I will refrain from discussing many alternative hypotheses which I do think shed some light on the divergence between northwestern Europe and the Middle East. For example, the relative political fractionalizationand frequent interstate warfare that embroiled Europe for most of the medieval and early modern periods may have set it up to have greater fiscal capacity than the Middle East (or China). This makes sense to me, and it seems to be part of the explanation. Likewise, differences in family structures (nuclear vs. clan) may have encouraged different types of institutional formation in Europe and the Middle East (or China), with the more individualistic Europeans forming institutions more conducive to inter-group commerce than the more “collective” Middle Easterners. This too makes sense to me, and it was likely an important aspect of the divergence. The point here is that such a large scale event like the divergence between two sets of economies over centuries is almost certainly multi-causal. It is true that these causes all interacted with each other – sometimes as substitutes and other times as complements – and pinning down the direction of these interactions is an important part of the story. But that is indeed another story."
Another via Brad DeLong :
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/02/reading-lisa-blades-and-eric-chaney-2013-the-feudal-revolution-and-europes-rise-political-divergence-of-the-christian.html
"We argue that forms of executive constraint that emerged under feudal institutions in Western Europe were associated with increased political stability and find empirical support for this argument. While feudal institutions served as the basis for military recruitment by European monarchs, Muslim sultans relied on mamlukism—or the use of military slaves imported from non-Muslim lands. Dependence on mamluk armies limited the bargaining strength of local notables vis-a`-vis the sultan, hindering the development of a productively adversarial relationship between ruler and local elites. 

We argue that Muslim societies’ reliance on mamluks, rather than local elites, as the basis for military leadership, may explain why the Glorious Revolution occurred in England, not Egypt."

From an old post ,http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/2008/05/needham-question.html, John Merson:

"'Roads to Xanadu' explores why the full potential of scientific discovery and invention, now regarded as a source of weath and power, is not often realized in its country of origin. The reason, paradoxically, lies not in failure but in success- in the tendency of cultures and civilizations to ossify around those economic institutions and ideologies that, at some stage, provided maximum stability and wealth. These institutional structures are often retained by bureaucracies and the power elites who are their beneficiaries long after they have become redundant. Economic growth and cultural development do not stem merely from technological innovation but from social and political change. However, the motivation for such a change rarely comes from within. Often, it has been the competetive threat from outside that has forced societies to come up with new and innovative social, economic and political structures."

A short appreciation of Grothendieck

From Quora : "Alexander Grothendieck was (is) a genius of the first order, and a truly amazing spirit. Freeman Dyson once categorized mathematicians as being of roughly two types: birds and frogs. The latter group studies the fine details of the terrain; the former group soars high above and surveys the landscape. Grothendieck was the highest-soaring bird — to Grothendieck, a problem was not truly solved until it was viewed from the "right" general perspective, from which it could be solved effortlessly, from which it became in a sense obvious, from which it fit naturally into a larger conceptual framework. " and more.

El Cóndor Pasa

Leo Rojas- El Cóndor Pasa
Simon and Garfumkel version

Simple narratives

A price is a signal wrapped up in incentive  says AlexTabarrok linking rise in oil prices to the emergengence of Karuturi Global at one time the biggest exporter of roses. But Karuturi who also figures in Panama Papers seems to have indulged in various dubious practices and has been liquidated

More details about the liquidation http://www.ipsos.co.ke/NEWBASE_EXPORTS/Banking/160502_Business%20Daily_12,13_b3768.pdf
A write up 'The role of narratives in economics' 

Michael Hudson on Trump's infrastructure plan

Trump's Infrastructure Plane=Developer Welfare 
"So I think Mr. Trump wants to turn the U.S. economy into the kind of real estate development that has made him so rich in New York. It will make his fellow developers rich, and it will make the banks that finance this infrastructure rich, but the people are going to have to pay for it in a much higher cost for transportation, much higher cost for all the infrastructure that he’s proposing.

So I think you could call Trump’s plan “public investment to create private profit”. That’s really his plan in a summary, it looks to me."

Michael Hudson on debt cancellation in ancient days

The Land Belongs to God
One excerpt "What do you do if you’re a ruler and people can’t pay? One reason they would cancel debts is that most debts were owed to the palace or to the temples, which were under the control of the palace. So you’re canceling debts that are owed to yourself.

Rulers had a good reason for doing this. If they didn’t cancel the debts, then people who owed money would become bondservants to the tax collector or the wealthy creditors, or whoever they owed money to. If they were bondservants, they couldn’t serve in the army. They couldn’t provide the corvée labor duties – the kind of tax that people had to pay in the form of labor. Or they would defect. If you wanted to win a war you had to have a citizenry that had its own land, its own means of support."

why falling housing prices could be a good thing

"The virtues of homeownership are so ingrained in the American psyche that we often forget that housing is also a source of economic stress. Rising milk prices are regarded as a household tragedy for some, and spiking gas prices stoke national outrage. But whenever home prices go up, it’s “a recovery,” even though that recovery also means millions of people can no longer afford to buy."

Rahul Banerjee describes some of his experiences

The exasperated anarchist

Interview with Bernard Yeung

“We Are Arrogant – We hold On to Our Old Beliefs on the Gains of Trade”: ProMarket Interviews Bernard Yeung, Part 3
https://promarket.org/lobbying-super-pacs-revolving-door-chipped-away-us-moral-supremacy-promarket-interviews-bernie-yeung-part-3/

Economic impact of violence

The Economic Value of Peace: e.g. ‘The total economic impact of violence to the world economy in 2015 was estimated to be $13.6 trillion and is expressed in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. This is equivalent to 13.3 per cent of world GDP or $1,876 PPP per annum, per person.’ From 
http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/a-philanthropist-using-systems-thinking-to-build-peace/

Inequality and violence

“It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time,” said Scheidel, summarizing the thesis of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, his newly published book.
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/24/stanford-historian-uncovers-grim-correlation-violence-inequality-millennia/
On Europe's rich from 1300 
"In the seven centuries recent research covers, across all the territories for which we have data, we find only two phases of significant inequality decline. Both were triggered by catastrophic events:

• The Black Death, the most terrible epidemic in human history, affected Europe in 1347-51. Afterwards the richest 10% lost their grip on between 15% and 20% of overall wealth. This was a long-lasting decline in inequality. The richest 10% recovered their pre-Black Death quota only in the second half of the 17th century). This decline in the share of the top rich, as well as in overall inequality, was probably the consequence of two main factors. On one side of the distribution there was an increase in real wages of skilled and unskilled workers. We have evidence for this in many areas of Europe, as described in Pamuk (2007). This helped a larger proportion of the population to gain access to property. On the other side, large patrimonies fragmented due to a mortality crisis which was occurring in the presence of an unmitigated partible inheritance system (Alfani 2010 and 2015).
• Shocks occurred between 1915 and 1945 related to the two World Wars, as argued by Piketty 2014, pp. 368-370). The share of wealth owned by the top rich has been growing again since around 1950, and reached 64% in 2010, but it is still far from the peak of 90% reached in 1910. The share of the richest 10% today is about the same as that in Europe (or at least, Italy) immediately before the Black Death."

http://voxeu.org/article/europe-s-rich-1300

More on Palma index

The concenusus seems to be that extreme inequality is bad. Palma index is one measure of it. Here are some thoughts by Joseph Stieglitz on it: Measuring Inequality: Comments on "Do nations get the inequality they deserve? The 'Palma Raio' reexamined' by Jose Gabriel Palma https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/files/MeasuringIncomeInequality.pdf
Branko Milanovic is not too enthusiastic about Palma index
http://glineq.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/why-i-am-still-not-excited-by-palma.html

Recent trends on the tension between the government and civil society

"Evidence from the last decade, however, suggests that the global trend may be a shrinking civic space (figure 8.10). Many governments are changing the institutional environment in which citizens engage, establishing legal barriers to restrict the functioning of media and civic society organizations, and reducing their autonomy from the state. For example, in the case of media, governments may award broadcast frequencies on the basis of political motivations, withdraw financial support of media organizations and activities, or enforce complex registration requirements that raise barriers to entry into a government-controlled media market. In the case of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments might resort to legal measures to restrict public and private financing or pass stricter laws that restrain associational rights ..." From http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/the-middle-income-trap-and-governance.html

The Middle Income Trap and Governance Issues by Tim Taylor

Ernest Gellner on civil society

in the past few months, I came across a few articles that I want to revisit. Here is one of the from 1990 called 'The civil and the sacred' by Ernest Gellner
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/g/Gellner_91.pdf
A quote
"A basic political centralization is inherent, it would seem, in advanced industrial society: order must be maintained, and it is difficult to imagine industrial production being maintained under conditions of genuine pluralism of mutually independent coercive agencies. In exceptional circumstances, something like this does happen - when multiple criminal and/or political mafias govern a large city (Belfast, Algiers during the final stages of the French presence, or highly criminalized sections of inner cities in one or two advanced industrial nations) ; but in general, industrial society presupposes that productive citizens can go to and from work without either protecting themselves or needing to duck while rival mafias or police forces shoot it out. It is assumed, in contrast  to segmentary society where the unit of habitation and production is also the unit of self-government, of ritual and defense, that citi- zens can rely for their protection on a specialized and uniqueagency or group of agencies. Citizens know whom to obey and do not need to form or choose alliances so as to ensure their own security. The job of keeping peace is performed, and it is clear precisely who does it. It is not a civic activity, but a precondition of other, legitimate civic activities.

 If this argument is correct, then modern society cannot find its pluralism in the political or governmental sphere (if by that we mean the order-enforcing agencies). The peacekeeping institu- tion may perhaps take its orders from plural and severally inde- pendent bodies (say assemblies, institutions, pressure groups), but it cannot itself consist of genuinely independent bodies, liable to use their instruments of violence on each other. That is the way of segmentary or feudal societies but is simply not feasible in a society with a sophisticated and growing technology, an enor- mously complex division of labor, and mutual interdependence of highly developed specialisms. Segmentary and similar politically plural societies cannot give us what we want - namely, civil so- ciety. All this being so, such pluralism as we need must have its base in either the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. It is precisely because the modern state does indeed have the monop- oly of legitimate coercion (and, in fact, the monopoly of coercion sans phrases when it is not undermined and is functioning prop- erly), that pluralism, or the breaching of monopoly, must occur in one of the other two realms: and, when full-blooded and pas- sionately embraced Marxism prevails, it is not allowed to emerge in them. Nor does it arise anywhere else either. Full-blooded Marxism monopolizes faith and the state while claiming that the latter is to be dismantled and that the former monopoly arises spontaneously. It also, thanks to its central tenet of the denial of private ownership of the means of production, monopolizes the economy. It thereby makes civil society impossible."

Two for the road.

Leaving for India tomorrow. Two articles to mull about on the trip
" I call myself a democratic socialist, just as Bernie Sanders does, but we’re living in a time where we have to frankly admit that we don’t know exactly what that means."
From https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/nancy-fraser-interview-capitalism-crisis-of-care
And "That phrase ‘true culture’ suggests that the revolution is a cultural rather than material one, with culture normatively conceived by a patrician Marxist sensibility that we ... encounter repeatedly as we trace the history of the Frankfurt School, especially in Adorno’s essays on the culture industry: the workers, once freed of the yoke of oppression, would march to the sunlit uplands of Beethoven, rather than wallow in the sewers of Hollywood." 
From http://www.drb.ie/essays/the-view-from-the-tower#

A 2014 appraisal of Obama

"The Obama era has been deeply disorienting for the left. Eight years ago, progressives would have delighted at the idea of a president who withdrew from Iraq, remade the rules for Wall Street, slowed the proliferation of greenhouse gases, brought the country within spitting distance of universal health care, and multiplied the rights of gays and lesbians. And yet it’s hard to be a self-respecting progressive these days and not feel a frustration that borders on disillusionment. The victories have been muddled, the errors unforced, the ambitions preemptively scaled back.

How could these two legacies coexist in one presidency? They emanate from the worldview that Jarrett and Obama share—call it “boardroom liberalism.” It’s a worldview that’s steeped in social progressivism, in the values of tolerance and diversity. It takes as a given that government has a role to play in building infrastructure, regulating business, training workers, smoothing out the boom-bust cycles of the economy, providing for the poor and disadvantaged. But it is a view from on high—one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms." From a 2014 article 'The Obama Whishperer" by Noam Schreiber https://newrepublic.com/article/120170/valerie-jarrett-obama-whisperer
Check also https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/obama-trump-counties/

I am still remembered in mathematics

During a selfsearch I find:
"The following is a very strong theorem.
Theorem 3.6 (Swarup [Swa]). If X is a connected metrizable space which admits a uniform convergence group action, then X is locally connected and contains no cut points."
i did not see it this way. This seems to refer to a theorem in which Brian Bowditch did 90 percent of the work and I put two and two together. That was done twenty years ago.
http://www.math.univ-toulouse.fr/~phaissin/Doc/actionqmobius.pdf
I am of course more pleased with the current work with Peter Scott and Lawrence Reeves about Poincare Duality pairs where we seem to have proved that their canonical decompositions depend only on the group and not on the boundary. The earlier work took only a week and this is going on even after three and half months. Possibly harder work gives more satisfaction though it is not clear which is more significant. One of the best things that I have done took place during a train journey of two hours in 1977. I was visiting Jo in Southampton, who is still a good friend and is still in touch. The 1977 work and the current work are related.

Bob Dylan opens up

From 2004
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-archives-bob-dylan-20161013-snap-story.html

Jerry Garcia interview from RollingStone 1991

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jerry-garcia-the-rolling-stone-interview-19911031

Completing the first stage in a mathematics program

Trying to revise old papers led to a new observation which took three months to complete. Being rusty, I am still not sure whether it is completely correct or not. Since there are a couple of collaborators, it seems that some thing may come out of it. In any case two old unpublished papers, again with collaborators, are being completed. So, very few posts in the next few months.

"your sheer knowledge has drowned your sense of reasoning."

https://youtu.be/fHZiQmalmMU

Some changes

I have my first cell phone. At the end of of shopping, a few times it was difficult to contact Jhansi and I had to walk home. She got a new phone and gave me her old one. Apart from not getting lost in shopping centres, I am not sure what I am going to do with it.
I seem to have got in to some rhythm with my mathematics. Getting some new results, understanding some old ones better. Collaborating with an ex-student and I guess that the current problems will keep us busy for an year or so.

A dent to the founder's dream

"Europe’s nations should be guided towards the Super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.” Said Jean Monnet according to http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/679277/History-EU-how-bureaucrats-seized-power

Still doing mathematics

Since January of this year, I have been busy with mathematics after a long absence. A collaborator visited to complete some old work. Around the time he left, I found a new paper dealing in a comprehensive way some things that I did not understand back in the nineties. Reading half of that paper took two months and it started me thinking about some related problems. It may not lead to any new work but would clarify some stuff for me in an area I worked for a long time. So, posts will be infrequent for a few more months I think. Meanwhile I have been posting on Facebook.

Two economics links

One short
Five simple formulas that capture today's economic challenges and solutions by Jared Bernstein
and the other long
Brad DeLong on Hamiltonian Economics and US Economic History

On the science of learning

Five classic studies by Tom Stafford via his post The memory trap

A music link

Young India Record Label Collection via 'Young India' sings again "In the second week of April, the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) of The British Library provided, quietly and without fanfare, access to some heirloom collections of music from India. These treasures are from the collections of well-respected individual researchers and collectors, including Suresh Chandvankar and Narayan Mulani of the Society of Indian Record Collectors.

Working with a grant sanctioned in 2008, Chandvankar steered the EAP190 project that has successfully digitized gramophone records, advertisements and publicity material as well as catalogues of the Young India record label that operated in Mumbai from 1935-55. A staggering 1,427 items populate this extraordinary collection which one can now access for free (http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Young-India-record-label-collection). Not even a single-click registration with an email is required to access this splendid collection, but that isn’t all. The mission of the programme, the transparency and clear vision so evident on the website, is nothing short of exemplary."

Indian Summer (via Madhular Shukla)

Unhloly woes and

A scene from India

viahttps://www.facebook.com/veeranarasimha.raju?fref=nf&pnref=story

Our desire to make sense of it all

Human nature: Behavioral economists create a model of our desire to make sense of it all from EurekAlert with a link to the paper. "There is an irony to the paper," Loewenstein added. "It is an attempt to make sense of our desire to make sense of the world."

Themes and variations around basketball

How Air Jordan Became Crying Jordan from TheNewYorker "Of his fierce competitiveness, Jordan told Thompson, “It’s consumed me so much. … I’m my own worst enemy. I drove myself so much that I’m still living with some of those drives.” This Jordan was almost a tragic figure, and it helps explain the Crying Jordan meme: if you can’t win anymore, you can only lose. The image of blubbering Jordan is part despair, and part tantrum. The meme is the people knocking Jordan down several pegs. Jordan in his prime was unassailable, a man out of reach, way up there above the rim. Now even you can take him."
Understanding Obama Through Basketball from TheNewYorker
Ex-Basketball Player a poem by John Updike, possibly a precursor to his novel 'Rabbit, Run' available online, a novel I read in the sixties and liked very much.
a similar theme bur from American football 'The Eighty-Yard Run' by Irwin Shaw

Visiting Sandy

My neighbour Sandy Burke is trying out an old people's home. She is 92-93, quite alert and seems to be in good health. But she is almost blind and deaf, so it is difficult to watch TV. Audi books help a bit. She says that there is no activity in the place. But there was less when she was home. At least now, she meets a number of people at meals times and there are common rooms etc. being with or near the children might have helped but this is a somewhat independent culture. I wonder whether we will face similar problems if we live too long.

The Questionaire interviews Mike Davis

The Questionaire: Mike Davis
 One of the questions and the answer:
Does age matter? 
Are you kidding? All this suffering just to acquire wisdom that is totally out of date – unfair!

The Power of Holding Hands
it was common in my childhood even for boys to hold hands. Then in 1965 ( I was 24 at that time andatarted my research in mathematics an year before), in TIFR during a party to Harisch Chandra, I was holding the hand of a friend. Komaravolu Chandrsekharan , our director, made a sarcastic remark and that more or less put an end to it. Now, sometimes, I put my hand on the shoulders of friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWDxHUEiE5g&feature=youtu.be

A couple of nice stories

Not diamond or gold, bride in MP wants 10,000 saplings as wedding gift
Meet Chandra: Small farmer. big heart, miracle moped I have known women like that, some worked when husbands were alive but struggling. A relative used to bring sarees from Chennai, go around the villages on a moped to sell them. The children have IT degrees now. Another struggled with two children and 100 rupees a month salary, the son became anengineer and daughter married a contractor. Strangely, in some similar cases I know, the children wanted lavish weddings.

A short nice piece about education

from almost ten years ago (via Madhukar Shukla) by Jaideep Sahni http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Sunday_Specials/5_things_you_dont_know_about_education/rssarticleshow/2144491.cms

A few more links

My laptap is not charging. I mainly use this blog for links and future reference. But links disappear and it is easier track if there is a passage from the article together with the link. Until things improve, which may take a couple of months, I have to with perfunctory posts.
The Guardian on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses
Rahila Gupta on Syrian Kurds and women's role
Less is more: What does mindfulness mean in economics? by Dan Nixon
The mirage of a return to manufacturing greatness
Japanese government weighs shopping vouchers, promotions to boost spending
Why are we all eating too much?Two on Wikipedia, One recent and an old one from Aaron Swartz
Why digital money has not killed cash?

SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE ON EPIGENETICS

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/breakthroughs-in-epigenetics
Two lectures by David Allis http://www.ibiology.org/ibioseminars/c-david-allis-part-1.html

Long read on Srinivasan Ramanujan

One of the best I have read http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/

A long read about basic income

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/
A shorter one:
http://www.techinsider.io/sam-altman-praises-basic-income-on-freakonomics-podcast-2016-4

Long read about medicine

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/22/literature-about-medicine-may-be-all-that-can-save-us

"Literature about medicine may be all that can save us."

Literature about medicine may be all that can save us’

Old age

Getting older and older. But parts of the brain still seem to be working in relation to mathematics. Once I started again, it has become difficult to stop.

Songs of Yore writes about Kanan Devi

The Swar Kokila Kanan Devi
Richard Singer has several posts on Kanan Devi https://roughinhere.wordpress.com/?s=kanan+devi

From a review of a recent book of Dan Ariely

"The experiment that crops up again and again through the book is a task to find numbers in a series of matrices. People then shred the answers before collecting payment based on how many the completed. Most people cheat a little, possibly because they can rationalise that they could have solved more, or had almost completed the next one. Few cheat to the maximum, even when it is clear they have the opportunity to do so......
One of the more interesting parts of the book concerned how increasing the degrees of separation from the monetary outcome increases cheating. Having people collect tokens, which could be later exchanged for cash, increased cheating. In that light, a decision to cheat in an area such as financial services, where the ultimate cost is cash but there are many degrees of separation (e.g. manipulating an interest rate benchmark which changes the price I get on a trade which affects my profit and loss which affects the size of my bonus), might not feel like cheating at all.....
As is the case when I read any behavioural science book, the part that leaves me slightly cold is that I’m not sure I can trust some of the results." From https://jasoncollins.org/2016/04/22/arielys-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty/

Prince RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hkhAu1sLkw&feature=youtu.be
Dan Kervick on his Facebook wall says "Prince was like Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Frank Zappa, Michael Jackson all rolled into one guy."

Peter Turchin invites comments on his book Ultrasociety

Science versus Ideology:Readers Comments on Ultrasociety. I commented on it earlier here and reserved it for rereading but got caught up in mathematics. I will come back to it as well as 'The secret of our success", two interesting books I read last year at some stage

Dani Rodrik plays sleuth

A Harvard ecomomist, A coup plot, A career forever changed by Marc Parry in The Chronicle of Hiher Education: "It began with unexpected news from home. In January 2010, Dani Rodrik and Pinar Dogan, married Turkish economists at Harvard University, got word of a dramatic story hitting newsstands in Istanbul. There had been a plot to topple the government. It involved terrorism. And its ringleader was a retired general named Cetin Dogan — Pinar’s father.....
 In 2014 the Turkish constitutional court, finding that the defendants’ rights had been violated, ordered a retrial in the Sledgehammer case. Cetin Dogan was released from jail. When The Economist wrote up the news, its article began, "That long-awaited ‘we told you so’ moment arrived on June 18 for Dani Rodrik … and his wife Pinar Dogan." The retrial resulted in the acquittal, on March 31, of all the defendants.........
"How could this have happened?" Rodrik asks later, after his wife has left. "How could such a massive undermining of the rule of law have taken place in the name of building the rule of law for so many years," all while "people were looking and applauding? That’s the massive paradox that I’m trying to understand."
. In practice, though, most of those democracies "fail to provide equal protection under thel aw," according to a recent essay that Rodrik published with another economist, Sharun Mukand. To understand why, they examine three kinds of rights. Political rights rest on the strength of numbers. Property rights have the wealth of elites behind them. But civil rights typically benefit a relatively powerless minority, who lack wealth or numbers. For that reason, "a truly functioning liberal democracy that provides civil rights is going to be a very, very rare phenomenon," Rodrik says. The question isn’t why democracies slide into illiberalism. That’s what you should expect. The interesting question — and one of the key puzzles that his new work tries to solve — is why some democracies manage to remain liberal. What makes the emergence of civil rights possible in societies where, on the face of it, those rights don’t have a strong constituency? "
Finally, the article oes on to discuss the role of liberals:
"On a less abstract level, Sledgehammer changed another aspect of Rodrik’s thinking. He no longer trusts much of what he reads in the newspaper. The professor had long been skeptical of economics stories. He now feels similarly wary about coverage of political developments in foreign countries. The reason: If you hadn’t known the reality in Turkey, he says, it was simple to accept the usual liberal explanations of what was happening.
"It’s very easy to read these stories, and they resonate with your own worldview as a liberal," Rodrik says. "And you’re likely to believe it. I wouldn’t say that it turned me into a conservative. But it made me much more skeptical and much more cautious about what one might say is the standard Northeastern-Ivy League-elite-liberal-establishment narrative about how the world works. It’s made me extremely skeptical of what I read in The New York Times, and The New York Times’s take on what’s happening in different countries. In a way, I should have known."
Another conviction of 275 people convicted in the Ergenkon case was recently overturned.

Links 22 April 2016

Computer charging problems. It chared aain unexpctedly. Some of the article, a fe lon reads, that I found interestin in the recent psat. These appeared on my Facebook wall where it is easier to post links with the iPad.
When Bitcoin Grows Up:What is Money? by John Lanchester
An old article by Christopher Hitchens on 'The Waste Land' A handful of dust:
"He[T.S.Eliot] was to tell the Paris Review that in the composition of the closing sections "I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying." There seems no reason at all why we should not take him at his word....It is not disputable that by publishing The Waste Land when he did, Eliot caught something of the zeitgeist and enthralled those who needed borrowed words and concepts to capture or re-express the desolation of Europe after 1918."
A learning secret:Don't take notes with a laptop:
 "Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material"
The first draft of history: dispatches from the frontline of war by Patrick Cockburn:
"This is one of the striking features of the present era: wars turn into bloody stalemates with no outright winners or losers, aside from the millions of civilians who are the victims. Political systems decay or are overthrown but nobody is strong enough to replace them."
Science explains why it's so easy to get sucked into fights on the internet by Brian Resnick:
"New research finds evidence for a different hypothesis: "The basic idea is that people are punishing selfishness to convey to other people that they are trustworthy," Jillian Jordan, a psychology researcher at Yale, tells me."
Why John J. Mearsheimer is right (about some things) by Robert D. Kaplan from three years ago: "Indeed, if you put Lobby together with Tragedy, you have the beginnings of a prudent grand strategy for America: invest less in one part of the world and more in another, events permitting. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently proposed that the United States should attempt to pivot away from the Middle East toward the Asia.....And it is likely to be China’s future, rather than Israel’s, that will ultimately determine Mearsheimer’s reputation. If China implodes from a socioeconomic crisis, or evolves in some other way that eliminates its potential as a threat, Mearsheimer’s theory will be in serious trouble because of its dismissal of domestic politics. But if China goes on to become a great military power, reshaping the balance of forces in Asia, then Mearsheimer’s Tragedy will live on as a classic."
The woman who saved economics from disaster an article about Elinor Ostrom by David Sloan Wilson

Sugar or fat?

"A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice." from

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin?CMP=share_btn_fb

Spiegel on the comedy conundrum

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-green-lights-legal-case-against-erdogan-critical-comic-a-1087445.html
The ditty with a translation here http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/the-dirty-german-ditty-that-got-erdogan-so-angry-that-he-sued.html

A precursor to ' The Waste Land'?

Paris: a poem by Hope Mirrlees
http://hopemirrlees.com/texts/Paris_Hope_Mirrlees_1920.pdf
Via http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/apr/17/ts-eliot-waste-land-radical-text-wounded-culture

A long read on Tom Lehrer

Lookin for Tom Lehrer, comedy's mysterious genius (via Rahul Siddharthan):
"In the recent history of American music, there’s no figure parallel to Lehrer in his effortless ascent to fame, his trajectory into the heart of the culture — and then his quiet, amiable, inexplicable departure. .........”The liberal consensus, which was the audience for this in my day, has splintered and fragmented in such a way that it’s hard to find an issue that would be comparable to, say, lynching,” he also told the New York Times in Purdum’s 2000 article, which was part of his last round of interviews to promote an anthology of his work. ”Everybody knows that lynching is bad. But affirmative action vs. quotas, feminism vs. pornography, Israel vs. the Arabs? I don’t know which side I’m on anymore. And you can’t write a funny song that uses, ‘On the other hand.”’